This – also freely downloadable – anthology documents projects developed over a two and a half year period. Its critical nature emerges clearly through discussion of an ample range of cultural fields... read more of this review at Neural,

http://neural.it/2016/03/edited-by-by-josephine-berry-slater-anthony-iles-clemens-apprich-oliver-lerone-schultz-%C2%AD-plants-androids-and-operators/

Simon Tyszko
The Unfun Fair Too

Exhibition: 10 July – 10 August, Wednesday – Saturday, 11am-5pm

The Unfun Fair expands in our Arch Space as Simon Tyszko develops new pieces within the second half of his sonic sculpture exhibition. 

Tyszko’s mixed media practice constructs narratives that originate in the joys and tragedies of his colourful personal life. The expression of poignant emotional experiences finds form through a variety of physical materials. Discarded machines are rejuvenated and linked to other objects creating new hybrids animated by sound or light. Through its evolution, the original core impulse acquires gravitas as a reflection of the experience of the wider social body. 

The composition of sound and light currently exhibited in the Arch is bound together by neon – a core symbol of consumer culture – and 10,000 volts.

Simon Tyzsko is notorious for disrupting his domestic life by installing a full-scale Dakota aeroplane wing in his West London flat, in acknowledgement of the events of 9/11. He is a regular broadcaster on Resonance FM. 

Beaconsfield

22 Newport Street
London
SE11 6AY

Fifty-one issues, covering twenty years from 1994 to 2014, making the complete set of printed magazines.

A twenty-kilo archive box with a full inventory from Mute Publishing, with all copies in pristine condition.

The print archive has only been made available for sale as a complete set since July 2016.  The archive is limited to only 110 sets being available for sale in total.

Price £1600 (VAT Exempt), plus courier shipping and carriage insurance.

Payment in advance by via bank transfer or PayPal and by invoice. Please email below for bank and purchase details.

Email or call simon@metamute.org Tel: UK +44(0)74.9300-7631 DE +49(0)17.4405-4890

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Magazine Issues

1. Mute Vol 1, No. 0 − Can Art Survive the 20th Century?

2. Mute Vol 1, No. 1 − Homo Ludens

3. Mute Vol 1, No. 2 − The Chocolate Covered Highway

4. Mute Vol 1, No. 3 − CODE

5. Mute Vol 1, No. 4 − Analogue City

6. Mute Vol 1, No. 5

7. Mute Vol 1, No. 6

8. Mute Vol 1, No. 7

9. Mute Vol 1, No. 8 – Cyberfeminism

10. Mute Vol 1, No. 9

11. Mute Vol 1, No.10 – Mongrel Culture

12. Mute Vol 1, No. 11 – Vote Now! Net. Sex, Net. Money, Net. Work

13. Mute Vol 1, No. 12 – Bringing It All Back Home

14. Mute Vol 1, No. 13 – Next Five Minutes: Tactical Media

15. Mute Vol 1, No. 14 – Space: Intergalactic Overdrive

16. Mute Vol 1, No. 15 – Y2K Positive: Bring Your Own Media

17. Mute Vol 1, No. 16 – Art Wars

18. Mute Vol 1, No. 17 – Europe Undone

19. Mute Vol 1, No. 18 – I Am The Network

20. Mute Vol 1, No. 19 – Global Systems Meltdown

21. Mute Vol 1, No. 20 – Digital Commons?

22. Mute Vol 1, No. 21 – Total Paranoia - The Metamap

23. Mute Vol 1, No. 22 – The Art Issue

24. Mute Vol 1, No. 23 – Info-War V.2.0

25. Mute Vol 1, No. 24 – Beach or Border?

26. Mute Vol 1, No. 25 − (Winter/Spring 2003)

27. Mute Vol 1, No. 26 − (Summer/Autumn 2003)

28. Mute Vol 1, No. 27 − (Winter/Spring 2004)

29. Mute Vol 1, No. 28 − (Summer/Autumn 2004)

30. Mute Vol 1, No. 29 − The Precarious Issue

31. Mute Vol 2, No. 0 − Precarious Reader

32. Mute Vol 2, No. 1 − Underneath The Knowledge Commons

33. Mute Vol 2, No. 2 − Dis-Integrating Multiculturalism

34. Mute Vol 2, No. 3 − Naked Cities: Struggle in the Global Slums

35. Mute Vol 2, No. 4 − Web 2.0 Man's Best Friendster

36. Mute Vol 2, No. 5 − It's Not Easy being Green: The Climate Change Issue

37. Mute Vol 2, No. 6 − Living In A Bubble: Credit, Debt & Crisis

38. Mute Vol 2, No. 7 − Show Invisibles? Migration/Data/Work

39. Mute Vol 2, No. 8 − Zero Critical Content/No Added Aesthetics

40. Mute Vol 2, No. 9 − Your Five A Day

41. Mute Vol 2, No. 10 − We Don't Need Another Hero

42. Mute Vol 2, No. 11 − Exhuming The Human

43. Mute Vol 2, No. 12 − The Creative City in Ruins

44. Mute Vol 2, No. 13 − Out of Time

45. Mute Vol 2, No. 14 − Disorder/Colony/Collapse

46. Mute Vol 2, No. 15 − Grey Goo Grimoire

47. Mute Vol 2, No. 16 − Real Life Training

48. Mute Vol. 3, No. 1 − Double Negative Feedback

49. Mute Vol. 3, No. 2 − Politics my Arse

50. Mute Vol. 3, No. 3 − Becoming Impersonal

51. Mute Vol. 3, No. 4 − Slave to the Algorithm

Caption: Mute (Financial Times printed) covers

Srnicek & Williams’ Inventing the Future proposes a forces-of-production-based programme leading to guaranteed basic income. But do the wageless workers of an already automated and accelerated world really need this new revolutionary ABC? De-Arrest Editorial Services checks out the wares of competing brands of rocket men, left and right, and urges wholesale product recall 

[1] ‘The distinction between a movement and its ideology is not only hopeless, but also irrelevant’, amplified Ernesto Laclau in 2005.[2] ‘Neoliberalism’ was successful because it ‘thought in long-term visions’, proclaimed Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams around six months ago.[3] For all of these self-identifying Political Thinkers, cogitating between the first election of the Thatcher government and the second election of the Cameron junta in May of last year, it is the principal role of revolutionary theorists to set themselves up as psychotherapists of the long-view. Left strategists are the key-workers for radical mindfulness in default of the radical actions that ‘activists’ can never take; they are carers coaxing their patients and loony analysands to move in radical baby-steps towards the goal of a fully articulated left programme, whether that means a left programme for a post-industrial British socialist culture, as it did for Hall in 1981, or a programme for investment controls and a Universal Basic Income, as it does for Srnicek and Williams’ in their Inventing the Future.[4] In any case, left-wing phronemophobia is the common enemy, a bug running wild in the leadership’s hegemonic calculator, converting even its most carefully laid plans into little heaps of organic fertiliser for the ‘folk political’ hydroponic gardens of the lumpen anarchist fringe.[5]    

In this approach it is the vocabulary of pathology that justifies the conservatism of the programme. The moderation of the demands that one finds in books like Srnicek and Williams’ does not amount to ‘reformism’ in any conventional sense but is instead a homeopathic attempt to mitigate a clinically specifiable aversion, ‘thinking’, whose aetiology it is presumed goes all the way back to the regrettable orgy of ideation that took place sometime after Josef Stalin was appointed General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party in the heady days of 1922. Revolutionary theorists have responded to this catastrophe and its long miserable aftermath by attaching themselves to a maximum programme of class struggle, workers’ control, abolition of value, etcetera, whose psychic overvaluation leads immediately to practical paralysis, disappointment, profound feelings of inadequacy, vegetative inaction, and so finally to embolisms in exactly the network of middle-to-long-term ‘vision’ that a high-functioning left-wing will need most keenly if it isn’t to embarrass itself in front of its co-workers. Moderate, scalable demands are the lifeblood for the high-functioning left, they are to its conditions of mental wellbeing roughly what a twelve-step programme is to the good life of a chronic alcoholic, a stairway leading towards a political sobriety so extreme that no exaggeratedly millenarian ultraleftism and no ‘folk political’ municipal gardening scheme will ever again tempt them from the Universal Basic Wagon.

This tendency in critical analysis affects the way in which the ‘alternative’ is justified. The veracity of an argument like Srnicek and Williams’ is to be judged primarily on the basis of the conversion statistics that it gives rise to and not on the grounds of the plausibility of the end-state that it envisions, which is to say that the argument turns out in the last instance not to have been about ‘ideas’ at all but rather about attitudes, in the sense of the industrial relations theory to which psychotherapy is now commonly expected to defer; and since the attitude of the left is manifestly bad, which is to say, because it stays at home all day and doesn’t want to pull its socks up, the socially dominant conclusion juts up out of Inventing the Future like a spectral front-page headline from The Sun. There will be no revolutionary transformation in social relations until ‘the left’ gets over its oedipal complex and learns to love ‘the vertical’;[6] and anyone who has already scaled that y-axis towards the bliss-point of theoretical enlightenment will already know that once you get to the right altitude, the difference between a post-work society and a back-to-work programme becomes exceedingly vague and indistinct.

2

It is a well attested fact that we live in pessimistic times. Perceptive commentators among the ‘leading classes’ express this fact most keenly, because they more than anyone are inclined to believe that the existing status quo is benignly and surpassingly good. Recently Martin Wolf has argued in the Financial Times that Donald Trump is the US’s Emperor Augustus, ‘an American “Caeserism” ... become flesh’, lurking at the podium of the popular subconscious like the state of exception with barely a comb-over; and in these terms he gives voice to the anxious intuition of the liberal fraction of the capitalist class that in the not-too-distant future it too may be burnt to death at a garden party for the world market.[7]

But the same pessimism also filters down into the conservative discourse of therapeutic anti-capitalism. In Srnicek and Williams’ text, and also in Paul Mason’s most recent book, it is argued that the only way to overcome exploitation is bureaucratically to introduce so much machinery that there is no work left to perform.[8] This is the theoretical residue that gets squeezed out of the current global outlook: where there is no human mass movement to end the power of the bourgeoisie, what we most of all need to prove is that bourgeois class power can be overcome by a mass movement of machines. ‘Productivity’ is the only trend in capitalist history that seems to be more or less fully vicissitude-proof, it is the one-size-fits-all replacement for leaky, obsolete class consciousness, you can put all of your eggs into its basket and they double in processing power every twelve months. Some of them threaten to go 3D. And anyway expropriation talk just doesn’t get people hot and bothered like it used to: it sounds too much like hard work, probably in the olden days people would have to spend their whole Sundays on it. The revisionist dogma of the technocratic moderniser whispers, Why bother when you can get a kitchen appliance to do it for you. The pseudo-populist dogma of the technocratic moderniser screams in counterpoint, What would your line-manager think. The academic-opportunist rounds off, Where is my next research council grant coming from.

The worldview is pessimistic because it affirms a situation of weakness under the guise of showing the way out from it. There is no war in this worldview, there is no mass suffering, there is no imperialism, there is no bombing campaign, there is no struggle for territorial access or control over markets, there is no counter-revolution, there is no mass death, there is no mass incarceration programme except as a kind of specious knowing aside made to prove that we aren’t racists. There is no real history in this worldview, ‘market forces’ operate in a theoreticist petri dish, new ‘modes of regulation’ grow out of them and are squinted at through rose-tinted microscopes bunged up with smelling salts. There is no fascism either, no populist authoritarianism, no dynamic of interaction between racist street movements and property billionaire demagogues, no USA Freedom Kids, no migrant Freitod or torturable body. And so there is no acknowledgement that what brought all of this shit into existence is exactly the thing that post-capitalist post-politicos re-assert in the form of an election manifesto; that automation, capital overaccumulation and warfare are a trio; and that it was exactly automation that made intense inter-capitalist and inter-state competition progressively more and more violent, until today it begins to break out as open populist-authoritarianism at home and as pre-emptive bombing campaigns everywhere else, justified in the usual bicep-pumping owner-occupier Esperanto as the defence of ‘our’ borders and ‘our’ women and ‘our’ luxury indoor heated gene pool.

It is optimistic in the face of all of this to hold to the idea that there is no progressive way forward that does not involve the direct and open affirmation of the expropriation of the expropriators. It is optimistic in the face of all this to believe that expropriation is still the way forward even when it becomes difficult to see how most workers could seize and self-manage their means of production. We do need to think about how the immediate seizure of what we need to live (in places like the UK this would also mean mass non-payment campaigns) could open into new forms of social organisation; also about how import-export relations can be sustained in industries that are necessary to social reproduction once the power of capitalist owners has been annulled (what would the UK wheat industry – low-value in capitalist terms but an important source of necessary physical goods – look like in the aftermath of the dissolution of the two or three companies that administrate it?) We do need to think about this; but the question of how to re-organise the world market along ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ lines is meaningless without an acceptance that mass movements can only succeed by making severe inroads into bourgeois property relations. There is no ‘forces-of-production’-only solution to the present disaster for the human species because the forces of production have already spoken. Their mouthpiece is Donald Trump. He is the ‘independently wealthy’ voice-box of the fictitious capital that decades of competitive fixed-capital investment and overaccumulation in the ‘real economy’ has given rise to, prophet of the total blow-out to come, fully ‘independent’ because totally insane in the technical sense that Marx developed in the third volume of his famous work of leadership psychology.[9] He is the embodiment of capital that can profit from war and mass annihilation and catastrophic currency devaluations and still feel fresh enough afterwards to climb onto the roof of the palace complex to play ‘Rocket Man’, Nero-style, to his little bands of falangist homophobe supporters.[10] And he wouldn’t be anything if the post-industrial working class who the post-capitalist theoreticians think are good for nothing except street demos decided that they were going to live rent free in the more upscale ‘affordances’ of his endless fucking real estate portfolio. [11]

3

A ‘traditional’ Marxist approach to Srnicek and Williams’ book might dismiss its theses by arguing that they give exact expression to a particular kind of class ‘ideology’, just like, back in the olden days, Marx argued that Proudhon’s socialism gave particular expression to his solicitude for small-to-medium-size businesses. An argument along these lines would probably pick out in particular the emphasis in Srnicek and Williams’ programme on abstract free time as the principal means ‘by which a collective of different identities are knitted together’. It could assert that this knitting-group approach to social identities seems to retail a particularly conflict-averse kind of ‘populism’, in which the nominated universal good of more free time is more than usually paradigmatically non-specific and indifferent in the possibilities that it parameterises. It might add to this that the way in which the good is to be achieved, by means of an aggregation of identities which once it arrives at its hegemonic weight-class can simply assume state power and pass its economic reforms through parliament – that this vision of transformation is derived from an academic and administrative ‘worldview’, in which ‘the economy’ is organised not as a system for the mediation of fundamentally antagonistic interests but rather along the lines of a particularly challenging spreadsheet. An approach like this one might say that the real technical problems of organising social reproduction without exploitation, class relations, and bourgeois property are travestied in works where the tradition of all past generations is converted by means of conceptual chicanery from a tradition of theft, exhaustion, unfilled capacities, anger, and yearning into a more or less indifferently assembled set of legacy systems, which it is the task of some indifferently assembled set of experts to pick through and ponderously to reassemble.

All of these arguments may be true, though evidently they wouldn’t say anything that isn’t equally applicable to any number of other works of technocratic reformism, whether written in the old cybernetic-authoritarian style or with the light coating of contemporary movementist jargon that has been sprayed over Inventing the Future. But there is also perhaps a better response to the text than the one that just sneers at the political marketing categories that it reverse graffitis onto all of its rhetorical flat surfaces. The response is a stylistic one, and, so, inevitably, it has to begin with a basic observation. The observation is this. Inventing the Future is not only a ‘petty bourgeois’ text; it is also and at every turn a singularly and formidably dull one. It has the permanently preliminary tone of an abstract that has somehow got lost from the academic article that it was meant to introduce and which has gone wandering aimlessly along the aisles of a supermarket in search of its point. Any reader not scanning the book on an iPhone while processing real-time updates on the world-market price of Brent Crude and trying to call an Uber will find it difficult to avoid the impression that the authors are only intermediaries, Mechanical Turks paid by the word to do a revolutionary programme to order, receiving their instructions from an algorithm somewhere upstream. The style of the text is almost ineffably machine-like. It passes with equal indifference through passages of contrived declamatory urgency and passages of contrived technical precision, orchestrating the ups and downs with all of the dynamic range of a symphony played on a barrel organ nailed hurriedly to a lab coat in order to deceive passers-by.

Why is the dullness of Inventing the Future theoretically significant? The accusation that Srnicek and Williams are presenting a luridly middle-class programme for a popular movement may be less important than the accusation that they are presenting a stupidly selective or theoretically deranged one, badly overinflated by the usual self-destructing cutting-edge speak, overpopulated by pedantically sophisticated and nonsensical conceptual distinctions, perennially anxious to negotiate little theoretical peerages for social identities, histories and movements that it in fact marginalises or suppresses, which is to say more generally that their argument is a kind of miniature replica of the economy that it claims systematically to counteract. [12] But why should it matter? Why is it important that the book is so generically flat and inert?

The answer to this last question returns us to the book’s diagnostic claims discussed earlier on. The argument in Inventing the Future that ‘the left’ suffers everywhere from a kind of pathogenic immediatism, and that this immediatism blocks off the possibility for a practical ‘hegemonic’ project against ‘neoliberalism’ – this argument has its own parallel in the failure of the text to provide any indicator of the middle-term conflict that would be necessitated by a movement for the abolition of wage-labour on a global scale.[13] The middle-term is largely repressed, trodden under the boot of we’re-being-reasonable, down into the forever yielding soil of can’t-we-talk-about-it-later, and so just where you might expect the text to imagine in detail the ways in which its ends might require a corresponding uptick in the radicalism of political means, everything goes silent. Clocks tick, pins drop, air-conditioning units filibuster, and all at once the workers of the world find themselves trussed up in the open-plan office of a think-tank with the planning documents for the ‘delinking of work from income’ stuffed into their mouths like a ball gag during an interrogation scene,[14] wondering why the wet ink tastes so challengingly stale, and perhaps just faintly recalling that ‘delinking working from income’ is what the international bourgeoisie has been doing ever since it first enclosed a piece of ground, bethought itself of saying This is mine, and found people stupid enough to believe it.[15]

The middle-term is repressed in Srnicek and Williams’ argument because it is in the middle-term of active struggle that a movement against capital must necessarily arrive at the stage of greatest tension and uncertainty. It is a moment in which the most fundamental contradictions of class and ownership cannot be ‘knitted together’ into a woolly hegemony and then handed over to a ‘future’ which can scarcely mask its ingratitude. In other words, Inventing the Future increases the plausibility of the prospect of a ‘post-work’ society still defined by bourgeois property relations only by eradicating from its schema of development every last trace of an account of bourgeois counter-revolution, as well as, more significantly, the desperate measures that would have to be taken by a mass movement of prolerianised and oppressed people in order to seize for themselves a political victory. The eradication of this scenario at the level of theory is also an eradication of tension at the level of imaginative foresight; the one deletion cannot be carried out without the other; and so the thin and unbelievable ‘optimism’ of the text’s prospectus is purchased at the cost of the rheumatic dumpishness of the prose in which it is written.

No text as boringly written as Srnicek and Williams’ can offer an adequate conception of ‘populism’, because no text as boringly written as theirs can conceive of the basic fact that populists as diverse as Hugo Chávez and Nigel Farage have forever known instinctively in their blood. What they have known is that populist politics when it succeeds must find a means of suddenly setting aflame in shared consciousness some instinct that liberal society has blocked off or incarcerated in the realm of merely private conscience, which is another way of saying that populist politics when it succeeds must be felt by its subjects as a sudden and exhilarating source of disinhibition.[16] The intense and bewildering need for this disinhibition is itself one historical component of our total technical inheritance. And while the forward-thinking reformers who overlook it in favour of good attitudes and healthy balanced organisational ecosystems may do so in the name of the future, for so long as they fasten their thousand-mile stares exclusively to an à la carte menu of automation, robots and technical fixes, and fail to see that the violent needs and sensations unfolding right in front of their eyes are themselves a force of production, even their most visionary modernist fantasias will turn out on arrival to be yet another helping of last week’s subcultural primitivism, warmed up on a plate of yesterday’s news, and surreptitiously spat in by the same old-new post-capitalist working class.

De-Arrest Editorial Services is a collective endeavour: other services available at www.de-arrest.me

Info

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. London: Verso 2015

Footnotes

#mute archive a triple gem! As part of the collaborative bibliographies residency at Anagram Books, Berlin. https://mute-publishing.github.io/archive/index.html

• Mute Magazine – Total Paranoia
• The Metamap of Surveillance and Security (DYMAXION DREAMS)
• Metamute Meets Echelon - A Literary Competition

The Magazine
http://www.metamute.org/shop/magazine/mute-vol-1-no.-21-%E2%80%93-total-paranoia-metamap

Mute issues photo gallery https://www.flickr.com/photos/mute_magazine/albums...

The Map
http://www.metamute.org/sites/www.metamute.org/files/u1/metamap.pdf
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/metamap-pull-out-global-map-charting-surveillance-and-privacy-projects

Metamute Meets Echelon
http://web.archive.org/web/20011130233350/http://metamute.com/

On the event of 9/11 Twin Towers attack Mute was in the last days of sending its Total Paranoia¹ (Mute Vol 1, No. 21, 2001-09) issue to the printers, themed around ‘dataveillance’ which had been prepared over July and August 2001. In the issue Mute had made a map of surveillance and privacy, the MetaMap of Surveillance and Privacy ², while at the Hackers at Large (note HAL for the 2001 movie reference)³ CCC hackfest in the summer. The map used the Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion (1938) World Projection⁴ and covered the activities of the intelligence services and electronic surveillance such as the Echelon⁵ system, but also activists in areas such as privacy, free speech and open infrastructure projects. A third component was a Echelon literary competition, titled ‘Metamute Meets Echelon - A Literary Competition’ organised to coincide with Jam Echelon Day 2001. The competition was formulated at the HAL CCC hackfest and involved a thousand euro prize money for the competition winners, which had been donated anonymously at the hackfest. The competition rules were pretty straight forward, create a written work that was attractive to Echelon and had literary merit.

In light of the Twin Towers attack the map carried an introduction ‘DYMAXION DREAMS’⁶ written by Pauline van Mourik Broekman. This was our opportunity to re-assert the need for freedom, in the anticipated abuse of security crack downs.

‘After the day commentators scrambled to dub the beginning of the 21^st century, nothing was certain. The sole exception being the drastic change the security and intelligence services would undergo – in the short term to support a counter-attack, in the long term in a preventative mode. In ways we had never imagined, ‘Total Paranoia’ characterised the public mood. We decided to publish this issue of Mute unamended: disavowing a thematic we perceived to be relevant to democratic life a week ago seemed misguided, to say the least. Instead, the more days went by, the more clear it became that the self-censorship that will no doubt continue in the wake of the disaster is precisely the opposite of what it demands.’
–Pauline van Mourik Broekman, ‘DYMAXION DREAMS’, 18 Sept 2001⁷

The ‘Metamute Meets Echelon - A Literary Competition’ was announced 4^th September 2001, see the original post here on The Way Back Machine http://web.archive.org/web/20011029130421/http://www.metamute.com/forum/viewtopic.php?topic=44&forum=1

These were the rules of the competition:

Rules 
Participants should utilise words from the Echelon dictionary 
http://metamute.com/echelonlist.txt to produce an original literary work. Any literary genre is admissable - from short stories to drama to poetry to speeches to the epistolary form. Fictional company memos and e-mail exchanges are admissable, as are IRC and SMS conversations, or any other form. 

The work produced must not be about Echelon in any way, shape or form, and the term 'Echelon' must not appear anywhere in the work. 

1st Prize in the competition is 500 Euros, and two runners up will each receive a prize of 250 Euros each. 

Judges' criteria 
Entries will be judged against two key criteria: 1) the literary merit of the piece of work and 2) the number of words from the Echelon word list that are present in the work. 

Both criteria are given equal weight. For example, a piece with good literary merit and fewer Echelon keywords will not necessarily lose to a weaker piece that contains more keywords. Indeed, where it is felt that the overuse of words from the Echelon wordlist has actively impaired the literary quality, entries will be marked down. Simple lists of keywords in an entry will automatically disqualify it. 

'Literary merit' is decided by the judges, and their decision is final. 

The results were announced in late October that same year.

‘In September 2001, Metamute launched its Echelon literary competition to mark international 'Jam Echelon Day'. A challenge to maximise literary virtuosity and Echelon's rumoured 'key word' in no more than 2500 words, the call for entries - and its euro1000 prize - produced an impressive mine of writings. Ranging from the dazed to the macabre, they were universally coloured by the same state of mind that produces Echelon's lists. Cyberpunk, poetry and codified missives were the genres of choice. Brains melting and teeth chattering from reading all this material, Metamute is now ready to announce its Echelon winners. We thank them for their heroic efforts and invite you to read them and others online in our M-files section!’

See the original page on the Way Back Machine http://web.archive.org/web/20011130233350/http://metamute.com/

The Prize Winners 

First prize: euro500
The Avatar Group with Isis

http://web.archive.org/web/20020204160207/http://m...
Runners up: euro250
Tessa Laird with Pink Noise in My Gray Data

http://web.archive.org/web/20020227132042/http://m...
Edward Lear with The Owl and the Pussycat Assassinate the EuroFeds
http://web.archive.org/web/20011201210753/http://m...
Special Mention for the French contribution: Laurence Comparat with Le 'RAID' 

http://web.archive.org/web/20020204155626/http://m...'RAID'.htm
 

- the bibliographer

Footnotes

As part of the ongoing Mute magazine archive project PDFs have been released of the early Mute issues printed on the FT press at East India Dock House, London.

Mute issues 0 to 7 (1994-1997) can be found on GitHub https://github.com/Mute-Publishing

The Mute archive is gradually being developed and this new GitHub resource forms the base of a free and open-source DIY archiving project. Currently the PDFs and scans are relatively low quality. The next steps are to improve the scans, add OCR layers and set the publications within a IIIF image deep-zoom environment, enrich the metadata in Zotero, cryptographic IDs and a lot more.

Follow Mute on Twitter for further updates @mutemagazine https://twitter.com/mutemagazine or on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/mutemagazine

Any questions or comments please drop simon@metamute.org a line or leave a comment on GitHub where you can also read up on or archive recipe  https://github.com/Mute-Publishing/Archive-Documen...

The complete Mute print archive is for sale on Metamute, covering 51 issues from 1994-2014 http://www.metamute.org/archive

As ever all of Mute‘s articles (except where they have slipped through the digitisation net) are free to read online at http://www.metamute.org/

PS For all you bibliophiles out there here are the Zotero citations for all the issues https://www.zotero.org/groups/mute/items/collectio...

*Issues Include*

Mute Vol 1, No. 0 − Can Art Survive the 20th Century? 1994 Nov, ISSN 1356-7748-01
Mute Vol 1, No. 1 − Homo Ludens 1995 May, ISSN 1356-7748-02
Mute Vol 1, No. 2 − The Chocolate Covered Highway 1995 Jun, ISSN 1356-7748-03
Mute Vol 1, No. 3 − CODE 1995 Sept, ISSN 1356-7748-04
Mute Vol 1, No. 4 − Analogue City 1995 Dec, ISSN 1356-7748-05
Mute Vol 1, No. 5 1996 Jun, ISSN 1356-7748-06
Mute Vol 1, No. 6 1996 Sept, ISSN 1356-7748-07
Mute Vol 1, No. 7 1996 Nov, ISSN 1356-7748-08
+ New Contemporaries - special insert, 1997

In the workplace automation and technology have tipped the balance of power greatly in favour of capital but, as Jamie Woodcock explains, workers are contesting this situation, logging out and calling the shots

In my new book Working the Phones,¹ I worked in a call centre to try to understand the labour process, management techniques, and new forms of resistance and organisation. This article connects the development of new managerial methods of surveillance and control, often tied up with automation, from the call centre to the new ‘gig economy’. The recent rise of Uber, and new ‘Uber for X’ type companies like Deliveroo, represents a new shift in employment relations, tipping the balance of power greatly in favour of capital. This is reliant on contractually outsourcing labour, a legalistic trick, backed up with new technological methods of surveillance and control. Call centres have provided an important site to understand these changes as they were at the cutting edge of both outsourcing and developing these technologies. What follows is an argument linking the call centre to the new ‘gig economy’, through an understanding of automation and technology, while also presenting some initial findings from a new project with Deliveroo workers.

Automation

Automation has become a particularly fashionable topic of discussion, both on the left and more broadly. Automation has the potential to transform work on a scale not seen since the industrial revolution, creating vast swathes of unemployment, seen for example in the claim that just under half of all jobs are at risk of automation.² Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams have raised the importance of contesting how automation happens, arguing for a universal basic income as one response.³ The key to understanding automation is that it is not a neutral process: it can serve the interests of the powerful, or enable free workers to spend their time on other things. Much like the application of technology more generally it is a contested process. For example, automation first involved augmenting work in various ways. It has been altering tasks carried out by labour for a very long time, but most often it falls far short of the science-fictional future of sentient robots and frictionless interactions that it promises.

Call centres have developed over time with the increasing application of technology to the labour process. At first, workers manually dialled numbers from sheets of paper, but over time these environments have been transformed into workplaces deeply shaped by the integration of computers and telephones. Automatic dialling resulted in workers making many more calls, reducing to a minimum the time between calls. The scripting of phone conversations took away some of the mental labour involved in the phone conversation, rationalising and regularising it. These greatly boosted the productivity of call centre workers, augmented through technological speed-up. This was successful in call centres because the integration of telephones and computers makes the work particularly susceptible to this.⁴ Call centres also emerged at a time of deregulation, often in the financial sector in the UK, leading to a rapid growth of sales operations.⁵

The next stage of automation brought the possibility not only of augmenting how work is carried out, but displacing people from the process entirely in some sectors. This raises the possibility of mass unemployment as a result. But the history of technology in the workplace has been one marked by the contested introduction of new methods of managerial surveillance and control, involving a fight over how work is carried out and under what conditions. This next shift involves increased technological capabilities of automation. Marx makes an important distinction between the ‘tool’ and the ‘machine’ which is useful to consider here. The machine was ‘a mechanism that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools the same operation as the worker formerly did with similar tools.’⁶ This replication of labour often carries with it errors and mistakes, particularly as the real world is much more contradictory and messy than planning allows for. For example, robotic assembly lines tend to need workers on hand to correct misalignment and things falling out of place. This next wave of automation will be led by a new kind of automation: instead of just automating tasks on the basis of recreating the previous actions of the worker, it is automation assisted by artificial intelligence that can self-correct and learn in various ways.

The risk is considering automation in very general terms, thinking about it as a point of rupture that will trigger an epochal shift in human existence, a stepping stone to Ray Kurzweil’s ‘singularity.’⁷ However, as Michael Burawoy has argued, ‘in reality, machinery embraces a host of possibilities, many of which are systematically thwarted, rather than developed, by capital.’⁸ Technological progress is not linear, but its possibilities are deeply shaped by capital. In the workplace specifically, Harry Braverman has argued that technology was tied up with both efficiency and control, as ‘machinery offers to management the opportunity to do by wholly mechanical means that which it had previously attempted to do by organizational and disciplinary means.’⁹ This method of control is one that has had great success in call centres, creating conditions of post-industrial work that have ‘become not Daniel Bell’s dream, but Harry Braverman’s nightmare.’¹⁰

Platform Capitalism and the Gig Economy

The call centre can be understood as an archetypal form of contemporary work, coming to symbolise the shifts from manufacturing to service work. Workers are often outsourced, and generally employed in precarious conditions, with work that is stressful, difficult, and emotionally draining. In the absence of strong trade unionism or workplace organisations, management has had a relatively free reign to design and implement despotic methods creating, in effect, an ‘electronic Panopticon.’¹¹ The high levels of surveillance have become synonymous with this kind of work, along with the pervasive use of metrics and perverse attempts at gamification. The call centre provides a powerful model for mangers to drive down costs and exploit workers, with its inspiration increasingly present across other kinds of work. The development of these technological methods of surveillance and control have provided valuable insights for how to manage the transformation of work following the 2008 financial crisis, in what Paul Mason has described as a jobless recovery.¹² The growth of the ‘gig economy’ has been driven by the ‘lean platform economy’, growing within a context which ‘ultimately appears as an outlet for surplus capital in an era of ultra-low interest rates and dire investment opportunities rather than the vanguard destined to revive capitalism.’¹³

These platforms claim to bring together people needing a service with those prepared to provide it: taxi journeys in the case of Uber, while for Deliveroo it is food delivery. The workers at Deliveroo and Uber are currently misclassified as self-employed independent contractors, despite having to pay a deposit for a uniform that they are expected to wear, and employment relations that are much like that of a worker, but shorn of most responsibilities for the employer. It is therefore a deliberate choice in this article to use the term ‘worker’, as opposed to the long-form legal construct that currently supports the business model of these platforms.¹⁴ This process of contractually outsourcing the workers has been described as ‘digital black box labor.’¹⁵ This captures how organisations try to obscure the labour that is key to their business models, reducing the liabilities of the company and making it look like a more attractive investment opportunity. Therefore, it is an important task to reveal the conditions of this kind of work, along with challenging its false categorisation.

At Deliveroo, the electronic panopticon of the call centre is being adapted to a geographically dispersed context that is mediated online. This results in workers taking on and internalising the pressures of management, often backed up by direct punishment or the precariousness of insecure contracts. In call centres this has resulted in high rates of turnover and a near-universally reviled workplace experience – both for workers and the people being called. For workers in the gig economy, whether driving Uber taxis or dropping off takeaways for Deliveroo, this pressure is manifested via an online app. Workers are monitored in great detail, noting the exact times and routes taken, while customers provide their own ratings. But unlike the call centre, the contact between a Deliveroo worker and management is extremely limited. The contractual outsourcing not only establishes precarious employment conditions, but it also operates within a setting in which workers may only have physical contact with the company when they sign up – and this contact is with other precarious workers assigned to the recruitment centres – or with call centres workers when something goes wrong. Instead of the physical supervision and management found in the factory regime, or the augmented supervisor in the call centre, there is management by the algorithm panopticon. In the interviews I have conducted so far, Deliveroo workers have detailed how ‘there isn’t that person telling you what to do, it’s the algorithm’ and that ‘the algorithm is the boss. They work on the algorithm, we work on the algorithm, they just interpret the numbers that we come out with.’¹⁶ The management function comes mainly in the form of emails that rate performance. Although these don’t tell workers the actual targets, only whether they were meeting them or not. This introduces that demand to self-regulate found with the panopticon, inculcating the feeling of being constantly tracked and watched, despite the lack of a physical boss or supervisor.

Rather than eliminating the possibility of resistance, this new incarnation of the panopticon creates a twofold precarity on the Deliveroo platform. The lack of employment rights and the dangerous nature of the work means that workers are left with little protection. As one interviewee explained:

I am young, I don’t have any family to care for, it’s not all that bad for me short term. But long term you’re scared, you’re scared. If I want to go holidays I need to keep money, if I crash or broke my leg so I can’t work. If I can’t work I can’t pay the rent, I can’t go holidays so it’s a process that’s quite hard.¹⁷

These conditions create clear structural difficulties for organising, but also mask a precarity for the platform itself. The management function that is found in other workplaces is also mostly outsourced in this lean platform model, meaning that the organisation has relatively few tools at its disposal to deal with organised resistance.¹⁸ 

How Workers are Resisting in the Gig Economy

My interest in the ‘gig economy’ began from a similar starting point to the project with call centres: here was a new and rapidly growing form of work, which had clear grievances but no signs of traditional workplace organisation. Just like in call centres, the possibility for workers in the ‘gig economy’ to organise has been written off too quickly. The refrain with Uber drivers was that they had no physical workplace, no way of meeting up, so could not form the networks needed to organise. It is perhaps more accurate to say that these doubts were held by people thinking they could not reach Uber drivers to organise them, a defence from the perspective of existing trade unions about why they could not justify campaign resources. Instead, what Deliveroo shows is that often these platforms require workers to collect at various points – meeting points – so that workers are in the prime position to start a delivery. Even without this, Deliveroo drivers meet at various points around the city, from popular restaurants to busy junctions, now a ubiquitous sight across London. Uber recognised that it was easy to find Deliveroo drivers, with multiple reports of Deliveroo orders to the Uber headquarters, where managers tried to recruit drivers to the rival service. These workers are not completely fractured across digital platforms, but remain embedded within the streets and roads, very real parts of the city. It should also be noted that Uber drivers also have to present documents, and the offices where this happens provide an important point of potential contact, despite the fact an Uber driver is only ever a short drive, and a request on an app, away in London.

Image: Deliveroo workers striking in London, August 2016

Unlike the call centre project, where I worked undercover for six months, I’ve been involved in an activist ethnography with Deliveroo workers since last year. This has meant taking part in some campaigning before the strike, along with more activity that followed the wildcat action. As I have detailed elsewhere,¹⁹ the self-organisation of the Deliveroo workers, along with the support of the couriers’ branch of the IWGB, has been hugely inspiring. The six-day strike was a spontaneous response to Deliveroo’s unilateral attempt to remove the hour rate of pay and replace it with only per-drop payments. This action was organised primarily on WhatsApp, building on pre-existing networks, some of which were formed at the meeting points assigned in each area by Deliveroo. What followed was a lively campaign which was widely circulated on social media.

At the UberEATS strike, which followed soon after the strike at Deliveroo last year, a similar approach was attempted. There was a special offer for the Uber service that meant the first order received a £5 discount. The workers on strike, along with some from Deliveroo, realised they could take advantage of this offer. They started making orders for less than £5 worth of food, getting both a free meal and another driver who could be convinced to join the wildcat action. Those on strike crowded around the driver cheering and chanting ‘log out’ – the ‘gig economy’ equivalent of downing tools – in a spontaneous picket line. Uber, who were well aware of the action taking place, found a workaround to stop orders to the demonstration, preventing any further drivers joining that day. As one of the drivers I interviewed about this explained, as well as the entertainment the strikers got out of the action, they also showed they could ‘occupy the system in a way... if it’s a wild cat strike... it’s like a sit-in.’²⁰ This was followed by discussions of how the platforms could be used against themselves, similar to the use of ‘call attacks’ in inbound call centres in Turkey, where activists organise mass phone calling to call centres in order to spread information and try to organise them.²¹

The campaign at Deliveroo is continuing to build, with the IWGB now fighting for trade union recognition. This would mean a huge change in conditions for Deliveroo workers if it is successful, since, if the bogus employment status is overturned, workers would be entitled to holiday and sick pay amongst other rights. This has been followed by campaigns in Leeds, Bristol, Brighton, and an increasing number of places where Deliveroo is setting up. There was also a recent strike of Italian workers at Foodora, a similar food delivery company.²² These events are proving that it is possible for workers to organise in the ‘gig economy’, experimenting with new ways to organise while adapting older techniques.

Automation in Transport and Delivery Work

Class struggle in call centres takes a particular flavour and form due to the widespread refusal of work and (perhaps necessary) lack of a more positive vision for what a sales call centre could be used for. There is a different dimension with transport and delivery work, given that an alternative way of running these is currently being forced onto the near-horizon. Uber has made it very clear its aim is to automate its services with driverless cars, already testing services with Toyota, Volvo, and now Mercedes Benz, that will see the company ‘run a network of driverless cars that can be booked through Uber’s app.’²³ At Deliveroo this remains a possibility, although rival company Just Eat had already begun testing a robot delivery vehicle in London. As an analyst at TCC Global remarked, ‘It’s a laudable and adventurous idea, but I also wonder how this could be rolled out at scale when there is already a very low cost human alternative.’²⁴ Despite this, autonomous vehicles and drones are falling in price, and are much more cooperative than human workers, meaning the automation of these sectors is rapidly becoming a possibility. From a purely academic perspective this can create a sense of inevitability and defeat – these sectors are going to be automated anyway, so why should we be concerned with the emergence of struggle here?

Automation, like the technology that facilitates and develops it, is not neutral. Rather it emerges from particular sets of social relations, reflecting the context from which it emerges, and going on to be used as part of an intervention into those social relations. The contest over automation needs to be considered from the perspective of workers who are currently doing this work, resisting its reorganisation, and thinking what alternatives might look like. As Marx observed:

The special skill of each individual machine-operator, who has now been deprived of all significance, vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity in the face of the science, the gigantic natural forces, and the mass of the social labour embodied in the system of machinery, which, together with these three forces, constitutes the power of the ‘master’.²⁵

The ‘master’ is now greatly augmented by new technology, holding the threat of automation over increasingly broad groups of workers. This threat makes it even more important to find ways to fight to make machinery no longer serve the ‘master’, seeing these not as losing battles but part of an alternative. Rather than uncritically accepting or rejecting new technology, we need to start our analysis from these questions. This means thinking about who designs this technology and under what pressures, what new forms of organisation and exploitation emerge from their use, and how technology is transforming work and everyday lives more generally. From call centre to the ‘gig economy’, technology has been used to dominate and exploit workers. However, it is worth remembering that computers and automation once promised exciting possibilities, but this creativity and potentiality were twisted and re-worked into the platform capitalism of the present. Through work we can understand that despite the dystopian indications, this present remains contested, and that a new kind of politics can once again force the liberatory potential of technology back onto the political horizon.

Jamie Woodcock <j.woodcock AT lse.ac.uk> is a fellow at the LSE and author of Working The Phones, a book about control and resistance in call centres. His latest project is about Deliveroo and the 'gig economy'. He is also currently doing research on digital labour, technology, management, and videogames

Footnotes

What form of technology is the police? Rees A offers a forensic analysis of the tools of jurisprudence and policing

yu cyaant awsk Clinton McCurbin

bout im haxfixiasham

an yu cyaant awsk Joy Gardner

bout her sufficaeshan

yu cyannt awsk Colin Roach

if im really shoot imself

an yu cyaant awsk Vincent Graham

if a im stab imself

– Linton Kwesi Johnson, ‘Liesense Fi Kill’

This is a history that has to be told in partial memories, fragmented stories, through the remains of broken struggles and broken bodies, in between the lines of public reports. It is not an official history or a victorious history. Maybe the only story there ever is to tell about the police is one of defeat: any other story would be that of their impossibility. This story, then, is another unhappy one made out of many other unhappy ones. It takes place in the gap between lives and the police line and is told with the tools that fill that gap.

Cheiralgia paresthetica is ‘a neuropathy of the hand generally caused by compression or trauma to the superficial branch of the radial nerve.’¹ It is commonly referred to as ‘handcuff neuropathy’ due to its usual cause. In more severe cases treatment involves putting the patient under local anaesthetic, cutting through the layers of skin and fat and muscle on your arm or wrist, and decompressing the affected area of nerve. Damage can be permanent. In the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) entry for handcuffs, officers are advised that:

Handcuffs that are not double locked may tighten and cause injury to the detained person's wrist. Handcuffs should be double locked and checked for tightness unless it is clearly impractical to do so. For example, if the detained person is struggling or violent. In these circumstances, steps should be taken to help ensure that the circulation of blood is not restricted and that no unnecessary injury is caused.²

Handcuff neuropathy is one of the more frequent medical problems afflicting those taken into custody. From one point of view it’s the result of the bad application of the cuff: a procedural irregularity that can be done away with through better training. From another, it’s a punishment for resisting arrest, questioning an officer, protesting. What is readable between the lines of the SOP is a counter-indication explaining how to use the tools of the trade to harm and maim. Cheiralgia paresthetica is as much the result of sadism as it is individual incompetence; a sadism that is combined and systemic in the police force. Indeed in an institution that employs tens of thousands of people, and holds responsibility for their level of training, any individual incompetence, multiplied across the force, is itself institutional sadism. A coordinated and predictable accident. hxckid84, suffering from a botched handcuffing and asking for medical advice, described the experience of cheiralgia paresthetica on Yahoo! Answers:

hi all, i was arrested on friday night and handcuffed very tightly. i can't remember much as I was drunk (reason i was arrested). Since then my left arm has been tingling and specifrically the shoulder muscle refuses to work. I have feeling in it but my wrists are very bruised and sore and my shoulder muscle being paralysed is really worrying me. whats the problem? will it be permanent? i canot make it move at all. its no sunday and still no improvement. my whole arm is weak and 'asleep'.³

While role-playing just this arrest scenario with rigid handcuffs, John Franklin – himself a police officer – suffered a similar injury. He was left unable to go back to work and experiencing bouts of depression and anxiety. Ultimately the courts awarded him a payout of £108,137 damages. The damage was done because Franklin was incorrectly treated like any other arrestee on a Friday night. For Franklin as for hxckid84, ‘extreme pain was caused frequently and […] there was no properly defined signal taught them to stop it.’⁴

The SOP then goes on to remind officers that ‘from time-to-time [sic] handcuffs may become contaminated with blood or other body fluids.’ If the contamination isn’t too bad, officers are advised to put on a set of disposable plastic gloves and clean the cuffs with disinfectant. When contamination is more serious (i.e. blood/spit/piss/shit) officers are advised to dispose of cuffs in the manner they would any other item of clinical waste. There is no mention of where this blood/spit/piss/shit has come from, the arrestee’s body. Its materialisation ‘from time-to-time’ is a matter of good housekeeping for the Met. You want to hit the streets looking your best.

