on the mattering of silence and avowal

'

Arman, untitled combustion, 1964

Plight of the After: Further Notes on Cage, Silence, Arman, Beuys, Adorno, Beckett, Trauma, Rememoration and Negative Presentation in Post-1945 Visual Art

by Gene Ray

Beuys, Plight, 1985

Two works by Joseph Beuys, or more precisely, two contrasting moments in his output: the first, a proposal for a Holocaust memorial produced in 1958, a feeble misfire; the second, the installation Plight, made and exhibited in 1985, a forcefully effective work of historical avowal. These two moments document the impressive development of one German artist. But more than that, they indicate the whole painful struggle within the visual arts to confront and respond to the Nazi genocide, a crime of state terror for which the place-name ‘Auschwitz’ has come synecdochically to stand. For visual artists willing to risk such a confrontation, the means and strategies with which to do so were by no means clear or obvious in 1958; if, after 1985, such means and strategies were established and available, that was due to the work of many, in a collective development that was absorbed and synthesized in Plight.

    

Beuys’ proposal for a memorial at Auschwitz-Birkenau, submitted in March 1958 to the juried competition organized by an association of camp survivors, was a failure by any standard. His offer to overshadow the camp with a monumental ‘monstrance’ derived from Roman Catholic ritual was wildly, monstrously inappropriate. I register this moment of misfire only to establish Beuys’ relatively early concern with the meaning, legacy and representation of Auschwitz. Beuys was one of 426 artists who submitted proposals to the jury convened in 1956 by the Comité international d’Auschwitz. For it, he produced numerous drawings and models in wood, pewter and zinc. None are compelling or evince much insight. Some were later incorporated into various installations and vitrines, including Auschwitz Demonstration 1956-1964; the dates in the title of the latter indicate the artist’s retrospective desire to establish his continuous engagement with the Nazi genocide and the problem of its artistic representation. This desire is significant, especially given Beuys’ evident reticence with regard to Nazism and its crimes. These early sketches and models, loaded with the Christian symbolism of sin, guilt, sacrifice and forgiveness, may betray the stirrings of the artist’s own unresolved conflicts in facing this history. They certainly illuminate a profound confusion before the crisis of representation imposed on art ‘after Auschwitz’, to use the phrase of Theodor W. Adorno. This confusion was hardly unique at the time; it marks a moment when the dialectic between genocidal history and representation was felt by some European visual artists as the pressure of a still unclarified problematic.

     

Beuys, Auschwitz Demonstration, 1964

The negative presentation of Auschwitz through the indirect material linkages and evocative strategies deployed so effectively in Plight – the environment he installed in the London gallery of Anthony d’Offay in 1985 – was only possible after the investigation of negative presentation in the visual arts had reached a certain point of development. The artistic strategy evident in this work manifests an understanding of the potentials of negative evocation to respond to historical trauma and catastrophe, as well as an at least minimally conscious control of the sculptural means for such evocation. With regard to artistic means, all the techniques used by Beuys in Plight had probably been developed by other artists by the end of 1961, although their potentials would not have been immediately clear to all.[1] The necessary historical disclosures no doubt took longer to circulate and fully sink in; the critical processing of those disclosures is by no means complete today.

Plight is a culminating work, in the precise sense that it consolidates this collective investigation and development that took place in the visual arts between 1945 and the end of 1961 in a way so compelling that it establishes a new standard for artistic approaches to Auschwitz. The negative memorials that in the 1990s would become the institutionally preferred model for monumental public remembrance are prefigured by Plight and are, by and large, merely echoes or variations on it. I am not concerned in this essay to treat Beuys’ personal development or career in any detail, beyond what I have done elsewhere.[2] Here I focus on Plight, in order to unfold from this one work the outlines of a larger history – the discovery and development, in the visual arts, of negative, dissonant strategies for representing catastrophic history in the aftermath of World War II.

drones of disaster (1)

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. 

war porn (2): interpellation

An everyday massacre, the obscene reality of occupation.

