Complete Unknown

Healthcare reform in the USA: Biggie Size it

2009-08-30T11:19:00.028+01:00

For weeks I have been putting off writing about the health care reform debate in the US. This is an issue that has interested me deeply for some time, and in the past I have done a lot of research on health care spending globally, some of it for a course on Medicine, Ethics, and Law, and some out of personal interest. A recent discussion in a stream of comments on a Facebook status update finally sparked the writing of this post.

In response to an anti-insurance rant by an American friend of mine comparing insurance giants to Big Brother, someone else commented "...I might become Big Brother. If I'm paying, it is going to totally hack me off to see the 250 pounders on their scooters buying sodas, ho hos, cigarettes and beer. I'll be following them through the store, 'nope sorry honey, none for you!"

Now I won't even get into all the moral complexities brought into play when well-off Americans (such as the commenter) complain about the unhealthy lifestyles of the millions of uninsured poor whose real incomes have not budged since the 1960s even as the economy and prices have grown, who are effectively the economic and social victims of the deregulation that has brought prosperity to the middle classes, and the associated fast-fooding and automobile-dependency of the American lifestyle; the fact that Mississippi is both the poorest and the fattest state in America (the fattest nation in the world) should give you an idea. (Yes, I am saying that the rich got rich on the backs of the fat and poor they complain about.) Nor is it necessary to inquire extensively here into how those unhealthy lifestyles developed on the ground level - for anyone interested in how America came to be the fattest nation on the planet, watch Morgan Spurlock's 'Super Size Me' - it's a good start. (hint: it does have something to do with aggressive marketing strategies and corporate profit margins)

If you want to think in such inhuman terms, the simple statistical truth is that people with unhealthy lifestyles (i.e. smokers) are actually much less of a burden on the health system, because - surprise!! - they die younger. It just so happens that a grossly disproportionate amount of money - even here in the UK, on the much-maligned NHS - is spent on the last few decades of life for those who, due to their extremely healthy lifestyles, get past 65. And no, there are no 'death panels' on the NHS, contrary to what has been reported in the American press. (As an aside, if obesity is the complaint, cigarettes have the added benefit of reducing the burden even further, given that tobacco is an appetite suppressant and most chain-smokers are highly unlikely to be obese. ) So in all fairness, the fat-asses my interlocutor complained about might be equally if not more justified shoving cigarettes down her throat to save the public the expense of keeping her alive well into her 70s and 80s...

But thank God that most people in countries with national health insurance schemes don't think that way, and neither does anyone follow fat-asses through the store and tell them what to eat, nor do old people get cut off when they get past a certain age.

The cost of end-of-life care and old-age care for that matter is disproportionately high anywhere, except where a policy choice is made to have so-called 'death panels', but I have not heard of such a country. Conservatives like to point to well-publicized cases of, say, the NHS refusing to fund a particular trial of an experimental cancer drug or something of the kind. You think that HMOs on private insurance don't refuse to fund treatments? Of course they do, all the time, and even more so - I can confirm this from experience as a patient on both sides. And think of the economic incentive - the only difference is that with private insurance, such decisions are made first and foremost for the sake of corporate profit margins rather than the public interest or absolute budget limits. In a national health care system - no profit margin means more money to spend on health care.

And whether you're insured privately or on a national insurance scheme, you always have the option to pay for treatments not covered on the insurance out-of-pocket - but that's got nothing to do with what system you're in. In fact, if anything, in such cases you'd be better off being in the UK, than in the US, where no price caps and sparse market regulation mean that treatments paid out-of-pocket would cost several times more.

The disproportional cost of old-age care is even greater in the US. When I last looked at the WHO statistics on public health spending, the US government's per capita health spending - the public funds spent on healthcare - was higher than in any European country besides France. Public health spending in the US is basically Medicare and Medicaid. What that means is that Americans are already paying more than most Europeans in taxes and other public spending per capita to fund a government-run healthcare system - but they only benefit from that money if they are over 65 or very poor and fulfill certain criteria.

One major reason as mentioned is that caring for seniors (i.e. the Medicare program) is very expensive, and the more so the older they get. But another reason is that the US healthcare system is way overpriced - i.e. no price caps - drug companies can charge whatever the hell they want, which is why congress tried to pass a bill a few years back to buy drugs from Canada, from the same companies, the same brands.

Factor into the public spending all the out-of-pocket costs (even Medicare isn't totally 'free'), the private insurance spending which is even greater per capita, both insurance premiums and co-pays, and you get a health system that is priced way above what its actual performance deserves, taking into account the standard of living and price index, which are greater in many European countries.

Do you get a better healthcare system for all that money? Don't think so. Last time I looked at WHO's health performance indicators, the US was middle-range, sharing the same infant mortality rate as Cuba - one of the poorest countries in the word, but one which alleviates that poverty with a health system that performs well beyond its means. I can't imagine what the NHS would be like, or the Cuban health care system for that matter, if they spent the amount of money per capita that the US already spends on Medicare and Medicaid.

Yet another reason for the high cost of healthcare in the US is precisely that it is too cumbersome compared to single payer healthcare systems. That is the argument against private insurance and in favour of something like the NHS - which precisely has the benefit of making things simpler, cuts out a lot of bureaucracy and paperwork. (Again, I can confirm this from experience as a patient on both sides)...

Another type of scare story cited by pro-corporate Americans (such as this blog) is that a national healthcare plan would 'victimize' immigrants and other vulnerable populations. One story cited is of an immigrant spouse of a New Zealander who is denied care due to rules that do not allow immigrants to be a 'public burden'. It is irrelevant whether the story is true or not. And let's not even discuss the blanket assumption that an immigrant in New Zealand would have access to health care through private insurance were things otherwise. The simple fact is that any American who buys this argument is unfamiliar with their own immigration system. (No surprise there, most likely they've never been through it) Under current rules, a legal 'green card' immigrant in the US is not allowed to become a 'public burden'; any American citizen with an immigrant spouse is required to sign an affidavit to this effect, declaring that they will be financially liable in the event that their spouse becomes a 'public burden' (i.e. by claiming social security).

Obviously, the issue at stake is not the humane provision of a health service for all New Zealanders or Americans, but the inhumane immigration rules which exclude non-citizens. When I signed up for the health service here in the UK, I didn't have to prove anything except my address, and even that only for the purpose of ensuring I am with the right GP for my area. Aside from my medical history the past few years, the only thing the NHS knows about me is my name and address. They don't know or care what my legal status is here - and I am not even a permanent resident, but a student now on a two-year post-study work visa. Once, a friend who lives in Italy contracted a kidney infection while on a brief visit here - she has a chronic condition - she was able to get phone advice over a 24-hour help line the same evening without even giving her name, and treatment from our GP the next morning, no fuss.

I can imagine what the next complaint would be, and I have heard that one too - 'medical tourism'. What people seem to forget is that going to the doctor is no fun for most people. I sure as hell put it off even when I should go to the doctor, even when I can do it for free. You don't need the disincentive of co-pays, let alone going to another country to get it. We're not talking government-sponsored tickets to the theater. When people go to the trouble of going to another country specifically to get medical treatment, most likely they really need it badly, and they can't afford it or obtain it otherwise. Anyone who's got a problem with that is sick in the head.

Yet another thing to consider is that it works both ways - the fact that someone visiting the UK from another country can get medical treatment here without a problem, and without charge, should they fall ill during their visit, is something we should be grateful for as human beings; just as much as the fact that I can similarly travel worry-free in some countries. If some people do abuse the system and come here for free treatment on purpose even when they could get it otherwise, or for treatment not medically necessary, there is really very little you can do about it without harming the majority of people who don't abuse the system, but it doesn't really worry me that much. You can't ever totally avoid people pissing in public parks, yet the fact that it happens is no argument for keeping them closed.

If you want to compare costs, I would advise anyone in the US lucky enough to have a health insurance plan to take a good look at their paycheck; and calculate what they pay in income tax, and add to that the health insurance premiums, social insurance, out-of-pocket costs, take it all out. And then calculate what you get in return. I guarantee that they will find that on average, contrary to the perception that Europeans pay a lot of taxes, Americans are the ones getting screwed over. Not by the government, however - but by the insurance companies and pharmaceutical giants.

Because ultimately, any health insurance money comes out of your paycheck, even if your health insurance is 'employer-funded'. The higher the insurance premiums, the less money there is for you to negotiate over. This is something that annoys me about some union bargaining strategies - in 2002, the AFL-CIO officially opposed a ballot initiative in Oregon to provide a state-wide health-coverage plan, on the grounds that the tax that would be imposed to finance it took up to 8% income tax (with as low as 2% for lower incomes) and up to 11% payroll tax. The employer, the AFL-CIO held, should bear a greater portion of the cost. But this is a bogus argument, as some local unions who favoured the plan realized - the tax money taken together would amount to much less than what is doled out on private insurance plans; in reality it doesn't matter who finances the health care on paper - whether it is payroll or income tax, the more money it costs, the less there is to negotiate over for pay rises and other benefits. The goal should be to cut health care costs, and one big way to do it is to eliminate insurance companies and corporate profit margins. The rest we can squabble over later.

Also, while medical malpractice is certainly another major contributor to the cost of healthcare in the US, that should have no impact on the extraordinarily high cost of Medicare, which is driven largely by drug prices and old-age care, which rarely involves malpractice.

Moreover, the highly litigious, adversarial culture of high payouts in damages that has developed in the US is precisely the result of a privatized system. When you pay for something, when health is a commodity rather than a public service, you have different expectations of it, even if those expectations are entirely misguided - i.e. relying on the misguided notion that if you pay doctors more they are less likely to make mistakes.

My only major criticism of Obama's health care package would be that it does not go far enough. In order to truly address all the problems with the US healthcare system without creating new ones, what needs to be dealt with is not just the cost of health insurance premiums, but the cost of health care itself - down to the root. If you simply move to a single payer system without imposing price caps (especially on pharmaceuticals), without investing in lower-cost medical education (recognizing foreign medical school diplomas would be a start), or investing in preventive care and patient education, even with all the savings achieved by cutting out the insurance companies (see Paul Krugman's article;) operating the system may prove to be simply too expensive. The system may be headed for insolvency, just as Medicare is at the moment.

Not to mention the need to address the shocking amount of disinformation and ignorance among Americans regarding this issue. As Krugman notes in a more recent piece, some Americans who benefit from Medicare don't even know that it is a government-run program.

Going back to the obesity issue, rather than complaining about it, perhaps my interlocutor should have considered whether the 250-pounders buying soda and ho hos are precisely why America needs national health insurance. Most people like them most likely don't even have health insurance, or regular access to a doctor, or anyone to tell them - before it is too late - that their enormous weight is something they should see a doctor for, that it is the product not so much of the quantity they eat, but the kind of food they eat. But bear in mind that if their lifestyles do change and their life expectancy goes up, they will cost the health care system - public or private - more, not less.

If as Morgan Spurlock puts it, "everything's bigger in America", then the healthcare plan needs to be too. America needs one super-sized biggie McWhopper of a public health insurance scheme in order to sort out all its problems.

Zizek on Iran: will the cat above the precipice fall down?