You rarely feel the touch of a police officer’s skin on yours. You feel the glove. You feel the baton. You feel the cuff or the boot. But bare flesh is strictly prohibited. Communication between flesh would be too messy, it must be constantly excised from police work. There must likewise be no easy means of dialogue between officers and their public. Anyone subjected to a police kettle knows the effect of this enforced monologue. Moving from one blocked entrance to the next, always being told you’ll be let out at another time or another place. Anti-fascists demonstrating against the EDL in Tower Hamlets in 2013 experienced an exception to this when they were greeted by police megaphones inside a kettle, and even found cops trying to converse with them one to one. But this was only to inform them that sections 12 and 14 of the Public Order Act (1986) had been imposed, requiring them to do the impossible and leave on pain of arrest. The police only did them this kindness because a requirement when convicting on these grounds is that the arrestee knew at the time that the sections were in effect (they have even been known to hand out leaflets to protesters in order to get their message across). Even then charges were dropped against all but a handful of the 300 arrestees on the day, and many are looking to receive compensation for wrongful arrest in the near future.

Care: Lethal and Less-lethal

Every interaction is mediated by a univocal technological apparatus that dampens and denies the voice of a mass that is its silent – and consequently suspect – object. Those moments where officers do listen (and they are few) are opportunities for intelligence gathering, for gaining evidence to secure a defensible arrest, for reinforcing the idea that they’re not all that bad if you get to know them (but if you get on their wrong side they’ll fuck you up). To facilitate this univocity your relationship with police is always mediated by a more or less complex assemblage of tools for the better management of human resources; guns, best practice, procedural manuals, tazers, the Health and Safety at Work Act (1974) and the Police Act (1997), pepper spray, the Human Rights Act (1998), Bronze Command, Silver Command, Gold Command, riot shields and helmets, extensive courses of training designed to correct vulnerability out of every aspect of the police officer’s body, the Evidence Gathering Team (EGT) and their camera, the dog and the horse, Police Liaison Officers (PLO), an officer’s notebook. According to the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) all these, and even water canon and rubber bullets, are ‘the tools it needs to protect the public and its officers.’ They are not threats to public safety, but its very embodiment.

This is a methodology of care that occupies itself with the minutiae of legal-technical maintenance, set apart from a violent police practice that mechanically redistributes bodies and their fluids by way of a multitude of tools, implements and weapons. In the context of this ever-expanding repertoire of techniques of repression, the easy and uninterrupted circulation of bodies (live or dead) is the very definition of public order. Its first and most absolute codification came with Metropolitan Commissioner McNee’s declaration at a press conference in 1981 that the days of ‘winning by appearance to lose’ when ‘policing a free society’ were over.⁵ In its place came the confident assertion that ‘if you keep off the streets of London and behave yourself, you won’t have the SPG to worry about.’⁶ Since then the police have persisted in reminding us that we’ve never stopped living this defeat. Redistributing streets as they see fit.⁷ But streets, even more than days, are where we live, so where are we meant to go when even their passive occupation is a declaration of war?

The natural and inevitable counterpart to this legal-technical philosophy of policing by corporeal redistribution is the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). At last count all eight of its Senior Investigators and ten out of twenty Deputy Senior Investigators were ex-police.⁸ They apparently understand ‘the job’ better than any civilian could. Another statistic, tied to the first, is that since the IPCC’s inception in 2004, 827 people have died during or following police contact, and not a single police officer has been convicted in relation to any of these deaths. At the notorious Brixton Police Station, on the death of Sean Rigg following contact with police in 2008, the IPCC’s first priority wasn’t a forensic examination of the body or the custody suite, but writing a press release in collaboration with senior officers.⁹ Seven years earlier, at the same station, Ricky Bishop suffered unexplained injuries to his face and limbs before being taken to nearby King’s College Hospital where he died. Twelve officers were involved in his detention, yet none of them could explain what happened, where the injuries had come from or when they had occurred. The IPCC could not explain what happened either, and the coroner recorded a verdict of death by ‘misadventure’.

Policing is definitely a contact sport. ‘Contact’ not only includes custody but shootings, assaults, pursuits, and ‘road traffic incidents’ (being run over by a police van or car). This record of non-conviction goes back to a time before the birth of the IPCC — or its predecessor the Police Complaints Authority (1985), or even its ancestor the Police Complaints Board (1977) to 1971 when David Oluwale’s murderers were convicted of assault.¹⁰

For Ani DiFranco, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt every tool is a weapon if you hold it right. But every tool is also a weapon if you hold it wrong. A whole host of more or less advanced technology is brought into operation in every death from police contact; handcuffs, shields, guns, press releases, radios, notebooks, batons, helmets, uniforms everywhere. Any history of the use of technology by police must at the same time be a history of its misuse. And any guide to the proper use of equipment is also legible as a guide to its proper misuse. In 1979 Blair Peach found this out. According to the coroner it was probably either a Motorola personal radio (police issue) or something like a rubber tube, filled with ball bearings (non-police issue) that made contact with his skull.¹¹ In searches of Special Patrol Group (SPG) premises at the time, investigators found baseball bats, coshes, sticks, knives and a number of other non-issue items prohibited – even to police officers – as offensive weapons under the Prevention of Crime Act (1953). There is no question that whatever finally killed Peach, it had been used incorrectly, improvised to fit the circumstances.

Police decided there was a risk that Joy Gardner would bite them, so they wrapped thirteen feet of plastic tape around her head and placed her in a ‘body-belt’.¹² Nick Cohen reported on this belt’s resemblance to ‘slave manacles.’¹³ This isn’t a coincidence. Hiatt and Company was founded in Birmingham in 1780 to sell ‘Prisoner Handcuffs to the Trade’.¹⁴ Its history ‘is virtually synonymous with the history of British restraints.’¹⁵ Hiatt’s history is also synonymous with the history of slavery, selling ‘Nigger collars’ and other such vital tools of the trade to trans-Atlantic slavers. Gardner’s restraints were the direct descendent of these ‘Nigger collars.’ The ‘job’ and the ‘trade’ have a common ancestry. In the late 19th and early 20th century Hiatt were also manufacturing cuffs with ‘M&C’ printed on them – military and colonial – used to secure the dark cells that ensured the British Empire continued to bathe in permanent sunlight. More recently Hiatt were the first British company to introduce the now ubiquitous rigid cuff design with their Quik-Cuffs (1992) and Speedcuffs (1993). Speedcuffs are praised by officers for being more secure, and allowing for the greater manipulation of detainees. They have been responsible for cases of handcuff related injuries across America and Europe. Odds are the cuffs used on hxckid84 and John Franklin were Hiatt Speedcuffs. If you’ve ever been arrested you’ve probably experienced them yourself. Hiatt’s factory finally closed in 2008 and production was moved abroad by Safariland, a US subsidiary of BAE Systems (named with nostalgia for the Safaris its founder took with his father in an Africa still largely subject to colonial rule from Europe). The scale of production in Birmingham was no longer cost-effective given the expansion of the global security market and the centralisation of production under the aegis of BAE Systems. So an old and eminent name in the restraint business was absorbed into a new and more profitable formation of the global security industry.¹⁶

These days it’s not only handcuffs that are imported into Britain from overseas by the police service. In Cities Under Siege, Stephen Graham emphasises, after Michel Foucault, that:

the resurgence of explicitly colonial strategies and techniques amongst nation-states such as the US, UK and Israel in the contemporary ‘post-colonial’ period involves not just the deployment of the techniques of the new military urbanism in foreign war-zones but their diffusion and imitation through the securitization of Western urban life.¹⁷

This ‘Foucauldian boomerang’ – whereby colonial models are brought back home, inflecting the techniques, apparatuses and institutions of power with a practice that resembles ‘internal colonisation’ – has had a diffuse and lasting effect on every aspect of policing in the UK. The ‘shoot-to-kill’ policies devised to combat suicide bombings in Tel Aviv and Haifa have been adopted by police across Europe and America, ‘a process which led directly to the state killing of Jean Charles de Menezes by London anti-terrorist police on 22 July 2005.’¹⁸ Drones are now as much a part of the armoury of the MPS as the CIA. Indefinite detention operates in Belmarsh as well as Guantanamo.

In 1981 Paul Conroy and David Moore discovered that vans were also weapons if you drove them right. Police dispersal tactics during the Toxteth Riots included driving vans through groups of people to get them off the streets. Moore died under a van and Conroy suffered serious injuries. Anti-fascists had first experienced this technique in Leicester in 1979 (three days before the death of Blair Peach). On the narrow Belvoir street, ‘transit vans were driven through the crowds at high speed.’¹⁹ This tactic had originally been deployed in the early 1970s with ‘success’ by Northern Ireland’s Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). CS gas used at Toxteth severely injured four more people and was another innovation imported across the Irish Sea from the policeman’s laboratory in Belfast. Tory Party spokesperson for Northern Ireland, John Biggs-Davidson, confirmed this metabolism in a speech to the Royal United Services Institute in 1973, warning ‘if we lose in Belfast we may have to fight in Brixton or Birmingham’ (or, in fact, Leicester or Liverpool).²⁰

In Spring 2013 I was visiting the British Library – a safety deposit box of ‘British’ ‘culture’, impervious to self-reflection just as much as fire – when I saw police officers stopping and talking to two children at its gate. These children were black and on their lunch break from school had gone to the library to smoke a cigarette in the Library’s courtyard. The officers said there had been incidents of bike theft reported in the area and they needed to search them. First the officer ran his hands up and down their body, then he checked in their pockets, then he opened their wallets and looked inside, then he ran his finger round the rim of their trainers, then he opened their bags and checked inside, then he warned them of the dangers of smoking cigarettes underage. Neither child had a bike with him. They were being searched in connection with a bike crime. Lock cutters don't fit in your pockets and they don’t fit in your wallet and they don’t fit in the rim of your shoe. The children did not match any description of anybody seen stealing bikes in the area. That day no bike theft had been reported.²¹ None of what happened to them was legal and none of what happened to them was surprising. They were in the white space of the British Library and were being warned by the police that trespassing on that white space would mean sacrificing their bodily autonomy, their time, their freedom. I explained to them that the search had probably been illegal and that they could make a complaint, but the length of the search (over 30 minutes) had meant that they were late for afternoon class and they would probably get in trouble again with their teachers at the other end once they made it back through the school gates.

Towards the end of the last parliament, then Home-Secretary (now Prime Minister) Theresa May questioned the use of Stop and Search powers by the Metropolitan and other police authorities, wondering whether it might be inefficient and possibly even racist. While news to the BBC and ITN and the daily newspapers, this was not news to anybody who has seen or experienced stop and search in their daily life. Before the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) 1984 were the so-called ‘sus’ laws. The laws came out of the Vagrancy Act 1824 and were designed to criminalise the massive numbers of soldiers and sailors discharged after the victorious conclusion to the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. All across Europe reactionary governments were reinstated by the British monarchy, paving the way for unobstructed Empire building over the next century. In Britain, the men who had helped accomplish this feat were being locked away for begging for food on the side of the road. The act declared that,

every suspected person or reputed thief, frequenting any river, canal, or navigable stream, dock, or basin, or any quay, wharf, or warehouse near or adjoining thereto, or any street, highway, or avenue leading thereto, or any place of public resort, or any avenue leading thereto, or any street, or any highway or any place adjacent to a street or highway; with intent to commit an arrestable offence […] shall be deemed a rogue and vagabond.²²

If you keep off the streets of London and behave yourself, you won’t have the magistrate to worry about. This law was still being used in Brixton in 1981 when Operation Swamp ’81 saw over 1000 (mostly black) people stopped and searched. This was racial profiling on a mass scale and without any cause beyond a desire to intimidate. Commander Marshall, head of Scotland Yard’s Community Relations department, pointed out in evidence to the 1976 Select Committee on Race Relations:

Recently there has been a growth in the tendency for members of London’s West Indian communities to combine against police by interfering with police officers who are effecting the arrest of a black person […] in the last 12 months, 40 such incidents have been recorded. Each carries a potential for large scale disorder.

This is what happened in Brixton in 1981. People rose up and kicked the police out. On Coldharbour Lane an SPG van was overturned and its windows smashed with bricks. Police officers were hit with bricks and mortar, they were hit by Molotov cocktails and by shouts of abuse. Then the streets were cleared of police, shops were looted and a pub was burnt down. The ‘sus’ law was quickly repealed in 1981 and replaced with other search powers over the 1980s: search powers that are still in use today. With these powers police carried on harassing black people like before, like the change in the law meant nothing, because the change in the law meant nothing.

In Patrick Keiller’s London Robinson remarks that in all his time in the city, he had only ever seen the police stop black men in cars. Try to remember if you’ve ever seen a white person stopped in a car or stopped and searched. In 2013 only one in ten stops led to an arrest; black people were five times as likely to be stopped and searched, Asian people twice as likely; black people are no more likely than white people to be arrested; the Metropolitan Police in London made a third of all these stops. These figures are familiar to everyone and if you don’t know them you can probably guess them. There is nothing particularly exceptional about them: racial disparities appear in every single aspect of the judicial system, from the British State’s hermeneutics of suspicion all the way to its theory of justice.

In June 2013, while driving home two brothers, H and A, were subjected to a ‘hard-stop’ on the Woolwich flyover by the Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism Command (SO15). This is the technique that had been used in the murder of Azelle Rodney, and again in the murder of Mark Duggan. During the assault they had their car windows smashed and were repeatedly hit with guns. At no point did police identify themselves. According to A during the attack police racially abused them, ‘I was on the pavement in a pool of blood and they were still hitting me and shouting abuse like “you black terrorist scum”.’ At points H was convinced he was going to die. Neither brother was ever questioned about terrorism offences. A wasn’t even arrested, taken to hospital in handcuffs by officers before being left to take the bus home – past the wreck of the car he had been a passenger in – with blood still caked on his face and caked on the passenger side of the car. They both continue to suffer from the physical and psychological consequences of the attack.²³‘Robust’ counter-terrorism, developed through a trans-Atlantic consensus on the danger of Muslim subjects, and the decades and centuries of cumulative fear of the politics of black sociability, combined in this attack to produce a hybrid articulation of the policed subject: the ‘black terrorist’.²⁴ An enemy within that can be conveniently transcribed quickly back across to foreignness, whether through the sudden rediscovery that racial difference in Britain never really went away, or with the fabulous prospect of removal of citizenship by the state even for people who have no other nationality (effectively rendering them stateless).²⁵ The reason this diagnosis of the ‘black terrorist’ gained currency so quickly, appeared suddenly legible in the aftermath of the Woolwich attack, is that behind its novelty lies a whole complex of well-used images and tropes that have been drawn and redrawn across black bodies for over half a century. H and A had spent much of their adult lives (and some of their childhood) subject to repeated Stop and Searches, each time the officers identified them according to these racial tropes. The gang member, the gangster, the dealer, the thug, the mugger, the Rasta, the alien.²⁶ The ‘black terrorist’ plays on this repertoire of sedimented racist common sense, persistently activating black criminality as the suture to bind these notions into a single streamline (if contradictory) narrative. After the English riots police quickly arrested all ‘known gang members’, and then told the media that gangs (of black people) were definitely behind the disturbances. Police didn’t need to investigate because they already knew who their enemy was, they didn’t need to pause for breath when verbally abusing H and A because they already knew what to call them.

Tooling up Against the Re-tooled

During the Stockport Messenger strike in 1983, this reorganisation of the techniques and models of policing along colonial lines went hand-in-hand with the transformation of the mode of newspaper production according to the capitalist imperative of an increased rate of exploitation. The Wapping dispute in 1986 is more familiar to most as a site of antagonism between print-workers and newspaper bosses. But Warrington was the first workplace in the period to experience the point at which traditional methods of production and labour organisation within the newspaper industry collapsed in the face of a concerted attempt at recomposition by capital, focused on the undoing of the ‘closed shop.’ Through a strategy of escalation and the implementation of recently enacted trade union laws (the 1980 and 1982 Employment Acts), the owners of the Stockport Messenger broke the power of the previously dominant National Graphical Association (NGA). At the same time the mass pickets organised by the NGA (with attendance often running into the thousands) were dispersed with a tactical force previously unseen in post-war British industrial disputes: on the largest night of protest ‘four thousand pickets were dispersed by police using new […] riot control tactics implemented with unprecedented ferocity.’²⁷ Snatch squads dragged pickets out, brought them to the back of police lines and made them ‘run the gauntlet’, where they ‘were punched and kicked and people came out bloodied [and] limping.’ The most serious police violence was saved for late in the night when officers launched repeated charges against terrified pickets, left

screaming […] running away, falling over […] And as people were running away and falling over, riot police were running up to them and kicking them and hitting them with their batons, even though they were already on the ground.²⁸

These tactics were not a matter of rogue officers' behaviour or miscommunication from command: they resulted directly from the decision to introduce colonial innovations in crowd control into UK policing. In autumn 1981 a meeting of ACPO focused on a discussion of public order that embraced the experiences of the MPS, the RUC, and ‘a detailed outline of colonial policing tactics […] presented by […] the [Hong Kong] Police Director of Operations.’ Tactical options presented at this meeting would come to determine the shape of industrial disputes (such as Warrington) for the rest of the decade. Roy Henry, Hong Kong’s Commissioner of Police, would later remark that arrest and dispersal tactics he witnessed used against strikers were ‘“all very similar” to the methods Hong Kong had taught the police in Britain.’²⁹

Again. Riot shields were first introduced to London in Lewisham and Notting Hill in 1977. The first instance was a community demonstration against the National Front, the second an annual Carnival organised by London’s black population. There are generally two kinds of riot shield in use in the UK: long shields and short shields. Whereas long shields are defensive, short shields allow for baton attacks and are even misused as weapons themselves. Reports from their very earliest use in Notting Hill indicate that police were happy to thrust their hard edges into the faces of carnival-goers. Video footage shows that at the G20 demonstrations in 2008, more than a generation later, short shields were still being used in exactly the same way against climate protesters.³⁰ In Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police one officer explains how he knew when the TSG were planning violent dispersal at a demonstration against the BNP, based on just this adaptation of shield use:

Now I found myself on the other side of the shield […] The only advantage it gave me was that I could see the tactics being used whereas my targets [the protesters] could not. I knew that when the long shields were out, that was fine because all they could do was push. But when the short shields came out you knew that it was trouble. […] With the short shields, you really have to get out of the way. That was the time to run.³¹

Shields (and the new helmets accompanying them) were tools originally imported wholesale from Northern Ireland and then increasingly distributed across the police service through the 1980s.

It was no surprise when in 2014 – in the midst of a renewed attempt to recompose the working class along still more austere lines and a corresponding fear of black urban socialisation – Boris Johnson and his cheerleaders at ACPO gleefully suggested that water canon would be needed for ‘reducing the ability of protesters to throw large injury-causing missiles (for example large masonry) at police.’ Ultimately their manoeuvres were thwarted by a Home Secretary adamant that she, not the MPs, controls policing decisions regardless of questions of appropriateness or capacity. However the impetus to re-tool carries on unabated across the British policing establishment. Somewhere in Sussex sits a warehouse containing the UK’s ‘National Barrier Asset’, a ‘Bi-Steel re-deployable anti-attack vehicle barrier system’, or massive bomb-proof fence. Its total length is undisclosed but it has grown substantially over the previous decade: it is currently something like 5-10 miles long (of which two miles are deployed right now in Calais alone as defence against the tired, the poor, and the wretched…). One day this country will be one continuous fence.

The official line is that this re-tooling happened and is happening in order to avoid a repeat of the situation at Notting Hill in 1976, and then Brixton in 1981, when police officers were left defending themselves from masonry and bottles using bin lids and traffic cones. Yet this idea of immediate response to public order problems with chance technical innovations begins to look ridiculous when you place in the scales the threat of a few bricks against a mass of shields; helmets; CS gas; armoured vans; body armour; new intricate restraints; advanced forms for record keeping and evidence gathering; new formations and methods of assault; DNA collection and retention; more than a hundred thousand agents of law and order; three decades of defeat and counting.

Re-tooling and re-skilling took time, coming about not through the first grasping response of a shocked political class, but as a result of a structural transformation in policing models. This shift can be dated back to the early 1970s. What it found in 'public order situations' was not a cause but a testing ground.³² This was a period when the fear of new forms of industrial dispute and urban (often black) socialisation became coupled with an increasing exhaustion with old models of social compact. Considered as part of these wider transformations of class struggle, such developments in the apparatus of public order policing begin to appear in their true light. They were (and continue to be) attempts to recompose the distribution of force in the UK.

Postscript

This piece was originally written around Spring 2014, so in one sense it can be said to be unfortunately out of date. But the everyday push and pull of life under the arbitrary force of the state continues. In that sense it is unfortunately current. Since I first wrote it, I have struggled with rounding it off with any kind of conclusion. To conclude at all, I think, would probably be dishonest towards what I want to say and what needs to be said.

These stories and histories don’t have a conclusion. Many of those convicted for the 2011 riots are now back out of prison. Operation Shield - a pilot project for the collective punishment of ‘gang’ members and their families – has run through Lambeth, Westminster, Haringey; its tools – both administrative and coercive – are now being generalised in Tower Hamlets, Brent, and across London. Working class young people having a water fight in Hyde Park found themselves interpolated as a riot. Notting Hill Carnival has come and gone and come and gone, with the Metropolitan Police Federation announcing this year that they want it abolished entirely or at least heavily curtailed. Former Home Secretary – now Prime Minister – Theresa May curtailed Stop and Search to a degree, but it is still way above the levels of even six or seven years ago, and it still disproportionately targets black people and people of colour. Eight years after Sean Rigg’s murder there is still no justice. On the morning of the anniversary of his death, a man died in the street in South-east London following contact with police. A week before, black ex-footballer Dalian Atkinson died after being tazered by police. A vibrant, local, and well-rooted Black Lives Matter movement has begun to emerge in the UK, ruining people’s holidays with the thought that the bodies of the many murdered by police will not go away, be forgotten, stay buried. Sadiq Khan, the new mayor of London, has sold Boris Johnson’s water cannons and unveiled a new force of 600 kevlar-clad armed motorcyclists ready to bring death to the streets at a moment’s notice.

History and horror continue. Complexes of force move through our streets and our bodies with impunity and the grip of the police does not loosen of its own volition. But in all of this the managers of state show not only the basis of a strategy of re-armament, but also the base of their fear. It’s not the brick that scares them, but the strength of the hand that throws it.³³

Footnotes

Artists and academics are jumping on the blockchain bandwagon and talking up the potential for cryptocurrency and distributed ledgers to mitigate austerity capitalism. Attractive as techno-monetary fixes may seem they come at a dangerous ideological cost, argues Andrew Osborne reviewing David Golumbia’s The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism

At the 9th Berlin Biennale, artists Simon Denny and Linda Kantchev presented Blockchain Visionaries (2016), an exploration and celebration of the blockchain phenomenon. Denny, a self-professed enthusiast described the blockchain as, ‘a great model for dreaming dreams and telling a diverse and divergent set of new (and not so new) stories about how the world might organize in the future’.[1] Similarly, in his New York show Blockchain Future States (2016) Denny set out to investigate ‘three financial companies at the forefront of Bitcoin’: Ethereum, 21 Inc. and Digital Asset.[2] In the press release his gallery stated:

At a moment when public debate spotlights a global governance system that seems to ignore the needs of many of its participants, starkly contrasting visions for alternative political systems are emerging. What would a world look like where the collusion of an elite few would be rendered technically impossible? Can a truly inclusive global future exist?

Whilst expressing a political vision familiar from any article on cryptocurrency, the bland inferences about a tech fix for ‘elite’ power read as a bromide. On closer inspection some of these assertions have a lineage that is far from emancipatory, however.

The art world is ardently advocating for Bitcoin and other blockchain technologies. For instance, it has recently been suggested that the blockchain might ensure a system by which artworks are provided with trustable provenance (‘a spreadsheet in the sky’); or used to enforce contractual obligations; or to establish a ledger so that artists are paid any royalties due.[3] There is even a scheme to encourage small investors to acquire tiny portions of famous masterpieces – a form of fractional ownership that is clearly derived from the Bitcoin paradigm. Behind the digital dreaming much of this ‘utopianism’ appears as an effort to shore up value in the art market, which has been sagging ever since the 2008 crisis. None of this is particularly surprising given that art has long been a form of speculative investment, but this indicates how Bitcoin and blockchain boosterism regularly disguise baser imperatives (whether the boosters are themselves aware of it).

Simon Denny, Blockchain Visionaries, 2016

Denny exalts the blockchain as having, ‘the potential to change some of the most fundamental societal building blocks from which our world is built’.[4] However, among artists, writers and curators there is very little scepticism about this ‘world-changing technology’; a technology that, exorbitantly, claims the capacity to abolish or at least seriously diminish the powers of the nation-state. Instead, within the current art market, the blockchain and its numerous derivations are celebrated as inherently innovative, democratic and progressive. Like many blockchain evangelists, Denny sees the possibility of ‘a more distributed global future as more people become dissatisfied with key institutions such as governance and finance.’[5] However, as we’ll discover, this runs quite contrary to many of the founding assumptions of Bitcoin. It is these that are interrogated by David Golumbia in his book The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism (2016); posing a series of compelling questions about whose dream we are being asked to dream and whose future we are expected to build.

Bitcoin, Digital Culture and Right-Wing Politics

David Golumbia begins his book The Politics of Bitcoin with a challenge to the leftwing users of the cryptocurrency: how can Bitcoin be progressive? Rather than directly answering this initial question, he instead explains why Bitcoin and the implicit political framework that supports it is right-wing. This is not a book about the technical aspects of Bitcoin and the blockchain, then, but an analytic deconstruction of ideological claims made for the cryptocurrency. He contends that left-wing users must drop these dangerous claims if they are to make the case for the blockchain model as progressive. This is a matter of particular urgency, Golumbia goes on to prove, since many of the technological aspects of the cryptocurrency commonly described as ‘radical’ in fact rest on reactionary political and economic traditions, however occulted by the rhetoric of liberation. The purpose of The Politics of Bitcoin then, is to clear up these categorical inaccuracies in order to provide a more adequate diagnosis of the cryptocurrency.

Golumbia starts with a short history of the development of Bitcoin and its operational principles, cutting through much of the complexity surrounding the currency. Accordingly, the online ‘currency’ is described as a new form of digital payment, one that has distinguished itself from other online payment systems in two ways. Firstly, it has incorporated a novel form of cryptographic software (i.e., the blockchain) and furthermore, its value has ‘skyrocketed relative to official world currencies’ meaning that, ‘[in] just under a year early investors could have made around 8,000 percent in profits.’[6] Technologists in particular have lavished attention on Bitcoin, yet as Golumbia notes, many of the political and economic claims made for the cryptocurrency are seemingly derived from ‘extremist’ sources; often promoting conspiratorial fringe ideologies well outside of their traditional ambit. These precepts are more frequently associated with ‘far-right groups like the Liberty League, the John Birch Society, the militia movement, and the Tea Party, conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and David Icke’.[7] Commonly, these groups target the political and economic role of the Federal Reserve. According to the conspiracists, the intentional function of the central bank is to destroy any value belonging to ‘ordinary people’ through inflation, a programme devised by a cabal of supra-national elites to debase the national currency. This accusation therefore begs an obvious question: how did Bitcoin enthusiasts come to repeat these same provocations?

Rather than presenting a technical analysis, Golumbia works at the level of ideology to reconstruct superstructural connections; revealing how far-right ideas became common-place within cyberlibertarian circles, through a series of unchallenged assumptions that arose in the early days of online communities. Golumbia begins by evaluating the widely held cyberlibertarian belief that, ‘governments should not regulate the internet’ [see Winner 1997]. Opposition to government regulation of the digital realm stems from the belief that, ‘freedom will inherently emerge from the increasing development of the digital economy [and therefore] efforts to interfere with or regulate that development must be antithetical to freedom’.[8] There is a double fetishisation at work here; firstly, of the market as an optimal form of information-sorting – one that’s computationally superior to human decision-making – and secondly, of the essential ‘freedom’ of that market. These predilections are most clearly evident in the ideological dicta of tech industry titans, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, both of whom are mistrustful of state-imposed limits to their cavalier social power.[9] This commitment to the ‘market freedom’ demands a subordination to accelerative technological determinism and an unquestioning subservience to what appears to be a variant of manifest destiny, with little time to pause and debate the consequences. Consequently, critical thought is considered a handbrake on what could characterised as blind developmental fatalism. Yet, as Golumbia explains – and here is the subtlety of his thesis – to be a cyberlibertarian doesn’t mean one is literally a Ron Paul-style political libertarian. Instead, he sees it as a spontaneous ideology that rests on underlying assumptions that just happen to be promoted by less savoury political actors (many of whom are themselves funded by arch libertarian and conservative US plutocrats, the Koch brothers). Furthermore, Golumbia asserts that the ideological coordinates that structure Bitcoin were coded into the software at its inception. Consequently, it can be said that through the practice of Bitcoin, an extremist ideology is unconsciously promoted whoever the user. Therefore, Bitcoin should be considered the concrete medium of that ideology.

Concerns about ‘freedom’ and ‘government’ are the points of overlap between cyberlibertarian and political libertarian thought. However, ‘free’ within both contexts can be read as synonymous with the ‘free market’. Langdon Winner in his 1997 essay ‘Cyberlibertarian Myths and the prospects for their Community’ points out:

Crucial to cyberlibertarian ideology are concepts of supply-side, free market capitalism, the school of thought reformulated by Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics.[10]

As a consequence, government regulation of any market is seen as the totalitarian curtailment of freedom. It’s also possible to draw an analogy here between the neoliberal conception of the free market – as optimal ‘information sorting system’ – and the growth of computational power, inasmuch as both come with idealised expectations of exponential compound growth.[11] Within this impoverished framework, the ideas of free market praetorians such as Friedman, Stigler, Hayek, von Mises and Rothbard are adopted and disseminated.[12]

Simon Denny, 2016 (detail). Note blockchain icons Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum), Ludwig Von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Bitcoin prize for identifying the face on the left

Bitcoin ideology is particularly redolent of Murray N. Rothbard’s ‘anarcho-capitalism’. Rothbard was the co-founder of the Cato Institute and like Ludwig Von Mises had profoundly racist tendencies.[13] Rothbard even boasted about purloining the label ‘libertarian’ from the left, something that he was immensely proud of.[14] Ironically however, while Bitcoin rests upon the worst premises of free market radicalism, it profoundly fails to live up to these ideals.

For example, the total number of Bitcoins is ‘capped’ in order to ward off inflation – which as we’ll see, is an apprehension derived from Austrian scarcity economics – yet capping has done nothing to prevent the tumefaction of the currency.[15] Similarly, the blockchain is often promoted as inherently democratic, although none of the Austrian School were proponents of the ‘equitable distribution of power’.[16]

At their limit – a limit that is often surpassed in current cypherpunk and crypto-anarchist rhetoric and practice – [the views of the Austrian economists suggest] that only government is capable of violence, and that even when private institutions and enterprises engage in what appears to be physical violence, it is in some sense of a different order than that practiced by governments.[17]

Consequently, among libertarians the oversight of large private concentrations of power is perceived to be entirely negative and this belief comes to fruition within the Bitcoin paradigm, under which the lack of regulation is heralded as a virtue.

Central Banking, Inflation, and Right-Wing Conspiracy

According to Golumbia, neo-Bircherist, free-market fundamentalist and cyberlibertarian ideologies coincide in a shared suspicion of the Federal Reserve.[18] This suspicion centres on the quality of central bank money, which has been ‘touchstone for the far-right’ since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, and subsequently formalised by Holocaust denier and disciple of Ezra Pound, Eustace Mullins.[19] The principle fallacy promoted by Federal Reserve conspiracists is that inflation is a stealth tax and therefore the act of ‘printing’ money destroys hard-won value. Since the ’60s the John Birch Society (JBS) has advocated that even moderate inflation is a ‘hidden tax’; a claim that runs contrary to mainstream economic theory. Conspicuously, conspiracy theories about the destruction of value have been promoted by demagogues like Alex Jones to drive the unsuspecting toward purchases of gold and other precious metals.[20] Similarly, this discourse found its way into the Chicago School of Economics (Friedman notably contended that, ‘inflation is just another name for “printing money”’).[21] As such, what was once a fringe view has inveigled its way into the mainstream. More sinisterly, these bald counterfactuals are attended by well-worn anti-semitic conspiracy theories about elite control of the Federal Reserve, supposedly supervised by the Anglo-Jewish banking family, the Rothchilds. Yet, while these grotesque claims are repackaged in Bitcoin propaganda in order to appear more palatable, the racist odour is still detectable. One only has to visit the Daily Stormer to read how Bitcoin is ‘hitting the Jew where it hurts: their gold.’

There is not necessarily a ‘genealogical connection’ between Federal Reserve conspiracy theories and Bitcoin evangelism, but as Golumbia shows, a direct connection isn’t required, since this isn’t the way ideologies function.[22] Rather, they serve our needs opportunistically. That is to say, the very structure and performance of Bitcoin lends itself to Bircherist ideas. Bitcoin rhetoric replicates elements of racist right-wing Federal Reserve conspiracism, deploying the language and rhetoric of the far-right without consciously identifying it as such or understanding the origin of these Volk-tales. These narratives are ubiquitous throughout Bitcoin literature and as Golumbia states, the ‘bedrock precepts of right-wing conspiracism’ are the rule and not the exception when reading through the propaganda.[23]

Consequently, keywords such as ‘tyranny’ and ‘liberty’ dominate Bitcoin discourse. Here the assumption is that Bitcoin prevents the tyranny of a Federal Reserve, which merely serves private extra-national interests. Conversely, Bitcoin claims to free ‘ordinary people’ from the oppression of ‘State monetary policy’.[24] Golumbia goes to some length to explain the reactionary origins of these narratives and how they in fact serve a corporatist agenda – attacking the familiar bug bears of the wealthy: tax and regulations which deprive ‘individuals’ of true value. The strength of Golumbia’s analysis here is in rooting out political and economic claims among what are supposed to be value-neutral technological assertions. Furthermore, his critique serves to blunt the insistence on Bitcoin’s novelty, behind which we find familiar right-wing canards, treated as common sense by Bitcoin’s boosters. The occultation of the origin of these discourses within left-cyberlibetarian circles therefore makes it possible to declaratively reject right-wing politics, while at the same time uncritically replicating the values of the far-right.

Value and the Fed

If there’s a limit to Golumbia’s critique it’s that, while the book dissects cyberlibertarian and cypherpunk ideology, it could perhaps go further in explaining why central bank conspiracies have a generalisable appeal. In its brevity The Politics of Bitcoin doesn’t delve into why the state must necessarily intervene in the money markets as part of crisis management, when real and nominal values come into conflict. Golumbia does well to unpick neoliberal beliefs about the opposition between state and market – and he certainly isn’t uncritical of central banks per se – yet it is beyond the purview of his inquiry to explain why the invisible hand is necessarily clad in the gauntlet of state power (ultimately, giving lie to neoliberal fantasies about minimising the state).[25] Clearly, a strong state is required to ‘liberate’ public utilities and to eventually administer CPR when the insatiable markets have their inevitable heart attack.

So what are we to make of conspiracy theories regarding the role of the central bank? Paranoia about the Federal Reserve runs contrary to the observable function of central banks, which is in fact to guarantee the quality of money in the last instance. From a Marxian perspective, concerns about value have quite different origins than those of the far-right – concerns based on the incommensurability of use and exchange, a tension which begins in commodity production and ultimately generates a chronic divergence between price and value in the financial markets. By way of solution, central banks serve to bind together all of the accumulated inconsistencies of the economy and stand ready to make necessary monetary corrections.

On further inspection, we find that the Federal Reserve doesn’t exactly exert a godlike power over the economy. Before the financial collapse of 1907 competition between the private issuance of New York banks undermined the quality of money and any claim to be lender of last resort – something that J.P. Morgan ultimately couldn’t afford given the rise of powerful West-Coast competitors. Yet, the creation of a single central bank overcame this limit, since the Federal Reserve was placed above competition and given the sole task of defending the quality of money backed by its gold reserves. This afforded the bank the power to drive out bad money in any crisis by refusing to convert the private money of other banks into ‘real money’. Consequently, positioned at the apex of money, the Fed was able to maintain the balance of payments between other nations (since gold was previously the universal equivalent of global exchange, something that later became problematic as capital became multinational, requiring a further level of banking, the IMF, which can be considered the world’s central bank).

The devaluation of the dollar in 1971 signaled the collapse of the Bretton-Woods agreement that in 1944 had pegged the dollar to gold. This in turn triggered a search for supra-national superior quality money. However, as Suzanne de Brunhoff claims: ‘these attempts are founded on the fallacious proposition that a form of credit can function as the ultimate measure of value. No way yet has been found to guarantee the quality of national moneys except by tying them to the production of some specific commodity.’[26] Traditionally, the ‘specific commodity’ was gold; used as a yardstick by which to measure the socially average labour-time it took a miner to mine a specific amount of gold and thereby allowing comparable wages to be calculated. That said, gold is an austere measure of value, highly illiquid and was by the ’70s politically contentious. However, Golumbia observes that it’s not by accident that Bitcoin markets itself as a scarce ‘mined’ commodity that supposedly rivals gold as the backstop of value.

Karl Marx himself rejected the notion that central banks sit in an all-powerful position in the economy, despite controlling the circulation of money. Instead, he considered their power be ‘extraordinarily limited’.[27] As such, the central bank’s ability to refuse to convert the lower-order private monies of other banks is seen to be a merely repressive power: a ‘power of negation rather than creation’ and therefore has very little influence on value-creation beyond the sphere of exchange.[28] Overall, this nested hierarchy of banking institutions is only necessary because of the displacement of the incommensurability of money as measure of value and medium of exchange at higher and higher levels, a contradiction that is generated and originates in the sphere of production. Yet, ultimately the central bank has very little traction over the chaotic production of commodities and consequently cannot be considered the tyrannical nexus of power that both Bitcoin enthusiasts and right-wing conspiracists claim it to be. In short, the central bank is merely the ‘real rival’ of private banks, yet doesn’t have ‘absolute control’ of the money market.[29] David Harvey makes the following comment on this inherent tension between private credit money and state-backed ‘real’ money:

[We] can best interpret the different forms money takes – the money commodity, coins, convertible and inconvertible paper currencies, various credit moneys, etc. – as an outcome of the drive to perfect money as a frictionless, costless and instantaneously adjustable ‘lubricant’ of exchange while preserving the ‘quality’ of money as measure of value.[30]

In the innovative upswing of the economy, private credit money proliferates, yet in the creative destruction of the crisis – and we are certainly in an almighty crisis – investors cease to invest and instead seek auric safe-havens, since bad quality money is refused. Gold is perhaps the most popular and time-honoured store of value, yet Bitcoin has also been proclaimed a rival store of value to gold. However, there is an insuperable tension within Bitcoin itself, something ignored by the currency’s propagandists, who assert that it performs the function of both store of value and frictionless medium of exchange. This is an illusion that Golumbia labours to dispel in his analysis of Bitcoin as money.

Value is an illusion, man: Ethereum's Vinay Gupta journeys inwards 

What’s the Function of Bitcoin?

Whilst it is possible to describe Bitcoin as a currency, Golumbia casts suspicion on whether it is money at all, providing exclusive definitions of both currencies and money. Accordingly, Bitcoin doesn’t conform to any standard definition of money as a store of value or unit of account. It could arguably be described as a medium of exchange, yet this is merely the ‘currency function of money’.[31] Literally anything might serve as a medium of exchange: cowrie shells, cumbersome iron bars, artworks or even signifying pixels on a screen. However, if Bitcoin is unable to function as a store of value and unit of account, its utility as money is questionable. Bitcoin is only viable, because it is supported by existing world currencies, such as the Federal Reserve-backed dollar, on which it relies for its other functions. Consequently, virtual coins can only stand as a placeholder for goods on Silk Road in relation to their dollar price (which itself stands in relation to labour, wages and the price of particular commodity bundles). To this extent, however much we might idealise it, Bitcoin cannot be cleanly delimited from the really existing economy. Therefore, at this point we might pause and rhetorically ask: who realistically holds Bitcoins in their desktop wallet, without continually thinking of the rate of convertibility to the paper dollar?

Furthermore, Bitcoin can hardly be considered a useful store of value on the grounds of its famous volatility and susceptibility to hyperinflation. Subsequently, given Bitcoin’s historical performance, no one has any reason to ‘reason to expect that value will be maintained over even a short time frame’.[32] Golumbia states that in considering whether Bitcoin is a store of value, we begin to see where the ideology is coded into its architecture, especially when Bitcoin is presented as a scarce resource that is euphemistically ‘mined’. To this extent, Bitcoin is frequently championed as a safe-haven comparable to gold and in contradistinction to ‘debased’ national currencies. It is not coincidental that this view is often promoted by exchanges that sell gold to Bitcoin enthusiasts (and here we might presume that this is the real name of the game – an attempt to rally the price of ‘real money’). Swapping out coins for gold at the top of this volatile market is therefore a means of realising ‘real value’. Of course, this conveniently ignores the fact that central banks correct the price of gold in moments of volatility or that precious metals are themselves also subject to illegal price-fixing, as with the Libor scandal.

Additionally, on the question of value and quality of money, Golumbia undermines Bitcoin enthusiasts’ obsession with government-backed ‘fiat money’. He explains that, fiat by any common definition refers to the fact that central-bank money is printed on a worthless paper substrate – that is to say the medium is arbitrary. Yet amongst proponents of Bitcoin it is speciously understood that central banks print money ‘by fiat’, meaning by formal decree. This would appear to be a willful misreading. Despite all of these contradictions, Bitcoin enthusiasts remain in thrall to the cryptocurrency’s foundational myth as outlined by the oracular and perhaps fictitious crypto-person, Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009.[33] Given that Bitcoin has been subject to a ‘brutal destruction of value’ over its short lifespan, Golumbia argues that it would be absurd to uphold Nakamoto’s claim that only electronic currencies unregulated by central banks can be trustworthy in the face of uncertainty and therefore capable of resisting inflation.[34]

The Mining of Fools

Although familiar with the technical operations of Bitcoin, Golumbia states from the outset that he’s not expressly concerned with their intricacies. Instead his intention is to demonstrate exactly where Bitcoin falls short of its political ambitions. Much is made of Bitcoin’s ability to ‘decentralise’ and ‘democratise’ currency operations.[35] It is these qualities that are perhaps most appealing to left-wing advocates of the cryptocurrency. However, in terms of decentralisation, at least once in Bitcoin’s short history a single investor has controlled over 51 percent of the market (this monopoly giving them the theoretical ability to ‘change the rules of Bitcoin at any time’).[36] Similarly, when it comes to the ‘democratisation’ of access to Bitcoin, the amped-up computing power now required to laboriously crunch the algorithm and mine bitcoins exceeds what many could afford in what is obviously a ‘pay to play’ market.