In New Baghdad on the twelfth of July 2007, death rained down from the 30mm cannons of two Apache gunships. (And let us not miss the history of blood and original accumulation condensed in that linguistic expropriation: a name stolen from a people who symbolize indigenous resistance is now the trophy-scalp decorating a flying weapons platform of US Army Air Cavalry, successors of the horseback troopers who chased Geronimo.)

The problem of enjoyment – of “war porn” – in this video released through WikiLeaks is glaring: the images of a dozen people slaughtered from the air do not in themselves exclude fantasmatic identifications with the voices heard and, through them, with the power of these weapons and the war machine as such. Similar images, seen countless times in the entertaining fodder of the cinema of war, erode the power to hold apart fiction and real killing.

There is a habitual structure of projective identification activated here that holds out something like a spectatorial path of least resistance. It tends to suck us in and place us, so that we assume a certain position and point of view in the antagonistic scenario. And this of course is exactly how movies and video games work. The template of entertainment matches the actual massacre.

Watching this video aligns us, like it or not, with the occupier's gaze, the soldiers' gunsights - behind which, the god's eye vantage of fantasmatic power. (The cameras of the murdered journalists would give us a very different vantage and image: see the negative presentation below.)

The fantasy of omnipotence is of course only a fantasy: the murderous paranoia of the soldiers, seeing weapons and enemies everywhere, betrays this clearly. Such paranoia is structurally produced by the occupation itself: they are manifesting the survival imperatives of occupiers (which does damage to them as well). But the ethical lapse this entails is mirrored and encouraged by the structure and template of the video image. The fantasy of absolute power that activates these alignments sets up the possible enjoyment for spectators.

Even if - consciously, ethically, politically - we refuse with a fitting revulsion the point of view offered, the fantasy lure of power never ceases to call to us in ways we can't be certain we don't respond to unconsciously. Enjoyment, in this sense, doesn't exclude the displeasure of revulsion.

Ethical corruption and the attrition of outrage thus accompany such images, along with disgust and indignation. We're obligated to see and absorb this video, in order to witness what's being done. At the same time, we need to resist and palpate its insidious lures. Here as everywhere else, we have to struggle for our humanity.

WikiLeaks has undertaken with courage and diligence the tasks of decrypting exposure abandoned by a mainstream journalism castrated by its corporate owners. For that, it is under attack by numerous states and agencies, including the Pentagon – as even the New York Times acknowledged on 17 March.

In the struggles to resist neo-imperialism, the info wars remain a crucial battleground. Under conditions of integrated spectacle and stupefying concentrations of corporate power, access to truth and counter-images is fundamental. And we’re going to have to fight for it, as the blow US courts struck this week to the principle of net neutrality should alert us.

Photo is from Gardez, Afghanistan, on the wake of the 12 February killing of five people, including two pregnant women, by US Special Forces.

Glenn Greenwald reports on the campaign against WikiLeaks, the growing fury over the posted video of the 2007 massacre, and the politics of net neutrality in a series of articles for salon.com.

On Democracy Now! Amy Goodman goes over the video with WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange. Families of the victims respond.

A more rigorous analysis of the video in context with Assange on Al Jazeera, 19 April.

crisis fallout

Not everyone will swallow the discourse of austerity, of “tighten your belt” and shit out your soul, delivered from on high (EU, etc.), with rude tonalities of necessity and no alternative.

It matters now, in the pitiless relation of forces, what kind of Left remains – if any remains. No one is fond of the parties and unions, and only fools give them blind trust. But those were the basis for organized self-defense. Where they have been crushed or corrupted into their unprincipled opposite, the working classes exist as object of exploitation but no longer as political force.

Of course movements can be organized again from scratch, outside the old structures – but then, where are they, and who, if not us, would need to do this work?

In Greece, where more than in most countries remnants of an organized Left persist, alongside a robust autonomist culture, resistance to austerity measures is also stronger and more explosive. (This is partly what is meant when Euro politicians talk condescendingly of Greek “backwardness.”)