2009-06-28T00:23:00.009+01:00

[This is an unpublished piece on Iran by Slavoj Zizek, which the mainstream media are apparently not interested in publishing. It was e-mailed to me by an Iranian friend and has appeared on the Support for the Iranian People 2009 blog. The argument is pretty much the same one made by Zizek in one of the lectures I attended at Birkbeck last week (in which he mentions my friend Ali by name, should anyone dispute the authenticity of the article). There is some audio of Zizek's lecture on the above-mentioned site, as well as here, in part IV, I believe.]

Slavoj Zizek

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, its dissolution as a rule follows two steps. Before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that the regime loses its legitimacy, its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent panic reaction. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down…

In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution, Ryszard Kapuscinski located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman simply withdrew; in a couple of hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although there were street fights going on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game is over. Is something similar going on now?

There are many versions of the events in Tehran. Some see in the protests the culmination of the pro-Western “reform movement” along the lines of the “orange” revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, etc. – a secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution. They support the protests as the first step towards a new liberal-democratic secular Iran freed of Muslim fundamentalism. They are counteracted by skeptics who think that Ahmadinejad really won: he is the voice of the majority, while the support of Mousavi comes from the middle classes and their gilded youth. In short: let’s drop the illusions and face the fact that, in Ahmadinejad, Iran has a president it deserves. Then there are those who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the cleric establishment with merely cosmetic differences from Ahmadinejad: Mousavi also wants to continue the atomic energy program, he is against recognizing Israel, plus he enjoyed the full support of Khomeini as a prime minister in the years of the war with Iraq.

Finally, the saddest of them all are the Leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad: what is really at stake for them is Iranian independence. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country’s independence, exposed elite corruption and used oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority – this is, so we are told, the true Ahmadinejad beneath the Western-media image of a holocaust-denying fanatic. According to this view, what is effectively going on now in Iran is a repetition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh – a West-financed coup against the legitimate president. This view not only ignores facts: the high electoral participation – up from the usual 55% to 85% - can only be explained as a protest vote. It also displays its blindness for a genuine demonstration of popular will, patronizingly assuming that, for the backward Iranians, Ahmadinejad is good enough - they are not yet sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular Left.

Opposed as they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests along the axis of Islamic hardliners versus pro-Western liberal reformists, which is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: is he a Western-backed reformer who wants more personal freedom and market economy, or a member of the cleric establishment whose eventual victory would not affect in any serious way the nature of the regime? Such extreme oscillations demonstrate that they all miss the true nature of the protests.

The green color adopted by the Mousavi supporters, the cries of “Allah akbar!” that resonate from the roofs of Tehran in the evening darkness, clearly indicate that they see their activity as the repetition of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, as the return to its roots, the undoing of the revolution’s later corruption. This return to the roots is not only programmatic; it concerns even more the mode of activity of the crowds: the emphatic unity of the people, their all-encompassing solidarity, creative self-organization, improvising of the ways to articulate protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity and discipline, like the ominous march of thousands in complete silence. We are dealing with a genuine popular uprising of the deceived partisans of the Khomeini revolution.

There are a couple of crucial consequences to be drawn from this insight. First, Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor, but a genuine corrupted Islamo-Fascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi whose mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power politics is causing unease even among the majority of ayatollahs. His demagogic distributing of crumbs to the poor should not deceive us: behind him are not only organs of police repression and a very Westernized PR apparatus, but also a strong new rich class, the result of the regime’s corruption (Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is not a working class militia, but a mega-corporation, the strongest center of wealth in the country).

Second, one should draw a clear difference between the two main candidates opposed to Ahmadinejad, Mehdi Karroubi and Mousavi. Karroubi effectively is a reformist, basically proposing the Iranian version of identity politics, promising favors to all particular groups. Mousavi is something entirely different: his name stands for the genuine resuscitation of the popular dream which sustained the Khomeini revolution. Even if this dream was a utopia, one should recognize in it the genuine utopia of the revolution itself. What this means is that the 1979 Khomeini revolution cannot be reduced to a hard line Islamist takeover – it was much more. Now is the time to remember the incredible effervescence of the first year after the revolution, with the breath-taking explosion of political and social creativity, organizational experiments and debates among students and ordinary people. The very fact that this explosion had to be stifled demonstrates that the Khomeini revolution was an authentic political event, a momentary opening that unleashed unheard-of forces of social transformation, a moment in which “everything seemed possible.” What followed was a gradual closing through the take-over of political control by the Islam establishment. To put it in Freudian terms, today’s protest movement is the “return of the repressed” of the Khomeini revolution.

And, last but not least, what this means is that there is a genuine liberating potential in Islam – to find a “good” Islam, one doesn’t have to go back to the 10th century, we have it right here, in front of our eyes.

The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others. Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.

people reloaded: why mass protest in iran is true politics worth supporting

2009-06-28T00:20:00.004+01:00

by Morad Farhadpour and Omid Mehrgan [translators and philosophers based in Tehran]

[This piece is copyright-free. Please distribute widely.]

In the past two weeks, the majority of people in Tehran and other cities in Iran (including Shiraz, Ahwaz, Tabriz, Isfihan) have been on the streets, protesting against the theft of the presidential election by a handful of state’s agents at the top level. It was not a rigging in the usual western sense, no added votes or replaced ballot boxes, the election went on properly, the votes were taken and probably even counted, the figures transmitted to the ministry of interior, and it was there that they were totally disregarded and replaced by totally fictitious figures. That is why all the opposition forces (Sazman-e-Mojahedin-e-Enghelab, Mosharekat party...) together with people called it a coup d’état.

Global public opinion and, especially, the body of (leftist) intellectuals, Inspired by recent events in the middle Asia and east Europe, mostly regard this Iranian mass protest as another version of the well-known, newly invented, neo-liberal, U.S.-sponsored, colour-coded revolutions, as in Georgia and Ukraine. But is it the case in Iran? This article intends to clarify the issue, to reveal the properly political essence of current mass movement, and to demonstrate that this movement has the potentiality of a self-transcendence, of surpassing its actual demands, of traversing its current phantasy. To do this, we shall first examine the contemporary tradition of radical politics in Iran. Without these references, the current movement, which truly deserves this title, can not be understood correctly.

People, whether consciously or not, are frequently recollecting the 1979 Revolution and the 1997 Reform Movement. Many of their slogans are transformed slogans of the '79 Revolution. The paths of demonstrations are symbolically significantly, the same as those against Shah. But this does not mean that people are imitating the '79 Revolution: there are many new possibilities and creativities, many formal and thematic inventions. As for the 1997 Reform Movement, and its aftermath (the crushing of student protest in 1999), the affinities are even more obvious. Khatami, along with Mir Hossein Mousavi, is one of the most significant leaders and supporters of the protest. It is as if people are trying to redeem the 2nd of Khordad (May 23, 1997), to revive the unfinished hopes and dreams of those days. But this time, the protest is by no means limited to students and intellectuals. Although Khatami in 1997 was elected with 20 million votes from the most varied sections of the nation, the movement was characterized by the political and cultural demands of the middle-class, of students and educated people. But, apart from this, what is the true significance of the 2nd of Khordad Front for politics in Iran?

On the 2nd of Khordad, for the first time since Iranian Revolution, we were encountering a dichotomy between the state and the total system of Islamic Republic of Iran, known as Nezam (System, which is based on the principle of Velayat-e-Faghih, the supreme authority of high-ranked Mullahs). This duality was partly due to the fact that the leader of the opposition, Khatami, was at the same time the chief of the state. It was the only occasion where this duality, which is, in a sense, one between the development of productive forces and cultural, political backwardness, between secular democracy and religious fanaticism, could be revealed. Before and after that period, the state and Nezam have been basically in accordance, as it had been in the Shah's Regime. One of the reasons, if not the main reason, why elections in Iran are of such importance for democratic movements, despite trends to boycott them, lies precisely in the significance of this very duality. Seen from a classical-Marxist perspective, in order to pave the way for the development of productive forces, in order to accomplish the ‘civilizing mission’ of capitalism, there must emerge a bourgeois state capable of carrying out the process of democratization and modernization. Whenever the state has been in full accordance with Nezam, this process fails to go on. Besides this, we deal with yet another duality, one between the capital and the state, the former as the means of development (with all its discontents, aptly and righteously exposed by the Marxist tradition), and the latter as the organ of regression and anti-modernism. So, the progressive and socialist opposition in Iran are faced with the unprecedented, hard task of fighting in two fronts: against religious fanaticism and the authoritarian factions in a semi-democratic government, and simultaneously against global capitalism and its hegemony by means of the production of wars. In a sense, intelligentsia in Iran are very similar to that of Russia and Germany of 19th century. We are a handful of schizophrenics who are, at one and the same time, against and for progress, development, capitalism, state management and so on. In other words, for us, the Faustian problematic, his tragedy, is formulated in a typically Hamletian way. This ambivalent attitude (to western civilization) can be characterized by the dialectic of state and politics. We are neither dealing with a pure politics a la Alain Badiou, nor with a classical Marxist politics, exhausted in class struggles, nor with the liberal-democratic politics of human rights, which was, by the way, the dominant discourse of opposition in Iran before Mousavi. Our supposedly radical politics consists of every one of these elements, but is not reducible to any of them. To deploy Agamben’s terminology, it is a politics of people against People, i.e. voiceless, suppressed people, against People officially constructed by the state. The current movement materializes, in many respects, this very politics.

But the question, which has confused the western (left) intelligentsia and has caused the most varied misunderstandings regarding Iran, is whether Ahmadinejad is a leftist, anti-imperialist, anti-privatization, anti-globalization figure. The common answer is a positive one. That is why certain misguided western leftists tend to regard the current mass movement in support of Mir Hossein Mousavi and against Ahmadinejad as the struggle of liberalism against anti-imperialism, of privatization, liberal-democracy against the enemies of global hegemony of America. The main aim of this article is to expose, to expel this widespread illusion. As regards the other confused camp, the Western, more or less, Islamophobic liberals, who are inclined to identify Ahmadinjad with Al-Qaeda, who refer to Mousavi, because of his Islamic-Republican career in 80’s, as another version of Islamic, anti-democratic Ideology, one could say that they too are caught up in an illusion based on easy Euro-centrist generalizations and lack of familiarity with the Iranian historical context. We should thus answer the simple question: what is actually at the stake? Apart from the triad of French Revolution, the triad of modern emancipatory politics, liberty, equality, fraternity, one could maintain that the main bone of contention in this struggle is precisely politics itself, its life and survival. Our government is called the Islamic Republic of Iran. Now the republican moment, which has always been downgraded by the conservatives, is presently being annihilated. It is precisely through this very outlet that any popular politics, from social movement of dissent and class politics to the defence of human rights, might survive.

