scurvy tunes

on sharks and nature now

2011-05-21T14:28:00.003+02:00

Damien Hirst’s Shark: Nature, Capitalism and the Sublime

by Luke White

The sheer volume of recent writings and academic conferences on the contemporary sublime suggest the subject is very much a matter of current concern [1]. But there is also a sense in which the sublime is not ever quite contemporary. To discuss the sublime now, we find ourselves inevitably tracing our way back to a historical discourse, to eighteenth-century thinkers such as Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant who theorised sublimity in its ‘classic’ form, or to nineteenth-century artists such as Caspar David Friedrich or J.M.W. Turner, with whom the aesthetic of the sublime is tightly associated. In fact, the very eighteenth-century thinkers who developed the notion of the sublime in its familiar, modern form were already looking back to the ancient world and to Longinus, and thus found themselves already caught up in the untimeliness of the idea [2].

Such a notion of a ‘contemporary sublime’ thus seems to me to raise two closely linked questions. First: what does it mean for the sublime to be at once a matter of current concern, but also a very old idea? And second: what is the relationship between the sublime that cultural historians of the eighteenth century studied and the sublime now?

Answering these questions is complicated by the peculiarly intermittent unfolding of the history the sublime, which has cycled repeatedly between being a key aesthetic or critical idea and becoming something seemingly irrelevant and outmoded, rising from its grave repeatedly, like those movie-monsters who are never quite killed off because they are already (un)dead. This insistent repetition of the sublime – like the return of the repressed – involves us in the temporality that Freud called Nachträglichkeit (sometimes translated as ‘afterwardsness’). Entwined as it is with a temporality of return, I understand the ‘contemporary sublime’ as a matter of our culture’s haunting by the history of sublimity. In such Freudian terms, haunting and Nachträglichkeit speak in turn of trauma; and the trauma that I would argue lies at the heart of this haunting is the rise of the capitalist modernity in which, as Marx’s translators put it, ‘all that is solid melts into air’, a phrase itself redolent with alchemical notions of sublimation [3]. After all, parallel to the aesthetic revolution of the sublime ran the ‘financial revolution’ of the 1680s to 1750s [4]. If we find ourselves tangling with the sublime again today, the reason for this might be our embrace within a capitalist modernity whose form of capital has come once more to bear uncanny resemblances to the imperial, hyper-liquid and perplexingly spectral capital of the eighteenth century.

To trace one aspect of this haunted present, I shall focus here on the natural sublime. A key aspect of the recent resurgence of the sublime as a subject for study has undoubtedly been its relevance as an aesthetic of terrible nature, at a moment when, with growing fears about environmental catastrophe, nature has reappeared as a limit to human power, progress and wealth, something which even threatens to destroy us. However, the approach I have outlined above implies that such representations of nature may be intimately bound with anxieties about capitalism. It is, in particular, the transfiguration of the natural world in early modernity by developing capitalist practices which, I suggest, is key in making sense of the sublime both then and now.

Hirst’s shark

My starting place for tracing such returns of the natural sublime is Damien Hirst’s art work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991. This is not to propose that the work is ‘sublime’ in some affirmative sense, nor to imply that Hirst has an environmentalist agenda. He is not taken up here as an exemplary artist, but rather a symptomatic one, who tells us much about our own time. Thus, Hirst’s art, riven with the contradictions of our society, is rather like capital’s uneasy dream-image of itself. His best work condenses our lived contradictions into perplexing, unforgettable, iconic images, in just the way that dreams do.

The sensibility for the sublime, it would seem to me, plays an important role in the formation of these images, and Hirst’s work is a locus where the histories of sublimity haunt contemporary culture. It often appears as if he has taken Burke’s treatise on the sublime as a handbook for cultural production (which, of course, is exactly what it was). Hirst echoes Burke’s fascination, for example, with the body, mortality, violence, pain and power. For Burke, such effects elicit ‘the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling’ [5], and it is in these terms that he defines the sublime. Hirst, too, orients his production towards this maximum of affect. In this context, Hirst’s restaging of the Burkean sublime places him in a long tradition of the commercial exploitation of the tropes and themes of the sublime. This tradition of the commercialised sublime places Hirst as much in the company of the Hollywood blockbuster, with its concern for overawing its spectators, as it writes him into a history of the avant-garde. Hirst’s shark is more Steven Spielberg than it is Barnett Newman [6].

The afterlife of the sublime for Hirst, then, is a means to push his audience’s buttons. Hirst has thus spoken of his interest in the shark, for the ‘really powerful kind of horror’ [7] that it produces, and as a ‘universal trigger’. During an interview he stated that ‘everyone’s frightened of sharks, everyone loves butterflies’ [8]. But though the shark is certainly for us a powerfully charged image, carrying the frisson of the Burkean sublime, it is not, as Hirst seems to suggest, simply a matter of ‘universal’ human responses. Rather, the figure of the shark as we recognise it today is also a peculiarly modern invention; its charge is tightly bound up with the transformation of ideas of nature as these developed alongside the emergence of capitalism and the sublime. If we turn to the ancient world, and to Pliny’s description of the shark in his Natural History, we find a very different beast from the one lodged in the modern imagination. 

Pliny writes: 'Divers have fierce fights with the canis marinus; these attack their loins and heels and all the white parts of the body. The one safety lies in going for them and frightening them by taking the offensive, for the canis marinus is as much afraid of a man as a man is of it.' [9]

This fish is certainly fierce and dangerous, but is far from being the inhuman monster, with those ravening, all-devouring and insatiable jaws, and row upon row of razor sharp-teeth, and with its implacable pursuit of human flesh, that occupies the fantasies of contemporary culture. There is none of Hirst’s ‘powerful kind of horror’ here, which is also to say categorically no sublimity. Even Pliny’s name for this beast, canis marinus or ‘dog of the sea’, which, translated into one language or another, was the primary name used in Europe for sharks throughout the Middle Ages, serves to make this beast familiar, small and ordinary. Only in the sixteenth century did new words appear to describe the shark in European languages: in Spanish, tiburón; in French, requin; and in English shark. These words shed the humdrum connotations of the dog, allowing sharks to be reimagined as terrible monsters of the deep.

What is ‘triggered’ in Hirst’s presentation of the shark, then, is not just primordial fear, but also a complex web of historically produced associations. It is this historical web, which stands as the ground of the sculpture’s possibility, that I want to examine further.

Changing conceptions of nature

The date at which this occurred locates the emergence of the modern conception of the shark within the context of a larger re-figuration of nature itself. This transformation has been charted in Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1959). In this now-classic publication, Nicolson asks how it was that during the seventeenth century rugged mountainous scenery transformed from being almost universally described in terms of the most ugly, disgusting and morally dubious things in the universe – ‘warts’ or ‘wens’ on the landscape, or even ‘buttocks’ sticking up out of it – to become the source of the deep feeling of awe, wonder, and reverence with which we are familiar today [10]. She was thus struck with the strange (and sudden) modernity of what seems to us an entirely natural aesthetic response. It is this new experience which would, in the eighteenth century, be theorised through the notion of the sublime.

Nicolson explains this monumental shift in sensibility in terms of a cosmographic revolution centring on new scientific theories: Galileo’s discovery that the earth does not lie at the centre of the solar system, or Descartes’ and Newton’s proposal of an infinite and centreless space, for example, or theories, such as those of Burnet or Agricola, about the earth’s surface being formed through processes of violent change. Very different from the stable, orderly and anthropocentric Ptolomaic cosmos which was the previously dominant model, these visions recast the universe as vast, formless, dynamic and violent, radically displacing humanity from its centre. For writers of the seventeenth century, God was to be sought now not in orderliness, but in the scale and violence of creation. Vast mountains, echoing the characteristics of this new vision of the universe, became privileged sites for its appreciation. When early-seventeenth-century Northern Europeans on the Grand Tour crossed the Alps they perceived them merely as ugly and dangerous, but by the end of the century they found them instead exhilarating, fascinating and sublime [11].

Alongside and against Nicolson’s focus on science as causing these changes – which today seems somewhat reductive – I would also like to explore this in terms of the development of pre-industrial capitalism. The cosmographic vision of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, republished in 1674) offers us a way of approaching this.

Paradise Lost

Milton’s epic poem was, of course, one of the canonical examples around which eighteenth-century critics developed theories of the sublime [12]. Much of its sublimity, I would argue, comes from its powerful articulation of the new universe which Nicolson describes [13]. The poem’s vast, formless space resists mapping. Its locations are separated by immeasurable voids of dark, cold space [14]. Gustave Doré’s nineteenth-century illustration of Book 3, lines 739–41 of Paradise Lost, in which Satan is traversing these voids makes an admirable attempt to capture something of this quality.

The poem is characterised by disorienting shifts in scale or perspective, akin to the shock of the new experiences of looking through telescopes and microscopes. But this Miltonic universe, even in its adherence to the new sciences, has also been understood as an articulation of an emerging ‘bourgeois’ ideology, and as an apologia for ‘marketised’ social and political relations. Milton, after all, had served as a propagandist for Oliver Cromwell during the English Civil War. John Rogers thus argues that Milton’s decentred universe drew on new materialist sciences to re-envision, at the level of matter itself, the organisation of a state run not according to the absolute decrees of a divinely instituted monarch, but to an order emerging spontaneously from the interactions of its parts [15]. In such a universe, God’s power is distributed atomistically into a vital, active, self-organising matter [16]. But Rogers goes on to argue that these vitalist-materialist sciences themselves drew their paradigms of emergent organisation from the nascent discourse of political economy, in the ‘nearly laissez-faire’ writings, for example, of Thomas Mun and Edward Misselden, who were already arguing in the 1620s that that markets functioned most harmoniously when exempt from intrusive monarchic practices of price-fixing [17]. It was when left alone by authority, they argued, that goods circulated freely, stimulating a vigorously productive economy. Rogers’s argument is that if Milton’s political ‘proto-liberalism’ is informed by scientific ideas of self-organising matter, these are informed in their turn by an embryonic economic liberalism.

What seems at first problematic with understanding this Miltonic vision of sublime nature as ideology for an embryonic liberalism, is that Milton’s cosmos so often seems a hostile, inhuman place. The matter of this universe often seems to generate not a benevolent order, but rather formless monstrosity. The apotheosis of this darkly sublime principle of Miltonic nature seems, in fact, to be his vision of hell. But ideology, in any case, is always dependent on first raising the very contradiction that it wishes to dispel, and Milton’s poem can thus be understood as shot through with the conflicts which he himself lived but could not fully articulate. Paradise Lost can thus be read as the poetic symptom of the anxieties of an emerging capitalist order.

In the poetry and science of the seventeenth century, then, ‘nature’ is produced through the same abstraction that now mediates social relations, and was already being recognised as eroding older forms of order, value and hierarchy [18]. Like capital, nature seemed increasingly formless, mutable, dynamic, and productive of violent upheaval. Nature and capital alike appeared unbounded, unpresentable, and permeated by a purposiveness quite indifferent to human welfare. There is a profound homology between Newton’s infinite, abstract space, which gave birth to innumerable paeans to the sublime vastness of the universe, and the spatial abstractions which Milton’s and Newton’s contemporary William Petty, another father of economics, was putting into practice in the mapping and colonial exploitation of Ireland under the name of ‘political arithmetic’.

Nature, capitalism and the shark

Although this excursion into Milton seems to have moved us away from Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde, I have aimed to sketch the transformed vision of nature in which the peculiarly modern figure of the shark emerges. In Book 2 of Paradise Lost, the fallen angels set out on their own colonial mission, ‘On bold adventure to discover wide / That dismal world, if any clime perhaps / Might yield them easier habitation’. The landscape they encounter (much like that encountered by European colonists in reality) is shifting, extreme and hostile; they find ‘a Universe of death’ (a phrase which Burke picks out for special attention in his account of the sublime) [19] in which ‘all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds, / Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, / Obominable, inutterable, and worse / Than fables yet have feigned’ [20] (fig.3). The monstrous generation which this landscape produces – a deathly un-creation – marks the zenith of the infernal sublimity of Milton’s universe; and though Milton does not give us any sharks in his poem, we might also recognise the shark, in the form in which it haunts the modern imagination, as just the kind of monster which such a landscape would throw up [21]. That such a monstrously generative nature (the kind of nature which would produce the shark) is to be discovered in the context of a fantasy scene of colonisation is itself significant, and a matter to which I shall return shortly.

The shark, I would argue, serves as a hyperbolic example of the terrible sublimity of this new conception of nature. The thrill of such a wild nature is pursued today through the shark in novels, films, wildlife documentaries and extreme tourism. My argument is that the shark provides, throughout its modern history, an image not only of nature as hostile but furthermore, and more precisely, of nature being as rapacious, insatiable, and unfeeling as capital accumulation itself [22].

The trope which ties the shark to capitalism has thus been insistent. For a well-known example we need look no further than Steven Spielberg’s film Jaws (1975). Here, the predatory instincts of the shark are mirrored on land by the economic forces that drive the suppression of public knowledge of the shark attacks, so as not to damage profits from the holiday trade. Such a privileging of economic rationality over people’s welfare belies the very name of the seaside town, ‘Amity’, which evokes a pre-modern form of community based on human feeling, an escape from the dysfunctional urban modernity which Police Chief Brody had hoped to leave behind in New York [23]. The water lapping at Spielberg’s lens in the beach scenes gives visual form to the contrast between what lies ‘above’ the bright surface of American consumer culture, and the social violence which lurks below.

For further examples, we could certainly trace the way that themes of economic exploitation permeate the genre of the ‘killer shark’ movie [24]. But the shark becomes more generally – and repeatedly – a representative figure of capital, even in visual forms which would be far less easily understood as ‘critiques’ of capitalism: in images that might be understood, that is to say, as its own self-presentations. The cover for The Economist (by no means an organ of the subversive left) for 17–23 November 2007, under the headline ‘America’s Vulnerable Economy’, pastiched the famous poster for Jaws, with a female swimmer clad in a stars-and-stripes bikini menaced by a monster shark emerging from the depths beneath her. Even here, in what we would expect to be the most sympathetic of depictions of the processes of capital, these are imagined through the image of the unfeeling, automatic predation of the shark.

Similarly, an advertisement displayed in the streets of London on March 2008, for the Financial Times, illustrated ‘in-depth thinking’ about mergers and acquisitions with an image of a chain of ever-larger sharks swallowing their smaller brethren. As I prepared this paper, I discovered a further example of the shark being used to sell a financial product in street advertising, this time a Henderson New Star investment fund. On a huge billboard, a diver was pictured next to a shark. The tagline of the advertisement claimed ‘This fund is so flexible [this last word in giant letters] you’re less likely to find yourself in the wrong place’. The fund, then, was being offered as a form of shelter from the perilous waters of the marketplace. But the emphasis of the advertisement on the word ‘flexible’ offers up another, parallel meaning. What was flexible in the image? It was the body of the shark itself, which we know to be lithe, elastic and muscular, and which was depicted curving around towards the poster’s viewer in a sinuous arc. What was on sale here was not just protection, but a piece of ‘shark-like’ financial suppleness – a fund which will eat rather than be eaten.

Race, slavery and colonial exploitation

In mentioning William Petty’s ‘political arithmetic’ above, I have argued for a link between the uses of spatial abstraction for sublime reverie and for colonial exploitation. These also intertwine in the figure of the shark. Petty’s abstract space is reiterated in Hirst’s vitrines, which figure processes of techno-scientific abstraction just as threatening to the living body as the shark itself. In Hirst’s shark, these two forms of violence – natural and technological – seem deliberately intertwined, each serving as a reinforcement of the other. The rationalisation here is now, of course, not that of colonial expropriation, but rather that of the commodification and control of human life in late twentieth-century society. It is the space of the panopticon, the museum, the hospital, and, as Hirst’s The Acquired Inability to Escape (made the same year as Physical Impossibility) makes clear, the office-worker’s prison-like cubicle. (Interestingly, Hirst himself, as he worked his way through art college, did time operating the phones for a market research company.) However much this art work may in other respects accommodate itself to the spectacular forms and ideologies of the market, it nonetheless speaks volumes about the experience of being locked within spatio-practical logics of modern, capitalist and technocratic society.

However (and as I have already suggested in my account of the shark as fitting with the monstrously generative Miltonic landscape of hell-as-colonial-outpost), it was largely in relation to that earlier form of imperialist capitalism that the shark first came to figure as an image of the inhumanity of capital. It is, above all, in this context that the shark emerged in the Western imaginary in its specifically modern form, as a monster. The new words which came to name this beast – shark in English and tiburón in Spanish, for example – are imported from languages encountered in the New World, and carry with them the connotations of the new spaces of colonization [25]. These, the blank spaces on the map, were suitable screens for outward projection. The shark was a figure that allowed the violence of social relations to be imagined ‘out there’, at the wild margins of empire, in a hostile nature which ‘over here’ was tamed by civilisation.

James Thomson’s poem, The Seasons (1730), is a case in point. Thomson was a key early eighteenth-century proponent of the natural sublime in poetry, and (to give you some sense of where his politics and his attitude to Empire may have lain), the writer of the lyrics of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ The Seasons, drawing out the imaginary geography of Empire, contrasts the gently bucolic nature of merry England with the sublime and violent nature of the colonial margins. Amongst the best-known of the horrors that he packs into his depiction of the latter is a description of a slave ship which has run into a tropical storm that will destroy it. Pursuing the ship is a shark, waiting to devour the bodies of the men aboard [26]. 

Thomson’s description of the shark runs:
    Increasing still the sorrows of those storms, 
    His jaws horrific arm’d with three-fold fate, 
    Here dwells the direful shark. Lured by the scent 
    Of steaming crowds, of rank disease, and death, 
    Behold! He, rushing, cuts the briny flood, 
    Swift as the gale can bear the ship along; 
    And from the partners of that cruel trade, 
    Which spoils unhappy Guinea of her sons, 
    Demands his share of prey – demands themselves!
    The stormy fates descend: one death involves 
    Tyrants and slaves; when straight their mangled limbs 
    Crashing at once, he dyes the purple seas 
    With gore, and riots in the vengeful meal [27].

Thomson here makes much of the shark as a leveller, devouring slave and master alike. Their flesh is reduced to indistinguishable ‘gore’. But this is ideology of course, erasing social difference to disavow the much more particular murderousness of the slave trade, which is now projected outwards onto the shark and into a ‘natural’ order. (We might at this point wonder whether Hirst’s conflation of natural and technological violence also plays something of this role, where the violence of techno-capitalism is imagined as being also part of the prehistoric and even pre-human natural order of predation to which the archaic shark belongs.) But even as this disavowal is performed, the shark itself is nonetheless described in Thomson’s poem metaphorically as a capitalist. It is a ‘partner’ in the ‘cruel trade / which spoils unhappy Guinea of her sons’, and one who ‘demands his share of prey’. Like Milton (and Hirst), Thomson cannot entirely escape the anxieties his work may otherwise be understood to serve to disavow.

The shark and the slave, in fact, are often associated in Western culture, in England right from the very first recorded use of the word shark, in a broadsheet of 1569 [28]. A sixteen-foot shark had been caught off the Dover coast, and was brought to London to be presented as a show in Billingsgate, in a conjunction of money, media interest and exhibitionary spectacle that might remind a contemporary reader of Hirst exhibiting at the Saatchi Gallery or the Royal Academy. The name for this strange, monstrous fish – ‘shark’ – was to be discovered, explained the broadsheet, on the lips of a crew of slavers just returned from the Americas, whose survival of hardships had earned them something of a celebrity status in London that summer. The name ‘shark’ stuck; and so did the special association of the fish with the racialised bodies of the victims of the slave trade, an association lasting well into the twentieth century. As that century was about to dawn, Winslow Homer painted The Gulf Stream (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1899), depicting a black sailor in a dilapidated boat, surrounded by sharks. 

In the middle of the century, the plot of Tintin and the Red Sea Sharks (originally published in 1958) revolved around a ring smuggling Africans enslaved whilst on the pilgrimage to Mecca. And still in 1999, a full century after Homer’s painting, in the shark-attack movie Deep Blue Sea, the character played by rap artist L.L. Cool J., in a moment of cinematic reflexivity, can still complain: ‘Brothers never make it out of situations like this!’

  
In conjunction with this continued association of the shark with slavery, Thomson’s figuration of the shark as a capitalist can be approached through Paul Gilroy’s work on the Black Atlantic [29]. Gilroy argues that the experience of the Middle Passage served as a blueprint for capitalist modernity. Slavery would provide the testing ground of a logic where all human life and labour were subject to the calculation of profit [30]. Thomson’s shark reducing its victims to homogeneous ‘gore’ thus not only serves to ideologically erase social difference, but also as a powerful image of the reduction of the particularity of the human body to the abstraction of exchange-value.

Visions of global empire, then and now

John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark 1778, which created a ‘sensation’ at the Royal Academy some 219 years before Damien Hirst’ s work, reprised many of Thomson’s themes. It commemorates the salvation from the jaws of a shark, whilst on a slave-trading expedition, of one Brook Watson, then a rising figure in the City of London [31]. Like Thomson’s poem, Copley’s painting allows his elite London audience to envision themselves at the heart of the global-colonial network of enterprise from which their wealth was derived, staging a contrast between their own lives and this exotic and dangerous elsewhere. Its depiction of ‘honest Tars’(as one reviewer called them) pulling together to save Watson provides a reassuring image of colonial endeavour. Its disavowal of social difference – echoing Thomson’s – is amplified in the compositional inversion which places Watson, the most socially elevated figure in the painting, at the base of the composition, and a black sailor at its pinnacle.

Hirst’s sculpture, I suggest, involves us in an updated version of the fantasy of Thomson and Copley’s global space of empire. The shark in Hirst remains a token of the exotic, fearsome nature of the antipodes, put on display through the power of money, and by the communicational technologies which allow one to have a shark caught on the other side of the world, refrigerated and shipped back to London. We are positioned, like Thomson’s and Copley’s audiences, at the heart of a spider web of wealth and power. This is surely a part of the frisson of pleasure that Hirst offers us [32]. This is, of course, not the Whig-liberal Empire of the eighteenth century which formed the context of the development of the sublime in British criticism, but rather the informational, transnational capital of a new kind of globalisation, within the flows of which the London of the 1980s was asserting itself. This globalisation, of course, is no longer based around slavery, but those very different forms of the calculation and control of human labour powers which I have mentioned already in relation to Hirst’s Acquired Inability to Escape. Hirst’s shark, with its imperial sublime, however, allows us to imagine today’s Empire through the schema of its older type.

Nature, now

The nature we meet in Hirst’s art work is transformed, too. If nature in the eighteenth century still seemed a powerful limit to human endeavour, the industrial and technical developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries made it seem increasingly less significant. Cultural historian David Nye has charted the development of a ‘technological sublime’, which replaced the natural variety [33]. By the 1960s, the sociologist and philosopher Theodor W. Adorno could think of the natural sublime as an ephemeral stage in European aesthetic sensibility, which had quickly lost its power to present humanity with the ‘non-identitical’ [34]. For the literary critic and political theorist Fredric Jameson, in the 1980s, the natural sublime had been replaced by the sublimity of the ‘second nature’ of the man-made environment, which was what now seemed primarily to face humanity as a terrible and counter-purposive Otherness [35]. If, with the growth of late twentieth-century environmental anxieties, nature has been reasserting itself as outside human control, then this is a nature which is now clearly overcoded with the powers of capitalist techno-science to transform it: a ‘third nature’, if you like, which is neither fully cultural nor fully outside of culture, but a hybrid of both [36]. This is the ‘techno-nature’ we find in Hirst’s vitrines. It is also more generally omnipresent in contemporary representations of sharks. The sharks we meet in horror films – in Jaws itself, or more recently in movies such as Deep Blue Sea (1999) or Shark Swarm (2008) – are repeatedly the products of human interference with nature [37]. It is a commonplace, furthermore, to describe the shark through technological metaphors: Hooper, the marine biologist in Jaws, is typical, calling the shark ‘a perfect engine – an eating machine’. In this regard the notoriously obvious mechanical nature of Spielberg’s ‘shark’ makes a certain kind of a sense in embodying how we imagine such creatures, as at once an absolute of voraciousness but also as hollowed out of desire: empty, subjectless, automatic. Peter Benchley’s novel, on which Spielberg’s movie was based, extends these metaphors in its descriptions of the shark. When it devours its first victim, Benchley, making the shark more machine than fish, describes it as hitting her ‘like a locomotive’ [38]. In the first description we have of the monster, it is figuratively decomposed not into a unified entity with a will or agency, but rather, a series of organs which communicate with each other through processes ‘transmission’. It is a kind of cybernetic organism, processing data or ‘signals’ (a word which Benchley repeats) from the world outside it. The cybernetic motif is taken up more emphatically later in the book, where the shark is found ‘banking’, registering ‘impulses’, ‘locking on’ to these and ‘homing’ in on them [39]. The shark here is even more clearly a piece of military hardware, a computerised weapon, at a moment, at the very end of the Vietnam War, when information technology was increasingly permeating both warfare and everyday life.

What I have argued here is that these ways of figuring contemporary anxieties about the penetration of the ‘natural’ world by technology are themselves possible on the basis of histories of representation in which the shark – and more generally the sublime, terrible nature of which it is a representative – has served as a displaced figure of the economic relations of capitalist modernity. Sublime nature is overdetermined, from the start, by a vision of the social. The contemporary reappearance of the natural sublime has occurred at a moment when the vision of the unified planetary scale serves as an image at once of an eco-system but also of a global economic order. But this planetary economico-environmental order is often imagined in terms of older maps of Empire.

Finally, I would like to focus upon a further example of where we find the contemporary sublime of the shark overlaid with old maps of Empire. In the summer of 2007 two very large sharks were spotted off the coast of Cornwall, prompting an immediate shark frenzy in the tabloids, and speculation that these were killer Great Whites. (See especially the editions of The Sun published from 28 July–1 August of that year.) The sightings, the newspapers implied, were the result of environmental changes – raising the spectre of British waters, with global warming, becoming the hunting ground of these monsters more often associated with the tropics. This also, however, figures the collapse of the comforting global order of Thomson and Copley, and the return of a violence which is both social and natural to the once tame and safe heart of power. Read in this way, this image of a tropical monster besieging our shores, produced at a time of profound paranoia about terrorism, raises the spectre of the chaos, poverty, war and exploitation which has long been exported to the former colonies, coming home to roost at the former heart of empire.

We see a similar instance where behind the natural sublime there lurks a set of more properly social fears about the nature of the global order in the disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow (2004), which also envisions a turning inside out of the map of empire, where the tame heartland reverts to absolute wilderness, though this time in its arctic rather than tropical form. That such a scenario is motivated by political as well as ecological fears is revealed in the film’s bizarre final fantasy of reconciliation in which, after the rich northern hemisphere has been overcome by climatic disaster, the survivors are welcomed as refugees in the now relatively-temperate global south in exchange for the cancellation of ‘Third World’ debt.

Notes
For example, this paper was delivered first in 2010 at a symposium which was one of a series organised by Tate in relation to its research project, The Sublime Object: Nature, Art and Language, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Even Longinus himself, whose essay, in the form in which we have it, ends up with a plaint against the degradation of poetry and morals with the increasing materialism of his own day, found himself looking backwards (to Homer and to Plato, for example) for his models of rhetorical sublimity.