The austerity package just passed by Parliament was the work of the ruling “socialist” PASOK party and supported only by the far-right LAOS. The rightwing party New Democracy and SYRIZA, the Radical Left Coalition, voted against it, while the Communist KKE boycotted the vote.

On the day the measures passed (5 March) the main unions went out on strike and rallied outside, the communist PAME in the morning and the GSEE and public-sector ADEDY in the afternoon.

In the demos, 87-year old Manolis Glezos was tear-gassed in the face by riot cops -- near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

In 1941, during the Nazi occupation, Glezos and Apostolos Santas climbed the Acropolis and tore down the swastika flying there. For that act of defiance, they tortured him. He was imprisoned again during the Civil War and again under Papadopoulos and the Colonels.

Glezos was hospitalized for respiratory problems.

phantoms of liberty

(addendum to on tea partiers)

The legions of Earl Gray (aka Fox, aka Beck) marching on Rome drag with them a pitiless engine of partisan siege. The aim of it: to pummel the first Black president.

In the tea bag, a heady mix of rage, myth and toxins. Venoms spurt in all directions. Within the simmering legions, ugly elements circulate: militiamen and border vigilantes, Patriots and John Birchers.

They speak of Tyrants and Liberty, wave The Constitution.

Rightward scurrying Obama they paint as Black Socialist Tyrant, conjuring old racist fears of slave risings and plantations up in flames - the ghosts of Toussaint L’Ouverture and Haiti’s Black Jacobins.

But palpably, in the fearing and seething: the deeper identification with power, impotence longing for a Tyrant – the still-shared fantasy of an invincible super sovereign bristling with nukes, dungeons and robotic terminators.

Proof: of the sacred war machine, that absolute black hole of “big government” expenditure, to which all common goods must be sacrificed, not one word. About that of which naught need be said, tea baggers are glad to be silent.

Obama’s person is despised but in the King’s true body, the executive function as such, the imago, dear to the heartland, of Avenging Protector persists.

Fear of the wretched and inscrutable enemy at large in the Global South feeds the wish for a grimacing strong man in the White House basement. Let him be more terrible than terror itself: ungloved, water-boarding, rampaging.

Hitting-out still underwriting war machine’s taking-out.

Tea machine as the “new American revolution,” from below? Unlaughably not. Restorationist reaction to merest whiff of change, more like it. Faux-radical, extreme only in its middling hatreds.

Its politics, translated into votes, prepares the return of Republican power and strengthens the Party’s right wing.

For the world, it means more killing, in waste and wrack. More war, more obstruction, more avoidance – of history, of planet in meltdown, the automaton of systematic antagonism, blind and miserable rule of domination.

exemplary delusion

“Bomb Power translates directly to information power. Secrecy emanated from the Manhattan Project like a giant radiation emission.”

“And the power of secrecy that enveloped the Bomb became a model for the planning or execution of Anything Important, as guarded by Important People. Because the government was the keeper of the great secret, it began to specialize in secret keeping.”

Garry Wills, Bomb Power, 2010


In the wake of Hiroshima, a new structural-strategic trend: the long-term concentration of executive power, mutating the US state. Wills traces, step by step, the formation of the new regime: a National Security State operating beyond and largely against the US Constitution.

Wills documents the crimes and abuses accumulated by every president from Truman to Bush II, shifting power steadily to the executive branch and there merging with the war machine.

To Wills’ conclusions, we would only need to add: this mutation of the US state unfolding from a new power of terror corresponds to its enforcing functions in the post-1945 global order.

In all of this Obama takes his place, here as elsewhere brings no change.

paquin pull down!

“The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.”
Pound, Pisan Cantos, 1948

The artists who made the monuments of modernism, Adorno noted deflatingly, were “not demigods, but persons,” fallible, entangled, damaged. Ditto of course for those lesser parodic moles who now, like Jehan Alonzo, snipe at pyramids or scratch splenetically at their bases.