Another common approach, no matter how radical, supportive, or conservative, to mass protest in Iran is the following: it is a youth movement, at its best, similar to 68’s student protests. New young generation in Iran, armed with Internet, socialized by social networking sites, tired of Islamic ideology, has awakened, claiming its own way of life, and so on. According to this attitude, which is evoked by a number of journalists, it is only the middle-class intellectuals, students, feminists, and other educated people in large cities who are rallying on the streets, communicating with each other thanks to the internet. What is striking is that the state discourse in Iran widely promotes this very attitude. The ruling elite, based on a populist rhetoric, tends to single out a certain section of the nation and call it the People. The state television, Seda-va-Sima, is the main place where this People is represented, indeed constructed, mostly through the usual populist tactic of one nation versus the evil external enemy who is the cause of all trouble. It presents a unified, pure, integrated image of People, all devoting themselves to Nezam, all law-abiding, religious, etc. This image of People is daily imposed on the masses and inscribed onto the body politic. Against this formally constructed People, with the state as its formal face, there has come out another people, a subaltern, muted people, claiming its own place, its own part in the political scene. June 2009 Election was a decisive opportunity for this people to declare itself, in the figure of Mousavi, who from the beginning insisted on people’s dignity as a true political right. But why him? Why not, say, Karroubi, the other reformist candidate? Has Mousvai, now the leader of the mass movement, appeared on the scene in a purely contingent way? Has he by mere chance, by force of circumstances, as it were, become the leading figure, the reform-freedom-democracy incarnate? The answer is positively negative. To elucidate this, we have to draw attention to the tradition from which he has emerged and to which he has repeatedly referred during his electoral campaign. As we said before, this tradition is rooted in 1979 Revolution and has been revived in the 2th of Khordad Movement -- whereas, Karroubi’s ‘politics’ was based on a subjectless process in which different identity groups would present their demands to the almighty state and act as its passive, divided, depoliticized supporters. In fact, Karroubi’s campaign, with its appeal to Western media, using the word ‘change’ in English, and profiting from celebrity figures, was the one that could be called a Western liberal human-rights-loving, even pro-capitalist movement. The fact that millions transcending their identity and immediate interests joined a typically universal militant politics by risking their lives in defence of Mousavi and their dignity, should be enough to cast out all doubts or misguided pseudo-leftist dogmas.

This is what democracy looks like

2009-06-18T18:24:00.026+01:00

The turmoil in Tehran over the past few days manifests precisely the 'minimal difference' that belies the boundary - the line of confrontation - in the so-called 'clash of civilizations'. What was always missing in this simple dichotomy is the actual struggle, the actual tension which is neither between Western democracy and Islam, nor between democracy and authoritarianism, nor simply between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi. In the context of stolen elections, one should always remember that in the 'world's greatest democracy', the Republican party stole at least one, possibly two elections - with a flourish, and deploying a variety of tactics ranging from racially-targeted voter fraud (i.e. 50,000 alleged ex-felons fraudulently purged from the register, most of them black) to voter intimidation, orchestrated at various levels nationwide but most notably in Florida by ex-president W's dear old brother, Governor Jeb and his cohorts.

So what is the difference between a stolen election in the 'world's greatest democracy' and a stolen election in Iran? Well, the Americans never took to the streets in revolt, never rose up in anger against the system that cheated them. In the 2000 election it was Al Gore himself who was behind the final, 11th hour betrayal, when about 20 members of the Congressional Black Caucus filed objections to the Florida vote, and he, as President of the Senate, ruled them out of order, one by one. But beneath all the concrete acts of betrayal, what took place in the US election was a betrayal of democracy by itself. Americans, ironically enough, betrayed democracy because they believed too much in democracy, in the institutions of democracy - they simply lacked cynicism. Living in a state of collective denial for 8 years, or leaving it up to democratic institutions to correct themselves, was preferable to revolt. Denial ain't nothin' but a river in Egypt, as Louis Armstrong put it.

What all this, I think, should tell us is that real democracy - the 'will of the people' - cannot be guaranteed by any system, and the very notion of 'institutional democracy' or 'democratic government' is already a step in the wrong direction, a contradiction of terms - something to be watched over carefully. The only guarantee of democracy is the willingness to revolt. A government is only 'democratic' as a function of the people's readiness to wipe it out when it turns corrupt - by non-democratic or non-prescribed means if necessary. Democratic legitimacy can be vested in institutions and formal procedures only so long as the collective will is ready to wipe out those institutions and bypass the prescribed procedures at a moment's notice, wipe the slate clean - because that collective will is ultimately the only substance of democracy. The threat of collective violence must always be present.

What is amusing in all this is the bewilderment of western journalists who see Iranians as a people 'ruled by fear', now all of a sudden taking to the streets and taking up an open struggle. Well, as we can see, under the circumstances and given the odds against them, they are far less ruled by fear and far less fearful than you thought. They have slightly more corrupt and less democratic institutions than some countries in the west; but as a people they are clearly more capable of exercising a collective will without institutions. On the level of collective will, democracy is as alive in Iran as it is in France - the French, natives and immigrants alike, are certainly prepared to revolt over even less than a stolen election - much more so than in the USA or Britain. Instead of the Americans teaching 'freedom and democracy' to the ignorant middle easterners, it's time for them to watch and learn - this is what you do when an election is stolen from you.

The real struggle - not between Iran and the USA, nor between Islam and the West, nor between authoritarianism and democracy - is evident: it is a struggle between collective will and state/institutional authority as such (democratically legitimated or not). It is a struggle that takes place within democracy, within a democracy, within a national political system of any sort, within an institutionalized religion - rather than between one nation and another, between one religion and another, between one political system and another. When that struggle and the difference it entails becomes externalized - as in the myth of the 'clash of civilizations' - the internal tension/difference is projected onto the other. The USA in fighting Islamism or communism was always fighting its own demons, and on the side of state institutional authority: in the case of China it reconciled not only with communism but with authoritarian rule (China was granted permanent 'Most Favoured Nation' status in 2000) - communism became palatable when it eliminated in practice any trace of collective will or 'people rule' - becoming, effectively, state capitalism.

Which explains why some right-wing US politicians and commentators are tacitly or ambiguously supporting Ahmadinejad. (while the liberals are just shrugging their shoulders) The real threat to their side, they well know, comes not from Islam but from any expression of collective will, from popular revolt as such. It just never goes their way, that's all.

Parallels to the 1979 revolution are apt, most of all because what is at stake is repetition, in the Deleuzian sense: in 1979, the revolutionaries lost in the end, as the energy mobilized was hijacked by Islamic fundamentalists who are firmly on the side of state/institutional authority. What is needed is a repetition - repetition is never repetition of the same, but the repetition of a possibility, a potential, and it is only with repetition that the truly new emerges.

In a lecture at Birkbeck today, Slavoj Zizek criticized the left's stance toward Iran, pointing out among other things that Mousavi's opposition movement has activated an emancipatory dimension within Islam itself, rather than pandering to Western liberal ideology. That is precisely it - internal difference, the only real difference. The one divides into two. And it is also the only path to true universality: nous sommes tous Iraniens.* The conservatives have Ahmadinejad, we have Mousavi - not because he panders to any western ideology, he is fully within Islam - but he is within Islam the emancipatory voice that the Left is or should be within capitalism.

I can just imagine western liberals and progressives blinking, "emancipatory dimension within Islam"? Well, yes. If I had a penny for every time an American politician, Republican or Democrat, mentions God...and many of them, frankly, sound more like Ahmadinejad, or even one of the mullahs - rather than Martin Luther King, Jr., or Mousavi for that matter.

Moreover, the ambivalence of the US political establishment is most likely due to the embarrassing realization that what is happening in Iran is "Iraq, the way it should have happened," as Zizek put it. I would only add that the irony is double: it's not just about the failure in Iraq, it's also the failure in Iran itself circa 1953. The reason why Western democracy never took root in Iran in the first place is because when the Iranians tried to build a progressive society, where women were more emancipated than they would be in Switzerland for decades**, and when they elected a socialist government, the British and Americans - prompted by a dispute between Iran and the Anglo-Iranian oil company (in which the International Court of Justice ruled itself incompetent, effectively ruling in Iran's favour) - removed Iran's democratically-elected government and installed the Shah as dictator. And this out of sheer greed and ideological infatuation. 1979 was the long-overdue blowback.

Similarly, Iraq today after a dose of US democracy is more religiously conservative than most Arab countries - more than it has ever been in history.

The thing about western democracy is it's a bit like the ridiculously overpriced pharmaceuticals peddled by multinational corporations, where the side effects seem to reproduce the symptoms they are meant to cure. The common side effects of antidepressants, for instance, include "urinary retention, blurred vision, constipation, sleep disruption, weight gain, headache, nausea, gastrointestinal disturbance/diarrhea, abdominal pain, inability to achieve an erection, inability to achieve an orgasm (men and women), loss of libido, agitation, anxiety" - erm, couldn't all that make one a little depressed? (Conveniently enough, if the side effects do appear, it's impossible to tell if it's the drug or the disease anymore.) Or take for instance the common side effects of antihistamines: "drowsiness, headache, blurred vision, constipation, dry mouth, dizziness, difficulty passing urine, confusion" - are we talking homeopathy or serious medicine here?

A lesson we should draw from history: the most common side effects of 'spreading democracy' - shall we call it, DemocracyProXylitol - include "authoritarianism, religious dogma, fundamentalism, outbursts of violence, repression, war, economic depression, financial meltdown, death, killing, mass imprisonment of political opponents, undemocratic activity, etc"...

The Iranians, left to their own means, are off the medication and are fixing things themselves. One should only hope that they don't give up. And that those outside Iran who take the idea of free self-determination seriously will look past Mousavi's beard.

*in the wake of September 11, 2001, a French newspaper headline proclaimed 'Nous sommes tous Americains' ("we are all Americans"). I agree, but in the sense of 'universality as struggle'; many of us were the skeptical Americans who did not sheepishly buy into their government's rhetoric following the attacks.
**incidentally, I was recently shocked to find out that one Canton in Switzerland only granted women the right to vote in 1990, after a decision by the Swiss supreme court; at the federal level, women's suffrage was granted only in the 1970s.

Why are the iranians dreaming again?*

2009-06-18T18:23:00.004+01:00

The following is a guest post from Ali Alizadeh, Researcher at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University. You can also see him discussing the situation in Iran here on BBC's Newsnight.

[This piece is copyright-free. Please distrbute widely.]

Iran is currently in the grip of a new and strong political movement. While this movement proves that Ahmadinejad’s populist techniques of deception no longer work inside Iran, it seems they are still effective outside the country. This is mainly due to thirty years of isolation and mutual mistrust between Iran and the West which has turned my country into a mysterious phenomenon for outsiders. In this piece I will try to confront some of the mystifications and misunderstandings produced by the international media in the last week.

In the first scenario the international media, claiming impartiality, insisted that the reformists provide hard objective evidence in support of their claim that the June 12 election has been rigged. But despite their empiricist attitude, the media missed obvious facts due to their lack of familiarity with the socio-historical context. Although the reformists could not possibly offer any figures or documents, because the whole show was single-handedly run by Ahmadinejad’s ministry of interior, anyone familiar with Iran’s recent history could easily see what was wrong with this picture.

It was the government who reversed the conventional and logical procedure by announcing a fictitious total figure first – in four stages – and then fabricating figures for each polling station, something that is still going on. This led to many absurdities: Musavi got less votes in his hometown (Tabriz) than Ahmadinejad; Karroubi’s total vote was less than the number of people active in his campaign; Rezaee’s votes were reduced by a hundred thousand between the third and fourth stages of announcement; blank votes were totally forgotten and only hastily added to the count when reformists pointed this out; and finally the ratio between all candidates’ votes remained almost constant in all these four stages of announcement (63, 33, 2 and 1 percent respectively).