The phrase is from Chapter 1 of The Communist Manifesto, available online from the Marx and Engels Internet Archive at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm accessed February 2010.

See in particular P.G.M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study of the Development of Public Credit 1688–1756, New York 1967. This period, which takes us almost exactly from Boileau to Burke, also sees the development of key financial institutions such as the Bank of England and Lloyds of London, the tradability of national debt, a massive explosion of joint-stock companies and financial speculation, and the generalisation of credit throughout society.

Edmund Burke, ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful’, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, London 2004, part 1, section 7, p.86.

Or perhaps rather, if, as Jean-Luc Godard suggested, the 1968 generation were the children of Mao and Coca-Cola, then Hirst’s art is the product of a union between Barnett Newman and Steven Spielberg. Figured this way, the Hirstean sublime might raise some uncanny questions about what it is that ties together Newman and Spielberg – seemingly at opposite ends of a cultural spectrum though they are.

Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work, London 2001, p.19.

Damien Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, reduced edition, London 2005, p.132.

Pliny The Elder, Natural History, trans. by H. Rackham, London 1983, vol.3, p.267 (translation slightly altered).

Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite, Seattle and London, 1997, p.29. It is in particular Hobbes who finds buttocks a suitable description for the Derbyshire peaks (Nicolson, Mountain Gloom, p.65).

Compare, for example, John Evelyn, who, crossing the Alps in 1644, writes that it is ‘as if nature had here swept up the rubbish of the Earth in the Alps’ (cited in Nicolson, p.62) with Dennis, who in 1688 wrote: ‘We walk’d upon the very brink, in a literal sense, of Destruction … The sense of all this produc’d different emotions in me, viz., a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy, and at the same time, that I was infinitely pleas’d, I trembled … Nature seems to have design’d [the Alps], and execut’d [them] too in Fury. Yet she moves us less when she studies to please us more. … Transporting Pleasures followed the sight of the Alpes, and what unusual Transports think you were those, that were mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair?’ (cited in Nicolson, Mountain Gloom, pp.277–8). Dennis’s paradoxical emotions – joy and yet terror, horror and yet delight – in the face of such a nature already take us into the aesthetic territory which Burke would theorise through the notion of the sublime.

See for example John Dennis, ‘On Milton’s Sublimity, from The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry’, in Milton: The Critical Heritage, ed. by John T. Shawcross, London 1970, pp.125–7, or Addison’s extended critique of Paradise Lost in a series of Saturday Spectator papers from nos.267 to 369 (5 January – 3 May 1712). Milton’s role in the English canon of sublime literature, as developed in the eighteenth century is discussed at length in Leslie Moore, Beautiful Sublime: The Making of Paradise Lost, 1701–1734, Stanford 1990, and also Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770, Cambridge 1998. Burke discusses Milton as exemplary of the sublime in his Philosophical Enquiry, in part 2 section 3 (‘Obscurity’), part 2, section 5 (‘The Same Subject Continued) and part 5, section 7 (‘How Words Influence the Passions’). See Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, pp.103, 105–6, 197–8.

Indeed, several twentieth-century critics have investigated Milton’s relation to the new sciences, for example Karen Edwards, Milton and the Natural World: Science in Paradise Lost, New York and Cambridge 1999; John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry and Politics in the Age of Milton, Ithaca and London 1996; Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, London 1979, pp.398–401.

Satan describes the space he traverses between worlds as a ‘dark unbottom’d infinite Abyss’ (Paradise Lost, 2.405). It is a ‘void profound / Of unessential Night [which] receives him [who enters it] … / Wide gaping, and with utter loss of being / Threatens him, plung’d in that abortive gulf’ (2.238–440). It is:
… a dark
Illimitable Ocean without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, & highth,
And time and place are lost; where eldest Night
And Chaos, Ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal Anarchie, amidst the noise
Of endless Warrs, and by confusion stand. (2.891–7)
It is in particular books 2 and 3 that to have so many fine examples of this perplexing space, but Milton’s grand and terrible vision of the universe is by no means limited to these.

As John Rogers has put it, we can understand Milton’s poem as subject to the ‘need to forge an ontological connection between physical motion and political action’. Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, p.ix.

Rogers picks out, in particular, Milton’s account of creation, as given by Uriel in book 3. In this, in a ‘massive liberalisation of the cosmos’, matter becomes ‘God’s disidentified body’ (Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, p.113). Raphael’s account of the creation in 7.276–84 (though he generally depicts a more hierarchical order) also depicts the world as paradoxically self-generating. This strange – and actually rather heretical – vision of matter as imbued with divine spirit allows Milton to propose a third way between the Calvinist vision of pre-destination, in which God actively commands everything from a central location, and the Hobbesian vision of matter as constituted by violently colliding particles, and society by the war of all against all, whose destructive conflict can only be held in check by the will of an absolute sovereign. The poem in fact seems to waver between these different positions, as if between them they pose a structure of the possibilities of thinking within which Milton was interpellated.

Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, p.22.

For more on the early modern anxieties about the liquidity of capital, its unsettling social effects, and its transformation of the world of appearances, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750, Cambridge 1986.

Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, pp.197–8.

Paradise Lost 2.571–3; 2.622; 2.624–7.

It is also not incidental that it is the Miltonic vision of such monstrous productivity which Alexander Pope was to take up in his satire of the emerging capitalist literary industry of the early eighteenth century, in his Dunciad. I discuss Pope at length in my PhD thesis, ‘Damien Hirst and the Legacy of the Sublime in Contemporary Art and Culture’, Middlesex University 2009.

Throughout modern culture the image of the shark brings together the two inter-folded forms of the ‘inhuman’ which Jean-François Lyotard proposes surround and construct the ‘human’ in modern discourse: the inhumanity of nature and that of techno-capitalist reason. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Cambridge 1991.

No less a politician than Fidel Castro read the film as ‘an indictment of greedy capitalists willing to sacrifice people’s lives to protect their investments’. Cited in Joseph McBride, Steven Spielberg: A Biography, London 1998, p.255. Interestingly enough Spielberg, who is often imagined as ultra-conservative, when he was told the remark by a journalist, is reported to have found Castro’s analysis a ‘wonderful’ and perspicuous interpretation of the film.

In Shark Swarm (2008), for example, the sharks have been made hyper-aggressive by the illegal dumping of toxic waste by a real-estate developer, who is seeking to drive a fishing community out of business in order to buy up their land cheaply.

For further discussions of the development of the figure of the shark in relation to the colonial experience, see J. I. Castro, ‘On the Origins of the Spanish Word “Tiburón”, and the English Word “Shark”’, Environmental Biology of Fishes, vol.65, no.3, 2002, pp.249–53; Tom Jones, ‘The Xoc, the Sharke, and the Sea Dogs: An Historical Encounter’, in Virginia M. Fields (ed.), Fifth Palenque Round Table, 1983, San Francisco 1985, pp.211–22.

Samuel Holt Monk, in his still-classic account of the sublime, calls the passage ‘too well known for quotation’. Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England, Ann Arbor 1960, p.89.

James Thomson, ‘Summer’ in The Seasons, Oxford 1972, lines 1013–25.

That this is the first recorded use of the term is proposed by the OED, and also the etymologies offered by Castro and Jones. The anonymously authored broadsheet in question is entitled ‘The True Discripcion of This Marveilous Straunge Fishe, Which Was Taken on Thursday Was Sennight, the XVI. Day of June, This Present Month, in the Yeare of Our Lord God, M.D.LXIX.’ (1569) and is to be found in Joseph Lilly (ed.), A Collection of Seventy-Nine Black Letter Ballads and Broadsides, Printed in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, between the Years 1559 and 1579, London 1867, pp.145–7.

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London 1993.

There is a link here, again, to William Petty, whose ‘political arithmetic’ was also a matter of such calculations; Petty measured the economic ‘cost’ of possible massacres of the Irish people in terms of the damage to the labour power of the nation.

Watson would later become an Alderman of the City of London, Member of Parliament (to which he spoke against the prohibition of slavery), Lord Mayor of London, a Director of the Bank of England, and finally a Baronet.

For more on this, see my analysis of Hirst’s shark and also his ‘diamond skull’ (For The Love of God, 2007) in my essay ‘Damien Hirst’s Diamond Skull and the Capitalist Sublime’, in Luke White and Claire Pajaczkowska (eds.), The Sublime Now, Newcastle upon Tyne 2009, pp.155–171.

David Nye, American Technological Sublime, Cambridge MA 1994.

Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno, Rolf Teidemann and Robert Hullot-Kentor, London 2002, p.70.

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London 1991, especially pp.34–7. As it emerges from Jameson’s account, the prominent sublime of that decade was a ‘cybersublime’: the subject lost in the infinity of a virtual reality entirely unmoored from the limits of the physical world, but which Jameson proposes in any case serves itself as a cipher for, or way to start to imagine, the unthinkable flows of postmodern capital itself.

For more on such a ‘third nature’, see Gene Ray, ‘History, Sublime, Terror: Notes on the Politics of Fear’, in White and Pajaczkowska (eds.), The Sublime Now, pp.133–54.

The behaviour of the shark in Jaws, it is implied at one point, may be the result of overfishing; Quint’s story about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis – the ship which delivered uranium for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima – creates alternative associative links. In Shark Swarm (2008), the killer sharks have mutated owing to dumping of toxic waste by a real estate developer. In Deep Blue Sea, genetically-modified, super-intelligent sharks escape and pursue the scientists that bred them. Again, it is capitalism which is posited at the heart of this transgression of the ‘natural’ balance of nature: a businessman has sunk $200 million into the work, in order to profit from the development of a cure for Alzheimer’s.

Peter Benchley, Jaws, 2nd printing, London 1976, pp.9–12.

Ibid., p.53.

forward leaning

2011-05-16T21:25:00.000+02:00

So much has happened since the last post here - too much, too quickly for a running critical round-up, or the stamina of a scurvy tune.

Of the bad news, from Fukushima to the ongoing dirty wars to xenophobic progroms (in Athens, right now, sickeningly), what more to say than has already been said here, repeatedly, about the splicing of terror and war machine? Disaster drones on and will do, the logic holding.

But these months have also seen a momentous reaching for liberation, a stirring emergence of self-empowered subjectivities rolling across North Africa and into the Middle East - a heartening, amazing and humbling movement from below, still unfolding, still gathering and spreading. How far, how deep? The subjects that have emerged, massively and historically, will decide that for themselves. 

And they will have to, for the old enforcers will not easily get out of their way. Scrambling, dissembling, bombing here, turning the blind eye there, the old order will do all it can to contain, capture and exhaust these energies, and to restore privileged access to gas and oil and addicted markets for arms.

What amazing courage, what admirable restraint those struggling reachers have shown! Now, in the metropoles of Europe and North America, the antiwar movements could show their solidarity. Unhappily, the miseries of enforced austerity are blocking such horizons.

For now, anyway. But frustration and pressure are building globally, evidently. Either self-liberation or more fear and scapegoating, these are the choices in the North. The South, awakening, isn't waiting. To this, one can only say: yes!

Beyond that, word-poor, myself, these days. Scurvy tunes remains open, though, to the texts of friends. These forthcoming, beginning soon, check back from time to time...

GR

normalizing catastrophe

2010-12-24T15:45:00.003+01:00

Normalizing Catastrophe: Cancun as Laboratory of the Future  

          
by Eddie Yuen

Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid crashed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and rendered extinct 70% of all life on Earth. In December of 2010 in Cancun, a mere geological stone's throw from the Chicxulub crater that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, a conclave of political and corporate leaders presided over a conference that failed to slow down the next great extinction event on this planet.

But for this geographic coincidence it's unlikely that this conference will be remembered as anything more than another tedious and predictable step towards a future of managed climate chaos and accelerated global enclosures. Cancun is most significant, though, not as the scene of a crime but as a laboratory of climate apartheid. Whatever fearsome predation the Yucatan of the late Cretaceous may have harbored, the Cancun of the early Anthropocene is the model of a naturalized social order even redder in tooth and claw. Even to use the language of "climate talks" is like speaking of the Israeli/Palestinian peace process. As linguist Noam Chomsky said years ago, the mere utterance of this phrase validates the discourse that there is such a process.

This particular conference, rightfully overshadowed by the Wikileaks saga, was both anti-climactic and anti-climatic, in the words of Laura Carlson, director of the American Policy Program in Mexico City. The Indigenous Environmental Network summed it up nicely: "The Cancun Agreements are not the result of an informed and open consensus process, but the consequence of an ongoing US diplomatic offensive of backroom deals, arm-twisting and bribery that targeted nations in opposition to the Copenhagen Accord during the months leading up to the COP-16 talks".

Hidden in the dismal wonkery of the summit, however, an important shift has taken place. The Economist of Nov 25th, 2010 pronounced the end of any effort by states to seriously seek to lower emissions. We are in a post mitigation world now, and elite effort will focus on adaptation. Some analysts estimate that the current ratio of prevention to adaptation in terms of funds spent is about 80 to 20, and this will likely be reversed. But what kind of adaptation to climate change are we talking about? Cancun in this regard is the perfect site for this conference, as it presents a vision of the future that elites are very comfortable with. Exclusion zones of concrete walled leisure, ringed by layered barricades and social apartheid. Like Dubai or Beverly Hills, its obvious who is a worker and who a consumer, and enough of the workers are security guards to ensure that "safety" and property will always be respected. Outside kilometer zero, in the city of 700,000, the highest suicide rates in Mexico. Inside the Hotel Zone, debt ridden Americans lounging on eroding beaches are convincing themselves that they're having a good time.

The elites like this model, but it's fragility is evident. Cancun itself can only take so many more category 5 hurricanes before it will be retired like Mazatlan or Atlantic City. When this happens, new frontiers of commodified leisure, whether in Colombia, Sri Lanka or Myanmar, will be developed, but even so the economic and political costs of the 2 degree Celsius average temperature rise that the world leaders have deemed acceptable are staggering.

How can we understand the utter failure of the leaders of the world's nation states, with the sole exception of Bolivia, to make even a perfunctory effort to assuage the crisis? It's certainly not climate denialism, as few if any countries are host to a political entity such as the US Republican Party. On the contrary, global elites know full well what is happening. China and many other Asian countries, where 9 of the 10 most at-risk cities are located, are run by engineers and technocrats. Can it be attributed primarily to a lack of vision - a systemic inability to look beyond electoral cycles and quarterly profit reports, something that liberal, communist and even fascist elites all seemed able to do not so many decades ago? Is it due primarily to a lack of cohesion amongst global elites resulting from the vacuum caused by the US's precipitous fall from hegemonic status? Or is it the failure of the boosters of green capitalism to pitch a plausible new bubble opportunity to global finance capital? Whatever the combination of these factors, there is a "growing acceptance", as The Economist says, "that the effort to avert serious climate change has run out of steam".

As insane as this is, it's not hard to see why Northern elites are warming to the idea of managed climate change. After all, they know that in this game of "lifeboat ethics", we're not all in the same boat. As Mike Davis has eloquently described, the existing inequalities between North and South will be exacerbated by temperature rise - and ideologically "naturalized" in the process.

The consolidation of this approach is perfectly symbolized by the city of Cancun. A concrete blight on the "Mayan Riviera", chosen by computer under the Echeverria regime that presided over the massacre of Tlatelolco plaza in 1968, Cancun boasts the most anti-democratic geography for a global summit since the WTO meeting in Qatar. From their orbit in the Moon Palace, state delegates, corporate lobbyists and credulous journalists were free to discuss the finer points of carbon markets and neo-liberal nature without even a mention of the alternative solutions proposed in the Cochabamba Accord from earlier in the year.

The "acceptable" level of sacrifice allowed for by the Cancun agreement is breathtaking even by the standards of global capitalism. These include the predictable starvation and displacement of millions, the obliteration of entire eco-systems such as coral reefs from the planet, the desertification of the Amazon, the disappearance of the glacial fed rivers of Asia and South America, the extinction of up to 35% of global species, and the advent of the "sea of slime", to name a few. We are enjoined, however, by governments, media and many environmental groups, to hail the signs of progress at Cancun, and to engage in the conceit that these summits are where serious people must come to hammer out policy. But is it really better that climate talks are now on "lifeline" rather than "zombie" mode if questions of climate debt are off the table and the collapse of biodiveristy is seen only as an "accounting" problem?

In what may ultimately be a positive sign, however, the dedicated social movement participants who did make the journey to the gates of Cancun were not discouraged either by the tedium inside or the barricades outside. The spectacle of the expulsion from the Moon Palace of dissenting and indigenous voices, as documented by Democracy Now!, says all we need to know about the legitimacy of the conference.

Many activists were disappointed with the street level climate movement after Copenhagen, but there were no expectations for a major mobilization this time around. Instead, campaigners, many from the vibrant social movements of Mexico, understood that life, and politics, is elsewhere. Issues such as the commodification of nature, new rounds of enclosures justified by REDD, and climate apartheid are crucial, but will only truly be challenged and acted upon outside of the framework of "climate talks". The facts on the ground, and in the atmosphere and oceans, will ensure that there will be climate movements in the next century. These may not take the form that many expected before Copenhagen, but the coming century of global defrosting will be nothing if not surprising.

Eddie Yuen teaches in the Urban Studies Department at the San Francisco Art Institute. He is the co-editor, with George Katsiaficas and Daniel Burton-Rose, of Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement (Soft Skull Press).

the long night

2010-12-22T12:42:00.001+01:00

The Long Night
 

by Iain Boal
 

Winter Solstice 2010

4.30 AM, BERKELEY---Later today, in the hours between total lunar eclipse and the longest night, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will be discussing an Order (drafted by its chairman and Obama appointee) which spells the end of the internet as a common carrier, and will allow "paid prioritization" by big capitalist firms. We have lived through the opening military-socialist phase of the planetary telecommmunications system, whose infrastructure required public subvention and state action far beyond the ability of private capitals - cold war computing and informatics, Pentagon ballistics and telemetry, DoD funded materials science, rocketry and satellite R & D, eminent domain and state seizures as necessary, etc. Now Big Telecom is poised and the electromagnetic enclosures are beginning in earnest; the camel's nose is the (de)regulation of the internet in its etherial mode, the so-called "mobile services". 

The opinion of the mass of commoners counts for nought, and the silent compliance of public servants and officials is at this stage a given, as when in 1800 the seizure of the commons could be completed, no longer in "letters of blood and fire", but with the stroke of the pen in Parliament by means of private members' Bills of Enclosure. In 2010 it takes a comedian-turned-US senator, aghast at the idea of Comcast customers being blocked from Netflix, to describe the prospects:

"Internet service giants like Comcast and Verizon want to offer premium and privileged access to the Internet for corporations who can afford to pay for it...For many Americans - particularly those who live in rural areas - the future of the Internet lies in mobile services. But the draft Order would effectively permit Internet providers to block lawful content, applications, and devices on mobile Internet connections. Mobile networks like AT&T and Verizon Wireless would be able to shut off your access to content or applications for any reason. For instance, Verizon could prevent you from accessing Google Maps on your phone, forcing you to use their own mapping program, Verizon Navigator, even if it costs money to use and isn't nearly as good. Or a mobile provider with a political agenda could prevent you from downloading an app that connects you with the Obama campaign (or, for that matter, a Tea Party group in your area).

It gets worse. The FCC has never before explicitly allowed discrimination on the Internet - but the draft Order takes a step backwards, merely stating that so-called "paid prioritization" (the creation of a "fast lane" for big corporations who can afford to pay for it) is cause for concern. It sure is - but that's exactly why the FCC should ban it. Instead, the draft Order would have the effect of actually relaxing restrictions on this kind of discrimination.

But grassroots supporters of net neutrality are beginning to wonder if we've been had. Instead of proposing regulations that would truly protect net neutrality, reports indicate that Chairman Genachowski has been calling the CEOs of major Internet corporations seeking their public endorsement of this draft proposal, which would destroy it. No chairman should be soliciting sign-off from the corporations that his agency is supposed to regulate - and no true advocate of a free and open Internet should be seeking the permission of large media conglomerates before issuing new rules.

After all, just look at Comcast - this Internet monolith has reportedly imposed a new, recurring fee on Level 3 Communications, the company slated to be the primary online delivery provider for Netflix. That's the same Netflix that represents Comcast's biggest competition in video services. Imagine if Comcast customers couldn't watch Netflix, but were limited only to Comcast's Video On Demand service. Imagine if a cable news network could get its website to load faster on your computer than your favorite local political blog. Imagine if big corporations with their own agenda could decide who wins or loses online."
 
The tireless tribunus populi, Alexander Cockburn, as editor of a dissenting online newsletter, knows what is at stake, and in the fortnight since he sounded the following clarion call in CounterPunch the stakes have become even clearer as the first full-blown popular cyberwar unfolds, with its unlikely epicenter at Ellingham Hall, the ancient seat of Norfolk gentry in the Waveney Valley of East Anglia, where Julian Assange is under "manor-house arrest", the guest of Vaughan Smith, a ex-Grenadier Guardsman, crack shot and organic farmer. In honor of two fallen photojournalist colleagues - in Iraq and the Balkans - Smith founded the Frontline Club in London as a hub for unembedded journalism. It is a converted Victorian plumbing factory with a restaurant sourced from the Norfolk estate, a suite of members' rooms upstairs, and a event space on the third floor hosting over 200 talks and screenings a year. While he was staying in one of the flats for visiting independent journalists, Julian Assange could feel the noose tightening. Cockburn understands the connection between l'affaire Assange and the meeting today of the FCC in Washington D.C.: 

"The WikiLeaks sites have vanished—though more than 1,400 mirror sites still carry the disclosures. Amazon, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and the organization’s Swiss bank have shut it down, either on their own initiative or after a threat from the US government or its poodles in London and Geneva. Attorney General Eric Holder is cooking up a stew of new gag stipulations and fierce statutory penalties against any site carrying material the government deems compromising to state security. Commercial outfits like Amazon are falling over themselves to connive at the shutdowns, actual or threatened.

As I outline at greater length in my Beat the Devil column in the current Nation, one of the biggest lessons for us all  comes in the form of a wake-up call on the enormous vulnerability of our prime means of communication to swift government-instigated, summary shutdown. 

So here we have a public “commons”—the Internet—subject to arbitrary onslaught by the state and powerful commercial interests, and not even the shadow of constitutional protections. The situation is getting worse. The net itself is going private. As I write, Google and Facebook are locked in a struggle over which company will control the bulk of the world’s Internet traffic. Millions could find that the e-mail addresses they try to communicate with, the sites they want to visit, the ads they may want to run are all under Google’s or Facebook’s supervision and can be closed off without explanation or redress at any time.

Here in the US certainly, we need a big push on First Amendment protections for the Internet: one more battlefield where the left and the libertarians can join forces. But we must do more than buttress the First Amendment. We must also challenge the corporations’ power to determine the structure of the Internet and decide who is permitted to use it."

 
Net Neutrality poster: Anthony Hook

holmes on paglen

2010-12-20T20:44:00.002+01:00

Visiting the Planetarium
Images of the Black World
 

by Brian Holmes

Clouds, fields, forests, country roads, empty skies: the video image shows you a landscape seen at random, or for purposes utterly unknown. Its shifting perspectives appear through the visual overlay of a targeting system, controlled by a distant operator. This is a drone’s eye view. The signal was captured from a satellite transmission, maybe intended for Creech Air Base, Nevada. We see a date and a local time, but the position remains blank—it could be in Kosovo or elsewhere in southern Europe. There’s something hesitant, furtive or even lost about the way the drone is scanning through the territory. Suddenly a large wall clock flashes up on the screen. Its face is emblazoned with a dragon-winged creature, threatening and strange, but typical of the emblems used by Air Force reconnaissance teams. Is it supposed to mark a significant moment, a planned operation, a hit? More likely it’s the cypher of some airman’s utter boredom, alone in a cubicle, glued to a monitor, staring at meaningless foreign landscapes whose very banality has become part of the secret.
    
The video was given to Trevor Paglen by one of his collaborators—people who are intensely curious about what goes on in the restricted zones of the Pentagon’s “black world.” It was then edited and folded into a larger body of work, to be shown in galleries and museums. Thus it has the status of a clue, an index, rather than a document strictly speaking. It points to a set of pressing questions that involve the uses of vision, the potentials of art and the bases of sovereignty. These questions coalesce around a major paradox: the existence of a secret world that is increasingly palpable, increasingly present. Why has the invisible become so banal, why does it crop up everywhere? Paglen does not answer individually. Instead, he seems intent on exploring — and, to whatever degree possible, on reversing — the social conditions of perception that allow multibillion-dollar weapons systems and vast clandestine intelligence networks to “hide” in the broad daylight of a democracy that is also an empire.
    
The work is investigative and journalistic, producing an impressive stream of books and articles. At the same time it is existential, leading the artist on journeys to countries like Afghanistan to look for military prisons, or on climbs up desert mountains to scrutinize forbidden sites. More recently it has revealed a deep involvement with the history of aesthetics, as he walks in the footsteps of nineteenth-century frontier photographers to make technically complex images of spy satellites against stunning natural backgrounds. The exhibition at the Vienna Secession takes this venture into aesthetics even further, with a cloud study recalling avant-garde photographer Alfred Stieglitz; a colorist abstraction that evokes the violent disorganization of visuality in the painting of Turner; or a grid of contact prints in the manner of Eadweard Muybridge. But what can such historicizing gestures bring to a contemporary politics of perception?
    
One should not forget that Paglen, the artist, is also a geographer. He does not simply remix the two disciplines in a postmodern mélange but moves deliberately between them, developing what I call an extradisciplinary practice that alters both departure points. [1] Thus, in a catalog essay entitled “Experimental Geography,” he suggests that a good geographer might not ask “What is art?” or “Is this art successful?” but instead “How is this space called ‘art’ produced?” He recalls Henri Lefebvre’s central concept: “In a nutshell, the production of space says that humans create the world around them and that humans are, in turn, created by the world around them.” And he concludes: “If human activities are inextricably spatial, then new forms of freedom and democracy can only emerge in dialectical relation to the production of new spaces.” [2]
    
In this text I’m going to focus on the geographic and aesthetic spaces from which the images of the black world spring. As Paglen shows, our vision has been shaped historically, so that a political engagement with state secrecy involves a struggle with the disciplines of perception. In conclusion, I’ll outline the transformation of the art space for which he and other extradisciplinary artists are striving.

Celestial Surveyors

Let’s start with the satellite portraits taken in the footsteps of the frontier photographers. When staging these augmented remakes of works by Timothy O’Sullivan or Carleton Watkins, Paglen has in mind not only the pictorialist images of his predecessors but also the teams of government surveyors who toiled alongside them, on geological expeditions undertaken in the wake of the Mexican-American War, when vast inhabited territories of the northwestern American continent were opened to conquest, settlement and exploitation. He conceives photography as an integral part of the colonizing process, which has not ceased in our time: “O'Sullivan and the other western photographers were to the nineteenth century what satellites are to the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries; ideologically and technologically, today's military and reconnaissance spacecraft are directly descended from the men who once roamed the deserts and mountains photographing blank spots on maps.” [3] By rephotographing the natural sites with the satellites in the frame, the artist-geographer situates himself within a common lineage; but he attempts to twist that heritage away from its imperial consequences. How to rival with or socially displace the imaging techniques of the warriors of vision?
    