Those who put other persons in camps and cages are also persons (fallible, etcetera), but constitute an altogether different functional category.

Camps and cages belong to a whole apparatus of state terror, a complex set of mobilized and managed processes, behind which are more than executive orders and exceptional empowerments.

Also required, to launch a “war on terror,” were the spectacles of fear and fury demanding action, the conditioned-reflexive flag-waving and chanting for vengeance, the deep enjoyment of a war machine on the move.

What keeps this dirty war going now, beyond its infamous exposures? Distractions, other cares, attention tiring into indifference.

This war goes on, today, scandalously, by occupation, assassination and torture by proxy, all at absurd public expense, because the massive, continuing, determined protest that could stop it is absent. In its place, the silences and passivities that translate into tacit consent.

No dialogue with the fraudulent arguments of global enforcement. Immediate end to occupations, close the bases and camps, open the cages, without conditions: such are the actual conditions of a global dialogue free of domination. Not likely, but anything less concedes too much.

Not forgetting this, the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo in Havana is a wound that should hurt, let it be said. The death of any caged dissident on hunger strike is a wound to all, felt or not, acknowledged in truth or veiled in lies.

Camps and cages: the naked apparatus of domination, of states aimed at individuals. Tear them all down, let them all out: right now, without conditions. Not likely, but anything less concedes too much.

on tea partiers

“the race-baiting and hate-mongering discourse of tea parties” (from the 9 Feb. post, what was habeas corpus?).

Right, let’s quickly document and register this, for readers real and imagined who happily may not be so exposed to the current grotesqueries of the US political mediascape. (Those for whom it’s all too familiar and dismal can skip this one...)

Background: the so-called tea party movement names itself after the Boston Tea Party, that lauded episode of direct action property destruction from the American anti-colonial struggle against the British. The fabled anti-tax riot was organized by merchants and carried out by sailors and dockhands masquerading as “Indians.”

As the image makes clear, the action plays ambiguously on clichés of native wildness and violence. Aboriginal features, donned as disguise, are used as masking cover for the real agents of riot.

But in this covert action, the instrumentalizing appropriation of the other’s cultural markers denies to the indigenous who are mimicked any standing of their own, as autonomous ends-in-themselves: performance reflects the logic and reality of primitive accumulation – actual processes of violent seizure and genocidal displacement.

Whatever its anti-colonial valencies, then, this particular party also evinces the racism of occupiers who, reorganized as sovereign nation, would soon claim for themselves special divine blessing and “Manifest Destiny.”

(The fetishization of founding, a constant of aggressive American exceptionalism.)

Today the ranks of tea baggers seem to converge suspiciously with the regular spectators of Glenn Beck & Co. at Fox News. In any case, the appearance of the movement last year, in the form of numerous local micro-demos of angry citizens, was extensively promoted and “covered” by Beck and others on Fox, who hailed it as a “new American Revolution.”

Their issues: big government, government spending (taxes), the bailouts ("free markets") and family values. Their unifying hate object: Barack Obama.

They call themselves “independents,” meaning, don’t take a Republican vote for granted. Some like McCain, others hate him. Some like Palin, others hate her. Some claim to have voted for Obama, but now hate him.

They’re busy and they’re organized. (Take note!!)

In the process of defining itself, still riven by internal disputes and contradictory positions, the movement of tea sippers just had its first “National Convention” in Nashville.

How many are they, then, really? We’ll all be finding out. For what it’s worth, the New York Times reported that during the recent election upset in Massachusetts, attributed to tea party power, more that 6 million people watched it on Fox, while at the same time CNN and MSNBC only attracted a bit more than a million each.

Their stance is ultra-middle class, but how grassroots are they, really? Organizers claim 600 people paid $549 to attend the convention (keynote speaker Sarah Palin; speaker’s fee reportedly $100,000.) Behind the scenes: a new legal entity called the Ensuring Liberty Corporation.

