Varvara Stepanova
Sketch for Study the Old, but Create the New
1919
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Sketch for Study the Old, but Create the New
Varvara Stepanova
Sketch for Study the Old, but Create the New
1919
Pulse Play/ Random Rules
Playlist by Ahmet Ogut
Pulse Play/ Random Rules Screenings
artists/selectors
Andrea Angelidakis, Aids 3D ( Daniel Keller and Nick Kosmas) , assume vivid astro focus, Pablo Leon de la Barra, Eric Beltran, Keren Cytter, Jeremy Deller, Cerith Wyn Evans, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Dora Garcia, Rodney Graham, Annika Larsson, Matthieu Laurette, Ingo Niermann, Miltos Manetas, Ahmet Ogut, Angelo Plessas, Lisi Raskin, Linda Wallace
Curated by Marina Fokidis
Pulse contemporary art fair, New York
Source:www.youtube.com/randomrules09
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
cowboyhandwerk
honest like the horse
between my knees
(Johnny Cash)
ich bin wie ein cowboy so sensibel, kann mich
in die pferde denken, in die rinder, in den rand
der rocky mountains, ich kann aus der ferne
auf die vielen vögel zielen und aus ihren federn
mosaike knüpfen, die die gründerväter zeigen
bei allerlei verrichtungen wie schmieden, fegen,
feuer machen, kirchen bauen, kinder zeugen.
ich kann in den bergen überleben und das wetter
aus den moosen lesen, aus dem schwanenhals
gebognen stiel, der bei trockenheit ein strick ist,
bei feuchtem wetter aufgerollt wird wie ein schwanz.
doch manchmal gibt es diese nächte in den bergen,
wo mir das messer von der hand geht, wie etwas,
das ich in diesem leben nicht mehr brauchen kann.
wo, wenn das laue feuer glutlos müpfelt mein herz
mir auf die größe eines vogelmuskels schrumpft.
dann sind alle tiere um mich rum verschieden,
und auch die moose leblos hart. dann bin ich wie ein
cowboy so sensibel, ein sensibler cowboyapparat.
Monika Rinck
cowboycraft
honest like the horse
between my knees
(Johnny Cash)
i am like a cowboy so sensitive, able to enter
the minds of the horses, the cattle, the edge
of the rocky mountains, i can from the distance
aim at the many birds and from their feathers
knot mosaics, which the founding fathers show
through all kinds of performances like forging, sweeping,
making fire, building churches, spawning children.
i can survive in the mountains and read the weather
from the moose, from the swan’s throat
curved handle that through dryness is a rope,
through humid weather rolled up like a tail.
certainly sometimes there are these mountain nights,
where the knife drops from my hand, like something
that in this life I do no longer need
where, when the lukewarm fire heatless sours, my heart
shrinks to a bird muscle’s size
then all animals around me are so different,
and also the moose is lifeless hard. then i am like a
cowboy so sensitive, a sensitive cowboy apparatus.
Monika Rinck
Translation: 2004, Donald Berger
between my knees
(Johnny Cash)
ich bin wie ein cowboy so sensibel, kann mich
in die pferde denken, in die rinder, in den rand
der rocky mountains, ich kann aus der ferne
auf die vielen vögel zielen und aus ihren federn
mosaike knüpfen, die die gründerväter zeigen
bei allerlei verrichtungen wie schmieden, fegen,
feuer machen, kirchen bauen, kinder zeugen.
ich kann in den bergen überleben und das wetter
aus den moosen lesen, aus dem schwanenhals
gebognen stiel, der bei trockenheit ein strick ist,
bei feuchtem wetter aufgerollt wird wie ein schwanz.
doch manchmal gibt es diese nächte in den bergen,
wo mir das messer von der hand geht, wie etwas,
das ich in diesem leben nicht mehr brauchen kann.
wo, wenn das laue feuer glutlos müpfelt mein herz
mir auf die größe eines vogelmuskels schrumpft.
dann sind alle tiere um mich rum verschieden,
und auch die moose leblos hart. dann bin ich wie ein
cowboy so sensibel, ein sensibler cowboyapparat.
Monika Rinck
cowboycraft
honest like the horse
between my knees
(Johnny Cash)
i am like a cowboy so sensitive, able to enter
the minds of the horses, the cattle, the edge
of the rocky mountains, i can from the distance
aim at the many birds and from their feathers
knot mosaics, which the founding fathers show
through all kinds of performances like forging, sweeping,
making fire, building churches, spawning children.
i can survive in the mountains and read the weather
from the moose, from the swan’s throat
curved handle that through dryness is a rope,
through humid weather rolled up like a tail.
certainly sometimes there are these mountain nights,
where the knife drops from my hand, like something
that in this life I do no longer need
where, when the lukewarm fire heatless sours, my heart
shrinks to a bird muscle’s size
then all animals around me are so different,
and also the moose is lifeless hard. then i am like a
cowboy so sensitive, a sensitive cowboy apparatus.
Monika Rinck
Translation: 2004, Donald Berger
Monday, February 23, 2009
Bittersweet
Poka-Yio, Untitled ("Bittersweet" series), 2009
Kalfayan Galleries
Salonica
until 23 of February
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Patterns of Individuality Within the Built Environment
Patterns of Individuality Within the Built Environment
56 X 76 cm
2008
Communards pose
Communards pose with the statue of napoleon form the toppled Vendome Column, Place Vendome, Paris May 1871
Friday, February 20, 2009
What Really Matters
In issue number 3 of Pouvoir Ouvrier, a schoolteacher posed the following question: Why don't workers write? He showed in a profound way how this is due to their total situation in sociey and also to the nature of the so-called education dispensed by schools in capitalist society. He also mentioned that workers often think their experience "isn't interesting."
This last point seems to me absolutely fundamental, and I would like to share my experience on it, which is not that of a worker, but of a militant.
When workers ask an intellectual to talk to them about the problems of capitalism and socialism, they find it hard to understand that we accord a central place to the workers' situation in the factory and at the point of production. I often have had occasion to present to workers some of my ideas, expressed in the following way:
-The way in which the capitalist factory is organized creates a perpetual conflict between workers and management on the very issue of how production is to be carried out.
-Management is always cooking up new ways of chaining workers down to "the discipline of producing" as this is understood by management.
-Workers are always inventing new ways of defending themselves.
-This struggle often has more influence over real wage levels than do negotiations or even strikes.
- The resulting wastefulness is tremendous and far greater than the wastefulness brought on by economic crises.
- Trade unions always are out of touch with and most often are even hostile to this kind of working-class struggle.
-Militants who are workers ought to spread the word of all examples of this struggle that can be used outside the specific company in which they originally were produced.
-This situation would not be changed in the least by the mere "nationalization" of the factories and the application of "planning" to the economy.
-Consequently, socialism is inconceivable without a complete change in the way production is organized in factories, and without the suppression of the present management and the instauration of workers' management.
These statements were both concrete and theoretical. In each instance they provided real and precise examples. At the same time, however, these statements, far from being limited to the mere description of facts, were an attempt to draw overall conclusions. Here we have things about which workers obviously had the most direct and complete experience. And yet, on the other hand, they had a profound and universal meaning.
Nevertheless, what we discovered was that our listeners had little to say and appeared rather disappointed.They had come to talk or to listen to people talk about things that really mattered, and it was hard for them to believe that the things they themselves do every day really mattered. They thought someone was going to talk to them about absolute or relative surplus value, about the falling rate of profit, about overproduction and underconsumption. It seemed unbelievable to them that the evolution of modern society is determined far more by the daily movements and gestures of millions of workers in factories all over the world than by some great and mysterious hidden laws of the economy discovered by theoreticians. They even wrangled over whether such a permanent struggle between workers and management existed and whether the workers actually were defending themselves. Once the discussion really got rolling, however, what they said showed that they themselves were conducting this struggle from the moment they set foot in the factory until the time they left.
This idea workers have that how they live, what they do, and what they think "doesn't really matter" is not only the thing that prevents them from expressing themselves. It is the gravest manifestation of the ideological enslavement brought on by capitalism. For capitalism can survive only if people are persuaded that what they themselves do and know is a private little matter of their own that does not really matter, and that really important matters are the monopoly of the big shots and specialists in various fields of endeavor. Capitalism is constantly trying to drum this idea into people's heads.
But we also must point out that it has been powerfully helped along in this work by the workers' own labor organizations. For quite a long time trade unions and w working-class parties have tried to persuade workers that the only questions that really mattered concerned either wages in particular or the economy,politics or society in general.This is already wrong.But there is something even worse. What these organizations considered as "theory" on these questions and what more and more has passed for such in the public's eyes, instead of being, as it should have been, closely connected to the experience of workers at the point of production and in their social life, has become an allegedly "scientific" theory that is also becoming more and more abstract (and more and more false). Of course, only specialists-i.e., intellectuals and leaders-know about this theory and can talk about it. The workers are just supposed to keep quiet and try conscientiously to absorb and assimilate the "truths" these experts" spout at them.
Thus we get a twofold result. The intense desire large sections of the working class have to enlarge their knowledge and expand their horizons so that they might be able to go beyond the confines of their particular factory and form an idea of society at large that would aid them in their struggle is destroyed right from the very start. The so-called theory put in front of them appears, in the best of cases, as a sort of impenetrable higher algebra or, as is the case today, a string of incomprehensible words that don't explain a thing. On the other hand, workers have no way of checking on the content of this "theory" or its truth value; the proofs are to be found, they are told, in the hundred-plus chapters of Capital and in huge, mysterious books owned by wiser comrades,in whom they will just have to place their confidence.
The roots and the consequences of this situation are far-ranging indeed. At its origin we discover a deep-seated, bourgeois way of looking at things: Just as there are laws of physics, there supposedly are economic and social laws, and these laws have nothing to do with people's direct experience. There are social scientists and social engineers who know them. Just as only the engineer can tell you how to build a bridge, so these social engineers-political and trade-union leaders alone can tell you how to organize society. To change society is to change the overall way in which it is organized, but this does not have any effect at all upon what goes on in the factories-since that "doesn't really matter."
To get beyond this situation, it won't do to just tell the workers: Speak up, it's up to you to say what the problems are. What remains to be done is to tear down this monstrously wrong-headed idea that these problems as they are seen by workers don't really matter, that other problems are far more important and that only "theoreticians" and politicians can talk about them. One cannot understand anything about the factory if one does not understand society at large, but nothing can be understood about society at large if the factory is not understood. There is only one way to do this: The workers must speak.
To show this ought to be the primary and permanent task of Pouvoir Ouvrier.
Text by Cornelius Castoriadis
Source:classagainstclass.com
This last point seems to me absolutely fundamental, and I would like to share my experience on it, which is not that of a worker, but of a militant.
When workers ask an intellectual to talk to them about the problems of capitalism and socialism, they find it hard to understand that we accord a central place to the workers' situation in the factory and at the point of production. I often have had occasion to present to workers some of my ideas, expressed in the following way:
-The way in which the capitalist factory is organized creates a perpetual conflict between workers and management on the very issue of how production is to be carried out.
-Management is always cooking up new ways of chaining workers down to "the discipline of producing" as this is understood by management.
-Workers are always inventing new ways of defending themselves.
-This struggle often has more influence over real wage levels than do negotiations or even strikes.
- The resulting wastefulness is tremendous and far greater than the wastefulness brought on by economic crises.
- Trade unions always are out of touch with and most often are even hostile to this kind of working-class struggle.
-Militants who are workers ought to spread the word of all examples of this struggle that can be used outside the specific company in which they originally were produced.
-This situation would not be changed in the least by the mere "nationalization" of the factories and the application of "planning" to the economy.
-Consequently, socialism is inconceivable without a complete change in the way production is organized in factories, and without the suppression of the present management and the instauration of workers' management.
These statements were both concrete and theoretical. In each instance they provided real and precise examples. At the same time, however, these statements, far from being limited to the mere description of facts, were an attempt to draw overall conclusions. Here we have things about which workers obviously had the most direct and complete experience. And yet, on the other hand, they had a profound and universal meaning.
Nevertheless, what we discovered was that our listeners had little to say and appeared rather disappointed.They had come to talk or to listen to people talk about things that really mattered, and it was hard for them to believe that the things they themselves do every day really mattered. They thought someone was going to talk to them about absolute or relative surplus value, about the falling rate of profit, about overproduction and underconsumption. It seemed unbelievable to them that the evolution of modern society is determined far more by the daily movements and gestures of millions of workers in factories all over the world than by some great and mysterious hidden laws of the economy discovered by theoreticians. They even wrangled over whether such a permanent struggle between workers and management existed and whether the workers actually were defending themselves. Once the discussion really got rolling, however, what they said showed that they themselves were conducting this struggle from the moment they set foot in the factory until the time they left.
This idea workers have that how they live, what they do, and what they think "doesn't really matter" is not only the thing that prevents them from expressing themselves. It is the gravest manifestation of the ideological enslavement brought on by capitalism. For capitalism can survive only if people are persuaded that what they themselves do and know is a private little matter of their own that does not really matter, and that really important matters are the monopoly of the big shots and specialists in various fields of endeavor. Capitalism is constantly trying to drum this idea into people's heads.
But we also must point out that it has been powerfully helped along in this work by the workers' own labor organizations. For quite a long time trade unions and w working-class parties have tried to persuade workers that the only questions that really mattered concerned either wages in particular or the economy,politics or society in general.This is already wrong.But there is something even worse. What these organizations considered as "theory" on these questions and what more and more has passed for such in the public's eyes, instead of being, as it should have been, closely connected to the experience of workers at the point of production and in their social life, has become an allegedly "scientific" theory that is also becoming more and more abstract (and more and more false). Of course, only specialists-i.e., intellectuals and leaders-know about this theory and can talk about it. The workers are just supposed to keep quiet and try conscientiously to absorb and assimilate the "truths" these experts" spout at them.
Thus we get a twofold result. The intense desire large sections of the working class have to enlarge their knowledge and expand their horizons so that they might be able to go beyond the confines of their particular factory and form an idea of society at large that would aid them in their struggle is destroyed right from the very start. The so-called theory put in front of them appears, in the best of cases, as a sort of impenetrable higher algebra or, as is the case today, a string of incomprehensible words that don't explain a thing. On the other hand, workers have no way of checking on the content of this "theory" or its truth value; the proofs are to be found, they are told, in the hundred-plus chapters of Capital and in huge, mysterious books owned by wiser comrades,in whom they will just have to place their confidence.
The roots and the consequences of this situation are far-ranging indeed. At its origin we discover a deep-seated, bourgeois way of looking at things: Just as there are laws of physics, there supposedly are economic and social laws, and these laws have nothing to do with people's direct experience. There are social scientists and social engineers who know them. Just as only the engineer can tell you how to build a bridge, so these social engineers-political and trade-union leaders alone can tell you how to organize society. To change society is to change the overall way in which it is organized, but this does not have any effect at all upon what goes on in the factories-since that "doesn't really matter."
To get beyond this situation, it won't do to just tell the workers: Speak up, it's up to you to say what the problems are. What remains to be done is to tear down this monstrously wrong-headed idea that these problems as they are seen by workers don't really matter, that other problems are far more important and that only "theoreticians" and politicians can talk about them. One cannot understand anything about the factory if one does not understand society at large, but nothing can be understood about society at large if the factory is not understood. There is only one way to do this: The workers must speak.
To show this ought to be the primary and permanent task of Pouvoir Ouvrier.
Text by Cornelius Castoriadis
Source:classagainstclass.com
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Misadventures of Universality
Thank you to Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Joseph Backstein and to the Biennale foundation. I shall bring out my subject by focusing on some statements and spectacles from another art Biennale that I visited last week in Seville, in Spain. The curator of that biennale in Seville was also the curator of the last ‘Documenta’ in Kassel, Kozui Enwezor, gave to the gathering of the artists and works a far-ranging objective court: “to unmask those machineries that decimate and waste social economic and political interconnection looking for a return to a logics of totalisation .” So, the question which the Biennale should address was: “how could, how can art play an integral and not only peripheral role in relation to the global challenge that affects both the artistic production and reception, especially in light of the damaging effects of reactionary conservative and fundamentalist politics in all social structures of the world today.” So, such statements affirm a will to oppose postmodern scepticism and resume a certain form of “universalist” view of art and politics and of the connection and attempt to challenge the machineries of dissociation, to restore a sense of universality and intelligibility, of the interconnections that frame a global world.