Consider the picture of the Keyhole Optical Reconnaissance Satellite (USA 186) portrayed as a delicate white streak bisecting star trails above the majestic outline of Yosemite’s Half Dome, photographed by Carleton Watkins in the mid-1860s. If Paglen is able to locate and record this secret object, it is only because he disposes of a database of classified American military satellites put together by an ad-hoc team of celestial surveyors scattered across the face of the planet. As he recounts in the book Blank Spots on the Map, these observers of “the other night sky” descend from Operation Moonwatch, a government-sponsored program that trained amateur enthusiasts to scrutinize the heavens for the appearance of Soviet sputniks in the 1950s to ‘60s. When the United States abruptly stopped publishing the orbital data of its military reconnaissance satellites in 1983, the mission of the artificial moon watchers spontaneously reversed: they became attached to the passionate hobby, or for some, the democratic duty, of ferreting out the identities and establishing the orbits of the unidentified objects they saw appearing above their heads. [4] Thus they were able to put their government-imparted knowledge to radically different uses. The measurements they take and the data they continue to generate is what allows Paglen to calculate the motion of the astronomical tracking telescopes he uses to take photographs of the orbiting satellites. What might appear to be individual detective work is dependent in reality on a distributed assemblage of perception.
    
What’s being deployed here is a specialized formation of civil society, one that collectively possesses the technical skills to begin identifying the classified Pentagon programs. This kind of critical formation is not new: consider the fundamental work of the Federation of American Scientists on these same issues. What’s remarkable today, however, is the way that groups like the satellite watchers can become effective within a self-organizing network, similar to the amateur plane spotters who contributed their research to the book Torture Taxi. [5] Civil surveyors acting from their backyards can now track the programs of the US intelligence agencies and the military space command. But Paglen’s specific contribution to such networks is not only that of a coordinator who publishes other peoples’ data; nor does he merely add an artistic touch that projects the material onto the museum circuit. Instead, his contribution lies in the particular focus he gives to the research, or if you prefer, in the way he determines its object.
    
To understand this focus—or impossibility of focus—take the Limit Telephotography series, where Paglen attempts to capture landscape views and even details of military installations through an astronomer’s telescope at distances of up to sixty-five miles. The resulting images, often on the verge of dissolving into atmospheric blur, provide fascinating glimpses into the restricted areas. Some examples are the black-site workers stepping off their commuter planes at the Gold Coast Terminal in Las Vegas; the control tower at Cactus Flat, Nevada; or the Reaper drone on a runway at Creech Air Base near Indian Springs. The aim here is not just to obtain sharp documentary photos: for that, commercial satellite imagery of the kind available for the last decade would be much more effective. [6] What these works ask the viewer to perceive is something different: not just individuals, installations or technical devices, but the larger order of systematic secrecy, the world into which they fit. The object of the research is always the black world as such, with its strictly compartmentalized divisions of labor, its need-to-know clearances and its legal and procedural barriers, which act to make the visible unspeakable, the tangible unprovable, the equitable unactionable. At stake is the apprehension of a systematic obstruction, something like a gradient in society, whose origins go back to the organized secrecy of a huge industrial undertaking, the Manhattan Project for the production of the atomic bomb. [7] The distance, the dust in the air, the shimmers of heat convection that break up the detail of the images are perceptual metonyms of this resistance to democratic oversight that defines the black world, and indeed, so much of contemporary military activity.

It takes a geographical approach—that is, a collective retracing of the patterns of human development on earth—to even begin conceiving the immensity of the American war apparatus. This is achieved by surveying the core elements of state secrecy that lay the basis for that apparatus, then following their extension beyond the atmosphere, into orbital space. In this way, one social formation comes to face another in an exchange of gazes. The masters of surveillance are in their turn surveilled. Photography, as a technical process, is on both sides of the fence: it is one of the key functions of the satellites and the drones, while at the same time it is integral to what Paglen calls an “experimental geography.” Could one find a similar ambiguity in photography as an artistic process?

Technological Sublime

It comes as a shock to learn that Clarence King, leader of the Fortieth Parallel expedition and founding director of the U.S. Geological Survey, was an admirer of Turner, a devotee of Ruskin, and himself an art critic. King, a scientist and mountaineer who absorbed his vocation from Alexander von Humboldt’s book Cosmos, was Timothy O’Sullivan’s patron on the expedition in 1867–69. [8] So there is nothing accidental about a photograph like that of Pyramid Lake, with its bold volumes and arresting curves, reprised by Paglen in another satellite portrait. What must be understood is that the survey photographers—who brought back images of strategic rail routes, Indian wars and future mining sites—were involved in the deliberate production of a frontier aesthetic combining scientific precision, a virile sense of adventure and a sharply honed taste for the sublime. A perfect example is O’Sullivan’s wilderness landscape at Shoshone Falls, also from the Fortieth Parallel expedition. Showing a team of surveyors on a rocky outcrop that falls away into the immensity of the cascade and the surrounding mountainscape, it is at once a document of the expedition’s labors and a pictorialist vista, destined to become an iconic image of the American West. [9] Today, when Paglen photographs the landscape and the military satellites, he cannot help but situate himself within and against this aesthetic tradition.
    
Let’s look back at its development. The taste for overwhelming natural spectacles emerged in England in the early eighteenth century, at a time when the Grand Tour across the Alps to Italy was de rigueur and sailing ships could convey the adventurous tourist to the furthest corners of the earth. A towering mountain, an immense cataract, a terrifying storm at sea viewed from an unshakable perch in a lighthouse became objects of aesthetic delectation for imperial subjects intent on discovering new capacities of wonder at the limits of their own expanding powers of control. Artists then sought to translate this sequence of fear and pleasure into pictorial terms. The landscape painting that resulted was brought to its peak by artists like Turner, then pursued in photography by O'Sullivan's generation, who found ample material in the natural features of the frontier, so different from anything in Europe. But the taste for a sense of self-loss and self-overcoming has its culturally instituted forms, which change across the continents and the generations. As historian David Nye observes, the American public tended to abandon the natural sites and vistas in favor of successive versions of the technological sublime, based primarily on spectacular feats of engineering: railroads, dams, bridges, skyscrapers, factories, electrified cities—all of which, of course, could also be portrayed artistically. Nye's study culminates with a chapter on rocketry and the atom bomb showing how the public experience of awe before the moon shots lifting off from Cape Canaveral became a way to tame the feelings of terror generated by the threat of nuclear warheads mounted on intercontinental ballistic missiles. [10] Today’s air and space magazines are still full of such “nostalgic” substitutes for national transcendence.
    
Paglen approaches the technological sublime from several different angles, using art historical models to seek an affective confrontation with militarized space while at the same time trying to undermine or redirect the political valences of aesthetic experience. An example is his cloud photography, evoking Alfred Stieglitz's Equivalents — an abstractionist version of the sublime, gesturing toward the dynamics of inner states for which there are no objective referents. For Stieglitz the clouds formed an uncoded space, a reserve of free visuality. In Paglen's photograph, the vastness of the image is punctuated by two tiny Predator drones that catch your gaze like technological hornets. In their presence the rippling abstractions of the clouds no longer evoke subjective freedom, but remind us instead of a more pragmatic “equivalent”: the electromagnetic waves of encrypted information that pulse through the atmosphere, maintaining precise contact with the unmanned aerial vehicle.

Another example is a large print looking for all the world like a sunset by the sea, with its undulant yellows and ochers sinking into somber reds and blacks. Entitled The Fence (Lake Kickapoo, Texas), it is the electromagnetic image of a section of the radar perimeter surrounding the United States, which Paglen calls “the earth’s largest galactic footprint.” The shift of the microwave frequencies into the visible spectrum (and thus, the translation from invisible to visible) creates a field of wavering atmospheric color that recalls the nineteenth-century painting of J.M.W. Turner, the premier exponent of the maritime sublime. By abandoning representational elements in his later oil sketches, Turner seemed to set consciousness adrift in its own capacities of perception. In the book Techniques of the Observer, art historian Jonathan Crary draws an historical link between this painter of sensory intensities and his contemporary, physiologist Gustav Fechner. The latter sought to quantify such intensities, determining thresholds of perceptual awareness and thus inaugurating the discipline of psychophysics, now crucial to the design of radar screens and all other informational monitors. [11] The understanding of perception as a physiological response to fluctuating intensities is what made possible the measurement of such responses in human beings tethered to the screens of electronic devices. It is in the gap between embodied consciousness and the scientific management of perception that Paglen, perhaps intuitively, situates his portrait of the radar fence.

Last example: a series of digital photographs, again of Predator drones, arrayed in a grid that echoes the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge. In an article, Paglen recalls how Muybridge’s studies were picked up in the mid-twentieth century by a man named Edgerton, who invented the stroboscopic camera and used it under military contract to take high-speed photos of exploding atom bombs. Edgerton later turned his photographic triggers into detonators for the weapons themselves, looping the loop between photography and war-making. [12] To approach this historical sequence that leads on to the visualization technologies used in the drones, Paglen has chosen to realize his grid of contact prints just as Muybridge did, using albumen-coated paper in a painstaking process that can take up to a month for each image. From today’s perspective, Muybridge’s stop-action technique acquires a new valence: it appears within an archaic phylum of images, stretching back to the tempera works of medieval painters. Here, against all the automatisms of technology, Paglen wants to make time slow down — as though holding off the split-second release of the photographic trigger.
    
What emerges from these encounters with the technological sublime is the double status of the artistic image in its relation to the black world. By bringing an element of pleasure into fear and by tracing a wavering line between the capacities of mastery and the forces of destruction, the sublime can naturalize technological terror. Thus the artistic gaze that seeks to reveal the vastness of the military apparatus can itself come to participate in veiling the raw facts of power. How to work beyond the aesthetics of the sublime? And how to stop or at least slow down the trend toward a pervasive militarization of society, after its extreme acceleration by the last American president? 
 Ancient Enemy

Paglen’s work has changed a great deal over the last few years. While retaining its investigative aims, it has taken on a cosmic dimension. Space, like secrecy, is everywhere in this exhibition.
    
A half moon hangs in a jet-black sky, its surface pockmarked by craters, while a dead satellite floats almost invisibly above it. A long exposure through a telescope pointed at polar north creates a wheeling vortex of stars; only the faintest of criss-crossing lines recall the electronic eyes that peer down from the heavens. A mysterious diptych titled After Galileo aligns Jupiter's moons with the silhouette of a functionary at the National Reconnaissance Office, working after hours behind mirrored glass that has turned transparent in the dark. The figure in the picture is real; but the role of the photograph as evidentiary document has begun to fade into the gray, even as the notion of transparency becomes ambiguous. What we see, in a work like They Watch the Moon, for example, is first of all the relation between earth and sky, the cosmic relation. Yet the radio telescope pictured here is devoted to banalities: it picks up stray cell-phone conversations bouncing off the lunar surface from halfway around the globe.

The change in the character and aims of the work is directly related to the arrival of Obama, an anti-war candidate who stood against the expansion of presidential privilege and seemed for a brief moment to fulfill his promise with an announced closure of the CIA prison at Guantánamo Bay—before invoking a Bush-era defense of state secrecy before a court of law, then going on to escalate the drone war in Pakistan beyond anything that Bush and Cheney had dared. [13] For all those whose efforts had helped to bring the abuses of the previous administration to trial, Obama’s failure to carry out any rollback of executive privilege has been a bitter disappointment, forcing a reassessment of basic strategies. The same problem now confronts activists at all levels, from the debacle of the Copenhagen climate summit to the failed reforms of the financial system. Extensive proof of the crime has accumulated, but where is the space in which evidence could become visible? 
    
To start producing it, let’s look at a text that Walter Benjamin published in 1928 as the closing fragment of One Way Street, under the title “To the Planetarium.” The text begins with Kepler and Galileo, that is, with the instrumental logic of the telescope and its objectifying effects, leading to the loss of what the ancients had known as cosmic experience: an ecstatic trance in which “we gain certain knowledge of what is nearest to us and what is remotest to us.” For Benjamin, that knowledge is fundamental:

"It is the dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable, and to consign it to the individual as the poetic rapture of starry nights. It is not; its hour strikes again and again, and then neither nations nor generations can escape it, as was made terribly clear by the last war, which was an attempt at a new and unprecedented commingling with the cosmic powers. Human multitudes, gases, electrical forces were hurled into the open country, high-frequency currents coursed through the landscape, new constellations rose in the sky, aerial and ocean depths thundered with propellers, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were dug in Mother Earth. This immense wooing of the cosmos was enacted for the first time on a planetary scale, that is, in the spirit of technology. But because the lust for profit of the ruling classes sought satisfaction through it, technology betrayed man and turned the bridal bed into a bloodbath." [14] 

Like Georges Bataille, Benjamin saw the industrialized battlefield as the site of a massive release of repressed drives, exploded by technoscience to cosmic proportions. And like Wilhelm Reich, he believed that the psychosocial conditions of barbarism sprang from innate human potentials, which must be diverted from their current expressions and redeemed as sources of civilizational progress. [15] At stake was a transformation of the notion of mastery (Beherrschung), whether in the intergenerational field of education or in the interspecies realm that we now call ecology. “Technology,” he wrote, “is not the mastery of nature but of the relation between nature and man. . . . In technology a physis is being organized through which mankind’s contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form.”
    
We are far today from the messianic Eros that inspired Benjamin, and still farther from a revolution that would bring mankind into harmony with the cosmos. But the text brings us very close to the destructive powers that are continually reproduced beneath the cover of state secrecy. In what space could technology become the guide, rather than the obstacle, to a new relation between humanity and nature? Benjamin does not describe the planetarium but only points to it, with a title that echoes an advertising sign in the spirit of the “profane illumination.” Nonetheless he makes clear that the telescope, that is, the instrument that allows us to perceive the universe, itself constitutes the negation of the cosmic totality that the planetarium seeks to make visible. As cultural critic Gene Ray indicates, this formula of negative presentation would become an artistic and philosophical response to the lingering nostalgia for the sublime in the late twentieth century, after the Nazi camps and the American use of the atom bomb had shown the ultimate consequences of fascination with technological power. Ray’s key contribution is to mark the need for a renewed challenge to such nostalgia for the sublime in the United States today, after the media-driven experience of national communion in the terrifying and perversely gratifying image of technological disaster constituted by 9/11, and after the military program of “shock and awe” legitimated by that image. [16] The works at the Vienna Secession form the elements of such a challenge. More broadly, I would suggest that a strictly materialist version of negative presentation lays the basis of the artistic space that Paglen and his far-flung networks of collaborators have set about producing.
    
The brooding latency of technological hubris, full-scale war and outright fascism, held back by the fragile conventions of scientific objectivity, administrative neutrality and due democratic process, forms the heart of the black world that the exhibition presents in self-contradicting fragments. This fragmentary presentation is necessary, because the banality of mass participation in modern war-making — what has been called the banality of evil — derives from compartmentalized knowledge, obedience to chains of command and the maintenance of tight lips as both a duty and a privilege. If “sovereign is he who decides on the state of secrecy” (to paraphrase Carl Schmitt), then Pentagon brass, intelligence officers, research scientists, CEOs of security companies and the myriads of minor functionaries on whom they depend will all get their day out of the sun, as obscure representatives of the proliferating exceptions that alone make possible the rule of imperial policies in an egalitarian democracy. [17] The capillary propagation of the claim to a rightful opacity is the real basis of the black world and the root of its unity and solidarity, which constantly threatens to normalize the abuse of deadly force. Like discipline according to Foucault, secrecy is produced at every level of contemporary society. Only the refusal to obey arbitrary orders in government service or at one’s corporate workplace — that is, the refusal to be an agent of the sovereign exception — can stand against this obscure power. The artistic difficulty is therefore not only to assemble the evidence proving that the psychosocial conditions of barbarism exist. It is to generate the affective openings that can expose each common consciousness to its own potential monstrosity.
    
A final work concentrates this affective dimension, while responding with temporal excess to the chronometric precision that governs the images of the black world. This is a diptych entitled Artifacts. One of the images, modeled after a photograph by Timothy O’Sullivan, shows a cave dwelling in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona. It’s a fascinating view of a monument left behind by a forgotten people, thought to have disappeared in an ecological collapse several hundred years before contemporary Native Americans came to the region. The former inhabitants are known only by their Navajo name, Anasazi, which means “ancient enemy.” At first sight I felt strangely close to this defensive dwelling, set in the striated face of a towering cliff, at once forbidding and welcoming.
    
Next to it is another photograph captured through an astronomer’s telescope, showing a ring of satellites which have been placed in a geosynchronous orbit. Such orbits are the most stable of all pathways through the heavens, Paglen explains. The satellites are guaranteed to stay in the sky for billions of years, until the sun explodes like nature’s hydrogen bomb. Irrational question: will we be the forgotten enemy on the day of a future apocalypse?

Dialectical Spaces

Paglen’s work, like that of other extradisciplinary artists, is technically complex. It is grounded in intertwining histories of geography and art, and it confronts the most elemental form of disciplinary power, the military, whose “production of space” now extends far beyond the upper atmosphere. This kind of art is challenging for the viewer, who is constantly invited to identify unknown objects and activities, to situate them with respect to each other and to discover the details of advanced operations with which most of us are deeply unfamiliar. Yet the photographs do not stress the estrangement effects that are the formal hallmarks of the avant-garde. Their hermeticism is that of the world around us.
    
In the opening paragraph of this essay, I described the video images of a military aircraft as “hesitant, furtive or even lost.” The idea seems fanciful in an age of geospatial positioning systems, when precise coordination between atomic clocks and orbital data on the pathways of artificial stars (the GPS satellites) generates a perfect grid of latitude and longitude, mapping out the entire surface of the planet. [18] What the images of the black world reveal, however, is a human condition of remote action and radical separation, exemplified by the distant relation between drone and pilot, which itself foreshadows an era of fully robotic warfare. This condition has developed primarily in the United States and among its closest allies; but it is gradually spreading throughout the world via multiple forms of military and police collaboration. Under such a regime the unconscious is spatialized: it becomes identifiable with productive activities that shape our lived environment and push it toward increasingly dangerous passes, without the knowledge, understanding or consent of the affected populations. It may be that the agents of military activities are themselves lost, unable to assess their actions in the light of an outside gaze. But in a more pervasive sense, we have all gotten lost at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The spaces of visibility and judgment have not kept pace with the explosive development of technoscience; and the situation grows considerably worse under the reign of state secrecy.
    
Paglen says that “new forms of freedom and democracy can only emerge in dialectical relation to the production of new spaces.” He has attempted, with initial success, to transform the institutional space of art into a crossroads of critical analysis and cosmic experience. What’s at stake is not the intellectualization of art or its reduction to discourse, but the shift of its perceptual focus to some of the more enigmatic objects in our humanly produced universe. Of course, this is no panacea; but it is one of the most promising directions being sketched out today in the cultural field. The point is to provide the tools and set the stage for a possible encounter with currently invisible realities—and then let people make original uses of their visit to the planetarium.

Notes

[1] Brian Holmes, “Extradisciplinary Investigations: Toward a New Critique of Institutions,” in Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society (WHW/Van Abbemuseum, 2009); http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/02/26/%ef%bb%bfextradisciplinary-investigations.
     
[2] Trevor Paglen, “Experimental Geography,” in Nato Thompson, ed., Experimental Geography (Melville House, 2009).

[3] “Trevor Paglen Talks about the Other Night Sky,” in Artforum (March 2009); http://www.paglen.com/Images/artforum.pdf.
     
[4] Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (Penguin, 2009), chap. 6, esp. p. 118.
     
[5] Trevor Paglen and A.C. Thompson, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights (Melville House, 2006).
     
[6] For aerial photography of the Air Force’s most secret site, see the page on “Groom Lake—Area 51” on the website of the Federation of American Scientists, at http://www.fas.org/irp/overhead/groom-interpret-f.htm.
     
[7] See the documentary by Peter Galison and Rob Moss, Secrecy, 85’, 2008; as well as chap. 6 in Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map (see note 4).
     
[8] For the nexus of influences and relations between King, Ruskin, Humboldt and O’Sullivan, see Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (Viking Penguin, 2006), esp. chap. 3 and 6.
     
[9] O’Sullivan’s photograph, taken in 1868, can be seen at http://www.archives.gov/research/american-west/images/007.jpg.
     
[10] David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (MIT Press, 1994).
     
[11] Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (MIT Press, 1990), chap. 5.
     
[12] “Trevor Paglen Talks about the Other Night Sky” (see note 3); and one of Paglen’s favorite books, Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and The Technological Wild West (Viking, 2003).
     
[13] See Paglen’s op-ed piece of Feb. 9, 2009, “Rendition, Secrecy, and the Wrong Side of History,” available at http://www.paglen.com/pages/writing.html.
     
[14] Walter Benjamin, “To the Planetarium” (1928) in One Way Street and Other Writings (Verso, 1997); also available in Walter Benjamin, Reflections (Shocken Books, 1978).
     
[15] Benjamin’s specific influence in this text is not Reich but Ludwig Klages, Der kosmogonische Eros (1922); see the article by Irving Wohlfarth, “Walter Benjamin and the Idea of a Technological Eros. A tentative reading of Zum Planetarium,” in Benjamin Studien/Studies 1/1 (May 2002); http://tinyurl.com/irving-wohlfarth.
     
[16] Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima to September 11 (Palgrave, 2005), esp. chap. 1 and 9.
     
[17] Schmitt’s dictum, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” forms the basis of the theory of the state of exception in Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press, 1998); also see Paglen’s remarks on the spaces of exception in the article “Groom Lake and the Imperial Production of Nowhere,” in Derek Gregory and Allan Pred, eds., Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror and Political Violence (Routledge, 2007).
     
[18] For the genealogy of GPS in the historical relations between astronomy, chronometrics and cartography, see Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (Norton, 2003).

This text was written for the catalog to a recent exhibition of Paglen's work. Warm thanks to Brian for generously agreeing to posting here. 
GR

art and resistance

2010-11-17T16:52:00.016+01:00

Adorno, Brecht and Debord: 

Three Models for Resisting the Capitalist Art System

by Gene Ray

This essay outlines three modes or models of radical cultural practice. Each begins with a critical appropriation of the traditions of art and aims at resisting the social power that passes through art, as an institutionalized field of production and activity. Each of the three modes establishes a set of productive strategies. Together, they are the three historically demonstrated and available models for resisting the political neutralization of art and for challenging the power of the capitalist art system. For convenience, I link each model with a name or names closely associated with it. They are, first, Adorno’s dissonant modernism epitomized by Kafka and Beckett. Second, Brecht’s “functional transformation” or “re-functioning” of institutions through estrangement and dialectical realism. And third, Debord’s Situationist détournement of art, aiming to rupture and decolonize naturalized everyday life. Each model works on a different level of social reality. Each produces different kinds of effects at different points or moments of the social process, and is affected differently in turn by the global conjuncture of struggle. Typically, the advocates of one model treat the others dismissively; there is, we know, a long history of rancorous debate regarding their relative merits. I doubt the rancor is still needed or helpful today. Each of the models is still capable of generating radically critical and resistant effects. While these effects are different in kind, they can all contribute something to a culture opposed to capital. None of the three models should be discarded, so long as their strategies can still be realized. Here I briefly outline each, before discussing their relative strengths, advantages and limitations.

Some general remarks. We are evidently stuck in a global social process dominated by the logic of capital accumulation. Art, obviously, isn’t going to deliver us from that. The passage beyond capitalist relations is a matter of struggle, however that’s conceived. Art remains a dominated field of activity, and thinking about its possible contributions to radical social transformation has to begin by situating art within the global social process that dominates it. Very briefly: art is a field that is organized and saturated by capitalist power. There very clearly is a capitalist art system, with its rules, conventions and institutions, relations and tendencies, enjoyments and enforcements, and so on. Seen dialectically, what happens within this system does have its utopian and critical moments. As long as such moments are not utterly excluded, we have to acknowledge art’s relative autonomy and oppositional use-value. Art is not utterly reducible to exchange value and affirmative social functions. But it is also clear enough that the administered art system channels the activity of art as a whole in ways that are affirmative and stabilizing. This has been well-marked and elaborated: art in sum contributes to the reproduction of the given global process. The question is what specific works or practices may be able to do within and against it. 

The first two models, Adorno’s dissonant modernism and Brecht’s re-functioning of institutions, operate within the existing art system. In different ways, both accept this dominated nexus of institution and tradition as a valid field for a practice that resists it. The third model, Debord’s Situationist intransigence, refuses to participate in the administered art system and takes up a position outside it. 

Today we hear claims that the character of art has been fundamentally altered under post-Fordism or “creative capitalism.” Some still want to collapse art into the culture industry, others to dissolve it into a general technics of subjectivation or a “distribution of the sensible.” I haven’t found any of these approaches convincing. Art may have gained some additional affirmative social functions as the global process has unfolded. But I doubt these essentially change the double character of art under capitalism. There is still a capitalist art system that grants art a relative autonomy. This being so, certain positions and strategies are immanent to art as a social process: they reflect the contradictions and antagonisms of art under capitalism. As the demonstration of these positions and strategies, these three models remain available for artists to appropriate and reinvent – and will remain so as long as the capitalist art system persists.

The first model, Adorno’s dissonant modernism, is focused on the particular artwork and its potentials for critical resistance. For Adorno, every artwork is a force field of antagonisms that formally mirrors the antagonism of the social outside – the social fact of class domination. Once upon a time, art aspired to cheerful harmony. But the immanent drift of capitalist modernity – toward administration, integration and catastrophe, in Adorno’s idiom – obliges art to refuse the false-reconciliations of harmonious unity. The dissonant artwork openly shows its tensions, contradictions and aporías. And it thereby rebukes capital’s claim to deliver reconciliation in the form of commodified freedom and happiness. This rebuke or moment of resistance is in part structural, inscribed categorically in the logic of art’s relative autonomy and specific difference from everyday life. But it is also reflected in all the mediated moments of every artwork’s specific dialectic of form and content, as well as the dialectic between the work and the unfolding social reality that is its other or outside. Modernist art develops, Adorno argues in the Aesthetic Theory, by means of a “negative canon” – a catalog of prohibitions that both grasps the meaning of all previous innovation and indicates what the social process itself has rendered obsolete, what no serious or rigorous artist can any longer do.

Such an art is a “negative presentation” of what happens to the integrated, administered subject in post-Auschwitz capitalism. The fractured dissonance of the artwork models the individual’s loss of autonomy and spontaneity, the crippling of experience and critical capacity, the social castration of radical non-identity – all of which are intimately bound up with the corruption and blockage of revolutionary subjectivity. We can acknowledge the model here, without needing to accept all of Adorno’s arguments about the necessity for indirection and the refusal of political commitment. Even demoted to one available mode among others, Adorno’s determinate negation of the traditional sublime sets out a possible form of production within the capitalist art system – a rigorous way of producing resistant non-identicals that registers the antagonism and misery of a social process turned catastrophic, genocidal and ecocidal. 

What are the effects of such an art? In whom are these effects produced, and how? While in general Adorno is opposed to effect-oriented artistic strategies, he in fact falls back on them to make his case for dissonant modernism. His radical, post-Auschwitz sublime is a moment of experience that, triggering and passing through emphatic anxiety, gives bodily support to a radical stance against all forms of false reconciliation. Kafka and above all Beckett are the models most often cited. 