Moreover, as in any other country, the increase in turnout in Iran’s elections has always benefitted the opposition and not the incumbent, because it is rational to assume that those who usually don’t vote, i.e. the silent majority, only come out when they want to change the status quo. Yet in this election Ahmadinejad, the representative of the status quo, allegedly received 10 million votes more than what he got in the previous election.

Finally, Ahmadinejad’s nervous reaction after his so-called victory is the best proof for rigging: closing down SMS network and the whole of country’s mobile phone network, arresting more than 100 leading political activists, blocking access to Musavi’s and many other reformists’ websites and unleashing violence in the streets...But if all this is not enough, the bodies of more than 17 people who were shot dead and immediately buried in unknown graves should persuade all those “objective-minded” observers.

In the second scenario, gradually unfolding in the last few days, the international media implicitly shifted its attention to the role of internet and its social networking (twitter, facebook, youtube, etc). This implied that millions of illiterate conservative villagers have voted for Ahmadinejad and the political movement is mostly limited to educated middle classes in North Tehran. While this simplified image is more compatible with media’s comfortable position towards Iran in the last 30 years, it is far from reality. The recent political history of Iran does not confirm this image. For example, Khatami’s victory in 1997, despite his absolute lack of any economic promises and his focus instead on liberal civic demands, was made possible by the polarization of society into people and state. Khatami could win only by embracing people from all different classes and groups, villagers and urban people alike.

There is no doubt that new media and technologies have been playing an important role in the movement, but it seems that the cause and the effect are being reversed in the picture painted by the media. First of all, it is the existence of a strong political determination, combined with people becoming deprived of basic means of communication, which has led the movement to creatively test every other channel and method. Musavi’s paper was shut down on the night of election, his frequent request to talk to people on the state TV has been rejected, his official website is often blocked and his physical contact with his supporters has been kept minimum by keeping him in house arrest (with the exception of his appearance on the over a million march on June 15).

Second, due to the heavy pressure on foreign journalists inside Iran, these technological tools have come to play a significant role in sending the messages and images of the movement to the outside world. However, the creative self-organization of the movement is using a manifold of methods and channels, many of them simple and traditional, depending on their availability: shouting ‘death to dictator’ from rooftops, calling landlines, at the end of one rally chanting the time and place of the next one, and by jeopardizing oneself by physically standing on streets and distributing news to every passing car. The appearance of the movement which is being sold by the media to the western gaze – the cyber-fantasy of the western societies which has already labelled our movement a twitter revolution, seems to have completely missed the reality of those bodies which are shot dead, injured or ready to be endangered by non-virtual bullets.

What is more surprising in the midst of this media frenzy is the blindness of the western left to the political dynamism and energy of our movement. The causes of this blindness oscillate between the misgivings about Islam (or the Islamophobia of hyper-secular left) and the confusion made by Ahmadinjead’s fake anti-imperialist rhetoric (his alliance with Chavez perhaps, who after all was the first to congratulate him). It needs to be emphasized that Ahmadinejad’s economic policies are to the right of the IMF: cutting subsidies in a radical way, more privatization than any other post-79 government (by selling the country to the Revolutionary Guards) and an inflation and unemployment rate which have brought the low-income sections of the society to their knees. It is in this regard that Musavi’s politics needs to be understood in contradistinction from both Ahmadinejad and also the other reformist candidate, i.e. Karroubi.

While Karroubi went for the liberal option of differentiating people into identity groups with different demands (women, students, intellectuals, ethnicities, religious minorities, etc), Musavi emphasized the universal demands of ‘people’ who wanted to be heard and counted as political subjects. This subjectivity, emphasized by Musavi during his campaign and fully incarnated in the rallies of the past few days, is constituted by political intuition, creativity and recollection of the ‘79 revolution (no wonder that people so quickly reached an unexpected maturity, best manifested in the abstention from violence in their silent demonstrations). Musavi’s ‘people’ is also easily, but strongly, distinguished from Ahmadinejad’s anonymous masses dependent on state charity. Musavi’s people, as the collective appearing in the rallies, is made of religious women covered in chador walking hand in hand with westernized young women who are usually prosecuted for their appearance; veterans of war in wheelchairs next to young boys for whom the Iran-Iraq war is only an anecdote; and working class who have sacrificed their daily salary to participate in the rally next to the middle classes. This story is not limited to Tehran. Shiraz (two confirmed dead), Isfahan (one confirmed dead), Tabriz, Oroomiye are also part of this movement and other cities are joining with a predictable delay (as it was the case in 79 revolution).

History will prove who the real participants of this movement are but once again we are faced with a new, non-classical and unfamiliar radical politics. Will the Western left get it right this time?

* The title is a reference to Michel Foucault’s 1978 writing on Iran’s revolution: “What are the Iranians dreaming about?”

Constructivism and the Future

2009-04-20T14:30:00.017+01:00

Far more refreshing than the 'Altermodern' Triennial at the Tate Britain, the special exhibition at the Tate Modern, 'Rodchenko and Popova' provides a comprehensive but by no means nauseating retrospective on the art of the revolution, as it flourished before the thermidor of Socialist Realism. If any 20th century art movement should be revived and rethought, I say, it should be Russian Constructivism.

In fact if, as Zizek says, the future will be either socialist or communist - 'socialist' meaning the kind of nanny-state capitalism practised by Western governments in the wake of the financial crisis - for the art world this must mean that the future will be either Altermodern or Constructivist. Art will either remain more or less what it is, a distinct sphere of rationality backed up by specific forms of cultural practices and modes of communication, or it will be sublated in a multidisiplinary network within an overall revolutionary dissolution of separate social spheres and disciplines.

'Altermodern' is clearly the tendency to be opposed, but not so much for the content of the art it takes under its wing - a lot of which, as discussed earlier, can be described as 'postmodern', in spite of its curator Nicolas Bourriaud's proclamation that 'postmodernism is dead' (kind of like Leonard Cohen's lyric... "I fought against the bottle/but I had to do it drunk..."). What should be opposed is not the art but the critical tendency - the mentality of 'out with the old, in with the new' - exemplified in equal measure by buzzwords like 'Altermodern' and by the spectre of Wall Street's return to Marx. ('retro' is now the 'in' thing...)

The issue is not that these are mere 'surface effects' but precisely that they exhibit the opposite or inverse tendency of 'depth without breath', of getting to the bottom of a problem but only after the fact, only when the damage is already done. Why did we need a complete breakdown of the system in order to correct its course, if it is at all a correction? (I personally don't find the idea of bankers reading Das Kapital very convincing.) Or why did we need a total degeneration of the art world into a commercial meat market in order for someone to suggest something is wrong?

What is needed is not merely a new form of art - let alone a new buzzword, a new name, a new way forward or into the depths - but a new way of thinking about the very production process of art and its social function, something which the constructivists, unlike most art movements, sought to do. What is needed is precisely not more depth, nor a different kind of depth, but more breadth: the extension of art into other realms. Let's face it: to what extent does Bourriaud's theorizing really exhibit the traces of a 'universal language'? Isn't the work of "translation" at stake in this 'altermodern' phenomenon merely the transcription of a myriad of untranslatable cultural phenomena into one non-universal and even somewhat esoteric language particular to the foofy contemporary art circuit, and largely unintelligible to the majority of society globally?

The language of lines and forms, on the other hand, is a universal language - if for no other reason than what one could call its 'primitivism'.

Constructivist design for a cup and saucer

But even more so, an art that rejects the notion of "art for art's' sake", an art that believes art must be put to use - in addition to the promise of social change built into its very core and fibre, must speak a universal language in order to exist. It can only exist on condition of extending its breadth, of its expansion into 'non-art'.

At the same time, the constructivist egalitarian rejection of the term 'artist' in favour of 'constructor', the simplification of the process of creation, to demistify art, etc - hints at the postmodern 'death of the author'; in both cases the aim is to undermine the privileged position of the speaker/author/artist as the arbiter of meaning or aesthetic value in favour of a configuration where the very dichotomy of author/consumer becomes false. Art for the people.

In this context the reference to 'modern' in 'altermodern', and the call "death to postmodernism" can be read as the thermidorian gesture of restoring order, repeating Stalin's gesture of outlawing constructivism and proclaiming Socialist Realism as the only acceptable form of art.

Constructivist clothing design: clearly the future

Another thing worth thinking about is the constructivists' involvement in advertising, and their insistence on not rejecting it as a capitalist consumerist ploy. There is something to this: for how can one confront the phenomenon of advertising at all, if not with advertising itself - either in the form of subversive re-production (i.e. Adbusters) or in the form of counter-advertising, advertising for the right causes?

The Adbusters slogan for what they have dubbed 'Buy Nothing day', November 22, has a distinctly constructivist ring: MAKE SOMETHING - BUY NOTHING.

From now on, I am no longer the author of this blog, but its chief constructor.

Punkstmodernism is not dead: notes from behind the irony curtain

2009-04-15T17:32:00.065+01:00

I hate it when people declare something 'dead' when it's actually not.

Scratch that. I hate it when people say that an Idea is dead, period. Sure, there are dead ideas; but that's because they never were real Ideas, because they were born dead. Just like "manuscripts don't burn" - Ideas don't die. In the world of Ideas, the only things that can ever legitimately be declared 'dead' are those that never were - the many false starts, misapprehensions, misdirections in the history of human thought. Ideas do not oscillate between the living and the dead; they oscillate between the living and the stillborn. Confusion slips in when the latter go on 'living', Zombie-like, 'undead' - until centuries later some rare, clear-sighted specimen of our blundering race sees through the folly, and tells it like it is.

Sadly enough, Nicolas Bourriaud - art critic, curator, and co-founder of the Palais de Tokyo - is no such gent, and he doesn't tell it like it is. Postmodernism is not dead. It is alive and kicking, and there is nothing radically new here. Postmodernism, like every great idea, has been declared dead before - most notably after September 11, when neoliberal apparatchiks excitedly whispered that the 'age of irony' was over. In fact, Derrida's strain was even declared 'dead on arrival', years ago, before the term 'deconstruction' embedded itself in the vocabulary of art and philosophy to the point of becoming a cliche.

The thing about irony is that - like dialectics - it just never goes away. It's worse than cancer. The more you 'excise' it, the more it multiplies - the more ironic the irony gets.

When people do declare an idea to be dead, this does signal a change, but it is often not the change they are counting on - it is very often the contrary. Just when Francis Fukuyama announced the 'end of history' in the Final Age of liberal democracy, he himself soon withdrew the proclamation. Just when it looked like Global Capitalism was going to be the only game in town for good after the fabled 'fall of communism' in the 90s and the various proclamations that the 'age of ideologies' was over, the financial system collapsed and people started reading Marx again.

And just as Nicolas Bourriaud proclaimed that 'postmodernism is dead', postmodernism reared its little head all over the very exhibition that Bourriaud curated this Spring at Tate Britain to signal the death of postmodernism and the birth of what he has dubbed 'altermodern'. Isn't that, like, ironic?