But this clear commitment to an enlightened view of the global world seemed to be questioned from the very beginning by the title chosen for that Biennale, this title was: ‘The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society’. It transpired as though the global view on the global world, advocated as a purpose of the exhibition, could not be but a matter of ghosts. It transpired as though the old Brechtian will to make the “homely” strange in order to provoke a fresh gaze on the contradictions of our world was overshadowed by the darkness of the Freudian “unhomelyness”. This wavering between two meanings of “unhomeliness” was strongly emphasized by the first works proposed to the visitors. They were series of photographs and installations focusing on the war in Iraq and the antiwar protests in Western countries. Close to the photographs of the horrors of the civil war made by the freelance Iraqui reporter Ghaith Abdul-Ahad we could see photographs of anti-war protests in New York and Washington made by the German born New York based artist Josephine Meckseper. On one of those photographs we could see some protesters holding banners in the background. As for the foreground, it shows us an overfilled dustbin, the content of which falls to the ground. The title of the photograph is “Untitled”. A title, which in such a context means: no title is needed because the image is more telling than any discourse.
This image clearly points to the ambivalence of the “unhomely”. On the one hand it belongs to the tradition of collage. It is not collage in the technical sense of the word but it belongs to the aesthetics of collage that chooses to play on the shock of heterogeneousness if not contradictory elements. But aesthetics was often implemented in the past as a means of producing political consciousness. Among the artists who used it in that way there was another New York based artist Martha Rosler who made in the 70’s her well-known series “Bringing war home” by pasting together photographs of the atrocities in Vietnam and advertising images of American petty-bourgeois interiors. Josephine Meckseper’s photograph may thus look as an ironic answer to Rosler’s series, as she pours the overflow of American consumerism into the way of the protesters that want to bring the Afghanistan or Iraqi war home. What is at issue is not the intention of the artist. What is at issue is a twist that has occurred in the practice of collage, which is also a twist in the meaning given to “unhomeliness”. Rosler’s collage, thirty years ago, was predicated on the heterogeneity of the opposite: the image conflated two opposite worlds, one of them was the hidden truth of the other, but also it conflated them in order to show that they could not go together. The image of the little nude Vietnamese girl shouting ahead of the soldiers on the roads of her wasted country could not go with the image of the American cosy interior without exploding it. The universality of the struggle for emancipation was supposed to break through the universality of the market. Meckseper’s “collage”, on the contrary, is predicated on homogeneity: the world of consumption is no more alien to the world of the struggle. The anti-war protest brings war home, in its way, but it brings it in a space where it is at home in a space of struggle that is itself a territory of consumption. Forty years ago Jean-Luc Godard already made fun of the “children of Marx and Coca-Cola”. But when they marched against the war in Vietnam, the children of Marx and Coca-Cola were fighting with the children of Marx. The little Vietnamese girl did not shout only for grief but also for struggle and victory. Now the protesters can no more identify with the fighters of the other side, no more march for their victory. The Iraqi victims turn out to be only victims of the empire of Coca-Cola, and the protesters are only fighting against that empire, or as a risk of perceiving and making us perceive that this empire ultimately turns out to be the empire of their own consumption.
So, the “phantom scenes of global power” show us the circularity of a worldwide complicity: the protest is organized against the terrorism of the “war on terror”, made by the empire of consumption that throws its shells on Mid-eastern towns. The shells are response to the terror of the attack of the towers. The attack itself had been displayed as the spectacle of the collapse of the empire. The protesters in turn have consumed the images of the collapse of the towers, the image of the bombing in Iraq and what they offer in the streets is a spectacle too, performed by consumers of spectacular horrors and diet coke. Ultimately terrorism and consumption, protest and spectacle are shown as part of the same process, a process governed by the law of the commodity which is the law of equivalence.
Needless to say, this process of homogenisation, this way of erasing any difference between the ways of domination and the ways of protest in the creation of a work which will be displayed and sold by Saatchi can be granted as a pervasive critique of our “global world” where the anti-commodity protests are marketed in the same way as commodity performances. And apparently it was the idea that made the curator decide to display Meckseper’s works as a kind of introduction to the ground thematic of the biennale. What interests me is not to suspect the intentions of the artist or the curator. What matters to me is this horizon of suspicion on the background of which the works of the former and the strategies of the latter are set up. It is the way in which the universality of the protest for human rights or people’s autonomy appears to be absorbed by another universality: the universality of the commodity, or rather a certain idea of the universality of the commodity. This is also a certain idea of the link between contingency and necessity. “Contingency” means what happens and might not have happened, what comes without necessity, comes to us, falls on us. But from this point on “contingency” can easily be identified with a certain idea of indifference: the indifference of what falls into the garbage can. What falls into the garbage in turn can be identified with the equivalence of the commodity, which in turn can be identified with the democratic equivalence of anybody with anybodies in the name of which shells are thrown against those who refuse it but set to work , in attacking it, another equivalence; the equivalence between war and spectacle.
This is apparently what has changed in the relation between Marx and Coca-Cola: the change is not that Marx has disappeared. He has not disappeared at all, he has shifted places. He is now located in the heart of the system, as its ventriloquist’s voice. Gramsci once said that the soviet revolution was revolution against Marx’s Capital, because Marx’s book had become the book of the Bourgeois scientists. The same thing occurred with the kind of Marxism with which the so-called “children of Marx and Coca-Cola” grew up: the Marxism of the denunciation of the mythologies of commodity, the fallacies of consumer’s society and of the empire of the spectacle. Forty years ago, it was supposed to “unmask” the machineries of domination, so as to provide the fighters with new weapons. It has turned to exactly the contrary: sort of nihilist wisdom that was the reign of the commodity and the spectacle, the equivalence of anything with anything, and of anything with its image and with the lie of its image.
But nihilist wisdom does not only give a phantasmagorical view of our world, featuring the entire mankind as a population of merry consumers overfilling all bins with the refuse of their frantic consumption. It also pictures the law of domination as a force that permeates any will to do anything against it. Any protest is a performance, any performance is a spectacle, any spectacle is a commodity, such is the ground thesis of this post-Marxist and post-Situationnist wisdom. But it is not only a matter of “vanity” , it is also a matter of culpability: ultimately the overwhelming empire of commodity is featured as the result of the sin of the individuals that live in it , and the worst sinners turn out to be those who want to rebel against its law.
I wish to substantiate this point by focusing on an apparently paradoxical phenomenon that has rocketed among western intelligentsia and most particularly French intelligentsias during the last ten years. I mean the development of more and more violent polemics against new disease that was said to threaten the future of civilisation. The name of that disease is said to be “democracy”. This is a strange case indeed. The intellectuals who herald this deadly danger live in countries that call themselves “democracy”, substantive that apparently implies the identity of a form of government based on public liberties and a way of individual life whose “freedom of choice” is based on the reign of the free market. As long as the Soviet Empire existed, it was commonplace to oppose that idea of democracy to the enemy called “totalitarianism”. And at the end of 89 the collapse of the soviet system was hailed in the Western World as the triumph of that idea of democracy, as the equivalence of public freedom, free market and the free choice by the individuals of their own way of life. But what happened after was exactly the contrary: the consensus on democracy as “human rights + free market+ free individual choice” vanished with the collapse of its enemy. In the years that followed, more and more furious intellectual campaigns trumpeted the disaster that was made to democracies by an enemy called democracy, more precisely by the disastrous connection between “human rights “ and “ free individual choice”. A number of sociologists, political philosophers and moralists began to explain us that the rights of Man, as Marx had proved it, actually were the rights of the egoistic bourgeois individual, and that, in our days, they meant the rights of the consumers to any kind of consumption – a right that pushed them to overstep and destroy all the limits to their thirst for consuming, thereby all the traditional institutions and forms of authority, imposing a limit to the power of the market. This is, they said, what democracy means in fact: the power of the individual consumer who cares for nothing but the satisfaction of his needs and desires. What the democratic individual wants is democratic equality. But what democratic equality means is equality between the seller and the buyer of any commodity. Therefore, they concluded , what the democratic individual wants is the triumph of the market in all the spheres of life and the more egalitarian it is, the more it is keen on providing that triumph. In such a way it was easy for those analysts to prove for instance that the students’ movements of the 60s and more specifically the movement of May 68 in France were aimed at the destruction of all those forms of authorities that hindered the invasion of the whole life by the law of Capital. By disparaging and impairing all those forms of authority the movement, they said, paved the way for a rekindled capitalism, it allowed our societies to become free aggregations of unbound molecules, whirling in the void, deprived of any affiliation, entirely available to the law of the market.
But that was not yet the whole picture: the consequence of the democratic thirst for equality, according to those new prophets, was not only the reign of the market. It was the complicity and ultimately the identity of democratic individualism and totalitarian terror, conspiring in common to destroy all the human bonds. When I was young, individualism was supposed to be the opposite of totalitarianism. According to the new intellectual fashion, it turned out that totalitarianism was the necessary outcome of individualism, which meant the fanaticism of free choice and unlimited consumption. When the twin towers were destroyed, a well-known French philosopher, psychoanalyst and professor of Roman Law, Pierre Legendre, explained in a French newspaper that it was something like the return of the western repressed, the castigation for the western overrule of the symbolic order an upsetting emblematised by gay marriage . Two years after, a French linguist and philosopher, Jean-Claude Milner gave a more radical turn to the thesis, as he published a book entitled The Criminal Tendencies of Democratic Europe. The crime that he imputed to “democratic Europe” was quite simply the extermination of the European Jews. As the Jewish people, he argued, is the people faithful to the law of affiliation and transmission, it stood up as the only obstacle to the democratic desire of unlimitedness. That’s why democracy had to exterminate the Jews and was the only beneficiary of their extermination.
More recently in the fall of 2005 when violent riots burst out in the poor northern suburbs of Paris, populated mostly by families coming from Moghreb and from Black Africa, the spokesperson of French Media intelligentsia, Alain Finkielkraut found it a perfect case of illustration of the democratic terrorism of consumption. This is how he explained it to an Israeli newspaper. “Those guys that are wrecking schools, what do they actually say? Their message is not a call for help or a demand for more schools or better schools, it is the will to eliminate all what stands between themselves and the objects of their desires. And what are the objects of their desires? It is quite simple: money, brands and sometimes girls. What they want is the ideal of the consumer society. It is what they see on TV”. As the same author also assumed that those youths had been pushed to rioting by Islamic fanatics, the demonstration ended up identifying democracy, consumerism, puerility, wide primitive violence and Islamic terrorism. Why focus on those discourses? I think it’s not only a matter of local paranoia. Those discourses thrive on wider transformation, wider process that I would identify as the “decomposition of the model of social critique” and more generally of the enlightened model of action empowered by knowledge. According to that model, it was the power of reason to unmask the fake “universal” and therefore discover the true one, for example the universal law of the social structure behind the former universality of juridical and political laws. As the true universal was more comprehensive, more powerful then the other, the disclosure was supposed to produce an effect of empowerment. The critical model, in fact, worked as long as the forms of consciousness and the social political movement that it was supposed to end, in fact, were already at work and stronger enough to pre-empt in fact its efficiency. But so long as they actually supported it, the idea of its efficiency still worked. Reason and power went hand in hand at least in the minds.
What is specific of the present configuration is their dissociation. At first sight the implications of the new prophets still obey the critical model, it is still a question of revealing the law of the nation, the law of the power of the commodity under its mask, but the explanation of the system now amounts to the explanation of the reason why the explanation of the reason is deprived of any power. This conjunction between reason and impotence is at the heart of the would-be-enlightened discourses of our time. They hung on to the universal but they hung on to it at the universal that doesn’t work, but is proved by the fact that it doesn’t work, so the universalist discourse becomes a pathological discourse about the disease of a world that doesn’t obey the law of the universal. Right-wing and left-wing discourses mostly bespeak the same syndrome of rational impotence, but they negotiate that impotence, according to different moods. First, the right-wing rage that I’d try to characterise very quickly and, on the other side, left-wing melancholy.
Left-wing melancholy, too, thrives on the evidence that the law of bio-power is extending its panoptical empire on individuals that are indulging in the new universal game available on the market: experimenting one’s life, which is, according to Peter Sloterdijk , the very dream of the modern individual. We are said to be in the belly of the monster where even the capacities of autonomous and disruptive practice and the networks of cooperative action that we could use against it, our virtuosity, as Paolo Virno names it, are exploited by the monster where they serve its new power, the power of immaterial production. Once we have accepted, you know, the premise that we are in the belly of the beast, the more logical deduction is the melancholic view of the omnipotence of the beast, which puts its grip on the desires and the capacity of its potential enemies as it offers them at the best price what is the most valuable commodity, the possibility of experimenting their life as a field of infinite possibilities. Therefore, it is said, the beast can offer anyone just what they want: reality shows on TV for the idiots and increased capacity of self-valorisation of their intellectual and relational capacities for the smart guys. So, in a sense, we are in the belly of the monster but on the other hand the monster appears to be so sweet. Some people sometimes object that the production of the commodities does not exactly identify with the development of the virtuosity of the high-tech workers. Some other people suggest that the shells and the jails of the beast are not that sweet. But they are answered that even if the beast sometimes strikes a bit too hard, it does it only to give way to the flood of universal liquidity.
This is how the master thinker of the post-modern sociology Sigmund Bauman put it, I quote: “the prime technique of power is now escape, slippage, elision and avoidance Blows delivered by stealthy fighter planes and smart self-guarded and target-seeking missiles replaced the territorial advances of the infantry troops. What is really at stake in the new type of war in the era of liquid modernity is not the conquest of a new territory, but crushing the walls which stopped the flow of new , fluid, global powers.” That diagnosis was published at the beginning of 2001. The events of the five years that followed do not exactly confirm it. But, the content of the melancholic prediction doesn’t matter. No matter that two Gulf Wars happened though Baudrillard had affirmed that none of them could ever happen. The message of the melancholic prediction is not about verifiable facts. It is just about the lie hidden in any truth. Melancholy thus turns to a kind of cynical wisdom. It only says: things are not what you think they are. A proposition that will never be refuted. So, cynical melancholy, like prophecy, thrives on its very impotence. It is enough that it can turn it into general impotence and secure the subjective position of the “smart one” who casts a disenchanted gaze on a world where power and reason don’t go hand in hand any more and where the critical interpretation of the system is part of the system itself.
As we know, this ambivalence is also at the heart of many artistic practices, that thrive on both the relevance and the irrelevance of the critical model. The struggle against the “society of the spectacle” and the practice of “détournement” are still put on many artistic and curatorial agendas and they are still supposed to be implemented in standard forms such as : parodies of promotional films, reprocessed disco sounds, media stars modelled in wax figures, Disney animals turned to polymorphous perverts, montages of “vernacular” photographs showing us standardized petty-bourgeois living-rooms, or overloaded supermarket trolleys , huge installations of pipes and machines representing the bowels of the social machine, swallowing everything and turning everything into shit. Those dispositifs keep occupying many of our galleries and museums, with a rhetoric assuming that they make us discover the power of the commodity, the reign of the spectacle or the pornography of power. But, as it will be hard to find anybody who would still ignore them, the mechanism ends up spinning around itself and playing on the very undecidability of its effect.
At the beginning of my talk I referred to Kozui Enwezor’s project for the biennale in Seville. The project of giving art an integral and no more peripheral role in the task of unmasking the machineries of the global world. It comes as no surprise that this enlightened project was dedicated to the production of ‘phantom scenes’. Unmasking the ghosts has turned to be an affair of ghosts. The ghost is a figure of the equivalence between the functioning of the machinery and the functioning of the unmasking the machinery. It has the power of “unmasking” turned to impotence, become itself a ghost, the voice of the ventriloquist.
This is probably why at the end of the space of the exhibition of the Biennale in Seville, there was an installation of a very different kind. In two rooms, the Austrian artist Oliver Ressler had set up a lot of monitors. On those monitors, there was no ghost. Nor collage. There were real persons, standing in front of us, speaking to us. One of them spoke about the Paris Commune, another about feminist perspectives, another one about zapatist movement, other one about alternative economy, alternative forms of production, exchange and life. So, it transpired as though the politics involved in the production of the “phantom scenes”, the politics of “unmasking” had to be supplemented by a politics of real scenes, where real people spoke about the state of the world, the sense of their struggle and the way to envision a new world - a supplement of “central” politics which precisely was “peripheral” in the space of exhibition.
What is at stake here in that spatial dissociation of the elements of the critical model is also the traditional view of the political empowerment of the Universal. It is the idea of the function of political Subjectivization. When the prophets bemoan the impending disaster or when the melancholic those denounce “anaesthesia” and thrive on its presupposition, they point to the same entropy of the historical model of political subjectivity as produced by both the dynamic of a global system and the denunciation of this global system. According to that model there was a two-fold relation between the dynamic of the system and the dynamic of its critique and of its destruction. On the one hand, the dynamic of the Universal was the dynamic of consciousness and of knowledge and consciousness, the unmasking of the machinery, the revolt against devastation, produced by the consciousness of the machinery and of its devastation. But, on the other hand, the dynamic of the Universal was supposed to be the dynamic of the system itself. Capitalism itself was supposed out of its own dynamism to produce the dissolution of its own particularity, it produced the universality of the class which is not a class, as Marx said. In the same way that he made everything solid, every solid thing melt into the air, become immarginal. On the one hand the force of rupture predicated on the historical assimilation of a critical knowledge of the system by the powerful material collectivity. On the other hand the force of rupture was predicated on the cumulating efforts of the melting effect.