As Adorno put it in 1962, in the polemical essay “Commitment”: "Kafka’s prose and Beckett’s plays and his truly monstrous novel, The Unnamable, produce an effect in comparison to which official works of committed art look like child’s play; they arouse the anxiety that existentialism only talks about. In taking apart illusion, they explode art from inside, whereas proclaimed commitment subjugates art from outside, and therefore in a merely illusory way. Their implacability compels the change in behavior that committed works merely demand. Anyone over whom Kafka’s wheels have passed has lost all sense of peace with the world, as well the possibility of being satisfied with the judgment that the world is going badly: the moment of confirmation within the resigned observation of evil’s superior power has been eaten away."

To be sure, there are limitations to this model – and I return to them at the end. But experiences passably close to what Adorno describes nevertheless remain possible. If an artwork of whatever medium produces effects of disturbance and anxiety through a negative presentation of social reality, then it aligns with this model. For an indication of how this model may be actualized in contemporary art, see Trevor Paglen’s images of the “black world” of Pentagon techno-power and covert operations – especially as Paglen’s work has been discussed recently by Brian Holmes. More controversially, Luke White has made a cogent case for the dissonant power of Damien Hirst’s infamous platinum and diamond skull; we may hate it, but this sparkling mix of threat and seduction faithfully mirrors the antagonisms of late capitalist reality.

Brecht and his collaborators (among them, Piscator, Eisler and Tretiakov) opened up other possibilities by shifting the focus from the artwork to institutions and reception situations. In the famous notes to Mahagonny, Brecht draws out the functions of art institutions and calls for their “functional transformation.” Modern theaters, opera houses, cinemas, publishers and so on are above all profitable vehicles for restorative entertainment and enjoyment. The “fodder principle” will override art’s autonomy and smother its critical moments, unless the artist appropriates the institution or apparatus and makes it perform other functions. For Brecht, such re-functioning begins with the disruption of empathic conventions and spectator expectations. Verfremdung or “estrangement” denotes techniques for breaking the spell of the aesthetic mirage and opening the distance for critical reflection. To the intoxications of Wagnerian immersion, Brecht opposed a radical and anti-culinary “separation of elements.” In his theater, dialogue, songs, gestures, staging and technological interventions all comment critically on the plot and each other. Against the conventions of audience identification and passive spectatorship, Brecht envisioned a new spectator-critic who in discussion calmly assesses production and performance. In the learning plays, Brecht breaks open the closed artwork, chopping the plot into episodes facilitating discussion and debate. In these new reception situations, the fourth wall falls, theater becomes workshop, and spectators become active collaborators. “Actually,” Brecht wrote in a 1946 letter to Eric Bentley, “the audience should be transformed into social experimenters, and the critique of reality should be tapped as a main source of artistic enjoyment.” In the same letter, he goes on to call this theater the “new dialectical realism.”

These innovations and experiments were developed in a specific conjuncture of class struggle: anti-Nazi and largely pre-Stalinist. But they clearly are the basis of much radical theater and film from the 1960s and 70s. And along with the rule-exposing provocations of Marcel Duchamp, they also stimulated practices of institutional critique in the visual arts. Today they are re-energized by groups such as Chto delat and What, How & for Whom. What sets these strategies apart from Adorno’s modernism is that they operate on a different level or moments of the art process. In the Brechtian model, artists look beyond the immanent logic of the artwork and are working on the form and functions of the institutional nexus that conditions reception and the possible effects an artwork can have. This model goes behind the relation between artwork and spectator, where Adorno’s model generates its disruptions. Brecht’s model aims to disrupt the operations of institutions, by turning them into sites of struggle. What they share is that they both seek critical effects within the constraints established by the art system.

A third model was theorized by Guy Debord and the Situationist International, or SI. Undertaking a radical critique of postwar commodity capitalism and the art system flourishing around a restored modernism, the SI soon transformed itself from a merger of art groups into an autonomist network of cultural insurrectionists. The Situationist project was constituted through a renunciation of the two necessary conditions of modernist art: the work-form and that dependent autonomy tied to institutional reception and approval. They did not attempt, as many of their contemporaries did, to bring disruptive fragments of real life back into the galleries and institutions, and thereby to expand the concept of art. Instead, the SI reversed the direction, renouncing the art system and re-siting their art-informed practices in real life. Strictly speaking, the results no longer fit the category of (modernist, capitalist) "art." But the struggle-oriented use-values produced by this model can be called radical culture.

In their journal, their well-known critiques of spectacle, and their innovative practices, they sought to align their inventive powers with “the actual movement that abolishes the present state of things.” Their practical innovations included the dérive, an active and mobile recovery of the remnants and traces of past struggles and freedoms scattered across the urban environment. And the détournement, a politicized expropriation of existing cultural artifacts, a kind of Brechtian re-functioning but conducted beyond the gaze of the institutions. SI practice culminated in the construction of “situations”, tactical ruptures in everyday normality that expose and repose the radical questions of social desire and the organization of life possibilities. Two successfully realized situations were the Strasbourg Scandal of 1966 and the less well-known Place Clichy action of March 1969.

While clearly shaped by the conjuncture of cold war imperialist rivalry and the anti-colonial struggles of the 1950s and 60s, SI theory and practice effectively renewed a tendency or vector that pulsed within the artistic avant-gardes since at least Berlin Dada. This was a kind of permanent strike – a cessation of approved production and the cutting of ties to the art system. Again, this is one possible response to the contradictions and predicaments within the capitalist concept of art itself – the antagonism, that is, between emancipatory impulses and affirmative social functions. These poles can’t be reconciled within capitalism; no surprise, then, that some artist groups continue to follow this trajectory out of the institutions and toward whatever social movements and struggles may be found. This model was impressively actualized by politicized groups of artists in Argentina, during the struggles that culminated in the uprisings of late 2001. Addressing tendencies toward official amnesia and false-reconciliation during the so-called restoration of democracy, groups such as Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC or Street Art Group) worked with social movements to invent new protest forms, such as the escrache or exposure of perpetrators from the dictatorship. 

Rather than promote one model against the others, it’s more helpful to acknowledge that all three are valid forms of radical culture. Carrying out a dialectical critique of each throws more light on their relative strengths and limits. Adorno’s dissonant modernism aims at the experience between artwork and subject. Adorno is well aware that this experience is mediated and conditioned by social reality in countless ways, but the institutional nexus is a major blind-spot of his aesthetics. Works like Beckett’s Endgame may well trigger emphatic anxiety in some subjects. But if this experience is to contribute to radical, critical consciousness, let alone revolutionary subjectivity, then all kinds of reception conditions would have to be met. It doesn’t happen automatically, and Adorno evades this problem in his advocacy. The fate of the subject under pressures of integration and administration underscores the limitation of dissonant modernism. By Adorno’s own account, the subjects and reception conditions needed for this kind of experience tend to be blocked rather than reproduced by the global social process – and in any case these subjects when they do emerge may not see a stake in radical transformation. Prudent accommodationism seems just as likely, as a political response. Still, if such subjects are an endangered species, they are not yet extinct. Insofar as there are subjects of sublime experiences, the political problem concerns their radicalization. So long as this is possible, this model should not be abandoned.

The other two models are more obviously interventionist. There is much scope for Brechtian work on the institutional nexus, and this scope increases whenever there is a crisis of hegemony or upsurge in social struggle. The institutions of the art system are neither identical nor monolithic; they are themselves local force fields within which spaces for radical practice open and close continuously. Overall, contestation within the art system is conditioned by the contestation of the global order outside it. The power of the whole system of functions constrains re-functioning in art. To the degree that capitalist power is challenged and resisted in real life, that power over the art process is also resistible – but probably not more than that. Again, the problem is not with art but in the organization, aim and strategy of social struggles more generally.

The third model engages with this problematic most directly. The trajectory from the art system to social movements and struggles need not adopt the Situationist strategy in every detail or aspect. The intransigence of that strategy is both its strength and its weakness. It avoids the usual castrations of administered art. But its absolutist insistence on direct, unmediated autonomy and self-representation is ultimately a poor strategy against organized capitalist war machines. The qualitative, participatory small-group form modeled by the SI is fitting for cells of cultural guerrillas, but it is at least very questionable whether this organizational form is the master key opening a passage out of capitalism. Without more massive and durable forms of struggle to support and sustain it, the exodus of small groups can be futile self-sacrifice. So the possibilities of this model, too, are set not by the art system but by the global process that dominates it. That said, there should be much to accomplish by going to the movements and struggles, provided there are movements and struggles to go to. Presumably in antagonistic society, there always are, but if they are weak and decomposed, as they unhappily are at this time, then the contributions of this mode will be proportionally modest.

All three models, then, offer viable strategies for producing radical art and culture. Because they act on the social process at different points or moments, they aim differently and do different things. But all have some radical use-value and none should be rejected. At this time, everything that contributes or can contribute to radical critique, debate and practice is badly needed.

This essay was presented at "Crisis and Critique," the seventh Historical Materialism conference in London, November 2010. It revises a talk first given at the symposium "Commanded Enjoyment and the Spirit of Capitalism" at the University of Cyprus in March 2010.

postcards from france

2010-10-20T08:39:00.003+02:00

Strikes against austerity continue today across France for the seventh day.  Millions of trades unionists have shut down down ports and refineries, blockaded roads and rallied in the streets, now increasingly joined by high school and university students.  The actions enjoy wide support (70 percent according to polls) despite fuel shortages, garbage pileups and other insults to capitalist normality. Sarkozy, stiff-necked, insists he will ram through the pension plunder anyway.

The posters above, published on France24 last week, were displayed in a Paris store window in the 11th arrondissement: "Me too, I started like that with the Roma, before exterminating a million in concentration camps. Try a little harder, Nicolas." The other, "Son of Pétain" shows Sarkozy in the uniform of the Vichy chief and Nazi collaborator.

GR

against austerity

2010-10-15T11:53:00.004+02:00

The resistance to immiseration in Europe is heating up and beginning to spread. In France, open-ended strikes are continuing, with students now joining in. Friends and comrades from Contrainfo (Athens) share this report on an occupation of the Acropolis by precarious cultural workers.

GR

‘Beneath the Acropolis we go on strike…’

by Contrainfo
15 October 2010

Approximately 100 ministry contractual employees barricaded themselves inside the Acropolis site overnight on Wednesday, 13 October, demanding two years of back pay and permanent contracts. They padlocked the entrance gates and refused to allow in tourists. Guardians of the Acropolis site (Athens, Greece) work in behalf of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Tourism either as civil servants (with permanent contracts) or as contractual employees (with temporal contracts). More than 400 contract-workers of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism have been working unpaid for up to 22 months. These are workers who have up to 20 years of service. The Greek government shows them the door of unemployment. Most of them will be laid off after years of flexible and underpaid work.

The following morning, Thursday, 14 October, the director of the First Inspectorate of Prehistoric Classical Antiquities filled a lawsuit, thus giving excuse to police squads to storm the site. Approximately 80 employees refused to open the gate against police squads, even when cops entered from a side door tear-gassing and beating with fury protesters, passers-by, even (so-called) journalists. There were people injured (unconfirmed number) and at least one witnessed arrest.

Workers remained in the archaeological site, which was shut down throughout the day. The same afternoon, under heavy rain, a solidarity gathering had been called in the presence of police and security force. The assemblers were beaten by police. Two of the slogans were ‘Beneath the Acropolis we go on strike; we think of the slaves rather than Phidias,’ and ‘Solidarity is peoples’ weapon – War against the bosses’ war.’

Mass media mocked the strikers, with hysterical scaremongering for ‘tourists who have traveled from far-flung countries, and will not see the Parthenon’ and comments such as ‘authorities often are sensitive [!] to protests at the emblematic ancient site, particularly as the country largely relies on tourism for revenue’… With the most famous recipe, that of brainwashing, international and Greek media prepares public opinion to accept the brutal repression at all levels.

See Contrainfo for video and continuing coverage. See also Occupied London.

brumaria on the general strike

2010-10-06T18:18:00.004+02:00

Spain: The General Strike of September 29th

by Brumaria

On September 29th, a General Strike (Huelga general) against the Ley de Reforma Laboral — driven by Zapatero’s government and passed by the parliament — was organized by the practical entirety of labor unions and leftist organizations and parties, with unequal results. 

It is necessary to search for the antecedents to said events in the profound economic crisis that Spain has suffered from during the last three years; this crisis (latent and prior to the global crisis of September 2008 involving the financial markets) is inscribed in the following parameters and events: 

- Enormous growth of public works and construction of homes during the last 15 years (currently in Spain there are 3 million empty homes)
- Unstoppable increase in the number of unemployed (4 million to date)
- Economic recession, drop in consumption, and zero growth the last two years
- Exponential increase of public debt based on the search for financial resources with which to pay social loans to the unemployed

Zapatero and his social-liberal government’s response was at first to deny the crisis in order to finally accept the measures of cutting social costs, which were pushed by the European Union (the tandem of Merkel and Sarkozy), the International Monetary Fund (experts in ruining countries with economic crises), and the United States’ government. The disparate measures that international Liberalism has imposed on Zapatero can be summarized as follows:
    -cutting public costs
    -stopping investment in public works
    -decreasing pensions and loans for unemployment
    -labor reform that reduces redundancies 
    -nullify capacity for refinancing debt in the fierce international markets

This totality of measures, far from stimulating the economy and stopping unemployment, has obtained the opposite results, that is, an increase in unemployment and negative economic growth. All this situates the Socialist Party 14 points below the right in polls taken for the next elections; in some way Zapatero — with tools from liberalism — paves the way for the right, which in a couple of years will give the definitive coup de grâce to the depleted “socialist state.”

But what results did General Strike achieve? Without a doubt we can describe it as a failure, or perhaps as a complicated failure. Allow us to explain ourselves; these were basically the results [turnouts]:

    -Education, between 3-5% following
    -Public administration, less than 5%
    -Public services, less than 5%
    -Construction, around 20%
    -General industry, around 90%
    -Automobile industry, 100%
    -Mining industry, 100%

If we abide by the available data we can extrapolate the following conclusions:

1. The General Strike was organized to a much lesser degree by the unions that represent the greatest number of workers
2. Zapatero’s government lacks an economic strategy beyond the recommendations of international financial liberalism
3. The General Strike of September 29th failed, but it clearly triumphed where there exists a “working class” with a strong tradition in political, union-based activity
4. The 4 million unemployed, a significant number of which are immigrants, continue to be a group that is heterogeneous and disorganized politically, a group that barely survives off of public loans, which in turn slow down growth
5. All this constitutes an explosive mix that nevertheless has failed to produce any kind of political consciousness or social alarm in spite of the fact that all of the information indicates that the worst has yet to come
6. The incidents on the day of the strike were minimal, marginalized, and without political significance
7. The protests organized at the end of the strike were not followed by a significant portion of the population

To finish this quick summary, we pose a couple of difficult-to-answer questions.

- Has the working class disappeared, has it become invisible, or is it in a state of transition?

- Do concepts such as “Post-Fordism” and “multitude” need to be revised in political theory?

The above remarks were sent in response to an inquiry I sent the editors of the Spanish leftist journal Brumaria. I asked for a local view, to probe the mirage of media representations. The text, a sobering critique of the actual strike no less than a scathing indictment of Zapatero's "Socialist liberalism," was written by Brumaria director Dario Corbeira and translated by managing editor Daniel Patrick Rodriguez. Thanks to both.
GR

spectacle and austerity

2010-10-05T09:18:00.006+02:00

Across France on Saturday (2 October), huge demos protested misery measures. But how huge, and who decides if such protests matter?

No secret: the business of capitalist news media is to market assertion, not to expose the truth about what happens. Circulating along with all the other transmitted garbage, truth rushes past, like slips of the tongue - but above all as truth about the concentration of social power congealed in every media report. 

In the current coverage of resistance to austerity in Europe, what is striking is how relentlessly state and corporate news reports reduce massive, embodied contestation to mere contention - to assertion and counter-assertion about how many protesters were actually in the street.

The process is a form of castration: precisely the logic of spectacular representation Guy Debord raged against more than forty years ago. Maybe it won't be useless to recall how it works, and see how it is still operating today.

Power's representations of struggles from below routinely alternate between two forms.

If resistance is growing, mediated power repeats the mantra that it does not matter: austerity measures are necessary and inevitable, and we will ram them through anyway, no matter what you do.

If resistance weakens, mediated power congratulates itself for finding its predictions confirmed: that's right, just like we said, told you so, what exists is best because it exists and cannot be contested.

Struggles "appear" within the spectacle in one form or the other: defeated in advance or in fact, but in any case always and only defeated. The two castrating forms of representation are like the barbs of the pitchfork analytic philosophers use to spear and dismiss whatever fails to please them: inconvenient propositions are either "interesting but false" or "true but trivial."

Those in struggle can afford neither to ignore the castrating representation machine nor to mistake its products for reality and fate. Facing the media, they have to be both radically critical and strategic. Clarity about how it works is some protection against demoralization.

How many protested? Protesters say X, police say X/2. The battle of numbers is inevitable under the logic of spectacle. The aim of reducing the quality of struggle to quantity in this way is always to insist that nothing can change unless our masters above say so.

The representations, in turn, effect the balance of forces they are supposed to represent: if resisting workers can be convinced that the turnout for their strike failed to meet expectations or that the size of demos is falling and people are going back home, then this undercuts their morale and position in the force field. On the other hand, if a struggle is perceived to be growing and has a change of winning its aims, then those watching may dare to join it and thereby cease to be spectators. 

Thus the cliché of hyper-mediatized capitalist politics: perception is reality, spin works. Radical praxis opposes the context that confirms this but in the meantime cannot ignore it: what is being contested, after all, is not the number of protesters but the repeated assertion that austerity is inevitable, that life cannot be organized otherwise.

If contestation can be reduced to mere contention, the real stakes never have to be acknowledged. This is particularly clear in an online report posted Sunday on France24: it pretends to mistake the war of representation for the main object to be reported and represented. The first part is reproduced below.
GR

French unions hail protests a success but govt says numbers are 'down' 

by France24 (3 Oct 2010)

Almost three million people joined protests across France to voice anger over changes to the retirement age according to trade union officials, while the French government put the figure at 900,000. Unions called on the government to "open dialogue". 

AFP - French unions on Saturday brought millions of protestors onto the streets, they said, shunning strikes for rallies in their latest salvo against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s pensions reform plan.

“Around 2.9 million” demonstrators have taken part, the CFDT union’s deputy leader Marcel Grignard told AFP, “roughly the same number” as during the last day of action against raising the retirement age from 60 to 62 on September 23.

“This is a successful mobilisation. We expect the government finally to pay attention to this popular expression and take action on its plan,” Grignard said.

But the interior ministry said that numbers were down, with 899,000 taking part in over 200 rallies around France, although in western cities such as Rennes heavy rain reduced the number of demonstrators.

“Everyone recognises this evening that the movement has got no bigger,” said government spokesman Luc Chatel.

The protests were the first to be held at the weekend after two days of weekday strike action in September that failed to bow the government.

The previous day of action ended in an argument over how many people took part: police said numbers were down from the previous September 7 protest at around one million, unions said they were up at three million.

the fightback

2010-10-02T13:00:00.011+02:00

Three days ago (29 September), the first general strike in Spain in eight years coincided with a general call-out from the European Trade Union Confederation to protest Eurozone austerity programs. The strike, although limited in time, was evidently strong and effective, and union actions and protest demos took place in many European capitals  - including Brussels, where 100,000 workers took to the streets.

As usual, state and corporate media reports offered a striking demonstration of their own - of their own spectacular biases. Following a Reuters news wire, most media outlets led with the assertion that "tens of thousands" of protesters had demonstrated across Europe. You would have had to work hard to learn that there were 50,000 in Lisbon alone -- or that demos or strike actions or both took place in Ireland, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovenia, Serbia, Italy, Greece and Cyprus. 

In one of the rare reports that did not go out of its way to discount and dismiss what happened, Deutsche Welle admitted that in Spain the general strike "hit Spanish industry and transportation hard" and that some sectors of industry were "paralyzed." Indeed, Spanish workers refuted repeated predictions from above that turnout to the strike would be poor: in the event, millions of workers - perhaps as many as 10 million - withheld their labor-power. The UGT trade union confederation claims 70 percent of its members participated, and that in the steel and energy sectors "almost all employees had taken part."

In Slovenia, public sector workers continued an open-ended strike in the face of a two-year pay freeze. In Dublin, a cement worker drove his truck into the front gate of Parliament; across the drum was painted TOXIC BANK ANGLO. In Greece striking dockworkers shut down ports, public transport workers shut down the Athens Metro, and public hospitals had to rely on emergency staffing as doctors went out on strike.

This weekend, ports across France will continue to be shut down by strikes that began on Friday (1 October). Demos today will protest pension "reform."

All this despite the message relentlessly broadcast from on high: there is no alternative, there is no alternative, be resigned to it, you really are resigned, everyone else is and so are you, yes you are, repeat after us...

The markets, it is true, did not register much panic. But European workers know that increasing the pressure is the only way to force capital's technocrats to back down. If those targeted for immiseration are resolved and follow up on this good start, they will shift the balance of forces. Then we'll see.

Collective self-defense against planned austerity is the counter-order of the day. Specific concessions are surely winnable. But just as surely, there will be no security for anyone until the whole global context of austerity is called more radically to account. An injury to one, as the black cat knows, is an injury to all...

GR

new false start

2010-10-01T10:52:00.004+02:00

New START's Big Winners: US Nuke Complex, Pentagon, and Contractors

by Darwin Bond-Graham

(17 Sept 2010)

Passage of New START in a 14-4 vote out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is already being hailed by Democrats and arms control NGOs as a substantial victory. A floor vote for ratification is now apparently set to occur after the elections.

While ratification is by no means guaranteed, there are several clear winners already: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Aerojet General, Alliant Techsystems, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons laboratories, Y-12 nuclear labs, the Pentagon, and Bechtel Corporation.

While much noise has been made about the New START treaty's cut to the nuclear weapons stockpile, the actual required reduction in arms may be as low as 8%, or 162 warheads out of a total of thousands. Furthermore, keep in mind too that this only affects deployed strategic warheads, not "tactical" weapons, and not weapons in the "reserve" stockpile.

So why the big deal? Why are both sides fighting like mad over a treaty that really requires virtually no change to the status quo US-Russia relationship and US nuclear stockpile?

Here's why in a nutshell:

1. The Democrats, led by the Obama administration, want the treaty badly in order to prove that their means of combating proliferation and the rising power of states like Iran is better than the Republican strategy. The difference essentially is that the Democrats propose to give the impression that the USA is cutting its arsenal and seeking "global zero." Of course it's not and the Dems intend to fund the US nuclear complex at large levels. Long-range national security state doctrine calls for keeping nukes far into the future, and modernizing them the whole way along. But the Democratic foreign policy establishment thinks their plan will provide superior power, diplomatic and military, when dealing with nations that pose a threat to US imperial interests. It's a tough balancing act, this anti-nuclear nuclearism! Thankfully the liberal militarists have found willing allies in the foundation community. Funds and NGOs like Ploughshares, American Friends Service Committee, and Peace Action West have lobbied extensively for ratification, proving that a little money goes a long way in politics.

2. The Republican strategy remains what the old gipper gave us - "peace through strength." G. W. Bush pursued it with his aggressive nuclear weapons programs, but the Democrats managed to back him down. Undeterred, many Republicans think the Democrats are wasting the national security state's time and energy and would just rather invest huge sums in weapons and invade and occupy nations as a first and early recourse when problems arise. There remains a great deal of ideological opposition to treaties, especially arms control pacts, whether or not they actually constrain US military might.

3. In addition to this acrimonious debate about imperial strategy, there's bread and butter. While New START doesn't pose any threats to any military funding whatsoever, it does offer a major opportunity to demand huge funding increases for several weapons programs.

    A. Chief among these is the nuclear weapons program. New START ratification is being used as the primary forum in which to hash out the budget for nuclear weapons over the next ten years. Thus far supporters of the nuke complex have gotten a pretty good deal; a minimum $10 billion increase over the next ten years to build a new plutonium pit factory, new uranium plant, new weapons components factory, and other major capital projects. Corker and Isakson's votes on September 16 to pass the treaty to the full Senate for a ratification vote may signal that they have received even larger funding commitments for the huge nuclear facilities in their states, or that they will use their vote on the floor to extort better deals between now and then.

    B. Then there's "missile defense" and "prompt global strike." Missile defense has its own agency in the Pentagon and budget larger than the NNSA's. Prompt global strike, a new conventional strategic weapons system capable of killing anyone on the planet in under an hour with hypersonic munitions, is a multi-hundred million dollar and growing program. Both are getting very large increases in Obama's FY2011 budget, due in part to Republican demands that neither program be constrained by New START. Of course the treaty does not such thing, but the concern is really a theatrical way of demanding even larger increases for these weapons systems. The Democrats are too happy to oblige. Obama and Biden are champions of prompt global strike.

4. Thus the Senators on both sides of the debate are working for the nuclear weapons complex, Pentagon, and their powerful corporate contractors. The Democrats have already offered up major funding increases, even before Republican opposition. Conservatives have only pulled the issue further to the right, and arms control foundations and NGOs have fed the whole process by making New START out to be vastly more important and meaningful than it objectively is.

Still don't see the bi-partisan consensus to fund the nuclear weapons complex and Pentagon's missile defense and prompt global strike programs and contractors? The campaign finance data for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee members' 2010 election cycle bank accounts demonstrates why the interests of the nuclear weapons complex and other weapons programs are absolutely not threatened by New START.

Raytheon, Textron, Lockheed, Boeing, United Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, SAIC, Carlyle, BAE, EADS all contract with the Missile Defense Agency and related Pentagon program offices. Lockheed serves at the lead contractor for prompt global strike. Bechtel, Honeywell, CH2M Hill, McDermott (through its BWXT subsidiary), URS, Flour, and Lockheed Martin contract with the NNSA to operate the US nuclear weapons complex. AECOM is subcontractor for the US nuclear weapons program.

For a detailed breakdown of each Committee member's nuke sector donors, go here.

Darwin analyzes the politics and power plays behind new START more fully in "New START: A brief analysis of the treaty ratification process, campaign finance, and lobbying activities," posted on sung a lot of songs.

Darwin's Summary:

For many reasons the New START treaty is proving to be a costly affirmation of nuclear arms as a national priority. The ratification process has empowered pro-nuclear interest groups. Debate during ratification has also cemented assurances to fund the multi-billion dollar missile defense and prompt global strike weapons systems while undermining the possibility of political opposition. Campaign contribution and lobbying disclosure data both help to explain why corporate contractors with stakes in these programs have been ably protected by both Republican and Democratic Senators throughout the ratification debate. Like the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that was debated in the 1990s, the political process of New START ratification has insulated nuclear weapons spending, as well as large budgets for other weapons systems. On balance New START has already exerted strong anti-disarmament influences on federal decision-makers, making it an arms affirmation treaty.

the sinking of guam

2010-09-30T12:03:00.004+02:00

The Military Occupation of Guam and the Struggle Against Bases in Okinawa

by Melvin Won Pat-Borja

During a congressional hearing on the Guam military buildup in early April, US Representative Hank Johnson said that he feared the Military Relocation on Guam would cause our tiny island to capsize and sink. The comment, though not meant to be taken literally, caused an uproar among Chamorus everywhere. People were so outraged at his perceived ignorance that they continually bashed him in the media and all over the internet. The sad truth however is that Guam WILL sink. It will sink under the weight of tons of toxic waste dumped by the military each year, sink under the pressure of contaminated drinking water, sink under the weight of overpopulated schools, massive amounts of traffic, inadequate health care, and extreme over population. If this military expansion goes as planned, the people of Guam will surely sink to the bottom of the Marianas Trench and become nothing more than a footnote in America’s colonial history.