I did like some of the works I saw, but I didn't find the show as a whole especially refreshing as against the contemporary art scene today. But rather than comment on the merits here, I will only address a few examples in relation to ('postmodern') theory. All quotations addressing the works and artists in the Triennial are from the exhibition guide.

Tacita Dean's work 'The Russian Ending' 2001, one of the highlights of the exhibition, is inspired by an early twentieth century custom in the Danish film industry where each film was produced in two versions: a happy one for the American market, and an alternative with a depressing or tragic ending for the Russian market. Taking images of disasters from original postcards purchased in flea markets, Dean uses handwritten notes that suggest the storyboard of a film to provide "imagined endings to imagined films."

What Dean is clearly getting at is the ambiguity of meaning in text and narrative that this reference to the Danish film tradition evokes; she inserts, for instance, coy double entendres such as 'man's laughter/manslaughter' - play, irony, reversal of signs. How is this in any sense not postmodern? Decontextualizing/recontextualizing images to imbue them with a meaning unimagined by their authors, through writing - palimpsest - and moreover suggesting "imagined endings to imagined films", is this not post-modernism par excellence? A perfect example of - whatchamacallit - deconstruction?

Similarly, Peter Coffin's work 'Untitled (Tate Britain)' 2009, projects animations with soundtracks onto existing artworks from the Tate's collection. The works "remain both in their conventional habitat and simultaneously become mobilised as fictitious characters in a new narrative scenario which...opens up a web of associations." In this way, Coffin "charges existing artworks with a life and mind of their own."

Oh, you mean that whole thing about the "death of the author" - how the 'meaning' of a work/text/utterance does not reside simply in the mind of the original speaker/author? Yep, nothing new there. Derrida again, right? And a bit of Barthes?

Rachel Harrison "splices together found objects, images, and hand-sculpted abstract forms to create installations that possess the iconoclastic energy of Punk...presents all her material on an equal footing and wilfully flattens out any cultural hierarchies." If that doesn't sound 'postmodern' enough, her work in the exhibition, 'Voyage of the Beagle, 2007', a "pantheon of fifty-eight portraits of figures and sculptures, from ancient artefacts to shop mannequins" - including a pelican, a buddha statue, a bear, an Elvis mannekin, a bear, a superman blow-up doll, all shot and framed identically and hung in a series - "functions as a sort of anti-taxonomy, mocking ideas of progression or systems of classification and otherness."

This anti-taxonomy is what Michel Foucault would refer to as a 'heterotopia' - an impossible place where all the unclassifiable junk is secluded in order to make a 'utopia' of order and reason (and taxonomy) 'possible'. Except that in The Order of Things - a work emblematic of precisely Foucault-the-poststructuralist - he goes even further. Harrison's work is just not radical or probing enough. A major inspiration for Foucault, cited in the famous introduction, was a short story by Jorge Luis Borges - a 'modern' writer (more on that below) - in which he mentions a "certain Chinese encyclopedia" which divides animals into

"(a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies."

This passage, to Foucault

"shattered thought...breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things...to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other...Moreover, it is not simply the oddity of unusual juxtapositions that we are faced with here...like the umbrella and the sewing machine on the operating table. The monstrous quality that runs through Borges's enumeration consists, on the contrary, in the fact that the common ground on which such meetings are possible has itself been destroyed...A vanishing trick that is masked or, rather, laughably indicated by our alphabetical order...What has been removed, in short, is the famous 'operating table'."

Another work, Simon Starling's 'Three White Desks', is made up of three copies of a no longer existing desk designed by Francis Bacon for Australian writer Patrick White. Only the first desk is a copy of it in fact, made by a cabinet maker after the only surviving photo. The second one, made after an identical photo of the first desk, is a copy of a copy, and is in turn photographed...you get the picture. The third desk is a "copy of a copy of a copy."

The disavowed reference is clear - Warhol only did it better, with more umph. The added dimension in Starling's 'altermodern' approach is having each copy made by a different cabinet-maker in a different country, each in a city relevant to the story of the original desk. But this unnecessary step, which makes for an 'interesting story', only obscures the key point - that repetition alone produces change, without any added input. If one artist alone makes copies of a thing, by the same method, in the same medium - after a sufficient number of repetitions the copy becomes a simulacrum. Each repetition brings about a change, however minuscule. This work, then, tells us nothing significant about 'cultural exchange' and 'translation' between cultural milieus or mediums - every copy, every repetition is a 'translation', every work - every copy in fact - a 'cultural milieu' unto itself on a microcosmic scale.

Here's Deleuze, one of the, you know, key dudes of postructuralist/postmodern philosophy, writing about Warhol circa 1968, p 366, Difference and Repetition [my italics]:

"Each art has its interrelated techniques or repetitions, the critical and revolutionary power of which may attain the highest degree and lead us from the sad repetitions of habit to the profound repetitions of memory, and then to the ultimate repetitions of death in which our freedom is played out...the manner in which, within painting, Pop Art pushed the copy, copy of the copy, etc., to that extreme point at which it reverses and becomes a simulacrum (such as Warhol's remarkable "serial" series, in which all the repetitions of habit, memory and death are conjugated)..."

I rest my case.

Reading Bourriaud's introductory text I find myself baffled - it oscillates between totally meaningless commercial art-world jargon with no apparent relationship to most of the works in the exhibition, other than what could be said of any contemporary art ("the figure of the artist as homo viator, a traveller whose passage through signs and formats reflects a contemporary experience of mobility"); and a schoolboy's highly simplified rendition of precisely postmodern philosophy, i.e. Deleuze - "lines drawn both in space and time, materializing trajectories rather than destinations, expressing a course or a wandering rather than a fixed space-time"; the term 'altermodern', he tells us, "suggests a multitude of possibilities, of alternatives to a single route."

Très chic. Yet this somehow means that the "historical period defined by postmodernism is coming to an end"? Not with these kinds of contradictions to play with.

Derrida can be read into this discussion as a kind of arch-Marxist: where Marx saw internal contradictions in capitalism, Derrida saw internal contradictions everywhere. Deconstruction is internal to things - and this is what bugs me when people throw these words around without grasping them, and write stuff like 'Artist so-and-so uses conceptual approaches to such-and-such to deconstruct notions of this-and-that with reference to narratives of something-or-other', and so forth. People don't deconstruct anything - deconstruction is a passive process, a force of nature. It can only be shown - one can only draw attention to the self-deconstruction of, say, a text. Things deconstruct themselves, break down into their constituent components, expose their own contradictions, generate their own opposites and internal differences. Language deconstructs itself through repetition. Ideas deconstruct themselves. Modernity, too, deconstructs itself; and Bourriaud's 'Altermodern' triennial is a case in point.

'Altermodern' decomposes, ironically enough, into a poor copy of 'postmodern'. And by 'poor' I don't mean artistic merit or 'faithfulness to original', but quite the contrary - poor in the sense that it falls short of its own mark, that within a history of thought, it doesn't represent a development in the way in which 'postmodernity' was a development of 'modernity'.

One of the great lessons of one of the key philosophers of modernity, Hegel, was this: something that appears to be refuted - annihilated - in the progression of thought, is merely sublated. (Aufhebung) One of Hegel's favourite metaphors was that of a flower springing from a bud, appearing to destroy the bud in the process; the flower blooms, the bud disappears. Nevertheless, without the bud there would be no flower - it is the bud that gives birth to the flower, and remains sublated within it.

Postmodernity is a moment in the history of thought - one of its key realizations as against modernity being that meaning and language are inherently unstable; that identity is unstable; that concepts themselves are unstable and their meanings shift, evolve. Even terms like 'modern' and 'postmodern' or 'poststructuralist' are themselves inherently unstable, and were rarely - if ever - self-applied by those thinkers usually corralled under them by high-minded critics concerned with fads and fashionable phrases.

We cannot simply retreat from that, abandon that moment in thought, pretend it didn't happen. In Deleuze, the dialectic exemplified in Hegel's metaphor translates into becoming. But becoming - what Bourriaud might call "trajectories rather than destinations" - encompasses more than Hegel's dialectic because Deleuze, among other things, had Darwin and evolutionary science behind him. Becoming takes account not only of a process of growth in the sense of a single living organism (even as a microcosm of world spirit), but the whole process of genetic development and actualization, which adds complexities - is more in the vein of 'rhizomatic'. It can move and split in any direction and does not follow any clear, determinable path to 'Progress' but only adaptation, neither up nor down, neither forward nor back; and it is dependent precisely on processes of repetition - the copy of a copy of a copy, etc - which over time generate the truly new in nature.

To Deleuze, the very suggestion that there is an opposition (real or apparent) between 'bud' and 'flower' as distinct identities, and that one annihilates or even appears to annihilate the other, would be false: this is the field of the negative, the 'false problem' or 'the fetish in person'. The one, rather, becomes the other, morphs into it. Together they form a 'trajectory' rather than two 'destinations' or 'points'.

In this vein, I find Bourriaud's notion of 'altermodern', at least from what I have so far seen in practice, very un-becoming.

Altermodernity hasn't come up with any truly new problems in relation to postmodernity. To use Bourriaud's own terminology, what he has missed is that the relation modern-postmodern is precisely that - a relation, in which neither is a fixed point in space/time - the two form a trajectory in which neither can be reduced to simply itself, or disengaged from the other.

Ideas - real ideas, generating real problems - don't die; and many of the pieces in the 'altermodern' exhibition demonstrate that the Idea in question here - the 'postmodern' one - is very much a real Idea, embodied in actual objects, even ones whose authors or curators claim that that same idea is 'dead'. Irony is indeed alive and well.

The thing is, writers and poets always 'got it' before art critics and historians did. Rimbaud's famous remark in a letter to a friend - Je est un autre ('I is another') - has long been mulled over as a herald of postmodernity. Jack Kerouac's "it ain't whatcha write, but the way 'atcha write it" hints at the notion of différance. Yet another great poet once wrote

Do I contradict myself? Very well then
I contradict myself.
I am large, I contain multitudes.

Now that sounds pretty damn post-modern to me. When was it written? 1855. Walt Whitman.

In the case of some writers, who stand in the margins and evade easy pinning down, such as the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa, people have debates and ask: was s/he modern or postmodern? And I say to that: does it matter? Only the Ideas matter in the end. Where 'modern' stops and 'postmodern' begins is a matter of pointless pedantry.

Walt Whitman - clearly postmodern

These writers - Foucault included - themselves embody that trajectory in thought, the discovery - the transition from 'modern' to 'postmodern'.

I am tempted to speculate here that Bourriaud may in fact have a point, however not the one he figures - that perhaps the rise of fads and buzzwords like 'altermodern' in today's global financial capitalist world does signal a new era, but one which is still postmodern, even ultrapostmodern rather than 'altermodern'. What we may be faced with here is a stripped-down version, a 'bare repetition' of postmodernity without self-awareness, or with a kind of false consciousness - a thoroughly unhinged postmodernity unaware of its own historical moorings, under a different name, a different guise. An even more postmodern postmodernity, precisely because it doesn't call itself that. (very much in line with Zizek's remark that one of the dangers of today's global capitalism is that it 'no longer calls itself capitalism.') Postmodernity, in other words, is Altermodernity's unnameable core - its Big Other - the elephant in the room.