What has been called the end of the “grand narrative” and of its “universal victim” is much more the entropy of that double logic of dissolution. Prophetic rage and cynical melancholy take advantage of this entropy to build the new “grand narratives”. Both make the same basic statement: everything becomes liquid , everything melts into the air. But it appears that this liquefaction turns to the contrary of what it was supposed to produce. It turns to the dissolution of any universalism the prophets say. All the human bonds, all the human institutions of social life are swallowed in the flood of consumption and communication, which mean the barbary of the individual beast. Everything becomes liquid, the cynical melancholic say. This means anything becomes equivalent to anything. There can be no subjectivity, but the subjectivity of the beast, which is a funny big monster. There can be no universality but the universality of the process, that makes everything melt into the air of universal equivalence and universal liquefaction.
As we know, some radicals still try to put the story the other way around, they still hang on to the promise of the becoming immaterial of the production of wealth. They tell us that what this becoming immaterial produces is the power of collective intelligence as Antonio Negri or Paolo Virno say, the power of the class that is really no class that needs no scientific head to lead its politenant body, no consciousness of the global system, since it is itself the enlightened, immaterial heart of the global system of the production of the common wealth. So it would be true that capitalism has produced its own grave diggers that we know how from this point on the whole idea that the machine produces its own negation has to be doubled by a very different idea, mostly voiced by Paolo Virno: the idea of exodus, that is to say the idea that we have to subtract the capacities of free individual and collective creation from the function of the machine.
From my point of view, the subtraction has to be both more modest and more radical. What we must leave first is the very idea of the Empire, the very idea of the global beast or the global machinery. It is the very idea of the necessity involved in the idea of the global logic. This way of staging the global system is still part of the logic of domination. The logic of domination is predicated now on the idea of the global necessity. As we know, the ruling oligarchies that govern our world today have appropriated for themselves the Marxist idea of the historical necessity. The only difference, you know, is that the historical necessity now leads to the triumph of the free market and not the triumph of the revolution. They tell us that there is a global necessity that imposes its laws, so that it is not in the power of anybody to oppose it. This is the principal of consensus. What “consensus” means is not only a specific form of government using expertise, arbitrage and agreement in order to avoid conflicts. What “consensus” means is the agreement between sense and sense: I mean it is the agreement on what we can perceive and of the meaning of what we can perceive.
As a way of government consensus says: there can be different interests, values and aspirations but there is only one reality that we can experience and there is only one sense that we can give to that reality. There is a clear evolution of the world according to a global logic. But you cannot deny whatever opinions you may have, or whether it is good or bad. Dissensus begins precisely with the contention that there is not one reality, that the given which offers such or such possibility or impossibility is controversial itself and this is what political Subjectivisation is about: reframing the very field of the given, of the sensible, the intelligible and, consequently, the possible. It is about putting in the unique common world of the consensual logics several worlds, conflicting worlds. To my mind, the first breakaway from the logic of consensus, the first exodus, is the breakaway from the configuration that urges us to think of dissensus only as “exodus”. It is the breakaway from the spectacular partition between the in and the out. The breakaway from the consensual logic of historical necessity and global necessity. There are no historical necessities, there are forces, conjunctions of forces that frame such and such logic of the global necessity.
When our governments decide to reform the so-called welfare system or the regulation of the job market in order to make employment more fluid or adapt our welfare systems to the necessities of the global market they set up the logics of a certain collective intelligence, a certain global logic. When strikers and protesters take the streets in order to thwart that logic of collective necessity, they construct overflows of ‘collective intelligence’. The concentral logic usually stigmatises their struggle by saying that they oppose local and particular interest to the general interest and to the thinking of the future. But precisely the first thing the struggle is about is the very question of the distribution of this kind of opposition, you know, about the competence, you know, what is first challenge is the logic that separates the few ones, the few expert ones who are able to care for the general and the future from the mass of those who are only able to care for the particular and the present.
What is first at stake is the configuration of the possible. This also means what is first at stake is the distribution of the capacities. The struggle is between opposing ways of understanding the relation between the particular and the universal, the relation between the present and the future. The same goes, you know, for instance when networks of mostly anonymous social actors oppose the rational policy of the immigration quotas decided by our governments, when they oppose it with another idea of who can be counted as a member of our national communities. The collective intelligence of emancipation is the collective capacity at work in those scenes of conflict. This collective intelligence has nothing to do with high-tech virtuosity. What it sets to work rather is the capacity which is common to that virtuosity and to the virtuosity that allows for instance the immigrant worker to cross all the geographical and legal boundaries, all the material and symbolical boundaries in order to prove that he is a French worker similar to any other French workers, if we take the example of France, and I think that this may prove a form of universalisation, a struggle for the universal, stronger, sometimes, then many discourses on universal values.
So, what is at stake is the common capacity of those deferent virtuosity, their common capacity to shift places and identities to break through the distribution of places, identities and competences in order to reframe the given situation of the capacity of producing a new configuration of the visible, the intelligible and the possible by implementing the capacity of anybody. That is the kind of universality the politics is about: the capacity of anybody. The political subject is not a part of the social structure, an element of the process of production. It has to come as a supplement to the distribution of powers, places, functions, and identities that make up a society, a supplement to the distribution of the capacity. But what comes as supplement to the distribution of capacity is undistributed capacity, the capacity of anybody, or rather the capacity created by the collectivisation of the power inherent in the equality of anyone with any other one. I called it “the part of the uncounted” or “the part of those who have no part”. It was sometimes misinterpreted as the power of the excluded. But what it truly means is the power of anybody, no matter who, the qualification of those who have no specific qualification. I think that investigation of this power, maybe more fruitful for the sake of artistic and political invention today by the endless denunciation of the power of the beast. The endless unmasking of the ghost. Universality has been for long associated with the demonstration of the power of necessity. It might be time to explore its conjunction with the powers of contingency, with powers of indifference to difference that don’t amount to the equivalence of anything with anything, but with the empowerment of the capacity of no matter who. Thank you.
Jacques Rancière's paper 'Misadventures of Universality' at the Moscow Biennale's Conference
http://2nd.moscowbiennale.ru/en/rancier_report_en/
But this clear commitment to an enlightened view of the global world seemed to be questioned from the very beginning by the title chosen for that Biennale, this title was: ‘The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society’. It transpired as though the global view on the global world, advocated as a purpose of the exhibition, could not be but a matter of ghosts. It transpired as though the old Brechtian will to make the “homely” strange in order to provoke a fresh gaze on the contradictions of our world was overshadowed by the darkness of the Freudian “unhomelyness”. This wavering between two meanings of “unhomeliness” was strongly emphasized by the first works proposed to the visitors. They were series of photographs and installations focusing on the war in Iraq and the antiwar protests in Western countries. Close to the photographs of the horrors of the civil war made by the freelance Iraqui reporter Ghaith Abdul-Ahad we could see photographs of anti-war protests in New York and Washington made by the German born New York based artist Josephine Meckseper. On one of those photographs we could see some protesters holding banners in the background. As for the foreground, it shows us an overfilled dustbin, the content of which falls to the ground. The title of the photograph is “Untitled”. A title, which in such a context means: no title is needed because the image is more telling than any discourse.
This image clearly points to the ambivalence of the “unhomely”. On the one hand it belongs to the tradition of collage. It is not collage in the technical sense of the word but it belongs to the aesthetics of collage that chooses to play on the shock of heterogeneousness if not contradictory elements. But aesthetics was often implemented in the past as a means of producing political consciousness. Among the artists who used it in that way there was another New York based artist Martha Rosler who made in the 70’s her well-known series “Bringing war home” by pasting together photographs of the atrocities in Vietnam and advertising images of American petty-bourgeois interiors. Josephine Meckseper’s photograph may thus look as an ironic answer to Rosler’s series, as she pours the overflow of American consumerism into the way of the protesters that want to bring the Afghanistan or Iraqi war home. What is at issue is not the intention of the artist. What is at issue is a twist that has occurred in the practice of collage, which is also a twist in the meaning given to “unhomeliness”. Rosler’s collage, thirty years ago, was predicated on the heterogeneity of the opposite: the image conflated two opposite worlds, one of them was the hidden truth of the other, but also it conflated them in order to show that they could not go together. The image of the little nude Vietnamese girl shouting ahead of the soldiers on the roads of her wasted country could not go with the image of the American cosy interior without exploding it. The universality of the struggle for emancipation was supposed to break through the universality of the market. Meckseper’s “collage”, on the contrary, is predicated on homogeneity: the world of consumption is no more alien to the world of the struggle. The anti-war protest brings war home, in its way, but it brings it in a space where it is at home in a space of struggle that is itself a territory of consumption. Forty years ago Jean-Luc Godard already made fun of the “children of Marx and Coca-Cola”. But when they marched against the war in Vietnam, the children of Marx and Coca-Cola were fighting with the children of Marx. The little Vietnamese girl did not shout only for grief but also for struggle and victory. Now the protesters can no more identify with the fighters of the other side, no more march for their victory. The Iraqi victims turn out to be only victims of the empire of Coca-Cola, and the protesters are only fighting against that empire, or as a risk of perceiving and making us perceive that this empire ultimately turns out to be the empire of their own consumption.
So, the “phantom scenes of global power” show us the circularity of a worldwide complicity: the protest is organized against the terrorism of the “war on terror”, made by the empire of consumption that throws its shells on Mid-eastern towns. The shells are response to the terror of the attack of the towers. The attack itself had been displayed as the spectacle of the collapse of the empire. The protesters in turn have consumed the images of the collapse of the towers, the image of the bombing in Iraq and what they offer in the streets is a spectacle too, performed by consumers of spectacular horrors and diet coke. Ultimately terrorism and consumption, protest and spectacle are shown as part of the same process, a process governed by the law of the commodity which is the law of equivalence.
Needless to say, this process of homogenisation, this way of erasing any difference between the ways of domination and the ways of protest in the creation of a work which will be displayed and sold by Saatchi can be granted as a pervasive critique of our “global world” where the anti-commodity protests are marketed in the same way as commodity performances. And apparently it was the idea that made the curator decide to display Meckseper’s works as a kind of introduction to the ground thematic of the biennale. What interests me is not to suspect the intentions of the artist or the curator. What matters to me is this horizon of suspicion on the background of which the works of the former and the strategies of the latter are set up. It is the way in which the universality of the protest for human rights or people’s autonomy appears to be absorbed by another universality: the universality of the commodity, or rather a certain idea of the universality of the commodity. This is also a certain idea of the link between contingency and necessity. “Contingency” means what happens and might not have happened, what comes without necessity, comes to us, falls on us. But from this point on “contingency” can easily be identified with a certain idea of indifference: the indifference of what falls into the garbage can. What falls into the garbage in turn can be identified with the equivalence of the commodity, which in turn can be identified with the democratic equivalence of anybody with anybodies in the name of which shells are thrown against those who refuse it but set to work , in attacking it, another equivalence; the equivalence between war and spectacle.
This is apparently what has changed in the relation between Marx and Coca-Cola: the change is not that Marx has disappeared. He has not disappeared at all, he has shifted places. He is now located in the heart of the system, as its ventriloquist’s voice. Gramsci once said that the soviet revolution was revolution against Marx’s Capital, because Marx’s book had become the book of the Bourgeois scientists. The same thing occurred with the kind of Marxism with which the so-called “children of Marx and Coca-Cola” grew up: the Marxism of the denunciation of the mythologies of commodity, the fallacies of consumer’s society and of the empire of the spectacle. Forty years ago, it was supposed to “unmask” the machineries of domination, so as to provide the fighters with new weapons. It has turned to exactly the contrary: sort of nihilist wisdom that was the reign of the commodity and the spectacle, the equivalence of anything with anything, and of anything with its image and with the lie of its image.
But nihilist wisdom does not only give a phantasmagorical view of our world, featuring the entire mankind as a population of merry consumers overfilling all bins with the refuse of their frantic consumption. It also pictures the law of domination as a force that permeates any will to do anything against it. Any protest is a performance, any performance is a spectacle, any spectacle is a commodity, such is the ground thesis of this post-Marxist and post-Situationnist wisdom. But it is not only a matter of “vanity” , it is also a matter of culpability: ultimately the overwhelming empire of commodity is featured as the result of the sin of the individuals that live in it , and the worst sinners turn out to be those who want to rebel against its law.
I wish to substantiate this point by focusing on an apparently paradoxical phenomenon that has rocketed among western intelligentsia and most particularly French intelligentsias during the last ten years. I mean the development of more and more violent polemics against new disease that was said to threaten the future of civilisation. The name of that disease is said to be “democracy”. This is a strange case indeed. The intellectuals who herald this deadly danger live in countries that call themselves “democracy”, substantive that apparently implies the identity of a form of government based on public liberties and a way of individual life whose “freedom of choice” is based on the reign of the free market. As long as the Soviet Empire existed, it was commonplace to oppose that idea of democracy to the enemy called “totalitarianism”. And at the end of 89 the collapse of the soviet system was hailed in the Western World as the triumph of that idea of democracy, as the equivalence of public freedom, free market and the free choice by the individuals of their own way of life. But what happened after was exactly the contrary: the consensus on democracy as “human rights + free market+ free individual choice” vanished with the collapse of its enemy. In the years that followed, more and more furious intellectual campaigns trumpeted the disaster that was made to democracies by an enemy called democracy, more precisely by the disastrous connection between “human rights “ and “ free individual choice”. A number of sociologists, political philosophers and moralists began to explain us that the rights of Man, as Marx had proved it, actually were the rights of the egoistic bourgeois individual, and that, in our days, they meant the rights of the consumers to any kind of consumption – a right that pushed them to overstep and destroy all the limits to their thirst for consuming, thereby all the traditional institutions and forms of authority, imposing a limit to the power of the market. This is, they said, what democracy means in fact: the power of the individual consumer who cares for nothing but the satisfaction of his needs and desires. What the democratic individual wants is democratic equality. But what democratic equality means is equality between the seller and the buyer of any commodity. Therefore, they concluded , what the democratic individual wants is the triumph of the market in all the spheres of life and the more egalitarian it is, the more it is keen on providing that triumph. In such a way it was easy for those analysts to prove for instance that the students’ movements of the 60s and more specifically the movement of May 68 in France were aimed at the destruction of all those forms of authorities that hindered the invasion of the whole life by the law of Capital. By disparaging and impairing all those forms of authority the movement, they said, paved the way for a rekindled capitalism, it allowed our societies to become free aggregations of unbound molecules, whirling in the void, deprived of any affiliation, entirely available to the law of the market.
But that was not yet the whole picture: the consequence of the democratic thirst for equality, according to those new prophets, was not only the reign of the market. It was the complicity and ultimately the identity of democratic individualism and totalitarian terror, conspiring in common to destroy all the human bonds. When I was young, individualism was supposed to be the opposite of totalitarianism. According to the new intellectual fashion, it turned out that totalitarianism was the necessary outcome of individualism, which meant the fanaticism of free choice and unlimited consumption. When the twin towers were destroyed, a well-known French philosopher, psychoanalyst and professor of Roman Law, Pierre Legendre, explained in a French newspaper that it was something like the return of the western repressed, the castigation for the western overrule of the symbolic order an upsetting emblematised by gay marriage . Two years after, a French linguist and philosopher, Jean-Claude Milner gave a more radical turn to the thesis, as he published a book entitled The Criminal Tendencies of Democratic Europe. The crime that he imputed to “democratic Europe” was quite simply the extermination of the European Jews. As the Jewish people, he argued, is the people faithful to the law of affiliation and transmission, it stood up as the only obstacle to the democratic desire of unlimitedness. That’s why democracy had to exterminate the Jews and was the only beneficiary of their extermination.