This problem is not limited to Bitcoin alone. If Bitcoin is a software then it is software based on a model, and that model is the blockchain which serves as the basis for a whole ecology of cryptocurrencies. According to its advocates, the blockchain’s primary virtue is that it is decentralized. However, observably the blockchain operates through a combination of centralisation and decentralisation, depending on what aspect of the machinery you are analysing. The ledger may well be (rather unevenly) distributed, yet the sale of coins must pass through highly centralised and vulnerable exchanges. Furthermore, over and above the claims of decentralisation, ‘Bitcoin functions as a centralised and concentrated locus of financial power’.[37] This practical observation raises severe doubts about any supposed ‘democratisation’ and is clearly at odds with the cryptocurrency’s anti-regulatory ideology. However, the uptake of Bitcoin does at least guarantee one thing: the spread of the ideas of the anti-democratic John Birch Society, an ideology that would grant capital more power than it already has. The ironic consequence of this is that Bitcoin bolsters the exact same ‘political power that the blockchain is specifically constructed to dismantle’.[38] Consequently, uncertainty about its role as currency or investment has led to exorbitant claims, allowing Bitcoin zealots to ‘simultaneously advocate for two diametrically opposed ends’: disintermediation and mediation both at once.[39]

In the final section of his book, Golumbia establishes that Bitcoin – exactly because it lies outside regulatory structures that govern basic economic civil liberties – is ‘particularly prone to the kinds of hoarding, dumping, derivation, and manipulation that characterise all instruments that lack central bank control and regulatory oversight by bodies like the SEC’.[40] As such, hoarders and big players can manipulate the market and infamously, in the case of the Mt. Gox exchange, steal huge amounts of Bitcoin.[41] As a result, Bitcoin holders have often been victims of sharp practice, leaving them in the crestfallen position of calling for the very regulations they once considered themselves oppressed by:

Many economists recognise something that appears to have been beyond the inventors and advocates of Bitcoin. Without direct supply-based regulatory structures that discourage an instrument from being used as an investment (aka ‘hoarding’), any financial instrument (even gold) will be subject to derivation, securitization, and ultimately extreme boom-and-bust cycles that it is actually the purpose of central banks to prevent. In fact, there is an underlying general proposition that applies not just to Bitcoin but also to other tradable commodities: ‘investment’ and ‘currency’ functions oppose each other. Despite this, it becomes increasingly clear that a majority of Bitcoin enthusiasm emerges not from its utility as a currency but as a highly speculative investment (Glaser et al. 2014), despite the arguments in its favor focusing almost exclusively on Bitcoin’s currency-like characteristics.[42]

Under such investment conditions, what becomes clear is that Bitcoin’s key feature – ‘the market’s unenforceability of governmental rules’  – is exactly what allows ‘cheating of some kind [and] a breaking of the social contract.’[43] Consequently, this gives Bitcoin the complexion of a peculiar post-2008 speculative investment instrument. In fact, one might say that its structure is a quasi-feudal paradigm in which lower order Bitcoin miners toil to create market activity, speculated upon by powerful masters in an unregulated system. In this light, Bitcoin and other species of cryptocurrency begin to appear Ponzi-like in structure, or even worse, a disguised ‘work-at-home’ get-rich-quick scheme, the complexity of which obscures and even flatters those it exploits. Appropriately, Golumbia leaves the left-wing users of blockchain technologies with a warning:

This is not to say that Bitcoin and the blockchain can never be used for non-rightist purposes, and even less that everyone in the blockchain communities is on the right. Yet it is hard to see how this minority can resist the political values that are very literally coded into the software itself.[44]

While artists, theorists and curators have promoted Bitcoin and blockchain technologies as emancipatory, finding content, cultural capital and indeed economic rewards in playing the blockchain avant-garde, as Golumbia’s analysis reveals, these aestheticized (monetary) politics carry an ideologically right-wing payload – and value is always accompanied by values. Despite the claim to liberate us from austerity and centralised power, the Bitcoin and the blockchain reinforce the dream of a monetary solution to capitalist crisis, deflecting attention from alternatives – actual social struggle against the conditions capital now imposes upon us – that are perhaps more arduous but certainly less bogus. This has the effect of reducing art’s utopian critical function to a historical nadir: art totally subordinated to retailing the brutal story capital now demands, while blocking off (as it were) all more antagonistic desires.

INFO

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism by David Golumbia, University of Minnesota Press, 2016

BIO

Andrew Osborne <andrew.osborne AT rca.ac.uk> is a Sociology PhD candidate at Goldsmiths studying migrant worker organisation in the US and currently works at the Royal College of Art

FOOTNOTES

[This little screed was written as a facebook post but seemed worth giving a minutely longer half life... It responds to this article: 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2014/03/26/why-wu-tang-will-release-just-one-copy-of-its-secret-album/]

So, the Wu Tang's next album is an edition of one. Forget tickets for Kate Bush, if you want nuff aura you need to rent time with the contents of this metal box, via a trip to a museum. Or you could just buy it outright and then let it out to everyone else who's willing to pay (Samsung-style)... Is this the official end of the fabled democratising powers of mechanical reproduction - RZA's soi disant re-'privatisation' of the record - or the definitive end of the ability to extract monopoly rent through ownership of recorded material (when someone leaks the files)? Illuminating to see the RZA still holds on to the direct equivalence of money and (use) value: music, he sez, has been devalued by being... devalued. CREAM remains the motto, and yet it would seem cash has generally been over-ruled by constant capital. 

This attempt to make a unique object do the job that elsewhere a live performance is supposed to do, providing a scarce commodity to which there is limited access, seems rather like Damien Hirst's experiment with the diamond skull, something which would make a lot more sense if one has simultaneously constructed a series of moves in more virtual money-like instruments to accompany the transaction(s). It also makes one think that bling (which is one thing both 'artworks' have in common) is the physical attempt to give material form to an ever more elusive value (form); bling is not just the signifier of new money looking for somewhere to (portably and visibly) store and advertise itself, an aspirational expression of conspicuous, auto-didactic, consumption, but also a desperate attempt to make money be money, to make value matter. The desire for recognition in the only currency which this society understands...(CREAM) is here attaining a squeeky pitch of screech higher than Kate Bush could ever reach.

But precisely as such the whole use value-exchange value, art value/money value, C-M, and M-C set of equations looks incredibly peaky and absurd. It's like Kubla Kahn decreeing a stately pleasure dome, in Staffordshire, or Florida  (though Citizen RZA has chosen Morocco for his launch...) and invoking the full panoply of fascistoid false assumptions about the possibility of an organic and authentic relation between the price and value of things. All this ornate invocation of pre-modern unities of substance and value bespeaks a desire to create a time machine which will undo its own (technical) preconditions and deposit us, or rather the 'artist', back in a moment where his achievement is at once recognised on an industrial scale and rewarded on a feudal one. Anyway, kind of a big gimmick and a total joke, but also something to keep cultural studies professors in biz a bit longer too generating questions for screeds such as these (if they're not given away for free, uniquely, here on Facebook)... 

Anyway I enjoyed writing this and might stick it on Mute somewhere - if you would like to see it published there please express your enthusiasm and recognition for my GZAlike genius using the currency (whose basis is the time it takes the consumer to assimilate and/or 'like' the 'free''commodity') known as 'likes'.

BTW is not every Facebook status a unique but universally available commodity, a kind of valueless but money-like token in the larger social media ponzi? As such the value of each is at once nil and incalculable, constitutive, ultimately, to the realisation of (all other circulating) commodities, to their prices and ultimate values? Thus - in this case one obviously contributes something by talking about the enormous PR punt that the whole unique album in a silver box in Morocco concept is. All social media users are permanently mobilised in labour on the realisation of all commodities these days through our wageless labour for Facebook and other social media, which is not to say that any of us are directly involved in the creation of value. But we are all busily swirling around in an infernal Dantean way in the great race of circulation, playing our part in the madness of the crowd and the bubble... Reflection within this turmoil is then a kind of thought bubble, a thinking in and of bubbles; the whole emphasis on labour in contemporary art is a misdirection cos what our labour consists of is largely beyond the white collar, something more like a white cloud; vapour labour, one might say - networked and nebulous but none the less material for that. And that, obviously, is for the lucky ones. Others are dredging buckets of mud out of Lagos harbour by hand 14 hours a day or trolling the jungles of the Congo with a rifle in their hands on the look out for other kids to shoot and minerals to loot. This kind of specificity and materiality in the relation between value and things is what RZA's great art at once presupposes (globally) and obfuscates, regally.

All such fictitious sultans, even the more 'creative' ones, deserve to have a little air let out of them, and yet a general oligarchoid tendency means the more useful ones will be the first to deflate, leaving us with the straight up arms dealers and more direct merchants in value-destruction commodities. The (vulgar) materialism of hip hop seems to have lead logically enough from black nationalism backwards to a kind of 'return to africa' in the 'like owning the scepter of an african king'/rifle of a child soldier retrogressive sense...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2...

If the last four decades of protracted crisis stem from the increasing productivity of capitalist technology, how does culture index this and how (else) might poets respond to the rise of the machines? Joshua Clover periodises the persistence and restoration of conceptualism within capital’s machinic boom and bust, and considers its fading to be necessarily en route, if not yet complete

We begin at the end, with the final sentence of Christian Bök’s ‘The Piecemeal Bard Is Deconstructed: Notes Toward a Potential Robopoetics’: a fascinating series of pensées regarding the writing machine RACTER, ‘an automated algorithm, whose output confounds the metaphysics of authorship, refuting the privileged uniqueness of poetic genius.':[1]

If we want to commit an act of poetic innovation in an era of formal exhaustion, we may have to consider this heretofore unimagined, but nevertheless prohibited, option: writing poetry for inhuman readers, who do not yet exist, because such aliens, clones, or robots have not yet evolved to read it.[2]

Writing machines, reading machines. The essay is seminal in the theorisation of contemporary or neo-conceptualism, so we begin at the end of the beginning.

As you will have suspected already, ends and beginnings are a chief concern herein. All of our best periodising hypotheses, Giovanni Arrighi foremost among them, tell us that the United States-centered era of late or finance capitalism should have ended, or be in its death throes, 2008 being the terminal to 1973’s signal crisis, with a new hegemon or something else entirely in the offing.[3] And yet, to this point, persistence and restoration call the tune against the quavering threnody of intensified and broadened immiseration. This immiseration should be in no context diminished. That said, the persistence and restoration of an era that by all rights should be in the boneyard offers a bizarre and eerie phenomenon, hence all the zombies.

Thinkers of durée long and otherwise might reasonably understand the last four decades as ‘the long crisis’; there was never any real recovery behind the appearance of nominal growth in the FIRE sector, behind the stock exchanges, behind the series of bubbles that have papered over the ongoing crackup of industrial profitability with no small amount of fictitious capital, ‘claims on future value’ never to be realised. Proceeding unevenly as it must, the long crisis has been marked by the ongoing production of non-production, a forcing house for surplus capacity and surplus populations which together provide a unity for the political economy of the post-industrial core in this period.

At the same time, the rises and falls within that grave descent make visible certain imperfect repetitions which we ought to take seriously. I want to consider a cultural synecdoche for this persistence and restoration: conceptual poetry.

I should aver immediately that there are multiple strands of conceptualism often in significant tension. I refer in main to the brand of conceptualism that has done the best job of arrogating the name to its own sensibilities in the institutional spaces of museums, status journals, television shows, and white houses. I am going to assume this sort of conceptualism doesn’t need much glossing, just as in Kenneth Goldsmith’s gloss it doesn’t need much reading. Summarising numerous previous arguments in a 2011 interview with poets.org, he insists,

The best thing about conceptual poetry is that it doesn’t need to be read. You don’t have to read it. As a matter of fact, you can write books, and you don’t even have to read them. My books, for example, are unreadable. All you need to know is the concept behind them. Here’s every word I spoke for a week. Here's a year's worth of weather reports ... and without ever having to read these things, you understand them.

So, in a weird way, if you get the concept—which should be put out in front of the book—then you get the book, and you don’t even have to read it. They're better to talk about than they are to read. It's not about inventing anything new; it's about finding things that exist and reframing them and representing them as original texts. The choice of what you’re presenting is more interesting than the thing that you’re presenting. You're not evaluated on the writing or what’s on the page; you’re evaluated on the thought process that comes before ‘pen is set to paper,’ so to speak.

In 1959, Brian Gysin said that writing was 50 years behind painting. And it still is. So if conceptual art happened 50 years ago, we're just beginning to get around to it now.[4]

The broadly accepted genealogy, variously informing the authoritative accounts of, e.g., Marjorie Perloff, Vanessa Place, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Craig Dworkin, gives conceptual poetry a doubled lineage. Within anglophone poetry, it takes the baton-pass of the avant-garde from language writing (née Language Poetry), doubling down on an anti-lyrical formalism with considerable theoretical armature motivated by a critical stance toward the spontaneous ideology of the sentimental-expressivist ‘mainstream’, conceptual poetry’s self-selected other. At the same time, conceptual poetry is rooted saliently in the soil of conceptual art.

This double genealogy underscores the temporalities of our untimely moment. Persistence and restoration may not offer a proper dialectic, but this ‘persistence of the avant-garde, restoration of conceptualism’ does offer a reversal or two. For poetry’s allegedly most avant proffer, conceptual poetry’s tenets and provocations must strike us as peculiary arriere: attacks on originality, creativity, authorship, on romantic paradigms of inspiration, the lyric I; inquiries into what art really is and its purported relationship to the ontology of the human. The litany will be familiar, closely replicating a certain intellectual portfolio of the previous century. As many have wondered, didn’t a couple of French types creep into the artists’ garret and put the poignard to the romantic genius some time back — ’67, ’68? After the first death there is no author. Even skeptical critics have often accepted the terms of the debate, defending affect, expressivity, originality, intention and so forth against the alleged depredations of neo-conceptualism; this in turn allows for ever-cleverer claims that conceptual poetry is in fact laced with affect, invention et cetera if we just read it right. Herein, I’m interested in a different question entirely. If the self-declared aesthetic inquiries of neo-conceptualism were interesting a few decades ago, why would they be particularly interesting in the oughts? Not just art for art’s sake, but art about art’s sake. In what sense, if any, are such dated and profoundly self-reflexive concerns entangled with the history of the present?

To engage this puzzle, we must first note that these concerns are not ‘dated’ in some vague sense but precisely so; the specific periodicity here proves hard to look away from. The date of the Barthes’ and Foucault’s essays are only an initial sounding. Despite the occasional brandishing of Lautreamont or Duchamp, neo-conceptual poetry’s programme, its vocabulary, and the referents proliferated by the house organs are resolutely those of the ’60s. The Oulipians oft-cited ‘The Litpot: The First Manifesto’ (François le Lionnais, 1962) brackets the early side:

That which certain writers have introduced with talent (even with genius) in their work…(Oulipo) intends to do systematically and scientifically, if need be through recourse to machines that process information.[5]

Multiple citations cluster around 1969; the most suggestive (and most repeated) is Douglas Huebler’s ‘The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.’

This disavowal falls at the pivot of the sequence that Lucy Lippard aggregates under the heading Six Years: Dematerialization of the Art Object 1966-1972— a period after which conceptualism begins to fade and give way to other aesthetic developments.[6] Come the millennium, Kenneth Goldsmith will rehearse Huebler’s sentiment so many times it is hard not to take it as a sort of key — though he is in the habit of changing one word, objects to texts. On this metamorphosis hangs a tale. But I am getting ahead of myself.

In ‘Conceptualisms, Old and New’ (2007), Perloff — having summarized ’60s’ conceptualism (including Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer’s text-based journal 0 to 9), ponders the neo-conceptual restoration and offers a pocket periodisation.

Why the new interest in the material word, in proceduralism, dictionary definition, and a dogged literalism that refuses the metaphoric mode of mainstream lyric…? One reason, surely, is the current nostalgia for the Bohemia of the late 60s-early 70s, for the moment when poets and visual artists were still likely to live in Village walk-ups and Brooklyn tenements, defying, not only of the bourgeois world of business, but also the university.[7]

Perloff gets something deeply right here, despite her focus on institutions and particularly on artist’s stances toward them. Her list of ‘material word, proceduralism, dictionary definition, and a dogged literalism’, while it declines to abstract from language-work to show its connection to studio art practice, is clear enough about the technics for avoiding the humanist whirlpool of precious expressivist subjectivity, for overcoming the lures of culturalist allusivity and egocentric depth psychology. Bök, in the aforementioned essay, had provided the coordinating rationale for technical composition, proclaiming that the artist will need ‘a machinic attitude, placing the mind on autopilot in order to follow a remote-controlled navigation-system of mechanical procedures.’[8] With that in mind, we can now suggest the following trio of crucial concerns for neo-conceptualism:

– one, a rejection of art as a form of virtuosity that indexes a necessarily human potentiality—here we recall Virno’s assertion that ‘every utterance is a virtuosic performance’, and that said virtuosity features ‘the absence of a “finished product.”’[9]

– two, an anxiety about the excessive production of objects in the present age, per Huebler; These two aspects run together into…

– three, the dream of a machinic virtuosity which eschews both finished products and humanist metaphysics, and the consequent proposition that this automation of art and especially language art, with its de-hierarchising of human and machine, might provide for a thoroughgoing reconsideration of both art and the human, while being adequate to the reality of technological development.

Having set these forth, we must now confront at least some of the contradictions in the results of the immediate production process. Conceptual writing does produce finished products, quite regularly and emphatically, from perfect-bound volumes of cheerfully plagiarised text to Goldsmith’s idea for ‘Printing the [Entire] Internet.’ There is more interesting here than mere irony. Human labour in the production of conceptual poetry remains as a ghostly presence — the sense that somebody put in the hours of drudgery transferring the words from here to there like Milo moving grains of sand with tweezers in The Phantom Tollbooth.[10] The book then retains a kind of pathos, a queer outcome of empty office labours with which many of us are all too familiar.

But if the bespoke physical reproduction of pre-existent language so familiar to neo-conceptualism seems contrary to the dream of dematerialisation, it nonetheless insists on the making-machinic of human aesthetic production. The lived labour seemingly congealed in the made text can and will be evacuated. Indeed, this process is fully in flight, per Bök’s machine dreams; such human expenditures exist largely as spectral residue in the audience’s imaginations. One can see that Goldmith’s jargon of inauthenticity, his lauding of the ‘uncreative’ and the ‘dumb’ and so forth, provide transitional terms for such a historical trajectory, allowing for the outcome that, if this be art — a new poetry of unoriginal genius — it’s an art-process that can easily be automated. Is not one lesson of the present that cognitive tasks once thought beyond mechanisation are in fact entirely amenable to such progress? Consider Place’s Statement of Facts, about which Perloff writes,

Vanessa Place, herself an appellate criminal defense attorney who specialises in sex offenders and sexually violent predators, has assembled a remarkable sequence of narratives, taken almost verbatim from court testimonies she herself reviewed.[11]

We might conjure the laborious effort underlying such appropriation art, and the highly-trained professional job that provides its enabling condition. But this must be considered in light of the parallel development detailed by McKinsey Global Institute in ‘Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy’ (May 2013):

Fields such as law and financial services are already beginning to see the benefits of knowledge worker automation. Law firms, for example, are using computers that can scan thousands of legal briefs and precedents to assist in pretrial research—work that would once have taken hundreds or thousands of hours of paralegal labor.[12]

Or, as a New York Times headline had condensed matters two years earlier, ‘Armies of expensive lawyers, replaced by cheaper software.’[13] Even if you are an artist-attorney, machines will take your place. Voila: machine virtuosity.

These coordinates do not claim to exhaust conceptualism’s concerns (and let me aver one last time that I am focusing on brand-name conceptualism). But they efficiently particularise and schematise the broader issues of originality, authorship, ontologies of art, etc — and these recur with great regularity. Bök is significant for his bravura consolidation; ‘The Piecemeal Bard’ is not just fantasia-as-theorisation, but provides a rhetorically appealing formulary or even manifesto. Here is the concluding paragraph in full.

We are probably the first generation of poets who can reasonably expect to write literature for a machinic audience of artificially intellectual peers. Is it not already evident by our presence at conferences on digital poetics that the poets of tomorrow are likely to resemble programmers, exalted, not because they can write great poems, but because they can build a small drone out of words to write great poems for us? If poetry already lacks any meaningful readership among our own anthropoid population, what have we to lose by writing poetry for a robotic culture that must inevitably succeed our own? If we want to commit an act of poetic innovation in an era of formal exhaustion, we may have to consider this heretofore unimagined, but nevertheless prohibited, option: writing poetry for inhuman readers, who do not yet exist, because such aliens, clones, or robots have not yet evolved to read it.[14]

An uncharitable sort might moralise about the rather unfortunate celebration of the drone. Of more immediate interest is the gesture toward periodisation. It’s a bit incoherent: the sudden suggestion that the impetus for this aesthetic innovation is ‘formal exhaustion’ stands in tension with multiple claims for technological innovation as itself the beat with which we must keep pace.

Rather than resolving this tension directly, one might suggest that this incoherence signals the possibility of another periodisation to be found beneath the technophoria, itself veritably rapturous in its vision of a human race relieved by robots not only from producing but consuming — a periodisation in which neither the anxiety over thwarted innovation nor the hurry of technological progress functions as cause for these poetic and more broadly social developments. Instead, this pairing might be understood together as complementary consequences of an underlying dynamic. Bök comes perilously close to naming it.

Why hire a poet to write a poem when the poem can in fact write itself? Has not the poet already become a virtually vestigial, if not defective, component in the relay of aesthetic discourse? Are we not already predisposed to extract this vacuum tube from its motherboard in order to replace it with a much faster node?[15]

Indeed, only one word’s worth of mystification remains. Whence this predisposition to replace humans with machines, and speed up the production process?

Bok’s essay was published in a founding collection of neo-conceptualist position papers, the 2001 number of Object, edited by Goldsmith. Perhaps it was drafted in late 2000, at the orgiastic perihelion of the tech bubble; this is of little matter against the larger pattern. We might now schematise the various dates for the clarity this provides, starting with the dates of conceptualism on which neo-conceptualism is fixated.

We can now see that conceptualism is an art of economic expansion, isomorphic with the final years of the postwar boom, les trente glorieuses, the greatest expansion of capital in world history. Perloff’s ‘current nostalgia for … the late 60s-early 70s’ is surely correct, but that nostalgia may be less about Bohemia and more about profit rates, so historically high at that moment. But this current reformation is less a nostalgia for what is irreparably lost than a nostalgia for what has been regained, but regained imperfectly. The return in the oughts registers the coincidence of the two moments — for the profit rate recovers in the span within which neo-conceptualism rises.

But not all the way. The two conceptualisms are, we must finally concede, both languages of the boom. But there is a difference in the two moments, a difference between the long post-war boom which made a home for conceptualism, and the FIRE sector bubbles encompassing neo-conceptualism. One expansion did indeed proliferate objects; the other, objectless services, data management, and purportedly value-productive discourse. Virno, once more:

The crucial point is, though, that while the material production of objects is delegated to an automated system of machines, the services rendered by living labour, instead, resemble linguistic-virtuosic services more and more.[16]

If conceptualism tracked the hyperproduction of material objects, neoconceptualism tracks the hyperproduction of services, immaterial goods, finance. Hence the necessity of the transformation from Huebler’s objects to Goldsmith’s texts; each in turn corresponds to the niceties of its own period’s privileged mode of rising productivity. And it is rising productivity about which they cannot stop conceptualising. Faster machines making more stuff without need for humans nor human needs, and the problems that arise.

One last turn, thusly. Conceptualism is not merely the aesthetics of boom, of productivities regnant. It is, unmistakably, a language of twilight, of expansion lurching toward its limit. Let us make the impossibly obvious move of adding the two great crises.

Now we see the plainest fact: conceptualism is a crisis bird. Rising productivity is a name for the rising technical composition of capital (TCC); the increasing ratio of means of production against labour power. In value terms, it is the way through which constant comes to stand over variable capital, the rising organic composition of capital (OCC) which manifests as the expulsion of living labour from waged work, and which finally must drive profit back downward. This is capital’s ‘moving contradiction’:

Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary.[17]

Such is the history of motherboards and faster nodes, the inner drive to speed up every process. Well, predispositions have to come from somewhere. This illuminates conceptualism’s limitless drive toward machinic production, and its terror of too much stuff; if rising OCC was an aesthetic, it would be conceptualism.

But for conceptualism this isn’t a problem. Just as conceptual poetry believes in the promise of service work, believes in the idea that there is something generative in the aesthetics of data entry, it believes in the promise of non-work. In the neo-conceptual imaginary, this machine virtuosity of both production and consumption (for that too becomes virtuoso) simply frees humans to do…what? To overcome the lyric I? To discover new potentialities of the human, or reflect on the wonders of the automated singularity? To be boring? Well, to be unemployed, if we want to get all technical. Or organic. The thing that conceptualism knows but cannot say, that drives its own internal contradictions and its dream resolution of abstractly freed human potential, is the awareness — so evident in the Huebler/Goldsmith formula — that the overaccumulation of stuff, finally of capital itself, will bring an end to the era which at once launched the ship of conceptualism, and provisioned its imaginary. It arises always in the moment when increasing automation, ever-faster production, has reached the inflection point and now lurches toward the blowout.

Persistence and restoration: neo-conceptualism is a bit of both, restoration of the Long Boom’s twilight, persistence of those propositions even after the crisis that exposes their poverty. This persistence reminds us that periodisations are never themselves exact, and that aesthetic movements never meet their moments perfectly. Service work has not suddenly vanished; one might expect neo-conceptualism to stumble forward a bit longer. What happens then, once these propositions have broken on the shoals of crisis, contraction, unemployment — now so much flotsam in the Sargasso of overaccumulation? If the last global blowout is to provide a cue, we can expect the present’s version of the poetry of new social movements. Not an eternal return, but not without history. This will be the meaningful other of conceptualism: not the ahistorical figure of ‘the mainstream’ but a poetics of reanimated social antagonism, cognisant of immiseration and wagelessness and capital’s latest, oldest snares — and ready to name them as a problem, not conceal them behind the latest phantasmatically objective vacuum tube.

Joshua Clover has collaborated on poetry, critical writing, and conferences with Chris Nealon, Chris Chen, Aaron Benanav, Annie McClanahan, Louis Schwartz, Jasper Bernes, and Juliana Spahr; with the lattermost two, he edits Commune Editions. His next book of poetry, Red Epic, is forthcoming from Commune Editions in 2015; Of Riot, on the return of the riot to the centre of struggle, will be published by Verso in 2016. Twitter: @bookofriot

Footnotes

Massively open online courses (MOOCs) have been sold as the future of higher education but there is more than a whiff of ‘primitive accumulation’ at the new frontier. Dominic Pettman examines the state-and-vulture-capitalist looting of ‘the last great unplundered resource’ and considers some other definitions of educational value

Friedrich Nietzsche, famously a full professor at the tender age of 24, was in a good position to develop an acute sensitivity to the university as machine:

The student listens to lectures . . . Very often the student writes at the same time he listens to lectures. These are the moments when he dangles from the umbilical cord of the university. The teacher . . . is cut off by a monumental divide from the consciousness of his students . . . A speaking mouth and many, many ears, with half as many writing hands: that is the external apparatus of the academy; set in motion, that is the educational machinery of the university.[1]

Today, we are living in an age in which many are poised to cut this umbilical cord altogether, while others would prefer to keep the connection, but stretch the flesh all the way around the globe, so it can double as a fibre optic cable.

New values on new tablets

Like the economy itself, higher education seems to be in a perpetual state of crisis. In the United States – where I have worked for nearly ten years– universities nevertheless like to consider themselves the last bastions of true homegrown industry. Despite the mushrooming of new educational institutions in China, the Middle East, and South America, the operating assumption here is that everyone around the world desires an American education. ‘This country may not make things anymore,’ so the logic goes, ‘but we still produce the finest minds the world has to offer, no matter the field.’ Whether this is an accurate representation of reality or not, a college education in the US is still a precious thing, at least for those who can afford it. Despite the daunting costs involved, some economists still insist that it is the best investment you can make in your financial future, but this of course depends on the institution and the area of study.[2] This yield is measured in prospective income, of course, for no mathematical formula can measure the benefits to one’s soul, if I may use such a word. American parents and students, however, crushed by more than 1 trillion in collective debt, are becoming increasingly skeptical of the rather intangible benefits of higher education. The rate of cultural climate change is such that the new batch of dot.com billionaires can try to bribe the brightest young minds not to go to college, in order to better jump feet first into the world of digital entrepreneurialism (as Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, is doing now, offering 100k scholarships for young tech developers to skip that bothersome ‘higher education’ requirement for a well-rounded life).[3] But from either side of the debate, it is clear that universities – like real estate and medical care – create their own greenhouse effect, leading to huge bubbles that must surely burst.     

Enter MOOCs – Massively Open Online Courses. While the precise form and definition of MOOCs are hotly debated, and evolving rapidly, they all depend on an updated version of ‘distance learning.’ The nutshell version, however, is an online course designed for large-scale participation. For those pushing this ‘revolution’ in education, MOOCs will solve all the systemic problems of higher education through the unprecedented power and potential of the internet. Classes will be ‘scalable’ from, say, 100 students up to 10,000, when digitised and put online. Being a student will not cost a bomb because the costs of real estate – and all those other real world factors with which ‘bricks-and-mortar’ campuses are forced to contend – don’t necessarily come into the equation. Location-based analog education will morph triumphantly into omni-accessible e-learning. Or so the rhetoric goes. There are many high-profile cheerleaders for this anticipated paradigm shift, who claim that education needs the next killer app in order to remain relevant. David Shay, for instance, takes the long, oversimplified view:

If Academia 1.0 [ancient Greece] was about institutionalizing access to the masters and their oral culture, and Academia 2.0 [the modern age] was about a transition from orality to literacy and access to the knowledge of certain masters through physical books, then Academia 3.0 is about universal access and social learning.[4]

Indeed, MOOCs have given birth to more Gutenberg comparisons than you can throw a museum full of printing presses at.

Professors, however, and other educators, are not necessarily so excited about the vision of the future these online evangelists paint for the panting pundits. Indeed they are concerned about what is already happening in terms of implementing (some would say ‘forcing’) the change. In the pedagogic trenches, MOOCs are considered a symptom of wider economic patterns which effectively vacuum resources up into the financial stratosphere, leaving those doing the actual work with many more responsibilities, and far less compensation. Basic questions about the sustainability of this model remain unanswered, but it is clear that there is little room for enfranchised, full-time, fully-compensated faculty. Instead, we find an army of adjuncts servicing thousands of students; a situation which brings to mind scenes from Metropolis rather than Dead Poets Society. (While it’s true I’d much rather watch the first film, I’d rather live in the later one.) Sebastian Thrun, co-founder of MOOC-provider Udacity, predicts that in 50 years there will be no more than 10 higher education institutions in the US. Now there’s a utopian vision for you.

How to do pedagogy with a hammer

Matters were complicated further in 2013, when the Californian Senate passed a bill stating that Universities are obliged to recognise online courses for credit, and indeed to provide such courses if demand outpaces supply. As the New York Times pointed out, this is ‘the first time that state legislators have instructed public universities to grant credit for courses that were not their own – including those taught by a private vendor, not by a college or university.’[5] It is worth noting that this bill passed unanimously, since this is not only thinly-veiled blackmail, but a wholesale shift of authority away from teachers and towards technocrats, with little history or understanding about the field they are now annexing. It denies faculty the right to make decisions about pedagogic quality, and what constitutes a legitimate course. Say goodbye to the idea of a carefully crafted and sequenced curriculum if ‘knowledge’ is simply treated in the same way as Xboxes or Nike shoes – a matter of supply and demand. The notion of admissions – a certain threshold of skill acquisition and expression, which students need to acquire before continuing – is effectively banished. Of course, this latter aspect can be framed as a democratic mandate, opening up the ivory tower to any who would like to step inside its walls. But in practice it is closer to a Trojan horse, designed to eviscerate education as an actual experience. The upbeat mantra of ‘access for all’ is a red herring, since it could very well be access to something that is incapable of responding to student needs.    

What makes all this so hard for professors to swallow, especially in California, is that this new corporate-driven mandate is being considered by the very same government body which voted to decimate public funding for universities, leading to a brain-drain to other states (which themselves are considering taking the same Draconian and short-sighted steps). Meanwhile, huge subsidies are provided for Silicon Valley, where a lot of the for-profit third-party providers of MOOCs are based. That’s right: a wide public investment in the education of future citizens and tax-payers is traded in for extremely narrow private gain. (We won’t even mention how much money California allocates for prisons, many of these profit-driven as well.) Lillian Taiz, the president of the California Faculty Association, notes, ‘What’s really going on is that after the budget cuts have sucked public higher education dry of resources, the Legislature’s saying we should give away the job of educating our students.’[6] No wonder conspiracy theories abound that hedge funds, lobbyists, and speculators zoomed in on education at the turn of the millennium – as the last great unplundered resource – artificially lowering the value of the university experience by hollowing out its essential core. An all-too familiar story; made all the more vivid by the recent English translation of Thomas Piketty’s Capital: vulture capitalists swooping in and making a quick fortune by monetising any meat left on the bones. I believe the agricultural equivalent is known as ‘slash-and-burn.’

Distanced learning

For companies pushing MOOCs, education is no different from entertainment: it is simply a question of delivering ‘content.’ But learning to think exclusively via modem is like learning to dance by watching YouTube videos. You may get a sense of it, but no-one is there to point out mistakes, deepen your understanding, contextualise the gestures, shake up your default perspective, and facilitate the process. The role of the professor or instructor is not simply the shepherd for the transmission of information from point A to point B, but the co-forging of new types of knowledge, and critically testing these for various versions of soundness and feasibility. Wisdom may be eternal, but knowledge – both practical and theoretical – evolves over time, and especially exponentially in the last century, with all its accelerated technologies. Knowledge is always mediated, so we must consciously take the tools of mediation into account. Hence the need for a sensitive and responsive guide: someone students can bounce new notions off, rather than simply absorb information from. Without this element, distance learning all too often becomes distanced learning. Just as a class taken remotely usually leads to a sea of remote students.   

Indeed, experts have noted that those who need education most, the unmoneyed and marginalised, are precisely those who require an actual, present, human guide most in order to advance. Moreover, students of colour ‘benefit the least from online instruction and flourish most when engaged on campus through residential housing, mentorships, and involvement in student organizations and community service’[7] (Gregory Jay). As Jonathan Marks notes, in reference to one of the biggest MOOC providers,,while Coursera’s mission of open access is democratic, its education is elitist, designed for those who already possess the judgment, independence, and discipline to teach themselves well.’[8] Even Sebastian Thrun himself, the CEO of Udacity, has recently admitted that it was naïve of his company and its rhetoric to consider students to be demographically-neutral consumers. After all, when it comes to those ‘from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives…[for them] this medium is not a good fit.’[9] It should be no surprise then that ‘a survey of active MOOC users in more than 200 countries and territories has revealed that most students on these courses are already well educated — and that they are predominantly young males seeking to advance their careers.’[10] Hence the schadenfreude felt by myself and my colleagues when one of the most hyped MOOC courses of last year, hosted by Coursera, collapsed into a heap in the first day when 40,000 students flooded the system. The topic? ‘Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application.’

TED talks are fine for interesting factoids to mention at your next dinner party, but hardly the model of critical depth or complexity one needs to nurture minds for extended focus, deep history, and intricate context. And if you thought lectures are often boring, then videos of lectures are excruciating. (Audio podcasts less so, but that might just be me.) Personally, I love learning about ‘the world’ through MIT’s open-courseware or documentaries on TV. But I don’t expect credit for watching these, nor assume I’ve done anything but scratched the surface of the topic. Indeed, the rose-coloured hope of the MOOC-spruikers – that credentials could be somehow untethered to your identity – has recently come crashing down to the ground.[11] What’s more, experience has shown that online discussion boards are no replacement for face-to-face interaction; for talking through ideas, methods, or techniques. And while intellectual communities can flourish on the Internet, these are usually established thinkers, who benefitted from tried-and-tested forms of instruction, who then seek each other out online. Anyone who has taken or taught an exclusively online course knows that it tends towards Tweets From Nowhere. Critical thinking, I would venture, is a martial art. Would the Karate Kid have learned his holistic skills through VHS subscription? Teachers provide the transformative spark. It’s sensei, not Sony, stupid.

So the problem is essentially about modes of engagement. ‘MOOCs assume a one-size-fits-all approach,’ writes one critic, ‘which might work for developing iPhone apps, but won’t necessarily work for teaching ethnographic film.’[12] Universities are not warehouses full of ‘information.’ If that was the case, they would have died a long time ago, with the introduction of campus libraries. Rather they are dynamic factories, lateral workshops, experimental labs, centripetal studios, speculative ateliers. In the US, lectures are often punctuated by student questions or comments, which can prompt a professor to shift gears or clarify something that the whole room was silently hoping would be clarified. Plato’s dialogues are alive and well on campuses in 2014, providing the same sense of shared exploration and discovery (though thankfully including a greater diversity of voices). In the Silicon Valley vision, the nuances and nebulous nature of human education – as well as the world’s many profound problems – are reduced to ‘information’, ‘innovation’, ‘disruption’, and ‘design.’ The importance of ‘being there’ is ignored, along with two little things called Time and Space. We know more than before about how important emotional involvement is for learning. The professor’s role is to demonstrate the stakes involved. It is a performance of commitment, sensibility, trust, and what Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips calls ‘impersonal intimacy.’ Pre-packaged courses will smell bad within months, especially if they are about the contemporary world. I have to update my PowerPoint presentations every year, and in much more substantive ways than simply replacing the photos of Paris Hilton with Kim Kardashian.

You are the commodity

Believe it or not, there is more to life than efficient delivery of preconstituted modules. University is as much about socialisation as education (as if the two could be separated). Here young people learn how to best inhabit the public sphere, without their parents or guardians. Much learning occurs in the hallways, dorms, quads, coffee shops, and streets, and not just the classroom. There is something very powerful and motivating about being in an unfamiliar space to do this; and not just one’s bedroom. To do so unencumbered by wage-based labour is a true privilege, sketching the outlines of a beckoning communicative utopia, and one which everyone should have access to during the formative late teenage years. We should be figuring out how to continue funding this kind of experience for everyone, rather than diluting the possibility for all but the anointed few. Which is not to exclude technology for the sake of an Arcadian fantasy of co-presence; but to recognise that new media should be enlisted in very deliberate ways to encourage potential pedagogic connections which allow for the full confrontations and challenges of the face-to-face. (Itself the model for ethics, for many 20^th century philosophers.)

Then again, this traditional ‘college experience’ is looking increasingly precarious, as university administrators look to the pharmakon of ‘technology’ to bring down already compromised budgets. Academia has been relatively sheltered from the neoliberal onslaught on those basic rights and conditions hard-won by the labour movement, and subsequently revoked by governments who prioritise the figure of the shareholder rather than the welfare of the citizen. But in the time it has taken to order a particularly elusive inter-library loan, the professoriate have found themselves dazed and blinking in front of students who have internalised the anti-intellectual discourse of higher education as commodity. Class instructors, almost overnight, have become reframed even by their own institutions as service providers delivering highly instrumentalised ‘learning outcomes’: a symptom of the global subsumption of any and all labour under the metaphor of value, while cutting the actual level of economic investment in the education process. Hence the increasing percentage of Deans who speak with Kool-Aid coloured lips, talking in pre-defeatist terms of financial ‘realities.’[13] To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a cash-strapped administrator, everything looks like an opportunity to implement a MOOC.

As Ian Bogost, one of the most visible and articulate critics of MOOCs puts it,

The fundamental problem isn’t one of cost containment, it’s one of funding — of understanding why the cost containment solution appeared in the first place. We collectively ‘decided’ not to fund education in America. Now we’re living with the consequences. [14]

Moreover,

The more we buy into the efficiency argument, the more we cede ground to the technolibertarians who believe that a fusion of business and technology will solve all ills. But then again, I think that's what the proponents of MOOCs want anyway. The issue isn't online education per se, it's the logics and rationales that come along with certain implementations of it.[15]

So what’s wrong with MOOCs? (Other than the name itself, which seems to refer to the hybrid bovine-human herd-animal that Nietzsche held in such contempt?). Well, it’s there in the very first word. ‘Massive.’ A lot of things can be massive. But true learning never is. (Which is why, according to the statistics I’ve seen, 5-10 percent of the people who enroll in these pseudo-classes complete them.) Given that MOOCs are so heavily influenced by the rhetoric of cybernetics, it’s supremely ironic that its adherents forget about the importance of ‘feedback’; or at least the logistics involved. You simply cannot ‘scale this up’ without resorting to ‘peer-to-peer’ learning (too often merely a euphemism for outsourcing teaching to the students themselves). The logistics involved are at once mind-boggling and depressing. What about identity fraud? Or plagiarism? Making education ‘social’ essentially hands the entire enterprise of self-formation to the over-coded algorithms and tunnel vision of Mark Zuckerberg. And like Facebook, if the service is free, then you are the commodity being sold. As media theorist Richard Grusin notes, ‘MOOCs are extractive industries. The knowledge that they are exploiting was gained over long years of hard work in small, in-person seminars or archives, representing a resource that will become finite in a MOOCified future.’[16] One also wonders where this super-sized graduating class is supposed to look for jobs. Certainly not in education (unless you develop an app to automatically replace photos of Kim Kardashian with the next default pop culture touchstone reference in all online presentations).

The Medium and the Massive 

No doubt, I realise that I risk sounding like a nostalgic humanist Luddite, suspicious of a technological intrusion into the classroom. In fact, this couldn’t be further from the truth (as any glance at my books will confirm). I have been an early adopter of what’s now called ‘the digital humanities’, and I use blogs, wikis, and other online tools to complement all my courses. I have taught Romantic literature in computer labs. I have had students ‘beam in’ to my seminars quasi-holographically, from other countries; but not en masse. These tools are supplements to the classroom experience, and should not be considered surrogates. Marshall McLuhan was half-right when he insisted that the electronic age is ushering in a post-literate society. But no matter how we like to talk of new audio-visual forms of literacy, there is still the ‘typographic man’ pulling the strings, encouraging us to express ourselves alphabetically. Indeed, the electronic and the literate are not mutually exclusive, much as people like to pit them against each other.

As my techno-savvy colleague Trebor Scholz puts it, ‘For-profit MOOCs completely ignore the history of online education, collaboration, and have no good understanding of what learning is about.’ The proof?

None of the major MOOC providers have hired anyone trained in instructional design, the learning sciences, educational technology, course design, or other educational specialties to help with the design of their courses. They are hiring a lot of programmers.[17]

So the key question is not how to keep the internet out of the classroom, but how to balance the truly remarkable and untested potentials of digital technology with the crucial element of engagement and actual interaction. We need to keep the score at: Baby 1, Bathwater 0.

From MOOCs to DOCCs

One of the most promising visions of online education is spear-headed by my colleague and Dean of the School of Media at the New School, Anne Balsamo. Together with her collaborative partners, Balsamo has launched FemTechNet, which is not a MOOC but a DOCC (Distributed Online Collaborative Course). Inseparable from ‘the long histories of feminist engagements with technology and cultural innovation,’ this instance of digital innovation inhabits the massive gaps which the Silicon Boy’s club’s obsession with the ‘massive’ itself creates. This not only ‘disrupts’ the e-masculinist assumptions about genius, history, and technology (cf. the worship of Steve Jobs), but also acts as a progressive reminder that the medium is the message. In an interview with the appropriately named journal of gender, new media, and technology, Ada, Balsamo states:

We see our mission and process as feminist in that size is not of importance, whereas collaboration, experimentation, power sharing and a DIY ethic take center stage. Our project uses technology to enable interdisciplinary and international conversations while privileging situated diversity and networked agency.[18]

This means that a dialogic approach is valued more highly than the asymmetrical ‘speaking from on high’ apparatus that Nietzsche held such contempt for (all the while finding mountain tops from which to make his own uber-masculine pronouncements).