Our story began centuries ago when we first sailed from the coast of south east asia and made this beautiful chain of islands our home, but for the sake of time, THIS story will begin when the DEIS (draft environmental impact statement) for Guam and the military buildup was released in November of last year. The document laid the blueprint for the transfer of 8,000 marines and their 9,000 dependents from Okinawa to Guam. It was an 11,000 page document that held our future in the margins of the paper it was printed on and the public was only given 90 days to comment on it. The plans suggested that Guam was the best alternative to right the wrongs that America’s armed forces had imposed on the people of Okinawa. The Department of Defense had chosen Guam because South Korea, the Philippines, California, and Hawaii all said “no.” 

But the sad reality is that Guam was never offered that same courtesy. We are an unincorporated territory of the United States, leaving us victim to whatever decision America makes, whether it is beneficial for us or not. Guam is America’s dirty little secret, the step child that no one ever talks about. We are affectionately referred to as the place “where America’s day begins,” but no one likes to admit that America starts each day with injustice. We have traditionally been loyal servants, patriots, and second class citizens, enlisting more soldiers per capita than anywhere else in the world. It makes me wonder if America could even have a military without people like us. We are as American as apple pie and baseball when there is war on the horizon or when strategic positioning in the Pacific is needed, but we are not American when it is time to vote in congress or the senate or when it is time to elect a new president.

When you read about the military buildup on Guam, many media sources portray the move as positive on all sides, hailing economic benefits as its saving grace. The people of Guam have been sold the idea of 33,000 new jobs that will stimulate our suffering economy, providing work for families in desperate need of some kind of income. Our government has been sold the idea that millions of federal dollars will go to fund desperately needed infrastructural upgrades. And the rest of the nation has been sold ideas of potential business ventures that promise them desperately needed money and success. Indeed, the global economy has created desperate times for all of us and it seems that selling Guam to the highest bidder is the answer.

Thousands of jobs and millions of dollars have a way of sounding too good to be true and upon reading the massive 11,000 page document it has become clear that it is indeed a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Nothing is what it seems and all of their promises are empty. Like their promise of 33,000 new jobs predicting an economic upturn for Guam in reality, a mere 17 percent of those jobs will go to the local community while the vast majority of jobs will go to the foreign work force from around the region. As we speak, people from all over the world and the US are making preparations to move to Guam in search of business opportunities. They promise financial prosperity to the people, but even the measly 17 percent of total jobs they will offer are mostly temporary construction work, which will cause unemployment to sky-rocket once the construction is completed. The DEIS even states that they predict a “recession-like atmosphere” after the construction phase is over. They say that there are incredible gains for our local government, which will absorb millions of dollars from the federal government, but nowhere in the DEIS does the federal government make any kind of commitment to support infrastructure outside the fence. 

In fact, of the billions of dollars coming from the federal government and the Japanese Diet, a vast majority is earmarked for infrastructural upgrades on base only. The DEIS suggests that the government of Guam will reap its financial benefits from an increase in tax dollars as a result of the population boom, but it doesn’t take into account the amount of money we will also have to spend in order to service all these people. They predict that Guam’s population will increase by almost 80,000 people. On an island that is only 31 miles long and 7 miles wide with a current population of 170,000 people it’s not hard to imagine Guam sinking to the bottom of the ocean floor. When you translate these numbers into social services, it becomes clear that the Government of Guam will find itself in dire straits trying to maintain an acceptable level of community care.

The DEIS predicts that our hospital, which sees a shortage of beds on a daily basis, will see an increase of over 41,000 patients. Yet the DEIS only has plans to upgrade Naval Hospital, a facility that not only denies health services to our general public, but consistently fails to care for our local veterans as well. They predict that the Department of Public Health and Social Services along with the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse will see an increase of nearly 23,000 more patients. Our Public School system will see 8,000 new students and the DEIS recommends that we build 5 new public schools. We will also require 532 new teachers in our public school system, which already has to fill 300 vacancies each year. There are a number of infrastructural upgrades that Guam will require in order to cope with the demands that 80,000 more people bring to our community, but there is no commitment by the Military or the Federal Government to support us financially. We are being forced to bear the burden of this buildup on our own. Once again, America has found a way to make a mess and the people of Guam will be forced to clean up after them.

Of course with any massive change in population we must also take into account the impact that such changes will have on our environment. Two major proposals in the DEIS are the dredging of 71 acres of coral reef in Apra Harbor to make room for a nuclear aircraft carrier and the acquisition of ancestral land for a live firing range. The military plans to dock their nuclear aircraft carrier in our local harbor instead of using their own Kilo Wharf, the harbor that they already occupy. The US Environmental Protection Agency claims that this dredging project is unprecedented and that the impact on the biologically diverse ecosystem cannot be mitigated. DoD experts claim that most of the reef in the area they want to dredge is already dead and that there isn’t much wildlife that will be adversely impacted, but our local marine biologists have found species of coral that have not yet been identified and could be endemic to this region. 

Furthermore, the way in which they propose to dredge the reef may have lasting impact on surrounding reefs and ecosystems as a result of sediment which could suffocate and destroy the species of coral down current. The plans for Apra Harbor in the DEIS demonstrate the military’s lack of concern and insensitivity to the issues facing Guam; in fact, it was just recently discovered by a local marine biologist that certain sections in the DEIS (particularly the sections on Apra Harbor) were plagiarized!

The land that the military wishes to acquire for their firing range is rich in cultural history and significance, containing ancient artifacts and ancestral remains that cannot be mitigated or replaced by any sum of money. Some parcels of land are owned by local residents who refuse to sell or lease, but the military insists on applying pressure to these private land owners as the threat of eminent domain hangs in the balance like it did after world war II, when residents were given a “take it or lose it” option when it came to private property. Most of the land that the military currently occupies was “purchased” for little to nothing in most cases and not selling was not an option.

Upon review of the DEIS, the US Environmental Protection Agency rated it “insufficient” and “environmentally unsatisfactory,” giving it the lowest possible rating for a DEIS. Among other things, the US EPA’s findings suggest that Guam’s water infrastructure cannot handle the population boom and that our fresh water resources will be at high risk for contamination. Our waste water system is in desperate need of upgrades and the population increase threatens to cause overflow and run off which could permanently pollute our fresh water lens. The increase in demand for fresh water will require that we dig up 22 new water wells especially to serve the military population up north, but several experts believe that digging so many new wells in close proximity to each other puts us at high risk of salt water contamination. Once a fresh water well is contaminated by salt water, the effects are irreversible. Officials at the Guam Waterworks Authority claim that we have more than enough water to handle the burden of 80,000 additional people, but the DEIS has plans for a desalinization plant, which is normally only used if fresh water resources are limited or jeopardized. In addition, the US EPA predicts that without infrastructural upgrades to our water system, the population outside the bases will experience a 13.1 million gallon water shortage per day in 2014. And this is where the battle gets interesting.

Though it seems that the odds are already stacked against us and that we can rely on no one but ourselves, we have found that special interest groups like the Guam Chamber of Commerce and the Guam Visitors Bureau have been avid proponents of the military buildup. They target our marginalized population enticing them with dreams of economic prosperity. Over 25 percent of Guam’s population lives below the poverty line and poverty is possibly the most powerful weapon in conquering a people. These special interest groups and even some government officials including our Governor and our representative in congress prey on our people, dangling money over their heads while unemployment looms in the background like the Gestapo. These house slaves promise that life will be so much better with the buildup and threaten that foreign countries will invade if the buildup does not happen. We are being subjugated by US imperialism and dependency and our own people have become our own worst enemy. Right now, our representative in congress claims that the people of Guam welcome this buildup with open arms and that we will gladly “take one for the team.” But we have never really been a part of America’s Team. We are like the black athletes of the 30’s and 40’s whose accolades on the field were heralded, but couldn’t even get a cab off the field.

We, the people, have found ourselves backed into a corner, deserted on the battlefield, left to fight the world’s largest superpower. It is truly a case of David vs. Goliath. Though the military buildup on Guam seems like a losing battle, this terroristic threat to our homeland has caused an uprising among the youth and many have stepped up to fight and defend our island and its people. But we cannot win this alone, so we are calling on our brothers and sisters from across the globe; those of you who know the bitter taste of oppression, we urge you fight alongside us in solidarity. We want this buildup no more than Okinawa wants the Marines to stay put. 

The military has already stolen almost 30 percent of the total land mass in Guam. We cannot allow them to take even more from us. We have sacrificed time and again for a country that has led us astray with empty promises and half-truths; who have held us hostage with US citizenship, fear, and economic dependency. We need your help. We need environmental law experts to help us take this issue to court. We need media support to get our message out to the rest of the world. We need more representation and influence to help us fight in congress and the senate. We need the international community to help us stay afloat and not allow us to sink into a sea of indifference, ignorance, and apathy. I pray that these words do not fall on deaf ears and that the world will come to the aid of a people and an island who have been mistreated for over 500 years of uninterrupted colonization. Please do not allow Guam to sink into oblivion.

Kyle Kajihiro relays this text of Melvin Won Pat-Borja's talk at the International Conference For a Nuclear Free, Peaceful, Just and Sustainable World, Riverside Church, NYC, 30 April-1 may 2010. Melvin is an activist with the Guahan Coalition for Peace and Justice/We Are Guahan. Kyle, Melvin and Kozue Akibayashi discuss the No Bases movement and militarization in the Pacific on Democracy Now (24 May).

defending the 'aina

2010-09-29T11:01:00.005+02:00

The Occupation of Hawai'i and the Struggle for Withdrawal of Foreign Military Bases

by Kyle Kajihiro

Aloha kakou. Warm greetings from Hawai’i.

For more than a century, the U.S. has treated the Pacific ocean as an “American Lake” and Pacific islands as stepping-stones to extend the march of “manifest destiny” westward to the Asian prize.

The peoples of the Pacific were merely an afterthought. Henry Kissinger’s remark about nuclear tests in the Marshall islands exemplified this attitude: “There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?”

The independent Kingdom of Hawai’i was one of the first overseas casualties of the American empire. In 1893 Hawai’i was invaded and occupied by U.S. troops in order to establish a forward military base in the Pacific. As Stephen Kinzer noted, the U.S.-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom was the prototype for the recurring tactic of “regime change”, all the way up to and including the invasion of Iraq.

The U.S. military occupation of Hawai’i enabled America to defeat the Spanish Empire in 1898, acquire its colonies, and emerge as a global power. During WWII, U.S. military bases in Hawai’i were crucial to America’s victory over the Japanese empire and its rise to global, nuclear armed superpower status.

After the war, America established the Pacific Command in Hawai’i, the oldest and largest of the unified commands. It has an area of responsibility that encompasses most of the world’s surface and a majority of its population.

Ke Awalau o Pu’uloa, the true name of what is commonly called Pearl Harbor, was once a marvel of aquacultural and agricultural engineering. It was the food basket for O’ahu. But the U.S. military wanted to turn it into a naval base. Today, what was once a life-giving treasure has become a toxic superfund site with more than 740 contaminated sites identified thus far.

Pearl Harbor also serves another function as the iconic war monument. It is a factory to valorize and reproduce the myth of America’s redemption through militarization and war. Hawai’i and America are still held hostage to this myth.

The military presence in Hawai’i can be imagined as the head of a monstrous he’e or octopus, with tentacles that grab at our brothers and sisters in the Philippines, Guam, Okinawa, Korea, Kwajalein. Hawai’i is simultaneously a victim of American empire and an accomplice in the building of that empire.

America’s bid for “full spectrum dominance” extends from the bottom of the sea to the heavens above, from space to cyberspace. Sensor grids on the sea floor off Kaua’i and radar, antenna and optical tracking stations on the peaks of our sacred mountains are the eyes and ears of the he’e. Supercomputers and fiber optics are its brains and nervous system. To stop a he’e, you must neutralize its head.

According to the 2009 Base Structure Report, the U.S. military operates a total of 139 installations and facilities in Hawaii, with a total area of 239,000 acres. In addition the Hawaii National Guard has 13 installations occupying 858,000 acres. The main islands are completely surrounded by military defensive sea areas, and the entire archipelago is surrounded by 2.1 million square miles of temporary operating area.

The process of militarization destroys Native Hawaiian culture and sacred sites and imperils native ecosystems. It has poisoned our environment and threatened our health with a toxic cocktail of depleted uranium, lead, dioxins, radioactive cobalt 60, chemical weapons, and a host of other substances. It creates economic dependency that verges on addiction and distorts our sense of cultural identity and social priorities.

After 9/11, Hawai’i experienced the largest military expansion since WWII. Despite protests and devastating environmental and cultural impacts, the Army seized 25,000 acres of land and stationed 328 Strykers in Hawai’i. Missile defense programs and congressional earmarks fuel a military-industrial gold rush, cutting off access to some of our best beaches at the missile range on Kaua’i. Even economic stimulus funds have been hijacked to boost construction of military housing and other facilities.

Despite overwhelming odds, people continue to resist. In 1976, the first of several waves of activists landed on Kaho’olawe island to protest the Navy bombing of that sacred place. This movement eventually ended the bombing and forced the clean up and return of the island.

In Makua decades of protest, lawsuits and the assertion of traditional Kanaka Maoli cultural practices have halted Army live fire training for the last five years. There is fierce community opposition to the Army’s plans to resume training in Makua.

In 2003, the community defeated a proposed Marine jungle warfare training facility in Waikane valley. The marines have now begun a process of cleaning up unexploded ordnance.

On Hawai’i island, activists have called for the end of live fire training in Pohakuloa, the clean up of depleted uranium and the cancellation of the lease of state land to the military.

In 2002, the DMZ-Hawai’i/Aloha ‘Aina network was organized to unite the various local struggles against the bases in Hawai’i. Our four demands are: 1. Stop military expansion, 2. Cleanup and return military occupied lands. 3. Develop sustainable economic alternatives and 4. Pay just compensation for the damages caused by the military in Hawai’i.

The arms of the he’e can grow back when they are cut off, as we are seeing with the return of U.S. troops and “lily pad” installations in the Philippines and the relocation of bases from Ecuador to Colombia. We need a different paradigm of peace and security based on meeting human needs and environmental sustainability, not the imposition of order through the threat of overwhelming violence.

We are inspired and encouraged by the emergence of a global network against foreign military bases. In Hawai’i we have organized actions to support Vieques, Okinawa, Guam, Korea and the Marshall Islands.

I’d like to make a special appeal and challenge to our comrades in peace and justice movements to please pay attention to and support the justice struggles on our small islands. The Pentagon wants to rule the planet from a network of strategic island military hubs. To end the present wars and prevent future wars, we must dismantle the architecture of this empire of bases, and the solidarity of people in the heart of the empire to push for the withdrawal of these bases is more important than ever.

In contrast to the imperial vision of the American Lake, peoples of the Pacific have a different vision of peace and security for our region. The Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement popularized the concept of Ka Moana Nui, the great ocean that connects the Asia Pacific through solidarity rather than hegemony. To borrow a Hawaiian concept, let us “haku”, that is braid our struggles into an unbreakable cord much stronger than its individual strands to restrain the powerful forces that make wars and rule through nuclear and military terror.

This text is Kyle Kajihiro's talk for the Workshop "Challenging Asia-Pacific Militarism" at the International Conference For a Nuclear Free, Peaceful, Just and Sustainable World, held at the Riverside Church, NYC, 30 April-1 May 2010. Kyle is Hawai'i Area Program Director for the American Friends Service Committee, and a member of the DMZ-Hawai’i/Aloha ‘Aina network and the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases.

wars of denial

2010-09-29T10:37:00.001+02:00

Ryuta Nakajima, PH What?, 2002.

Ry Nakajima paints history as instrumentalized projection - a social process of coding and recoding, construction, forgetting and exclusion. Here, he projects a fragment from an iconic image of the Japanese attack on the US fleet in Ke Awalau o Pu’uloa (aka, Pearl Harbor) through  an optic of critical reflection. Immersing the stratagems and strikes of imperialist adversaries are the wars of denial: in the official mythologies of nation-states, of victors and vanquished alike, real histories of conquest and occupation are actively disappeared.

atomkraft? nein danke

2010-09-23T12:13:00.005+02:00

On Saturday a large and spirited demonstration marched through Berlin’s governmental quarter, filling the air with drumming, whistles and catcalls. The largest anti-nuke demo seen in Germany since the years of Chernobyl was organized with impressive rapidity in response to Merkel’s backdoor deal with the nuclear power industry. At the front of the demo were farmers and tractors from the Wendland, where the Gorleben nuclear waste storage site remains a perennial flashpoint for resistance. Otherwise, it looked and felt like an inter-generational sampling of the middle classes – confirmation of the mainstream character of opposition to nuclear power in Germany.

Organizers claim 100,000 people took to the streets in protest. Police under-counters countered with 40,000. Even splitting the difference at 70,000, this was a mobilization too large to be ignored. And with all the grassroots and activist networks involved, as well as parties (Greens, SPD, die.Linke), it’s not likely to be a one-off. The networks are already focused on Gorleben: there is a buzz that this year they may actually be able to stop the Castor train with massive blockades.

Merkel’s governing CDU-FDP coalition had been signaling for weeks that it would seek to roll back the scheduled phase-out of German nuclear power plants enacted by Schröder’s SPD-Green government with strong public support in 2002. Nuclear power company CEOs went into a closed-door meeting with Merkel’s economic minister and party leaders late Sunday morning, on 5 September. When they came out in the wee hours before dawn on the following Monday, the deal was done: Germany’s 17 nuke plants would extend operations for an average of 12 years beyond the currently scheduled shut-down dates, the extensions subsidized with massive state hand-outs. The scandal is in the form as well as the content: Merkel’s initiative, undertaken without any mandate and initially opposed by her own environmental minister, is the literal negation of democracy.
GR 

to gorleben

2010-09-23T12:03:00.008+02:00

After Chernobyl, nuclear power lost whatever legitimacy it had managed to attain by relentless spin and obfuscation. Aside from safety problems in the plants themselves, the radioactive waste produced is a problem that has never been solved or honestly confronted. Moreover, the nuclear power industry is practically the condition of the nuclear weapons complex with which it merges on many levels. So long as nuclear power persists, nuclear weapons remain possible; only by shutting down the nuclear power complex will the abolition of nuclear weapons be realized dependably. In this light, IAEA and NPT are the administrative-diplomatic instruments of the dominant states, with the US at their head: crucial parts of an enforcement regime by which the global social process is reproduced. The re-branding of nuclear power as the great clean hope for managing climate change without relinquishing the logic of accumulation and infinite growth doesn't change the underlying reality. Anyone who doesn’t want to talk about imperialism had better keep silent about nuclear energy.

The radioactive waste produced by Germany’s 17 nuclear power plants is stored in Gorleben, in the Wendland region of Lower Saxony. The waste first goes for reprocessing to the La Hague facility in France. From there it is shipped back to Germany by train on the notorious annual “Castor” transport, always in November. Two interim depots close to the Elbe River hold the toxic material while construction continues on a “permanent” depot in the underground salt dome there.

Resistance to the Castor trains has been broad and determined. Direct action tactics have included locking sit-down blockades on the tracks. In 2004, the police failed to clear the tracks near Harlingen, and a protester was killed when the Castor train severed his leg. This is enforcement by state terror, against which pulses the re-gathered courage and resilience of those who won't be cowed.
GR 

For more, see Ausgestrahlt and Castor Nix.

on the german green resurgence

2010-09-23T11:54:00.006+02:00

In the week after Merkel’s deal with the nuke industry was made public, polls registered a sharp spike in support for the Green Party. Nationally, they are suddenly polling 22 percent, and in Berlin are approaching 30 percent. Whether this represents a durable shift in the parliamentary landscape remains to be seen.

In any case, it is a good time to remember the instructive trajectory and shabby fall of the German Greens over the last decade. Formed in the aftermath of 1968 and the repression of the student movement, the Greens advanced four clear principles: ecology, social justice, non-violence and grassroots democracy. Initially at least, the Greens’ stylistic affronts to the conservative German political class were accompanied by an alternative vision that included some substantively radical challenges to the status quo.

Over time a split emerged, however, that would prove fatal. The Realos, oriented toward electoral campaigning and longing to participate in a governing coalition, eventually banished the Fundis, who held to the founding principles. Under Fischer, the Greens were transformed from a party of principle to one more instance of neo-liberal opportunism. They were soon rewarded with power and major portfolios. As Foreign Minister, Fischer’s first major test came with the crisis of Yugoslavia. He proved pliable, presiding over and defending with double-talk the first foreign deployment of German troops since World War II. And he never looked back – non-violence indeed.

The Fundis reorganized as the Ökologische Linke, or ÖkoLinX as it is also known, and renewed their commitment to radical change. The ÖL's five-point stance is critical and unequivocal: 1. Against capital and for solidarity and radical ecology; 2. Against patriarchy and for feminism; 3. Against racism and for internationalism; 4. Against militarism; and 5. Against the state and for grassroots democracy. Despite the guiding presence of the often brilliant Jutta Ditfurth, the ÖL was punished with marginalizing ostracism. It remains active, and is never missing from any important demo or protest action. But its fate speaks much about the compromises required by capitalist pseudo-democracy. Only the pressure from below of larger radical movements can dissolve the stasis.

Wherever the Green Party will go from here, it is not likely to be radical. Before Merkel’s nuke fiasco, Green politicians were busy cozying up to the CDU and dreaming publicly of a Conservative-Green coalition. "Now we are preparing ourselves to become the ruling party."(Renate Künast) Its current orientation and leadership is irredeemable; its corrupted realism does insult to the color green. Real change in the party would take a revolution from below. The real crises of objective processes call for nothing less.
GR

micro air vehicles

2010-09-19T11:16:00.006+02:00

Recent prototype of the Harvard Microrobotic Fly, a three-centimeter wingspan flapping-wing robot. (Credit: Ben Finio, The Harvard Microrobotics Lab)

The following "article" appeared on TerraDaily, a digest of ecology-oriented reports and snippets. While what and who is behind the website begs investigation, the entity and intentions behind this report are clear enough. It is reposted here as a social fact; critical reflection follows on in the next post.

Tiny MAVs May Someday Explore And Detect Environmental Hazards

by Maria Callier
Air Force Office of Scientific Research

Arlington VA (AFNS) Sep 16, 2010

Air Force Office of Scientific Research-sponsored researcher, Dr. Robert Wood of Harvard University is leading the way in what could become the next phase of high-performance micro air vehicles for the Air Force.

His basic research is on track to evolve into robotic, insect-scale devices for monitoring and exploration of hazardous environments, such as collapsed structures, caves and chemical spills.

"We are developing a suite of capabilities which we hope will lead to MAVs that exceed the capabilities of existing small aircraft. The level of autonomy and mobility we seek has not been achieved before using robotic devices on the scale of insects," said Wood.

Wood and his research team are trying to understand how wing design can impact performance for an insect-size, flapping-wing vehicle. Their insights will also influence how such agile devices are built, powered and controlled.

"A big emphasis of our AFOSR program is the experimental side of the work," said Wood. "We have unique capabilities to create, flap and visualize wings at the scales and frequencies of actual insects."

The researchers are constructing wings and moving them at high frequencies recreating trajectories similar to those of an insect. They are also able to measure multiple force components, and they can observe fluid flow around the wings flapping at more than 100 times per second.

Performing experiments at such a small scale presents significant engineering challenges beyond the study of the structure-function relationships for the wings.

"Our answer to the engineering challenges for these experiments and vehicles is a unique fabrication technique we have developed for creating wings, actuators, thorax and airframe at the scale of actual insects and evaluating them in fluid conditions appropriate for their scale," he said.

They are also performing high-speed stereoscopic motion tracking, force measurements and flow visualization; the combination of which allows for a unique perspective on what is going on with these complex systems.

The original article on TerraDaily.

drones of disaster (2): eco-erotics perverted

2010-09-19T11:00:00.006+02:00

"A million technocrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it." (Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow)

The playful imitation of nature relates to nature without dominating it: mimesis, sublated in the forms and impulses of art, performs the promise of nature’s liberation. This idea is what Benjamin and Adorno tried to rescue from Romantic aesthetics. Adorno retains mimesis as an irreducible moment of play within negative dialectics, or thinking rigorously oriented toward non-identity. Mimesis becomes a principle guiding rigorous imagination, that attentive immersion in non-conceptuals, singularities and particulars that releases the social truth of objects without bombing and gassing them. 

If astonishment at nature inspired early science, its modernist form, struggling to liberate thought from superstition, aimed to repress all traces of play within its own methods. Under capital, mimesis returns as one more means of domination. The dragon-slayers went to work for the dragons, and dragonflies droned airborne from the labs of engineers.

Over the skies of the walled border with Mexico no less than in the Afghan mountains and flooded valleys of Pakistan, we are seeing where this leads. The war machine has let slip its dreaming of bee-sized killer drones, and already some years have passed since we heard tell of strange dragonflies shadowing antiwar demonstrations. Knowing well how the Pentagon takes its dreams for reality, we can feel the chill in the warming air. 

And as always, every leap in domination is sold to us as its opposite. In the aftermath of Hiroshima, the US state used the promise of the “peace atom” to mystify the terror of the “war atom.” 

All these processes are legible in the short and glowing report that appeared on a remarkable website called TerraDaily (“news about planet earth”). It is re-posted in full above, minus the ads by Google. Are you worried about the biosphere? Have you been sensitized to the global threat? Be reassured, rare and gifted minds are at work at Harvard and Los Alamos. This little gadget, miracle of nano-science, epitomizes the good micro-robotics. This is “research on track to evolve into insect-scale devices for monitoring and exploration of hazardous environments, such as collapsed structures, caves and chemical spills.” Don’t be alarmed that the sponsor of this project and employer of the "journalist" is the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Science is humane, after all; it will rescue us from hazardous environments, whether or not it was instrumental in producing them in the first place.

Everything about this report betrays the perverting of eco-erotics, the channeling capture of the legitimate human longing to be reconciled with exploited and dominated nature. Militarized and capitalized, science forfeits its notion of truth as liberation; in its place is the correspondence between the means and end of domination. But the untruth of antagonism, which the given production produces at every level, remains the glaring truth about the global social process. In that process, nature is no less commodified and exploited than labor power, and with reverberations that are no less planetary. But even perverted, mimesis preserves a promise of reconciliation – freedom, sensual happiness and the liberation of inner and outer nature. 