More recently in the fall of 2005 when violent riots burst out in the poor northern suburbs of Paris, populated mostly by families coming from Moghreb and from Black Africa, the spokesperson of French Media intelligentsia, Alain Finkielkraut found it a perfect case of illustration of the democratic terrorism of consumption. This is how he explained it to an Israeli newspaper. “Those guys that are wrecking schools, what do they actually say? Their message is not a call for help or a demand for more schools or better schools, it is the will to eliminate all what stands between themselves and the objects of their desires. And what are the objects of their desires? It is quite simple: money, brands and sometimes girls. What they want is the ideal of the consumer society. It is what they see on TV”. As the same author also assumed that those youths had been pushed to rioting by Islamic fanatics, the demonstration ended up identifying democracy, consumerism, puerility, wide primitive violence and Islamic terrorism. Why focus on those discourses? I think it’s not only a matter of local paranoia. Those discourses thrive on wider transformation, wider process that I would identify as the “decomposition of the model of social critique” and more generally of the enlightened model of action empowered by knowledge. According to that model, it was the power of reason to unmask the fake “universal” and therefore discover the true one, for example the universal law of the social structure behind the former universality of juridical and political laws. As the true universal was more comprehensive, more powerful then the other, the disclosure was supposed to produce an effect of empowerment. The critical model, in fact, worked as long as the forms of consciousness and the social political movement that it was supposed to end, in fact, were already at work and stronger enough to pre-empt in fact its efficiency. But so long as they actually supported it, the idea of its efficiency still worked. Reason and power went hand in hand at least in the minds.
What is specific of the present configuration is their dissociation. At first sight the implications of the new prophets still obey the critical model, it is still a question of revealing the law of the nation, the law of the power of the commodity under its mask, but the explanation of the system now amounts to the explanation of the reason why the explanation of the reason is deprived of any power. This conjunction between reason and impotence is at the heart of the would-be-enlightened discourses of our time. They hung on to the universal but they hung on to it at the universal that doesn’t work, but is proved by the fact that it doesn’t work, so the universalist discourse becomes a pathological discourse about the disease of a world that doesn’t obey the law of the universal. Right-wing and left-wing discourses mostly bespeak the same syndrome of rational impotence, but they negotiate that impotence, according to different moods. First, the right-wing rage that I’d try to characterise very quickly and, on the other side, left-wing melancholy.
Left-wing melancholy, too, thrives on the evidence that the law of bio-power is extending its panoptical empire on individuals that are indulging in the new universal game available on the market: experimenting one’s life, which is, according to Peter Sloterdijk , the very dream of the modern individual. We are said to be in the belly of the monster where even the capacities of autonomous and disruptive practice and the networks of cooperative action that we could use against it, our virtuosity, as Paolo Virno names it, are exploited by the monster where they serve its new power, the power of immaterial production. Once we have accepted, you know, the premise that we are in the belly of the beast, the more logical deduction is the melancholic view of the omnipotence of the beast, which puts its grip on the desires and the capacity of its potential enemies as it offers them at the best price what is the most valuable commodity, the possibility of experimenting their life as a field of infinite possibilities. Therefore, it is said, the beast can offer anyone just what they want: reality shows on TV for the idiots and increased capacity of self-valorisation of their intellectual and relational capacities for the smart guys. So, in a sense, we are in the belly of the monster but on the other hand the monster appears to be so sweet. Some people sometimes object that the production of the commodities does not exactly identify with the development of the virtuosity of the high-tech workers. Some other people suggest that the shells and the jails of the beast are not that sweet. But they are answered that even if the beast sometimes strikes a bit too hard, it does it only to give way to the flood of universal liquidity.
This is how the master thinker of the post-modern sociology Sigmund Bauman put it, I quote: “the prime technique of power is now escape, slippage, elision and avoidance Blows delivered by stealthy fighter planes and smart self-guarded and target-seeking missiles replaced the territorial advances of the infantry troops. What is really at stake in the new type of war in the era of liquid modernity is not the conquest of a new territory, but crushing the walls which stopped the flow of new , fluid, global powers.” That diagnosis was published at the beginning of 2001. The events of the five years that followed do not exactly confirm it. But, the content of the melancholic prediction doesn’t matter. No matter that two Gulf Wars happened though Baudrillard had affirmed that none of them could ever happen. The message of the melancholic prediction is not about verifiable facts. It is just about the lie hidden in any truth. Melancholy thus turns to a kind of cynical wisdom. It only says: things are not what you think they are. A proposition that will never be refuted. So, cynical melancholy, like prophecy, thrives on its very impotence. It is enough that it can turn it into general impotence and secure the subjective position of the “smart one” who casts a disenchanted gaze on a world where power and reason don’t go hand in hand any more and where the critical interpretation of the system is part of the system itself.
As we know, this ambivalence is also at the heart of many artistic practices, that thrive on both the relevance and the irrelevance of the critical model. The struggle against the “society of the spectacle” and the practice of “détournement” are still put on many artistic and curatorial agendas and they are still supposed to be implemented in standard forms such as : parodies of promotional films, reprocessed disco sounds, media stars modelled in wax figures, Disney animals turned to polymorphous perverts, montages of “vernacular” photographs showing us standardized petty-bourgeois living-rooms, or overloaded supermarket trolleys , huge installations of pipes and machines representing the bowels of the social machine, swallowing everything and turning everything into shit. Those dispositifs keep occupying many of our galleries and museums, with a rhetoric assuming that they make us discover the power of the commodity, the reign of the spectacle or the pornography of power. But, as it will be hard to find anybody who would still ignore them, the mechanism ends up spinning around itself and playing on the very undecidability of its effect.
At the beginning of my talk I referred to Kozui Enwezor’s project for the biennale in Seville. The project of giving art an integral and no more peripheral role in the task of unmasking the machineries of the global world. It comes as no surprise that this enlightened project was dedicated to the production of ‘phantom scenes’. Unmasking the ghosts has turned to be an affair of ghosts. The ghost is a figure of the equivalence between the functioning of the machinery and the functioning of the unmasking the machinery. It has the power of “unmasking” turned to impotence, become itself a ghost, the voice of the ventriloquist.
This is probably why at the end of the space of the exhibition of the Biennale in Seville, there was an installation of a very different kind. In two rooms, the Austrian artist Oliver Ressler had set up a lot of monitors. On those monitors, there was no ghost. Nor collage. There were real persons, standing in front of us, speaking to us. One of them spoke about the Paris Commune, another about feminist perspectives, another one about zapatist movement, other one about alternative economy, alternative forms of production, exchange and life. So, it transpired as though the politics involved in the production of the “phantom scenes”, the politics of “unmasking” had to be supplemented by a politics of real scenes, where real people spoke about the state of the world, the sense of their struggle and the way to envision a new world - a supplement of “central” politics which precisely was “peripheral” in the space of exhibition.
What is at stake here in that spatial dissociation of the elements of the critical model is also the traditional view of the political empowerment of the Universal. It is the idea of the function of political Subjectivization. When the prophets bemoan the impending disaster or when the melancholic those denounce “anaesthesia” and thrive on its presupposition, they point to the same entropy of the historical model of political subjectivity as produced by both the dynamic of a global system and the denunciation of this global system. According to that model there was a two-fold relation between the dynamic of the system and the dynamic of its critique and of its destruction. On the one hand, the dynamic of the Universal was the dynamic of consciousness and of knowledge and consciousness, the unmasking of the machinery, the revolt against devastation, produced by the consciousness of the machinery and of its devastation. But, on the other hand, the dynamic of the Universal was supposed to be the dynamic of the system itself. Capitalism itself was supposed out of its own dynamism to produce the dissolution of its own particularity, it produced the universality of the class which is not a class, as Marx said. In the same way that he made everything solid, every solid thing melt into the air, become immarginal. On the one hand the force of rupture predicated on the historical assimilation of a critical knowledge of the system by the powerful material collectivity. On the other hand the force of rupture was predicated on the cumulating efforts of the melting effect.
What has been called the end of the “grand narrative” and of its “universal victim” is much more the entropy of that double logic of dissolution. Prophetic rage and cynical melancholy take advantage of this entropy to build the new “grand narratives”. Both make the same basic statement: everything becomes liquid , everything melts into the air. But it appears that this liquefaction turns to the contrary of what it was supposed to produce. It turns to the dissolution of any universalism the prophets say. All the human bonds, all the human institutions of social life are swallowed in the flood of consumption and communication, which mean the barbary of the individual beast. Everything becomes liquid, the cynical melancholic say. This means anything becomes equivalent to anything. There can be no subjectivity, but the subjectivity of the beast, which is a funny big monster. There can be no universality but the universality of the process, that makes everything melt into the air of universal equivalence and universal liquefaction.
As we know, some radicals still try to put the story the other way around, they still hang on to the promise of the becoming immaterial of the production of wealth. They tell us that what this becoming immaterial produces is the power of collective intelligence as Antonio Negri or Paolo Virno say, the power of the class that is really no class that needs no scientific head to lead its politenant body, no consciousness of the global system, since it is itself the enlightened, immaterial heart of the global system of the production of the common wealth. So it would be true that capitalism has produced its own grave diggers that we know how from this point on the whole idea that the machine produces its own negation has to be doubled by a very different idea, mostly voiced by Paolo Virno: the idea of exodus, that is to say the idea that we have to subtract the capacities of free individual and collective creation from the function of the machine.
From my point of view, the subtraction has to be both more modest and more radical. What we must leave first is the very idea of the Empire, the very idea of the global beast or the global machinery. It is the very idea of the necessity involved in the idea of the global logic. This way of staging the global system is still part of the logic of domination. The logic of domination is predicated now on the idea of the global necessity. As we know, the ruling oligarchies that govern our world today have appropriated for themselves the Marxist idea of the historical necessity. The only difference, you know, is that the historical necessity now leads to the triumph of the free market and not the triumph of the revolution. They tell us that there is a global necessity that imposes its laws, so that it is not in the power of anybody to oppose it. This is the principal of consensus. What “consensus” means is not only a specific form of government using expertise, arbitrage and agreement in order to avoid conflicts. What “consensus” means is the agreement between sense and sense: I mean it is the agreement on what we can perceive and of the meaning of what we can perceive.
As a way of government consensus says: there can be different interests, values and aspirations but there is only one reality that we can experience and there is only one sense that we can give to that reality. There is a clear evolution of the world according to a global logic. But you cannot deny whatever opinions you may have, or whether it is good or bad. Dissensus begins precisely with the contention that there is not one reality, that the given which offers such or such possibility or impossibility is controversial itself and this is what political Subjectivisation is about: reframing the very field of the given, of the sensible, the intelligible and, consequently, the possible. It is about putting in the unique common world of the consensual logics several worlds, conflicting worlds. To my mind, the first breakaway from the logic of consensus, the first exodus, is the breakaway from the configuration that urges us to think of dissensus only as “exodus”. It is the breakaway from the spectacular partition between the in and the out. The breakaway from the consensual logic of historical necessity and global necessity. There are no historical necessities, there are forces, conjunctions of forces that frame such and such logic of the global necessity.
When our governments decide to reform the so-called welfare system or the regulation of the job market in order to make employment more fluid or adapt our welfare systems to the necessities of the global market they set up the logics of a certain collective intelligence, a certain global logic. When strikers and protesters take the streets in order to thwart that logic of collective necessity, they construct overflows of ‘collective intelligence’. The concentral logic usually stigmatises their struggle by saying that they oppose local and particular interest to the general interest and to the thinking of the future. But precisely the first thing the struggle is about is the very question of the distribution of this kind of opposition, you know, about the competence, you know, what is first challenge is the logic that separates the few ones, the few expert ones who are able to care for the general and the future from the mass of those who are only able to care for the particular and the present.
What is first at stake is the configuration of the possible. This also means what is first at stake is the distribution of the capacities. The struggle is between opposing ways of understanding the relation between the particular and the universal, the relation between the present and the future. The same goes, you know, for instance when networks of mostly anonymous social actors oppose the rational policy of the immigration quotas decided by our governments, when they oppose it with another idea of who can be counted as a member of our national communities. The collective intelligence of emancipation is the collective capacity at work in those scenes of conflict. This collective intelligence has nothing to do with high-tech virtuosity. What it sets to work rather is the capacity which is common to that virtuosity and to the virtuosity that allows for instance the immigrant worker to cross all the geographical and legal boundaries, all the material and symbolical boundaries in order to prove that he is a French worker similar to any other French workers, if we take the example of France, and I think that this may prove a form of universalisation, a struggle for the universal, stronger, sometimes, then many discourses on universal values.
So, what is at stake is the common capacity of those deferent virtuosity, their common capacity to shift places and identities to break through the distribution of places, identities and competences in order to reframe the given situation of the capacity of producing a new configuration of the visible, the intelligible and the possible by implementing the capacity of anybody. That is the kind of universality the politics is about: the capacity of anybody. The political subject is not a part of the social structure, an element of the process of production. It has to come as a supplement to the distribution of powers, places, functions, and identities that make up a society, a supplement to the distribution of the capacity. But what comes as supplement to the distribution of capacity is undistributed capacity, the capacity of anybody, or rather the capacity created by the collectivisation of the power inherent in the equality of anyone with any other one. I called it “the part of the uncounted” or “the part of those who have no part”. It was sometimes misinterpreted as the power of the excluded. But what it truly means is the power of anybody, no matter who, the qualification of those who have no specific qualification. I think that investigation of this power, maybe more fruitful for the sake of artistic and political invention today by the endless denunciation of the power of the beast. The endless unmasking of the ghost. Universality has been for long associated with the demonstration of the power of necessity. It might be time to explore its conjunction with the powers of contingency, with powers of indifference to difference that don’t amount to the equivalence of anything with anything, but with the empowerment of the capacity of no matter who. Thank you.
Jacques Rancière's paper 'Misadventures of Universality' at the Moscow Biennale's Conference
http://2nd.moscowbiennale.ru/en/rancier_report_en/
Thursday, February 5, 2009
This is what I most want
This is what I most want
unpursued, alone
to reach beyond the light
that I am furthest from.
And for you to shine there-
no other happiness-
and learn, from starlight,
what its fire might suggest.
A star burns as a star,
light becomes light,
because our murmuring
strengthens us, and warms the night.
And I want to say to you
my little one, whispering,
I can only lift you towards the light
by means of this babbling.
Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (1891-1931)
unpursued, alone
to reach beyond the light
that I am furthest from.
And for you to shine there-
no other happiness-
and learn, from starlight,
what its fire might suggest.
A star burns as a star,
light becomes light,
because our murmuring
strengthens us, and warms the night.
And I want to say to you
my little one, whispering,
I can only lift you towards the light
by means of this babbling.
Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (1891-1931)
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Monday, February 2, 2009
And the Winner is ..
Diogenes Verigakis- Leda Lycourioti
vacation house in Skroponeri, Boeotia
Photo:Marianna Verigakis
The Residence in Greece: from the 20th to the 21st century
Benaki Museum, Athens
23/01/2009 - 15/03/2009
Sunday, February 1, 2009
The residence in Greece: from the 20th to the 21st century
Over the past few years, interest in residential architecture, which for some decades had been marginalized, has risen once more worldwide. The "return to residences" commenced at the 2006 Venice Biennale, whose theme was the modern metropolis; then continued with a series of international exhibitions.
Within this framework, the exhibition, which appears to be particularly timely, makes a review of “landmark” residential designs in modern architecture, presenting and recording the phases of development and the trends in residential architecture from the 20th to the 21st century.
The purpose of the exhibition is to “open up” architecture to a broader public, which to date has approached housing mainly from a commercial standpoint; to render specific groups more sensitive and to mobilize them in order to highlight the work of architecture and to improve the residential standards; and, finally, to correlate modern architecture with contemporary materials and new technologies.
The exhibition will show approximately 60 houses by award-winning Greek architects, selected from a total of 175 invitations to participate in a competition issued by the Hellenic Institute of Architecture. The participations submitted include work by: A66 – D. & S. Antonakaki; Apostolakos Architects; Aik. Valsamaki; I. & A. Vikelas; deca ARCHITECTURE; D. Diamantopoulos; P. Dragonas – V. Christopoulou; T. Exarchopoulos; A. Zambikos; D. Issaïas – T. Papaioannou, N. Ktenas; A. Kotsiopoulos – E. Chalkiopoulou; K.
George Lycouriotis
block of flats on Lycabettus hill, Athens
Aristide Antonas
private house at Hydra Island
Aris Zabikos
Dimitris Papalexopoulos
Benaki Museum, Athens
23/01/2009 - 15/03/2009
Organization
Hellenic Institute of Architecture
Within this framework, the exhibition, which appears to be particularly timely, makes a review of “landmark” residential designs in modern architecture, presenting and recording the phases of development and the trends in residential architecture from the 20th to the 21st century.
The purpose of the exhibition is to “open up” architecture to a broader public, which to date has approached housing mainly from a commercial standpoint; to render specific groups more sensitive and to mobilize them in order to highlight the work of architecture and to improve the residential standards; and, finally, to correlate modern architecture with contemporary materials and new technologies.