Moreover:

Unlike a MOOC, where the instructors and course experts are centralised at a single institution (i.e., Stanford, Harvard, MIT), in this DOCC, students from across the globe enroll ‘at large’ to learn (access the knowledge) from the center. The ‘Dialogues in Feminism and Technology’ DOCC is built on the notion that not only the students but also the teachers/instructors/experts, as well as the institutional infrastructures for granting ‘credit’ or supporting a learning community, are all distributed across the globe. Even though Alex and Anne serve as the coordinators of the ‘Dialogues in Feminism and Technology’ DOCC, they are neither the instructors nor the main learning designers. The teachers are those who arrange to offer a nodal class for students enrolled in their educational institutions. The teachers are those who agree to offer ‘independent studies,’ ‘directed reading experiences,’ or extra credit for those students who seek credit for participating in the DOCC. The teachers are those who sign on as ‘at-large’ learners, who want to engage in the material offered as part of the course. The teachers are those who ‘drop in’ as informal learners because they are interested in a particular topic on the course schedule. The teachers are also the students. Everyone is a participant in a massively distributed work of feminist innovation.[19]

One fascinating innovation with FemTechNet is the attempt to redefine and articulate new ‘learning objects’, so that subjectivity itself – the sovereign fetish of Enlightenment pedagogy – is understood as embedded within socio-technical networks. In other words, this is not a fable about reconnecting with human roots in the face of alienating technologies, but better appreciating how our new electronic tools shape our sense of self, and the possible valences that affords (whether this be to form an alliance with other people, or institutions, or catalytic things).

Massively Oppressive Offline Courses

The question remains open, however, as to what extent access is restricted to students who have already jumped through the financial hoops necessary to enter the system of recognised accreditation. After all, higher education is, on the whole, prohibitively expensive, especially in the land of the free. Senator Elizabeth Warren, for instance, has been very active at trying to shame the federal government for its policy of giving corporations all sorts of tax breaks and zero-interest loans, while profiting to the tune of 51 billion dollars on the backs of student loans.[20] This is simply ‘obscene’, as she puts it, where young citizens graduate with crushing debt that can take a lifetime to erase. Some of that cost could feasibly be off-set by the institutions themselves, who, in some cases, are currently hiring upper-level administrators at around eight times (!) the rate of faculty.[21] But a lot of it is built in to the tax structures and priorities of the country, whereby bombs outweigh books by a million-to-one.

Academe does indeed harbor some ugly secrets, but these are not necessarily the ones routinely demonised in the press (i.e., tenured ‘dead wood’ professors), but rather what Jay calls

massively oppressive on-campus courses that squeeze the most tuition dollars out of students with the minimal return on investment, and the least respect for just arrangements of academic labor.[22]

The digital snake oil peddled by Coursera and Udacity is not an alternative, but an intensification of this myopic logic. So called indyMOOCs – non-profit ventures like edX, that include local meet-ups – seem more balanced, but still raise the same thorny questions about approach and logistics. Meanwhile, the students themselves continue to work two jobs and one unpaid internship, while studying full-time, and also trying to ‘enjoy’ being in their early 20s (as the advertising for products they can’t afford exhort them to do).

Return of the MOOC?

As I write, there is a sense among the professoriate that the MOOC monster has been somewhat stung, if not slayed. Like the dreaded creature in any horror movie worth its salt, however, a return is inevitable – especially when the protagonists least expect it. (For instance, just this morning the publically-funded New York Public Library announced that it would foot the bill for instructors to guide smaller groups in person through some of Coursera’s proprietary massive online courses, ‘as part of its own public-service mission.’)[23] But even if MOOCs as currently conceived and implemented do die, we are left with the same economic ‘realities’, and the same narrow circuits of thinking, which connect the sinister dots along the continuum between pedagogic distraction and destruction: ‘assessment’ (whereby more funds are allocated to ‘assess’ an educational initiative than to staff or mount it), ‘data’ (in which the quantative enjoys its ultimate triumph over more subtle and potentially revealing modes of interpretation), and ‘learning outcomes’ (where professors are forced to stuff the warm gelatinous sculptures of their conceptual edifice into the cold Tupperware boxes of mythical categorical clarity). Not to mention once again, the unethical minefield of soaring tuition rates, crushing student debt, a demoralised army of adjuncts, and the increasing adoption of automatic grading machines (surely the most tangible sign that we have tipped somewhere along the line into a dystopian situation: as if Kafka and Orwell were joint-appointed the Global Ministers for Education).

The sense that professors lost a war that they didn’t even know had been declared is increasingly difficult to shake off. Yet with FemTechNet and other such initiatives and counter-offensives, there is room for cautious optimism. It is not through rejecting technology, but by being mindful of its dangers, and strategic with its potentials, that the committed stewards of higher education can avoid being herded into the slaughterhouse.  

            *                      *                      *

At the end of last semester, I received a wonderful email from a student, who said – with only a touch of irony – that she would never have written such an outstanding final paper if it weren’t for my ‘sense of disappointment’, which she apparently felt all too palpably while we were discussing an early draft. This made me smile, as it perfectly captured the way that subtle interpersonal signals, including or especially body language, can inspire people to reach the proverbial next level. After all, no one wrote a great paper because they wanted to impress Wikipedia.

Dominic Pettman is Chair of Liberal Studies, New School for Social Research, and Professor of Culture & Media, Eugene Lang College. His most recent books are Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines (Minnesota, 2011), Look at the Bunny: Totem, Taboo, Technology (Zero Books, 2013), and In Divisible Cities (Dead Letter Office / Punctum Press, 2013).   

Footnotes

Sometimes ethical claims about public space and 'free expression' conceal private interests and violence against the oppressed. Jacob Bard Rosenberg on the case of Dries Verhoeven and some problematic presuppositions of relational and post-internet art practices

Nationally funded surveillance art is still surveillance – Imri Kahn

A rage has been percolating through the social media of the art scene and the queer scene of Berlin during the last week. The art world and its market still thrive on scandal. This is a story of how an artist, in his work, attacked the gay community in Berlin, and how the rage his attack created was transformed into the sort of scandal that the art world could easily absorb and exploit.

In the middle of last week, Dutch artist Dries Verhoeven set up a large portacabin in Heinrichplatz in the centre of Kreuzberg. One side is made of glass, with white curtains shielding the artist from the clear view of passers by. On visiting the work on Sunday afternoon, the other side was emblazoned with gaffer tape reading ‘RAPIST IN HERE!’ At the corner of the cabin stood a group of locals, met by two stocky skinhead security guards. Verhoeven’s artwork ‘Wanna Play? Liebe in Zeiten von Grindr’ [Love in the times of Grindr], was commissioned and curated by Hebbel am Ufer Theatre (HAU), one of the larger and older arts organisations in Kreuzberg. It was funded jointly by HAU and the Dutch government, as part of the series ‘Treffpunkte’ [meeting places], an artistic exploration of intimacy in the public and private spheres, supported by the Haupstadtkulturfonds [capital city cultural trust.]

The work was due to run from the 1st to the 15th of October. During this time Verhoeven would live in the cabin and communicate with the outside world through the mobile app Grindr – an app designed for gay men to find partners for dates and sexual liaisons. The conversations that he was having with men through the application would be both projected in the square and also streamed on the internet. Although it was claimed that all pictures projected would be anonymised, in fact they were just put into negative so people could still be recognised, and anyone photographing or downloading them could return them to the original image at a click of a button. Verhoeven’s plan was to invite men into the trailer to take part in non-sexual activities.

The visual aesthetic of the piece, with its sleek-but-cheap white lines crammed into a trailer cabin brought to mind some moment in the last years of the 1990s: the first series of Big Brother, and the invention of the iMac. Perhaps this was a conscious decision of the artist: better to make it look like something from a time when the formal aesthetics of the work – the late-1990s craze for ‘Relational Art’ – was still in fashion. But in discussion Verhoeven showed little consciousness that his work was so hackneyed.

Kreuzberg 36, the area around Heinrichplatz, is socially one of the most diverse in Berlin. It is also the centre of the Berlin queer scene. Alongside Kreuzberg’s famous image as a home to the radical Autonomen, and vibrant squatting and punk scenes during the 1980s and 1990s, it also has become home to successive waves of immigrants from Turkey (both ethnic Turks and Kurds), from many countries in the Middle East and the Caucasus, and most recently it became a home to many refugees, mainly from Africa, who set up camp in Oranienplatz, the other end of Oranienstraße in 2012, before they were forcibly evicted by the local authorities, leading to violent clashes between the local community and the police. Many of these migrant communities have also established queer scenes and spaces in the area – at times totally integrated into the cosmopolitanism of Kreuzberg and at times maintaining some separation.

By Thursday last week, the second day of the work, a statement had appeared on Facebook, written by a man named Parker Tilghman. It began, ‘I just experienced the most violating and infuriating experience of my life. I have never felt rage until this evening.’ Parker’s message continued by detailing how he had begun chatting with Verhoeven on Grindr, as well as exchanging pictures, and had been deceived into believing he was being invited to a private address. When he arrived at Heinrichplatz he discovered that their conversation had been projected into the square. He entered the cabin, punched Verhoeven and was subsequently removed. The statement continues, detailing what Parker screamed in Heinrichplatz that afternoon:

you are violating people’s lives, you are publicly mocking people and projecting the pictures and words onto a screen that an entire city block in one of the busiest parts of kreuzberg for everyone to see. what you are doing is digital rape. you are a digital rapist. at no point did you have my consent or notify me that you would be doing anything of the sort. you cannot exploit people like this for your bullshit hipster berlin art world crap.

Parker asked for people to contact HAU to complain, and his statement was widely shared on Facebook. By Sunday a small protest had been organised again on Facebook under the title ‘“Wanna Play?” Not a chance. THIS IS NOT ART.’ But by the time of the protest, HAU had organised something of an alternative: Verhoeven was to appear in ‘public discussion’ that evening at one of the HAU theatres, a mile up the road.

Several hundred people, mainly drawn from Kreuzberg’s gay community and art scene (the two are often closely intertwined), filed into the HAU theatre on Sunday night. In front of them sat four figures on an otherwise empty black stage. The discussion began with Annemie Vanackere, artistic and business manager at HAU announcing that after discussion with Verhoeven they were ending the artwork. She then said that she likes to think of HAU, the theatre, and the art space as a safe place to disagree, and that she was sorry that this safety had been violated despite all steps to secure it.

Verhoeven then began speaking by saying that it felt like being brought to a slaughter house. But his simile was way off the mark: far from the bloodiness and anonymity of the abattoir, the event took a form quite obviously borrowed from the culture industry: this was to be a chat show à la Jerry Springer or Jeremy Kyle. The two guilty parties, Verhoeven and Vanackere sat together. They were joined by sexologist Prof. Martin Dannecker playing the part of pop psychologist, while dance and theatre theorist Eike Wittrock would play the part of the host. This was one of the most swish pieces of theatrics to grace the stages of Berlin in 2014. A brief history: as tragedy leapt the Atlantic into the TV studios of New York and LA it was given a Christian twist: no longer was the hero to be condemned by fate for his hubris. Instead the everyman would become the little-man, whose archetypal portrait was given in Dale Carnegie’s 1930s self-help manual How to Win Friends and Influence People. He, as amoral as the market he must serve, is set up to be cleansed, his demons exorcised, and his character expiated by the fire of public opinion; but he would live to return to work another day, just as every little-man must. The form is exported back across the Atlantic from the obviously commercial set-ups of the TV studios to an art scene that will still proclaim, albeit falsely, the separation of its activities from the motive of profit and the demands of big capital.

Parker Tilghman then made a statement, which was subsequently posted on Facebook. After an introduction in which he said he thought that the public discussion should not be happening and that he found HAU’s attempts at reconciliation trivial, he said,

I want to make one thing very clear: I have never given, and still do not give my consent to be a part of this project. It should be known that I forbid Mr. Verhoeven to use these encounters, my likeness, my name, or any other reference to me in this current project and any future project. Mr. Verhoeven and HAU cannot profit from my suffering or the suffering of others affected by this project. It is important to me that you understand that I am not ashamed about having my information broadcast in this way. While I still believe it to be illegal and unethical, I am traumatized but not embarrassed about what transpired between us. I am a proud person with no qualms about my sexual desires or public representation.

The discussion continued, albeit at times raucously, but little of interest was said by those being held to account. Everything remained unambiguously contained within the chat show aesthetic. Meanwhile, both Verhoeven and Vanackere refused to answer questions on how much had been paid for the work. When asked about what he would do next, Verhoeven mentioned that he would like to do the same sort of project again but using Tinder instead of Grindr ‘as it has an 80 percent heterosexual user base’ – obviously having learnt nothing from the experience.

Much was intimated about how this artwork is truly innovative in its use of technology – that it is an investigation into the transformations of subjectivity, intimacy and privacy on an online platform. There is no doubt there is much to say about these topics in general, although one finds the significance of the digital often overstated in the art world today due to its attraction to funders. Furthermore, there are genuine social questions about the use of online platforms, and how they change social relations, as well as how people deal with the genuine security risks posed by these applications, ranging from the data leak from Grindr reported just two weeks ago, to the Cambridge University paper which claimed last year that it could predict with 88 percent accuracy the sexuality of Facebook users based on ‘liking’ data.[1] Verhoeven had either intelligently or fortuitously pitched his artwork at the intersection of two artistic trends that continue to dominate in Europe: Relational Art and Post-Internet Art, but perhaps most striking about ‘Wanna Play’ is its absolute failure to engage reflexively with the technology and technical transformations it hoped to explore. Indeed, its form was little different from something that could have been done long before the Internet and Grindr: putting a floodlight and CCTV cameras on a cruising ground. If this work had anything at all to say about the technology of dating and cruising apps, it was merely that using them to out people and to undermine the privacy of gay men is, in 2014, more socially acceptable and more likely to accrue public funding, than a project of turning on the lights in dark rooms of gay clubs. Its conclusion is not only obvious and entirely uninteresting, but was predicated on a cunning thought on how technology might make the abuse of a community socially acceptable.

The argument Verhoeven’s work hoped to make about the technological governance of the distinction of the public and private was also extremely old-fashioned. Already by 1947 Adorno and Horkheimer had remarked that ‘the step from telephone to radio has clearly distinguished the roles. The former liberally permitted the participant to play the role of subject. The latter democratically makes everyone equally into listeners, in order to expose them in authoritarian fashion to the same programs put out by different stations. No mechanism of reply has been developed, and private transmissions are condemned to unfreedom.’[2] Verhoeven had coupled this to the bizarre notion that the use of Grindr meant a return of gay men to the closet, describing it in a blurb to the work as ‘die Tragik eines neuen Phänomens in den schwulen Communities’ [the tragedy of a new phenomenon in the gay communities]. Despite the fact that much of what happens on Grindr was never uniformly happening in the public eye, he had assumed that by bringing Grindr into the public sphere he would sublimate those apparent repressions that led people to use the application. He failed to notice that his surveillance of the gay community was itself a repressive measure. That is, he failed to understand that the public sphere continues to be in itself repressive.

It probably need not be stated again, but there unfortunately remain many and various reasons, both globally and within Kreuzberg, why people might not come out. Little was said Sunday night of the fact that it was a white, male, successful artist, backed by a well established institution, who was making the decision to out those people in Kreuzberg using Grindr. No questions were asked nor answered about what knowledge or experience he had of dealing with the diverse ramifications that the diverse users of Grindr continue to face in Kreuzberg. And it is worth remarking too, that while Kreuzberg historically has been a place where those disowned by their families and communities have often found support, this is made significantly more difficult by the evictions of squats and enormous increases in rent in the area over the past few years.

But Verhoeven’s misunderstanding of what is at stake in the maintenance of public and private boundaries rests not just on an obtuse stance with regard to a piece of technology, but also on a poetic problem. Relational art takes as its arena the public sphere, but relational art has for the most part refused to acknowledge a dialectical complexity of the public sphere in its bourgeois form: precisely that which is considered public (from the streets to the polity to the ruins of the institutions of the welfare state) are constituted from and conditioned by private interests. We might remember Kant’s famous answer to the question, ‘what is Enlightenment?’ There he says that ‘the public use of one's reason must be free at all times, and this alone can bring enlightenment to mankind.’ But then quickly adds the caveat that the private use of one’s reason may well be curtailed, and that in particular one ought not to expect to be able to use one’s reason freely at work: that is, in the spaces governed by private interest. But Kant’s public sphere was always a mere fantasy. By the time he wrote these lines any commons had been enclosed. The centuries ushered in by the French Revolution would be an era in which the social totality would be governed by private interests.

Alongside the relational artwork with its claims of an absolutely public arena, belongs a concomitant mode of criticism that would describe itself as ‘ethical’. Ethical criticism and relational art belong to, and justify the continued existence of, the same public sphere. The question of the ethical criticism of art underpinned a great deal of the discussion last night, both in terms of suggesting that the criticism of artworks in the public sphere ought to be ethical, and in suggesting that the ethical critique of artworks is not sufficient to justify their destruction, defunding, or censorship. Indeed, the question of the legitimacy of ethical criticism of artworks has been on people’s minds recently as white South African artist Brett Bailey’s work ‘Exhibit B’, in which black actors were exhibited in cages at the Barbican in London was shut down by protestors two weeks ago.[3] The piece had also been shown around Europe and had resulted in protests when it was shown in Berlin.

Tilghman remarked that he had been attacked by people for his original Facebook post – he was called a Nazi for the suggestion that an artwork should be stopped. To understand what is at stake in these ethical criticisms – which are bolstered by Vanackere’s claims for an art space as a safe space for disagreement – requires a historical setting. As is well known, the 20^th century saw much repression of artworks. In Germany the key reference point remains the designation of artworks as degenerate in the 1930s, although the post-war history of the performances of Wagner – particularly Die Meistersinger, with its final chorus ‘Ehrt Eure deutschen Meister’ [‘honour thy German masters’] remains another touchstone. This Germany history is quite different from the comparatively tame matter of the 1960 Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial in the UK. Although the issue in Germany requires a longer history than I can give here, it rests broadly on the establishment of enormous organisations for art in the public realm in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, such as the summer schools in Darmstadt for music, and Documenta for the plastic and visual arts. The appeal to art in the public sphere continues to return its gaze to the national working through of the past through the establishment of these institutions.

The appeal to this historical aspect encourages a mistake in recognising what these protests against artworks are. Must we really consider them ethical, or assume that they need to be couched in these terms? It is certainly true that many purely ethical arguments do not even approach the mark of addressing the matter of the art itself, or its right to existence that they may hope to extinguish. Yet behind the description of these critiques as ethical is an assumption that the aesthetic comportment towards the artwork ought to be distant, contemplative, and leave the artwork (publicly) intact. As with everything else, the public sphere of the art world remains riddled with private interests. The defence of the public space of art refers almost ubiquitously to the maintenance of artworks by art organisations as saleable goods. But an argument can be justifiably made that the attacks on ‘Wanna Play’ were indeed the hard work of aesthetics, an engagement of interpretation, reflexion, critique and response to these works in a way that cannot be reduced to a discursive and purely public ethics. Furthermore, the response from the people of Kreuzberg – an aesthetic comportment of sorts – has begun to address the incision that ‘Wanna Play’ made on both a public and a private plane, with more nuance than the theatrics of HAU.

The point of saying all of this is to comment on the form of the discussion on Sunday night at HAU, and to say something about why a ‘public’ discussion might allow this arts organisation to reconfigure the events of the last week as the sort of productive scandal that has driven artistic valorisation since the Second World War. The issues that we are dealing with function on the boundary of the public and the private: sexuality, trauma, art, have all long been known to have both social and asocial elements. On both sides a troubling leap has been performed: for the private sphere the old bourgeois subject, whose social modus operandi was to secure its individual identity, is revealed to be a mere husk: an apparatus devised for security is exposed to have been empty; the subject is fully dissolved into a figure of pure automatism. Meanwhile, this emptying of the subject is echoed by the establishment of the public sphere as a tabula rasa, a public world devoid of dreams. The persistence of sexuality, trauma, and art gives the lie to these intellectual leaps.

The artwork that takes as its presupposition that it is absolutely public invariably rebounds back into the enduring private realm. We have seen this elsewhere: in 2012 underpaid and precariously employed workers found themselves having to divulge intimate elements of their personal histories to members of the public in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall for four months as part of Tino Seghal’s work ‘These Associations’, and at the end of the work, Seghal thanked those workers for giving to him their personal lives.[4] The distortion and deformation of the private realm remains an interesting question for art, but the assumption that the deformation of humanity by social processes can be combatted by the opening of the private sphere into the public sphere as it is currently constituted is erroneous. As is any suggestion that the artwork is already a public space for public disagreements which can always be conducted safely. This is not to say that all works that hope to lift something private into the public sphere are uniformly bad, nor to denigrate the rich history of artworks that have engaged in this practice. But it is to say that it fails as a universal method, and where it is taken as a presupposition of art it will always lead to a redoubling and reinforcing of the distinction of the public and the private. If there is to ever be freedom it will arise from taking on not just the private as it currently exists, but from challenging the relation of the public and the private as they are mutually and historically constituted.

The conclusion must be that we cannot deal with the fallout of ‘Wanna Play’ in a ‘public discussion.’ And the attempt of HAU to do so, to create a public peace ceremony, is itself a problem: it demeans – and makes more difficult – the intensive private work that those affected will have to undertake in the coming months to come to terms with what has happened, while transforming the violence of the artwork into something HAU think they can be proud of.

It extends the same public sphere that on one day exposed the private elements of people’s sexuality to the public of Kreuzberg into the realm of prophylaxis. Any working through of what has happened, and any protest against the public sphere and its mechanisms of continued surveillance and repression is forced to take place under its glaring lights. The public sphere of the theatre, its platform for conversation, is identical to that which people’s private lives were violently subjected to. In the terms of Adorno and Horkheimer’s thought about the transformation of the telephone to the radio, a mechanism has been designed to reply: the victims of the artwork are to be offered a mouthpiece that will only speak again the same violence with which they were afflicted.

Jacob Bard Rosenberg

prolapsarian.tumblr.com 

@prolapsarian 

Footnotes

'Or for instance, if you were crushed to death by hundreds of boxes of chocolate....' John Russell takes the (w)hole system apart and refuses to put it back together again…

In his essay ‘The Pineal Eye’ Georges Bataille describes a giant gibbon aiming her anus at the sky, buried upside down, trussed up like a chicken, with her legs folded back against her body, ‘… her bestially howling mouth swallowing dirt’ while, at the other end, ‘her huge screaming pink anal protrusion stares at the sky like a flower’. A stake runs between her belly and her bound paws and ‘only the part whose obscenity stupefies emerges above the top level of the pit’. After her captors have filled the pit with dirt the gibbon’s anus is described as even more upsetting to see when touched by the ‘pretty white fingers’ of the English woman.[1]

Emerging from Freud’s libidinal semiotics, Irigaray describes how bodies coded in castration are organised into an economy of representation based around the ultimate symbolic value of the penis or phallus. A brutal visual (or as Irigaray puts it ‘specular’) dialectic of 'have' or 'have not' where the patriarchal structure cannot make sense of the ‘Little Girl’ except as a 'little man’ with an inadequate penis;[2] prioritising the masculine and phallic in contrast to the feminine and vaginal (as ‘lack’ or ‘other,’ structured as an absence which proves masculine presence). The relation of MAN to NOT-MAN (woman) which pre-scripts us all.[3]

The problem of sexual difference then (for forthcoming cosmonauts) is a problem of ‘sameness’ where the ‘feminine’ can only register as 'difference' in the format of 'difference from' the dominant term (difference from the ‘same’). And in this context, specularity is a structure which excludes (the unseen) but validates the seen or seeable. To quote Irigaray: ‘… the flat mirror reflects the greater part of women’s sexual organs only as a hole. And the eye does the same, unless it gets “inside”’ and here she references Georges Bataille’s ‘Story of the Eye’. Women cannot appear reflected in this flat mirror, but can only be thought of as the components of which the mirror is made, the tain of the mirror (the reflective backing).[4]

Sliced off with blood spurting out of your neck-hole. Swaying slightly. A comforting hand on your shoulder from the blond man on the right. His head twisting around and across to make sure you are OK. The scalpel stands at the side – looking down.

The penis, sliced down the middle, fat and muscle removed, sways upright supported by calipers (from a video documenting the transformation of a penis into a vagina).[5] The servants in the background collapse against the wall, their dresses splattered with blood. The skin is loosened from the flesh and folded round. And then miraculously wrapped inside, the penis head now becomes the clitoris.

Ejaculating out his penis-hole – but barefooted – the terrorists have shot out the partition windows – Bruce Willis must take care not to cut the flesh on the underside of his feet on the broken glass strewn around the office. Swaying there like a penis with the fat cut off, he remembers he used to specialise in comedy-action movies where he could deploy his rugged good looks as the lovable but flawed good guy (with sex potential). For instance, in the Moonlighting TV series (1985-9), as John McCane in the first two Die Hard films (1988 and 1990), or even as the washed up boxer in Pulp Fiction (1994).

An ant ‘death spiral’ is where ants (sometimes millions of ants) get separated from the main swarm and end up following each other's scent in a ‘circular mill’ until they are exhausted and die. Films of this phenomenon are posted on YouTube, often accompanied by William Beebe’s eyewitness account of an example in Guyana in 1921. Measuring 1,200 feet in circumference, with a 2 hour circuit time per ant, the mill persisted for two days, ‘with ever increasing numbers of dead bodies littering the route, as exhaustion took its toll. But eventually a few workers straggled from the trail thus breaking the cycle, and the raid marched off into the forest.’[6]

This metaphor crudely expresses, in the structure of a joke (or trap), the integration of our temporary life-spans into the strategies and circulations of capital (and its genetics) as the finite expenditure of labor power, chopped up into small circuits of work and pay, repeated again and again (and our dependence upon this repetition) until death.

This is replayed, in ideology, as a cosmic melodrama of circulation, where the brutal cycles of labor and wage are contrasted against the cool “infinity” of M-C-M, expressed in the ‘etc.’ of Marx’s formula and lined up with the ‘Unlimited’ of the Universe and 'Nature' (as Bruce Willis describes it in his Sky Broadband advert).[7]

The banal stretched across the glamour of Time like a castrated penis wrapped in cling-film or Kubrick’s match cut from caveman to space travel (and back to KFC bone) and so on.[8] Space travel as escape from the limited and the terrestrial, measured out against the trivial carnality of our own petty materialities, 'until the last syllable of recorded time' and so on. As Benedict Singleton writes ‘the characteristic gesture of cosmism, what we might call the “cosmist impulse”, [is] to consider the earth a trap, and to understand the common project of philosophy, economics, and design as being the formulation of means to escape from it’.[9] To escape the banal-terrestrial like angels. 

More recently in films like Sin City (2005), Die Hard IV (2007) and Fire with Fire (2012) Willis has been recast as a father-figure decoy phallus and/or Grandpa reverse-fuck figure, counterpointed against the ‘younger female lead’ and based on the premise of reverse-potency, that is, the unstated but implicit promise that: ‘If I was forty years younger I would [be able to] fuck you [in a nice way]’. This is a similar format to many Hollywood films and TV series where the male lead plays the Grandfather role, always meeting young female leads who he would have fucked in the past, subject to Hollywood laws of oedipal propriety.

This scenario also requires a younger male character as stand-in (non)-fuck decoy phallus – a virtualisation of Willis’s retro-potential sex appeal in the format of a ‘younger’ penis-model but non-threatening and undeployed. That is, in Freudian terminology: ‘My dick is not (DIE) HARD enough (to fuck my daughter) and therefore I pass my symbolic baton on to you.’

This exchange is suspended in the figure of the younger male lead as doe-eyed, fantasy-baby, soft-on man-cherub as marker holding open the space (or place) for Willis’s fantasy rigid-designator as lost object and symbol of erect verticality. Impossible potential is mirrored by possible (non)potential. And the female lead in the role of ‘the person who could be fucked’ as a stand-in for our own viewer position. A place or hole that can be occupied, as in Irigaray’s description of ‘woman as a place for man’. After all we all want to be fucked by Bruce Willis. Baby-penis, Man-Father, penis-stool, envelope-sheath. The Fantasy is available to us all in a spectacle of scale. There is no false consciousness. [10]

And so if, for example, you are a soldier holed up in a cellar somewhere and you hear the rumble of tanks. And you are singing a few songs with other people to keep your spirits up – some kind of political or religious bullshit. And the sound of the tanks gets near. And then there are some shouts and a bomb comes bouncing down the stairs. And blows your skin and flesh all over the walls. Then this is called HISTORY and OBLIVION. History structured by the ‘politics of disposability’. As a kind of abstraction. And you have just been ABSTRACTED. 

Or if you are lying underneath the ruins of a factory that collapsed on top of you while you were working, because it was built cheaply so as not to eat into profits.[11] Or if you are working in a deep-space call-centre and mining facility which splits its seams, after a reactor malfunction, spewing flesh and hardware across the void.[12] Or for instance, if you were crushed to death by hundreds of boxes of chocolate. And you tried to attract attention but every time you shouted ‘The Milky Bars are on me’ people just cheered, then you have just been LOVED by the mechanism.[13]

And when the worms find your body under the rubble and turn your body back to chemicals. As a return to the molecular.[14] Back to the universe. Back to NOTHING. Visible and not-visible. As the ultimate expression of sovereignty as ‘the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die’.[15] Or who can be left to die (who can be forgotten). NOTHING as the necropolitical, at once ‘above’ and ‘below’ the scale of the human being. But traced back to real exploitation, to the economy and primitive accumulation. Actual real, unimportant examples of exploitation and oppression. Then you’ve just met MUMMY. And she loves you.[16]

In Elizabethan slang, ‘nothing’ was a term for the female genitalia, as in the title Much Ado About Nothing. To Hamlet, then, ‘nothing’ is what lies between Ophelia’s legs, for, in the male visual system of representation and desire, women’s sexual organs, as Irigaray puts it, ‘represent the horror of having nothing to see.’ When Ophelia is mad, Gertrude says that ‘Her speech is nothing,’ mere ‘unshaped use.’ Ophelia’s speech thus represents the horror of having nothing to say in the public terms defined by the court. Deprived of thought, sexuality, language, Ophelia’s story becomes the Story of O – the story of ZERO.’[17]

In Aristotle’s terms, according to Irigaray, the intelligible order (eidos) actuallised by form is divine. The deity (theos) is the highest being in his metaphysics, and it is the only being uncontaminated by matter and occupying no place in other words, the deity is pure actuality and does not suffer the changes and the destructions characteristic of artifacts and things that come to be in the real world.[18] Articulated in sexual/sexuated terms – matter desires actualisation. At the very moment that matter is presented as defective – because it is merely a potential substance, characterised by privation – it is related to the feminine. ‘You might say that it [matter] yearns [for form] as the female for the male and as the base for the beautiful.’[19]

Infected by parasitic fungi, the ant stumbles out of its colony, its ant-head guided by a pathogen to a precise location in the forest. It climbs a plant and sinks its mandibles into the main vein of a leaf selected for its specific height and orientation. Once anchored it dies, and from the back of its head erupts a stalk, which, ‘while in a way […] quite beautiful, might be considered the world’s least desirable hat’.[20] This in turn rains spores down onto the ant’s fellow workers below, attaching to their exoskeletons. And the cycle begins again.

Benedict Singleton writes that ‘it is less use to the trapped to decide upon some holy condition of freedom’ than to ‘understand how one is implicated in the mechanism of one’s entrapment’. To engage in the former ‘is mere escapism’. But if hunting traps are ‘lethal parodies’ of their prey’s behavior. And the design of traps is a strategy that makes use of ‘observed disposition,’ for instance the ‘inclination to eat certain kinds of food’ in the setting of bait, or even the inclination to understand the 'mechanism of one’s entrapment,’ then obviously a trap might be designed in the way it articulates an ‘escape’ – any type of escape – and the escape from the trap might be the trap: ‘a good snare kills through desperation, strangling the target as it tries to escape’.[21] The trap is the trap. 

Aristotle’s theorising of ‘place’ and selection of the model of ‘topos’ as a lynchpin of his philosophical system,[22] develops from his characterisation of the ‘womb’ as the primary example of place, whereby ‘thing’ (masculine) and place (feminine) are gendered hierarchically: ‘Irigaray emphasizes that the relationship between woman’s function as a dwelling for the embryo and her vagina’s figuration as a place for the man’s penis are not discrete’.[23] This is replayed as a phallo-nostalgic tragedy, where man yearns to return to the Mother's body, whilst at the same time (dis)locating his origin away from the corporeal (from matter): ‘In all his creations, all his works, man always seems to neglect thinking of himself as flesh, as one who has received his body as that primary home…’[24] In this sense, the vagina, according to Irigaray, functions as a ‘perforation’ toward this ‘first place’ as coffin or tomb.[25] But at the same time female sexual and reproductive functions furnish the system with the concept-metaphors to define place as immobile, in order to give limits to ‘Man and to his things’.[26] Everything in its place. Or placed. 

And so we may look to the skies, squinting upwards like Plato’s philosophers escaped from the deceptive materialities of the womb-cave, blinking up at the divine immateriality of the sun and the ‘good’ as the dream-destiny of mankind and the ‘greatest ideas of our civilisation’.[27] Delineating the vertical axis of patriarchy, as the Father of form – the 'progressive erection that goes from quadruped to Homo-erectus.’[28] As a phallus spurting out cum at the sky. As a Fantasy-outside or excess coordinate articulated as both an ‘escape’ from Capitalism (as transcendence, Light, Knowledge, Enlightenment, Truth), and, at the same time, as part of its mechanisms of expansion, as described, for instance, in Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis where capitalism always needs a periphery, a non-capitalist outside to appropriate: new land, new resources, new investment opportunities.[29] This figures space exploration as the export of our retarded and deadly social relations across the galaxy like the escaping monsters in The Thing or Alien– ‘carriers’ of our diseased archaic structurings of time and place.[30] The expansion, militarisation, marketisation, flexibilisation of the Cosmos.

Or this can be reversed around as a parasiting of the present by the future. Ray Brassier, in a recent discussion on JG Ballard’s short story, ‘The Voices of Time’, described the disjunction between adaptation for the future and being in the present: Ballard’s story revolves around an apocalypse, where ‘Time’ is coming to an end; in response, a number of animals begin undergoing strange morphological changes, rapidly evolving to meet a future rushing towards them (a spider that weaves its own neural net outside of its body, a toad with a lead shell, an anemone that hears light). Brassier regards these as examples of the ‘future’s maladaptation to the present’. In Brassier’s analysis this moment is catastrophic[31] – the introduction of a necessary trauma as adaption or orientation towards the future. He describes this as a rehabilitated Prometheanism or enlightened catastrophism where we grasp our destiny in the admittedly corporate/capitalist technologies of advanced science and its applications, for instance, Space Travel.[32] As he describes we have to do something with Time because ‘we know time will do something with us’. The problem here is the brief mention that we should 'refunction' or 'repurpose' the technologies of capitalistic production to 'emancipatory ends'. This is obviously the difficult bit. [33]

Mickey Mouse, Barack Obama, Justin Timberlake, or Nicki Minaj are sitting in a car – flicking their eyes up at the rear view mirror – they move the car forward a few feet to get a better angle to reverse – the view is partly obscured – thinking about what they have to do that day, the events that will unfold in the next few hours – they reverse the car – there is a nasty crunching sound – suspended nauseously between past and future – and they know they’ve just run over next door’s one year old child who has crawled out onto the drive. The emotion of terror/sickness/wonder reminds them of […]

This is reminiscent of the avant-garde aesthetic (trauma) where our experience of experimentation with the configurations of form and space, in the example of an actual object, for instance a cubist painting (the manipulation of materials, colour, planes and so on) predicts future spatial and temporal configurations and radically transformed conditions of experience. An actualisation of the future in the present moment, as a prophecy or promise, of the forthcoming transformation (or not) of relations of exchange between humans, objects and places including (potentially) the transformation of political systems and redistribution of the means of production. In extension, this is played out affectively, as a kind of terror-aesthetic where these proposed transformations predict our own absence or erasure in the sublime of human potential – that is, the modes of experience which make and construct us as humans would now be incomprehensible to us and us to them.[34] At worst a personalised, 'correlationist' bourgeois histrionics (horror vacui).[35]

But if this is viewed from a Deleuzian/Bergsonian perspective – vitalist image of ‘the ‘force of life’ as difference – as the excessive drive to differ – set against the force of repetition of the same, on both human and cosmic scales.[36] As Elizabeth Grosz describes it, through her Irigarayan/Bergsonian analysis of Darwin, as the expression of freedom tied to the capabilities of our own transformable/ transforming bodies telescoping back through the multi-millenial, material, cosmic-queering of life from the bacterial through to the excessive animal-aesthetics of sexual selection. In the extravagant plummage of birds, the decadence of mating ritual and the frenzied dance of bees, then this aesthetic or affect can be splayed out as an oscillation between the ludicrous and the operational, form and informe, possible and impossible, drama and melodrama, present and the future. And always the stratification of or movement between revolution (including social revolution) and banality – potentially revolutionary as well as potentially trivial. Like a gif.[37] A NOTHING as mediation with the future, where mimicry and sophistry operate as the play of the ‘given’ and the ‘made’.[38]

There’s an ‘I’ and a ‘U’ in LUVIN. 

Or to return to the idea of the trap which Elizabeth Grosz discusses with reference to the work of the biologist Jacob von Uexkull who describes the development of fly and spider (in terms similar to Singleton) as a kind of ‘mutual adaption’ or ‘harmonic coordination’ where the spider’s web exists as ‘a kind spatial counterpoint to the movements of the fly’. The fly is ‘already mapped, signaled, its place accommodated [bodily/spatially] in, for example, its inability to see the smooth unmoving threads of the web’.[39] Given this structure, one of the ways the fly might escape is to not be a fly. The exceptional thing here is not only to escape the trap but to express a freedom as other to the logic of the trap. That is, to change the rules of the game. And the conditions which create the spider and the fly. This is the production of an aesthetics which is always concerned with affective experience of ontological force, as a virtual and material force of transformation acting in and on the actual drives and flesh of our bodies, as they exist now (positioned by class, race and sexual/sexuated relation) and as they have transformed over Time. [40] Which is why aesthetics is like sci-fi and why Outer Space is so important to aesthetics and politics.

Sub-troped as post-alien category 7/humanoid, deep space cleansing operative 7S1A/Amboina, including tentacle attachments and penis-vagina refurb, moving across the blackness – galaxy reflected in her visor. Meat suit with bio implants. Rotating above Entrance hatch x117. She sprouts wings at her sides. Golden scales reflecting bright white. As an intensity of mimicry and acting out of the cadavers of place. Miming mime itself. Gliding upwards. An angel. As a movement across the material and the divine. As both. The space between.

John Russell is an artist living and working in London, http://www.john-russell.com This text was written to accompany the exhibition AQUARIUM PROLETARIUM at MOT International London, 12 December - 31 January 2015 

FOOTNOTES

1. Georges Bataille, ‘The Pineal Eye’, in Visions of Excess. Selected Writings, 1927-1939, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, pp. 85-6.

2. Irigaray, Luce, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), Ithaca/NY: Cornell University Press, 1985, p.26.

3. There have been regular criticisms of Luce Irigaray's writing as heteronormative and/or biological essentialism (in particular in 1980s and ’90s), for instance Judith Butler's comments in Diacritics 28/1, (1998), pp.27-28. For a survey of these criticisms, see Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray. Philosophy in the Feminine, Routledge: London, (1991), pp.9-25 . As Naomi Schor writes (paraphrasing Whitford's description of Irigaray's 'strategic essentialism') '... mimeticism is the strategy, essentialism is the stage [...] as a philosopher in the feminine Irigaray is obliged not only to pass through essentialism but also to speak its language.' (In 'Previous Engagements. The Receptions of Irigaray', ed.s, Burke, Schor and Whitford, Engaging with Irigaray, Columbia Univ. Press, (1994), pp.11-12. Irigaray locates sexual difference in context of patriarchy as structuring force. Also see: bell hooks, 'Understanding Patriarchy', http://imaginenoborders.org/ pdf/zines/UnderstandingPatriarchy.pdf

4. Irigaray, Luce, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), Ithaca/NY: Cornell University Press, 1985, p. 89.

5. Youtube: Operación de pene a vagina, 2011.https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=wCigVyJBZus

6. William Beebe, Edge of the Jungle, 1921. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=WxLDin3vYUs.

7. Sky Broadband Unlimited Advert with Bruce Willis, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=9ehtYUYxVrM

8. 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968 (Dir. Stanley Kubrick).

9. Benedict Singleton, ‘Maximum Jailbreak’, e-flux journal, #46, June 2013 http://www.e-flux.com/journal/maximum-jailbreak/ Those ‘who point to the huge expanse of the earth and the whole terrestrial history of life – this is nothing but myopia, squalid provincialism'. As if the choice was between shiny-suited utopia and some hippy smoking spliffs and talking about dolphins.

10. I have to admit I would like to be fucked by Bruce Willis. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, p.35.

11. 'Bangladesh garment factory fire kills 10 people,’ Associated Press, Oct. 9, 2013 

http://www.apnewsarchive.com/2013/Fire-at-Banglade...

 Working classes to be moved underground: Daily Mirror, August 19 2014. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/social-cleans...

12. Following the capitalisation of outer space, the mass exportation of the poor and dispossessed to deep space live-work factory units and call centres becomes common-place - far beyond the terrestrial reach of labour and health and safety regulations.

13. Catchphrase from British TV advert for Nestlé Milky Bar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= muJDv6Do124

14. This is the affect of ‘Radical Bewilderment’ as the move to ‘molecularity’ in context of culture, politics, social relations whatever, where matter, as ‘particulate’ becomes a kind of sublime miniature [or ‘whatever-vastness’], and the blooming of ‘ontological wonder’ separates ‘the space of rapture from questions of ‘commitment, collective struggle, utopia.’ Jordana Rosenberg, ‘The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present’, Theory & Event 17.2 (2014), Project MUSE.

15. Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics,’ in Public Culture, Winter, 15(1), 2003, 11-40: 11.

16. 'After all ‘we are all still cunts,’ Silvia Federici, 'Wages Against Housework', Power of Women Collective and Falling Wall Press, 1975: http://caringlabor.wordpress.com 2010/09/15/silvia-federici-wages-against-housework/

17. ‘Reproductive’ or ‘domestic’ labour is not conventionally (socially) validated as ‘waged’ labour, nor clearly accounted for in Marx’s Capital – that is, the process of transforming Marx’s ‘basket of commodities’ into labour-power. See Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women. Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’, in Towards an Anthropology of Women, NY: Monthly View Press, 1975. This labour is essential to capitalist production but invisible in its accounting. ‘These are the non-social of the social, the non-labour of labour. They are cut off from social production; they must not only appear as, but also be non-labour, that is, they are naturalised. They constitute a sphere whose dissociation is necessary to make the production of value possible: the gendered sphere’. ‘The Logic of Gender’, Endnotes, #3, September 2013. http://endnotes.org.uk/en/ endnotes-the-logic-of-gender

18. 'The emergence of the intelligible ideas as a standard of truth depends upon the reduction of feminine materiality to inert matter, whose constitutive exclusion sustains the intelligible by suppressing an alternative standard and serving as the ground upon which the progression to the intelligible world occurs,’ Anne Caldwell, 'Transforming Sacrifice: Irigaray and the Politics of Sexual Difference', Hypatia, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Autumn, 2002), pp.16-38, esp. p.18. And therefore the material, changeable, base, finite, dirty, sinful (feminine/female) is differentiated from the eternal/immutable/pure/ divine/immaterial (masculine/ male). These kinds of structures are emphasised by Irigaray as underpinning the 'greatest ideas of our civilization.’

19. Rebecca Hill, The Interval. Relation and Becoming in Irigaray, Aristotle, and Bergson, New York: Fordham University Press: 2012, p.26.

20. Matt Simon, ‘The Zombie Ant and the Fungus That Controls Its Mind', Wired, Sept. 2013. http://www.insidetasmania.com/ p/weird-news.html

21. Benedict Singleton, ‘Maximum Jailbreak’, e-flux journal, #46, June 2013 http://www.e-flux.com/journal/maximum-jailbreak/

22. In Physics, 4.1-5, Aristotle considers the potential of four models for the concept of ‘place’: form, matter, interval and the first immobile limit surrounding a body. He rejects the first three in favour of the fourth thus grounding his philosophy in a structure of immobile places. See, Rebecca Hill, The Interval. Relation and Becoming in Irigaray, Aristotle, and Bergson, pp. 37-54.