So, there - deconstruct that.

As another modernist poet - whose words also have a distinctly post-modern/Taoist ring at times - T.S. Eliot, put it:

And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment.

Alternatively, one could say that just like Marx is only now, 150 years later, in the midst of a financial crisis, coming into his own; postmodern thought, too, has yet to come into its own. 'Altermodern', on the other hand, in the world of Ideas may well be of the stillborn/undead variety.

Therefore in keeping with this fashion of inventing interesting buzzwords, I have come up with my own: AlterpostpunkAnarchoMarxistModernism. Whatever straw dummy Bourriaud in his out-of-touch world takes postmodernism to be may be 'dead', but this surely ain't. This, I claim, is the true 'sign of the times'; but alas, I haven't the time to elaborate on it here.

Tamil sit-in at Parliament Square and the Bug of Colonial Cynicism

2009-04-13T19:44:00.018+01:00

It seems every time I go see an exhibition the past few days, I run into a Tamil protest. This time it was the Altermodern triennial at Tate Britain (of which I will write more later), and my Tamil friends were staging a sit-in at Parliament Square. I shot some more photos, but concentrated mostly on video footage this time, which I have edited into a short film, posted above through Youtube. (I shot in high-definition, but unfortunately it has gone through various conversions for upload...hm. something to work on. I am quite fond of the last shot, with the Churchill statue looming over the crowd as the clock of Westminster Cathedral stikes seven.)

These protests have been going on for several days and have blocked streets in central London, the one on Saturday drawing a crowd of 100,000 according to official police figures; yet it has hardly made the headlines. (Partly explainable by the Sri Lankan government's ban on foreign journalists.)

One key thing to note is that although Tamil communities worldwide have been staging protests and sit-ins, there is an added significance here. Unsurprisingly, the root of the conflict in Sri Lanka is one of many British colonial leftovers - the creation by Crown mandate, on the departure of the British from Sri Lanka (formerly known as Ceylon), of an artificial statelet - without regard to pre-existing regional demographic differences and related claims to autonomy, in this case the Tamil minority who were left in a repressive majority-Sinhalese statelet.

I am tempted to come up with a jibe here on the likelihood that all this had something to do with preserving the supply - and of course the impeccable flavour - of English tea.

It also strikes me that almost any existing armed conflict in the world today, now, that I can think of is rooted in some mess left by European colonialists - usually British - upon their departure; and in almost every single case, the root cause is a cynical disregard of demographic, political, and ethnic differences in carving out artificial statelets, power usually being doled out to the most loyal or cooperative of colonial subjects. Palestine, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, East Timor, Somalia, Ethiopia, you name it - case after case, the map of armed conflict in the world today is almost invariably a series of variations on a theme.

Just look at a map of Africa - look at all those perfectly straight lines. I mean, sure, desert and savanna is pretty straightforward territory if you're drawing borders. But who drew them? Do you think they largely reflect the migratory patterns of Bedouin tribes, or the whims of colonial prelates of yore?

And then they blame the mess in the world on the genetic proclivity of 'darker races' to engage in violence. (I have personally witnessed a member of the liberal British upper classes - a Guardian-reading, public school-educated PhD student in urban development at UCL - quietly elaborate this point to me once on a bus chock-full of local immigrants in Dalston, in relation both to the causes of the high crime rate in Hackney and the violence in the world in general; it was one of my first cultural shocks in Britain, and I shall never forget my initial disbelief that he was indeed suggesting - indeed, in a very British, understated manner - what I was indeed hearing...)

To be fair, the British certainly aren't the only ones to blame, and one should also take into account places like Vietnam and Korea - the product of a similar colonial bug, albeit of a more modern, Soviet-American-Franco-Chinese variety. (interestingly enough, both countries were split between a communist north and a pro-Western south, in both cases reflecting no known actual demographic divisions, but rather the balance of power between the occupying forces.)

And yet it seems to me that almost all the key hotspots brewing right now - Palestine, Iraq, Sri Lanka - can be traced back to British colonial rule. Sure, it's complicated. Sure, there is a situation on the ground and there is no simple solution - not anymore at least. But is it just that the British are unlucky, and happened to take on the most difficult places with the most complicated histories under their domain, or is it that there is something particularly cynical about their methods of colonial government? An example much closer to home - Ireland - might be instructive, since it poses similar dilemmas and complications.

The British government's way of washing its hands clean of the mess in Sri Lanka at present is to dismiss the Tamil Tigers, as other governments have, following Sri Lanka's cue, as a terrorist organization. The best indication of the cynicism of such policies, in light of what is known about the conflict, is the double standard applied by the USA and other governments to the kurds, as documented in the film Good Kurds, Bad Kurds : the Iraqi Kurds, who are useful, are treated as 'freedom fighters'; the Turkish Kurds, who are essentially part of the same movement, have the same goals and deploy the same methods, are 'terrorists', because Turkey is an ally.

It is for this reason that the Tamil protesters' slogans include 'Tigers are our freedom fighters'.

In light of all this, it is commendable that they still wave the British flag at their protests, instead of burning it, as I surely would in their shoes.

G20 and the rise of disciplinary power: the bankruptcy of justice

2009-04-12T16:04:00.014+01:00

The Guardian has posted stories of mistreatment of civilians by police during the G20 protest, along with a version of the video (above) showing the police assault Ian Tomlinson, who later suffered a heart attack, as he was making his way home. The Guardian edit of the original video (the first one to surface, shot by a bystander) includes a slow-motion replay and action highlights.

This, along with the thousands of other such stories that go unreported with every protest because they do not result in deaths (take the use of harassment legislation to curb protests, discussed in an earlier post), is a good index of the rise of disciplinary power in contemporary Western society.

The fact that no major riots or anti-police actions have broken out is a measure of the effectiveness of that power, even when it exceeds its bounds. (Think of the Rodney King riots in LA) An individual officer may get reprimanded; but the overall effect is a success, the message hit home. Just as the rhetoric of freedom and democratic values in the age of the 'war on terror' and the 'clash of civilizations' has heated up, the police on this side of the fence are getting more brutal. (Incidentally, an item in the Readings section of this month's issue of Harper's details a lawsuit filed by the family of a 12-year-old black girl in Texas who in 2006 was brutally beaten by police officers on her parents' lawn for resisting arrest on charges of being a prostitute. The family "eventually learned that the dispatch call the officers were responding to reported three white female prostitutes soliciting men half a block from the family’s home.")

This split in Power theorized by Foucault - between the conventional form it takes in the West in the sovereign legal right, and its modern form in disciplinary power, is perhaps more real than ever. Even when police actions are questioned, they are not questioned on the basis of right, but on the logic of necessity - i.e. was it reasonable under the circumstances, were security measures that led to this shooting or that beating necessary in view of the threats, etc (who gets to measure such things?).

Even when rights are infringed (think of the De Menezes shooting), this is irrelevant so long as the measures taken are deemed to have been necessary, and the innocent casualty becomes simply the victim of an 'unfortunate accident'. Rights only come into play to cover up the bare bones of disiplinary mechanics.

In other words, disciplinary power is questioned only on its own terms, on the logic of necessity. The only question that can be asked of it is: 'is it necessary to take such measures in order to produce the desired effects/goals?' One is not allowed to question the effects/goals themselves, or their justification. One is not allowed to suggest that a particular measure is illegitimate because it may or is bound to infringe on a particular political/natural/legal right.

Yet it is clear that the real 'necessity' behind the techniques of discipline is not security from terrorism or from particular threats - this can never be achieved one hundred percent as proto-fascist security barons would believe - but the disciplining of the population, the deployment of techniques of discipline and 'normalization' without popular or democratic oversight. It is no surprise that the recent crackdown on supposed Pakistani terrorists using student visas came on the heels of the police brutality at the G20 protest - the timing was no doubt arranged to downplay police brutality and conflate the threat of 'terror' with the threat of the protesters - something which New Labour politicians have attempted to do explicitly, making statements that liken anti-globalization protesters to Bin Laden, etc. It was just oh-so-convenient that Bob Quick misplaced a memo and they had to crack down early.

With each new crackdown and ensuing security measures, i.e. no bottled water, taking off one's shoes at airports, one lighter per passenger (what is it that can be done with one but not with two?) - the 'terrorists' try something else because, of course, they won't try bottled liquid explosives or shoe explosives again; and the possibilities are endless when one is willing to give one's own life up in the process. Yet the retrospectively enacted measures stay in place, however useless they are in the long run, after the fact; because their ultimate target is the population at large; and their aim is teaching discipline and obedience to authority, regulating and corralling the mass of ordinary citizens, teaching them to execute commands without asking questions. We're all in the army now.

No doubt there will soon be new restrictions on student visas and entry clearances, allegedly for security but in reality with a view to organizing a 'reasonable racism' or 'reasonable xenophobia', to borrow a formulation used by Slavoj Zizek in recent lectures.

It is notable that in the torture debate of recent years, even those liberals who maintained their principled opposition to torture for the most part found it necessary to assert that anyway, the intelligence obtained by torture is unreliable, that people will say anything you want them to under torture. It is insufficient, in other words, to assert that torture is unethical, that 'we are becoming like them', that it infringes the legal or natural rights of suspects, etc. One must always also engage the technical point; one must question disciplinary power on its own terms, on the issue of necessity and efficiency.

And the power of disciplinary mechanics is ultimately the only real power, or as Foucault put it, the 'mode in which power is actually exercised...power at the point of its application to bodies' ; as opposed to vague or abstract notions of sovereignty and autonomy and democracy and legal right. Disciplinary power constrains and subordinates any recourse to legal action or legal right, rather than being constrained by it.

It is this same power that is at the bottom of the financial meltdown and the ongoing recession, in the form of economic disciplinary power. The goal of neoliberal economics from Milton Friedman onwards has been nothing less than to wrest economics from the domain of political sovereignty and right, and bring it fully within the scope of discipline, within disciplinary power. Disciplinary power, as Foucault shows in his analyses of various social domains (prisons, hospitals, schools, etc) is constituted by what he calls the 'medicalization' of knowledge: this is where the notion of economic 'shock therapy' fits in neatly - a term that Naomi Klein in her critique of neoliberal economics did not coin but borrowed from Milton Friedman, the neoliberal shock doctor in person. (at a time when, of course, 'shock therapy' was still believed to be valid medical science; nonetheless, it is a good example of self-incriminating statements, however unwittingly made)

And it is through the 'medicalization' - one could say de-politicization - of economic knowledge that the neoliberal 'shock doctors' were able to take key economic decisions regarding deregulation of markets and other economic reforms outside the political and democratic sphere, and into the scientific/technical sphere. There is no room in the edifices of modern government to question economic policy, because economic policy has become a matter of science, of mechanical necessity, of technical knowledge - not political decision. We are meant to take it on faith that state assets, utilities, schools, prisons and the like must be privatized or turn to private sources of funding, that taxes must be lowered, that credit interest rates must be set to suit the banks, that there just isn't enough money to cover the cost of social security and other benefits even as taxes are being lowered for the benefit of the super-rich or when - even during a once-in-a-century recession - billions are given away in a massive 'benefits package' to banks, and so forth. What should be political decisions take the form of unconditional demands, mechanical necessities.