The exhibition will show approximately 60 houses by award-winning Greek architects, selected from a total of 175 invitations to participate in a competition issued by the Hellenic Institute of Architecture. The participations submitted include work by: A66 – D. & S. Antonakaki; Apostolakos Architects; Aik. Valsamaki; I. & A. Vikelas; deca ARCHITECTURE; D. Diamantopoulos; P. Dragonas – V. Christopoulou; T. Exarchopoulos; A. Zambikos; D. Issaïas – T. Papaioannou, N. Ktenas; A. Kotsiopoulos – E. Chalkiopoulou; K.
George Lycouriotis
block of flats on Lycabettus hill, Athens
Aristide Antonas
private house at Hydra Island
Aris Zabikos
Dimitris Papalexopoulos
Benaki Museum, Athens
23/01/2009 - 15/03/2009
Organization
Hellenic Institute of Architecture
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Private Moon
Leonid Tishkov - Boris Bendikov
Private Moon, 2003 – 2005
Russian Dreams
Curated by Olga Sviblova
Artists also include: AES+F Group, Alexander Ponomarev, Dubossarsky and Vinogradov,Yuri Avvakumov, Dmitri Gutov, Olga Chernysheva, Leonid Tishkov, Andrei Molodkin, Alexei Kostroma, Nikolai Polissky, Andrei Philippov,Vladimir Tarasov, Dmitry Gutov, Yuri Albert, Haim Sokol, MishMash Group, Julia Milner,Alexei Buldakov
December 4, 2008 - February 8, 2009
Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow
Friday, January 23, 2009
Educated shoppers go to Globus
Otto Baumberger, Wer rechnet kauft im Globus (Educated shoppers go to Globus), 1934
Nowhere
Kostas Bassanos, "From Here to Eternity", 2007, installation, cardboard box, slide projection
Nowhere at Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Centre Thursday 15th January-21st February
The great divide
The discipline of anthropology has split firmly into two factions - social anthropologists and evolutionary anthropologists. Hannah Fearn asks whether or not the warring sides can be reconciled
Renowned anthropologist Eric Wolf once described his discipline as "the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences".
Perhaps he was attempting to capture the uniqueness of a subject that can talk to both academic camps but, by the time he died in 1999, his words articulated the growing split within the discipline.
Today, anthropology is at war with itself. The discipline has divided into two schools of thought - the social anthropologists and the evolutionary anthropologists. The schism between the two is simple but deeply ingrained. Academics in the subject clearly align themselves with one side or the other; once that choice is made it defines their career.
The division lies in the question of whether or not anthropology is a science, and if it accepts that Darwinian evolutionary theory guides research into human behaviour and the development of societies.
On one side are the evolutionary anthropologists. "(They believe) our behaviour is based on things that we did to find mates in our years of evolution," says Alex Bentley, a lecturer in anthropology at Durham University. "Then we have the social anthropologists. Some of them really strongly reject this kind of thinking. They consider it reductionist. They are focused on the specifics of culture."
Put crudely, social anthropologists describe and compare the development of human cultures and societies, while evolutionary anthropologists seek to explain it by reference to our biological evolution. The two sides of the one discipline are struggling to unite.
"They just do not see eye to eye. They don't see anything the same way," says Bentley. "It can be very difficult. In some departments they hardly speak. Professionally there is almost no overlap. One is more descriptive and the other is more analytical. It's a very clear dividing line in many departments. It often causes a lot of acrimony."
This division dates back to the 1970s, when eminent American anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon (now retired emeritus professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara) presented his work on the Yanomami tribes of Venezuela in the context of evolutionary biology.
At first, evolutionary anthropologists were considered the mavericks of the discipline and regarded with both amusement and disdain. But the popularity of the subdiscipline has grown over the decades, and universities now face a challenge in keeping their anthropology departments operating civilly. The divisions within the subject are even guiding the hiring process, with many recruiters ensuring a balance of interests when hiring new staff.
"(Departments) might say: 'We'll have a social anthropologist this time but next time we can have a biological anthropologist.' It's that much out in the open," continues Bentley. Even undergraduates are forced to select one route of study or another from the outset. The effect on the subject is obvious: "While the two sides aren't communicating (the discipline) is not working as efficiently as it could," Bentley concludes.
Although the debate may be hosted within academe, there is nothing considered about the war of words exchanged between the two camps. Today's anthropologists are certainly not afraid of a bit of mud-slinging.
"A lot of anthropologists are interpretivists; they are interpreting what they see. They're not working within the framework of the scientific method," says Ruth Mace, professor of evolutionary anthropology at University College London. "That's all well and good, but why should we be more interested in one person's interpretation over someone else's interpretation unless we have got some commonly accepted grounds for testing competing hypotheses?"
For Mace, the debate over whether to work within the "scientific method" is holding anthropology back. "If you're interested in making formal hypotheses about why people do what they do, we have to test those hypotheses," she says. "I'm a scientist - that's what I do. I think that evolutionary theory provides a very real framework for trying to understand that. If a discipline isn't saying anything that is of interest to any other discipline then that is a problem. The scientific method is a common currency across all scientific disciplines, most of the social sciences included. In that way, disciplines can speak to each other."
Mace believes that cultural anthropology is still very dominant, and that trying to work as an evolutionary anthropologist is difficult within a British university. "It's unfortunate that the discipline's divided," she says. "It's difficult to do science in a non-science department."
But Tim Ingold, chair of social anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, finds this view hard to accept. He says it is the biological anthropologists' refusal to compromise that is at the root of the split.
"They seem to be stuck on a very rigid form of argument, and it's one which they're not prepared to question. They already assume they have the correct answer. It's extremely frustrating. They're not prepared to accept any kind of criticism from people on the social side," Ingold says. "From where I sit, the biggest obstacle to satisfactory integration in this way is this dogmatic adherence to a fairly orthodox neo-Darwinian paradigm.
"I have always seen anthropology as something that bridges the divide between science and the humanities, but the terms on which most biological anthropologists insist that (the two sides) should be brought together are completely wrong and unhelpful."
Indeed, Ingold is concerned about the rise of evolutionary anthropology in US academe. "Everybody looking across the pond would say that the way in which things have gone there has been unhelpful to the discipline."
When Ingold established the department of anthropology, he recruited a team of social anthropologists. Despite this, he deliberately chose not to call it the "department of social anthropology" as he did not want to be divisive.
He says anthropology is now locked in a stalemate for which he blames the lack of movement on the part of the evolutionary anthropologists. "They're just not prepared to compromise," Ingold says. "I believe anthropology should be a science but there are many ways of doing science."
How can the discipline expect to unite if neither side is prepared to talk to the other and to compromise? Despite the clear division, many anthropologists remain hopeful. They believe a common ground can be found, and are working to bring both camps together.
Harvey Whitehouse, professor of anthropology at the University of Oxford, is one of them. He aims to show how the two sides of anthropology can work in tandem, and tells social anthropologists that they must accept that biological differences have an impact on the development of society if academic research in anthropology is to progress.
"Over the course of the 20th century, anthropology became 'mindblind', but more generally the discipline developed a kind of biological myopia. The future of anthropology lies in the development of much sharper vision in these areas," wrote Whitehouse in an insert for Joy Hendry's An Introduction to Cultural and Social Anthropology: Sharing Our Worlds. "Just as feminist scholarship has begun seriously to grapple with and contribute to the discoveries of evolutionary sciences and experimental psychology, so too must anthropology ... In my own area of specialist interest, the anthropology of religion, there can be little doubt that natural features of cognition contribute to the content and salience of beliefs in the afterlife."
In fact, the recent book Religion, Anthropology and Cognitive Science, co-authored by Whitehouse, shows just how easily ethnography, history and cognitive science can be integrated in an anthropological study of religion.
"Children, it now seems, cannot be raised to believe just anything; nor can adults be converted to any type of ideological system," Whitehouse wrote.
"Religions must exploit certain fundamental universal human intuitive biases and predilections if they are to get a foothold. The cognitivist project has certainly been valuable in explaining why many features of religious thinking and behaviour are much the same everywhere."
The Royal Anthropological Institute is at the vanguard of a new unity within the discipline. Hilary Callan, the institute's director, says the charity exists to represent the interests of all anthropologists. As such it has inevitably faced its critics.
"The discipline has suffered from the progressive divergence between the sub-disciplines. There has been a tendency for the biological end to be associated with the political right and the sociocultural with the political left. I would not support that polarisation. I think it's a false one," she explains.
"We are positioned as an institution that's representative of all of the subdisciplines. There have been debates about whether there has been over-representation of the interests of social anthropology at the expense of biological and evolutionary anthropology."
But Callan is optimistic, and such criticisms have not deterred the institute from its aim of getting biological and social anthropologists talking to each other. The institute is hosting lectures with a focus on all disciplines bringing the two forks together - psychology and behaviour; nature and culture; Darwinism and religion.
It is also publishing new texts looking at the oldest questions of anthropology, such as kinship, with the newest cross-disciplinary theories. Callan calls this progress the "green shoots of new growth".
"If there has been a problem it has been a problem of separateness, but that separateness has not been complete and without exception. The issue of reaching across boundaries is not just a question of bringing together biological and social anthropology," she says.
New research subjects, such as medical anthropology and the anthropology of tourism, are examples of this reaching out. At Durham University, Robert Barton, head of the anthropology department, has deliberately recruited a team of academics who will work to bring the two elements of the one discipline closer together. He cannot understand why the two subdisciplines have been kept separate for so long, and believes that the division has led anthropology to lose its way academically.
"There was a kind of confusion about what the aims (of anthropology) were," Barton says. "We're interested in the same kind of phenomena. Sometimes we're working in parallel but not really talking to one another about what methods of study we're using and how these might contribute to each other's interests."
Barton's employment strategy has been aimed at bringing in academics specifically interested in exploring the areas of interaction between social and biological anthropology, whether they are from a scientific or humanities background.
"What I am interested in doing here is bringing together those people who really do have something to say to each other," Barton explains. "There was a real barrier to that happening in terms of lack of understanding. In particular I think many social anthropologists misunderstood evolutionary biology. They caricatured it. One of my missions has been to break down those misperceptions that everything we're doing implies genetic determinism."
Barton's researchers are working on overlaps between the disciplines, and are focused on research that will reveal new truths about the human condition. An example of such work includes an analysis into whether the evolution of a pastoral way of life in certain parts of the world is linked to the biological capacity to digest milk. "That's the kind of process that people are interested in," he says.
Barton believes that his work to unite anthropologists also creates an opportunity to engage academics outside the discipline in a way that has been impossible until now because of persistent infighting.
"I'm very optimistic. We're going to see real collaboration going on across the social divide," he adds. "I'm totally convinced that it's essential they come together. I don't think there's any future for an anthropology that doesn't combine the different approaches and perspectives."
However, even here among those working to get the anthropology factions talking again, opinions are divided. At the Royal Anthropological Institute, Callan says that although evolutionary and social anthropologists can certainly work together profitably, they will never be united.
"What I think will happen, and what I hope will happen over the coming period, is that the specialisation and the proliferation of really excellent research within the subfields will continue," says Callan. "But there will be a growing core of common interest looking at the themes from different perspectives, and raising new questions and new kinds of answers to them.
"There will always be many anthropologies. The discipline won't speak with one voice or look in one direction."
By Hannah Fearn
Source: Times Higher Education , Nov.08
Renowned anthropologist Eric Wolf once described his discipline as "the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences".
Perhaps he was attempting to capture the uniqueness of a subject that can talk to both academic camps but, by the time he died in 1999, his words articulated the growing split within the discipline.
Today, anthropology is at war with itself. The discipline has divided into two schools of thought - the social anthropologists and the evolutionary anthropologists. The schism between the two is simple but deeply ingrained. Academics in the subject clearly align themselves with one side or the other; once that choice is made it defines their career.
The division lies in the question of whether or not anthropology is a science, and if it accepts that Darwinian evolutionary theory guides research into human behaviour and the development of societies.
On one side are the evolutionary anthropologists. "(They believe) our behaviour is based on things that we did to find mates in our years of evolution," says Alex Bentley, a lecturer in anthropology at Durham University. "Then we have the social anthropologists. Some of them really strongly reject this kind of thinking. They consider it reductionist. They are focused on the specifics of culture."
Put crudely, social anthropologists describe and compare the development of human cultures and societies, while evolutionary anthropologists seek to explain it by reference to our biological evolution. The two sides of the one discipline are struggling to unite.
"They just do not see eye to eye. They don't see anything the same way," says Bentley. "It can be very difficult. In some departments they hardly speak. Professionally there is almost no overlap. One is more descriptive and the other is more analytical. It's a very clear dividing line in many departments. It often causes a lot of acrimony."
This division dates back to the 1970s, when eminent American anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon (now retired emeritus professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara) presented his work on the Yanomami tribes of Venezuela in the context of evolutionary biology.
At first, evolutionary anthropologists were considered the mavericks of the discipline and regarded with both amusement and disdain. But the popularity of the subdiscipline has grown over the decades, and universities now face a challenge in keeping their anthropology departments operating civilly. The divisions within the subject are even guiding the hiring process, with many recruiters ensuring a balance of interests when hiring new staff.
"(Departments) might say: 'We'll have a social anthropologist this time but next time we can have a biological anthropologist.' It's that much out in the open," continues Bentley. Even undergraduates are forced to select one route of study or another from the outset. The effect on the subject is obvious: "While the two sides aren't communicating (the discipline) is not working as efficiently as it could," Bentley concludes.
Although the debate may be hosted within academe, there is nothing considered about the war of words exchanged between the two camps. Today's anthropologists are certainly not afraid of a bit of mud-slinging.
"A lot of anthropologists are interpretivists; they are interpreting what they see. They're not working within the framework of the scientific method," says Ruth Mace, professor of evolutionary anthropology at University College London. "That's all well and good, but why should we be more interested in one person's interpretation over someone else's interpretation unless we have got some commonly accepted grounds for testing competing hypotheses?"
For Mace, the debate over whether to work within the "scientific method" is holding anthropology back. "If you're interested in making formal hypotheses about why people do what they do, we have to test those hypotheses," she says. "I'm a scientist - that's what I do. I think that evolutionary theory provides a very real framework for trying to understand that. If a discipline isn't saying anything that is of interest to any other discipline then that is a problem. The scientific method is a common currency across all scientific disciplines, most of the social sciences included. In that way, disciplines can speak to each other."
Mace believes that cultural anthropology is still very dominant, and that trying to work as an evolutionary anthropologist is difficult within a British university. "It's unfortunate that the discipline's divided," she says. "It's difficult to do science in a non-science department."
But Tim Ingold, chair of social anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, finds this view hard to accept. He says it is the biological anthropologists' refusal to compromise that is at the root of the split.
"They seem to be stuck on a very rigid form of argument, and it's one which they're not prepared to question. They already assume they have the correct answer. It's extremely frustrating. They're not prepared to accept any kind of criticism from people on the social side," Ingold says. "From where I sit, the biggest obstacle to satisfactory integration in this way is this dogmatic adherence to a fairly orthodox neo-Darwinian paradigm.
"I have always seen anthropology as something that bridges the divide between science and the humanities, but the terms on which most biological anthropologists insist that (the two sides) should be brought together are completely wrong and unhelpful."
Indeed, Ingold is concerned about the rise of evolutionary anthropology in US academe. "Everybody looking across the pond would say that the way in which things have gone there has been unhelpful to the discipline."
When Ingold established the department of anthropology, he recruited a team of social anthropologists. Despite this, he deliberately chose not to call it the "department of social anthropology" as he did not want to be divisive.
He says anthropology is now locked in a stalemate for which he blames the lack of movement on the part of the evolutionary anthropologists. "They're just not prepared to compromise," Ingold says. "I believe anthropology should be a science but there are many ways of doing science."
How can the discipline expect to unite if neither side is prepared to talk to the other and to compromise? Despite the clear division, many anthropologists remain hopeful. They believe a common ground can be found, and are working to bring both camps together.
Harvey Whitehouse, professor of anthropology at the University of Oxford, is one of them. He aims to show how the two sides of anthropology can work in tandem, and tells social anthropologists that they must accept that biological differences have an impact on the development of society if academic research in anthropology is to progress.
"Over the course of the 20th century, anthropology became 'mindblind', but more generally the discipline developed a kind of biological myopia. The future of anthropology lies in the development of much sharper vision in these areas," wrote Whitehouse in an insert for Joy Hendry's An Introduction to Cultural and Social Anthropology: Sharing Our Worlds. "Just as feminist scholarship has begun seriously to grapple with and contribute to the discoveries of evolutionary sciences and experimental psychology, so too must anthropology ... In my own area of specialist interest, the anthropology of religion, there can be little doubt that natural features of cognition contribute to the content and salience of beliefs in the afterlife."