23. Rebecca Hill, The Interval, p.59. See also p.57: ‘Man’s body is entangled in Aristotle’s conception of a thing, (not matter) and woman’s body is bound up in his concept of topos (place)'. This is presented as uncontroversial/ neutral; and Irigaray claims these metaphors repeat throughout the history of philosophy and culture, instantiated in our 'commonsensical' ideas of time and space. For instance, her interpretation of Plato's parable where the philosophers escape from the cave (womb) and seek the vertical purity of origin/Truth in the immateriality of the Sun/Light.

24. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, pp.127-8.

25. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, p.41

26. Rebecca Hill, The Interval, pp.59-60.

27. Shulamith Firestone claims: ‘Of all feminist theorists De Beauvoir is the most comprehensive and far-reaching, relating feminism to the best ideas in our culture.’ Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, New York: Bantam, p.7. Luce Irigaray writing a few years later suggests that it’s the ‘best ideas’ that are the problem.

28. Georges Bataille, ‘The Pineal Eye’, in Visions of Excess. Selected Writings, 1927-1939, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, p.87.

29. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, 1913: https://www.marxists.org/ archive/luxemburg/1913/ accumulation-capital/accumulation.pdf. 

In more contemporary contexts, David Harvey suggests that the world capitalist system needs to find $1.5tn profitable investment opportunities today in order to keep growing at its historical average of 3 percent a year – and $3tn by 2030. From David Harvey, ‘The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis this Time’ (paper prepared for the American Sociological Association Meetings in Atlanta, 2010): http://davidharvey.org/2010/08/the-enigma-of-capit...

30. Under Article II of the 1967 ‘United Nations Outer Space Treaty’, the whole of outer space ‘is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means’. But lawyers promoting the extension of the private sector into outer space now claim that the framers of the UN Outer Space Treaty '... were deliberately ambiguous about private property as opposed to nationally owned property’. And that ‘the settling of space – including the establishment of permanent settlements on the Moon and Mars – will bring incalculable economic and social benefits to all nations’. Therefore 'sufficient profits must be guaranteed, and this can only be done by ensuring property rights in space'. Peter Dickens, ‘The Humanization of the Cosmos – To What End?’, Monthly Review, Volume 62, Issue 06, 2010. https://monthlyreview.org/2010/11/ 01/the-humanization-of-the-cosmos-to-what-end/#en70

31. In Brassier’s analysis the actualisation of the future in the present moment is catastrophic as the introduction of a necessary trauma, because the future always requires adaptation. Brassier suggests that we orient ourselves towards the production and logic of catastrophe, so that we may become masters of trauma and seize the future. An enlightened catastrophism and rehabilitation of prometheanism, as the claim that there are no predetermined limits of what we can achieve or limits on how or what we can become. That we ‘…should try and do something with time, given that time will try to do something to us.’ This requires the acknowledgement that ‘…the way we understand the world and the way we change the world based on that understanding is continually transforming’. Ray Brassier, EXPO 1: NEW YORK, MoMA PS1, 19 July 2013: http://www.momaps1.org/expo1/event/raymond-brassier/

32. Likewise Benedict Singleton steers clear of describing how space travel is wrested from capitalist control, although he describes the ‘irreducibility of design to stated motivations of capital interest, social progress or scientific advance’, proposing a scenario where freedom is quantitative, ‘proceeding by degree – we are free of this, and then of this, and then of this’, new end points emerging in process ‘rather than an a priori finish line […]’. Benedict Singleton, ‘Maximum Jailbreak’, ACCELERATE. The Accelerationist Reader, Falmouth/Berlin: Urbanomic, 2014, pp.489-507.

33. Ray Brassier, ‘Prometheanism and its critics’, in (ed.s) McKay, R. and Avanessian, A., ACCELERATE. The Accelerationist Reader, Falmouth/Berlin: Urbanomic, 2014, p.469.

34. For instance, Robert Neville, as the last human in Richard Matheson’s , I am Legend, 1954. Or Marx’s conception of species-being: ‘It is therefore in his fashioning of the objective that man really proves himself to be a species-being. Such production is his active species-life. Through it nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is therefore the objectification of the species-life of man: for man reproduces himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created. In tearing away the object of his production from man, estranged labour therefore tears away from him his species-life, his true species-objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.’ Karl Marx, 'Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts' (1844) in Karl Marx, Early Writings, New York: Vintage Books, p.197, p.329. For instance, Irigaray proposes a transformation of the symbolic/imaginary, as an ontology of ‘at least two sets of forces, two kinds of processes, two relations to the world’, as opposed to a tracking back to the one. Cosmonauts therefore require a ‘from-birth’ re-education as a way of reformatting our retarded social relations and conceptions of time and space: ‘The transition to a new age requires a change in our perception and conception of space-time, the inhabiting of places and of containers and envelopes of identity’. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, p.7.

35. Horror or 'wonder'. ‘When the first encounter with some object surprises us, and we judge it to be new or very different from what we formerly knew, or from what we supposed that it ought to be, that causes us to wonder and be surprised; and because that may happen before we in any way know whether this object is agreeable to us or is not so, it appears to me that wonder is the first of all the passions’. René Descartes, ‘The Passions of the Soul’, article 53. Quoted in Irigaray, Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, p.13.

36. ‘See I had this theory once … I believed in the politics of Saturday night … I rated all governments and countries by how good or bad their Saturday nights were and I knew that Moscow and Peking had to be a stone drag at that time of the week … so I was fighting for a cause … I was fighting to defend chicken barbecues and weenie roasts and Ray Charles songs and drinking Southern Comfort till you pass out behind the bar…’ Mel Gibson, Air America, 1990. Also see Elizabeth Grosz's description of the 'repetition of matter', Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone, Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art, Durham &London: Duke University Press, 2011, pp.52-54.

37. In the sense of the 'dialectical image', that is, the dynamic force of ‘images charged with movement’ as in Benjamin’s structuring of messianic time, where the fleeting appearance (movement) of the dialectical image invokes action, animated philosophically and politically by its impermanence and movement. Or for instance as Bataille writes, in ‘Nietzsche’s Laughter’, pp.18-19, the possible exists at ‘the limit of the impossible.’ ‘The possible and the impossible are both in the world. We are troubled by the sky, the starry space in which we discover the laws of harmony, general viability. In this domain we can have a presentiment of suspended horror, ungraspable to us. But we have a precise knowledge of our terrestrial domain that comes from the possible and the impossible. The possible is organic life and its development in a favourable setting. The impossible is the final death, the necessity of destruction for existence. This at least is irreducible: human conduct adds the exuberance of cruelty, useless disorders, war, torture, oppression, vice, prostitution, alcoholism, and, in the end, the multiple horrors of misery.’

38. Discussing the relationship between the organism and its surroundings Roger Callois describes the operations of camouflage where ‘resemblance is therefore obtained by the sum of a certain number of small details, each of which has nothing exceptional about it and can be found isolated in neighbouring species, but whose combination produces an extraordinary imitation of a dry leaf’. Later he writes: ‘Mimicry is an excess or dangerous luxury for instance the case of the Phyllia who eat each other ‘taking each other for real leaves … the simulation of the leaf being a provocation to cannibalism … The search for the similar would seem to be a means, if not an intermediate stage. Indeed, the end would appear to be assimilation to the surroundings.’ Roger Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’ (1935), October 31, 1984, pp.12-32, especially p.23, p.25 and p.27. 

Irigaray describes mimicry as: ‘[a]n interim strategy for dealing with the realm of discourse (where the speaking subject is posited as masculine), in which the woman deliberately assumes the feminine style and posture assigned to her within this discourse in order to uncover the mechanisms by which it exploits her’, Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p.221. As Elizabeth Grosz puts it ‘Irigaray mimics the hysteric’s mimicry. She mimes mime itself.’ Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists, St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, (1989), p.136. Irigaray’s mimicry is both ‘…terroristic and terrorized’ Dianne Chisholm, `Irigaray's Hysteria', in Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor and Margaret Whitford, Engaging with Irigaray, New York:Columbia Press, pp.263-283, esp. p.269.

39. Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone, Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art, Durham &London: Duke University Press, 2011, pp.180-1.

40. Both Marx and Irigaray propose ontological change as disruption of given and made (as Brassier puts it). For instance what Luce Irigaray proposes as a terrifying but understandable and experienceable ontological transformation (because of the way she connects it to the conditions of our body), is the an ontology of at least two, as opposed to continuously tracking back to ‘The One’ as God or Truth, a structure which she claims underpins Western philosophy/ politics. An ontology which would always include at least two perspectives/positions and is never collapsible back to one. In part the force of this is aesthetic.

Irigaray retrieves one of Aristotle’s rejected models of ‘place,’ that is ‘the interval’ – the space in between – and transforms it from a ‘place’ into a ‘thing’ or substance – always in play – in the same way that mucous or the placenta are conductive materials between things. For instance, Irigaray’s example of mucus as medium of exchange between bodies for the absorption of food, oxygenation, sexual reproduction – as the points at which our bodies exchange matter with what is not our body: mucus ‘serving love, respiration [and] song’. The way the spoken voice requires saliva to occur, as the physical relation becoming social. Or the placenta as a negotiation between the embryo which is part foreign (half of its genes are paternal) and the maternal body. Living tissue that operates during a (roughly consistent) term of pregnancy – the placental relation gestures to the past experience of the Mother, her relations with others and with her milieu, to her own prenatal life within her mother’s body, and to her future, which is unknowable. The embryo is also virtually human – a boy or a girl – with an incalculable future. 

After the Insurrection that was to come The Invisible Committee’s À nos amis assesses the defeats and 'permanent catastrophe' which never stopped. Alberto Toscano’s extended review, ahead of the book’s English translation, seeks points of agreement among the peaks and pitfalls of a relentless metaphysical attack on network power

It is the rule of European culture to organise the death of the art of living.

– Jean-Luc Godard, JLG/JLG – Self-portrait in December

Agir en primitif et prévoir en stratège.

– René Char, Feuillets d'Hypnos

1. A theory of revolution is a balance-sheet of its defeats. That much transpires from the first pages of À nos amis/To Our Friends (English translation forthcoming in April from Semiotext(e)), setting it apart, notwithstanding the continuities of tone and targets, from The Coming Insurrection. Where in the latter, to recall the Eighteenth Brumaire, phrase had prophetically anticipated its content, now the content has outstripped the phrase. The insurrection came and was beaten back. Yet it is still coming. But the order of urgencies has shifted, the poetry of the imminent future largely making way for the prose of the recent past. We have been defeated. But we are everywhere. Stability is dead. Capitalism is disintegrating. And yet it reproduces itself – as a catastrophe in permanence.

2. The mood is not so much of slow impatience, as of its inverse, a hastening patience, a planetary horizon distilled into action in situ, not required to wait for any appointment with history, any serendipitous crossing of capitalism's curvature. A theory of revolution should bind together a portrait of the conjuncture, a sounding of the tendency, the naming of enemies, the gathering of friends. ‘Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?’ are the very first lines of the first volume of Mao Tse-tung's Selected Works. From the title on down, this ‘classical’ question resonates throughout To Our Friends. But it is precisely in the ‘we’, in what the linguist Roman Jakobson tellingly dubbed a shifter – a part of speech whose referent is only stabilised by a message's context – that this call is less univocal than may at first appear.

3. That is not so much a product of the authors’ incomplete anonymity. The reckoning with counter-revolution demands reflexivity, subordinating the supremacy of foes to the weakness in ‘our’ forces. The initial impression is then that of an all-too-welcome self-criticism. But there is a crucial gap between the ‘we’ who faltered and the ‘we’ who writes. The political automatism of crisis, for instance – here predictably pinned onto a readymade apocalyptic Marxism – was certainly not a sin of the Invisible Committee's previous profession of communist faith. And the suggestion that what blocks ‘us’ is the stubborn resilience of the ‘Left’, of a whole habitus of militancy that undergirds Leninist, social democrats, anarchists and many ‘occupiers’ alike, was no doubt one of the caustic leitmotivs of The Coming Insurrection. Likewise, in lambasting the whole repertoire of consensual antagonism, from the human mic to the wavy hands, it does not seem that the authors are, to paraphrase Fortini’s poem, ‘Translating Brecht’, writing their own names in the list of their enemies. And perhaps they couldn’t, without troubling the rhetoric of secession and authenticity that pervades their text.

4. Considering the Committee’s considerable capacity for polemical incision, for sallies of devastating Kultukritik, it is a shame that less restraint is not exercised in matters of style, which is also politics. The final envoi in verse, which almost seems to apologise for the bracing analysis that preceded it, is a case in point. We could also adduce such dismayingly confident declarations as ‘our margin of action is infinite, historical life stretches out its arms to us’ (p.39 this and all subsequent translations mine). ‘We’ are certainly not everywhere, conspiring, as the authors hopefully report. It is with undue confidence – and against the grain of its picture of the epoch as one of untold metaphysical and anthropological degradation – that To Our Friends presents the popular wisdom of the day in the Argentinian adage, ¡Que se vayan todos! If that is so, it is only to the extent that this scorning of those who govern us is also a property of the right, and handled by it with much greater assurance than the Party of Equality could ever muster. Likewise, it is bending the stick too far to project into Occupy Wall Street – a movement whose forays into the revolution of everyday life were comparatively timid – the idea of a ‘disgust’ with life today. Wouldn’t it be more useful, beyond the ‘existential’ epiphanies that might overtake us in our groups-in-fusion, to gauge how little habits and psyches have been truly ‘revolutionised’ in recent risings? Joining a communist party in the age of Stalin no doubt involved far greater personal upheavals than participating in today's insurrections, which, for better or worse, require far less thorough de- and re-subjectivations.

5. Fed up with every received philosophy of history and delusion of progress, To Our Friends tells us to refuse the interpellation of the economic crisis. Behind this, however, is not a familiar nominalist option for which ‘crisis’ is but an abstraction illegitimately foisted upon the real multiplicity of social life. Not only is it emphatically affirmed that the happenings since 2007 are part of one ‘sequence’, ‘a single wave of uprisings that communicate among themselves imperceptibly’ (p.14); insurrection itself is a kind of expressive totality: every individual surge carries ‘something global’ (p.15). From Libya to the Ukraine, Tunisia to Wall Street, Notre-Dame-des-Landes to Oakland, the Invisible Committee are vigorously inclusive when it comes to the sites of contemporary antagonism, of what they want to reveal as a single (if not actually unified) revolutionary process. But the ensemble of insurrections does not express or even respond to a capitalist crisis. Indeed, the dominant discourse of crisis, with its invocation of the ungovernable, itself stands revealed as a ruse of government. That is why in the final analysis ‘there is no “crisis” from which we need to exit, there is a war that we need to win’ (p.18). The absence of critical ‘points’, the everyday experience – both enforced and disavowed by the powers-that-be – of the endlessness of crisis, is transmuted in these pages into the horizon of a total negation. While crises financial and political are not simply discounted, they are in the end mere epiphenomena of a properly civilisational, metaphysical crisis. A crisis of presence. If we wished to be paradoxical, we could say that what unites the current sequence of revolt, what historicises them, is the fact that they no longer pose the problem of a discontinuity in history, but a discontinuity from history, the history of the West. In the propositions of To Our Friends, it is difficult to shake the impression that what is being demanded is affinity, assent. No argument or analysis is advanced (nor could it be) for the overtaking of ontic crises by a veritably ontological one, and if you find the ontalgia (to borrow a neologism from Raymon Queneau) transpiring from sentences like ‘we have lost the world’ either inimical or incomprehensible, you will know that you can only conspire (breathe with) so far and no further – perhaps, you are not really a friend. The matrix of a romantic anti-capitalism is irremovable, no matter how much it may be offset by an axiomatic agonism (according to which ‘civil war’ is inexorable, the attempt to expunge it both delusional and debilitating). True life, the fight against the ‘civilisation of alienation’, the loss of the world – these are the watchwords of the Invisible Committee. Perhaps an allergy to the kind of urge for authenticity that pervades To Our Friends is but a mark that one remains a ‘Westerner’ (a category the authors dubiously note is indifferent to colour, p.33), unable to join the ‘war’ of the earthlings [Terriens] against Man (p.33). There is portentous, left-Heideggerian ring to such talk – leavened, perhaps, by quoting from World War Z (p.39). Though the authors speak of ‘the catastrophe that we are’ (p.29), it is merely as a prelude to an all too quick desertion. In this angry leave-taking from millennia of metaphysics, the authors risk dragging in their train more humanist detritus than they suspect. Presence is such a Christian word.

Image: Graffitti against theproposed airport in Notre- Dame-des-Landes, unknown location or date

6. It is unfortunate that the name of ‘life’, that resilient repository of pseudo-concreteness and false immediacy, wasn't handled with as much suspicion in these pages as the quotidian infrastructure of late capitalism, from high-speed trains to iPads. One may not be able to employ the latter with impunity, but neither can one dive with both hands into the reservoir of life-philosophy and vitalism without sowing more confusion than anyone can currently afford. There is nothing to celebrate about life nor to condemn about calculation, as such. Such a position is but the obverse of reification, its product and its complement. To Our Friends, as behoves an insurrectionary theory of defeat, is a much more sober text than The Coming Insurrection, and the better for it, but it still can’t resist telling itself stories it must doubt deeper down. What it perhaps doesn’t reckon with is how similar it is in this respect to so much of the contemporary radicalism it abhors, rarely capable of conveying enthusiasm without that false note of exhortation. Today the most depressing texts are often the most euphoric.

7. I feel it necessary to mark this distance from the positions and poetics of To Our Friends to better address the book’s pivotal question, that of organisation understood as common perception (p.17). One doesn’t really criticise a manifesto or a call, especially when it is not addressed to you, but it may be possible nonetheless to make something of the moments of assent and dissent that such declarations elicit. So even if much of this perception is not shared, the terms of the problem – what would it mean to forge a common perception – no doubt must be. For the Invisible Committee, the organisation that the uprisings of 2011 and after lacked is thus not a party, not a union, or a militia, but a perception. (Though the Committee would likely baulk at this, we are not a million miles from Badiou’s translation of organisation as idea, or, in another register, Jameson’s cognitive mapping, both understandable as varieties of class consciousness without a class.) A common perception is the marriage of ethics and strategy. Here it is difficult not to hear the echoes of the later, defeated Debord, weighing up the spectacle’s own conspiracies of reproduction through the lenses of Clausewitz (in Commentaries) and the damage done to life and ethos (in Panegyric). Unlike in Debord, the negativity of To Our Friends is more epidermal. How, otherwise, could one write such disarming sentences as: ‘strategic intelligence comes from the heart’ (p.16)? This desire for another life is also more prophetic than dialectical. In turn, the arche-politics of a planetary ethical revolt risks overwhelming considerations of strategy, or calibrations of tactics. ‘What is at stake in contemporary insurrection is the question of knowing what is a desirable form of life, and not the nature of the institutions that oversee it. But to recognise this would immediately imply recognising the ethical nullity of the West’ (p.48). Surely a form-of-life can’t be pried away from its institutions, at the risk of collapsing into that vitalist immediacy which has always served as romantic anti-capitalism’s abiding temptation. If ‘the West’ (whatever it may be) is an ethical void, then we may just have to be a little careful about carrying on with a political and philosophical discourse which doesn’t just borrow wholesale from a recognisably Western ethical and philosophical grammar, but fails to subject it to determinate negation. ‘Ethical truth’ (p.46), here articulated as the opposite of democracy – perhaps that too is a ‘Western’ concept... (So much would be suggested, for instance, by Viveiros de Castro’s enticing On the Inconstancy of the Savage Soul.) And precisely to the extent that current insurgencies haven’t, except fugitively, given rise to new institutions, they have left the new life precisely as a matter of desire, which is to say of lack.

8. This ‘other idea of life’ (p.57) thus risks being nothing but an idea, of happiness and the good life, just as abstract as the idea of communism. We might not have lost the world, but we have certainly lost many of the moral economies that would make an ethical opposition effective. That is why it is striking that the question of how one may produce, invent, experiment with other modes of living, while dismantling the current ones, receives relatively scant attention in these pages – notwithstanding the several indications of where this other life may be painstakingly constructed (in the struggle in the Val di Susa against the Turin-Lyon high-speed railway, in the one against the Aéroport du Grand Ouest in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, etc.). Too quick to absorb the generalised negativity into its project, To Our Friends stipulates that widespread condemnations of ‘corruption’ are a sign of this ethical turn of antagonism (p.50). Yet, as it recognises in its provocative peroration against the Spanish label of indignado (‘He postulates his impotence all the better to cleanse himself of any responsibility as to the course of things; then he converts it into a moral affect, in a trait of moral superiority. He thinks he has rights, the sad creature’, p.56) this may serve as a kind of exorcism, a way of calling ‘ourselves’ out of the moral and financial mire of the present, of assuming the position of victim alone.

9. But something more precise and more severe is going in these pages, as they distil with combative acumen what is at the core of the insurrectional criticism of the movement of squares: its fetishism of democracy. There are refreshingly harsh moments here, as when the Committee reminds us that popular comes from populor, ‘to ravage, to devastate’ (p.54), that an uprising is a plenitude of expression and a nothingness of deliberation. The contempt that the latter term is held in (displaced by the non-instrumental communication of friendship, with shades of Maurice Blanchot) signals the wish, beyond the illusory drift of the first person plural, to divide the ‘we’ into an antagonistic detachment, on the one hand, and a petty-bourgeois impasse, on the other. No doubt, to the extent that in its moments of non-confrontation much of the spontaneous political philosophy of the ‘movement of squares’ is broadly ‘democratic’, it also sets the stage for another ‘civil war’, a war between notions of the popular. It’s a shame that To Our Friends opts to castigate Hardt & Negri, or Hessel, or the common sense of assembly politics, rather than squaring up against the politically serious modalities of contemporary radical reformism, such as Syriza or Podemos. For these latter, when all’s said and done, must be its enemies, to the very extent that they impose a political strategy, grounded on democracy and deliberation, that can only impede the surge of the other life, the irruption of ethical truth. Surely, from the Committee’s vantage, such a channelling of refusal into a project of power could only signal disaster? Has one square divided into two? On the one side, ‘the crash against the real of the cybernetic fantasy of universal citizenship’; on the other ‘an exceptional moment of encounters’ (p.58). The pragmatic pedants of ‘micro-bureaucracy’, be they Trotskyist or anarchist, square off against the partisans of an ethical revolt. The negative phenomenology of the assemblies, with its bracingly dark humour, testifies here to a lived experience of disengagement and frustration.

Image: Oakland, 2011

10. The diagnosis is an existential one: the fetishism of the general assembly and the political affect of indignation, voiced in the ‘formless language of separated life’ (p.61), stem from the fact that an assembly can only come out with what it already contains, and if what it contains is the seriality of a damaged postmodern ‘life’, then the result will be naught but collective impotence. And yet, if the squares are two-in-one, for every pseudo-antagonistic paroxysm of democratic hysteria there are shoots of a new life, able to ‘inhabit the uninhabitable’ metropolis (p.61), to dwell [habiter]. It is not in the anxieties of direct democracy but in the self-organisation of everyday life that these movements and insurgencies score their real political victories. The lessons are again metaphysical in scope, as the insistence on ‘dwelling’ might suggest – here harmonising with left-Heideggerianism more than with the practical utopias of habitation of Lefebvre’s recently published Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment. That anxious compulsion to repeat which is voting is surpassed by ‘an unprecedented attention to the common world’, which receives a kind of philosophical imprimatur: ‘a regime of truth, of openness, of sensibility to what is there’ (p.63). It is interesting to see how the collective assumption of the requirements of social reproduction (not all of course, protesters weren’t running the sewer systems, the water supply, or sundry facets of the logistical state) is here taken as the material sign of a revolutionary present. It is perhaps a ‘Western’ peculiarity to be thus amazed at self-organisation, but its an amazement that might not be in the end so philosophical, if it leads us to ignore that this ‘movement communism’ (to use Badiou’s term for the same phenomenon in The Rebirth of History) is politically indeterminate. Social reproduction and self-defence are also the purview of far-right militants or religious conservatives (as evident from Maidan to Tahrir), and unless we think that taking over what has been monopolised by the state is as such emancipatory we may have to recognise that neither ethics nor reproduction, and certainly not ‘life’, are capable of rendering obsolete the moment for politics, or indeed deliberation – which is certainly not reducible to sterile assemblies and wavy hands.

11. The truth of democracy, the Invisible Committee tell us, is not the state or the law, it is government. In the political-metaphysical horizon of To Our Friends, democracy is the ‘truth’ of all forms of government, insofar as the identity of governor and governed is government ‘in its pure state’. The present would then appear as a kind of apotheosis of the cybernetic rule which had already been compellingly theorised by Tiqqun. The conditioning of this ‘great movement of general fluidisation’ (p.69) by the imperatives of accumulation stands in the rather distant background, so much so that at times one suspects that a properly ontological fate is at work, and agency has been volatilised. Though power is invoked more than theorised, the Committee nevertheless raises an extremely urgent and painfully concrete question: what allowed the revolutionaries in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere to be ‘played’ by established political forces, turned into vanishing mediators, retroactive stage armies for settling accounts in the corridors of power? The answer is deceptively simple: if you demand a destitution (of established power) but don’t have the force to organise, organised forces will manipulate you and the very process of destitution. Or, in an elegant dictum: ‘A movement that demands always has the lower hand against a force that acts’ (p.72). Even more pointedly, the Committee suggest one abandons the ‘fiction’ of a dialectic of constituent and constituted power, in which the popular act of destitution could be absorbed into the dynamics of legitimation, eliding the ‘always sordid origin of power’ (p.73). (It might be noted that the abandonment of any such dialectic, and of any attendant conception of legitimate power ruins any available conception of revolution, including, it could be argued, anarchist ones. The authors, for reasons that may be more aesthetic or ethical than they are properly political, still insist on calling themselves revolutionaries.) The conclusion is unimpeachable: ‘Those who have seized power project back on the social totality that they now control the source of their authority, and will thus legitimately silence it, in its own name’ (p.73).

12. To abandon the dialectic of the constituent and the constituted, and its hypostasis of contingent forms of government (the Republic) is thus to rethink revolution as pure destitution– that which deprives power of its foundation without creating a new one (‘destituent power’ is the last word, so to speak, of Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer series, closing its last volume, The Use of Bodies, and his influence is palpable in these pages). Insurrection here is a great revealer, simultaneously manifesting the metaphysical vacuum of power and its contingent roots in the vile particularities of policing and privilege. I sense that the authors don’t consider it a paradox to link the Heideggerian sweep of their anti-history of the West with this rather Durrutian conclusion: ‘All bastards have an address. To destitute power is to bring it down to earth’ (p.75). But the destitution of governing power is also the destitution of popular power. Not the least corollary of this approach is the call to ‘give up on our own legitimacy’ (p.76). This is an acute challenge, to be heeded at the very least by remaining vigilant to the ease with which supposedly antisystemic movements reproduce, and at times revitalise, the very coordinates of their subjection.

13. But the Committee don’t heed their own injunction. Instead, they consistently shift the locus of legitimacy, which is to say of truth, from the practical to the metaphysical. From what they call their ‘other plane of perception’ (p.78), they posit that the problem of government, and the negative political anthropologies it implies, can only be posed once a void has been created between beings. To exit the paradigm of government is to enter that of ‘habitation’, a relational ontology of plenitude in which ‘each of us is the place of passage and knotting together of a welter of affects, lineages, histories, significations and material flows that exceed us. The world does not surround, it traverses us. What we inhabit inhabits us’ (p.78). Organisation and strategy would thus come down, in the last instance, to the Gestalt switch that allows us to stop seeing things, subjects and bodies, and start living through forces, power and connections: ‘It is through their plenitude that the forms of life achieve destitution’ (p.79). For such a caustically critical collective, it is perplexing that the Invisible Committee wouldn’t recognise how much they have joined an all-too-common contemporary tendency: to deny the autonomy of the political only to accord it to a life and a being equivocally politicised. It might be argued that they have not renounced their own legitimacy, they have hypostasised it, in life itself.

Image: 'Capital survives / if the commodity runs / if the commodity runs life dies / Let's block everything'

14. Headed, like the other chapters by the photograph of a graffito – this one from the Susa Valley, declaiming in Italian: ‘Power is logistical. Block everything!’ – the section on infrastructural power is the strategic heart of the book, and arguably the one least mortgaged to a metaphysics of insurgent life. Never ones to let a sweeping declaration go to waste, the Committee start from the visible performances of insurrection from 2011, all those assaults on the symbols of power which are defended by the ‘forces of order’ with a fierceness the authors think is proportionally inverse to their significance: ‘Power no longer resides in institutions’ (pp.81-2). They are but ‘lures for revolutionaries’ (p.82). It might be retorted that symbolic efficacy hasn’t entirely gone away. Or, conversely, that the ‘theatrical’ character of power has been on the wane for long, centuries even. Strong periodisations are arguably indispensable for any common perception to emerge, but it is surely historically disorienting to posit a passage from institutions to infrastructures. Not only have the institutions of the state always depended on infrastructural power – from the debates on the hydraulic bases of ‘Asiatic despotism’ to Robert Linhart’s brilliant excavation of the logistical tragedies of Bolshevism in Lenin, the Peasants and Taylor– but contemporary infrastructures, from metro systems to intermodal transport, are institutions, replete with bureaucracies, measurements, agencies, rituals, lobbyists, and so on. They don’t make or rule themselves. One can accept the salience of the infrastructural to recent strategies of power and opposition – as well as to the readjustments in the mode of production – without accepting that institutional-representational power is but a smokescreen. In a passage like the following, logistics, like self-valorising capital for value-theorists or the police for anarchists, can turn into a veritable fetish:’The nature of contemporary power is architectural and impersonal, not personal and representative’ (p.83) (I guess we can delete the addresses of the bastards after all, as they don’t much matter in the end.) The acute descriptions belie the epochal narrative. The position of a purely cybernetic power, without a secret other than its functioning, immanent to apparatuses like ‘the blank page of Google’ turns out to be the site of… political decisions: ‘He who determines the arrangement of space, who governs milieus and environments, who administers things, who manages access, governs men’ (p.84). This is well said, but there’s no reason why this agency should be thought of as transcending institutions (one can prove so much just by following along with Donald MacKenzie’s account of the material and juridical genesis of high-frequency or algorithmic trading). This also holds for the way in which the contemporary ‘governance’ of capital produces ‘zones’ beyond the nation, subjecting the very notion of ‘society’ to a violent fluidisation (p.185).

15. That said, To Our Friends synthesises with flair a feeling diffuse among contemporary struggles, which we could term as the demand for a political materialism that takes infrastructure as its field and target: ‘Those who wish to undertake any action against the existing world, must start from here: the real structure of power is the material, technological, physical organisation of this world’ (p.85) But I don’t see why it’s necessary, other than for rhetoric’s sake, to declare immediately thereafter: ‘Government is no longer in government’ (p.85). This may be true in terms of long-held political illusions that neglected the materiality and political economy of the state. But it is impossible to grasp (and to intervene in) infrastructures without realising how the material, technological and physical organisation of this world also requires a mind-boggling array of institutional operations, and not a few governmental ones. To neglect law and politics as constituent of such infrastructural power would be a major strategic blunder. ‘Political constitution’ isn’t laminated onto ‘material constitution’ without remainder.

16. To Our Friends uses this concept of infrastructural power to account for how domination today has moved from the symbolic to the environmental, while policing has been accelerated in its pervasiveness precisely by becoming the guardian of a power that lies, so to speak, all along the network. Not least of the virtues of the Committee’s attention, of its perception of this ‘logistical revolution’ in the arts of domination, is how it accounts for the impasses of much contemporary revolt. As they laconically observe: ‘you do not criticise a wall, you destroy it or tag it’ (p.86). Against the broken-homogeneous space of the metropolis, ‘desert and existential anaemia’ (p.88), rise places of common joy (Gezi, Puerta del Sol, etc.) in which we can gauge the ‘intuitive link between self-organisation and blockage’ (p.89). But the landscape of capital too has shifted, as the workers’ prison and fortress, the factory, has transmuted into a ‘site’, a logistical link. In a couple of clipped pages (pp.91-2) the authors try to summarise and dismiss much Marxian debate, generally crystallised around the second volume of Capital, but also the discussion of the general intellect in the Grundrisse. It would be churlish to engage in philological exercises here, but it is worth noting, in terms of its political upshots, that the lesson drawn – besides the one of the obsolescence of value theory – is that of an indiscernibility between spheres of production and reproduction. It is a dialectical irony, not noted by the authors, that infrastructural changes produced as strategies in the class struggle – to fragment the power of transport and extractive workers, in particular – should give rise to a situation of expressive totality, where any logistical attack is an attack on the system as a whole.

17. ‘To physically attack these flows, at any point whatever, is therefore politically to attack the system in its totality’ (p.93). This is hopeful, but weak. A system is only politically attacked in its totality if there is a totalising intention or (preferably and) a totalising effect. Precisely because such networked systems are strategically designed to minimise contagion, depending on the fragmentation of labour and the maximisation of resiliency, as much as on homogeneity of standards and intermodality, nothing is less sure than the notion that to block one flow is virtually to block them all. The Committee entreat us to see ‘each attempt to block the global system, each movement, each revolt, each uprising, as a vertical attempt to stop time, and to bifurcate in a less lethal direction’ (p.94). This arresting Benjaminian image unfortunately generates in enthusiasm what it blurs in understanding, since we haven’t seen any attempt to block the global system as such (whatever that may mean), but more importantly because such a vision of metaphysically expressive revolts runs against the strategic question of how revolts against logistics could be made antisystemic. To presuppose that blockages are already as such antisystemic is not just to ignore how they’ve long been tactics of perfectly ‘reformist’ movements (or even of reactionary ones, as in the truckers’ strikes in Chile, to which Allende’s government responded with a… cybernetic system), but to fantasize that a tactic can in itself be a strategy. Later in the book, the authors provide the blunt correction to this misstep: ‘Sabotage has been practised by reformists as well as Nazis’ (p.144).

18. The chapter on blockages concludes with some astute reflections on the question of knowledge. Grounding itself on the very classical assumption that the weakness of struggles is a product of the absence of a credible revolutionary perspective, and not vice versa, the Committee pose the problem of the present as that of a revolutionary strategy aimed not against power’s representatives but against the ‘general functioning of the social machine’ (p.95), on which we depend for our survival. Here the reflexive negativity of struggle (we are our own enemies) takes on a material cast (our enemy is our life-source) and poses a practical, experimental question: how could one de-link from such infrastructural power without incurring the paralysing menace of scarcity? In other words, how can sabotage not be primarily against oneself? The severity and sobriety of the following statement is welcome: ‘as long we won’t know how to do without nuclear plants and dismantling them is to be a business for those who wish them to be eternal, to aspire to the abolition of the State will continue to raise a smile; as long as the horizon of a popular uprising will mean the certain shortage of medicines, food or energy, there will be no resolute mass movements’ (p.96). From here comes the call to revive the inquiry as a tool bringing together strategy, knowledge and political (and ethical) recomposition. As they write, ‘there is no point in knowing how to black the infrastructure of your enemy if you do not know how to make it function, if needs be, in your favour’ (p.99). It is interesting that the moralistic tonality of previous references to the good life fades here, replaced by a more attractive vision of another life as founded on the ‘passion of experimentation’, on a ‘technical passion’, the ‘accumulation of knowledge’ (p.96), without which there can be no serious return of the question of revolution. It’s perhaps testament to our inverted present that the most realist and materialist moment in this tract, the call to ‘aggregate all technical intelligence into a historical force and not a system of government’ (p.97), taking leave of our deep ignorance about our material conditions, should sound the most Utopian.

19. Where the material and energetic infrastructures of capital’s reproduction afford an imagined reappropriation, at least a partial one, those of ‘communicative capitalism’, namely Facebook and Google, are but most baleful realisation of the managerial lust of cybernetics. Some of these pages, as they scrape around the web’s military and financial plumbing, can be read with gusto, but it is difficult to shake the feeling that they are in the end redundant, echoing a critical common sense – which of course doesn’t stop (almost) anyone from reproducing (themselves through) these speculative-exploitative dispositifs. That the misery of cybernetics is what will make it collapse in the face of ‘presence’ seems wishful thinking. More suggestive, though somewhat rushed, is the anthropological claim that social media evince the outstripping of technics by technology, defined as the ‘expropriation from humans of their different constitutive techniques’ (p.125). Continuing the extended Heideggerian pastiche, whereas the engineer is the chief expropriator of technics, the hacker embodies the ‘ethical’ (in the sense of ethos) facet of technics. He is the figure of experimentation understood as living what is ethically implied by a given technique. For all the calls to abandon the West, this ethics of knowledge has a distinctly Enlightenment flavour, wherein understanding how the apparatuses surrounding us work, prying open the black box, entails an ‘immediate increase in power’ (p.127). The Committee are careful though not to drag the regressive assumptions of libertarian individualism into this figure, and riffing on the etymological affinities of ‘friend’ and ‘free’, we are told that the freedom borne by the hacker is a collective, a transindividual one: ‘I am free because I am bound’ (p.129). The fetish of unbound freedom (and free speech) is thus a necessary sacrifice if hackers wish – do they? do we want them to? – to ‘become a historical force’ (p.129).

20. The more we advance into this tract, the more the call for a common perception and the enumeration of mirages grows louder. Though its insistence on ethical truth would seem to militate against it, To Our Friends is not just a critique of the ideologies of recent movements, it is also a call for an ideology. The meagre and bitter fruits of the inspiring mobilisations in Greece teach us that ‘without a substantive idea of what a victory would be, we can only be vanquished’ (p.136). By a somewhat sketchy detour via the Ancient Greek ‘origin’ of politics, we come to the repudiation of the paralysing face-off of radicalism and pacifism. Neither strategic nor conjunctural, the analysis here is entirely philosophical. War is defined as ‘not carnage, but the logic that presides over the contact of heterogeneous power’ (p.140). A rather bloodless, metaphysical definition, aimed at declaring the inanity of those who wish to ban war from the socius. But without the fact of killing, in quantities industrial or artisanal, why not stick with ‘conflict’, ‘agonism’ – as so many of our political theorists do? Is there an extra frisson of authenticity in all this talk of civil war? Despite the weakness of this slogan, the portraits of pacifist and radical are ably executed, especially the latter, with his ideological praise of violence, his neglect of strategy and privatisation of activism as ‘an occasion for personal valorisation’ (p.144) (I’m sure every reader has assembled a rather ample line-up of such ‘radicals’ in their own mental theatre). The phenomenology of the ‘small terror’ of ‘radical milieux’ is also painful in the realism of its observations: ‘A vertigo takes over a posteriori anyone who has deserted these circles: how can one subject oneself to such mutilating pressure for such mysterious stakes?’ (p.145) Against the radical’s ‘extraterrestrial politics’, bringing insight from outside and above, To Our Friends again sounds the note of ‘attention’ – a promising if problematic one, since it depends on a somewhat vague image of the revolutionary’s ‘sensibility’, of the production of acts that are slightly ‘ahead’ of the movement but whose appositeness is decided by the state of the movement itself. (In passing, it is odd that writers so taken with the idea of civil war should so easily slip into the left jargon of ‘the’ movement.)

21. ‘Life is essentially strategic’ (p.150). Having mobilised the problematic martial metaphors of immunity a few pages before, and seeking a fusion of strategy with ethics, this declaration should not come as a shock. What is more striking perhaps is that in seeking to develop a ‘civil concept of war’ (p.150) the authors draw with such glee from the archive of contemporary counter-insurgency. Nothing wrong with learning from the enemy, of course, but in these long citations without commentary, we miss the opportunity of truly thinking (following the work of Laleh Khalili and others) through how the gendered and racial axes of social reproduction are entirely crucial to the sociology of counter-insurgency, and to reflect on how those identities and resources could be neutralised or mobilised in a ‘civil’ politics of war. What’s more, to present the ‘epoch’ (it will have been one of the book’s main aims, as it was of its prequel, to assert in no uncertain terms that this is indeed an epoch) as the ‘race [between] the possibility of insurrection and the partisans of counter-insurrection’ (p.155) is to sideline the quotidian character of social reproduction and its logistics, the low-intensity warfare that accompanies the organisation of exploitation and exclusion, and to draw too much sustenance from the scenarios of global insurrection that pepper the reports of the CIA and other such bodies – which after all depend on these scenarios to make themselves and their military-industrial complex necessary. It is heartening nonetheless to see the authors vigilant as to the temptation to flip counter-insurrectionary theories into insurrectionary ones. Their alternative is gnomic if suggestive: ‘We need a strategy which doesn’t target our adversary, but his strategy, and turns it against itself’ (p.157).

22. The problem is that the premise of this dictum, the ‘ontological asymmetry’ between insurgent and counter-insurgency experts, is based on a hopeful but massive over-estimation of one’s own threat or power: ‘We revolutionaries are both the stakes and the target of the permanent offensive that government has become’ (p.161). A momentary threat, yes, a permanent nuisance, surely, but the target? This is highly doubtful – as is the later statement that the global counter-revolution that took 9/11 as a ‘pretext’ was a political response to ‘anti-globalisation’ – nonetheless anatomised as a movement of the planetary petty-bourgeoise which disappeared in its very realisation (p.226). In this imaginary projection of the ‘we’, To Our Friends risks repeating one of the rhetorical traps of the very sectarianism it is trying to escape – the idea that power is just a reaction-formation against our own formidable threat. But the reproduction of a capitalist society is a much less circuitous and martial thing than that, its violences more distended if not less profound. To treat all social life as a battleground might be galvanising, but it remains an error. More interesting – because less metaphysical, more strategic – is the warning not to allow government to produce one as a radical subject (be it ‘IRA’ or ‘Black Bloc’, to use their examples), as well as the unexpected turn to the Palestinian resistance for a ‘diffuse’ and ‘irreducibly plural’ image of struggle (p.167). But then we fall back again on that warm soil of legitimacy, ‘life’, from which (in one of the more dubious lines in the book) ‘emanate both the identification of the enemy and effective strategies and tactics’ (p.165). And so strategy collapses into homily: ‘To dwell [habiter] fully, that is all that one can oppose to the paradigm of government’ (p.165). That said, the more demotic translation of this passage certainly carries a not insignificant truth-content: ‘Those with shitty relationships will only be able to have a shitty politics’ (p.167).

23. Politically man dwells, then. But where? In a ‘local’ which repudiates all ‘localism’ – the Committee are rightly unsparing in their critique of that evergreen temptation – an everyday life of territories in struggle whose consistency is drawn from these struggles themselves. Feeling flippant, one might call this – recalling the Guevarist practice theorised by Régis Debray – a foquismo without a party an army or a jungle. Rather than localism, localisation then, that very activity of cognitive mapping – ‘following the connections from a stock-exchange floor down to the last fibre’ (p.192) – which crowned the account of the politics of blockage, of counter-logistics. When aiming at the ideologies of the contemporary left, the Committee’s aim is often true, and their distancing from the way in which ‘local struggles’ are often made to corroborate a consoling view of underlying sociability or communism (one from which it might be suggested they are not entirely immune) hits the mark. But the way to avoid these ideological pitfalls again seems to mean resorting to an extreme abstraction that wants itself to be the most concrete: ‘living life’ (p.195), the ‘experience’ of relations, friendships, proximities and distances. Can we put such trust in experience? Isn’t it a paralysing fantasy to think that all of our experiences are to be carried into struggle, that all life is ‘in common’ – a fantasy that can grow boring or sinister when these common experiences become institutions, rituals, structures? (And how could they not unless we think that politics can be radically de-instrumentalised, de-reified into a relentless flow of immediacies?)