The only good answer to this is to say, as Martin Luther King did in the march on Washington, that "we refuse to believe that the Bank of Justice is bankrupt." We must cash our cheque. Our demands too must be unconditional.

This is a point where it is no longer even that the ends justify the means - in the Machiavellian schema one still has to justify the ends, promote a 'just' end. In the sinister logic of neoliberal capitalism, the ends are taken to be self-evidently just and fully identified with the means chosen. The relation between ends and means cannot be questioned, since it is the mechanical result of 'economic science'.

Two articles also in this month's issue of Harper's provide the most incisive critique I have yet seen of the current economic crisis and its roots in several key moments of deregulation of the US economy over the past several decades - in particular, the deregulation of interest rates and wages.

INFINITE DEBT: How unlimited interest rates destroyed the economy details how the elimination of the right to form unions in key sectors of the economy and the subsequent union-busting led to an effective pay freeze - no real increase in the minimum or average wages over 40 years, even as the economy grew - driving millions of people into levels of debt unfathomable to their parents; this, coupled with the constitutional legalization of usury - i.e. unlimited credit card interest rates - promising supernormal profit margins, drove all the capital out of manufacturing (a strong union sector but with lower profit margins) into banking and finance, lining up the key elements to ignite the crisis. This is what ensured the decline of Detroit and the rise of Wall Street since the mid-1980s.

Usury country: Welcome to the birthplace of payday lending is a more documentary account of an industry that, with its beginnings in the state of Tennessee, has effectively come into being as an industry and exploded across the USA since the early 1990s. Payday lending - as in dodgy businesses that lend people an advance on their monthly salary at six-figure annual interest rates when they can't pay the bills (no kidding) is rightly referred to by the author as a modern-day form of sharecropping. Or in Foucauldian terminology, another one of those techniques of disciplinary mechanics.

Tamil protest; Picasso, repetition, and being-in-the-world

2009-04-12T12:27:00.030+01:00

On my way to see the Picasso exhibition at the National Gallery yesterday (more on that below) I stumbled on the Tamil protest against the Sri Lankan government. As I was cycling down from Bloomsbury the car traffic was stalled for miles all the way up Charing Cross Road, at an almost complete standstill. Just as I was scanning the columns of cars weaving my way around lanes of traffic reciting my cyclist mantra - 'you fucking idiots, you fucking idiots, you fucking idiots...' - I reached Trafalgar square and noticed some commotion along the southern rim. At first it looked like there were a lot of English and British flags; and I thought this must be some BNP or UKIP follow-up to the G20 protests. As I got closer it became clear that something very different was afoot.

There were quite a few Tamil flags, but perhaps because there were so many, they were less conspicuous than the larger and more ominous Union Jacks and St George's crosses, which at first stood out against the sea of red and yellow.

There were men, women, young and old, children, even parents pushing prams...

The whole thing was pretty well orchestrated, with official march coordinators in bright yellow vests (not fluorescent, as that might offend the bobbies) reading 'FREE TAMIL EELAM' on the front and 'STOP Genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka' on the back.

The Sri Lankan government has kept foreign journalists and aid workers out of the war zone, and made a comprehensive effort to ensure that, if the conflict is reported in foreign media at all, only its own side of the story is heard.

According to a Human Rights Watch report, the government has indiscriminately shelled civilian "no-fire" zones. Some investigators did get in, apparently. Read more about it in Arundhati Roy's piece for the Guardian.

Bobbies looking inconspicuous as always.

Back on Trafalgar Square, the current incarnation of the Fourth Plinth, Thomas Schütte's Model for a Hotel 2007 , a 5-m by 4.5 m by 5 m architectural model made of coloured glass. It was originally titled Hotel for the Birds (presumably before the artist got wind of Ken's ban on pigeons in the square).

I did eventually make it to the Picasso exhibition, which was also well organized.

Most refreshing and thought-stimulating were some of the perhaps less well-known or at least less clichéd works, such as the late variations on Velazquez, Monet, Van Gogh, and others.

'Imitation as the source of creativity' - it occurred to me - is only the art historian's clichéd sublimation of Deleuze's far more subversive proposition: that the truly new only ever emerges in repetition. Newness is by definition an effect of repetition, of return, of grasping an 'old' thing from a different angle: which is why only repetition produces the truly singular, and no two grains of sand are ever the 'same', cannot be reduced to the same thing - this one is this one and that one is that one - even if their molecular structure is identical.

Rather than being a return to the classical tradition (as suggested by some of the accompanying material), Picasso's explorations of his later years are only a more explicit way of stating what the underlying message was all along: neither a break with the past nor simply a continuation of it, but an incessant search for the new - the excess of innovation - through more and more radical forms of repetition.

It is not enough to say that if we do not know history, we are doomed to repeat it; or the inverse, 'you can't repeat the past'. Nor is it simply the opposite, the ancient wisdom of repetitio est mater studiorum. Each of these propositions falls short. Much more subversively, one must repeat in order not simply to learn but to transform and overcome the existing. One must repeat, in order to avoid replication: repetition is never repetition of the same. To repeat is always to repeat a problem, a possibility, a fork in the road. No wonder the most original artists and improvisers in any discipline are also the greatest imitators.

Some of Picasso's morbid imagery (cubist or otherwise) throws up a related problem: what Heidegger calls the 'hiddenness' of things. The cut-up and mix of objects and perspectives - the simultaneous presentation of profile and frontal views of faces, the back and front of a torso - is an index of the impossibility of seeing things in their completeness; not a 'cubist' or 'abstract' representation of reality but the marker of a representational void.

A part of things always remains hidden from view; and even the multiplication by a mirror remains only that - a multiplication of two-dimensional perspectives which never merge in a single perspective.

What makes these images morbid is their emphasis on the tension between a three-dimensional space and the impossibility not only of representing it, but of even seeing more than two dimensions; the suggestion being that the world would probably look very different, morbid even, in three dimensions. As Picasso himself put it, "Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth."

The polypill and the purple pill

2009-03-31T17:42:00.010+01:00

More proof that what's good for health - and society as a whole - is bad for business, in today's Independent headline. Fie on you, Big Pharma.

The standard rationale for the patenting and high pricing of pharmaceuticals - i.e. that the poor, struggling multinationals need money to fund research - makes no mention of the fact that they spend about twice as much on marketing as they do on research, or that the very people proposing it earn six-figure (and up) salaries. In other words, given that producing the actual chemicals costs next to nothing, about two-thirds of every pill you take pays for advertising and promoting that pill to you, paying lobbyists, paying the media, paying politicians, paying doctors and clinics to prescribe that particular pill to you over another one.

Nor do they mention the fact that the money they do spend on "research" mostly goes to developing and marketing stuff like Prozac and Viagra, given that treatments for things like AIDS and Hepatitis just aren't profitable enough - precisely because the people who suffer from these illnesses can't afford the treatments that Big Pharma offers, at the prices at which they are offered.

And when no research is necessary, and the (unpatented) ingredients are cheaply available, and treatments can be cheaply produced at a profit? Nah, who needs that. Public health, improving the lot of humanity? Who cares. If we can't dig real deep in people's pockets and hold a knife to their throat, why bother?

Night wraps the sky

2009-03-24T12:48:00.012Z

Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and About Mayakovsky (ed. Michael Almereyda) uniquely intersperses Mayakovsky's poetry and other writings (diary entries, excerpts) with others' writings about him, fictional and non-fictional, some fairly recent.

"In 150,000,000, a poem written during the American intervention in the Russian Civil War, the collossal peasant Ivan, who has 150,000,000 heads, an arm as long as the Neva River, and heels as big as the Caspian steppes, wades across the Atlantic to fight a hand-to-hand battle with a Woodrow Wilson resplendent in a top hat as high as the Eiffel Tower."

Why didn't anybody think of that during the Iraq war? Hm...

Be Like Turtle: Constructing a time for thought

2009-03-24T11:58:00.022Z

Badiou in Infinite Thought, p. 51 ('Philosophy and Desire'):

"the singular and irreducible role of philosophy is to establish a fixed point within discourse, a point of interruption, a point of discontinuity, an unconditional point. Our world is marked by its speed: the speed of historical change; the speed of technical change; the speed of communications; of transmissions; and even the speed with which human beings establish connections with one another. This speed exposes us to the danger of a very great incoherency. It is because things, images and relations circulate to quickly that we do not even have the time to measure the extent of this incoherency. Speed is the mask of inconsistency. Philosophy must propose a retardation process. It must construct a time for thought, which, in the face of the injunction to speed, will constitute a time of its own. I consider this a singularity of philosophy; that its thinking is leisurely, because today revolt requires leisureliness and not speed."

Aside from providing a stark contrast to the anti-philosophical injunctions of fascist sympathizers like the Italian Futurist artist Marinetti, who celebrate speed and modern commerce and advocate the burning of libraries (something to that effect, at least), this philosophical tasking gives meaning to my own lifestyle, or to my somewhat lengthy morning routine. Thanks Badiou, now I don't feel useless any more - cooking porridge, eating, shaving, and drinking a cup of freshly-ground Zapatista coffee for about two hours every morning. Aside from being excellent bike fuel, a massive bowl of porridge, consumed slowly, is certainly conducive to 'constructing a time for thought'. To re-/paraphrase Badiou, the task of philosophy is to solve one major philosophical problem every day by lunchtime.

Quo vadis domine?: Totality and Totalitarianism

2009-03-23T12:34:00.027Z

Following on the previous post I have been contemplating the relation between political totalitarianism and philosophical totality. Zizek's claim that the two are in an inverse relation, that political totalitarianism corresponds not to philosophical totality, but precisely to contingency and subjectivity, and vice versa - provides an interesting starting point, although I have never heard him elaborate on it much.

The whole point of the totalitarian state apparatus - and any modern state can be said to have components or degrees of it - is to fill a gap in the structure of Power/Knowledge. The state is afraid and is constituted by fear: its law must be enforced because it is not believed in; it must be obeyed because it is not 'in the hearts of men' (to use Rousseau's phrase).

The state has no traffic with philosophical truth, therefore it must acquire knowledge or 'intelligence' by purely technical means (surveillance, CCTV, phone-tapping, etc). It does not know its citizens, and therefore must spy on them; it registers no knowing, and therefore must force knowledge to come to it.

The state is afraid and does not trust its citizens, nor can it gain their trust any longer; it must resort to technical means of control (walls, fences, barriers, prisons), and technical manipulation; it must make threats and regulations and enforce its judgments.

It goes without saying that in the process of all this surveillance and regulation and control, in the process of protecting itself from 'terror', the state commits far greater wrongs, invasions and violations than are ever committed against it. But even at its most totalitarian/technocratic it hardly aspires to philosophical truth, or totality. Even its belief in itself is deeply cynical.

It is no coincidence that one of the earliest rebels against what could in an abstract sense be called 'the state' was a fragile being who feared nothing and was nailed to a cross; who confronted the Roman Empire not with contingency and subjectivity, but with an absolute philosophical totality: 'God as love' or the 'Kingdom of Heaven'.