In fact, the recent book Religion, Anthropology and Cognitive Science, co-authored by Whitehouse, shows just how easily ethnography, history and cognitive science can be integrated in an anthropological study of religion.
"Children, it now seems, cannot be raised to believe just anything; nor can adults be converted to any type of ideological system," Whitehouse wrote.
"Religions must exploit certain fundamental universal human intuitive biases and predilections if they are to get a foothold. The cognitivist project has certainly been valuable in explaining why many features of religious thinking and behaviour are much the same everywhere."
The Royal Anthropological Institute is at the vanguard of a new unity within the discipline. Hilary Callan, the institute's director, says the charity exists to represent the interests of all anthropologists. As such it has inevitably faced its critics.
"The discipline has suffered from the progressive divergence between the sub-disciplines. There has been a tendency for the biological end to be associated with the political right and the sociocultural with the political left. I would not support that polarisation. I think it's a false one," she explains.
"We are positioned as an institution that's representative of all of the subdisciplines. There have been debates about whether there has been over-representation of the interests of social anthropology at the expense of biological and evolutionary anthropology."
But Callan is optimistic, and such criticisms have not deterred the institute from its aim of getting biological and social anthropologists talking to each other. The institute is hosting lectures with a focus on all disciplines bringing the two forks together - psychology and behaviour; nature and culture; Darwinism and religion.
It is also publishing new texts looking at the oldest questions of anthropology, such as kinship, with the newest cross-disciplinary theories. Callan calls this progress the "green shoots of new growth".
"If there has been a problem it has been a problem of separateness, but that separateness has not been complete and without exception. The issue of reaching across boundaries is not just a question of bringing together biological and social anthropology," she says.
New research subjects, such as medical anthropology and the anthropology of tourism, are examples of this reaching out. At Durham University, Robert Barton, head of the anthropology department, has deliberately recruited a team of academics who will work to bring the two elements of the one discipline closer together. He cannot understand why the two subdisciplines have been kept separate for so long, and believes that the division has led anthropology to lose its way academically.
"There was a kind of confusion about what the aims (of anthropology) were," Barton says. "We're interested in the same kind of phenomena. Sometimes we're working in parallel but not really talking to one another about what methods of study we're using and how these might contribute to each other's interests."
Barton's employment strategy has been aimed at bringing in academics specifically interested in exploring the areas of interaction between social and biological anthropology, whether they are from a scientific or humanities background.
"What I am interested in doing here is bringing together those people who really do have something to say to each other," Barton explains. "There was a real barrier to that happening in terms of lack of understanding. In particular I think many social anthropologists misunderstood evolutionary biology. They caricatured it. One of my missions has been to break down those misperceptions that everything we're doing implies genetic determinism."
Barton's researchers are working on overlaps between the disciplines, and are focused on research that will reveal new truths about the human condition. An example of such work includes an analysis into whether the evolution of a pastoral way of life in certain parts of the world is linked to the biological capacity to digest milk. "That's the kind of process that people are interested in," he says.
Barton believes that his work to unite anthropologists also creates an opportunity to engage academics outside the discipline in a way that has been impossible until now because of persistent infighting.
"I'm very optimistic. We're going to see real collaboration going on across the social divide," he adds. "I'm totally convinced that it's essential they come together. I don't think there's any future for an anthropology that doesn't combine the different approaches and perspectives."
However, even here among those working to get the anthropology factions talking again, opinions are divided. At the Royal Anthropological Institute, Callan says that although evolutionary and social anthropologists can certainly work together profitably, they will never be united.
"What I think will happen, and what I hope will happen over the coming period, is that the specialisation and the proliferation of really excellent research within the subfields will continue," says Callan. "But there will be a growing core of common interest looking at the themes from different perspectives, and raising new questions and new kinds of answers to them.
"There will always be many anthropologies. The discipline won't speak with one voice or look in one direction."
By Hannah Fearn
Source: Times Higher Education , Nov.08
Saturday, January 17, 2009
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I threw my arms about those shoulders...
Darling, you think it's love, it's just a midnight journey.
Best are the dales and rivers removed by force,
as from the next compartment throttles "Oh, stop it, Bernie,"
yet the rhythm of those paroxysms is exactly yours.
Hook to the meat! Brush to the red-brick dentures,
alias cigars, smokeless like a driven nail!
Here the works are fewer than monkey wrenches,
and the phones are whining, dwarfed by to-no-avail.
Bark, then, with joy at Clancy, Fitzgibbon, Miller.
Dogs and block letters care how misfortune spells.
Still, you can tell yourself in the john by the spat-at mirror,
slamming the flush and emerging with clean lapels.
Only the liquid furniture cradles the dwindling figure.
Man shouldn't grow in size once he's been portrayed.
Look: what's been left behind is about as meager
as what remains ahead. Hence the horizon's blade.
Joseph Brodsky
Best are the dales and rivers removed by force,
as from the next compartment throttles "Oh, stop it, Bernie,"
yet the rhythm of those paroxysms is exactly yours.
Hook to the meat! Brush to the red-brick dentures,
alias cigars, smokeless like a driven nail!
Here the works are fewer than monkey wrenches,
and the phones are whining, dwarfed by to-no-avail.
Bark, then, with joy at Clancy, Fitzgibbon, Miller.
Dogs and block letters care how misfortune spells.
Still, you can tell yourself in the john by the spat-at mirror,
slamming the flush and emerging with clean lapels.
Only the liquid furniture cradles the dwindling figure.
Man shouldn't grow in size once he's been portrayed.
Look: what's been left behind is about as meager
as what remains ahead. Hence the horizon's blade.
Joseph Brodsky
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
The March of the Pylons against Heidegger
The March of the Pylons against Heidegger
Wood, acrylic, plywood, varnish, veneer, felt, plastic
121 x 30 x 150 cm
2008
Hotel Oush Grab
The buildings of Oush Grab after the re-occupation by the settlers and after the artists’ détournement
Source: Decolonizing Architecture @ www.decolonizing.ps
Friday, January 9, 2009
Balkanology
New Architecture and Urban Phenomena
in South Eastern Europe
In the western Balkans, the collapse of the socialist economic system in Yugoslavia and Albania has given rise to extensive informal building activity that represents a new form of urbanisation. The question is: how far do such urban transformations indicate patterns of future development for European cities in general? The exhibition uses examples from projects in Belgrade, Zagreb, Kotor, Prishtina and Tirana to illustrate the way architects, artists, urbanists and activists are dealing with these rapid new transformation processes. The outstanding yet hardly known buildings of socialist modernism in Yugoslavia are compared and contrasted with contemporary architecture.
»Balkanology« opens a new field of architectural discourse in Switzerland —the little-known architecture of the post-socialist period and the result of unregulated, uncontrolled urban planning in the countries of South Eastern Europe. The exhibition focuses on the impact of recent socio-political changes on architecture and urban planning.
The situation in South Eastern Europe is prototypical for urban development in transitional and post-conflict situations, from Prishtina to Belgrade, where weak or missing institutional structures make it impossible to achieve the regulation of construction processes. The wild, volatile spread of informal building structures is the aftermath of the kind of urban crisis that follows social upheavals or wars. At the same time, independently of regional particularities, these urban developments display a new kind of urban form that is quite different from informal settlements in countries outside Europe. Their specific forms result from a new intermeshing of spaces through visual worlds communicated by the media, migratory movements and cash flows.
»Balkanology« brings together leading architects and urban planners from South Eastern Europe and shows their approaches to these fundamental urban transformations. The exhibition will show the cultural, social and political dimensions of the urban phenomena of the region. The key question here is to what extent unregulated, informal urbanism develops new typologies and urban forms, and how these forms could also emerge under the banner of neo-liberal de-urbanisation in the rest of Europe.
The exhibition presents research projects and concrete interventions, architectural analyses and planning strategies. »Balkanology« deliberately avoids trying to achieve a picture of urban development that would be valid for the whole region. Instead, it uses selected examples from different locations to highlight specific local influences on architecture and urban construction, thus critically examining the potentialities for a re-qualification in urban planning.
Prishtina, 2008.
The term »Balkans« is generally synonymous with South Eastern Europe, a region with varying geographical definitions. This vague term for the area is a 19th-century invention. In the European, or Western European imaginary, the word »Balkan« stands for ambiguity, hybridity, or a state of transition; it is a concept that can be used positively or negatively. »Balkanology« goes beyond the clichés to draw a differentiated picture of urban development in the region and the forces that determine it.
Using selected examples, Maroje Mrduljaš, the editor of the Croatian architectural magazine Oris, and the Serbian architectural historian Vladimir Kulić will show how Yugoslavian architects and planners have tackled "modernity" and "internationality". Alongside chosen topics, the co-curators will set up an interrelation between historical and contemporary buildings and projects, and comment on them with reference to the phenomenon of "interrupted modernism" in Yugoslavia.
Curated by Kai Vöckler
Contemporary Architecture
Bevk – Perović arhitekti Housing Polje, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2005/Studio Capsula Social Housing, Island of Cres, Croatia 2005/Robert Claiborne, Lia Ruccolo, Ivan Markov Museum of Contemporary Art, Project, Novi Sad, Serbia, 2007/OSNAP Architecture Consultancy Srebrenica Memorial, Potočari, Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina 2006/Marijan Hržić Eurotower, Zagreb, Croatia, 2008/Slavija biro and ARCVS Reconstruction Business Centre “Ušće” (formerly Building of Social and Political Organisations), Belgrade, Serbia, 2005/Srdjan Jovanović Weiss / NAO Stadium Culture – Centre for New Media and Recreation, Project, Novi Sad, Serbia, 2007/Iva Letilović & Morana Vlahović Social Housing, Krapinske Toplice, Croatia, 2003/Hrvoje Njirić Mini Housing Complex “... this familiar feeling”, Gračani near Zagreb, Croatia, 2007/Ofis arhitekti Extension and Renovation of the Ljubljana City Museum, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2004/Helena Paver Njirić New Permanent Exhibition – Memorial Museum of the Jasenovac Memorial Area, Jasenovac, Croatia/
Goran Rako Archäologisches Museum Narona, Vid near Metković, Croatia, 2007/Randić-Turato Arhitektonski Biro Primary School Fran Krsto Frankopan, Island of Krk, Croatia, 2005/Re:act Terazije Terraces, Belgrade, Serbia, 2010/SCArS City Trade Centre Update, Skopje, Macedonia 2008/Hosoya Schaefer Architects Šmartinska Partnership Masterplan, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2008/Studio UP High School and Polyvalent Hall, Koprivnica, Croatia, 2007/Sadar Vuga Arhitekti Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Slovenia, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1999/Studio za arhitekturu - Igor Franić Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia, 2009/
Modern Architecture
Ivan Antić and Ivanka Raspopović Museum of Contemporary Art, New Belgrade, Serbia, 1965/Vojnin Bakić (Sculpture), Berislav Šerbetić (Architecture)Monument, Petrova Gora, Croatia, 1981/Bogdan Bogdanović Partisan Cemetery, Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1965/Bogdan Bogdanović Jasenovac Memorial, Jasenovac, Croatia, 1966/
Nikola Dobrović Grandhotel, Lopud, Croatia, 1936/Nikola Dobrović Ministry of Defense and Headquarters of Yugoslav People’s Army, Belgrade, Serbia, 1963/Drago Galić
Apartment Buildings, Zagreb, Croatia, 1954/Mihailo Janković Federal Executive Council (Federal Government), New Belgrade, Serbia, 1962/Studio 71 Opera and Ballet, Skopje, Macedonia, 1981/Milorad Macura Apartment Building, Belgrade, Serbia, 1956/
Boris Magaš, Edo Šmidihen, Radovan Horvat Museum of Revolution (today Historical Museum), Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1963/Edo Mihevc Commercial and Apartment Building Kozolec, Ljubljana, Slowenia, 1957/Andrija Mutnjaković National and University Library, Prishtina, Kosovo, 1983/Juraj Neidhardt Apartment Buildings, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1958/Kazimir Ostrogović City Hall, Zagreb, Croatia, 1956/Jože Plečnik National and University Library, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1940/Edvard Ravnikar Memorial Complex, Kampor, Island of Rab, Croatia, 1953/
Vjenceslav Richter Pavilion of Yugoslavia at the Expo, Brussels, Belgium, 1958/Vladimir Turina Flexible Swimming Pool, Project, Rijeka, Croatia, 1949/
Zlatko Ugljen Sherefudin’s White Mosque, Visoko, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1980
Ivan Vitić The Cultural Centre of the Yugoslav People’s Army (today: Public Library), Šibenik, Croatia 1961
in South Eastern Europe
In the western Balkans, the collapse of the socialist economic system in Yugoslavia and Albania has given rise to extensive informal building activity that represents a new form of urbanisation. The question is: how far do such urban transformations indicate patterns of future development for European cities in general? The exhibition uses examples from projects in Belgrade, Zagreb, Kotor, Prishtina and Tirana to illustrate the way architects, artists, urbanists and activists are dealing with these rapid new transformation processes. The outstanding yet hardly known buildings of socialist modernism in Yugoslavia are compared and contrasted with contemporary architecture.
»Balkanology« opens a new field of architectural discourse in Switzerland —the little-known architecture of the post-socialist period and the result of unregulated, uncontrolled urban planning in the countries of South Eastern Europe. The exhibition focuses on the impact of recent socio-political changes on architecture and urban planning.
The situation in South Eastern Europe is prototypical for urban development in transitional and post-conflict situations, from Prishtina to Belgrade, where weak or missing institutional structures make it impossible to achieve the regulation of construction processes. The wild, volatile spread of informal building structures is the aftermath of the kind of urban crisis that follows social upheavals or wars. At the same time, independently of regional particularities, these urban developments display a new kind of urban form that is quite different from informal settlements in countries outside Europe. Their specific forms result from a new intermeshing of spaces through visual worlds communicated by the media, migratory movements and cash flows.
»Balkanology« brings together leading architects and urban planners from South Eastern Europe and shows their approaches to these fundamental urban transformations. The exhibition will show the cultural, social and political dimensions of the urban phenomena of the region. The key question here is to what extent unregulated, informal urbanism develops new typologies and urban forms, and how these forms could also emerge under the banner of neo-liberal de-urbanisation in the rest of Europe.
The exhibition presents research projects and concrete interventions, architectural analyses and planning strategies. »Balkanology« deliberately avoids trying to achieve a picture of urban development that would be valid for the whole region. Instead, it uses selected examples from different locations to highlight specific local influences on architecture and urban construction, thus critically examining the potentialities for a re-qualification in urban planning.
Prishtina, 2008.
The term »Balkans« is generally synonymous with South Eastern Europe, a region with varying geographical definitions. This vague term for the area is a 19th-century invention. In the European, or Western European imaginary, the word »Balkan« stands for ambiguity, hybridity, or a state of transition; it is a concept that can be used positively or negatively. »Balkanology« goes beyond the clichés to draw a differentiated picture of urban development in the region and the forces that determine it.
Using selected examples, Maroje Mrduljaš, the editor of the Croatian architectural magazine Oris, and the Serbian architectural historian Vladimir Kulić will show how Yugoslavian architects and planners have tackled "modernity" and "internationality". Alongside chosen topics, the co-curators will set up an interrelation between historical and contemporary buildings and projects, and comment on them with reference to the phenomenon of "interrupted modernism" in Yugoslavia.