24. Though they recoil at the term, there is an institution advanced here, that of the commune. Not a form of government, a body politic, but nevertheless an institution, defined by the authors themselves as ‘a pact to face the world together’ (p.201), and more ontologically as ‘a quality of relation and a way of being in the world’ (p.201). The nods here are many: not just to 1871, but to Huey P. Newton, Kwangju and Gustav Landauer. Striking is the spatial grammar brought into relief here: the commune is ‘a certain level of sharing [partage] inscribed territorially’ (p.203). The war against quantitative, calculating abstraction continues: ‘By its very existence, [the commune] breaks up the management of the spatial grid’ (p.203); it is a ‘concrete, situated rupture with the global order of the world’ (p.204). Again, the expressive totality looms large, the metaphysical stipulation that a rooted break is also a planetary one. This is curious if we think that the global, the planetary, is a product of abstraction, of science and capital and colonialism. Dwelling globally would seem to be a contradiction. (And ‘the’ commune could also be regarded as an abstraction of incommensurable forms of commonality, which could only be projected as universal from the heartlands of abstraction.) The solution is a heterodox federalism: the commune must both hold fast to a territorial reality heterogeneous to the system, and draw links and solidarities with other local realities, lest it turn into a sterile or besieged enclave, or wander homelessly. The commune is here emphatically not a taking charge of the common, a new legal form for appropriation, however egalitarian, it is ‘a form of common life’, a ‘common relationship to what [communes] cannot appropriate to themselves’, the res communes, the ‘world’ itself. It is also an effort to abolish the needs born of the world’s privation (in the authors’ rather Rousseauian universal anthropology) for the sake of a profusion of means. In this merrily anti-historical-materialist horizon production is but a by-product of a ‘desire for common life’. Inverting the Chinese slogan, we could say: ‘Production last!’ But ‘fecundity’, which is what the commune organises, beyond economy and exchange, is first. It is what allows the Committee to hopefully declare: ‘we can organise ourselves and […] this power is fundamentally joyous’ (p.221). Common life as the life of the commune also replicates the expressive structure which pervades To Our Friends: ‘In each detail of life the whole form of life is at stake’ (p.218). (One may be forgiven for finding this living without remainder claustrophobic, superegoic.)

25. At its strategic conclusion, like many tracts of the left, To Our Friends is suggestively vague. (It would be an interesting exercise in militant iconoclasm to strip anarchist and Marxist essays of their final paragraph. An anthology of them would certainly be indigestible.) Yet again, in the absence of a determinate target it is to the elusive concreteness of ‘life’, of ‘where one is’ that the text turns, to the promissory empiricism of enquiries, conspiracies, and local consistencies, and to the general question of alliances, here nicely articulated as translation. In asking how to build a force that is not an organisation, the move is also to warm, concrete abstractions, but abstractions nevertheless – and ones whose political valence is difficult to think as univocal: the increase of ‘power’, as a site of ‘discipline’; and ‘joy’; the different proportions of ‘spirit’, ‘force’ and ‘wealth’, whose prudent handling should avoid the disproportions of the armed avant-garde, the sect of theoreticians and the alternative enterprise (p.238). Happiness is more or less the book’s last word, and, like all ethical truths which are not tied to forms-of-life, this too cannot but taste somewhat thin or sound somewhat hollow, unless it is a screen on which to project the spirit, force and wealth of our own localised struggles. The slippage to abstract morality, to a rhetoric that could never really be spoken among friends, is not a problem for the Invisible Committee alone. It is our condition – a condition many of whose ideological pitfalls and fantasies are tracked down in this book with severity and insight. That such a bracing discourse, and the untold acts that shadow and relay it, should need a foothold is perhaps inevitable. That this foothold is a vitalism of sorts might not surprise. If confidence is not drawn from the contradictions of structure, from the logic of your own domination, where else then than lived experience and sensibility? The authors would do well to heed Franco Fortini's dialectical rejoinder to Adorno’s glum dictum: ‘No true life but in the false’. Which also means no true life in and for itself, for, as Lukács had already observed in The Theory of the Novel, the notion of life as it should be cancels out life.

Alberto Toscano <A.Toscano AT gold.ac.uk> is Reader in Critical Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author, with Jeff Kinkle, of Cartographies of the Absolute (Zero Books, 2015), and of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (Verso, 2010). He edits The Italian List for Seagull Books and sits on the editorial board of the journal Historical Materialism

Eco-friendly glass architecture that incorporates flora into its design is trending high among West Coast tech giants. Only last week, Amazon's 'Spheres' HQ opened in Seattle. Key Macfarlane traces the imperial and utopian lineage of this aesthetic, arguing that its contemporary effect is that of the greenhouse: a seductive but reactionary spectacle of life incubated by total corporatisation.

The Corporate Biodome

‘What would Kew Gardens (in London) look like if they were built today?’[1] This is the question Amazon’s global real estate director, John Schoettler, asked himself during the design process for the company’s new $4 billion campus, just opened this week in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighbourhood. By far the most spectacular structures found on this campus are ‘the Spheres’ – three colossal glass geodesic domes with an ornate steel exoskeleton.[2] These buildings, which will become operational in early 2018, are designed to mimic a nature conservatory, a kind of Amazon Rainforest 2.0, that will soon be home to over 400 species of plants from around the world, many exotic and endangered. The flora will provide the backdrop for a river, waterfalls, and treehouse meeting rooms. This environment will be meticulously controlled, with temperatures set at 72 ºF (22 ºC) and 60 percent humidity, to simulate the climate of Costa Rica’s Central Valley.

Apple unveiled something similar to the Spheres in 2016. The company is phasing out the Genius Bar – where customers receive tech support at long, pub-like tables – in favour of the ‘Genius Grove’, the first of which opened in May 2016 in San Francisco’s Union Square. Giving a little life to the chrome-white sterility of Apple’s usual aesthetic, the stores house a thicket of ficus trees, each encircled by a ring of leather seats. The idea, says Apple, is a collaborative one: ‘inviting customers to get support working side-by-side with Geniuses under the comfortable canopy of local trees in the heart of the store’.[3] Apple’s Genius Grove constructs a ‘natural’ environment for consumption in much the same way that Amazon’s Spheres cloak the monotonous aspects of production as a rosy walk in the park.

Amazon and Apple are extreme examples of a much larger trend towards eco-friendly corporate architecture. Across the globe, there are currently 90,900 commercial projects participating in LEED, the most widely used green-building rating system in the world. [4] These projects have increased exponentially, the global green building sector (including residential projects) doubling in size about every three years.[5] In the language of market growth, green architecture has already prophesied its own success. Making inherently exploitative and wasteful work into something shiny, clean and sustainable, green architecture is a monument to a future of capitalist progress and resilience.
 

Apple’s ‘Genius Grove’

With its turn to glass design, along with the renewable energy projects recently pioneered by Facebook, Apple, Google, and Amazon,[6] the tech world appears ahead of its time. Yet there is little new in that the use of glass, the incorporation of ‘nature’, the emphasis on spaces of cooperation and creativity are all marshalled towards future company growth. Green building is symptomatic of how this process unfolds today within the so-called digital economy. It is the architectural component of what Nick Srnicek has identified as the ‘emerging’ business model of platform development.[7] A platform is a digital infrastructure that extends control over both distribution and production, drawing its users into a common web of interaction. Greenhouse architecture represents the extension of platform-based companies’ realm to the distribution and production of certain kinds of life (and the uneven social relations that make them possible) within the spaces of capital accumulation. While human life has always been a raw material for capital, it is increasingly blurred within, and extracted as part of, a larger socio-environmental ecology. At the same time, today’s corporate architecture casts doubt on the novelty of the digital economy. For while the institutions and technologies may have changed, glass architecture has long served the purpose of making brutal stratifications of class, race and gender appear transparently natural.

The Botany of Empire

Greenhouses, orangeries and conservatories have always been entwined with imperialism and the reproduction of an elite class. In Rome during the second century AD, proto-greenhouses called specularia [8] were used to grow cucumis for Emperor Tiberius Caesar, which he demanded in all seasons.[9] Instead of glass, the emperor’s gardeners used transparent sheets of mica to cover beds of melons or cucumbers. Mounted on wheels, these beds could be rolled out into the sun or withdrawn on wintry days.

What we think of as the modern greenhouse did not emerge until the 1600s. Around the middle of that century, royalty and nobility in France, Italy, Britain, and the Netherlands began having orangeries constructed with vertical glass panes in the front for sunlight to reach the plants inside.[10] Many have discussed the links between the developments of systematic horticulture and the brutalities of European colonial expansion.[11] Early-modern greenhouses show how these developments carved out uneven geographies within the imperial nation-state as well. Harnessing the power of the sun, trapping heat, extending the lives of flora ex situ: this all had a direct connection with the shoring up of social power and sovereignty, which, as Agamben has shown, rests on a symbolic ordering of the world, including its ornamentation.[12] With the greenhouse, royalty and the aristocracy could, in a way, ‘perennialise’ their positions of authority by filing those spaces with vibrant and unfamiliar plant life, along with the figurative power that these enabled. This occurred in France in the latter half of the 17th century, when Louis XIV became obsessed with the orangery. Orange trees became a symbol of the Sun King’s power and of the gulf between the ruling class and the commoners who subsisted on lettuce and onions.
 

The ‘Palm House’ at Kew Gardens

Royal greenhouses began to emerge in England around the same time. The earliest to have survived was installed in 1688 in Hampton Court Palace at the bequest of King William of Orange and Queen Mary. In the nineteenth century, greenhouses, or ‘palm houses’, became fashionable among the nobility and the monied upper class as a display of affluence, education, and excellent taste. Glass itself became a luxury item. This was especially the case after 1696, when King William III imposed a steep tax on windows in order to mitigate the financial burdens of the Revolution, recoinage, and England’s wars in Ireland and on the Continent. The Window Tax, which applied to every dwelling in England and Wales except cottages, wasn’t lifted until 1851.[13] As the Industrial Revolution got under way, the poorer urban population, cooped up in dusky factories and overcrowded rooms, suffered from the lack of natural light.[14]

As England rose in imperial dominance, the glasshouse enabled elites to preserve, study, and ‘appreciate’ exotic species from around the world. It was one of the spaces in the metropole where colonial practices were aestheticised and made natural, where the Other could be ‘domesticated’, placed behind glass, admired with tea in hand or prodded at with a botanist’s magnifying glass. Public palm houses, like the one built at Kew Gardens between 1844 and 1848, shared the empire’s spoils with a larger Victorian audience. In this way, the greenhouse became a technology of colonialism, operating from afar to graft nature (along with vanquished populations of the imperial hinterland) onto an emerging industrial capitalism.[15]

With advances in lighting, heating, ventilation, and design, today’s greenhouses have changed immensely since Victorian-era England. But in their connection to power they have stayed much the same. Both demonstrate control of nature and god-like powers over the reproduction of life, both are connected to global networks of acquisition and value extraction, and both perform a certain sort of environmental awareness. Today, glass architecture is, at least in part, an extension of older colonial techniques of accumulation, aimed now at the metropolitan core of capitalism, where it is deployed to help boost efficiency, minimise employee turnover,[16] and project a green spectacle of power that extends over plant life and living labour. In Silicon Valley, the ambition for such power, the desire to continue the legacy of Western ‘exploration’ and colonisation, is represented by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which aims to build ‘a self-sustaining civilization on Mars’.[17]. As hammered home by the recent National Geographic docu-drama Mars,[18] the advanced greenhouse is central to cultivating the portability and hardiness of vegetal and human life so that it can colonise space. The portable greenhouse comes to symbolise the resilience of human will, which finds its vanguard in the visionary business venture.

Microsoft appropriates this symbolism with its ongoing ‘urban farming experiment’.[19] The company employs a subcontractor to grow lettuce and microgreens within the office. The lettuce is cultivated in glass hydroponic towers and pyramids, while the microgreens are grown in ‘machines that look like glass fridges’.[20] Unlike traditional greenhouses, the glass used does not let in natural sunlight. Instead, on the advice of Xbox employees, the growing units use plasma lights, which provide a complete light spectrum and are said to be 30% more efficient than their halogen or LED alternatives.[21] What is harvested is then distributed to the many cafes around Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, WA. However, the amount of greens produced makes up a very small portion of the what’s needed to feed the 40,000 Microsoft workers served each day.[22] The goal of the operation is clearly not subsistence. Instead, it is to market the benefits of sustainability and small-scale farming and to create an aesthetic experience. This extends to the pyramid-shaped structure of some of the ‘greenhouses’, which is less than optimal for growing microgreens. The growing units have certain areas, like near the top of the pyramid, where lettuce gets roasted by the lights and must be thrown out. But the greenhouse looks futuristic, and that’s worth more to Microsoft that a few browned heads of lettuce.
 

Microsoft’s hydroponic ‘Microgreens’

The shift to green corporate design reflects less an enlightened perspective than it does business efforts to capitalise on and secure themselves amid environmental collapse and endless disruption in the jungle of competition. It is no accident that Microsoft has a ‘Greenhouse’ business unit dedicated to improving ‘Information Worker productivity’.[23] As an ‘internal incubator’, the Greenhouse is tasked with identifying and ‘cultivating’ new software applications and helping Microsoft break into new markets.[24] Here, the greenhouse becomes a design principle par excellence, linking architecture and organisation into a vitalist whole capable of infusing the entire firm with a new life that does not distinguish between the conservation of plants and the conservation of capitalist labour relations. The undergirding idea of this managerial trend is that capital can incubate its own survival amidst the coming winter of the world. Meanwhile, its fertility can be put on display for all, blending capitalist production into every environment, every relation.

Thus, rather than serving as the salvage paradigm of Victorian empire, today greenhouses are more about the resilience paradigm of living in, with, and like adaptive nature. Such ‘nature’ is totalising. At a company like Apple, the greenhouse design uses transparency as a medium of networking. The Genius Grove mentioned above is thought to play a connective role in the ‘ecology’ of the local ‘community’:

Apple Union Square’s glass doors open the store to Post Street and Union Square. The building’s unique position connects San Francisco’s most famous square to a rejuvenated plaza to the north, creating a beautiful gathering place for the community. The art-filled plaza offers seating, public Wi-Fi, a 50-foot tall ‘green wall’ and regular acoustic performances. The store is powered by 100 percent renewable energy, including power produced by photovoltaic panels integrated into the building’s roof.[25]

History, art, architecture, nature, the public – the Genius Grove brings them all together in seeming harmony. What runs through the corporate touting of community and environment is the desire for a selectively permeable transparency. According to Apple’s chief design officer, ‘It all starts with the storefront – taking transparency to a whole new level – where the building blends the inside and the outside, breaking down barriers and making it more egalitarian and accessible’. One can expect, however, that this ‘egalitarian’ vision does not include the large homeless population around Union Square. It is also no secret that Apple has a history of worker exploitation as well as indelible ties to environmental destruction. Genius Grove presents a counter-narrative to this, one that allows Apple to camouflage within its environment. Vanishing into its ‘community’ the company gains legitimacy. Transparency fetishised in the workplace has similar effects. As the co-founder of an architectural design firm in Hong Kong explained, ‘a clear workspace [open to the public] leaves nothing questionable, nothing hidden; it generates trust’.[26]

In today’s business world, strategies of transparency and camouflage increasingly resemble one another, acting as two sides of the same specular process of hybridising life and capital, placing accumulation within a wider ecology that includes botanical scenery and community involvement. Whereas the Victorians seemed to take a noblesse oblige approach to educating the masses inside the greenhouses of the royalty, today’s talk of transparency comes with the performance of egalitarianism and ‘see it all, show it all’ openness – that is nevertheless restricted to pre-selected hyper-competitive elites. The touted transparency camouflages their class dominance and the vast networks of global value extraction that are organised and monopolised by tech giants.

The Future is Clear

Aside from Victorian aesthetes and Silicon-Valley profiteers, glass architecture has long held sway over certain segments of the left, particularly those dabbling in utopian politics. From Charles Fourier’s interest in glass-covered pathways as a symbol of communication and social order,[27] to J.C. Loudon’s 1822 utopia of village-sized greenhouses,[28] to the glass-covered Social Palace (Le Familistère) Jean-Baptiste André Godin established in northern France in 1856 to house workers, [29] glasshouses loomed large in the 19th century imaginary of social utopias. They pointed towards a future society in which everything would be transparent, honest, ordered, where individuals would be able to congregate and express themselves freely and in ‘full Harmony’.[30] However, as it became expressed in glass architecture, the utopian desire for transparency did little to challenge, and in some cases fortified, the rise of industrial capitalism and the formation of the global market.

This point is illustrated by what is perhaps the most famous example of glass utopianism: Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace. The Palace was built in Hyde Park, London to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, and affixed 500 tons of glass to a cast-iron space frame. The public was said to have marvelled at the structure’s industrial building techniques, which were made possible by developments in plate-glass technology.[31] In this, the Crystal Palace acted as a shrine to the industrial ‘progress’ of its time. During the Great Exhibition, it also played a directed role in normalising the world market on which industrial products circulated. On display for the public were 100,000 ‘wonders’ of industry and culture from around the world.[32] Later, in its new location on Sydenham Hill, the Palace contained a winter garden with plants from every climate as well as rare birds. It also held several zoological, geographical and art collections.[33] The purpose of incorporating all of this, according to the Crystal Palace Company, was ‘to build a universal temple for the education of the great mass of the people and the improvement of their recreational pleasures’. In this way, the Palace acted as a glass trophy case for the spoils of capitalist accumulation, which the public was invited to ‘appreciate’ as cultural and scientific artefacts. These were said to produce edifying effects on the viewer, affixing individual development to the growth of imperial capitalism. The utopia of the ‘universal temple’ is thus revealed to be something more like a glass cage.
 

The Crystal Palace in Hyde Park for the Grand International Exhibition of 1851
 

In the twentieth century, glass utopianism became more abstract. For members of the Crystal Chain (Die Gläserne Kette), a group of German expressionist architects who exchanged letters from 1919 to 1920, the very material of glass was an expression of the spiritual. Glass was treated as a liberating device, performing a kind of alchemy on the world around it. Adolph Behne, an art critic writing at the time, summed this up:

No material overcomes matter as much as glass. Glass is a completely new, pure material, into which matter is melted and transformed. […] It reflects the sky and the sun; it is like luminous water, and it possesses a wealth of possibility in the way of color, shape, and character that is truly inexhaustible and can leave no one indifferent.[34]

And isn’t glass alchemy equivalent to the social alchemy underlying utopianism?[35] Ian Buchanan has described utopia as a ‘promising-machine’, generating the expectation of a better future without ever fulfilling it.[36] There’s something in the very concept of glass that supports this kind of desire, which is the desire to affirm everything while grasping nothing. This paradox is apparent in the etymology of the word, which overwrites the relationship between appearance and essence. Despite its transparency, the term ‘glass’ is historically linked to notions of brilliance and colour. The Proto-Indo-European root of the English word is *ghel- which means ‘to shine’ and has derivatives referring to colours ranging from ‘grey’ to ‘blue’, ‘green’ and ‘yellow’.[37] The ancestors of glass fall within this spectrum. In Latin glaseum refers to ‘amber’, as does glær in Old English.

It is significant that the term ‘glass’ is so firmly rooted in the material’s perceived colour or appearance, rather than the translucent quality we normally think of as essential to glass.[38] In utopian projects, the world is captured in glass (as colour) and yet, having been captured here, it acquires a certain equivalence (as transparent). In this way, the dialectic of glass enables one to affirm life in a lifeless medium, to trap it there, taking something that should be infinite and subjecting it to the finitude of this world, to death. In capitalist societies this affirmation is always bound up with the fetishism of commodities, attributing value to dead things while entombing the living in relations of exchange and immiseration. If everything solid has melted into air, then it is glass architecture that gives us the transcendental feeling of moving through this air, of effusing our flesh in the smooth elevator music of capital.[39] But ultimately we hit a ceiling. Glass is something that was molten turned solid again, containing us while letting the sun shine through. This evaporation of the living, this build-up of dead things, is the greenhouse effect.

Today, companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google carry on the utopian tradition of glass as they construct new eco-friendly headquarters.[40] Some have called their glass-intensive designs ‘high-tech hippie communes’, but it’s better to say that these spaces are false communes, if anything.[41] The rise of corporate integration with the environment symbolised by such architecture helps to shatter any illusion of a pristine public sphere or civil society insulated from capital. Despite their impressive sightlines, the very transparency of these utopias is an act of closing off space, the sounds of struggle muted outside the glass. Such a bright ‘ecotopia’ reflects a neoliberal oikonomia of resilience that benefits a cosmopolitan elite to the exclusion of everyone else.[42] But there is another neoreactionary tendency involved. In the corporate greenhouse, cooperation, community, citizenship – along with the sense of sight itself – are all merged with the accumulation of capital in a blinding vision of harmony that bears a resemblance to some of the most manic fantasies of last century’s myriad fascisms.

Vital Geometries

In April, Apple opened ‘Apple Park’, its new 175-acre, $5 billion campus in Cupertino, CA. The campus, which will eventually replace Infinite Loop as the company’s headquarters, is considered by his followers to be Steve Jobs’ final stroke of genius. As Wired magazine puts it, ‘through this new headquarters, Steve Jobs was planning the future of Apple itself – a future beyond him and, ultimately, beyond any of us’.[43] In meetings before his death, Jobs envisioned the campus as an ecological-preservation project, transforming flat asphalt sprawl to a vibrant panorama, harkening back to the pre-digital days of Silicon Valley. The plan is to maintain 80 percent of the site as a green space, which will involve planting around 9,000 trees of over 300 varieties, along with other native and drought-resistant plants, intended to withstand climate crises.[44]

In the middle of this reconstructed wilderness stands the main building, a ring-shaped, 2.8-million-square-foot structure, wholly sheathed in what Apple claims is ‘the world’s largest panels of curved glass’.[45] When viewed from above, what’s most striking about Apple Park is its illusion of movement. The circular design and space-age aesthetic of the Ring creates a sense of centripetal acceleration, of a metallic disk spinning in a forest, pulling everything inwards. ‘It’s a little like a spaceship has landed’, Jobs once told the Cupertino city council in reference to the campus design.[46] With its so-called ‘neo-futurist’ architecture, many will see Apple Park as the new face of Silicon-Valley utopianism. As lead architect Lord Norman Foster explains, the ‘idea that a beautiful object descended on this verdant, luxurious landscape and that it will be inhabited by 12,000 people: That is a true utopian vision’. One is reminded of a rotating space colony, the ‘ringworlds’ that have played such a large role in the imagination and actual design of extra-terrestrial habitats.[47]

Designer’s impression of the Apple Park in Cupertino

Yet there is little new about this vision. In its blind celebration of movement, vitality, and technology, the ‘utopianism’ of Apple Park resembles that of fascism’s Italian Futurist wing. In fact, the Ring seems as if it were ripped out of Tullio Crali’s 1939 painting, Cityscape, and placed in a densely wooded, suburban backdrop.[48] Many of Crali’s other paintings revel in the speed, thrill and mechanisation of aerial warfare. In Upside Down Loop (Death Loop) (1938) Crali captures the perspective of a pilot in an aerobatic manoeuvre. Viewed upside down from the cockpit, the city is revitalised, infused with the intensity of violence, death, and endless motion. Something similar is happening in Apple Park. Instead of the city, it is nature that is re-enchanted by the speedy exchange of digital information and strings of code. One imagines these flowing like blood around the Ring, animating it and the trees outside.

Over the last twenty years, many have noted futurist or utopian strands within Silicon Valley. Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron present such a critique in their 1995 article, the ‘Californian Ideology’.[49] The latter is defined as an odd alloy of technological determinism, neoliberal economics, and baby-boomer counterculture. By holding up the free market as natural and by conscribing to a rigid teleology of hi-tech development, this ideology is said to foreclose ‘alternative futures’. For Barbrook and Cameron, what is needed to combat this ideology is to open up ‘political debate’, to ‘think socially and politically about the machines we develop’, and ultimately to ‘recognise that the potentiality of hypermedia can never solely be realised through market forces’. ‘We need an economy’, they argue, ‘which can unleash the creative powers of hi-tech artisans’.

But the rise of glass architecture suggests a different picture, something closer to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon than any sterile, robotic future. The designs and motivations surrounding Apple Park suggest that it is life and creativity, not the technical product, that has become the predominant obsession of the Silicon-Valley elite. This is at least in part a product of Californian Ideology incorporating the critique of the Californian Ideology into itself. For example, the idea of ‘unleashing the creative powers of hi-tech artisans’ could literally be a stock phrase from Google or Facebook or any other major web 2.0 platform company.

Despite its many architectural feats, Apple Park’s Ring seems more like a living organism than any kind of building project. In line with Jobs’ wishes, and as if pulled from a weird-fiction novel, the building is made to breathe, inhaling air via soffits around its perimeter. While Apple Grove is intended to blend in to the surrounding community, the Ring seems designed to blend into itself, into nature.[50] Apparently, Jobs ‘wanted no seam, gap or paintbrush stroke showing; every wall, floor and even ceiling is to be polished to a supernatural smoothness’.[51] Such is the tech guru’s dream of a fully networked world, one without cracks, without delays, where everything is essentially equal and where there’s no need to think about where you are because it doesn’t matter anyway.

Silicon Valley affirms life, and itself as life’s protector, by concealing violent geographies under its newfound obsession with vital geometries. From Apple’s ringworld to Amazon’s tessellated spheres to Microsoft’s pyramid-shaped hydroponic growing units, the tech industry is enthralled by eccentric shapes and the multiplication of surfaces, as if they held some occult power or vitality. The ‘resilience’ and ‘adaptive capacity’ of such architecture is often seen as part of a global neoliberal logic. In Silicon Valley, these neoliberal (and liberal progressivist) tendencies increasingly intersect with neo-reactionary and neo-fascist ones. The fascination with the ‘geometric splendour of forces’ is another element that today’s tech elite shares with Italian Futurists: in his 1913 manuscript for a ‘Futurist Manifesto of Men’s Clothing’, Giacomo Balla emphasises the need to ‘invest dynamic designs’ for clothes as well as ‘equally dynamic shapes: triangles, cones, spirals, ellipses, circles, etc’.[52] The ‘dazzle’ produced by this clothing, along with ‘our Futurist architecture, will mean that everything will begin to sparkle like the glorious prism of a jeweller’s gigantic glass-front’. Contemporary greenhouse architecture produces a similar sparkling, one that works to vitalise corporate culture and space, making the built environment appear alive and generative.

Eternal Life

Infatuation with life is now one of the most pronounced and bizarre features of the Silicon Valley elite. In secret underground laboratories, start-ups like Unity Biotechnology develop drugs to halt or reverse the aging process.[53] Meanwhile, futurist entrepreneurs like Ray Kurzweil await the Singularity, the moment when exponential developments in genetics, computers, robotics, and artificial intelligence will, in the near future, bring us to a historical rupture point where humans will transcend their biological limits and fuse with the machine. This, in his view, is the beginning of eternal life. Belief in the Singularity, now widespread in Silicon Valley, is symptomatic of a larger range of transhumanist tendencies that have emerged in the tech industry over the last couple of decades. These tendencies mark a general shift in the Californian Ideology, from the techno-utopian libertarianism to the technological authoritarianism of figures like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

Recently, there have been several attempts to map out the ways in which Silicon Valley, and particularly its transhumanist subculture, has been a significant incubator of ‘neoreaction’ (NRx) and neo-fascist thought. The rise of greenhouse architecture suggests that neoreaction is much more closely bound to liberal progressivism than either tendency would like to think. In eco-friendly headquarters, (neo)liberal values of creativity, equality, and environmental stewardship exist alongside, and in mutual support of, authoritarian longings for eternal life and total corporatisation. Both tendencies converge in their belief, which is eugenicist in principle, that life is something that can and must be ‘tapped’, controlled, and cultivated by an elite cadre of engineers – the visionaries, CEO gurus, and creative types.

None of this should come as a surprise. Fascism in the 20th century emerged out of much of Italy’s most cosmopolitan tendencies and existed on the very cutting edge of both industrial technology and urban culture. The Nazis, for their part, implemented some of the most far-reaching environmentalist policies of the time, albeit in connection with the desire for a racially cleansed ‘soil’.[54] These historical examples sit uneasily with a dominant media narrative that blames the rise of Trump, and neo-fascism more generally, on poor and uneducated rural whites who refuse to believe in climate change. Today’s corporate greenhouses, and the ideologies that pervade them, suggest that the emerging fascistic tendencies are much more closely aligned with a business elite, that speculates on environmental conservation, unbridled technology, full transparency, and eternal life.

In places like San Francisco and Seattle it is no longer possible, if it ever was, to separate neo-fascism from neoliberal urban development caused or exacerbated by a growing tech industry, and its consequences of gentrification, homelessness, gender inequality and worker exploitation. Sometimes this connection is explicit. This was the case last year at the Northwest Forum, a white nationalist convention in Seattle heavily attended by men working in tech.[55] Though less obvious, this connection also applies to the series of clashes that occurred last year in Berkeley around the University of California, with antifascists and anarchists sparring with members of the alt-right, neo-Nazis, and Trump supporters. Liberal media pundits have been quick to condemn antifascist tactics as ‘mob violence’.[56] Meanwhile, on the grounds of free speech, far-right activists are given the right to put on public displays of racism, which have lethal consequences for those already marginalised.[57] Neoreaction and the purified forms of ‘life’ it espouses, is incubated in the glassy public sphere of diversity of opinion, free speech and biodiversity. This is the bio-sphere that tech companies are building today. It creates a living space for neoreactionary thought because it naturalises and encloses as ‘life’ the illusion of an authentic and self-transparent community. Antifa and other struggles have posed a challenge to this sphere and to neoreactionary tendencies along with it, to the extent that they have been able to call into question the very conditions on which life under capitalism is based.

There is nothing inevitable about these glass structures. They may turn out to be passing whims. Yet they serve as symptoms of a global capitalism in crisis, needing to mine life for new sources of value. Like tech bubbles in the stock market, greenhouses are landscape bubbles full of hot air, incubating life under clear glass panes. A radical politics today is one that shatters this glass, rejecting an eternal life that mirrors to infinity the mechanism by which our lives are being selectively destroyed.

BIO

Key MacFarlane is a graduate student in the History of Consciousness department at UC Santa Cruz.

FOOTNOTES

On May 18th 2016 a police car was spectacularly burnt on the Quai de Valmy, Paris. This happened in the midst of a counter-demonstration against a protest which was called by police to end “the hatred against police”. The counter protest became a manif sauvage, spilling out of République and thus the car was burnt. République was, at this time, a highly symbolic location, one which had been occupied as part of the social movement against the Loi du Travail, the new set of labour reforms proposed by the “socialist” President François Hollande, and had been violently evicted only 3 weeks before in the course of a strike day (28th April 2016). 

The social movement ran from February-June 2016, and involved near constant and serious public sector strikes, spectacular street demonstrations, co-ordinated actions and blockades, as well as the significant involvement of students and particularly high school students. Owing partly to the State of Emergency set up by Hollande after the Paris terrorist attacks which permitted extended police and military powers, as well as prohibiting public protest, and to the subsequent attempts of Hollande’s government to repress the movement against the labour laws, policing had been fairly militarised during the period. Therefore the police’s manifestation against the ‘hatred’ of cops can only be seen as a provocative intervention in the context of a hard fought social movement, which had only seen anti-strike and anti-protest policing. 

At the time of this particular demonstration the government had just pushed through the work law using a special decree (the 49-3, on the 10th May 2016). As well as the persistent violences suffered by those participating in the social movement since February 2016, that week, the CGT, among others had supported the idea that casseurs (i.e. breakers, or outside ‘provocateurs’) were sabotaging the demonstrations through property damage (or indeed through resisting the police). The union’s Service d’Ordre had that week begun openly collaborating with the police on a street level (at the demonstration of Tuesday the 17th May in Paris, where the CGT S d’O actually kettled protesters and tried to hand them over to police).

It will not be possible to summarise a ‘union’ position with respect to the police; such a thing would rely on the officer line given by the CGT bosses and Service d’Ordre (a part of the march originally intended to protect the demonstration, that sometimes does, depending on the union), and would ignore, for example the base, the videos of gas workers on pickets singing anti-police songs. Similarly, the CGT very successfully, along with other unions, stalled the country several weeks after this demonstration with oil refinery strikes which were reinforced by road blockades and other ‘non unionised’ support (for example the mass breaking of ATMs in Rennes meant that there was neither petrol nor cash in the town for several days, making their blockade effective - voila, the ways in which the casseurs and the union might work together). However this same union did not choose to continue to strike after June 14th, which is one of the many reasons the movement was ‘lost’. 

While it is therefore not possible to summarise the unions’ positions on strategy with respect to the new Laws (ie continuing or not the strike), neither is it possible to summarise the position of unionised members towards the police or toward the burning of the police car. What is certain, however, is that those who participated in the movement on the level of street protest (whether big demonstrations or manif sauvage), Nuit Debout (the occupation and its surrounding demonstrations), came up against or witnessed extreme police and state violence, bolstered by a considerable use of tear gas and legal machinery (individual and collective protest bans). Of course police violence is experienced constantly by especially racialised and poor people and was experienced prior to the state of Emergency and the protest movements. In this case, the State of Emergency marks a kind of tightening of the mechanisms in the face of terrorist attacks, and indeed facilitated thousands of house arrests and raids. Participation in repressed protest is one way that people experience police violence and this in itself is a politicising experience. The anti police sentiment that the police demonstrated against was tangible: the main chant, chanted constantly during the movement social contre la loi travail was “Tout le monde déteste la police”. This remains anecdotal. Given the violence against strikes and protesters delivered by the police, the paranoiac and divisive discourse of the (higher parts of the) CGT regarding casseurs and property damage was obfuscatory of the police violence leading up to those weeks.

Besides the fact that it is impossible to summarise a ‘union’ position on the police, even trying to do so should be resisted, since asking the question in this way has as its subtext the idea of the respective ‘legitimacy’ of different ‘sections’ participating in the movement, based on unionisation. Divisive lines are drawn, disputing the ‘legitimacy’ of students, precarious workers, sans papiers or the unemployed, sometimes even on the basis that they should have no ‘interest in’ and therefore ‘no right’ to protest about, labour laws. This are the reactionary talons of a certain wing of thinking but could be conceived of as a kind of crisis in formal union structures in the face of neo-liberal reforms to work. 

These tensions about ‘legitimacy’ were expressed in the course of the movement itself. The casseur discourse was only a continuation of an argument between the main unions and what had emerged as the ‘tete de cortege’ (the head of the march), as unionised, precarious, students, or sans papiers (in otherwise, not represented by the big unions) fought to have the front of the march. This was symbolic as well as tactical, meaning that more ‘militant’ elements of the march would steer the demonstration. The unions (in general) claimed that the ‘téte de cortege’ had no stake, and therefore no claim, in the movement: they did not count as workers. But the work law would be bringing in exactly the kinds of conditions that the tete de cortege were already working under. In other words, there was a crisis in the image and the capacity of formal, older unions, to accommodate the needs and demands of this younger ‘ungovernable’ generation. 

That should sketch out the existing divisions within the movement with respect to property damage and positioning itself against the cops (whether or not the cops were positioned specifically against the movement), with the obvious caveat that what the CGT branch and CGT service d’ordre say is obviously not reflective of the base. The police protest on that day was also supported by elements of the extreme right, who, as République was secured by police forces, gained a platform in the square. This extreme right included Marion Maréchal LePen, as well as, conflictingly, the antisemite Alain Soral and the Jewish Defense League [Ligue Défense Juive].

The police car burnt, and two police officers inside were safely escorted out of the car, with a kind of scuffle occurring between them and another protester. However, no-one was hurt. Politicians, led by prime minister Manuel Valls, were quick to condemn the car burning. As Serge Quaddruppani writes intranslation 4, the legal system was under a dual pressure: external, that of public moral outrage, stirred up by politicians who wanted to damage the reputation of the movement, and internal, that of the police unions and police anger. Very swiftly, the names of the 9 people suspected to have burnt the car were ‘found’: that is a special branch detective made a phone called based on no evidence, and they were arrested and placed in garde à vue. The anonymous police phone call was subsequently backed up by an anonymous police witness. The 9 defendants were tried the following Autumn (2017), and whilst 2 defendants were let off, the total sentencing for the remaining 7 came to 29 years. 

The following texts are four essays written by four different authors, whom the online magazine lundi.am asked to cover the court case. The trial, having very little evidence aside from the smartphone and press footage that frenetically captured the event, was the first in France to centre solely around images: “essentially a long video projection with a commentary” (Quintaine, translation 2). Both the writers and the defendants comment on the way the images cannot exist as evidence without arrows, prompts, and commentaries of lawyers; and even then the images are not so convincing as ‘identifying’ ones. Most people in view of the camera had been ‘masked up’ and this rendered the results of the image search more ambivalent: on the one hand it was impossible to see a face, on the other hand the colour of some boxer shorts became guilt. At least in the case of the two defendants let off, it was found that “being masked up did not constitute guilt; the element of ‘intention’ was not upheld” [Libération]. 

Also at stake in the court case were questions of the inequality in judicial treatment of those charged with violence against police, and the police who had attacked civilians. This is particularly stark when considering the murders in the following year, by police, of Adama Traore (Beaumont sur Oise), Shaoyao Liu (Paris) and Aboubakar F. (Nantes), to name only a few. In the trial it was pointed out that it was unfair that police were able to form a civil party (ie a collective case) when appearing in court. Police were represented by their union, Alliance, because the case concerned a ‘threat’ to the police profession itself. It was therefore necessary to set a legal precedent, even if no police had been killed. The justification of this decision lay in jurisprudence from direct action lawsuits in the 1980s, notably that of Action Directe, who were accused of assassinating the CEO of Renault. The police are a civil party because they are in danger ‘because of their profession’, just as CEOs are in danger of being kidnapped or assassinated because they are CEOs, said the police lawyers. The defendants’ lawyer argued that demonstrators or high school students were in danger from police because they were high school students and demonstrators, she argued that one goes on a demonstration precisely ‘because of and not in spite of’ one’s class position. The question of ‘legitimacy’ (ie. casseur, anti-casseur) comes through in the ways the judges call the defendants ‘vandals’; and in the same breath, ask -  given that the demonstration was ‘violent’ (that violence coming from the police), why didn’t the protesters just go home? Quintane replies: ‘for [the judges] the reasons for protesting are sufficiently light that they would go home should it cease to be a nice walk’. Intriguing, is the case of Nicolas, a “gaullist” IT technician, who accidentally went on a protest one day and describes having had a ‘revelation’ about the French state and the police. A couple of months later, he was arrested for having hit one of the police officers next to the car in self defence (“I knew he could kill me” said Nicolas Fensch). He was given five years, and has, from prison released a book of interviews about his ‘radicalisation’, called Radicalisation Express (Éditions Divergences, 2018).

Day one: “Everybody hates small rooms” by Frédéric Lordon

—Translation Lu Jin. 

At the entrance to Courtroom 14 the forces of order organise disorder: that’s their job. They do this with the help, of course, of the justice system itself (although isn’t a fusion of these two institutions [the police and justice system], already far underway, at least on a local level and despite the fact that certain people here in the law court still resist it, as far as they can?) In any case, some strategist somewhere in the Palace of Justice thought it cunning, for this trial, to assign a cubby hole in place of a courtroom. Obviously for the simple pleasure of pissing people off. The thing is that this police-justice/police-law is an institution, that guards a wealth of pettiness and small-mindedness on behalf of particular parts of the population, and that clings to the taste of vile humiliation as it does its own body. ‘They will not enter’, is probably what this génie des alpages thought when he found the broom cupboard of his dreams on the floor plans.

As we are waiting, it’s the cops at the entrance who channel this thought. Not without their own small contribution to the general disorder, obliged as they are by professional conscience and force of habit. The trickle of admissions becomes a drip. Backed by common sense, particularly that which says that two is better than one, the police search everyone again, even though everyone already went through the detectors at the entrance to the building. The flow of admissions is clearly being siphoned in the desired direction. Lawyers are admitted. Then journalists, who are here held in the highest public esteem. It should be recognised that the automatic ratification of the police version of events by the mainstream media, and their concerted effort to make the accused seem at the very least technically guilty, and if not pathological murderers, discourages nuanced views.

So here we are, and whatever remnant of serenity the ‘chariot of justice’ ought to uphold begins to to dissipate for good. Comrades of the defendants put themselves forward for entry in dribs and drabs. Comrades of comrades open umbrellas to block the cameras’ field of vision. One is reminded that during the debates about the hijab, certain institutional philosophers had no problem invoking Lévinas and his ‘ethics of the revealed face’. If it’s not already been suggested, hoods will be next in line, because the philosophy of certain institutional philosophers really is whorish. It is worth noting in passing how often the establishment of arguments about Arab populations is destined to open up onto wider uses. Still, Lévinas enlisted here, in the service of the police databases is some tour de force.

Shot, reverse shot: one of the comrades lands an umbrella on the head of the guard at the entrance. His hat doesn’t fall off but only just. Everyone starts laughing, and making a lot of noise. Now the distress following the definitive refusal of entry is finally negated: because we feel that it’s no longer inside the courtroom that ‘it’s going to happen’. But outside. And indeed, it’s good that it should happen here. Because everyone has realised that we wouldn’t have been able to go in, now that the room is stuffed with plainclothes police and journalists. As it happens, we find out that even the lawyers have started seriously protesting. They should be happy that the génie des alpages has saved them a seat, at any rate not a table.

A table, for all those waiting at the door, would be gold dust. It’s a simple matter of attributing to the words ‘public trial’ the minimum of the meaning concerning them. And so the yelling begins. And a lot of it, because there are almost a hundred people outside. We demand ‘a big room’, cry ‘seats for all, or no trial at all’, and then - of course - ‘everybody hates small rooms’. The racket is so loud as to make the courtroom reverberate. Inside, things are boiling up. And outside, there is a realisation: that we can influence the law without being invited in by the law. Doubtless, influence it only at a short range and only via the lawyers inside, but influence it nonetheless; it’s a reminder that a justice supposedly dispensed ‘in the name of the people’ will struggle to remain applicable when things go awry with the people. Making noise, one physically prevents the address of an audience that can no longer morally justify itself.

As a postponement of today’s hearing has still not been settled, one person, denied entry, shouts out in a tone that raises ambiguity: ‘it’s a scandal in a State of Law,’ and there’s a burst of laughter. The trial will take place, and things will happen in it, it will be reported, but, these terms are as far as its truth goes. In the France of 2017, the ‘rule of law’ is nothing more than a laughing matter, in fact a massive joke. Of course that’s been known for a long time but things now have a blinding clarity. With the collapse of the legitimacy of leaders, the methodical break with all intermediaries - and those cumbersome ties to the kind of insulated government to which they so fundamentally aspire - in short the total bankruptcy of political institutions, necessarily leaves the police with the sole function of ‘enforcing’ social policies. If the police had two ounces of sense, they would understand the impossibility of the role that they have to uphold, and draw some conclusions from this. But maybe that’s too much to ask. In any case, in the current context, it’s impossible to rule other than through the police.

Or put better: it’s impossible to rule other than through police-justice/police-law. It’s in this conjunction that the shipwreck of whatever could be called the ‘State of law’ reveals itself. In effect, in this shipwreck the State itself, under pressure, has recourse to its original fantasy that it is a monolith which destroys all internal differences to form one common front. There are of course national conditions which determine, in each case, the level of this de-differentiation. Intuition says that the French approach is in this regard completely mad. Were this monolithic State-bloc, in any case, to assume its essence again - to return to the matrix as a self-protecting reflex - its sovereignty would no longer make sense, except as an affirmation of its own arbitrary power. In this form, justice ceases to be a matter of justice, and becomes a matter of punishment. As ever, recourse to force is a striking emblem of weakness. But here we are. And everything is in place to nurture a performance of powerless power: the constitution of dossiers-on-steroids if necessary, the big bosses, there to intimidate, confusion over the hearing’s adjournment, a quick crushing of those who have been made enemies of the State. Putting such young people, some of them burdened with ill founded accusations in preventative detention for a long time is a sign of such an intention, one that has little to do with justice. But it is rather the fact that ‘it comes from the state’, and that fact in itself which apparently justifies everything in the eyes of state institutions, united in their common cause — the emphasis being on multiple senses of the word cause.

What makes The Children of Men by Cuaron rather good film of its genre, is that, by way of a simple, continuous, transformation, and, moreover, one of a modest size, it shows us both terrifying dystopia and one borne out of our present situation. In other words: there are only a few buttons to push, not many at all. When we realise this we may be truly afraid: and in a sense that is what this trial has already shown the observer, even if the observer hasn’t be able to observe much!