But only as a promise. Its realization is the real struggle from below.

limits of terror

2010-09-16T08:17:00.003+02:00

Limits of Terror: 
On Culture Industry, Enforcement and Revolution 

by Gene Ray

Excerpt:

These reflections suggest that a break with the master logic of  accumulation entails disarming the technocratic national  security-surveillance state, and above all the US war machine that is  the main enforcer of the global imperialist process. To put it more  pointedly: without disarmament, the prospect of emancipating system  change is nill. Possibilities for transformation would increase in pace  with progressive disarmament, however, and indeed the latter would  measure the former. If this is so, then struggles will be strategic only  insofar as they articulate themselves with anti-militarist struggles  and make their own the aim of dismantling state war machines.  Disarmament implies confronting the neo-imperialist state and need not  be naïvely pacifist, but obviously this confrontation cannot take the  form of a suicidal war of annihilation. Total struggle, mirroring total  war, is terminal: pursued without limit or reserve it becomes the terror  it aims to fight. And yet effective struggles need to be grounded in  everyday experience; they are robust and resilient insofar as they are  lived fully and vividly, pulsing beyond a mere convenience emptied of  risk. The tight-wires of practice are strung under tension across these  aporias. In our world of normalized emergency, the desire to be  liberated from fear and terror is the long, gently bowed balancing pole  of sanity. 
    
The traversing refusal of imposed fear and terror has clear aims to  struggle for: the immediate cessation of all military occupations and  interventions and the permanent closure of the global network of  neo-imperialist military bases and spy stations that supports them; the  global abolition of nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction,  without exception; the radical reduction of military spending and the  redirection of these funds to the urgent amelioration of social misery.  Every real step toward these aims would already be radical change. And  only by passing through them can struggles for autonomy, happiness and  the liberation of nature have their chance to survive and grow fruitful.  There is no liberation within the politics of fear: liberation as such  begins and is coextensive with liberation from state terror. 

This essay is forthcoming in a special issue of Brumaria on Revolution and Subjectivity, out in December (The other contributors are Alain Badiou, Alex Callinicos, Simon Critchley, Barbara Epstein, John Bellamy Foster, David Harvey, John Holloway, Domenico Losurdo,  Michael Löwy, Milos Petrovic, Antonio Negri, Alberto Toscano and Slavoj Žižek). The whole essay is posted here with images of the massive sit-in in Okinawa and other global struggles to close US military bases.

 

Limits of Terror: 
On Culture Industry, Enforcement and Revolution 

by Gene Ray

‘Enjoy your precarity!’ This is the command behind the bubbling ideological re-descriptions and compensating revalorizations of the so-called creative industries. If such a command is to stick, it needs appeal, allure, mystique. The figure of the artist as creative rebel, dusted off and shined up, seems to do the trick. In the new imaginaries of post-Fordist cognitive capitalism, the old categories of autonomy and creativity are jolted back to life and luster. On the subjective level, it’s all about moods, fantasies and libidinal investments. Self-exploitation can be hip, if deep knee-bends are performed to an appropriate sound track. It really is possible to find freedom in unfreedom, correct living in the false, if only you look for it in the new and approved ways. How much potential for resistance comes with these shifted productive relations and this readjusted subject of labor is a matter of some dispute.
    
In any case, trends in the labor market, characterized by a painful intensification of precarity, dependency and demoralization, are evidently a firmly established aspect of the contemporary social process, even if claims about post-Fordist production arguably are more applicable to certain sectors in the Global North than generalizable as capital’s new avant-garde.[*] Such shifts clearly have a material basis, not least in the dominant position capital has for decades held in the global force field. Neo-liberalism may be more than ever exposed by the current economic and biospheric meltdowns. But whatever legitimation crisis it suffers as a result, the social processes this hegemonic ideology was shaped to cover and justify are proceeding apace; with regard to policy and state interventions, this aggressive, offensive posture in the class war against labor has ceded hardly any momentum at all. In Europe in 2010, misery is advancing under the sign of an ‘austerity’ aiming to protect finance capital and mop up the remnants of organized labor-power. ‘There is no alternative’ is still the official mantra of the day, even among ‘socialist’ governments. At this writing only in Greece has there been massive popular resistance to the immiseration program; in Spain and France the unions are stirring and may yet show some fight. Mostly, though, austerity proceeds amid strikingly little contestation. 
    
How are we to explain this remarkable intransigence of capital in its neo-liberal posture? The classical balance of forces framework offers a sobering optic. It suggests that capital can go on wreaking such havoc because labor as an organized counter-power has been decomposed and pulverized. The reasons for this de-organization are debatable. Is it due to decisive defeats and co-optations – the result of a cumulative overpowering? Or is it rather attributable to deep shifts in the organization of social production, shifts in which labor has actively participated, by its selective resistance and exodus? But even the latter appears more and more as another form of defeat today, as the real and continuing costs of labor-power’s weakness in relation to capital relentlessly come to light.
    
Today renewed debates over communism are flaring on the edges of academe; these at least throw into relief once again the wager and stakes of a serious and strategic anti-capitalism. The hypothetical return to communism may work as a provocation and stimulus to thought, but whether this tarnished legacy really offers a vector of leftist renewal is more dubious. The Communist Parties of the early Third International – before the self-mutilating corruptions of Stalinism and the decimating attacks of fascism – constituted a credible challenge to capitalist power. But these organizations in the event did not suffice: the world revolution had stalled by 1923, and the Parties discredited themselves to the point that, fifty years on, the exploited had abandoned them and their marginalized splinter formations in decisive exodus. The collapse of Soviet-style ‘really existing socialism’ helped to fuel a decade of neo-liberal triumphalism and encouraged gloating post histoire pronouncements about the death of revolution. The reasons for the demise of Soviet imperialism are complex and debatable, and the subsequent resurgence of Russian imperialism and the rapid rise of Chinese state capitalism do not make the task of critical interpretation any easier. What these restructurings portend in the long run for other models of socialism remains to be seen. But the defeat, over the course of the last century, of the revolutionary hopes released by the Russian Revolution at the very least puts in question the conception of revolution that took the Bolshevik vanguard as its model. 
    
The idea of revolution, however, is not bound to this historical model and is not compromised by its defeat. The global happiness and freedom that capitalism promises but fails to deliver are negative pointers to a world beyond the misery of exploitation and domination. Such a world is utopian, if it remains unconcerned with its own conditions of possibility, if it fails to seek practical and strategic pathways by which it can be realized. The idea of revolution is first of all an emphatic insistence that freedom and happiness should be actualized and not just dreamed about. This idea entails the removal of the blockages and constraints that capitalist relations impose on human powers and potentials. These powers and potentials have been forced to develop along the channels required by the logic of accumulation. But one can easily imagine what may be possible, in terms of shared abundance and a reconciled relation to nature, if other values and social forms were not violently repressed.

   
No one can say for certain where necessity ends and freedom begins at any point in time: this point can only be discovered by reaching for it, by pushing collectively against the evident limits of the given. In a world in which capitalist relations and power are enforced by violence and state terror, the reach beyond the rule of antagonism has to pass through the mediations of struggle. It will not be granted as a gift from above, by the actual placeholders of power and privilege. The given structure of places, the status quo of a globally enforced social process, will have to be overthrown by struggle if it is to be abolished. The oppressed and exploited will have to liberate themselves by their own gathered power and agency, or else renounce liberation. This, I take it, remains the simple truth content of the idea of revolution, and so long as the world is capitalist it will be valid to invoke this idea. 
    
But if, in this sense, revolution is always ‘on the agenda’, as a demand that misery makes urgent, it does not at all follow that it is just around the corner or that its necessary conditions are even minimally present. In this direction, little can be taken for granted and everything should be open to question and critical debate. Models, which preserve past approaches to problems, tend to become symbols – potent objects of reverence or hatred that absorb the intensities of the struggles they schematize. Today they should be studied carefully and even rubbed against the grain. Not as fetishes do they release their greatest use-values to the ideas of liberation and revolution; those use-values may be negative ones. What is unhappily clear today is that in the wake of the defeat of militant hope in its twentieth century forms, nothing has succeeded in recomposing the power of labor as an organized force capable of gaining and holding a position in the force field. Purged of radical aims, the approved spectacle of party politics in the capitalist democracies drifted long ago into a wasteland of unprincipled opportunism. With nothing now effectively constraining it, the ‘inspirited monster’ of accumulation runs amok – over the planet, and through our bodies and minds.
    
New theories that advocate abandoning the logic of the force field – theories of multitude and exodus, of anti-power and non-instrumental revolution – have wrestled admirably with the political problems we inherit but have not solved them. Those problems – of agency and organizational form, and of viable strategies and ethics of struggle – still mark the limit of emancipating social transformation. For it is not enough to organize a social form opposed to capitalist values; any alternative model or opening in normality also has to organize its effective defense against capitalist power – or will be short-lived. By this test the most influential new theories of radical transformation – Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s multitude and John Holloway’s anti-power – have so far been signally ineffective. Our current conjunctural predicament – antiwar movement dead in the water, movement of movements in paralysis or disarray, corporations allowed to act and states to intervene with hardly any visible resistance or contestation in the imperialist metropoles – underscores the theoretical and practical crisis. It does no good to underestimate the enemy or imagine that there is not one. A sober accounting of labor-power’s current weakness in its relation to capital and of the real and continuing costs of that weakness, in terms of increasing social misery and biospheric meltdown, would be a first condition of any strategic renewal of resistance.
    
Back to Benjamin and Adorno then, back to the melancholy of impasse? Old school, no doubt, but a measure of Frankfurt pessimism is bracing corrective to an optimism become foolish. It is a willful gaze that can take in the last century and still see progress. Such a return would not be unproductive in rethinking the intersections of revolution, subjectivity and culture. As many have remarked, the fashionable discourse of creative industries is premised on a neutralizing appropriation of Adorno’s critical category of ‘culture industry’. This category certainly poses the problematic of subjectivity. But it also gives heavy weight to the dominant tendencies of objective reality. It is this second aspect that is sometimes discounted in even critical responses to the celebration of creative industries. Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, Adorno came to see ‘administration’ and ‘integration’ as the decisive immanent tendencies of late capitalism. Both, it will be shown, are inseparably bound up with the category of terror, which has to be a part of any adequate account of the global social process that dominates life today. This essay re-reads the culture industry argument against more recent approaches to subjectivation and considers the administration of terror as a gripping dialectic of enjoyment and enforcement.

The Stakes of Culture Industry

Discussions of culture industry typically begin with the famous chapter from Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. There, the tendencies and processes engulfing ‘culture’ – ‘tendencies which turn cultural progress into its opposite’ – are registered across ‘philosophical fragments’ emplotting ‘the tireless self-destruction of enlightenment’: Enlightenment, the dream suicided by society. The liberation of man from a dominating ‘nature’ is converted into the class domination of man by man, and this dialectic takes catastrophic and genocidal turns under late capitalism, as the nets of the social whole tighten. The rationalized production of cultural commodities for mass consumption reinforces culture’s affirmative ideological functions in a vicious spiral. Spaces for critical autonomy tend to be squeezed out and critical capacities atrophy, leaving conformity and resignation as the paths of least resistance. In a hostile takeover and permanent occupation of leisure time, the exploitative social given advertises itself unceasingly. Mass culture, as Adorno puts it in the continuation of the chapter, becomes ‘a system of signals that signals itself’. Culture industry denotes the dominant logic of cultural ‘goods’ that are impressively varied and apparently free of direct censorship, but which nevertheless exhibit a strong tendency toward uniformity. In this they mirror the logic of the global social process, that persistence in domination that Adorno in 1951 described vividly as ‘the ever-changing production of the always-the-same’.
    
The culture industry chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment was only a preliminary formulation of this thesis, however. Adorno offered some important elaborations of the argument in the 1960 essay ‘Culture and Administration’ and ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, from 1963. Additional glosses and remarks in passing can be found throughout his texts of the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, the published book chapter represents only the jointly edited first half of a longer manuscript drafted by Adorno; in the 1944 mimeograph edition circulated to Frankfurt Institute members, the chapter ends with the line ‘To be continued.’ The unedited remainder was published posthumously in 1981, under the title ‘The Schema of Mass Culture’.
    
The additional writings do not greatly change the argument and certainly do not retract the conclusions. But the clarifications and elaborations they offer get in the way of writers wishing to dismiss those conclusions too easily, on the grounds that changes since have made them obsolete. In the new preface to the 1969 edition of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno acknowledge that time does not stand still; processes change as they unfold. But they insist that the tendency they pointed to continues to hold:

'We do not stand by everything we said in the book in its original form. That would be incompatible with a theory which attributes a temporal core to truth instead of contrasting truth as something invariable to the movement of history. The book was written at a time when the end of the National Socialist terror was in sight. In not a few places, however, the formulation is no longer adequate to the reality of today. All the same, even at that time we did not underestimate the implications of the transition to the administered world.'

The general tendency or immanent drift of the global process has not changed, because the capitalist logic that grounds and generates it remains in force. This general tendency is the essence of capitalist modernity, which unfolds through all the dynamic processes that are its concrete appearance-forms. It holds, so long as the social world is a capitalist one.

In ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, Adorno recalls that he and Horkheimer chose the term ‘culture industry’ not only to express the paradoxical merger of an at least quasi-autonomous tradition with its opposite. They also aimed to critique the concept of ‘mass culture’, with its implication of an authentically popular culture: ‘The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object.’ Adorno does not hesitate to reaffirm the tendency at work. The production and consumption of commodified culture ‘more or less according to plan’ tends to produce comformist consciousness and functions in sum as ‘a system almost without gaps’: ‘This is made possible by contemporary technical capacities as well as by economic and administrative concentration.’
    
The term ‘industry’, then, refers to the market-oriented rationality or calculus that drives all aspects of the processes involved. It registers the fact that there is a master logic, operative through technical developments and shifts in particular processes:

'Thus, the expression ‘industry’ is not to be taken too literally. It refers to the standardization of the thing itself – such as that of the Western, familiar to every movie-goer – and to the rationalization of distribution techniques, but not strictly to the production process.'

The production processes themselves often still involve the input of individuals who have not been entirely severed from their means of production and who may be celebrated as stars – or today’s ‘creatives’. But their contributions are still integrated according to the logic of valorization and accumulation that dominates commodified culture:

'It [culture industry] is industrial more in a sociological sense, in the incorporation of industrial forms of organization even when nothing is manufactured – as in the rationalization of office work – rather than in the sense of anything really and actually produced by technological rationality.'

It is no refutation of the culture industry thesis, then, simply to point to this or that aspect of the cultural field today and note how aged and out of date those old examples from the 1940s have become. If micro-enterprises are the norm in today’s creative industries, this means little if their very existence is an effect of technology and ‘economic and administrative concentration’. The Internet feels like freedom, but Google and Verizon can still decide together how they will undo the principle of net neutrality. Nor will it suffice to point to counter-tendencies, local or not, if these do not displace the master logic; over time, generally if not in every case, the dominant tendency wins out, so long as it is dominant.     
    
To refute the argument, it would be necessary to show that the overall drift or tendency no longer holds – or never did. The issue at stake is manipulation: the restriction, impoverishment and seduction of consciousness. Are the gaps, in which autonomous subjects can emerge and from which practices of critical resistance might produce real effects, still closing? Or are these gaps of autonomy expanding now, as some claim, indicating a reversal of the trend? How are autonomous subjects formed, anyway? What are the conditions of their formation and, if they are to be considered as ‘actors’ in a cultural field, what freedom of action is actually theirs?
    
Here, of course, the argument of culture industry clashes with theoretical orientations firmly established in academe in the wake of 1968. Rejecting Frankfurt pessimism, the new disciplinary hybrid of cultural studies took aim at the manipulation thesis. The dominated classes are not the passive objects of manipulation, it was countered; even as consumers, they find ways to express their resistance to control and exploitation. From one angle, scholars such as Edward Thompson, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall insisted in Marxist terms on the existence of cultures of popular resistance, even within the forms of dominant culture. In a different vector, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Michel de Certeau became new reference points for an end-run around the manipulation problem that rejected the Marxist conception of social power; in this approach, the forms or modes of subjectivation constituted by specific relations of power gain priority over macro structures of exploitation and direct repression.
    
How far do such retorts and re-conceptions really come to grips with Adorno’s dialectic of subjectivation and the dominant objective tendency? In answering this question, we need to avoid caricatures and straw-arguments. Whatever the rhetorical hyperbole of certain formulations, Adorno does not argue that the consumers of mass culture are merely passive slaves invariably doomed to eternal reification. He is careful to acknowledge that gaps and openings for critical autonomy still exist. The argument is that the dominant process is systematically reducing such gaps and that the constriction is well advanced; those critical and autonomous subjects who do emerge are increasingly blocked from any practice that could change the dominant trend or aim radically beyond it. In this sense, the system is ‘totalizing’. 
    
But totalizing does not and cannot mean totalized, as in actualized with an exhaustive completeness that would, once and for all, eliminate every gap and permanently block critical subjects from ever emerging again. This is a basic point of Adorno’s ‘negative dialectics’ and of his critique of Hegel. Social systems tend toward closure, but they can only actualize closure through the final solution of genocidal integrations and subsumptions; the once-and-for-all of global closure would simultaneously eliminate the conditions of the system itself, which cannot do without the subjects it needs to activate, mobilize and control. The catastrophic aspect of late capitalism is that techno-power and so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction make the literal suicide of enlightenment a real historical possibility for the first time – this is where terror will have to come in, and will do later in the essay.

  
The point about subjectivation, however, is that there are chains – there are objective constraints that function as obstacles to subjective autonomy and limit what subjects can do with their autonomy. The problem is not exhausted in the question, why do people choose their own chains (or: give their consent to the hegemonic culture). Some may do so as the result of an economic calculation, or a specific fear, or the compensatory enjoyment of more unconscious repressions. But the high stakes of the culture industry argument are in the claim that the objective tendency reaches far back into the processes by which subjects are formed. ‘Pre-formed’ subjects begin to emerge, who no longer even recognize this choice – yes or no to their chains:

'The mesh of the whole, modeled on the act of exchange, is drawn ever tighter. It leaves individual consciousness less and less room for evasion, pre-forms it more and more thoroughly, cuts it off a priori as it were from the possibility of difference, which is degraded to a nuance in the monotony of supply.'

The modes and processes of subjectivation are a proper focus, then, for the forms and qualities of subjectivity are precisely what are at stake. But these modes and processes of formation are themselves shaped and constrained in ways that cannot be avoided or dismissed: ‘Society precedes the subject.’ Subject-centered approaches are premised on the possibility of intervention into the modes of subjectivation. This entails the freedom and autonomy required to refuse an imposed or offered form of subjectivity, for example by withdrawing from a specific relation of power and domination. But how free are existing subjects? Are they masters of destiny who can do what they want, regardless of objective factors and forces? That hardly seems likely, and if they are not, then there is no reason to think Adorno has been answered or refuted. 
    
Some post-structuralist approaches to subjectivation risk one-sidedly discounting the headlock of the objective – the constraints imposed by prevailing structures, conditions and tendencies. There is an implicit voluntarism in the assumption that subjects can simply refuse and leap out of every subjugating relation of power or de-link themselves at will from the forms of dominated subjectivity that correspond to such relations. (If they could, things would presumably be much different.) Adorno is clearly arguing against such voluntarism. But it would be a distortion of Adorno’s position to attribute to him some version of absolutized passivity and servility. For him, critical autonomy is the necessary subjective vector of emancipation. Critical subjects can still emerge, but only through the hard mental work of self-liberation – against the processes and dominant tendencies of which the culture industry is an ideological mediator. This becomes increasingly improbable as critical capacity is systematically attacked, undermined, blocked and repressed. Unlikely but still possible: Adorno also insists it cannot be excluded. Individual subjects can through their own efforts break the spell and see through the mirages of social appearance. While the conditions of autonomy objectively dwindle, its subjective condition remains the subject’s own desire for liberation. 
    
Consider the ending of the full, extended version of the culture industry chapter:

'The neon signs that hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, its frozen death. Yet they do not come from the sky. They are controlled from the earth. It depends upon human beings themselves whether they will extinguish these lights and awake from a nightmare that only threatens to become actual as long as men believe in it.'[**]

Taken out of context, these lines could even leave an impression of idealistic voluntarism. But there is too much continual emphasis elsewhere, indeed throughout, on the objective domination of the global social process to warrant any such precipitous reading. The aporia is not that subjects cannot, here and there, break the spell, but rather that the conditions for a critical mass of such subjects, and thus for a passage to strategic social transformation, are evidently blocked.

Relative Autonomy, Resistance and Struggle

The problem with the culture industry argument is that, even if it reflects a sober and basically accurate estimation of social forces and tendencies, its pathos of pessimism threatens to become paralyzing. It tells us why there is less and less space for resistant subjects and practical resistance, without telling us what can be done about it. We are called to stand firm and seek whatever vestiges of critical autonomy are left to us, but at the same time we are told why this cannot possibly alter or transform the status quo. If critical theory does no more than reflect the given double-bind, then it too fosters resignation and contributes to the objective tendency it would like to critique. The heliotropic orientation toward praxis in late Frankfurt theory has wizened too much. The resistant subject (even qua object of exploitation and target of manipulation) cannot be less stubborn and intransigent than the agents of its systemic enemy. 
    
One way out of the theoretical impasse opens up by pushing the notion of autonomy – not the mystified autonomy that returns in the discourses of creative industries, but the potential that is actually ours. Pure autonomy, we can agree, is a myth. For ‘autonomy’ we have to read ‘relative autonomy’. The culture industry subverts artistic autonomy and tends to absorb it, but never does so entirely. Relatively autonomous art, holding to its own criteria and to the historical logics of its own forms, goes on – and insofar as it does, it remains different from the merely calculated production of cultural commodities. Such an art shares the social guilt and is always scarred by the dominant social logics it tries to refuse. Still, by its very attempts at difference, it activates a relative autonomy and actualizes a force of resistance. In comparison, the culture industry has less relative autonomy; there capital holds sway much more directly. But even in the culture industry, there is some relative autonomy to claim and activate. Even Adorno acknowledges as much in his discussion of individual forms of production in ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’. Although certain cultural commodities are produced through technical processes that can properly be called industrial, there is still a ‘perennial conflict between artists active in the culture industry and those who control it’.
    
Absolute autonomy is a sublime mirage. But so is its opposite. The absence of autonomy is slavery. But its utter absence, the elimination of even potential autonomy, would be absolute, totalized slavery – a closure impossible, short of global termination. Relative autonomy, then, is both the condition of resistance and the condition that actually obtains most of time. What varies – in the specifics of place, position and conjuncture – is the extent and kind of relative autonomy. This granted, we regain a focal point for possible practices of resistance. The culture industry, we can now see, may operate according to a dominant logic, but the operations of this logic cannot exclude all possibilities for resistance. The culture industry is not utterly monolithic, any more than the capitalist state is. It too is fissured by the tensions and antagonisms that plague any hierarchical system; it too mediates and condenses the social force-field, as a ‘crystallization’ of the forces in class struggle, as Nicos Poulantzas would have put it. To continue this analogy, the culture industry is neither an object-instrument of capital with zero autonomy nor a neutral, domination-free system in which actors can do anything, without regard for the power of capital. Obviously the institutional nexus of culture industry is also very different from the nexus of the state, but that difference can also be thought of as a difference in kind and degree of relative autonomy. 
    
Such a focus brings back into view the class war of position and reopens the struggle for hegemony. It is compatible with the Frankfurt account, remembering the latter’s caveats about the impossibility of full systemic closure. And in re-posing the linkage of resistant practices and radical aims, it goes beyond Frankfurt pessimism, without lapsing into a naïve voluntarism or pretending that there are no grounds for worry. The project of subjective liberation is bound to the liberating transformation of the objective whole, the global process. For that aim, the unorganized league of impotent critical subjects is clearly inadequate. Even within spheres of relative autonomy, individual or cellular micro-resistance remains merely symbolic and token, if it cannot organize itself as a political force capable of gaining and holding a place in the balance. In the current weakness, the need is to recompose, reorganize and link struggles, through practical alliances and strategic fronts. Easier said than done, but concrete aims stimulate the search for strategies. Pessimism may be justified but need not freeze us: even in the culture industry, there is always something to be done.

Terror, Culture and Administration

For Adorno, ‘integration’ and ‘administration’ named the two linked tendencies of the late capitalist global process. Integration is the logic of identity and the subsumption of particulars, and Adorno traced its workings in social facts and cultural appearance-forms, from philosophical positivism and empirical sociology to astrology columns and Walt Disney cartoons. Administration, or techno-power concentrated in specialized institutions, is congealed as the instrumental logic of entrenched and expanding bureaucracies. Social subjects are not left untouched by processes of integration and administration; in fact, these processes reach into and shape the conditions for possible forms of subjectivity. Adorno emphasizes this point in ‘Culture and Administration’:

'Administration, however, is not simply imposed upon the supposedly productive human being from without. It multiplies within the person himself. That a particular situation in time brings forth those subjects intended for it is to be taken very literally. Nor are those who produce culture secure before the "increasingly organic composition of mankind".'

The objective tendency, produced by subjects and only transformable by subjects, nevertheless constricts the forms and modes of subjectivation: this dialectic, precisely, generates the perennial catastrophe. And as already noted, these tendencies do not stop short before the physical reduction and liquidation of actual subjects. ‘Genocide is the absolute integration.’[***] Genocide, then, cannot be dismissed as a deviation from the rule of law and humanist norms, for it belongs to the immanent drift of the global process. And after the demonstrations of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, we must live in a social world in which the final integration – the global termination of systemic logic that would at the same time terminate all life and the conditions of all systems – has become objectively possible. Exit, ruined, the myth of progress.
    
Terror and late capitalism, then, go together. What begins as the pressure of conformity and the market – today, the terrors of precarity and the miseries of austerity – tends toward the logic of exterminism. In the last pages of ‘The Schema of Mass Culture’, Adorno elaborates the connection between the ‘anxiety, that is the ultimate lesson of the fascist era’ and techno-power in the hands of administration:

'The terror for which the people of every land are being prepared glares ever more threateningly from the rigid features of these culture-masks: in every peal of laughter we hear the menacing voice of extortion and the comic types are legible signs which represent the contorted bodies of revolutionaries. Participation in mass culture itself stands under the sign of terror.'

The conformity and resignation fostered by a system of cultural uniformity is connected, through the mediations of an unfolding master logic, to the defeats of radical struggles and the triumphs of capitalist war machines. State terror, resurgent today, declares the bogus ‘war on terror.’

Enjoyment and Enforcement    

Another way to think about subjectivation is through Jacques Lacan’s notion of jouissance or enjoyment. I began by détourning the title of a 1992 book by Slavoj Žižek. Other Lacanian theorists have produced stilumating recent work on the problem of ‘commanded enjoyment’, a term introduced by Todd McGowan and helpfully elaborated by Yannis Stavrakakis in his The Lacanian Left. Enjoyment, a form of pleasure that does not necessarily exclude pain, displeasure or even terror, compensates for impotence. The subjective investment in fantasmatic object choices and identifications is not experienced as a conflict with objective reality because enjoyment as it were flies under the radar of conscious reason. This embodied return on investment offers a compelling, if partial, account of our social ‘stuckness’ – our inability to resist our addiction to social processes we know, on another level of awareness, to be self-threatening. The notion of commanded enjoyment acknowledges that the repressed also returns, however, as the hidden cost, the element of unfreedom and compulsion. However indirectly, terror haunts enjoyment issued as a social imperative.
    