Curated by Kai Vöckler
Contemporary Architecture
Bevk – Perović arhitekti Housing Polje, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2005/Studio Capsula Social Housing, Island of Cres, Croatia 2005/Robert Claiborne, Lia Ruccolo, Ivan Markov Museum of Contemporary Art, Project, Novi Sad, Serbia, 2007/OSNAP Architecture Consultancy Srebrenica Memorial, Potočari, Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina 2006/Marijan Hržić Eurotower, Zagreb, Croatia, 2008/Slavija biro and ARCVS Reconstruction Business Centre “Ušće” (formerly Building of Social and Political Organisations), Belgrade, Serbia, 2005/Srdjan Jovanović Weiss / NAO Stadium Culture – Centre for New Media and Recreation, Project, Novi Sad, Serbia, 2007/Iva Letilović & Morana Vlahović Social Housing, Krapinske Toplice, Croatia, 2003/Hrvoje Njirić Mini Housing Complex “... this familiar feeling”, Gračani near Zagreb, Croatia, 2007/Ofis arhitekti Extension and Renovation of the Ljubljana City Museum, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2004/Helena Paver Njirić New Permanent Exhibition – Memorial Museum of the Jasenovac Memorial Area, Jasenovac, Croatia/
Goran Rako Archäologisches Museum Narona, Vid near Metković, Croatia, 2007/Randić-Turato Arhitektonski Biro Primary School Fran Krsto Frankopan, Island of Krk, Croatia, 2005/Re:act Terazije Terraces, Belgrade, Serbia, 2010/SCArS City Trade Centre Update, Skopje, Macedonia 2008/Hosoya Schaefer Architects Šmartinska Partnership Masterplan, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2008/Studio UP High School and Polyvalent Hall, Koprivnica, Croatia, 2007/Sadar Vuga Arhitekti Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Slovenia, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1999/Studio za arhitekturu - Igor Franić Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia, 2009/
Modern Architecture
Ivan Antić and Ivanka Raspopović Museum of Contemporary Art, New Belgrade, Serbia, 1965/Vojnin Bakić (Sculpture), Berislav Šerbetić (Architecture)Monument, Petrova Gora, Croatia, 1981/Bogdan Bogdanović Partisan Cemetery, Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1965/Bogdan Bogdanović Jasenovac Memorial, Jasenovac, Croatia, 1966/
Nikola Dobrović Grandhotel, Lopud, Croatia, 1936/Nikola Dobrović Ministry of Defense and Headquarters of Yugoslav People’s Army, Belgrade, Serbia, 1963/Drago Galić
Apartment Buildings, Zagreb, Croatia, 1954/Mihailo Janković Federal Executive Council (Federal Government), New Belgrade, Serbia, 1962/Studio 71 Opera and Ballet, Skopje, Macedonia, 1981/Milorad Macura Apartment Building, Belgrade, Serbia, 1956/
Boris Magaš, Edo Šmidihen, Radovan Horvat Museum of Revolution (today Historical Museum), Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1963/Edo Mihevc Commercial and Apartment Building Kozolec, Ljubljana, Slowenia, 1957/Andrija Mutnjaković National and University Library, Prishtina, Kosovo, 1983/Juraj Neidhardt Apartment Buildings, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1958/Kazimir Ostrogović City Hall, Zagreb, Croatia, 1956/Jože Plečnik National and University Library, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1940/Edvard Ravnikar Memorial Complex, Kampor, Island of Rab, Croatia, 1953/
Vjenceslav Richter Pavilion of Yugoslavia at the Expo, Brussels, Belgium, 1958/Vladimir Turina Flexible Swimming Pool, Project, Rijeka, Croatia, 1949/
Zlatko Ugljen Sherefudin’s White Mosque, Visoko, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1980
Ivan Vitić The Cultural Centre of the Yugoslav People’s Army (today: Public Library), Šibenik, Croatia 1961
The Truth Machine: the Relationship between Life and Sovereign Power
In the long awaited movie Sex and the City, one of the main protagonists, Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), hires a personal assistant; she is a young, lower class woman who came from the southern U.S. to New York in search of a job and, indubitably, “happiness.” Being a personal assistant, she has to have the “necessary” commodities; she cannot afford them, but still she is forced to get them, though only for a short period of time. What is a necessary commodity other than a Louis Vuitton purse? Happiness is therefore not achieved (as this popular series/movie/brand promotes) by getting a job, a career or the like; not even by getting the commodity itself; but by getting a lifestyle. This example shows not just how commodity fetishism influences the cultural system of capitalist democracy, but how much life itself today plays the role of the rationalisation of power structures. Today it is not the commodity itself that is the fetish, but a form of life which is. What better way, then, to see the relationship between power and life than by taking a view on life that is neither life, nor power, but is something in between, an alien. The figure of an alien (illegal alien, excluded misfit) surpasses mere administrative questions of the regulation of foreign laborer status; it does not matter if we look at the suburban riots in Paris or even at the military blockade against Mexican immigrants on the southern U.S. border. An alien, as a “phobogenic” object (an object that creates fear in others), has become a sort of a foundation of the cultural system in capitalist democracy that rationalizes the political malfunction of these same democracies. When Joel Kovel describes the relation of the economic forms and patterns of racism, he finds three forms in historical phases of racism: dominant – in which the “savagery” of the black man that endangers the purity of a white woman is controlled by domination and violence; repulsive – in which the “contagious filth” of a black person is “approached” through avoidance; and a meta-racism (a designation of the present capitalist democracies) – in which a difference is being denied through a complete denial of the existence of racism.1 In all of these cases, as Ivan Ward remarks, “the phantom Negro” endangers cultural illusion and structures of power status quo.2 “The phantom Negro,” as an alien, is the ultimate phobogenic object. The present text is precisely about the relation of this phantom to the status quo capitalist power structure.
Sovereignty and Life
The Alien, in its ambiguous position, by not being completely inside, and neither being completely outside the law, exposes the very sovereignty of today’s power structure that is not the “supreme power over a body politic,”3 but is rather a sovereignty that organizes a social context in which individuals should crave for something else as compensation for the lack of participation in political processes, or for a lack of the political process at all.
Just what form of sovereignty are we talking about? First is the “imperial sovereignty”, which is not a sovereignty of a certain nation-state, but a global form of sovereignty that includes dominant nation-states along with supranational institutions, major capitalist organizations and other powers.4 And second, this sovereignty is marked less by definition, and more by paradox, like the one Giorgio Agamben refers to. The paradox of sovereignty, according to him, means that the “Sovereign is at the same time outside and inside of the legal order.”5 To paraphrase him further, I can state that the sovereign, by having a legal power to suspend the law, legally puts itself outside the law. The structure of this paradox that presents sovereignty as a border (in the sense of drawing a beginning and an end) is, as Agamben claims, a structure of exceptions. When Agamben quotes Schmitt, paraphrasing him, we see that “the Sovereign creates and guarantees the situation in its totality, the sovereign has the monopoly on that last decision; there lies an essence of state sovereignty, not as a monopoly on repression or rule, but as a monopoly of a decision.”6 In other words, the sovereign decides whether some situation is “normal” (where legal order is applicable), or whether it is to proclaim a state of exception (stating that the legal order is not to apply). Therefore, sovereignty of a capitalist state does not depend on power over certain political space; it depends on maintenance of a certain truth about that political space. That truth says that the only sovereignty is not some state sovereignty, but the sovereignty of capital itself (as an ongoing state of exception), and that the only politics it has is the politics of the market that supports life as commodity. Hence, once capital reached its initial accumulation within the nation state, it started to reproduce constantly, and in the process of discovering new forms of production, distribution and exchange, it changed the very notion of territory. As philosopher Marina Gržinić observed, de-territorialisation is not the process of erasing territories, but of re-territorialisation – the constant cannibalisation of old territories and the constant reinvention of new ones.
One such territory is life itself. Giorgio Agamben differentiates bare life: life for the sake of life only; Greek zoe; pure nature. This is the life of Homo Sacer, Holy man, a figure that, according to Agamben, can be killed but can not be sacrificed, a life that does not have anything more than its biological life (migrants stripped of any commodity, third world laborers, etc.). The other form of life is bios: life with style, of a citizen; the form of life that can be sacrificed (to the sovereign). Although it could seem that an alien might resemble bare life and although bios might be seen as an oppressor of bare life, our basic hypothesis here is that the figure of an alien is situated between these two forms of life. The alien is the ultimate phobogenic object, a blank position that attracts all residues of failed rationalizations of state-of-exception power structures. What this means is that an alien emerges somewhere in the bare life’s path toward the power structure, or in the path of bios moving away from the rationalization of power structures.
Relationship of Life and Power
As Agamben says, bare life is a life form that is excluded from human jurisdiction and that has not been included in God’s jurisdiction.7 The continuous sovereign sphere is one in which one can kill while committing neither murder nor sacrifice. And holy life, the one that can be killed but not sacrificed, is a life caught in this sphere. As such, and produced as such, according to Agamben, bare life in that sense is a primal effect of sovereignty. Western mainstream media reports and/or the policy makers, when reporting on the situation in Iraq, fail to acknowledge the thousands of dead Iraqis8 but rather acknowledge that a far less number of dead American soldiers (as soldiers, not as members of low class community in the U.S.) are, on the other side, a cause for panic in assessments of the effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy. Iraqi life is bare life, while a U.S. soldier’s life is bios. The death of an Iraqi is an humanitarian problem, while the death of a U.S. soldier is a political fact. Hence, the sovereignty of the capitalist state, through the lack of ruling over certain social organizations that seek a solution for its problems, rules over life, produces bare life and sustains bios. Production of bare life is paradoxically also a practice of killing it, as a practice of a sovereign’s “right” to rule over the possibility to cease life, or to organize all of life’s relationships and meaning. But bare life is not one that would perceive itself as a victim: it has a tendency to perceive itself as potential bios, potential “success story”. Bare life does see that the state of exception is not the anomaly, but the truth of capital, but it does not react against it, as it wants to become a part of it, to become the one who oppresses. Bare life, therefore, does not react towards the discriminatory hierarchy of state exception (truth of capital), but it tends to react against some other bare life, that allegedly stops it in its way of emancipation to the same hierarchy.
As Mona Chollet explains, in a Marxist model, a worker is called upon to resist a servile and humiliating position that does not allow him/her to compare his/her destiny to the destiny of a wealthy man and demand a share of the wealth.9 In this model, the worker identifies him/herself only to his/her fellow workers, employed and unemployed. According to Chollet, the genius of the political right is exactly in the twisting of this scheme, which has been effective in the past. Today a worker identifies him/her self with a wealthy man and compares himself to those who share his/her situation. Therefore, s/he “sees” that immigrants get social help and he or she doesn’t; s/he “sees” that the unemployed sleep longer, while s/he has to go to work. Chollet says that workers are therefore diverted from the legitimate target, and that this then creates the vicious circle: the more his/her life conditions are deteriorating, the more likely s/he is to vote for the politics that deteriorates them. This is what happens to bare life: the more it suffers, the more it wants to become integrated into the work processes of neo-liberal capitalism; the more it wants to become bios, life with style. It has a tendency not to resist the oppression, but to become an oppressor. As Hardt and Negri say, “Every sovereign power (…) necessarily forms a political body of which there is a head that commands, limbs that obey, and organs that function together to support the ruler.”10 But it seems that the sovereignty of capital does not even need a political body (as a demand for a potential of a different organization of the social); it just needs a body. Thus, bare life is not the only form produced by the sovereign, but the sovereign produces the relationship between two forms of life, in which one, bios, wants to stay included, while the other, bare life, struggles to be included. This obscene relationship marks the situation in which politics are being slowly killed by capitalism, where the tortured body of politics is not hidden, but presented as culture. And here, the main preoccupation of a slave (bios) and of the wannabe slave (bare life) becomes nothing but a lifestyle as an euphemism for a right to be indifferent, or for a right to become an oppressor. The same way the state socialist totalitarian rituals (mass parades, etc.) were used for compensation for other “sins” of their sovereigns, similarly capitalist democracies use entire cultures for the same compensation policy, for the same scope… but it can barely be seen as such.
As an example, the New York Times recently reported11 that there is a peep-show style artistic installation on Coney Island (NY), where two animatronics (demonstration figures) are simulating the act of waterboarding.12 This presentation of a method used by U.S. interrogators against alleged terror suspects clearly shows that something as deadly serious as torture not only symbolizes the legacy of Bush Jr.’s neo-conservative rule, but also the frivolity of its potential installation as public art/entertainment. Incidentally, the New York Times published this article in the Art & Design section of the paper. Therefore, culture has become the other name for political indifference that is nothing else but neo-liberalism (as a dominant form of representation of capitalist state), or in other words, lifestyle instead of a struggle for a more meaningful, or for some other meaning of life.
A Machine that Produces Truth
Like we said, alien is neither bare life, nor bios, but is in-between. How does this in-between look like? When the French of African/Arab heritage started to riot in Parisian (and other French) suburbs, the rioters were immediately presented as insignificant, lazy, unemployed people, who during pauses between dealing drugs like to burn cars. This discrediting of the rioters by the authorities and the mainstream media, besides being an intentional destruction of the political potential of the protests was in my opinion a strategy to keep bare life as bare life. Although probably a mass of the rioters did not want anything more than a job, the effect of the riots was such that it was recognized by the authorities as potentially capable of igniting questions that address the issue of inequality in a far broader, racial and class context. The political repercussions of the riots were pretty effectively denied, as the rioters were presented as a bunch of hooligans, as bare life. When somebody protests against class inequality, against G8 meetings or against globalization, they are a bunch of hooligans, but when somebody protests against Hugo Chavez, against Iranian leadership or against Chinese rule over Tibet, then those are political protests. This is the representation and repression strategy whose aim is to stop the emergence of an alien as a political figure. Not because they demand integration into a society, but because aliens as political figures invoke the possibility of more radical changes to the society all together. A moment when a certain life (bare life or bios) ceases to be such a life, and becomes an alien, is exactly a moment where either of the two (or both) starts to shape a political demand that goes beyond liberal capitalist dogma of the truth of capital. At the moment Parisian suburban riots started to receive (or at least started to get perceived as) a form of political demand that would address segregation (i.e., an issue of class), bare life became an alien and the political form of its demand was denied to it. When the riots developed beyond the boundaries of the suburbs, and started to refer to a process of inequality as a class, and when bare life started to reject being bare life, but at the same time refused to become bios, these are two cases when the alien as political figure emerged. It is a moment when bare life refuses to be sacred, refuses to be available for murder without sanction, and refuses to be available for sacrifice to the sovereign of capital. The alien is the figure that practices the Marxist model mentioned by Mona Chollet. It focuses its hate toward the very nature of the sovereignty of the capitalist state, toward its truth. It identifies not only with other aliens, but also with the possibility of conflict, the possibility of unmasking or exposing the hideous democratic/consumerist ritual as a totalitarian ritual. The position of an alien is not an embellished position; it does not mark some decorated, romanticized role to be coveted; above all, it is not an alienated subjectivity. An alienated subjectivity (the misfit member of a subculture, or some celebrity with a drug addiction everybody loves to hate) is mainstream today; as elaborated by Marina Gržinić, it is a way that legitimizes itself through a “right to choose” concept, which she elaborated in analyzing such films as Lost in Translation or Broken Flowers. Bill Murray as a lost, empty, depressed misfit character in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation or in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, presents not an alien but a “sensualised alienated position” to the point to become an attractive, stylish, alienated subjectivity.13
According to Hardt and Negri, “The multitude is an internally different, multiple social subject whose constitution and action is based not on identity or unity (or, much less, indifference), but on what it has in common.”14 In the context of this definition, the figure of an alien turns out to be a figure that exposes what is “in common,” what is the same for both bios and bare life. Exposing the truth of capital as nothing but capital itself is a disbelief in the definition of truth imposed by capital(ism). The alien, thus, is not an individual position (as “I”), and it is not a position that demands “emancipation”: it perceives itself as one of many whose “sameness” (common denominator) lies in the fact that they are all subjectivities produced by the order. Therefore, bare life, or even the relationship between different forms of life, is not the primal product of the order’s machine. Its primal product is the “truth” which the individual life tends to accept as its own system of belief; it is the form of life’s grand rationalization of the order, and of itself. This system of belief imposes that its particular truth is the only one possible. This is not a notion that would actualize a question about universal truth, but addresses the capitalist order that monopolizes truth as such, with the imposition of the (im)possibility of struggle for some other truth. This mise-en-scène of life is the capitalist machine’s main product.
Alien vs. Predator
In order to clarify this even further, let us refer to the action movie Alien vs. Predator (Twentieth Century Fox, 2004). In this movie, Aliens (disgusting, reptilian, completely unknown but resilient creatures – pure other) are beings that are created and nurtured as such by the hunter civilization of “Predators” for the sole purpose of being a “worthy” prey for them. The meaning of existence for Aliens is to resist as much as possible before the Predator hunters kill them. Can we draw a parallel here with Agamben? He says that the basic operation of sovereign power is a production of bare life as a source political element and the threshold of articulation between nature and culture. In pre-modern times, our “aliens” were the bare life that suffered under colonization from the (White) First world, and whose purpose was solely to be at service through slavery to their masters, the white colonizers, i.e., the “predators.” Then, not only was bare life used as a work force, but also as a justification for the segregation practiced by the white sovereignty; the same sovereignty as a “domination of culture” also relegated to itself the right to rationalize its imperialistic territorial gains by oppressing the “pure nature,” as the savages, the slaves, i.e. bare life, were defined. But after the era of colonization, the purpose of bare life (as a result of the imposition of the truth of capital) shifted from “being a slave” to “wanting to be a slave”; which reflects today’s bare life position that (mostly) tends to “succeed” in the First World, to become a lifestyle. It is not about achieving a decent life, but about embracing the perverted notion of a decent life as mindless consumerism. If the prime political relationship is an exclusion (a state of exception as an area of non-differentiation between the outer and inner, exclusion and inclusion), then “bare life” could be seen as life that “wants to be included” into capital, while bios (life of culture) is a life that, under a threat of exclusion from the capitalist order, wants to “stay included”. The paradigm of bios is Terezín (German: Theresienstadt) a camp where Jews lived in “better” conditions, where the Nazis could film them for propaganda purposes, to kill them later. Bare life and bios are therefore inscribed not in a form of capitalist democracy, where equality among human subjectivities is allegedly universal, but into an obscene, banal totalitarian ritual where equality means only that subjectivities are equal as commodities on the market. The state of exception, where capitalism can even suspend itself, is therefore a capitalist attempt to give itself some (ideological) meaning, though such meaning is not less banal than the unlimited power of the market, or the human equality that is defined by the market.