The paths of the abuses of power make their inroads starting on the margins. An abusive power begins to establish itself first over those who are most set apart, over immigrants, urban youth, over ‘extremists’ labelled as mad - and, alongside this, official discourses strive to mask the fact that the real extremists are more often counted among those who, completely within the law, devastate the planet, poison people, and are destroying humanity under every pretext, the most recent of these pretexts being for ‘growth’. Again: immigrants, then the urban youth, then ‘extremists’ are all words destined to become potential synonyms for plain and simple ‘youth’. Starting from the peripheries, this abuse begins its journey toward the centre. Abuse is generalised, in fact. Because it gets there as much from this politics of repression as from ‘social’ policies, which, category after category, we are all liable to pass through. And it’s exactly this extension of abuse that should concern all the ‘un-concerned’: all of those who think they are still on the right side, and who let the damage play out at a distance while being horrified by images on BFM. For it’s of this that we can no longer be at all mistaken: what the abusive state begins by doing to some, it finishes by doing to all.

Day 2

“Yeah I know that I have the video against me!” by Nathalie Quintane

—translation La Serveuse  

On the 19th September, the grand tribunal opened for the court case concerning the police car that was burnt on the quai de Valmy last May. To cover this event, and for a richer comprehension of what’s at stake in the process, lundimatin has asked different writers to report. Nathalie Quintane recounts the second day for us. 

Second day of the hearing. That’s to say the first, since the first day was cancelled because of the size of the courtroom. The size of the 16th (correctional chamber) is, it seems, a little bit less small than that of the 14th (forty or so places for the public). We seat ourselves in front of the police barriers. We await the accused and the lawyers, in that order. Above me (he stands three heads higher than me), is quite an old, very right-wing man, wearing a Lacoste bordered in blue-white-red piping, who can’t conceal his annoyance. He’s a bit on his own, surrounded by women and young people not wearing the same kind of clothes as him (in this trial, clothes are a capital question). A stirring - it seems that the accused are blocked at the entrance to the Palais de justice. We imagine the conversation: 

• But let me through! as I’ve told you, and as you repeat, it’s my hearing!

• no question of it young man! Orders not to let anyone who looks like you in!

• But it’s precisely because I look like I do, that I must go to trial…  (etc)

Meanwhile, ten members of the police trade union Alliance greet us, rushing into the courtroom at the tail end of the press queue. Disquiet, then anger: how many places will be left if the police union take half?

• Out! Out! 

Screams the crowd. 

At last, we enter.

Beginning of the hearing. Some questions, statements of rights and jurisprudence, which seem like appetisers, but are not, they will become important in relation to the rest of the day, which will centre on the question of images (here you have the tenor of the proceedings, since the afternoon was essentially a long video-projection with commentary). One of the lawyers raises the problem of the inequality in judicial treatment between those charged with violence against a Person of Public Authority (police) and those Persons of Public Authority charged with violence, and brings up the recent case of a lycéen (high school student) who was hit in the face by CRS. It shows us a kind of mirror-case, he explains, in so much as in that case the demand by high-school students’ parents that they could form a civil party was rejected (along with the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme), whereas in the present case the very same demand has been accepted for the police union, Alliance. The lawyer for Alliance responds that the constitution of a civil party is justified here as the collective interest of the (police) profession is at stake. She refers to jurisprudence, which in the case at hand is linked to a history of the illegal confinement of chief-executives, and the bitterness towards chief-executives, which existed just because they were chief-executives. But wasn’t the lycéen in question hit just because he was a lycéen? And don’t the people who go out and demonstrate do so exactly because of and not despite what their professions are? The disturbance around the qualification of ‘protesters’ - “protesters, I mean, vandals” says the prosecutor; these “protestor-vandals”, said a witness - has done nothing here but reinforce the feeling that underneath the purely intellectual understanding and the mechanical acceptance of the idea that, in democracy, we have the right to protest, since it’s the Constitution, that under this varnish there is the profound truth of a radical incomprehension, put simply: but why do you protest? That’s the question asked by the President of the Tribunal, and then of the prosecution, who doesn’t understand (or pretends not to understand, but it’s the same thing) that we could return to protest even if we can’t take the tear gas,

• it didn’t bother you to go back?

says the President, and 

• But why did you go there?

says the prosecution

because for them, without a doubt, the reasons for protesting are sufficiently light that they would go home should it cease to be a nice walk. It’s anyway in that, that the account of one of the accused, one of the most implicated, logically lodges. He says that at the end of March 2016, he went out for the first time of his life on a protest “to walk for his mother”, who had had a stroke. The protest-walk changed quickly into tear-gassing and beating, and there - as we say - epiphany. So, they’re like that, the police in France? Followed by a second revelation, when he was arrested and then incarcerated: So, it’s like that, prison in France? The political hole (even vacuum) was filled quickly when this computer scientist, in his 40s, keen to verify by way of a second demonstration that he was not mistaken in his revelation, confirmed “and once more, I was gassed!”. His version places the duel (in which the policeman gets out of his car, faces up to him, and begins to aim, with what the speaker describes as an iron bar, a rod, a stick, etc) - and the place - in parallel with or mirror-image to the version of the policeman - they both say, one after the other, that they were afraid they might die, afraid the other would bring out a weapon and aim, afraid the other would throw them on the ground and end it; fear against fear. 

• He gets out, he’s facing me, he’s armed, I know he can kill me, says the computer scientist.

That is what we all know, and what he has recently learnt: no, the exercise of rights within a democracy is no longer a nice walk. 

Another thing that falls outside of the understanding of the prosecutor, is that one can go back to help other demonstrators trapped in a kettle when you yourself are not trapped: you were well out of the woods, you, in short, the only thing left for you to do was to run away! The moral standard of society is also discovered in the courts, and doesn't always emerge on the side we would expect.

The way in which images (videos, screenshots, photos) are exploited by the police and the justice would merit a fat book (which has perhaps already been written, and if not, should be). In the courtroom hearing, the situation is as follows: a screen the size of a big television is placed up high, to the right of the president of the tribunal, such that he can turn toward the images to comment on them, in emulation of Jean Douchet (a celebrated critic and theorist of cinema). Each image counts for one piece of evidence from the incident that must make it possible to determine the intentions of the accused – intentions which have been deduced from their appearances as described by the police. I copy here a few phrases that were spoken – most often by the president – in relation to these images (most of them available online plus some CCTV cameras which didn’t really add anything): 

• With most precise and productive exploitation of these video resources, the police will ensure the rapid progress of the inquest. 

• Here are photos that illustrate what is said in the tribunal

• The policemen explain that they are seen from behind

• We would see them completely masked so as not to be recognised

• The police explain that this is the same person, that would be - you

• We will see, under the red arrow designed to guide you, the first person, with a red baseball cap, and a second, wearing a stud

• Here, another red arrow to identify you, since it’s very difficult to do so with a face hidden among 150 demonstrators

• There, we would see you, close to the police baton

etc. etc.

Anyway, in pure Woody Allen style, the peak of this is reached when the president of the tribunal requests that we recognise a face on the screen as the defendant before us on the stand, and it is obviously not the same face….

• So, you don’t recognise yourself in this photo? the President demands

• It would seem evident that it’s not me, responds the accused amidst laughter in the courtroom. 

His lawyer interjects:

• And it’s off the back of these photos that he’s accused of the attempted homicide of a police officer!

But the truth of these images and our relation to them is articulated by the youngest of the accused, who says:

• Having seen these images, I confuse my vision of the facts with these videos. Of course this faith in the image - the image as an indubitable proof - is supported only by its interpretation: it only works when accompanied, or preferably preceded by the words of the police or of a judge (in short, the words of the justice). Now what that speech explains or declares of what is seen in the image, could just as well be defeated by a contrary or more fitting explanation: 

• You have said: “I saw the car burning”

• No! You are not reading the phrase completely, I said “I saw the car burning de loin [from afar]”

Here, everything plays on a word, that adverb “de loin”, since it can determine who was close to enough the car to fall under the charge that they’re all accused of: belonging to a group set up for violence and degradation. The desolate substitution of the image for reality can be defeated by words. 

Day 3

“We have seen the boxer shorts of justice”, by Serge Quadruppani

—translation La Serveuse  

Alain Alçufrom, vice-president of the Grand Tribunal of Paris, who is in charge of the disciplinary hearing for the ‘affair of the burning car’, in the beginning of 2017 expressed his wishes for the new year in the form of suggestions for a better Justice-system, in an article in the Express that’s well worth a read. Apart from that he is in favour of putting the French flag on display in court-hearings, in the article we discover two important points: that in the 90s before being a judge he worked in advertising in the States; and that he would like for lying under oath to become a criminal offence. This contradiction is manifested between two parts of his life: one part resting structurally on lying, the other aimed toward rendering truth obligatory - perhaps each side reveals the means of achieving the other. In a welcome change from his colleagues, Mr Alçufrom doesn’t show any belligerence toward the accused, he rarely cuts them off and never stops reminding us of the rights of the defence. But when we hear him invoke the interests of the accused when demanding that the room holds its fire at the moment that the prosecution launches the most ridiculous extrapolations from the blurred images, or again invokes the interests of the accused, in order to throw out a young woman of the audience provoked by a tricoloré-fascist defended by his colleagues of the Alliance, we understand what kind of truth he’s talking about: judicial truth. 

The fundamental lie that this judicial truth rests on is that, as announced over the speakers in the courtroom, everyone has to pretend that the accusers and the accused are on equal terms. This comedy is only made possible by occluding, from the discussion, the heavy and menacing presence of the forces of order, in and outside of these walls, and by repressing the presence of the very walls within which the accused find themselves. However, as that famous old horse responded to the friends of his client who were annoyed about the young woman being thrown out: “We have no power here, absolutely none”. Does truth under extreme pressure still bear any resemblance to truth? And, as with the Law, is judicial truth ever anything but the manifestation of power relations? It was this abyss that spilled out under our feet, while, outside below the windows, friends of the accused demonstrated, chucked out of the hall for having protested against being prevented entry for the sake of this provocateur-fascist, who had revealed himself as such the day before by insulting them. Between the walls of justice, one acts as if it were merely a question of debate, based solely on information and reasoning, to the exclusion of convictions, maintained by force, which nevertheless lead to the events they pretend to judge in the first place. The young woman was then expelled amidst impotence and confusion, two sentiments that dominated the entire hearing. The obsessional presence of images inevitably counted for a lot in this atmosphere of impotence and confusion.   

The main part of the hearing consists of looking at a screen, and in commenting on the images appearing there, with hypnotic obstinacy. It was long and laborious, the manipulation of scrolling through and of zooming in and out; the identification of the files side of things didn’t seem to be, particularly, the speciality of the specialist in charge of the machine.  Despite the punishing character of the thing,  a sign of a generalised tendency that has won over all of the trials, or otherwise the pathology reserved for this case, was that whenever it was about citing a passage of a text, neither the lawyer nor the defence would read it, as in the past when this always happened under the control of the president, but would ask to see it. Nobody in the room saw anything on that kaput screen, but in the end, there it was, like an article of faith on a smooth surface: the proof of the existence of firm reference points within a procedure as blurry as this one. That image says only what as we want to make it say, as was patently clear throughout the proceedings. The evidence against the accused resembles certain oeuvres of contemporary art, in that both exist only thanks to long accompanying commentaries. Red arrows, called in as reinforcement, indicate this or that hazy detail in the videos or photos; police pretend to identify Antonin with the balaclava who threw a bollard in the window of the car, driver-side. They even pretend to recognise him from the dark circles under his eyes! But his lawyer has no difficulty showing, with the help of photographs, that the description by the police could just as well be applied to a dozen of others who were near by to the attack. Is that a balaclava or a snood there? Are those stripes on the front or on the side of the shoes? And the shape of the phone in the pocket? Really, we lose ourselves in a fog which can assume neither meaning nor wholeness unless we speak of what’s missing or underneath: that the anonymous witness, in reality a cop working in the general intelligence services, that same department that over the years has launched no less than 12 procedures against Antonin, who in turn was released or had his charges dropped 11 times. Which adds a certain resentment to this encounter. The anonymous witness’s description is based on the glimpse he had of Antonin passing by the tinted window, so in other words, when he had a completely different outfit on to in the demonstration? He recounts that Antonin was masked up all the way, even though the videos prove the contrary. Never mind, the judges of the investigation chamber have decided that his status as a recognised policeman, rather than making his statement suspicious, only reinforces it, since it comes from a testifying official. We couldn’t have said it better, that, because he’s sworn in - that’s to say because of his profession - the words of a cop will always count for more than the words of any old Jane Doe. 

So the testifying officers have provided their interpretation, which the prosecution makes into his own: when Thomas, who admits to having kicked the car, lifts his arms, we see the equivalent of a “V” of victory, and when he gives his finger, he “riles up the crowd”: the aforementioned gestures were interpreted by the testifying officers as those of a “leader”. They also saw with their own eyes that the wisp of white hair that Ari, another defendant, had in a demonstration in front of the Fresnes prison, proved that it was this man who had the red quiff during the Valmy protest. The case of Ari is an absurd twist of the knife in the process, without doubt the effect of the American tropism of Monsieur Alçufrom, the president. Indeed, in the trials overseen by Mr. Alçufrom, everything rests on the interrogation of the defendants, done by the judge and prosecution first, and by the defence afterwards. Such that, when the lawyers want to attack the arguments in the case file, they are limited to harassing their clients with rhetorical questions, like: don’t you think that if we look at this, we could deduce that? That said, since the beginning, Ari has refused to respond to the questions of the police, of the judges, and even at the hearing, of his own lawyer. This courageous intransigence which seems to imprison him, obliging him to refuse to respond in his own defence even when his lawyer asks him questions about things that could prove his innocence (for example, about the fact that the cops had identified two other people, one after the other, in the video before deciding that it was him). It’s true, though, that the show justice puts on for him couldn’t convince him that any other truth could come out of this other than the juridical truth, that’s to say the truth of the testifying officials. Justice never produces anything but truth from the professionals of justice. 

Relying always on the very reliable video, a lot hung on the colour of Antonin’s underpants before and after his arrest, that some saw as pink, others purple, others red, without anyone thinking of asking him if he usually wore one-of-a-kind underwear, or if anyone else could have been wearing the same ones. This story of the underpants would provide us with an excellent metaphor for reconnecting the sentiments the day left us with: “today we’ve seen the underwear of the justice system’, said an assistant. In his interview, Mr Alçufrom affirms that “the duty of a judge is to contribute to ensuring that peace prevails within society”. Not sure that works when the judge shows its pants before eyes of those who know how to identify them.

Day 4

“The Man who Could no Longer be a Man”, by Alain Damasio

—translation La Serveuse  

19th September, the grand tribunal opened in Paris for the affair of the burnt police car on the quai de Valmy.  The things at stake legally, politically and for the police are numerous and of significant urgency. What legitimacy does anger have in the face of police and institutional violence? Is the anonymous testimony of a police officer working in intelligence sufficient to condemn young activists to time in prison? Can a court judge a movement by examining only a handful of individuals? Does the justice system represent merely the echo chamber of the methods of control and correction utilized by the police? 

We are sure that there will be countless reports which do not respond to any of these questions. For this reason Lundimatin has chosen to cover the process in an unusual way. Four well-known authors, each active in very different domains of literature, are in the courts with a view to telling us what they see and understand. Frédéric Lordon, Nathalie Quintane, Alain Damasio and Serge Quadruppani do us this honour. 

The fourth day is recounted by Alain Damasio.  

It’s 1720, Friday 22 September. Jérémie Assous, lawyer of Bryan Morio, one of the nine accused, has just taken the stand and already hits the nail on the head. “This process is extraordinary on many levels”. A comrade elbows me to ask if I’m going to write something sci-fi. I would rather like to respond “yes”. A little dystopia? A tribunal of artificial intelligence that would ramp up jurisprudence to the speed of light and pronounce automatic penalties, immediately applicable in the neuronal network of the accused. Mental punishments, ultra-rapid, where one month would be felt as ten years? Brains softly grilled, judicial control by triggering epilepsy? DNA mutations operated by cripsr-k9, disabled for life… No longer any need for incarceration, even: your own body a prison.

I digress. In front of me, in this heaving correctional chamber, it’s Paris 2017 with our State of Prey and our rules of Troy for twisting the bar (of the law), predictably enough in the direction of power. We’ve seen it all before then? No, and far from it, whatever you say. The battle goes on, and is conducted by the weapons of the right, as blunt, false, or warped as they are. This makes the malignant (Leclerc) or offensive (Assous) pleas by the defence lawyers only more admirable. 

Over the course of two hours, at the end of the morning, the two prosecutors hammered away without pity. They have buried the nine accused under something like three dozen years of incarceration. For the Swiss man who delicately put the smoke flare on the ridge at the back of the car: 8 years in prison. Closed prison. For the guy who did nothing except break the back right window of the car: 4 years!  5 years for the computer scientist who discovered police brutality at 40, the famous assailant at the blue barrier who attacked the kung fu police officer. 5 years also for Antonin whose alleged culpability is such a reddish-pinkish-purplish patchwork of inconsistent clues and all loose threads at the seams, a fraying legal fabric one would not want for a quilt in a squat. Leclerc, Bernanos’ lawyer, supreme elder among the men of law in the room, with one blow of his paws pinpoints the nature of the punishments: they are “incredibly excessive”. 

At 1720, Assous takes the stand. We sense that it might be a huge success. Better: it’s carnage. 45 minutes later, the little wall of arguments built up on the asphalt by the prosecution - badly sealed at the base, badly cemented between stones - is lego strewn across two square metres, as if shattered by water cannons (any resemblance to the demonstration in Nantes the day before, purely fortuitous…) There only just remains three breeze blocks on which the combative humour of the room is emblazoned in the tag: “Antifa’s not dead”.

These judiciary chronicles annoy you? Me too. Except here, it’s as exciting as it is vital for understanding. I’ll try and be simple. Open a beer. Done? Okay. Let’s go. 

The normal procedure of the law, Master Assous reminds us, runs from suspicion, through clues, through proof. Thus the inquiry is elaborated, thus judicial truth is constructed, thus the punishments or the pardons are established. Suspicion corresponds with garde-à-vue; clues correspond with indictment; and at the moment of proof, punishment is decided. 

In the case of Valmy, it is thoroughly the inverse. It’s the law, degraded, running in panic in the other direction under a colossal internal (police anger) and external (public outrage) pressure. This pressure is amplified at breakneck speed in social networks (videos gone viral) behind which run, panting, the old vampires of the traditional press. In other words, it’s a judicial machine torn between its base (the cops crying for revenge) and its summit (the parading politicians) who, from the day after, ventriloquising Manuel Valls, said that they would find and condemn the guilty. Still better, they had already found them!

Except that at this moment now, they have nothing. Nil. Zilch. Diddly squat. Wind and foam. The skin of a Lorax. Nothing, but a photogenic and narrativisable nothing: videos from riot tourists, the waste of the CCTV cameras. That’s not enough? That doesn’t prove anything? At this stage it’s clear. Because names are needed, and names are needed straight away, only a long inquiry, inevitably uncertain of its results, and conducted outside of the time-scale of the media, can provide them.

Valls didn’t have time: he does the politicom. He owes his clients, his electorate. The anger is too strong, too public already, too volatile. So, pressure from the top to the bottom. That they know how to do. Someone from the DRPP makes a phone call. Passes on 4 names. Names of activists who he's followed for a while and who he saw the day of the demonstration. And on that basis, legally without foundation - pure police denunciation, a sheer New-Age wax-sealed-letter crafted by the grubby hands of a clerk at the Central Directorate of General Intelligence - with neither suspicion nor proof, we’ll put four young people in garde-à-vue. Illegally. So much so that the next day, to give the procedure the foundation it is sorely lacking, we’ll get that anonymous snitch, a certain T142. He’s not a robot, ok? He’s a man. A funny man, as we’ll see. We’ll ask him nicely to come spit out a witness statement. That will serve retroactively as grounds for an arrest… 80 hours later. Hippedy hop, a three card trick! 

Where all the press falls down, continues Assous, very focused, with Le Monde in mind, is that it confounds this anonymous information of May the 19th with the official but secret witness statement of May the 20th. The second could have justified garde-à-vue. The first invalidates everything, the whole process, since it rests on nothing. Behind this, the police will pile up procedures and multiply raids, with the aim of adding these famous proofs on afterwards, which would have been needed at the beginning to start any real investigative work. 

T142 is a police witness. Why not? says Assous, his voice swelling and extinguishing with the phrase. At least, his job is to observe, at least he is sworn in, the foundation is solid. Except that, ‘normally’, for a witness to be accepted, he must be able to be interrogated both by the prosecution… and by the defence! We have to be able to corroborate the witness statement with the reality and the facts of the accused. If not, then under administrative pressure (he’s paid by the DRPP), his witness statement will be bent out of shape, if only because of fear of those above him, or out of solidarity for his other workers. A witness who remains ‘secret’ hinders the work of the defence and therefore of the law, which, in order to be deployed well, cannot be contradictory. 

But there’s worse to come for the defendants: the witness statement reveals itself to be erroneous. At many points it’s even completely false. It’s contradicted, without discussion, by the images. That’s a bit embarrassing for T142, but…! The judicial machine starts up. In the murky wake of the approximations of T142, an army of colleagues busy themselves with filtering through the videos, looking for scattered clues dispersed throughout the wardrobes of the demonstrators, with the hope of feverishly seizing upon the grail of some further evidence. 

Bryan’s charges are so slight they graze nothing and we ask how he could even be here, at this stand. For Antonin, they sculpt a golem-figure out of the dust - a flash of the eyes, shoes with a white tick, fitted boxers, a banal backpack, a jacket never found again and a double ring to top it all off. They have no DNA – not even a bit of face? Whatever, it’s him! It has to be him! Or else the witness statement of T142 will be thrown out. And everybody’s credibility is resting on T142-the-secret-witness.

The prosecutor’s bundle of clues, which he says at the beginning of his rant are “only clues” (excuse my zigzagging, I return to the morning), will become, through a pitiful and revealing magic trick, by the end of the indictment, a “bundle of evidence”. We’re hallucinating. 

Assous is near finished. It’s 18h00. He addresses himself now to the judges, in a tense face off. He says for Bryan - and of course for the other defendants too - ‘you are going to condemn him on the basis of a simple piece of information’. Not even an unsigned note. Just information off the back of a telephone call. 

And clearly he points to a historical responsibility. If the investigating chamber lets this pass, it allows for the end of the rule of law. It legitimises the fierce, backdoor entry of the police-state. A state where it would be enough for a policeman, without ever having to confront the defence, to make an anonymous accusation, in order to throw those who offended the powerful in a hole, should those in power wish it. And first in line, those enemies of the police, known as anti-fascists, more broadly the extreme left, and more broadly still any citizen who thinks the République is not about knocking to the ground the young who dream of a better world, and who have the dignity to fight for it.

You’ll tell me: you’re getting carried away Damasio! You saw the images like all of us. You saw them beating the policemen with the iron rod and fucking up the police car, no? Of course. It’s not about absolving all violence, even this response to the violence of the professionals of the Law, which is otherwise routine and injustifiable in my eyes. It’s not about legitimising the fire for the beauty of the flames, nor about excusing blind rage, founded and anchored politically in the spring of 2016, which saw an explosion of the use of excess-force by the Baq that continues indefinitely today. 

It’s about staying cool in the face of a film with a too evident and pulsing register so as not to short circuit all rigour and all thought. It’s about asking whether a reflex-identification with the police officer, resulting from the general empathy that he provokes as a victim, ought to prevent the slow and meticulous work of the legal investigation, since this identification guarantees that such cool-headedness will be flouted and disgraced to the extent that they put away in the joint, for five years, young people who, without any physical consequences, flipped out a bit.

Because behind the shame of a disgraceful procedure that humiliates even the law itself, surpassing even those methods that clearly belonging to the police state, there’s simply a short viral film with the effect of a bomb.

Everything starts from a video story that the state had neither foreseen nor mastered, but would master very quickly, within 24 hours, to reframe the storytelling in line with to the supposed expectations of the public: the very mainstream opinion that, as the police reassure the citizens, every attack on police would be paid for by implacable vengeance/unremitting punishment. Out of proportion. Or “Jupiterian!” if one buys in to the new newspeak. In fact it is less the police state that organises the reality of this procedure than the Spectacle-State, which supervises and instrumentalises it. It is the state in its storytelling function, in its function of assuring and securing socially-held stories that save and comfort it, that rehabilitate it in the eyes of those who have exchanged their freedom for security. The Myth-State.

In truth there’s no conspiracy, no propaganda. Nothing dark or hidden. There’s just the limpid production of a state discourse which must at the same time rewrite and finish off the script started equivocally by a riot video that finished too well (the police showing their dignity and heroism) and too badly (the car in flames and the guilty evaporated). The state is no longer credible unless it can avenge the victim who embodies, ideally, its regal function. And avenge them spectacularly, more spectacularly than the initial menace, finally quite small, which threatened the symbolic “forces of order”. 

It is against this narrative that the lawyers of the defence most admirably struggle. It is against this narrative that the law, which they activate and give energy, regains its nobility. Sequence by sequence the stages of the script, sewn together with pink thread, are decomposing and rendered invalid. At the end purple. Maybe red. The judges will judge. They are hoped to be lucid and icy, like truth.

T142, him, drinks a small glass of white in front of his flatscreen, feet on the coffee table. His cat miaows. He is tired but happy. Or he’s sad. We don’t know. One day later, T142 will be a robot. An artificial intelligence of ultra-precise images has rendered him blind. For the moment, he’s still a man, an anonymous man. A man who could have been a man. But who will stay a tool. A part. A part slid into the slot of a judicial jukebox to make us Manuel-waltz to an air of Collombe. 

I really have trouble writing at the moment, it’s weird. And with our justice system.

Original Texts: 

https://lundi.am/Affaire-de-la-voiture-de-police-b...

https://lundi.am/Affaire-de-la-voiture-de-police-b...

https://lundi.am/jour-2-Nathalie-Quintane

https://lundi.am/jour-3-Serge-Quadruppani

https://lundi.am/jour4-Alain-Damasio

The moment of the Gilets jaunes, or ‘Yellow Vests’ has ruptured the consensus of French politics and social life. Since mid-November, hundreds of thousands of disaffected people have repeatedly rioted in the city centers, blocked highways and oil refineries, occupied toll booths and roundabouts across the country, and clashed with police. Although the early phase of the movement legitimized itself with slogans about the gasoline tax initiated by Macron and his team of technocrats, when the tax was repealed under a flurry of cobblestones, the Yellow Vests refused to go home. Leftists, commentators, and politicians have failed to understand the basic intention of the movement, while the politicals—from the anarchists to the unionists to the neo-Nazis—either attempt to steer the movement or else reject it completely. So far, the Yellow Vests have initiated a process that no one understands, but that no one can ignore. Whatever the outcome of the present sequence of struggle, it is clear that the Yellow Vests have broken the rules of politics and social movements as we know them. We think it’s worthwhile to begin drawing some lessons from this complex and unfinished sequence, in the hopes that we may better act within similar circumstances in the future, which are bound to arrive.  

RADICAL ACTIONS, NOT RADICAL ACTORS

It is not the insurrection that many love to dream about, it is not an act of sedition, it is not the seizure of a territory. It is something else. Some new thing whose word hasn’t been invented yet.

– Liaisons, “Encore”

If we insist on reading today’s social ruptures through the categories of the 20th century, we can be sure to misread them. It is no accident that many on the far-Left initially interpreted the Yellow Vest phenomenon in France as fascist or naively populist (and therefore in need of a radical "correction"), or that others were so quick to decry the evils of a "cross-class" alliance. Contemporary political rationality cannot comprehend radical actions, only radical actors. The truth of action, we are told, lies in the identity and motivations of its protagonists, which constitute the real objects of social inquiry. A movement could express itself in a thousand different ways, but it will only really become comprehensible and valid once it can be pushed through a legitimizing vector erected by these two factors. From which place in the social order did the action emerge? What intersection in the matrix of oppression do these participants represent? It is assumed that the answer will reveal the collective social interests of the movement, at which point one can decide whether or not to "support" or "oppose" it, as if one were shopping in an ideological supermarket.^[1] How did this impulse to seek out a subject behind all action develop? Where does it come from?

If we are accustomed to letting concrete actions disappear, to seeing only the ‘social’ relation between actors, this is because we have inherited a conception of politics in which discourse, the communication of information, forms the ideal political act. If acting together is simply another way of speaking to one another or to a third party, if revolt is simply another mode of making demands, if war is simply politics by other means, then the impulse to interpret action understandably takes hold of us. In order for one person to interpret the statement of another, a shared symbolic context of meaning must obtain between us, and it is our respective institutional upbringing that makes this possible.

Contemporary politics sees in action nothing but a conversation between constituencies and populations in society. It is for this reason that, when radical activity emerges in a way that is relatively anonymous, that lacks a consistent author, and persistently refuses to answer to our compositional ("who are you?") and projectual questions ("why are you doing this?"), it tends to be unrecognizable to political analysts and activists alike.

It is precisely this received wisdom that the Yellow Vests have been laying to waste, week after week. What is emerging today in France is a radical form of collective action that does not rely on a coherent ideology, motivation, participant, or regional location. Above all, it is not proceeding by means of a dialogue with its enemy. It is the logic of this new mode of practical composition that we must aim to understand.

MEMES WITH FORCE

Whoever has a song written about them never lives long.

– W.B. Yeats, Mythologies

How did a rupture like the Gilets jaunes come into being? At a time where naming and identifying groups and people has become a hegemonic practice among activists and police alike, it is important (from all sides) to identify how an amorphous and radically unstable movement could continue to explode into the streets for over two months.

Ferguson and Standing Rock were subjected to constant “naming” operations, from within and from without. In both cases, the ability to name the "legitimate claimants" of the movement contributed in direct ways to destroying it. That every tendency of these movements claimed to act in the name of “the community” is not totally without sense: whoever forms the normative center of a population forms the natural representative ideal. For democrats and reformers, establishing the right to speak for the movement is a precondition of political power. Once the subject of a movement is sufficiently described and defined, the moment inevitably begins to shrink and dry up: leaders are called to bargain, militants are repressed, and large numbers of active participants are reduced to simple "supporters" of a struggle that is no longer properly common. When movements begin to cohere around charismatic individuals and loudmouths, it is only a matter of course that the poorest and most militant - and usually most racially marginalized -  (e.g. Joshua Williams, Red Fawn) absorb the bulk of the repression. It therefore makes sense that, from Ferguson and Standing Rock to Bordeaux and Toulouse, the most uncompromising and determined actions today are not originating in the political cliques or activist networks. The gap between the ideologues and the actual revolutionaries is widening. As their conceptions of the nature and meaning of struggle become increasingly asymmetrical, they become increasingly unintelligible to one another.

The Yellow Vests are not a traditional social movement. The social movement paradigm refers to a process by which groups get organized around their distinct experience of social institutions (or around their distinct experience of oppression, as in the case of the New Left), work to advance the interests of their respective constituencies, and link up with other institutional segments along the way. From the “Worker-Student Action Committees” of May ’68, to the failed alliance between French rail workers and university occupations exactly 50 years later, this Trotskyist model of organization continues to exert a lasting influence on how an escalation of conflict comes to be imagined.^[2] Since each constituent group is understood to have become politicized through its institutional consciousness, composition is imagined as taking place segment-to-segment, through a ‘convergence of struggles’ ultimately imagined to culminate in a general strike. Yet the present moment has witnessed little to no proliferation of minor or partial subjectivities, no ‘queer Yellow Vests’, ‘student Yellow Vests’ or ‘worker Yellow Vests.’ Hardly anyone is insisting on their distinct socio-institutional predicates and traditional forms of struggle to the exclusion of the others. While no one can yet say where it will lead, the Yellow Vests have shown that it is possible to construct a practical sequence of revolt in which anyone can participate irreducibly without either foregrounding the particular interests of any marginalized groups or defaulting to a White, patriarchal, petty bourgeois, or otherwise hegemonic grammar of suffering. This is the gauntlet that the current movement has thrown down, and which it falls to revolutionaries everywhere to think through.

Considered in itself, donning a safety vest carries with it no unifying ideology, principle, or demand, nor any particular subject-position or identity. It operates as what we might call a ‘meme with force’. A meme does not necessarily alter the content of a struggle. In France, for instance, the catalyzing factors are without a doubt eminently familiar social pressures, such as the rising cost of living, diminishing social mobility, cuts to public services, a triumphant neoliberal government who spits in the eyes of the working poor, etc. What the meme of the Yellow Vest offers is a malleable form within which this content can assume the force of an intervention. Within every political struggle there is a minimal formalization; to this extent, the meme reopens the basic question of the Party, and offers what is perhaps the minimal basis for organizing a force of rupture in the twenty-first century. The fluidity of the meme makes it possible to join a march, a blockade or a roundabout occupation without having to buy into a “common interest” or the legitimizing “beliefs” of a movement. It does not solve, but simply defers the question of a common grammar of suffering to a later point.^[3] In the meantime, however, it has the power to suspend the suspensions that define our metropolitan social separation. Differences of experience or ideology are neither effaced nor resolved, but their resolution nor longer forms a precondition for engagement with others. The meme authorizes everyone to act on their respective experience of how the ‘elites’ (a deliberately under-constructed enemy) have screwed them over, like a Tarot deck in which the audience fills in the personal content. Each of us is invited to intervene against the enemy without waiting or asking permission, and for our own reasons. Masses of people are able to collaborate and act alongside one another, to express their social rage and frustration without falling back upon on conventional models of collective and organization to mediate the distances within and between social groups (political parties, direct democratic assemblies, gangs, etc.). In spite of its apparently monochromatic homogeneity, therefore, the meme in fact facilitates the most radical affirmation of singularity. There is no other mode of social composition that more directly encourages us to trust in the adequacy of our own perception, to act upon our reading of our situation.

The Yellow Vests are not a ‘coalition’ of diverse yet pre-existing political groups. The concept of the coalition still belongs to the horizon of the ‘convergence of struggles’. But, so far, the Yellow Vests are producing far more than they represent. If they continue to retain the initiative, if their productive and inventive powers are not subordinated to the logic of demands and negotiation, if they do not begin to carry out their irruptive interventions in the name of any stable population or constituency, they might just succeed in exiting the depressive cycle of 20th century revolutions, in which one government is quickly replaced by another.

Nobody knows in advance what the compositional limits of a meme are; its coherence is spelled out in an entirely a posteriori manner, week by week, piece by piece. Whatever the ‘Yellow Vests’ will come to mean will be based on its concrete effects in different times and places. This open-endedness gives it an obvious strength, since it can be taken up by anyone, pushed in virtually any direction. Having freed itself of any inherent reference to a stable ‘subject’, it opens onto a limitless horizon of experimentation. As with any meme, its currency depends on its ability to expand and reinvent itself, to resonate and combine with new content and modes of expression. Here, purity is inversely correlated to strength. The meme is modeled not on the universality of the Idea but on the unlimited movement of the simulacrum, since its vitality increases the more it replicates, mutates, and moves virally. The moment it finds itself unable to overcome obstacles and continue the process of mutation, the moment it is forced to police its edges, to sift claimants from imposters, authentic members from the ‘violent agitators’, it loses its creative or experimental fringe and peters out.

THE CORTÈGE DE TÊTE

The cortège de tête [‘head of the demo’] phenomenon during the 2016 Labor Law movement marked the first momet in recent French history where a social movement managed to produce a meme alongside and within itself. From its position at the front lines, the cortège de tête determines the rhythm, the tempo, and the slogans for large demonstrations. Normally jealously guarded by unions and formal organizations, whose leaders treat it as a stage for self-aggrandizing performances behind pseudo-unitary banners, in 2016 the space was seized by graffiti kids, YouTubers, students, and other youth of all sorts, who conferred on it the air of a splinter march. This gesture of ‘seizing the head position’ itself quickly became a meme, and was soon repeated in every large march throughout the months-long sequence of struggle. Due to its wild energy and aggressive disposition toward the police, the cortège de tête provoked frequent confrontations, which in turn led to more people joining and an increased level of material preparation from one demo to the next. The cortège functioned like “an aggregation point, as physical as it is political. Bit by bit, it magnetized the desire for revolt, the rage, the cohort of unruly bodies, the wounded, the unresigned, and the ungovernable.”^[4] Of course, as its name suggests, there can be no cortège de tête without the union processions marching behind it, a fact that ensured that the power of contagion remained essentially captured within the spatio-temporal logic of the traditional social movement. In spite of this limitation, like the Yellow Vests, the cortège de tête meme facilitated the creation of a space in which a new sort of composition of people could occur, one that similarly tended to suspend all prior institutional roles and identities. As a musician wrote at the time,

The singularity of the cortège de tête lies in its generic character, which evades capture by any identity. In it, people are encountering others who they should never meet under the normal course of things, whose assigned positions appear radically incommensurate. What could be more worrisome for power than to observe the practical weaving-together of those very bodies it busies itself keeping apart? […] If becoming-revolutionary means anything, it is precisely this assumption of the clinamen, this self-abandonment, this uncompromising engagement with the possible opened up by the situation [...] The cortège de tête embodies the neutral and anonymous coalescence, the becoming-anyone of this whole human multiplicity whose specific origins find themselves locally and punctually suspended.^[5]

At least as far as metropolitan centers like Paris are concerned (the blockades in the West being a different story), the power and the limits of the 2016 sequence were determined by the ability to flee the logic of a "convergence of struggles," and it was a memetic mode of composition that made this flight possible. However, the anonymous becoming of the cortège de tête was restricted to the form of the riot, one whose duration was entirely tethered to the rhythm set by the labor union officials. Without a union march, there was no head-space to usurp. In spite of its tremendous power, it was the distinctive form of the cortège meme that placed a ceiling on its ability to expand and mutate, eventually crushing it.

Memes do not call for interpretation so much as improvisation. If they challenge us to assume a posture or disposition, it would be less that of the scholar than the visionary who remains on the lookout for iterable gestures, those creative acts that harbor a new sequence of experimental repetition.

^[6]

DESTITUTION & PLACE

A communist revolution is not the sum of its riots, revolts, or battles. It is nothing other than the process whereby millions of people succeed in reorganizing their day-to-day existence in accordance with non-economic ideas of what happiness or the good life can and should look like. While the past decade of radical movements, occupations, and revolts have allowed countless people to experience firsthand the intelligence and dignity of collective self-organization without the mediation of money, such 'communist measures' are ultimately only historically significant to the extent that they allow themselves to become irreversible. Without the growth of a confident, durable, commonsensibility, the suspensions of this world are guaranteed to topple back into the old ways of doing things.

Autonomous and communist forms and practices must find a way to spread and endure, but how? It's a question anyone who has lived through the power and dignity of a riot has undoubtedly asked themselves, at the moment they must return to the video games, social media profiles, and 'business casual' that hem in the space of private life. The order of the riot remains flanked by the disorder of normal life. How can we make the leap from suspending time to reorganizing it, generating lasting forms of anarchic collectivity? Is it possible (as Joshua Clover, for example, seems to suggest) for the riot to spill beyond the form of the riot altogether, that a “cascading series” of riots could, of their own energy, “succeed in preserving their own existences while drawing forth other struggles to take their main chance against a spreading disorder”?^[7] Can riots engender communallyreproductive forms of self-organization? Or is it necessary that another, entirely distinct dynamism of struggle emerges alongside them?

As concerns action, there are not two opposing tendencies in the Yellow Vest movement: one that riots and destroys the cities, and the other that blocks roundabouts and builds collective canteens. While both are undoubtedly happening, what is decisive is understanding how these two dynamisms fit together, for it is this that explains both the originality and the tenacity of the movement. The riots in the cities have been intimately bound up in a parallel process that has relocalized the very experience of politics itself. It is the constitution of collective places that forms the destituent/revolutionary kernel of the movement, that overcomes the opposition between the riot and everyday life. A Parisian letter to the Liaisons collective recently observed, “the prerogative of the Gilets Jaunes is to organize themselves where they live, at the regional level, and not in terms of a precise political identity. It is thus no coincidence that, in a given region, the roundabout is precisely the minimal unit of connection.”^[8] As its author reminds us, in France, small rural roundabouts call up a different history than the plazas and squares of the larger cities, which were the locus classicus of the citizenist assemblies of Nuit debout in 2016, and which importantly have not been occupied by Yellow Vests so far. For us, this observation hints at a larger ethical-political wager: in the destituent paradigm that defines the politics to come, place will supercede position. The need to invest and defend new places or 'sites of life' will eclipse the centrality of ‘social’ differentiations like identities and symbolic positions within a matrix of oppression. What does it mean to establish a 'place', and how have the Yellow Vests linked place-making to the riots and blockades that have become so definitive of contemporary struggles?

The Roundabouts

By occupying roundabouts where the participants live—and even going as far as constructing some 200 shacks and buildings upon the roundabouts in which to eat, share resources, and conspire—the Yellow Vests are engendering a place of life amidst the dead spaces of late-capitalist circulation. This improbable feat was also observed recently in Chico, California, where climate refugees built an encampment in a Wal-Mart parking lot following the wild fires earlier this year. Consciously or not, they have inherited something from the gesture of the ZAD and the No-TAV movements, the Zapatistas in Chiapas and the Kurds in Rojava. It was these latter struggles that have most clearly proven the strategic efficacy of weaponizing 'place' as an element of attack, of converting the vitalinhabitation of an intensely-lived territory into a means for the delegitimation of state and economic management.

At the same time, the maneuver of the Yellow Vests is different. Instead of many people from across Europe converging on two or three 'zones to defend', which ensures that the initiative in fixing the location of politics continues to be determined by the prerogative of Vinci and other corporations like it, the Yellow Vest roundabouts remain proximate to everyday life. This proximity to everyday life is the key to the revolutionary potential of the movement: the closer the blockades are to the home of the participants, the more likely these places can become personal and important in a million other ways. And the fact that it is a roundabout that is occupied rather than a forest or a valley strips the prefigurative or utopian content from these movements. While this might at first glance appear to be a weakness, it may prove to be a strength.

As anyone who has visited the ZAD and returned home to the city can attest, the feeling of power one gains from driving into the cop-free zone falls away as soon as one leaves. The ZAD is something akin to a living state of exception from the world around it (albeit a real one, rather than a juridical fiction). By contrast, to occupy the roundabout near where one lives ensures that the collective confidence, tactical intelligence, and shared political sensibility the Yellow Vests cultivate from one day to the next traverses and contaminates the networks, ties, friendships and bonds of social life in these same areas. What were utopian feelings in the action camps, in the roundabout blockades now bleed into the space of everyday life rather than holding themselves apart from it. Nor does the roundabout maintain an extraterrestrial existence alongside normal life in the way the “radical” spaces of Berlin do.

The ferocity of the Saturday riots can only be explained by the affinities found on the roundabouts. According to all reports, every Saturday the crowds are increasingly composed of tightly-organized small-groups who show up prepared to act together in tactical and intelligent ways. Since no one is hanging around Paris, Bordeaux or Toulouse long enough to form social ties, it stands to reason that it is precisely the ties developed in an everyday life that is now ‘filtered’ through the roundabouts that are going on the offensive during the weekend "Acts". The opposition is not, as has sometimes been suggested, between the strategic front of the Saturday riot and that of the roundabouts. The roundabout is the membrane, the point of contact, between the riot and daily life, each with their own distinctive rhythms and textures.

It is this combination of a memetic mode of composition and a destituent or place-making mode of cohabitation that explains the movement’s unparalleled ferocity and longevity.

ECSTATIC POPULISM

Are we dealing with a ‘populist’ movement? Have the Yellow Vests become a populist symbol?