If enjoyment is one side of the coin, then, what we can call enforcement is the other. Enforcement, as I have been developing this concept, is the irreducible element of violence in capitalist reproduction. What begins as the asymmetry of antagonistic productive relations is channeled and intensified, through market competition and imperialist rivalries, into a global process that requires and culminates in war and state terror. The concentration of executive power and the rise of the national security-surveillance state, with its nuclear arsenals of mass destruction and rapidly expanding squadrons of terminator drones – these social processes mutating the capitalist state and hollowing out the carcass of democracy are the continuing condensations of what Adorno called integration and administration. As an unfolding master logic, capitalism has proved to be a self-driving terror machine. We know over whom and what it drives.
    
In this light, coercion and the paradigm of discipline and punish have not been superseded so much as driven deeper into the structures of everyday subjectivity. Demonstrations of terror, from water-boarding and the dirty war technics of disappearing enemies to the ‘shock and awe’ of spectacular weaponry, show what is done to those who rebel or directly oppose the system. Absorbing the lesson in their bodies, spectators do not need to think twice about it. Terror pre-forms subjectivity and saturates labor relations within the cultural sector as everywhere else, but also circulates as the shadow or reflected presence, as insidious as it is demoralizing, of the real war machines globally in perpetual motion.
    
Moreover, the celebratory discourses of the creative industries, countersigned by the smirks of pseudo-bohemians, are giving cover to cultural trends that are alarming indeed. Hiroshima had already demonstrated the tendency for science and war machine to merge under the administrations of dominant states. What can be seen today, in company with the politics of fear and the increasing militarization of everyday life, is the merger of war machine and culture industry. Deployments of state terror are accompanied every step of the way by machines of image and spin; these sell the wars that never end by rendering them supremely enjoyable. More and more often, their operators are ‘creatives’ co-opted from the culture industry. The big-money world of bellicose computer gaming – dominated by the Pentagon-funded America’s Army and its commercial rival, Modern Warfare 2 – is one case in point. The career of Adrian Lamo, the convicted ex-hacker turned snitch for Homeland Security, is another: in 2010, Lamo informed on US Army Private Bradley Manning, who allegedly had leaked a damning video of a 2007 massacre of civilians by US forces in Iraq. The first case indicates the addictive power of enjoyment; the second, the corrupting effects and reach of enforcement.

These reflections suggest that a break with the master logic of accumulation entails disarming the technocratic national security-surveillance state, and above all the US war machine that is the main enforcer of the global imperialist process. To put it more pointedly: without disarmament, the prospect of emancipating system change is nill. Possibilities for transformation would increase in pace with progressive disarmament, however, and indeed the latter would measure the former. If this is so, then struggles will be strategic only insofar as they articulate themselves with anti-militarist struggles and make their own the aim of dismantling state war machines. Disarmament implies confronting the neo-imperialist state and need not be naïvely pacifist, but obviously this confrontation cannot take the form of a suicidal war of annihilation. Total struggle, mirroring total war, is terminal: pursued without limit or reserve it becomes the terror it aims to fight. And yet effective struggles need to be grounded in everyday experience; they are robust and resilient insofar as they are lived fully and vividly, pulsing beyond a mere convenience emptied of risk. The tight-wires of practice are strung under tension across these aporias. In our world of normalized emergency, the desire to be liberated from fear and terror is the long, gently bowed balancing pole of sanity. 
    
The traversing refusal of imposed fear and terror has clear aims to struggle for: the immediate cessation of all military occupations and interventions and the permanent closure of the global network of neo-imperialist military bases and spy stations that supports them; the global abolition of nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction, without exception; the radical reduction of military spending and the redirection of these funds to the urgent amelioration of social misery. Every real step toward these aims would already be radical change. And only by passing through them can struggles for autonomy, happiness and the liberation of nature have their chance to survive and grow fruitful. There is no liberation within the politics of fear: liberation as such begins and is coextensive with liberation from state terror. 

Conclusion

Theories of subjectivation that do not give due weight to the objective factor of a dominating global logic risk lapsing into voluntarism. Those that do will have to face and grapple with the tendencies Adorno pointed to. Strategic resistance begins by assessing the preconditions for its own actual effectiveness. Unhappily, developments since Dialectic of Enlightenment have not yet refuted its case. But if we cannot make our history just as we like, oblivious to inherited constraints, we can always transform our pessimism by organizing and aiming it, as both Benjamin and Gramsci counseled at the dawn of the new terror.

[*] As we now know, processes of ‘new enclosure’ in China and India have actually resulted in a massive increase in the size of the planet’s industrial proletariat. These new ‘direct producers’ of commodities work in factories and sweatshops that combine elements of Fordist and pre-Fordist (in fact nineteenth-century) forms of organization and discipline. Evidently, the new ideal-typical worker is a young or teenage woman who has been separated from her family and social networks for the first time and who sends home the bulk of her earnings. These vulnerable workers, who may be charged with pay cuts for talking on the work floor or socializing off-hours with members of the opposite sex, clearly do not fit the model of post-Fordist virtuoso. Moreover, their terms of employment are precarious in the extreme; they have been largely stripped of representation and Fordist securities and can be fired at will. For a chilling glimpse into the new factory, see David Redmon’s 2005 documentary film Mardi Gras: Made in China.

[**] The scintillation of these lines begs comment. The alignment of ad-saturated pop culture (neon signs) with mystification (comet reading, or astrology) becomes a negative evocation of arcing V-2 rockets and aerial bombing – a prefiguring echo of the famous first line of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (‘A screaming comes across the sky.’) While I will not remark it further, the oblique allusion to terror will be relevant to the last two sections of the essay.

[***] The passage from Negative Dialectics continues: ‘It is on its way wherever people are leveled off [gleichgemacht werden] – ‘polished off’ [geschliffen], as they called it in the military – until one exterminates them literally, as deviations from the concept of their utter nullity. Auschwitz confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death.’

drones of disaster (1)

2010-09-14T08:23:00.014+02:00

From Sindh province, Pakistan, a report that the left bank of the flooding Indus River was deliberated breached, inundating a heavily-populated district and displacing millions - in order to protect the covert US terminator drone base on the right bank. So alleges writer, filmmaker and former UN Goodwill Ambassador Feryal Ali Gauhar on Democracy Now (13 September 2010). 

If this can be proved or supported with compelling evidence, the staggering cynicism it exposes would, one can only hope, irreparably discredit Obama's robotic "war on terror." Who knows about this allegation? Will corporate media "investigate" a military-social disaster within a "natural disaster" that has already disappeared behind the indifference of Northern spectators? Will those who know dare to speak, after Bradley Manning and Wikileaks? Will some independent filmmaker find support for such a perilous task? Sindh province, where enforcement holds sway, is after all a very dangerous place. And the danger is objective and specific: how to make enforcement accountable (and to whom?) precisely where it operates lethally with most minimal accountability? Make a fuss? Less complicated, to take the Pentagon's word for it, move on, put it out of mind. The obstacles to reaching and broadcasting the truth belong to the essence of state terror today.

Meanwhile, amid the distraction of Islamophobic episodes, 14 antiwar activists are going on trial in Nevada for holding a nonviolent protest vigil outside Creech Air Force base, the oldest in the rapidly expanding network of bases from which Predator and Reaper drones are flown by joystick...

GR

Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: Feryal Ali Gauhar, welcome to Democracy Now! It’s  interesting to go from Kathy Kelly in Nevada, who’s talking about this  protest at Creech, where one of the drone programs is based, to your  experience of the flooded areas in Pakistan. Can you talk about the  connection?  

FERYAL ALI GAUHAR: Well, yes, there is a very real  connection, although that’s not the only element that we’re concerned  about. But it is well known, if not acknowledged by — particularly by the  state, that the base for the drones, where they’re housed before they  are automated, is in Pakistan. The current government has literally gone  blue in the face denying that.  

But I just happened to stumble across a contractor — and that’s not  the Blackwater contractor — the contractor who built the base, who  inadvertently, actually, spoke about it. But he was speaking about it in  a different context, and that context was the fact that he was there at  the time of the flooding — and, you know, this is the worst catastrophe  to have hit any state since apparently biblical times. So, he actually  mentioned to me that the River Indus, which is one of the largest rivers  in the world, carrying now a volume of water which has not been known  in contemporary history, was breached on the left bank deliberately in  order to protect the base, which is on the right bank. And the breaching  caused, consequentially, the inundation of an entire district, which  resulted in the displacement of millions, not thousands, but millions,  because we have 170 million people in the country, and this particular  district is one of the most densely populated. So, yes, there is a  connect between, you know, what is considered to be a natural disaster,  but then the management of that disaster is not natural at all. 

AMY GOODMAN: And this is a base that is used, run by US military, to run its drone attacks?  

FERYAL ALI GAUHAR: Oh, absolutely. In fact, it is a base  where non-US military personnel are not allowed. 

In fact, the person I  was talking who was there, who built the base, actually said to me that  one of the reasons why non-US military personnel are not allowed is not  just for security of the US military personnel, but because they do not  wish to share the technology. They are — you know, we’ve had a long  historical and political tie with the People’s Republic of China. And  so, there is this fear that was expressed while the contractor was  working on the base that the drone technology, you know, should remain  specifically in the hands of the US military, and it should not be  replicated by any other nation. So there is that protection of the  technology itself. It’s not just the protection of the personnel.  

AMY GOODMAN: And this is in Sindh province?  

FERYAL ALI GAUHAR: Yes, it is. Yes, in — 

AMY GOODMAN: Where — and for people who are very unaware, especially in the United States, of any geography outside of our country?  

FERYAL ALI GAUHAR: It’s — if you go along the River Indus,  which stretches about 1,800 kilometers — and in miles, that’s about over a  thousand miles—from the north to the south to the Arabian Sea.  Jacobabad is named after a British colonialist, Jacob, and it is  situated on the banks of the river between two provinces. The one  province is Balochistan, which borders on — partly on Iran and also  Afghanistan, and that is a very volatile border. And the other province  is Sindh. So it is very strategically located, the base itself. Ordinary  Pakistanis are not supposed to know about it. I’m sure ordinary  Americans are absolutely unaware of it. But yes, there is a physical  American presence. 

AMY GOODMAN: We had reports that both the water was  diverted, which flooded further Pakistanis, and also that the US  military had to refuse to allow it to be used as a staging base for aid.   

FERYAL ALI GAUHAR: Also, also true. Yes, that is also  true, and which makes it even more ironic that, you know, in this  so-called battle for hearts and minds — I mean, we all know that, you  know, the agenda behind this very poetic sort of, you know, expression  of hearts and minds, the agenda is really of violence and imperialism.  And it is even more ironic that we have had many state — many visits by  important personages from the United States government, including  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And, you know, there is this  desperate sort of a need to reach out to the Pakistani people. And the  flood almost seems to have presented itself as an opportunity for  American foreign policy to be accepted more readily by Pakistani people  in exchange for relief. And, you know, relief consists of food aid, as  well as shelter. But the irony is that, you know, while there is a  physical military presence in the country, that is cordoned off and  cannot be used for humanitarian purposes.  

So American forces and helicopters have actually been flying in  from the Seventh Fleet into Pakistan and from other locations, possibly  even from Afghanistan, because in 2005 during the colossal earthquake,  which cost us 75,000 lives, we did have a diversion of the particular  kinds of helicopters, which are the large—I think they’re called the  Chinook, which was diverted from Afghanistan, from the duties there,  which, again, is ironic — I mean, I just find things all connected — which  is again ironic because at the time of Hurricane Katrina, the National  Guard, who was supposed to have been protecting the American people, the  National Guard was engaged in Afghanistan at that time, or in Iraq, one  of the two countries. So, you know, you have this ongoing irony, series  of ironies, where the state is meant to protect the people; it’s  actually protecting only its own interests at the expense of the people.

AMY GOODMAN: You were in Pakistan, and you are Pakistani, but you were in Pakistan with Palestinian doctors helping flood victims?

FERYAL ALI GAUHAR: Yes, I was. I mean, for us, it was  very — it was a symbolic presence, a very significant symbolic presence.  The Pakistani people have been friends and supporters of the Palestinian  liberation movement and the movement for self-determination of a  sovereign people. And it was a very small team, six—four doctors and two  medical technicians. And I felt that, of the foreign missions that had  come — and there have been many, many, many — I have had a long association  with the Palestinian movement, and I felt that this was my way of  reconnecting with that movement. And my experience, of course, with the  flood affectees was something else, which we can talk about if you like.  But in personal terms, it was something I never expected, is that, as a  result of my association with the team, I was then offered — and, in  fact, given—the honorary citizenship of Palestine, which, for me, as a  Pakistani, you know, is like—is like, for a lot of people, getting the  green card to come and live in the United States. So I have had both a  personal fulfillment and a political fulfillment in this experience.  

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being  with us, Feryal Ali Gauhar, a Pakistani filmmaker, writer, actress,  human rights activist, served as a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN, the  only Goodwill Ambassador to have quit over the US invasion of Iraq. She  has written a novel about Afghanistan. It’s called No Space for Further Burials.

Video stream of the interview is online at Democracy Now. 

on nature & postcards from poseidon

2010-09-12T11:48:00.003+02:00

Nature and the human: mythical poles of an actual dialectic, a process of metabolic exchange that is neither natural nor entirely social.

Adorno, stimulated by Benjamin as well as Marx, tried to work out the forms and variations of this dialectic under the paradoxical heading of "natural history." Today they bear down with bitter clarity.

Nature is the material rock bottom of mortal bodies in cycling flux: the ceaseless conversion of matter and energy that is both the astonishing beauty of bonding webs and the liquidating sublimity of death's heads.

History - the idea, produced in time, of freedom - promises escape from nature as blind fate: human reason begins as protest against imposed structural impotence.

But what reason rescues from domination by nature is rapidly converted into new domination over nature and people: freedom is taken hostage by power.

History, stuck in domination, renounces liberation: not yet historical, not nearly rational enough, the social process remains naturalized, the reproduction of mythical second nature.

As global social process, capital gives specific form to reason, science, technology, power, the state: the valorization-accumulation process produces and reproduces the order of exploitation, enforced by state terror and weapons of mass destruction -- a dynamic of domination that escapes rational control.

Moreover, the social form of mortal human bodies impacts the forms and tempos of metabolic flux: society changes nature.

Class domination of man by man and the rape and plunder of nature are a single global process, escaping reason on planetary scale: under the rule of accumulation, ecological degradation accumulates to the point of looming biospheric meltdown.

But this second nature is not natural: neither invariable nor inescapable, it is the mirage of fate spreading before a relentless and gripping social process that could be otherwise.

The abundance that reason and the power of production dangles in view but does not deliver is the actual possibility of reconciliation between humanity and nature, as well as between humanity and itself: the liberation of inner and outer nature.

However, emancipating transformation of the social process remains the only pathway to such liberation: a history that would break with capitalism's "ever changing production of the always-the-same."

In the unbroken persistence of domination, the promised progress in freedom and happiness remains blocked.

But now accumulation recoils, threatening the conditions of life as such: under capitalist modernity, leaping development overleaps itself, and becomes terminal.

The process is open - meaning: no outcome is pre-given or automatic. 

But: time itself is a limiting constraint. We will not have forever to find the passage beyond capital, domination and terminal ruin.

A century ago, these theses were mere science fiction; now they are urgency itself.

Nature and history (or: the human), then, are inseparable non-identities: each conditions and mediates the other in actual process, just as each conceptually de-mythifies the other by continuous specific negation.

They are, as Susan Buck-Morss puts it, "mutual, non-identical mediators."  In constellation with other concrete dialectical couples (individual/society, subject/object, particular/universal), they form the tensional matrix of possible practice.

The radical embodiment of negative dialectics would be the revolutionary practice Adorno's thinking reached but did not become. We are still in that "would be."

GR

freedom ride

2010-09-10T18:52:00.010+02:00

On Labor Day weekend (Sept 3-5, 2010), the Moratorium on Deportations Campaign undertook a “Freedom Ride: Immigrants’ Caravan” through the vast suburban sprawl of the Chicago metropolitan area. The 3-day, 100 mile bike ride, as well as the actions, rallies and meetings along the way, addressed the collaboration between local police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the rise in xenophobia as expressed in recent English-Only legislation, and the locally-specific ways in which capital accumulation is predicated on the degradation of work, the management and policing of migration, and the reorganization of urban/suburban space.

As the expanding logistics management industry consolidates enormous warehousing centers (“inland ports”) in foreign trade zones west and south of the city, hundreds of thousands of precarious workers, in large part immigrants, are pushed out of the city into planned suburban developments and into “perma-temp” jobs. The vast suburban landscape we rode through is a system of highly policed and regulated sub-territories that are at once separated and connected by a limited number of county roads and an expanding system of freight rail lines. The logistics industry does not consist only of the warehouses and the flow of commodities in the supply chain, but also of the residential districts and of the efficient management of the flow of cheap, precarious labor – it is, in other words, a “people” system. Suburban Chicago appears in this sense as a logistical landscape: that is to say it is a spatial and social arrangement of differential mobilities – and immobilities – that links land speculation, the efficient warehousing and distribution of commodities and the efficient warehousing, detention and controlled migration of people.

The Freedom Ride was both a moving protest and group learning experiment. It was an attempt to journey between political issues and locations, and to connect with other groups such as Immigrant Solidarity DuPage, Warehouse Workers for Justice, the campaigns for immigrant rights in Joliet among others. It was also an opportunity to take our demand for a moratorium on deportations into some of the townships most prolific in passing recent anti-immigrant legislation. This text was written before the ride as one way to frame the action; it also formed the basis of two statements we distributed along the way: 5 Statements from the Moratorium on Deportations Campaign and Our Solutions, Our Demands.

From RB in Chicago
  

WHY AN IMMIGRANTS' FREEDOM RIDE?

For every crisis, a scapegoat

The full effects of the global economic system are once again hitting home: expanding poverty; the plunder of all public assets; environmental devastation; the degradation of work and workers; the overt hijacking of the electoral process by corporate sponsors. The most recent crisis has shattered the American myth and the middle class that lived it. It exposed the US Government as working for corporate interests, using its power and resources to guarantee them immunity from the devastation they have created. 

History teaches us this much: times of economic meltdown are also times of fervent speculation, when the agents of the crisis capitalize on the misery they have created. In these times, there is a rush to hide the machinations of the boom-and-bust game behind a dense and foul smokescreen. And what is today’s smokescreen??? We are to believe that the root cause of our social, economic and political problems is immigrants and that the solution lies in the realm of prisons, detention centers, militarized borders, increased surveillance, mass criminalization, racial profiling and monoculture.  

We have seen this before of course: the disenfranchisement of immigrants, their reduction to second-class human status while profiting off their labor, has a long history. It has its roots in the history of colonization, in the dehumanization, enslavement and degradation of native peoples as a condition of European expansion and accumulation. It works by defining entire populations as disposable labor. That is to say, it is racializing. And today’s white American citizens might do well to remember: in the 1800s it was the southern Europeans who were seen as not white; in the early 1900s it was the Italians and Eastern Europeans who were the dangerous new immigrant races; by 1920 it was Jews, Chinese, Germans and Japanese who were the threat to American purity and the danger to its economic, political and cultural stability. And so on.

Today’s anti-immigrant "arguments" are familiar ones: they are criminals; they are threatening our culture; they are not assimilating; they are not as good as us; they are taking away our jobs, our opportunities. These are the talking points of a myth that represents immigrants as illegal and citizens as worthy and legitimate, to mask the dynamics of migration as a result of US foreign policies and of US economic interests both at home and abroad. History teaches us again: nativist resurgence coincides with times of economic recession. English-only becomes the displaced and misleading culturalist argument: from the 1880s through today, the myth of a pure American culture and of English as the common language both captures and prays upon the dreams and fears of people in hard economic times. English-only also becomes the way nativists with political ambitions score political points, masking self-interest as patriotism.

From 287g to Secure communities: the national strategy

A broad strategy called “Secure Communities” is quickly and quietly being implemented around the country, promising the efficient, hi-tech integration of surveillance and policing between local authorities and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It outlines something like this: at any point during your time in the custody of local law enforcement — whether at a traffic stop, being booked, formally charged, awaiting trial, or serving a sentence — local authorities are to pass your identification information to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. This is true even in situations of wrongful arrest, when no charges are filed or when charges are subsequently dropped. The previous generation of Polimigra policies called 287(g) required ratification at the local level (including having local police formally deputized as federal agents) and thus was vulnerable to opposition from community organizations, local legislators and often local law enforcement. In contrast, no formal vote or other process of public debate is necessary for Secure Communities to be implemented locally, not even an official decree: it masks itself as a logistics improvement via augmented technological capabilities and systems integration. All that is required by County officials is signing a letter of intent to follow the Standard Operating Procedures set forth by ICE.  As a result, Secure Communities has been rolled out at incredible speed and in almost deafening silence, with virtually no public oversight. Furthermore, ICE has been deliberately misleading in calling it an "optional" program: several jurisdictions have made efforts to “opt out” of the program only to have their requests mired in a confusing bureaucratic process.

Where is the border? Who is the target?

What exactly is being sold to us, wrapped up in the language of security and community? What can we recognize in the imperatives of efficiency and systems integration?

Even though President Obama has acknowledged that the immigration system is broken, that it does not realistically address migration in a globalized economy, his administration has stepped up its enforcement to unprecedented levels. According to Homeland Security, no administration in US history has ever forcefully removed more people from this country. The number of raids, arrests, mass trials, detentions and deportations is staggering – DHS has a “target” number of 400,000 deportations for this year. Immigrant families are being torn apart, but this is also an all-out attack on the communal economies and social structures they are often crucial in sustaining: neighborhood arrangements that collectivize domestic and reproductive work, economies of barter and exchange, social and institutional practices of self-governance and so on. In other words, all the social arrangements and relations that correspond to a definition of communities as living systems. These arrangements are a nuisance from the perspective of logistics management; they are an impediment to efficiency and profit maximization, as much an obstacle to the total marketization of life as public education and the few remaining entitlement programs – and equally under attack.

Poli-Migra is not new, but Secure Communities has the effect of formalizing what were until now extralegal practices of collaboration between local police and ICE.  We are witnessing the proliferation of policies that virtually incentivize abusive detentions without probable cause, the policing equivalent of the economic race to the bottom. And when local police become de facto border police, all neighborhoods become de facto border zones: characterized by surveillance, repression and fear.

We are to believe that due process makes us less safe. We are to live in a state of permanent suspicion and fear. We are to build border walls within our neighborhoods, within ourselves; we are to believe that living behind these walls will make us more “secure”. But in oppressive societies no space is ever safe for anyone. We know we are being offered the “security” of a prison world with no beginning and no end, the “community” of a work camp, where all human relations that are not mediated by and dependent on capital are to be squeezed out of existence. We will not be fooled by double-talk: by political maneuvers that use the language of “security” and “community” but which actually create insecurity, further destabilize the conditions of people’s lives and push them into total dependency, increase conflict and aggression, undermine and destroy communal support systems and attack our neighborhoods. We refuse to believe in the myth of well-being for some through the degradation of others.

Our solutions, our demands - for starters:

   An immediate end to the collaboration between local police and ICE. Local councils can pass resolutions to prohibit this kind of collaboration or “opt-out” of the program, as in the example of the 1-sentence resolution recently passed by the Washington DC district council “to prohibit the District of Columbia to transmit arrest data to the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)”.

  Immediate Moratorium on deportations – A broken system should not be enforced, a lie should not be amplified.  We demand a moratorium on deportations now, because we cannot confront the realities of the globalization of capital and labor while millions of people live in permanent terror 

Immediate legalization of undocumented immigrants. Not some, all. Legalization cannot wait until a just and comprehensive immigration reform can be discussed nationally, but is a precondition for it. 

English-only ordinances are meant to disenfranchise people by promoting the myth of a pure American culture under threat of contagion. We demand public funding of multicultural education, social institutions and public infrastructures – because the myth of monoculture is not sustainable! We demand the full participation of all people in civic life through multilingual governance at all levels.

Context: The southern border wall and vigilantes; the rise of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); clampdowns, detentions and deportations; massive immigrants' rights demos across the US on May Day 2006 and 2010; CenterPoint, a 2500 acre "foreign trade zone" outside of Joliet, IL; the rise of the tea partiers; racist new enforcement laws in Arizona.

For more, see moratorium on deportations. 

postcard from cyprus

2010-09-01T12:51:00.003+02:00

Κάτω η Χούντα (Káto e Hoúnta: "Down with the Junta").

Still legible on a wall in the village of Kritou Terra, Pafos district: graffiti from the Spring or early Summer of 1974 - from the time between Ioannidis's 'coup within a coup' in Greece and the 15 July coup against Makarios in Cyprus.

Between the lines: After the student uprising in Greece was crushed by tanks at the Polytechnic University in Athens on 17 November 1973, splits within the military leadership came to a head. Papadopoulos was ousted by the hardliner Ioannidis. Under Ioannidis, the Greek Junta stepped up its campaign against Makarios, the elected President of the Cyprus Republic. Makarios, one of the two main leaders of the national liberation struggle against the British during the 1950s, had accepted the compromised sovereignty imposed on the new Republic, but continued to work diplomatically for the conditions of full Cypriot sovereignty. His strategy included an independent foreign policy that refused to subordinate Cyprus to US and British Cold War politics. (His independent diplomacy and participation in the Non-Aligned Movement led US critics to smear him as "the Castro of the Mediterranean.")

The Junta in power in Greece since the 1967 coup actively sought to replace Makarios with a more pliable figure. It encouraged ultra-nationalists in Cyprus to revive the goal of enosis, or union with Greece, and sponsored the right-wing paramilitary group EOKA-B. Several attempts were made to assassinate Makarios. By Spring of 1974, with Ioannidis in power in Greece, Makarios's intelligence service uncovered evidence of an impending coup. On 2 July, Makarios published an open letter to the Greek Junta, protesting their interference. The reply came on 15 July, when Greek officers of the Cypriot National Guard launched a full attack on the presidential palace. Makarios escaped, but had to flee the island, and ultra right-wing trigger-man Nikos Sampson was installed as interim leader. Five days later, Turkey invaded Cyprus.

Behind the scenes: US imperialism. In the distracting confusion of Watergate and Nixon's fall, Kissinger gained a freer hand to shape and micromanage US foreign policy. He used the agencies of US power to push the crisis between Makarios and the Greek Junta toward an outcome that would maintain Cyprus as a NATO force platform. This entailed eliminating Makarios, but also containing the conflict without a war between Greece and Turkey. The forced partition of the island under Turkish arms would accomplish this, as long as US acceptance was clearly signaled. The self-styled Metternich struck again. And Cypriot aspirations to self-determination were once again brutally subordinated to the Cold War calculus. In the aftermath of spilled blood, occupation and forced removals, Turkey was appeased, Greece was disciplined without conceding "too much" democracy, and  British military bases and US spy stations continued to operate.

The graffiti probably dates from between Markarios's public letter of 2 July and the coup thirteen days later. The village of Kritou Terra, we're told, was a stronghold of Makarios supporters - center-nationalist rather than leftist, but pro-democracy and anti-Junta.

AP/GR

the village

2010-08-28T11:58:00.005+02:00

 A nine-panel comic by Michael Baers.

Click on image to enlarge.

manifesto of the 130

2010-08-20T07:17:00.004+02:00

Open Letter to French President Nicolas Sarkozy

16 August 2001

published in Libération

The French government has indicated that it is pursuing possible legal action against the Committee for the Reimbursement of the Indemnity Money Extorted from Haiti (CRIME) over a Yes Men-inspired announcement last Bastille Day pledging that France would pay Haiti restitution.