Hence, as the movie unfolds, after the Predator commander is killed, other predators take his body into a space ship… but in the final seconds of the movie, out of his body a newborn alien emerges, as a threat to everyone on the ship. Here, the alien refuses to stay on Earth (the predators’ battleground and concentration camp), and thus, it refuses to respect the rules of the game; it does not want to be in a camp at all. Instead of emancipating itself within the truth of the machine, the alien should start investing its own diverse skills and knowledge to emancipate itself through resistance against capitalism, by unmasking the border of capitalist truth, by showing its nature as totalitarian.
Šefik Šeki Tatlić
1 Cf. Ivan Ward, Phobia, Totem Books, Cambridge 2001. Joel Kovel’s quotation is from this book.
2 Ibid.
3 As defined in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary (http://www.merriam-webster.com)
4 Cf. Michael Hardt / Antonio Negri, Multitude, War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Books, London 2005.
5 Cf. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, Giulio Einaudi, Torino 1995.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=78
9 Cf. Mona Chollet, http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2008/04/CHOLLET/15818
10 Cf. Michael Hardt / Antonio Negri, op. cit.
11 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/arts/design/06wate.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
12 A form of torture that consists of immobilising a person on his back with the head inclined downward and pouring water over the face and into the breathing passages.
13 Cf. Marina Gržinić, Re-Politicizing art, Theory, Representation and New Media Technology, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Schlebrügge.Editor, Vienna 2008.
14 Cf. Michael Hardt / Antonio Negri, op. cit.
Source: REARTIKULACIJA no. 5 - 2008
Sovereignty and Life
The Alien, in its ambiguous position, by not being completely inside, and neither being completely outside the law, exposes the very sovereignty of today’s power structure that is not the “supreme power over a body politic,”3 but is rather a sovereignty that organizes a social context in which individuals should crave for something else as compensation for the lack of participation in political processes, or for a lack of the political process at all.
Just what form of sovereignty are we talking about? First is the “imperial sovereignty”, which is not a sovereignty of a certain nation-state, but a global form of sovereignty that includes dominant nation-states along with supranational institutions, major capitalist organizations and other powers.4 And second, this sovereignty is marked less by definition, and more by paradox, like the one Giorgio Agamben refers to. The paradox of sovereignty, according to him, means that the “Sovereign is at the same time outside and inside of the legal order.”5 To paraphrase him further, I can state that the sovereign, by having a legal power to suspend the law, legally puts itself outside the law. The structure of this paradox that presents sovereignty as a border (in the sense of drawing a beginning and an end) is, as Agamben claims, a structure of exceptions. When Agamben quotes Schmitt, paraphrasing him, we see that “the Sovereign creates and guarantees the situation in its totality, the sovereign has the monopoly on that last decision; there lies an essence of state sovereignty, not as a monopoly on repression or rule, but as a monopoly of a decision.”6 In other words, the sovereign decides whether some situation is “normal” (where legal order is applicable), or whether it is to proclaim a state of exception (stating that the legal order is not to apply). Therefore, sovereignty of a capitalist state does not depend on power over certain political space; it depends on maintenance of a certain truth about that political space. That truth says that the only sovereignty is not some state sovereignty, but the sovereignty of capital itself (as an ongoing state of exception), and that the only politics it has is the politics of the market that supports life as commodity. Hence, once capital reached its initial accumulation within the nation state, it started to reproduce constantly, and in the process of discovering new forms of production, distribution and exchange, it changed the very notion of territory. As philosopher Marina Gržinić observed, de-territorialisation is not the process of erasing territories, but of re-territorialisation – the constant cannibalisation of old territories and the constant reinvention of new ones.
One such territory is life itself. Giorgio Agamben differentiates bare life: life for the sake of life only; Greek zoe; pure nature. This is the life of Homo Sacer, Holy man, a figure that, according to Agamben, can be killed but can not be sacrificed, a life that does not have anything more than its biological life (migrants stripped of any commodity, third world laborers, etc.). The other form of life is bios: life with style, of a citizen; the form of life that can be sacrificed (to the sovereign). Although it could seem that an alien might resemble bare life and although bios might be seen as an oppressor of bare life, our basic hypothesis here is that the figure of an alien is situated between these two forms of life. The alien is the ultimate phobogenic object, a blank position that attracts all residues of failed rationalizations of state-of-exception power structures. What this means is that an alien emerges somewhere in the bare life’s path toward the power structure, or in the path of bios moving away from the rationalization of power structures.
Relationship of Life and Power
As Agamben says, bare life is a life form that is excluded from human jurisdiction and that has not been included in God’s jurisdiction.7 The continuous sovereign sphere is one in which one can kill while committing neither murder nor sacrifice. And holy life, the one that can be killed but not sacrificed, is a life caught in this sphere. As such, and produced as such, according to Agamben, bare life in that sense is a primal effect of sovereignty. Western mainstream media reports and/or the policy makers, when reporting on the situation in Iraq, fail to acknowledge the thousands of dead Iraqis8 but rather acknowledge that a far less number of dead American soldiers (as soldiers, not as members of low class community in the U.S.) are, on the other side, a cause for panic in assessments of the effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy. Iraqi life is bare life, while a U.S. soldier’s life is bios. The death of an Iraqi is an humanitarian problem, while the death of a U.S. soldier is a political fact. Hence, the sovereignty of the capitalist state, through the lack of ruling over certain social organizations that seek a solution for its problems, rules over life, produces bare life and sustains bios. Production of bare life is paradoxically also a practice of killing it, as a practice of a sovereign’s “right” to rule over the possibility to cease life, or to organize all of life’s relationships and meaning. But bare life is not one that would perceive itself as a victim: it has a tendency to perceive itself as potential bios, potential “success story”. Bare life does see that the state of exception is not the anomaly, but the truth of capital, but it does not react against it, as it wants to become a part of it, to become the one who oppresses. Bare life, therefore, does not react towards the discriminatory hierarchy of state exception (truth of capital), but it tends to react against some other bare life, that allegedly stops it in its way of emancipation to the same hierarchy.
As Mona Chollet explains, in a Marxist model, a worker is called upon to resist a servile and humiliating position that does not allow him/her to compare his/her destiny to the destiny of a wealthy man and demand a share of the wealth.9 In this model, the worker identifies him/herself only to his/her fellow workers, employed and unemployed. According to Chollet, the genius of the political right is exactly in the twisting of this scheme, which has been effective in the past. Today a worker identifies him/her self with a wealthy man and compares himself to those who share his/her situation. Therefore, s/he “sees” that immigrants get social help and he or she doesn’t; s/he “sees” that the unemployed sleep longer, while s/he has to go to work. Chollet says that workers are therefore diverted from the legitimate target, and that this then creates the vicious circle: the more his/her life conditions are deteriorating, the more likely s/he is to vote for the politics that deteriorates them. This is what happens to bare life: the more it suffers, the more it wants to become integrated into the work processes of neo-liberal capitalism; the more it wants to become bios, life with style. It has a tendency not to resist the oppression, but to become an oppressor. As Hardt and Negri say, “Every sovereign power (…) necessarily forms a political body of which there is a head that commands, limbs that obey, and organs that function together to support the ruler.”10 But it seems that the sovereignty of capital does not even need a political body (as a demand for a potential of a different organization of the social); it just needs a body. Thus, bare life is not the only form produced by the sovereign, but the sovereign produces the relationship between two forms of life, in which one, bios, wants to stay included, while the other, bare life, struggles to be included. This obscene relationship marks the situation in which politics are being slowly killed by capitalism, where the tortured body of politics is not hidden, but presented as culture. And here, the main preoccupation of a slave (bios) and of the wannabe slave (bare life) becomes nothing but a lifestyle as an euphemism for a right to be indifferent, or for a right to become an oppressor. The same way the state socialist totalitarian rituals (mass parades, etc.) were used for compensation for other “sins” of their sovereigns, similarly capitalist democracies use entire cultures for the same compensation policy, for the same scope… but it can barely be seen as such.
As an example, the New York Times recently reported11 that there is a peep-show style artistic installation on Coney Island (NY), where two animatronics (demonstration figures) are simulating the act of waterboarding.12 This presentation of a method used by U.S. interrogators against alleged terror suspects clearly shows that something as deadly serious as torture not only symbolizes the legacy of Bush Jr.’s neo-conservative rule, but also the frivolity of its potential installation as public art/entertainment. Incidentally, the New York Times published this article in the Art & Design section of the paper. Therefore, culture has become the other name for political indifference that is nothing else but neo-liberalism (as a dominant form of representation of capitalist state), or in other words, lifestyle instead of a struggle for a more meaningful, or for some other meaning of life.
A Machine that Produces Truth
Like we said, alien is neither bare life, nor bios, but is in-between. How does this in-between look like? When the French of African/Arab heritage started to riot in Parisian (and other French) suburbs, the rioters were immediately presented as insignificant, lazy, unemployed people, who during pauses between dealing drugs like to burn cars. This discrediting of the rioters by the authorities and the mainstream media, besides being an intentional destruction of the political potential of the protests was in my opinion a strategy to keep bare life as bare life. Although probably a mass of the rioters did not want anything more than a job, the effect of the riots was such that it was recognized by the authorities as potentially capable of igniting questions that address the issue of inequality in a far broader, racial and class context. The political repercussions of the riots were pretty effectively denied, as the rioters were presented as a bunch of hooligans, as bare life. When somebody protests against class inequality, against G8 meetings or against globalization, they are a bunch of hooligans, but when somebody protests against Hugo Chavez, against Iranian leadership or against Chinese rule over Tibet, then those are political protests. This is the representation and repression strategy whose aim is to stop the emergence of an alien as a political figure. Not because they demand integration into a society, but because aliens as political figures invoke the possibility of more radical changes to the society all together. A moment when a certain life (bare life or bios) ceases to be such a life, and becomes an alien, is exactly a moment where either of the two (or both) starts to shape a political demand that goes beyond liberal capitalist dogma of the truth of capital. At the moment Parisian suburban riots started to receive (or at least started to get perceived as) a form of political demand that would address segregation (i.e., an issue of class), bare life became an alien and the political form of its demand was denied to it. When the riots developed beyond the boundaries of the suburbs, and started to refer to a process of inequality as a class, and when bare life started to reject being bare life, but at the same time refused to become bios, these are two cases when the alien as political figure emerged. It is a moment when bare life refuses to be sacred, refuses to be available for murder without sanction, and refuses to be available for sacrifice to the sovereign of capital. The alien is the figure that practices the Marxist model mentioned by Mona Chollet. It focuses its hate toward the very nature of the sovereignty of the capitalist state, toward its truth. It identifies not only with other aliens, but also with the possibility of conflict, the possibility of unmasking or exposing the hideous democratic/consumerist ritual as a totalitarian ritual. The position of an alien is not an embellished position; it does not mark some decorated, romanticized role to be coveted; above all, it is not an alienated subjectivity. An alienated subjectivity (the misfit member of a subculture, or some celebrity with a drug addiction everybody loves to hate) is mainstream today; as elaborated by Marina Gržinić, it is a way that legitimizes itself through a “right to choose” concept, which she elaborated in analyzing such films as Lost in Translation or Broken Flowers. Bill Murray as a lost, empty, depressed misfit character in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation or in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, presents not an alien but a “sensualised alienated position” to the point to become an attractive, stylish, alienated subjectivity.13
According to Hardt and Negri, “The multitude is an internally different, multiple social subject whose constitution and action is based not on identity or unity (or, much less, indifference), but on what it has in common.”14 In the context of this definition, the figure of an alien turns out to be a figure that exposes what is “in common,” what is the same for both bios and bare life. Exposing the truth of capital as nothing but capital itself is a disbelief in the definition of truth imposed by capital(ism). The alien, thus, is not an individual position (as “I”), and it is not a position that demands “emancipation”: it perceives itself as one of many whose “sameness” (common denominator) lies in the fact that they are all subjectivities produced by the order. Therefore, bare life, or even the relationship between different forms of life, is not the primal product of the order’s machine. Its primal product is the “truth” which the individual life tends to accept as its own system of belief; it is the form of life’s grand rationalization of the order, and of itself. This system of belief imposes that its particular truth is the only one possible. This is not a notion that would actualize a question about universal truth, but addresses the capitalist order that monopolizes truth as such, with the imposition of the (im)possibility of struggle for some other truth. This mise-en-scène of life is the capitalist machine’s main product.
Alien vs. Predator
In order to clarify this even further, let us refer to the action movie Alien vs. Predator (Twentieth Century Fox, 2004). In this movie, Aliens (disgusting, reptilian, completely unknown but resilient creatures – pure other) are beings that are created and nurtured as such by the hunter civilization of “Predators” for the sole purpose of being a “worthy” prey for them. The meaning of existence for Aliens is to resist as much as possible before the Predator hunters kill them. Can we draw a parallel here with Agamben? He says that the basic operation of sovereign power is a production of bare life as a source political element and the threshold of articulation between nature and culture. In pre-modern times, our “aliens” were the bare life that suffered under colonization from the (White) First world, and whose purpose was solely to be at service through slavery to their masters, the white colonizers, i.e., the “predators.” Then, not only was bare life used as a work force, but also as a justification for the segregation practiced by the white sovereignty; the same sovereignty as a “domination of culture” also relegated to itself the right to rationalize its imperialistic territorial gains by oppressing the “pure nature,” as the savages, the slaves, i.e. bare life, were defined. But after the era of colonization, the purpose of bare life (as a result of the imposition of the truth of capital) shifted from “being a slave” to “wanting to be a slave”; which reflects today’s bare life position that (mostly) tends to “succeed” in the First World, to become a lifestyle. It is not about achieving a decent life, but about embracing the perverted notion of a decent life as mindless consumerism. If the prime political relationship is an exclusion (a state of exception as an area of non-differentiation between the outer and inner, exclusion and inclusion), then “bare life” could be seen as life that “wants to be included” into capital, while bios (life of culture) is a life that, under a threat of exclusion from the capitalist order, wants to “stay included”. The paradigm of bios is Terezín (German: Theresienstadt) a camp where Jews lived in “better” conditions, where the Nazis could film them for propaganda purposes, to kill them later. Bare life and bios are therefore inscribed not in a form of capitalist democracy, where equality among human subjectivities is allegedly universal, but into an obscene, banal totalitarian ritual where equality means only that subjectivities are equal as commodities on the market. The state of exception, where capitalism can even suspend itself, is therefore a capitalist attempt to give itself some (ideological) meaning, though such meaning is not less banal than the unlimited power of the market, or the human equality that is defined by the market.
Hence, as the movie unfolds, after the Predator commander is killed, other predators take his body into a space ship… but in the final seconds of the movie, out of his body a newborn alien emerges, as a threat to everyone on the ship. Here, the alien refuses to stay on Earth (the predators’ battleground and concentration camp), and thus, it refuses to respect the rules of the game; it does not want to be in a camp at all. Instead of emancipating itself within the truth of the machine, the alien should start investing its own diverse skills and knowledge to emancipate itself through resistance against capitalism, by unmasking the border of capitalist truth, by showing its nature as totalitarian.
Šefik Šeki Tatlić
1 Cf. Ivan Ward, Phobia, Totem Books, Cambridge 2001. Joel Kovel’s quotation is from this book.
2 Ibid.
3 As defined in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary (http://www.merriam-webster.com)
4 Cf. Michael Hardt / Antonio Negri, Multitude, War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Books, London 2005.
5 Cf. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, Giulio Einaudi, Torino 1995.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=78
9 Cf. Mona Chollet, http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2008/04/CHOLLET/15818
10 Cf. Michael Hardt / Antonio Negri, op. cit.
11 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/arts/design/06wate.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
12 A form of torture that consists of immobilising a person on his back with the head inclined downward and pouring water over the face and into the breathing passages.
13 Cf. Marina Gržinić, Re-Politicizing art, Theory, Representation and New Media Technology, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Schlebrügge.Editor, Vienna 2008.
14 Cf. Michael Hardt / Antonio Negri, op. cit.
Source: REARTIKULACIJA no. 5 - 2008
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