The idea of the “people” (Lat: populus / popularis)  has always had two senses. On the one hand, Western states need the spectral figure of the ‘People’ for a precise juridical reason, namely, in order to position the source of their authority outside of themselves in such a way that this source never in fact appears. The People in this juridical sense is the law's own self-presupposition, a pure fiction that exists only on paper, or on the lips of politicians. On the other hand, the term has always also meant the poor, the disadvantaged, ‘ordinary people’. It is a shifting placeholder, analogous to what for centuries was known as the ‘pleb’.^[9] The two senses of the term have nothing in common but a name. More importantly, as Marcello Tarí reminds us, they are actually mutually exclusive in practice: “just as insurrectionism as an ideology exists only when there is no uprising, populism exists only when the people are absent.”^[10] When the people are really in the streets, government cannot rule, and the newfangled parliamentary populisms of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain appeared precisely at the moment when the riots and square occupations of 2011-12 were defeated. The Yellow Vests are not the same ‘People’ in whose name the law speaks. If anything, the vest is the uniform of the ex-citizen, the symbol of a negative or ecstatic populism that has forcefully stepped out-of-joint from the law that legitimates itself in its name. There is no denying that the fundamental antagonist in this struggle remains the ‘elites in government’, of which the central chant, Macron, démission!, a demand for dethronement, is emblematic. Yet it would be entirely premature for anyone to claim that a new constituent subject can be glimpsed through the thick clouds of tear gas filling the cities each week. The only thing we’re certain of seeing is a mass of individuals and small groups engaged in almost totally unmediated acts of constructing a rapport de force with its government, the outcome of which no one can as of yet predict.

It is important to emphasize this ballistic inclination of the Yellow Vests, their predilection for force relations and direct confrontation, as it helps to account for the shift in the function of speech within the movement. Things would indeed be different if the Yellow Vests were once again taking over the city plazas and engaging in the sort of direct-democratic general assemblies that had defined the 2016 Nuit debout movement, and the movement of occupations before it. While calls for a ‘citizens referendum’ continue to be made from different corners of the movement, the Yellow Vests have for the most part admirably refused to trade their practical initiative for political representation, and have confronted the state less as an interlocutor than as a kinetic and physical opponent. Rallies and public assemblies have not featured prominently in the struggle so far. While assemblies and inter-roundabout spokescouncils do occur, they retain the character of local, strategic, situated moments of logistical self-organization and coordination. The moment anyone begins to present themselves as a representative of the movement, or claims the legitimacy to speak for the movement as a whole, they find themselves preaching in a desert. No one can take on the voice of the movement in any convincing way, least of all those who claim to. The acephalous character of the Yellow Vests’ tactical repertoire—riot, blockades, commandeering toll booths, occupying roundabouts, etc.—has contributed to a radical diminution of the power of ‘official’ political speech. It is this that has ensured, for now anyway, that the populism in question remains an ecstatic and plebeian one; that the disidentification with both the forces of order and the lonely atomization preceding the movement prevails over the representational and assimilationist temptation; and that where speech does occur, that it serves primarily to renew and extend our commitment to defending those sites of collective life assembled throughout the movement, from roundabout to roundabout, which is a type of speech that is qualitatively distinct from the proclamatory universe of politicians. It is entirely likely that the movement will be crushed, its revolutionary aspirations dashed, the moment it allows itself to be reduced to a constituent force in the great game of democracy, well-known in France, wherein an ostensible 6th Republic would come to replace the current stupidity.

LOOTING AS ANTI-FASCIST MEASURE

One of the central novelties of the Yellow Vest movement lies in the unprecedented discrepancy between the rapid growth of collective power and the simultaneous absence of a positive horizon. Rarely have we seen such a high capacity to disrupt everything accompanied by such an indeterminacy of anything like a demand, identity, ideological consistency or program. The ‘official’ antagonism has been almost entirely concentrated on a single office of power, namely, the Macron administration. Certainly, this is ideologically spurious, since it suggests a ‘mis-management’ of the capitalist class relation, a confusion of effects and causes. However, although it is philosophically or critically insufficient as an analysis of power, it has practically allowed a broad cross section of people to recognize common targets, allowing the polarization to remain as broad as possible. It is precisely the ideological indeterminacy of the situation, aided by the movement’s under-construction of its enemy, that has allowed the rupture to widen and intensify in the way it has.

This raises a serious question, namely, what has prevented the movement from succumbing to a fascist drift? Certainly, the more conventional anti-fascist tactic of attacking and chasing-out organized cadres of right wing extremists from the demonstrations has made it harder for the latter to achieve any measure of influence disproportionate to their numbers. We believe, however, that widespread vandalism has limited the influence of nationalists more than anything else. The Yellow Vests have taught us the strategic importance of joining actively in movements that do not depart from a recognizably far-Left grammar, and working to legitimate property destruction within them.

Consider the case of Maidan. Because nationalism (democratic and fascist alike) is a technique for creating alliances between the rich and poor ‘in the name of the people’, it is important to underscore that, setting aside union halls, in Kiev's EuroMaidan movement property destruction against businesses was considered unacceptable, and rarely occurred. Contrary to civil unrest in other European nations such as Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal and France, where storefront windows are routinely attacked during lively demonstrations, an article in the Kyiv Post from January 20, 2014 asserts that “in two months of confrontation, there has not been a single shop window broken in Kyiv’s downtown. Granted, Ukraine’s protesters aren’t shy about taking apart fences or ripping up paving stones, but those acts of vandalism also serve the larger plan.”^[11]

Undoubtedly, liberalism and fascism both line up to defend the market, disagreeing only about who should be able to participate in its licit institutions, and at what scale. These groups have great difficulty ideologically condoning property destruction. Where they do tolerate it, this destruction must be ethnicized. Nationalists can only explain their particular attacks on sites and targets in a ethno-nationalist and political way. The windows smashed out at the synagogue in downtown Chicago in 2017 was a personal and racial attack on the members of the congregation. What they can’t accept is generalized attacks on private property, a violence that clearly attacks the market: anti-capitalist violence. It is one thing to attack a union hall or government office, it is quite another to destroy entire shopping districts. This is perhaps the most difficult thing to introduce in American movements, where property damage and vandalism are seen as reckless and without strategic sense.

CONCLUSION: A WAGER

In the coming years, struggles could emerge around a feeling of disgust, and not a common experience of suffering. From our perspective, nothing could be better today. The characteristic human experience in the American ex-urbs and hinterlands is utterly unlike the sorts of metropolitan factories on which the workers movement was built. Today’s suburban and rural sprawl produces extreme alienation, isolation and loneliness. American society today is separated by increasingly complex lines of differentiation: class, trade, race, gender, sexuality, age, religion, weight, politics, subculture, diet, health profile, astrological identity, etc. Certainly, struggles will continue to emerge on the basis of alterity and political difference, but we aren’t confident that these will be liberatory struggles. It feels, at this point, more likely that liberatory struggles will emerge from a vortex like the Yellow Vests, wherein diverse practices flow into a common area of articulation, than from continuous clashes between rival political groups, or the struggles of marginalized groups to represent their interests within the increasingly hollow ‘center’ of normative society. Certainly, the opposite is becoming harder to imagine: that a broad cross-section of the US would unite under a single identity and banner.

A struggle of this nature could look like this: Angry and disenfranchised people begin descending on the city centers, or on logistical sites like airports and ports. Their angry invasion resonates in a distinct yet parallel way with people living in marginalized or low-income neighborhoods either inside the city or at its edges (graffiti crews, rednecks, truck drivers, drug dealers, sex workers, former-prisoners, pensioners). Ethical extremists of various ideological or subcultural persuasions operate alongside one another in the streets, united only by their respective unwillingness to police each other’s anger at the system (for better and for worse: anarchists, neonazis, soccer hooligans, gang members). The various social groups never synthesize into a larger whole, but simply move alongside one another, occasionally clashing with one another, but returning week after week to smash the glittering facades of the cities and attacking police and governmental buildings. Those who can’t make it to the urban centers block the roads and arterial infrastructure on which they depend, from outside. This heterogeneous alliance of ‘randos’ from the near-and-far hinterlands and urban ethical extremists repolarizes the political situation from top and bottom, rather than left and right. Politicians, leftist organizations, trade unions and N.G.O.’s initially distance themselves from the confusing mêlée and denounce the violence. The crowds pay them no mind, owing them no allegiance. Realizing they have been eclipsed, leftist organizations have no choice but to tuck their tail and chase after the crowds from a rearguard position, attempting however possible to co-opt, manage, and eventually pacify them. College students and middle managers of all demographics attempt to shame and divide the rioters racially, sexually, geographically, by class, by any axis of identity they can, so as to better gain a foothold in the chaos. Along the way, the police will commit their usual heavy-handed blunders, which will (at first) widen the antagonism and expand the struggle, forcing the government to deploy the National Guard. When they reach this point, struggles will will either dissipate, or else succeed in fracturing the armed forces and inducing widespread social defection…

Revolutionaries should be prepared, because the situation is likely to get more confusing and not less. It seems unlikely to us that the country will plunge into a civil war between anti-fascists, neo-nazis, and the extreme center. It is also impossible to imagine a new political consensus emerging between the Democrats and the GOP in a way that adequately addresses the anxieties and tumult of the age. If something like the Yellow Vests comes to the US, you can bet that it will be even more confusing and weird, even more violent and uncomfortable. It is our wager, however, that the coming movements won’t be without their own charm, their own innovations, their own beauty.

POSTSCRIPT: SIX NOTES FOR FUTURE STRUGGLES

1. To spread an ungovernable idea of common happiness, it is first necessary to become ungovernable.

2. Memes with force allow people to self-authorize, enabling them to act directly on their suffering. In this way, they subvert the management of our movements by internal and external police.

3. Memes that polarize the situation from top to bottom, concentrating the hostility on a centrist target, will allow the largest antagonism to emerge, making it harder for reformers to forestall the revolt, and opening up the possibility of communism in a real and practical way.

4. Do not exclude ‘conservatives’ from the movement ideologically; rather, popularize gestures that their ideology cannot endorse. One way to do this is to legitimate property destruction against the super-rich. Show, don’t tell.

5. Although the use of graffiti and other messaging might be necessary to counter the influence of right-wing slogans early on, do not allow any one group or tendency to hegemonize the meme until the state has fully lost control.

5.1. Graffiti should be used in two ways only: to express hostility toward the shared enemy, and  to celebrate the tactical repertoire you want to see and the heroic deeds of the movement as a whole. Do not speak in the name of a ‘subject’ or exclude components of the movement.

6. If the riot’s power to suspend social identities and predicates cannot generate alongside itself territorial places wherein to expand, persist, and cross over into the duration of everyday life, it becomes a cruel festival.

BIO

Adrian Wohlleben is a communist researcher and translator living in Chicago. He can be reached at silentwater@riseup.net

Paul Torino lives in Atlanta, and can be reached at flightoficarus@riseup.net

FOOTNOTES

A Worker Informs a Lord on the Subject of the Guillotine

Adapted from Heinrich Heine, Wintermärchen. 1844.

“King Louis the fifteen died,

 Quite peaceful, alone in his bed.

The sixteenth, however, was guillotined,

Along with Queen Antoinette.

The queen showed great courage,as has been told, given the severe situation,

Although her small dog did yelp and did cry

While she suffered her neck laceration.”

The Lord didn’t move, he had stopped quite still,

And stared, whilst his skin grew colder -

“What is this new thing, that sows such division

‘Between heads and what was once their shoulders?”

“The guillotine,” I explained to him,

“Is a method just newly imported,

Whereby people of any and every position

From living to dead are transported.

One is bent down and strapped to a plank,

On display to a crowd of gay mourners.

Your neck’s between posts, and patiently waits      

To encounter a blade with three corners.

A switch is then pressed and down shoots the axe,

Quite gaily, as if one had asked it.

As a result, off comes your head

To land in its own special basket.”

The Lord shrilled a cry and stopped me right there,

“Be silent, I find you appalling!

I want to know nothing, may God protect us

From living this age and its dawning.

The King and the Queen! Fastened to a board!

That is contrary to all that is born.

No reverence is here, for old, safe and tried;

You ventriloquize chaos and swarm.

And you, who are you, that you dare to speak

To me in so familiar a manner?!

You are but the cow, come to work by your will,

As I am, by nature, the tanner.”

“You are but a creature of fables,” I laughed,

“Fuck you and fuck all your garbage.

We’ll raise ourselves up right without you

And your head, now resembling a cabbage.

Elsewhere, they move and they’re laughing at us;  

They see that the best we can do

Is be ruled by a ghost with a scepter and crown,

While the old world they’re splitting in two.

Be good to yourself and go get yourself home,

Back there, where you have your fence mended.

It all seems quite clear from right down, down here:

The day of the bourgeois is ended.”

Forthcoming in We Do Not Believe in the Good Faith of the Victors, a one-off publication featuring pieces by Jackqueline Frost, Rona Lorimer, St Agatha, Lisa Jeschke, Miri Davidson, Friedrich Hölderlin, marzec, Fritz Heinle, Lotta Thießen, Christina Chalmers and Cassandra Troyan. Arriving soon from Fraile Press, London

'Or for instance, if you were crushed to death by hundreds of boxes of chocolate....' John Russell takes the (w)hole system apart and refuses to put it back together again…

In his essay ‘The Pineal Eye’ Georges Bataille describes a giant gibbon aiming her anus at the sky, buried upside down, trussed up like a chicken, with her legs folded back against her body, ‘… her bestially howling mouth swallowing dirt’ while, at the other end, ‘her huge screaming pink anal protrusion stares at the sky like a flower’. A stake runs between her belly and her bound paws and ‘only the part whose obscenity stupefies emerges above the top level of the pit’. After her captors have filled the pit with dirt the gibbon’s anus is described as even more upsetting to see when touched by the ‘pretty white fingers’ of the English woman.[1]

Emerging from Freud’s libidinal semiotics, Irigaray describes how bodies coded in castration are organised into an economy of representation based around the ultimate symbolic value of the penis or phallus. A brutal visual (or as Irigaray puts it ‘specular’) dialectic of 'have' or 'have not' where the patriarchal structure cannot make sense of the ‘Little Girl’ except as a 'little man’ with an inadequate penis;[2] prioritising the masculine and phallic in contrast to the feminine and vaginal (as ‘lack’ or ‘other,’ structured as an absence which proves masculine presence). The relation of MAN to NOT-MAN (woman) which pre-scripts us all.[3]

The problem of sexual difference then (for forthcoming cosmonauts) is a problem of ‘sameness’ where the ‘feminine’ can only register as 'difference' in the format of 'difference from' the dominant term (difference from the ‘same’). And in this context, specularity is a structure which excludes (the unseen) but validates the seen or seeable. To quote Irigaray: ‘… the flat mirror reflects the greater part of women’s sexual organs only as a hole. And the eye does the same, unless it gets “inside”’ and here she references Georges Bataille’s ‘Story of the Eye’. Women cannot appear reflected in this flat mirror, but can only be thought of as the components of which the mirror is made, the tain of the mirror (the reflective backing).[4]

Sliced off with blood spurting out of your neck-hole. Swaying slightly. A comforting hand on your shoulder from the blond man on the right. His head twisting around and across to make sure you are OK. The scalpel stands at the side – looking down.

The penis, sliced down the middle, fat and muscle removed, sways upright supported by calipers (from a video documenting the transformation of a penis into a vagina).[5] The servants in the background collapse against the wall, their dresses splattered with blood. The skin is loosened from the flesh and folded round. And then miraculously wrapped inside, the penis head now becomes the clitoris.

Ejaculating out his penis-hole – but barefooted – the terrorists have shot out the partition windows – Bruce Willis must take care not to cut the flesh on the underside of his feet on the broken glass strewn around the office. Swaying there like a penis with the fat cut off, he remembers he used to specialise in comedy-action movies where he could deploy his rugged good looks as the lovable but flawed good guy (with sex potential). For instance, in the Moonlighting TV series (1985-9), as John McCane in the first two Die Hard films (1988 and 1990), or even as the washed up boxer in Pulp Fiction (1994).

An ant ‘death spiral’ is where ants (sometimes millions of ants) get separated from the main swarm and end up following each other's scent in a ‘circular mill’ until they are exhausted and die. Films of this phenomenon are posted on YouTube, often accompanied by William Beebe’s eyewitness account of an example in Guyana in 1921. Measuring 1,200 feet in circumference, with a 2 hour circuit time per ant, the mill persisted for two days, ‘with ever increasing numbers of dead bodies littering the route, as exhaustion took its toll. But eventually a few workers straggled from the trail thus breaking the cycle, and the raid marched off into the forest.’[6]

This metaphor crudely expresses, in the structure of a joke (or trap), the integration of our temporary life-spans into the strategies and circulations of capital (and its genetics) as the finite expenditure of labor power, chopped up into small circuits of work and pay, repeated again and again (and our dependence upon this repetition) until death.

This is replayed, in ideology, as a cosmic melodrama of circulation, where the brutal cycles of labor and wage are contrasted against the cool “infinity” of M-C-M, expressed in the ‘etc.’ of Marx’s formula and lined up with the ‘Unlimited’ of the Universe and 'Nature' (as Bruce Willis describes it in his Sky Broadband advert).[7]

The banal stretched across the glamour of Time like a castrated penis wrapped in cling-film or Kubrick’s match cut from caveman to space travel (and back to KFC bone) and so on.[8] Space travel as escape from the limited and the terrestrial, measured out against the trivial carnality of our own petty materialities, 'until the last syllable of recorded time' and so on. As Benedict Singleton writes ‘the characteristic gesture of cosmism, what we might call the “cosmist impulse”, [is] to consider the earth a trap, and to understand the common project of philosophy, economics, and design as being the formulation of means to escape from it’.[9] To escape the banal-terrestrial like angels. 

More recently in films like Sin City (2005), Die Hard IV (2007) and Fire with Fire (2012) Willis has been recast as a father-figure decoy phallus and/or Grandpa reverse-fuck figure, counterpointed against the ‘younger female lead’ and based on the premise of reverse-potency, that is, the unstated but implicit promise that: ‘If I was forty years younger I would [be able to] fuck you [in a nice way]’. This is a similar format to many Hollywood films and TV series where the male lead plays the Grandfather role, always meeting young female leads who he would have fucked in the past, subject to Hollywood laws of oedipal propriety.

This scenario also requires a younger male character as stand-in (non)-fuck decoy phallus – a virtualisation of Willis’s retro-potential sex appeal in the format of a ‘younger’ penis-model but non-threatening and undeployed. That is, in Freudian terminology: ‘My dick is not (DIE) HARD enough (to fuck my daughter) and therefore I pass my symbolic baton on to you.’

This exchange is suspended in the figure of the younger male lead as doe-eyed, fantasy-baby, soft-on man-cherub as marker holding open the space (or place) for Willis’s fantasy rigid-designator as lost object and symbol of erect verticality. Impossible potential is mirrored by possible (non)potential. And the female lead in the role of ‘the person who could be fucked’ as a stand-in for our own viewer position. A place or hole that can be occupied, as in Irigaray’s description of ‘woman as a place for man’. After all we all want to be fucked by Bruce Willis. Baby-penis, Man-Father, penis-stool, envelope-sheath. The Fantasy is available to us all in a spectacle of scale. There is no false consciousness. [10]

And so if, for example, you are a soldier holed up in a cellar somewhere and you hear the rumble of tanks. And you are singing a few songs with other people to keep your spirits up – some kind of political or religious bullshit. And the sound of the tanks gets near. And then there are some shouts and a bomb comes bouncing down the stairs. And blows your skin and flesh all over the walls. Then this is called HISTORY and OBLIVION. History structured by the ‘politics of disposability’. As a kind of abstraction. And you have just been ABSTRACTED. 

Or if you are lying underneath the ruins of a factory that collapsed on top of you while you were working, because it was built cheaply so as not to eat into profits.[11] Or if you are working in a deep-space call-centre and mining facility which splits its seams, after a reactor malfunction, spewing flesh and hardware across the void.[12] Or for instance, if you were crushed to death by hundreds of boxes of chocolate. And you tried to attract attention but every time you shouted ‘The Milky Bars are on me’ people just cheered, then you have just been LOVED by the mechanism.[13]

And when the worms find your body under the rubble and turn your body back to chemicals. As a return to the molecular.[14] Back to the universe. Back to NOTHING. Visible and not-visible. As the ultimate expression of sovereignty as ‘the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die’.[15] Or who can be left to die (who can be forgotten). NOTHING as the necropolitical, at once ‘above’ and ‘below’ the scale of the human being. But traced back to real exploitation, to the economy and primitive accumulation. Actual real, unimportant examples of exploitation and oppression. Then you’ve just met MUMMY. And she loves you.[16]

In Elizabethan slang, ‘nothing’ was a term for the female genitalia, as in the title Much Ado About Nothing. To Hamlet, then, ‘nothing’ is what lies between Ophelia’s legs, for, in the male visual system of representation and desire, women’s sexual organs, as Irigaray puts it, ‘represent the horror of having nothing to see.’ When Ophelia is mad, Gertrude says that ‘Her speech is nothing,’ mere ‘unshaped use.’ Ophelia’s speech thus represents the horror of having nothing to say in the public terms defined by the court. Deprived of thought, sexuality, language, Ophelia’s story becomes the Story of O – the story of ZERO.’[17]

In Aristotle’s terms, according to Irigaray, the intelligible order (eidos) actuallised by form is divine. The deity (theos) is the highest being in his metaphysics, and it is the only being uncontaminated by matter and occupying no place in other words, the deity is pure actuality and does not suffer the changes and the destructions characteristic of artifacts and things that come to be in the real world.[18] Articulated in sexual/sexuated terms – matter desires actualisation. At the very moment that matter is presented as defective – because it is merely a potential substance, characterised by privation – it is related to the feminine. ‘You might say that it [matter] yearns [for form] as the female for the male and as the base for the beautiful.’[19]

Infected by parasitic fungi, the ant stumbles out of its colony, its ant-head guided by a pathogen to a precise location in the forest. It climbs a plant and sinks its mandibles into the main vein of a leaf selected for its specific height and orientation. Once anchored it dies, and from the back of its head erupts a stalk, which, ‘while in a way […] quite beautiful, might be considered the world’s least desirable hat’.[20] This in turn rains spores down onto the ant’s fellow workers below, attaching to their exoskeletons. And the cycle begins again.

Benedict Singleton writes that ‘it is less use to the trapped to decide upon some holy condition of freedom’ than to ‘understand how one is implicated in the mechanism of one’s entrapment’. To engage in the former ‘is mere escapism’. But if hunting traps are ‘lethal parodies’ of their prey’s behavior. And the design of traps is a strategy that makes use of ‘observed disposition,’ for instance the ‘inclination to eat certain kinds of food’ in the setting of bait, or even the inclination to understand the 'mechanism of one’s entrapment,’ then obviously a trap might be designed in the way it articulates an ‘escape’ – any type of escape – and the escape from the trap might be the trap: ‘a good snare kills through desperation, strangling the target as it tries to escape’.[21] The trap is the trap. 

Aristotle’s theorising of ‘place’ and selection of the model of ‘topos’ as a lynchpin of his philosophical system,[22] develops from his characterisation of the ‘womb’ as the primary example of place, whereby ‘thing’ (masculine) and place (feminine) are gendered hierarchically: ‘Irigaray emphasizes that the relationship between woman’s function as a dwelling for the embryo and her vagina’s figuration as a place for the man’s penis are not discrete’.[23] This is replayed as a phallo-nostalgic tragedy, where man yearns to return to the Mother's body, whilst at the same time (dis)locating his origin away from the corporeal (from matter): ‘In all his creations, all his works, man always seems to neglect thinking of himself as flesh, as one who has received his body as that primary home…’[24] In this sense, the vagina, according to Irigaray, functions as a ‘perforation’ toward this ‘first place’ as coffin or tomb.[25] But at the same time female sexual and reproductive functions furnish the system with the concept-metaphors to define place as immobile, in order to give limits to ‘Man and to his things’.[26] Everything in its place. Or placed. 

And so we may look to the skies, squinting upwards like Plato’s philosophers escaped from the deceptive materialities of the womb-cave, blinking up at the divine immateriality of the sun and the ‘good’ as the dream-destiny of mankind and the ‘greatest ideas of our civilisation’.[27] Delineating the vertical axis of patriarchy, as the Father of form – the 'progressive erection that goes from quadruped to Homo-erectus.’[28] As a phallus spurting out cum at the sky. As a Fantasy-outside or excess coordinate articulated as both an ‘escape’ from Capitalism (as transcendence, Light, Knowledge, Enlightenment, Truth), and, at the same time, as part of its mechanisms of expansion, as described, for instance, in Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis where capitalism always needs a periphery, a non-capitalist outside to appropriate: new land, new resources, new investment opportunities.[29] This figures space exploration as the export of our retarded and deadly social relations across the galaxy like the escaping monsters in The Thing or Alien– ‘carriers’ of our diseased archaic structurings of time and place.[30] The expansion, militarisation, marketisation, flexibilisation of the Cosmos.

Or this can be reversed around as a parasiting of the present by the future. Ray Brassier, in a recent discussion on JG Ballard’s short story, ‘The Voices of Time’, described the disjunction between adaptation for the future and being in the present: Ballard’s story revolves around an apocalypse, where ‘Time’ is coming to an end; in response, a number of animals begin undergoing strange morphological changes, rapidly evolving to meet a future rushing towards them (a spider that weaves its own neural net outside of its body, a toad with a lead shell, an anemone that hears light). Brassier regards these as examples of the ‘future’s maladaptation to the present’. In Brassier’s analysis this moment is catastrophic[31] – the introduction of a necessary trauma as adaption or orientation towards the future. He describes this as a rehabilitated Prometheanism or enlightened catastrophism where we grasp our destiny in the admittedly corporate/capitalist technologies of advanced science and its applications, for instance, Space Travel.[32] As he describes we have to do something with Time because ‘we know time will do something with us’. The problem here is the brief mention that we should 'refunction' or 'repurpose' the technologies of capitalistic production to 'emancipatory ends'. This is obviously the difficult bit. [33]

Mickey Mouse, Barack Obama, Justin Timberlake, or Nicki Minaj are sitting in a car – flicking their eyes up at the rear view mirror – they move the car forward a few feet to get a better angle to reverse – the view is partly obscured – thinking about what they have to do that day, the events that will unfold in the next few hours – they reverse the car – there is a nasty crunching sound – suspended nauseously between past and future – and they know they’ve just run over next door’s one year old child who has crawled out onto the drive. The emotion of terror/sickness/wonder reminds them of […]

This is reminiscent of the avant-garde aesthetic (trauma) where our experience of experimentation with the configurations of form and space, in the example of an actual object, for instance a cubist painting (the manipulation of materials, colour, planes and so on) predicts future spatial and temporal configurations and radically transformed conditions of experience. An actualisation of the future in the present moment, as a prophecy or promise, of the forthcoming transformation (or not) of relations of exchange between humans, objects and places including (potentially) the transformation of political systems and redistribution of the means of production. In extension, this is played out affectively, as a kind of terror-aesthetic where these proposed transformations predict our own absence or erasure in the sublime of human potential – that is, the modes of experience which make and construct us as humans would now be incomprehensible to us and us to them.[34] At worst a personalised, 'correlationist' bourgeois histrionics (horror vacui).[35]

But if this is viewed from a Deleuzian/Bergsonian perspective – vitalist image of ‘the ‘force of life’ as difference – as the excessive drive to differ – set against the force of repetition of the same, on both human and cosmic scales.[36] As Elizabeth Grosz describes it, through her Irigarayan/Bergsonian analysis of Darwin, as the expression of freedom tied to the capabilities of our own transformable/ transforming bodies telescoping back through the multi-millenial, material, cosmic-queering of life from the bacterial through to the excessive animal-aesthetics of sexual selection. In the extravagant plummage of birds, the decadence of mating ritual and the frenzied dance of bees, then this aesthetic or affect can be splayed out as an oscillation between the ludicrous and the operational, form and informe, possible and impossible, drama and melodrama, present and the future. And always the stratification of or movement between revolution (including social revolution) and banality – potentially revolutionary as well as potentially trivial. Like a gif.[37] A NOTHING as mediation with the future, where mimicry and sophistry operate as the play of the ‘given’ and the ‘made’.[38]

There’s an ‘I’ and a ‘U’ in LUVIN. 

Or to return to the idea of the trap which Elizabeth Grosz discusses with reference to the work of the biologist Jacob von Uexkull who describes the development of fly and spider (in terms similar to Singleton) as a kind of ‘mutual adaption’ or ‘harmonic coordination’ where the spider’s web exists as ‘a kind spatial counterpoint to the movements of the fly’. The fly is ‘already mapped, signaled, its place accommodated [bodily/spatially] in, for example, its inability to see the smooth unmoving threads of the web’.[39] Given this structure, one of the ways the fly might escape is to not be a fly. The exceptional thing here is not only to escape the trap but to express a freedom as other to the logic of the trap. That is, to change the rules of the game. And the conditions which create the spider and the fly. This is the production of an aesthetics which is always concerned with affective experience of ontological force, as a virtual and material force of transformation acting in and on the actual drives and flesh of our bodies, as they exist now (positioned by class, race and sexual/sexuated relation) and as they have transformed over Time. [40] Which is why aesthetics is like sci-fi and why Outer Space is so important to aesthetics and politics.

Sub-troped as post-alien category 7/humanoid, deep space cleansing operative 7S1A/Amboina, including tentacle attachments and penis-vagina refurb, moving across the blackness – galaxy reflected in her visor. Meat suit with bio implants. Rotating above Entrance hatch x117. She sprouts wings at her sides. Golden scales reflecting bright white. As an intensity of mimicry and acting out of the cadavers of place. Miming mime itself. Gliding upwards. An angel. As a movement across the material and the divine. As both. The space between.

John Russell is an artist living and working in London, http://www.john-russell.com This text was written to accompany the exhibition AQUARIUM PROLETARIUM at MOT International London, 12 December - 31 January 2015 

FOOTNOTES

1. Georges Bataille, ‘The Pineal Eye’, in Visions of Excess. Selected Writings, 1927-1939, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, pp. 85-6.

2. Irigaray, Luce, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), Ithaca/NY: Cornell University Press, 1985, p.26.

3. There have been regular criticisms of Luce Irigaray's writing as heteronormative and/or biological essentialism (in particular in 1980s and ’90s), for instance Judith Butler's comments in Diacritics 28/1, (1998), pp.27-28. For a survey of these criticisms, see Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray. Philosophy in the Feminine, Routledge: London, (1991), pp.9-25 . As Naomi Schor writes (paraphrasing Whitford's description of Irigaray's 'strategic essentialism') '... mimeticism is the strategy, essentialism is the stage [...] as a philosopher in the feminine Irigaray is obliged not only to pass through essentialism but also to speak its language.' (In 'Previous Engagements. The Receptions of Irigaray', ed.s, Burke, Schor and Whitford, Engaging with Irigaray, Columbia Univ. Press, (1994), pp.11-12. Irigaray locates sexual difference in context of patriarchy as structuring force. Also see: bell hooks, 'Understanding Patriarchy', http://imaginenoborders.org/ pdf/zines/UnderstandingPatriarchy.pdf

4. Irigaray, Luce, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), Ithaca/NY: Cornell University Press, 1985, p. 89.

5. Youtube: Operación de pene a vagina, 2011.https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=wCigVyJBZus

6. William Beebe, Edge of the Jungle, 1921. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=WxLDin3vYUs.

7. Sky Broadband Unlimited Advert with Bruce Willis, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=9ehtYUYxVrM

8. 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968 (Dir. Stanley Kubrick).

9. Benedict Singleton, ‘Maximum Jailbreak’, e-flux journal, #46, June 2013 http://www.e-flux.com/journal/maximum-jailbreak/ Those ‘who point to the huge expanse of the earth and the whole terrestrial history of life – this is nothing but myopia, squalid provincialism'. As if the choice was between shiny-suited utopia and some hippy smoking spliffs and talking about dolphins.

10. I have to admit I would like to be fucked by Bruce Willis. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, p.35.

11. 'Bangladesh garment factory fire kills 10 people,’ Associated Press, Oct. 9, 2013 

http://www.apnewsarchive.com/2013/Fire-at-Banglade...

 Working classes to be moved underground: Daily Mirror, August 19 2014. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/social-cleans...

12. Following the capitalisation of outer space, the mass exportation of the poor and dispossessed to deep space live-work factory units and call centres becomes common-place - far beyond the terrestrial reach of labour and health and safety regulations.

13. Catchphrase from British TV advert for Nestlé Milky Bar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= muJDv6Do124

14. This is the affect of ‘Radical Bewilderment’ as the move to ‘molecularity’ in context of culture, politics, social relations whatever, where matter, as ‘particulate’ becomes a kind of sublime miniature [or ‘whatever-vastness’], and the blooming of ‘ontological wonder’ separates ‘the space of rapture from questions of ‘commitment, collective struggle, utopia.’ Jordana Rosenberg, ‘The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present’, Theory & Event 17.2 (2014), Project MUSE.

15. Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics,’ in Public Culture, Winter, 15(1), 2003, 11-40: 11.

16. 'After all ‘we are all still cunts,’ Silvia Federici, 'Wages Against Housework', Power of Women Collective and Falling Wall Press, 1975: http://caringlabor.wordpress.com 2010/09/15/silvia-federici-wages-against-housework/

17. ‘Reproductive’ or ‘domestic’ labour is not conventionally (socially) validated as ‘waged’ labour, nor clearly accounted for in Marx’s Capital – that is, the process of transforming Marx’s ‘basket of commodities’ into labour-power. See Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women. Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’, in Towards an Anthropology of Women, NY: Monthly View Press, 1975. This labour is essential to capitalist production but invisible in its accounting. ‘These are the non-social of the social, the non-labour of labour. They are cut off from social production; they must not only appear as, but also be non-labour, that is, they are naturalised. They constitute a sphere whose dissociation is necessary to make the production of value possible: the gendered sphere’. ‘The Logic of Gender’, Endnotes, #3, September 2013. http://endnotes.org.uk/en/ endnotes-the-logic-of-gender

18. 'The emergence of the intelligible ideas as a standard of truth depends upon the reduction of feminine materiality to inert matter, whose constitutive exclusion sustains the intelligible by suppressing an alternative standard and serving as the ground upon which the progression to the intelligible world occurs,’ Anne Caldwell, 'Transforming Sacrifice: Irigaray and the Politics of Sexual Difference', Hypatia, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Autumn, 2002), pp.16-38, esp. p.18. And therefore the material, changeable, base, finite, dirty, sinful (feminine/female) is differentiated from the eternal/immutable/pure/ divine/immaterial (masculine/ male). These kinds of structures are emphasised by Irigaray as underpinning the 'greatest ideas of our civilization.’

19. Rebecca Hill, The Interval. Relation and Becoming in Irigaray, Aristotle, and Bergson, New York: Fordham University Press: 2012, p.26.

20. Matt Simon, ‘The Zombie Ant and the Fungus That Controls Its Mind', Wired, Sept. 2013. http://www.insidetasmania.com/ p/weird-news.html

21. Benedict Singleton, ‘Maximum Jailbreak’, e-flux journal, #46, June 2013 http://www.e-flux.com/journal/maximum-jailbreak/

22. In Physics, 4.1-5, Aristotle considers the potential of four models for the concept of ‘place’: form, matter, interval and the first immobile limit surrounding a body. He rejects the first three in favour of the fourth thus grounding his philosophy in a structure of immobile places. See, Rebecca Hill, The Interval. Relation and Becoming in Irigaray, Aristotle, and Bergson, pp. 37-54.

23. Rebecca Hill, The Interval, p.59. See also p.57: ‘Man’s body is entangled in Aristotle’s conception of a thing, (not matter) and woman’s body is bound up in his concept of topos (place)'. This is presented as uncontroversial/ neutral; and Irigaray claims these metaphors repeat throughout the history of philosophy and culture, instantiated in our 'commonsensical' ideas of time and space. For instance, her interpretation of Plato's parable where the philosophers escape from the cave (womb) and seek the vertical purity of origin/Truth in the immateriality of the Sun/Light.

24. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, pp.127-8.

25. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, p.41

26. Rebecca Hill, The Interval, pp.59-60.

27. Shulamith Firestone claims: ‘Of all feminist theorists De Beauvoir is the most comprehensive and far-reaching, relating feminism to the best ideas in our culture.’ Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, New York: Bantam, p.7. Luce Irigaray writing a few years later suggests that it’s the ‘best ideas’ that are the problem.

28. Georges Bataille, ‘The Pineal Eye’, in Visions of Excess. Selected Writings, 1927-1939, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, p.87.

29. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, 1913: https://www.marxists.org/ archive/luxemburg/1913/ accumulation-capital/accumulation.pdf. 

In more contemporary contexts, David Harvey suggests that the world capitalist system needs to find $1.5tn profitable investment opportunities today in order to keep growing at its historical average of 3 percent a year – and $3tn by 2030. From David Harvey, ‘The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis this Time’ (paper prepared for the American Sociological Association Meetings in Atlanta, 2010): http://davidharvey.org/2010/08/the-enigma-of-capit...

30. Under Article II of the 1967 ‘United Nations Outer Space Treaty’, the whole of outer space ‘is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means’. But lawyers promoting the extension of the private sector into outer space now claim that the framers of the UN Outer Space Treaty '... were deliberately ambiguous about private property as opposed to nationally owned property’. And that ‘the settling of space – including the establishment of permanent settlements on the Moon and Mars – will bring incalculable economic and social benefits to all nations’. Therefore 'sufficient profits must be guaranteed, and this can only be done by ensuring property rights in space'. Peter Dickens, ‘The Humanization of the Cosmos – To What End?’, Monthly Review, Volume 62, Issue 06, 2010. https://monthlyreview.org/2010/11/ 01/the-humanization-of-the-cosmos-to-what-end/#en70

31. In Brassier’s analysis the actualisation of the future in the present moment is catastrophic as the introduction of a necessary trauma, because the future always requires adaptation. Brassier suggests that we orient ourselves towards the production and logic of catastrophe, so that we may become masters of trauma and seize the future. An enlightened catastrophism and rehabilitation of prometheanism, as the claim that there are no predetermined limits of what we can achieve or limits on how or what we can become. That we ‘…should try and do something with time, given that time will try to do something to us.’ This requires the acknowledgement that ‘…the way we understand the world and the way we change the world based on that understanding is continually transforming’. Ray Brassier, EXPO 1: NEW YORK, MoMA PS1, 19 July 2013: http://www.momaps1.org/expo1/event/raymond-brassier/

32. Likewise Benedict Singleton steers clear of describing how space travel is wrested from capitalist control, although he describes the ‘irreducibility of design to stated motivations of capital interest, social progress or scientific advance’, proposing a scenario where freedom is quantitative, ‘proceeding by degree – we are free of this, and then of this, and then of this’, new end points emerging in process ‘rather than an a priori finish line […]’. Benedict Singleton, ‘Maximum Jailbreak’, ACCELERATE. The Accelerationist Reader, Falmouth/Berlin: Urbanomic, 2014, pp.489-507.

33. Ray Brassier, ‘Prometheanism and its critics’, in (ed.s) McKay, R. and Avanessian, A., ACCELERATE. The Accelerationist Reader, Falmouth/Berlin: Urbanomic, 2014, p.469.

34. For instance, Robert Neville, as the last human in Richard Matheson’s , I am Legend, 1954. Or Marx’s conception of species-being: ‘It is therefore in his fashioning of the objective that man really proves himself to be a species-being. Such production is his active species-life. Through it nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is therefore the objectification of the species-life of man: for man reproduces himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created. In tearing away the object of his production from man, estranged labour therefore tears away from him his species-life, his true species-objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.’ Karl Marx, 'Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts' (1844) in Karl Marx, Early Writings, New York: Vintage Books, p.197, p.329. For instance, Irigaray proposes a transformation of the symbolic/imaginary, as an ontology of ‘at least two sets of forces, two kinds of processes, two relations to the world’, as opposed to a tracking back to the one. Cosmonauts therefore require a ‘from-birth’ re-education as a way of reformatting our retarded social relations and conceptions of time and space: ‘The transition to a new age requires a change in our perception and conception of space-time, the inhabiting of places and of containers and envelopes of identity’. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, p.7.

35. Horror or 'wonder'. ‘When the first encounter with some object surprises us, and we judge it to be new or very different from what we formerly knew, or from what we supposed that it ought to be, that causes us to wonder and be surprised; and because that may happen before we in any way know whether this object is agreeable to us or is not so, it appears to me that wonder is the first of all the passions’. René Descartes, ‘The Passions of the Soul’, article 53. Quoted in Irigaray, Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, p.13.

36. ‘See I had this theory once … I believed in the politics of Saturday night … I rated all governments and countries by how good or bad their Saturday nights were and I knew that Moscow and Peking had to be a stone drag at that time of the week … so I was fighting for a cause … I was fighting to defend chicken barbecues and weenie roasts and Ray Charles songs and drinking Southern Comfort till you pass out behind the bar…’ Mel Gibson, Air America, 1990. Also see Elizabeth Grosz's description of the 'repetition of matter', Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone, Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art, Durham &London: Duke University Press, 2011, pp.52-54.

37. In the sense of the 'dialectical image', that is, the dynamic force of ‘images charged with movement’ as in Benjamin’s structuring of messianic time, where the fleeting appearance (movement) of the dialectical image invokes action, animated philosophically and politically by its impermanence and movement. Or for instance as Bataille writes, in ‘Nietzsche’s Laughter’, pp.18-19, the possible exists at ‘the limit of the impossible.’ ‘The possible and the impossible are both in the world. We are troubled by the sky, the starry space in which we discover the laws of harmony, general viability. In this domain we can have a presentiment of suspended horror, ungraspable to us. But we have a precise knowledge of our terrestrial domain that comes from the possible and the impossible. The possible is organic life and its development in a favourable setting. The impossible is the final death, the necessity of destruction for existence. This at least is irreducible: human conduct adds the exuberance of cruelty, useless disorders, war, torture, oppression, vice, prostitution, alcoholism, and, in the end, the multiple horrors of misery.’

38. Discussing the relationship between the organism and its surroundings Roger Callois describes the operations of camouflage where ‘resemblance is therefore obtained by the sum of a certain number of small details, each of which has nothing exceptional about it and can be found isolated in neighbouring species, but whose combination produces an extraordinary imitation of a dry leaf’. Later he writes: ‘Mimicry is an excess or dangerous luxury for instance the case of the Phyllia who eat each other ‘taking each other for real leaves … the simulation of the leaf being a provocation to cannibalism … The search for the similar would seem to be a means, if not an intermediate stage. Indeed, the end would appear to be assimilation to the surroundings.’ Roger Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’ (1935), October 31, 1984, pp.12-32, especially p.23, p.25 and p.27. 

Irigaray describes mimicry as: ‘[a]n interim strategy for dealing with the realm of discourse (where the speaking subject is posited as masculine), in which the woman deliberately assumes the feminine style and posture assigned to her within this discourse in order to uncover the mechanisms by which it exploits her’, Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p.221. As Elizabeth Grosz puts it ‘Irigaray mimics the hysteric’s mimicry. She mimes mime itself.’ Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists, St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, (1989), p.136. Irigaray’s mimicry is both ‘…terroristic and terrorized’ Dianne Chisholm, `Irigaray's Hysteria', in Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor and Margaret Whitford, Engaging with Irigaray, New York:Columbia Press, pp.263-283, esp. p.269.

39. Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone, Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art, Durham &London: Duke University Press, 2011, pp.180-1.

40. Both Marx and Irigaray propose ontological change as disruption of given and made (as Brassier puts it). For instance what Luce Irigaray proposes as a terrifying but understandable and experienceable ontological transformation (because of the way she connects it to the conditions of our body), is the an ontology of at least two, as opposed to continuously tracking back to ‘The One’ as God or Truth, a structure which she claims underpins Western philosophy/ politics. An ontology which would always include at least two perspectives/positions and is never collapsible back to one. In part the force of this is aesthetic.

Irigaray retrieves one of Aristotle’s rejected models of ‘place,’ that is ‘the interval’ – the space in between – and transforms it from a ‘place’ into a ‘thing’ or substance – always in play – in the same way that mucous or the placenta are conductive materials between things. For instance, Irigaray’s example of mucus as medium of exchange between bodies for the absorption of food, oxygenation, sexual reproduction – as the points at which our bodies exchange matter with what is not our body: mucus ‘serving love, respiration [and] song’. The way the spoken voice requires saliva to occur, as the physical relation becoming social. Or the placenta as a negotiation between the embryo which is part foreign (half of its genes are paternal) and the maternal body. Living tissue that operates during a (roughly consistent) term of pregnancy – the placental relation gestures to the past experience of the Mother, her relations with others and with her milieu, to her own prenatal life within her mother’s body, and to her future, which is unknowable. The embryo is also virtually human – a boy or a girl – with an incalculable future.