We believe the ideals of equality, fraternity and liberty would be far better served if, instead of pouring public resources into the prosecution of these pranksters, France were to start paying Haiti back for the 90 million gold francs that were extorted following Haitian independence.

This “independence debt,” which is today valued at well over the 17 billion euros pledged in the fake announcement last July 14, illegitimately forced a people who had won their independence in a successful slave revolt, to pay again for their freedom. Imposed under threat of military invasion and the restoration of slavery by French King Charles X, to compensate former colonial slave-owners for lost “property” (including the slaves who had won their freedom and independence when they defeated Napoleon’s armies), this indemnity burdened generations of Haitians with an illegitimate debt, which they were still paying right up until 1947.

France is not the only country that owes a debt to Haiti. After 1947, Haiti incurred debt to commercial banks and international financial institutions under the Duvalier dictatorships, who stole billions from the public treasury. The basic needs and development aspirations of generations of Haitians were sacrificed to pay back these debts. Granting Haiti the status of Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) and canceling part of the current debt only begins to reverse the financial damage done by these recent debts. More recently, in 2000, Inter-American Development Bank loans of $150 million for basic infrastructure were illegally blocked by the US government as a means of political pressure. This also did measurable economic and human damage. Each of these institutions and governments should be responsible for the harm they did to Haiti's society and economy.

In 2003, when the Haitian government demanded repayment of the money France had extorted from Haiti, the French government responded by helping to overthrow that government. Today, the French government responds to the same demand by CRIME by threatening legal action. These are inappropriate responses to a demand that is morally, economically, and legally unassailable. In light of the urgent financial need in the country in the wake of the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010, we urge you to pay Haiti, the world’s first black republic, the restitution it is due.

Tariq Ali, Gilbert Achcar, Michael Albert, Pierre Alferi, Jean-Claude Amara, Kevin B Anderson, Roger Annis, Anthony Arnove, Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Nnimmo Bassey, Rosalyn Baxandall, Pierre Beaudet, Dan Beeton, Walden Bello,Medea Benjamin, Andy Bichlbaum & Mike Bonnano, Serge Bouchereau, Myriam Bourgy, Houria Bouteldja, José Bové, Leslie Cagan, Aldrin Calixte, Ellen Cantarow, Camille Chalmers, Noam Chomsky, Stefan Christoff, Jeff Cohen, Jim Cohen, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Brian Concannon, Raphaël Confiant, Mike Davis, Warren Davis, Nick Dearden, Rokhaya Diallo, Christine Delphy, Rea Dol, Ariel Dorfman, Stephen Duncombe, Berthony Dupont, Ben Ehrenreich, Joe Emersberger, Yves Engler, Eric Fassin, Dianne Feeley, John Feffer, Anthony Fenton, Bill Fletcher, Jr., Eduardo Galeano, Grazia Ietto-Gillies, Greg Grandin, Arun Gupta, Peter Hallward, Hamé, Hammond, Thomas Harrison, Helene Hazera, John Hilary, HK, Doug Ireland, Kim Ives, Olatunde Johnson, Eva Joly, Mario Joseph, Mathieu Kassovitz, Robin D. G. Kelley, Richard Kim, Amir Khadir, Sadri Khiari, Naomi Klein, Pierre Labossiere, Joanne Landy, Fanfan Latour, Charles Laurence, Jesse Lemisch, Reed Lindsay, Pauline Londeix, Isabel Macdonald, Christian Mahieux, Henri Maler,Noël Mamère, Betty Reid Mandell, Marvin Mandell, Jerome Martin, John G. Mason, Gustave Massiah, Georgina Murray, Cyril Mychalejko, Robert Naiman, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Bernard Noël, Derrick O'Keefe, Karen Orenstein, Rosalind Petchesky, Wadner Pierre, Kevin Pina, Justin Podur, Serge Quadruppani, Adam Ramsay, Jacques Rancière, Judy Rebick, William I. Robinson, Pierre Rousset, Stephen R. Shalom, Bobbi Siegelbaum, Steve Siegelbaum, Fanny Simon, Eyal Sivan, Ashley Smith, Jeb Sprague, Louis-Georges Tin, Cornel West, Howard Winant, Cécile Winter, Lawrence Wittner, Marie Yared, Nick Nesbitt, Melanie Newton

after the occupation

2010-08-12T20:00:00.002+02:00

Middlesex, the Morning After

by "Joe Jack-Toe"

Since my post to Scurvy Tunes back in May (“The Struggle at Middlesex,” 14 May 2010), much has happened in the conflict between staff/students and management over closure of philosophy programmes at Middlesex University, and all in all the outcome has not been good.

The students occupying University buildings were served a writ and evicted. Further protests and occupations met with heavy-handed opposition from the management, who suspended staff and students for their involvement, and launched what was essentially a smear campaign claiming that the students had “broken bones” of a member of security staff during the occupation (something patently untrue). Several staff who sent public emails criticising management through the University email system were disciplined. On 28th May, the (sluggish) lecturer’s union (UCU) finally got involved, issuing an ultimatum to management to lift the staff suspensions or go into formal dispute. On 2nd June this dispute was declared, but on 8th June the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy announced that it had done a deal to move to Kingston University on the other side of London, effectively robbing the campaign to save philosophy at Middlesex of its gathering momentum.

To call this rescue of the centre a merely a “partial victory” (as CRMEP’s statement did) is rather an understatement of just how slim the achievement was. The good news about the outcome was that CRMEP, and its excellent and valuable work in the study of traditions of European and radical thought can continue, and this is, in the end, something to cheer for.

However, the form in which it has been saved is a much reduced one: only postgraduate teaching and research and no undergraduate programmes will move to Kingston; furthermore, two members of staff from the department have not been included in the deal, and now face an uncertain future of redundancy or redeployment. Had the management at Middlesex proposed such an outcome (job losses and axing of programmes) the reaction would have been indignation. In effect CRMEP have acceded willingly to a programme of “rationalisation” and downsizing of the sort that we should be vigorously resisting as damaging to the nature of education and to the rights of people to receive an education (and not just job training). Moreover, once the current BA students have finished their courses, there will be no philosophy at Middlesex University: the very thing which we fought against has now come about.

What the staff at CRMEP have done is understandable and the inevitable result of a rationality which is forced on them – both in terms of their individual careers, and (to view the matter a little more generously) in terms of their commitment to the continuation of a key institution in the dissemination of radical continental thought within Anglophone academic discourse. However, for the undergraduate students, and for other staff in the humanities at Middlesex it feels like something of a betrayal (especially to the undergraduate students who have placed their futures on the line by protesting, and the academic staff who have been picked out to be disciplined for their open criticism of management).

The students’ brilliant campaign – largely using “web 2.0” technologies – to save the department caused a storm of controversy, with a petition drawing over 18,500 signatures and a Facebook site with over 14,000 members. On the back of this, the international outcry of academic superstars raised coverage not only in the blogosphere but the national press. Shortly before the CRMEP announcement the management were beginning to look profoundly discomforted by all this negative publicity and cracks between the positions of different senior staff seemed to be opening up. (As Bruce Lee says in Enter the Dragon: “The enemy has only images and illusions… Destroy the image and you will break the enemy.” Debord could hardly have put it differently.)

The success of this campaign, and the prestige of the Philosophy department offered a rallying point to those of us worried about the wider general tendencies within the University (and HE more generally) of which this was so obviously symptomatic - tendencies to cut humanities subjects, to yoke education to the vocational, to transform it from a right into a commodity and to subject it to calculations of profit so narrow as to make them almost arbitrary. The highly visible campaign was a battle within a larger struggle within the University, and CRMEP’s retreat to Kingston leaves those in other vulnerable (and less prestigious) areas feeling as if the rug on which their opposition was able to stand has been pulled out from beneath their feet. When smaller, less “important” departments are picked off in future, it will be much harder to mount a campaign against such cuts than in this case.

What also emerged clearly into the light of day in the controversies around philosophy were the highly irregular and arbitrary ways in which power is exercised in Middlesex: the general lack of accountability or safeguard procedures within the University and also the ability of management to ride roughshod over what few safety checks and balances there are. The decisions made over philosophy opened an opportunity to challenge these systems and procedures to which all of us are subject. The flight of the department means they will now be hard to challenge.

This lack of accountability may be a contributory factor as to why the protests at Middlesex have been so much less successful than in other recent cases in other Universities. (In older Universities, decisions to close down courses may need to go through an academic Senate, for example. A look through the biographies of the Board of Governors at Middlesex is also informative: they are all heavily invested in the marketisation of education.)

The management had other advantages at Middlesex. As a multi-campus University, the staff at Middlesex are more than usually dispersed and isolated. Divide and conquer has long been the order of the day: other departments that have been closed in the recent past have gone with hardly a splash in the consciousness of others, who are looking only after their own patch. Management at Middlesex, furthermore, have a stranglehold over the use of the University’s email systems so that only “official” emails can be sent globally to all staff. Many thus knew nothing, little, or only what management told them about the dispute. Perhaps the management at Middlesex were also just smart in the choice of when to announce the closure: at the end of a term, when staff were finishing teaching, and preparing to disappear to pursue the research projects which have increasingly been squeezed into Summer months by increasing teaching loads. This made organization (and industrial action) difficult.

The background of a lack of solidarity was exacerbated by the weakness of the Union. In spite of strong feelings from the membership, UCU officials seemed loathe to get involved in the dispute – partly, I think, because they are invested in a system of everyday local bargaining over small issues, and were slow to recognise this as a matter of a crisis rather than business as usual. Arthur Husk, the Branch Chair, talked of avoiding an “equal and opposite” reaction from the University administration, and voiced a belief that management was ready to negotiate as soon as they could without loosing face. This placatory attitude meant that Union involvement was slow to come. Perhaps if it had come sooner, it would have forced the matter to some kind of resolution before the move to Kingston was announced. Union caution is, however, understandable, with the general weakness of Unions under current legislation in the UK. In a recent ruling on a dispute in the HE sector, for example, a precedent was set upholding the right of employers to withhold all pay for even the smallest withdrawal of labour, as with “industrial action short of a strike.” The Student Union was even less involved. But then, when the SU proclaimed support of a sit-in on the art and design campus back in 1989, they were held liable for damages and were still paying the University back many years later.

All in all, this has been something of a gloomy picture I have painted. But are there grounds for hope too? What positive lessons can be learned from the Middlesex philosophy fiasco? First, off, of course, one of the achievements of the campaign is the rescue of CRMEP - perhaps without the strong campaign, this could not have been achieved, or would have been achieved on even less favourable terms.

Second, the creativity and energy of the students’ campaign is also to be praised, and stands as a positive model. Their technologically savvy but also grassroots strategies (drawing on the legacy of 1968 and the anti-globalization movements) were highly effective in drawing support and publicity, hitting the University in its most sensitive area, which is to say: its public image. During occupation, University buildings were transformed into temporary autonomous zones of creation, critique and festival: they were, that is to say, exactly what a University should always be…

Finally, even if Middlesex faces the inevitability of further rounds of cuts, and now without a philosophy department, so with an altogether less lively academic culture for that, I hope that what the campaign has brought about is an increased awareness amongst staff and students in the University of the threat hanging over them, of the need to take collective action (rather than minding their own patch), and of the possibilities of campaign. It was Rosa Luxemburg who saw the revolutionary defeats of the present and the past as preparing the ground for a future victory. I can only hope that the experience of increased solidarity which gathered around the Save Middlesex Philosophy Campaign, and the network of contacts with campaigners in similar situations in other Universities will remain resources in the coming months.

And in any case, is the campaign really over? Talking to some of its campaigners, they told me that they had suspended the campaign over Summer, but were looking to begin it once more when term starts again, with the aim of re-establishing a philosophy course at Middlesex, and with the aim of challenging the processes through which the courses were closed. Save Middlesex Philosophy may grow into a “Save Middlesex” campaign per se, just one cog in a larger machine of protest against the current policies of the marketisation of education and everything that this entails.

against forgetting

2010-08-06T08:15:00.003+02:00

"Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it 'the way it really was.' It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to hold fast to that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to the historical subject in a moment of danger. The danger threatens both the content of the tradition and those who inherit it. For both, it is one and the same thing: the danger of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer; he comes as the victor over the Antichrist. The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious."

Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History" (1940), thesis VI.

It's a struggle - to remember the victims, to mourn and ask again what is to be done. To denounce the criminals and their crimes, refuse the unceasing invitations to their victory celebrations, their false reconciliations and commanded identities.

Genocidal techno-power is no accident. It is an appearance-form of a master logic: the unfolding of a global social process, capitalist modernity and its proliferating antagonisms, the sequential crystallizations of the social force field, its relations and tendencies.

The moments and turns of class struggle on a global scale, the hot house of racing accumulation and imperialist rivalry, the emergency mutations of the capitalist state, administration and integration, the use and normalization of terror - in a word, enforcement.

Now, this year, the spectacle announces, "the world" will commemorate Hiroshima Day. And for the first time, an official US envoy will "attend" ceremonies in the city destroyed by the first use of nuclear WMDs on this day 65 years ago.

What is the meaning of this "envoy" and this "attendance"? Does it announce that the perpetrating state will now express some form of official regret or apology? No. And what if it did? The only statement that would not be another dissembling victory of conformism would be a the speech of serious acts and measures toward disarmament and nuclear abolition.

Instead, the official rhetoric in this direction is covering a massive increase in US spending on the nuclear arsenals: 'modernization' processes that will lock in these WMDs and the US state's continuing dependence on them for another half-century.

The struggle against forgetting is waged from the bottom up. It has nothing to do with the official commemoration of states or the pseudo-critical mouthing of national stains. The work of this struggle is ours to do, with hell hounds at our heels.

GR 

day of infamy

2010-08-06T08:06:00.001+02:00

Guerrilla street theater by the Carnival of Democracy Players, Sarasota, Florida, 6 August 2001.

Photos by Gaby.

ghost sited

2010-08-06T08:04:00.001+02:00

Greg Sholette sends this snapshot from his Return of the Atomic Ghosts project.

manifesto of the 121

2010-08-04T13:36:00.002+02:00

Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the War in Algeria

(5 September 1960)

A very important movement is developing in France, and it’s necessary that French and international opinion be better informed about it at a moment when a new phase in the War in Algeria must lead us to see, and not to forget, the depth of the crisis that began six years ago.

In ever greater numbers, French men and women are pursued, imprisoned, and sentenced for having refused to participate in this war, or for having come to the assistance of the Algerian fighters. Distorted by their adversaries, but also softened by those who have the obligation to defend them, their reasons, for the most part, are not understood. Nevertheless, it isn’t enough to say that this resistance to public authority is respectable. As a protest by men wounded in their very honor and in the idea they have of the truth, it has a meaning that goes far beyond the circumstances in which it is affirmed, and which it is important to grasp, however the events turn out.

For the Algerians the struggle, carried out either by military or diplomatic means, is not in the least ambiguous. It is a war of national independence. But what is its nature for the French? It’s not a foreign war. The territory of France has never been threatened. But there’s even more; it is carried out against men who do not consider themselves French, and who fight to cease being so. It isn’t enough to say that this is a war of conquest, an imperialist war, accompanied by an added amount of racism. There is something of this in every war, and the ambiguous nature of it remains.

In fact, in taking a decision that was in itself a fundamental abuse, the State in the first place mobilized entire classes of citizens with the sole goal of accomplishing what it called a police action against an oppressed population, one which had never revolted except due to a concern for its basic dignity, since it demands that it at last be recognized as an independent community.

Neither a war of conquest nor a war of “national defense,” nor a civil war, the war in Algeria has little by little become an autonomous action on the part of the army and a caste which refuse to submit in the face of an uprising which even the civil power, aware of the general collapse of colonial empires, seems ready to accept.

Today, it is principally through the will of the army that this criminal and absurd combat is maintained; and this army, by the important political role that many of its higher representatives have it play — at times acting openly and violently outside any form of legality, betraying the ends confided in it by the nation — compromises and risks perverting the nation itself by forcing the citizens under its orders to become the accomplices of a seditious and degrading action. Must we be reminded that fifteen years after the destruction of the Hitlerite order, French militarism has managed to bring back torture and restore it as an institution in Europe.

It is under these conditions that many French men and women have come to put in doubt the meaning of traditional values and obligations. What is civic responsibility if, in certain conditions, it becomes shameful submission? Are there not cases where refusal is a sacred obligation, where “treason” means the courageous respect for the truth? And when, by the will of those who use it as an instrument of racist or ideological domination, the army shows itself to be in open or latent revolt against democratic institutions, does not revolt against the army take on a new meaning?

This moral dilemma has been posed since the beginning of the war. With the war prolonging itself, it is only normal that with greater frequency these moral choices are concretely made in the form of increasingly numerous acts of insubordination and desertion, as well as those of protection and assistance to Algerian fighters. Free movements have developed on the margins of all the official parties, without their assistance and, finally, despite their disavowal. Outside of pre-established frameworks and orders, by a spontaneous act of conscience, once again a resistance is born; seeking and inventing forms of action and means of struggle in a new situation where, either by inertia or doctrinal timidity, either due to nationalist or moral prejudices, political groups and journals of opinion agree not to recognize the true sense and requirements.

The undersigned, considering that each of us must take a stand concerning acts which it is from here on in impossible to present as isolated news stories; considering that whatever their location and whatever their means, they have the obligation to intervene; not in order to give advice to men who have to make their own decision before such serious problems, but to ask of those who judge them to not let themselves be caught up in the ambiguity of words and values, declare:

We respect and judge justified the refusal to take up arms against the Algerian people.

We respect and judge justified the conduct of those French men and women who consider it their obligation to give aid and protection to the Algerians, oppressed in the name of the French people.

The cause of the Algerian people, which contributes decisively to the ruin of the colonial system, is the cause of all free men and women.

Arthur Adamov, Robert Antelme, Georges Auclair, Jean Baby, Hélène Balfet, Marc Barbut, Robert Barrat, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Louis Bedouin, Marc Beigbeder, Robert Benayoun, Maurice Blanchot, Roger Blin, Arsène Bonnefous-Murat, Geneviève Bonnefoi, Raymond Borde, Jean-Louis Bory, Jacques-Laurent Bost, Pierre Boulez, Vincent Bounoure, André Breton, Guy Cabanel, Georges Condominas, Alain Cuny, Dr Jean Dalsace, Jean Czarnecki, Adrien Dax, Hubert Damisch, Bernard Dort, Jean Douassot, Simone Dreyfus, Marguerite Duras, Yves Ellouet, Dominique Eluard, Charles Estienne, Louis-René des Forêts, Dr Théodore Fraenkel, André Frénaud, Jacques Gernet, Louis Gernet, Edouard Glissant, Anne Guérin, Daniel Guérin, Jacques Howlett, Edouard Jaguer, Pierre Jaouen, Gérard Jarlot, Robert Jaulin, Alain Joubert, Henri Krea, Robert Lagarde, Monique Lange, Claude Lanzmann, Robert Lapoujade, Henri Lefebvre, Gérard Legrand, Michel Leiris, Paul Lévy, Jérôme Lindon, Eric Losfeld, Robert Louzon, Olivier de Magny, Florence Malraux, André Mandouze, Maud Mannoni, Jean Martin, Renée Marcel-Martinet, Jean-Daniel Martinet, Andrée Marty-Capgras, Dionys Mascolo, François Maspero, André Masson, Pierre de Massot, Jean-Jacques Mayoux, Jehan Mayoux, Théodore Monod, Marie Moscovici, Georges Mounin, Maurice Nadeau, Georges Navel, Claude Ollier, Hélène Parmelin, José Pierre, Marcel Péju, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Edouard Pignon, Bernard Pingaud, Maurice Pons, J.-B. Pontalis, Jean Pouillon, Denise René, Alain Resnais, Jean-François Revel, Paul Revel, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Christiane Rochefort, Jacques-Francis Rolland, Alfred Rosner, Gilbert Rouget, Claude Roy, Marc Saint-Saëns, Nathalie Sarraute, Jean-Paul Sartre, Renée Saurel, Claude Sautet, Jean Schuster, Robert Scipion, Louis Seguin, Geneviève Serreau, Simone Signoret, Jean-Claude Silbermann, Claude Simon, René de Solier, D. de la Souchère, Jean Thiercelin, Dr René Tzanck, Vercors, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, J.-P. Vielfaure, Claude Viseux, Ylipe, René Zazzo.

Translation by Mitch Abidor for marxists.org, with the following introductory note:

By the fall of 1960 the war in Algeria had been going on for six years. Despite defeats, massacres and torture, the FLN was gaining in strength, and opposition in France was growing. The relative timidity of the official left, in particular the French Communist Party (PCF), which insisted on mass actions calling for peace, was offset by circles of independent leftists who actively supported the FLN. Led by one of Sartre’s lieutenants, Francis Jeanson, and the communist without a party, Henri Curiel, the porteurs de valise (valise carriers) ferried arms, men, money and papers for the Algerians. Called the Jeanson Network, the heart of the group had been arrested and was to go on trial on September 6, 1960.

The day before, the text of what was to come to be known as the Manifesto of the 121 (after the number of original signatories) was released. But it was a document more read about than read since – of the journals in which it was to appear, one was seized, and the other, Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes, came out with two blank pages in its place, the result of government censorship. The government didn’t stop at censorship. As a result of the manifesto, they put in place stiff penalties for those calling for insubordination; jobs were lost and careers temporarily shut down.

The text was originally the work of Maurice Blanchot, and was revised by several others, including Claude Lanzmann. Though more than 121 were to sign the manifesto, the publisher Jerome Lindon decided to officially stop at that number because: “it sounds nice.”

exposures

2010-07-30T19:15:00.020+02:00

Two major exposures of the US-led neo-imperialist war machine hit the Internet in the last two weeks: first, the Washington Postpublished “Top Secret America,” a two-year investigation by journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin. Then, WikiLeaks released “Afghan War Diary,” a collection of 91,000 internal military logs and reports that document, from day to day, some six years of US and NATO operations. The WikiLeaks documents were vetted and published conjointly with theGuardian, Der Spiegel and the New York Times.

And what, after a day of media frenzy and frisson, has been the impact? Salon.com, in a notice posted Thursday and headlined “Why we ignored two huge stories,” evidently thinks there will be little to no impact: Both stories, writes Michael Barthel, “have landed with a resounding thud.” If it can’t be summed up in few soundbites, and if there is no direct scandal or titillating visual porn-factor, then Americans can’t be bothered.

That is a chillingly cynical judgment that goes far beyond justified pessimism. The response of the clearly furious US state indicates that the administrators, generals and politicians see things differently. They fear the fallout, and with reason. Despite White House claims that the WikiLeaks documents reveal nothing new or alarming, the snippets that have so far been published and discussed reveal glaring gaps between the official, spin-doctored version of this scandalously under-reported occupation and the destructive realities. Among other things, we now learn of “Task Force 373,” a previously unknown assassination unit, of drone problems, and of high-level resistance to the war from within Pakistani military and intelligence forces.

Moreover, two things are likely to be indisputably confirmed as more of the WikiLeaks archive is analyzed in detail:

First, the war is causing far more civilian casualties than has so far been admitted. When the actual field logs are scrutinized, the mistakes, abuses, excesses and massacres that are glibly written off as “collateral damage” are shown to be, instead, the necessary result of military occupation as such, with its irreducible and structurally-produced fear, hatred and paranoia.

Second, the strategy for “winning hearts and minds” and therefore the war, is failing and must fail, since Afghanistan demonstrates yet again that foreign military occupations have no legitimacy among the occupied.

In short, the question that must emerge from these documents is: “Why are ‘we’ there?” They expose the occupation as unjustifiable in all but the most naked and cynical imperialist terms. They are obviously a potent weapon for an antiwar movement, if there is one that knows how to use them.

That movement, such as it is, has been mostly invisible for years. But now it has another chance to refocus itself and public attention on the war machine and its central connections to every social struggle – a theme ("enforcement") that has been repeated so many times in these posts that I won’t tax patience by doing it again now.

Instead, two points, one urgent and the other grave:

The US state is going after Pfc. Bradley Manning, who it suspects of leaking the Afghan war logs; Manning has been detained pending trial for previously leaking the notorious video of a 2007 massacre in Iraq perpetrated by the crew of a US Apache helicopter gunship. And the state is going after Julian Assange, the editor of WikilLeaks. The warlords need to make an example of both. Their strategy has now emerged: they will try to discredit and destroy WikiLeaks by charging that Assange has put US soldiers and Afghan informers at risk, and that he therefore has “blood on his hands.” This inversion of reality, in substance unworthy of serious response, must be unequivocally and robustly refused. Hands off Bradley Manning and Julian Assange! Prosecute the abuses and massacres brought to light, not the messengers.

Solidarity, in the form of public defenses and hat-passing for legal fees, will no doubt have to be organized in the time-tried ways. But let’s go further now, and remember what others have done and organized in similar wars.

In 1960, after public exposure of widespread torture used by French forces in their colonial war against the Algerian independence struggle, the French state put on trial a network of French citizens who gave material support to the FLN. In that context, French intellectuals – including Jean-Paul Sartre, André Breton, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Maurice Blanchot, Henri Lefebvre, Alain Resnais, François Truffaut and Pierre Vidal-Naquet – wrote, endorsed and circulated a text called “Declaration on the Right of Insubordination in the Algerian War" - the so-called Manifesto of the 121.

And in 1981, Edward Thompson and Dan Smith published an American edition of Protest and Survive, a collection of texts calling for nuclear disarmament and abolition. For that volume, Daniel Ellsberg, the Rand whistleblower who dealt the Vietnam War a major blow by leaking the top-secret study known as the Pentagon Papers, contributed a text titled “Call to Mutiny.” Enough said.

Second, the Washington Post report, which has gotten far less attention, is equally devastating on a different front. Priest and Arkin document the rapid growth of the US intelligence apparatuses after September 11 – what amounts to a new, covert branch of government, a “top-secret world so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”

“Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies [now] work on programs related to counter-terrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.” An estimated 854,000 people now have top-secret security clearances for this work, and the equivalent of three new Pentagon buildings have been built for it.

Remembering that this covert parallel apparatus is just one part of a war machine the budget of which, at $1.5 trillion, eats up half of every tax dollar, we have here an astounding social fact that is screaming for attention.

It ought to provide a strong basis for productive discussions and debates with the Tea Party, for the spook agencies have just pulled off an amazing expansion of the repressive state bureaucracy. Up to now, tea partiers have been happy to write the war machine a blank check. The bulk of them are probably immune to reason on this issue and will remain irremediably militarist come what may. But these anti-state tax revolters ought at least to be confronted with this contradiction – on their own terms and with their own arguments. The basic facts about the military-fiscal black hole is a wedge of truth that, driven with cogent arguments, should wake at least some of them up and plant some doubts among their imperial fantasies.

Past posts here have extensively addressed the rise of the national security-surveillance state in the US and in general. As a mainstream mapping of its physical contours, the Washington Post series helps to make this continent of secrecy more concrete and subject to critical evocation.

GR 

“Top Secret America,” Washington Post, 19-21 July, 2010.

”Afghan War Diary,” WikiLeaks, 25 July 2010.

Julian Assange at the Frontline Club, London, 27 July 2010; and on DemocracyNow, 28 July 2010. 