Do we really have to take this seriously? Isn’t it just a joke?

Expresso, please, and make it a double. This is real, it’s organizing and it’s already a demonstrated and mediatized material force, producing effects and impacting national discourse and policy.

Proof: Obama’s “spending freeze” (war machine exempted, of course) is a doomed attempt to appease them.

For these people are not likely to be appeased, and anyone who tries to conciliate them will be eaten alive.

Now for the crux:
Nashville, Tennessee (CNN) 6 February 2010:

The organizer of the Tea Party Convention says he agrees with Tom Tancredo's description of President Obama as a socialist.

The former congressman from Colorado and 2008 Republican presidential candidate blasted Obama, saying “people who could not even spell the word ‘vote,’ or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. His name is Barack Hussein Obama.”

Tancredo made his comments Thursday night as he gave the kickoff speech for the convention, which is being held at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville.

That good old American perennial, then: racism plus anti-communism, in gaudy new Sunday dress.

But Obama clearly is no socialist.

Conclusion: this is an organized apparatus for scapegoating attacks – a crude form of would-be lynching.

Sadly, for the record.

Now, cui bono?

yes, we do assassination

“Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair has confirmed US forces are authorized to kill US citizens abroad. Speaking before the House Intelligence Committee, Blair acknowledged President Obama is continuing a Bush-era policy authorizing the killing of US citizens if they’re considered a terrorist threat to the United States. In response, Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald wrote the assassination policy gives President Obama “the power to impose death sentences on his own citizens without any charges or trial.” DemocracyNow!, 5 February 2010

Constitution? When permanent emergency normalizes exception to code, that code is altered and a new code goes into force.

Under the master logic of antagonism, the law is the law of convenience.

Does the citizenry stir itself? Where aims its raging?...

pinochet's corpse (and specter)

"The course of the world [Hegel's Weltlauf, master logic of the global process] which is hostile to human beings asserts itself against them but with their approval."
Adorno, 1964

state of exception

Where did it go -- was it ever? Toxic foundations in original accumulation, the condition of European industrialization. But leave that for now. Let's focus on the transformations since 1945. Shifts in the global social process and its enforcement, within it the functions of the US and the capitalist state as such.

Hiroshima: one word that condenses a whole set of such shifts.

"It would be no exaggeration to say that the legacy of the Manhattan Project included what Dwight Eisenhower would later call the 'military-industrial complex,' as well as a powerful national security culture organized around a permanent nexus of profit and secrecy."

"Whether the legacy of Auschwitz will in the end prove worse that that of Hiroshima is doubtful. As Jonathan Schell reminds us, the 'long' or 'real twentieth century' - the last phase of which began on August 6, 1945 - is still 'unfinished.' Hiroshima left the Americans with a new institutional nexus of profit, secrecy and power. But in a vicious circle, the effort to enforce its nuclear monopoly led to an intensification of secrecy and a perpetual culture of national security that quickly corroded civil rights and democratic foundations."
Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory, 2005

Now here's a new and more detailed accounting, this time from a conservative constitutionist:

"This book has a basic thesis, that the Bomb altered our subsequent history down to its deepest constitutional roots. It redefined the presidency, as in all respects America's 'Commander in Chief' (a term that took on a new and unconstitutional meaning in this period). It fostered an anxiety of continuing crisis, so that society was pervasively militarized. It redefined the government as a National Security State, with an apparatus of secrecy and executive control."

"All this grew out of the Manhattan Project... The project's secret work, secretly funded at the behest of the President, was a model for the covert activities and overt authority of the government we now experience."
Garry Wills, Bomb Power, 2010

State terror, including genocidal powers held in reserve, has specific functions in global "governance."

coffee or tea?

"Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate victim in real life receive their beatings so that the spectators can accustom themselves to theirs.... There is laughter because their is nothing to laugh about."
Horkheimer & Adorno,
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)

(thanks, joni and bourbaki!)