To the Roman Empire Jesus says: your power is of this world - temporary, subjective, contingent; behind me is a power far greater, a totality which is the origin of all creation.

The political message is clear: Caesar is not divine. Give unto caesar that which is Caesar's; give unto God that which is God's: in historical context, the effect of this subversive message dressed up as political obedience is - if anything - drawing a line in the sand, putting up a barricade: 'NO PASARAN'. An act of resistance and an act of will, a violent separation. Caesar: historical contingency. God: absolute totality.

As Godard puts it in L'Origine du XXIème siècle (quoting Bergson I think), "Nothing conflicts more with the image of the beloved than that of the state...The state in no way possesses, or it has lost, the power to embrace before our eyes the totality of the world, that totality of the universe offered externally via the loved one as object, and internally via the lover as subject."

There is a kernel of truth in Monty Python's legendary parody of the crucifixion in Life of Brian where, nailed to the cross, the Jewish convicts sing the ditty 'Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.' This refrain effectively sums up Jesus' political message, which offers both hope and empowerment to a wholly disempowered people: there is always another side, always a way out, one can always subvert/rerout the game and turn the table on Empire, turn a weakness into a strength, and set up the antagonism without falling back on the negative, without being drawn into the pit of open confrontation. One can always win, even when one loses - by taking up one's burden and willing it all backwards - or as Nietzsche has it, by turning every 'it was' into an 'I willed it thus' (J. returns to Rome to be crucified again). To turn one's own punishment for disobedience into just another gesture of defiance: "Ah, so you think you've got me there, ey? But I wanted to be crucified, you fools!"

Waiting for the barbarians: Lies (and the lying liars who tell them)

2009-03-19T17:03:00.043Z

In a recent article for the Guardian, George Monbiot laments the extensive use of UK anti-harassment legislation, in particular the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, to curb public protest - and its relatively sparse use for its intended purpose: "As the injunctions use civil law to create criminal offences, they require a much lower standard of proof: hearsay evidence and untested and unproven allegations can be used to criminalise any action the police or the courts wish to stop...In 2001, the act was used to prosecute protesters outside the US intelligence base at Menwith Hill, who were deemed to have distressed American servicemen by holding up a placard reading "George W Bush? Oh dear!""

One person particularly upset by this abuse of the legislation by police is Evonne Powell-Von Heussen, who spent five years vigorously campaigning for the passage of the law, having been for "17 years...the victim of an aggressive stalker, who attacked her and held her captive."

Yet this is not a problem simply with this piece of legislation, or with the notion of harassment. It is a problem with the law and legal reasoning as a whole.

Protesters against a goverment certainly do fit the technical definition of 'harassment' in the act, and the wide remit of definition may even be 'necessary' in a purely formal sense. Yet the fact that the same government may have, for instance, told bald-faced lies, causing untold deaths in some far-away land, is beyond the comprehension of the law. Lying, taken alone, is at most a civil wrong (i.e. 'defamation' or 'slander'), rarely a criminal one, and almost never one for which a government can in any way be held collectively responsible.

The law, like capital, objectifies and therefore distorts the real relations between human brings. Just as for economic Marxists capital generates the abstract notion of value as expressed by money, in the legal sphere we have the abstract notion of 'legal wrong' as expressed both in money terms (damages, fines) and prison sentences. In the economic sphere, a cinema ticket might be equal to 10 packets of crisps, or as Marx might have put it, a yard of linen = 20 kg flour. In the legal sphere, this is analogous to the equation that smoking about 150 joints is equivalent to murder.

A real relation is thus reduced to a purely quantitative one; once this initial abstraction is accomplished and embedded within a system, all kinds of other distortions creep in, where even any sense of quantitative proportion is eventually abandoned. So for instance, under current UK law a defendant can be given a lifetime jail sentence for 'supplying' magic mushrooms, which until recently were legal. This, it just so happens, is the very same sentence recently given by an Austrian court to Josef Fritzl, who "fathered seven children with his daughter while he kept her locked in a cellar for 24 years, one of whom he admitted having murdered by neglect."

Under the law of some countries, smoking about 270 joints could be equated with Fritzl.

I will therefore take this opportunity to make a bold assertion to the contrary: that in a society where magic mushrooms and marijuana were totally permitted, among other things, there would be no Josef Fritzls in existence. But that, sadly, would be a free human society - a utopian dream, to be sure.

The inverse is also true - Fritzl is the Foucauldian convict who resides at the very heart of the carceral archipelago, the necessary product of the system which convicts him, who gives it its meaning and justifies its existence.

(Of course, if for instance marijuana was legalized overnight in the present state of society, there would probably be a lot of teenagers getting wacky in the streets, etc; what I am suggesting rather is a mental experiment; I urge the reader to imagine for a moment a very different kind of society in which there is no need for codified law, and smoking a joint or nibbling on a shroom is no different than having a glass of wine with dinner.)

It is worth reconsidering in this light Marx's remark that it is not communism (as he conceives it) but liberal capitalism (bourgeois society) that is the true enemy of the individual and singular; law and capital are both part of the framework which transforms the singular human being into an abstract value, which alienates and divides the human subject on the inside as well as on the outside, confining, categorizing and determining by class, profession, legal category (wrongdoer/wronged); and formulating all social relations within these rigid terms, solidifying them within this firmament.

As Che Guevara, a doctor who became a revolutionary, wrote in a letter to Uruguayan journalist Carlos Quijano : "we socialists are freer because we are more complete; we are more complete because we are freer."

The law, which concerns itself with facts, has no interest in the category of truth as such, in the true as the whole, the truth of a situation; for this reason it cannot concern itself with crimes committed half a world away by a government 'harassed' by protesters.

Once we use the language of the law, as Eyal Weizman explains in his critique of the Israeli occupation, we accept the basic premise of the hegemonic power; once we frame our critique in terms of 'war crimes', legal rights and legal wrongs, we accept the basic legitimacy of the non-illegal violence (the violence exerted within the confines of international law, violence minus war crimes), and thus the basic legitimacy of the occupation; we give in to the kind of thinking advocated by the legalists in Nazi Germany, to use Slavoj Zizek's example, who expressed their absolute contempt for the Jews but “nevertheless insisted that there were no proper legal grounds for the radical measures they were debating.”

Like capital, the law subordinates the present (labour) to the past (accumulated capital). It even prides itself on this: for the greatest virtues that it claims for itself are things like precedent (internal consistency), neutrality or 'equality before the law' (equal right to be mistreated), and procedure; not truth and justice. This is why the law is said to be by nature conservative; it is also atavistic.

Even when it changes it remains the same: a decision that is made into a law is still a past that speaks to and subordinates a present; but a present whose real truth eludes its grasp, escapes it. At this juncture the Heideggerian category of being-thrown-into-the-world emerges; a gap between a situation which can never be formulated in advance, and a corresponding legal category which constantly attempts to formulate that situation in advance. (Take for instance some of the security measures in the so-called 'war on terror', the various micro-practices of power - the imperative to take off one's shoes, the ban on liquids - they are always retrospective, i.e. the terrorists could have done their job the first time had it not been for some unfortunate accident; and their real target is not the terrorists, but us.)

As John Irving, that crypto-Marxist (I am aware this is normally used as a derogatory term) of the American novel, put it:

"Who live here in this cider house, Peaches? Who grind them apples, who press the cider, who clean up the mess, and who just plain live here... just breathin' in the vinegar? Somebody who don't live here made them rules. Them rules ain't for us. We the ones who make up them rules. We makin' our own rules, every day. Ain't that right, Homer?"

The meaning of that present which eludes the past is what constitutes the human; the (non-)subject whose truth eludes the objectifying operations of law and capital.

The arrest of political protesters on charges of harassment - while true injustices continue unimpeded - makes visible a gap within the structure. The more law tries to grasp the human, the more its grasp is eluded, the more fixed and impotent it becomes, the more it contradicts itself, the more it turns into a serpent swallowing its own tail, gnawing on its own entrails; while the human being grows and persists, without interrupting this lethal circuit - it never occupies the place designated for it within this asexual edifice, the space between the mouth and the tail.

This (non-)subject is perhaps precisely what Cavafy is after in his famous poem - the barbarians at the gates of Empire who never appear - for whom no laws can be written, who are unimpressed by rhetoric - and yet who would have been "a kind of solution." Isn't this also the meaning of the injunction "we do not negotiate with terrorists"? It is interesting to note that as UK officials have quietly parted wih the Bush administration over its approach to terrorism, they have just as quietly dropped the term itself, 'the war on terror'. Isn't the 'war on terror' in a broader sense - very much like, or even more than its Cold-War-era counterpart, the 'war on drugs' - a war not on the terrorists themselves or on terrorism as such, but on the human (non-)subject, a war on the 'neighbour', a war on human singularity that cannot be circumscribed/contained by the law, by the machinery of power, for which the only speech reserved is the law's refusal to speak, a refusal to negotiate, a refusal to acknowledge its own impotence when faced with a presence it cannot comprehend and which it considers by definition extra-legal, para-military, extra-ordinary (think: 'rendition'), liable to torture, imprisonment without trial, etc - not worthy even of the minimal constitutional protections that even someone like Josef Fritzl is given?

Waiting for the Barbarians
C.P. Cavafy

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

(on the)Roads

2009-03-18T18:37:00.009Z

Following on the above post, this poem by Bosnian poet Mak Dizdar (who was, incidentally, born in October 1917, on the eve of revolution) traces the same gap within the edifice of power. On one hand it speaks to a certain sense of Bosnian hybrid multicultural identity; on the other it more universally applies to the self-creating identity of the colonized (non-)subject which resists yet rejects being reduced to victimhood. Dizdar was also a linguist and scholar of medieval gravestones (stećci) left by the bogumils, the gnostic heretical faith that thrived in the Kingdom of Bosnia; his poetry was peppered with archaic terms derived from the stećci. Although the below is a very good translation, this particular dimension of Dizdar's language is totally absent.

Roads
Mak Dizdar

1

You have decreed me not to be cost what may
Charging me down
You laugh and weep
On your way
You purge all clean
You wipe all out

You have decided to wipe me out whatever the price
Yet nowhere will you find
The real
Road to me

For
You know roads carved and cleared
But none beyond
(Barren they be and narrow indeed
No matter how broad
And long
They seem
To you
So proud
And strong)

You know only the paths
That rise
From heart
And
Eyes

But that is not all

2

Roads unfold ahead
With no trace of beaten track
No almanac
Departure time
Or tide

Your path to me in my misery
Seems trodden and tried in your sight
The sort
That leads
Left
Or
Right

You fool yourself I can be found
If you follow a course
Like north
Or
South

But that is not all

Hide and seek
Eyes peeled
Come and find me
Beneath the rye rippling in the wind
In the roots of earth where the dark has congealed

3

But from the measureless heights
Above
Might
Must
Crush
The mightiest
Breast

But that is not all

You know no right of way
At the crossroads
Of night
And day

But that is not all

For you know least that in your life
The one true war
The hardest strife
Is at your
Spirit's core.

And so you do not know
That you are the least of my evils
Among a legion
Of larger
Evils

You do not know
With whom you are dealing

You know nothing of this roadmap I own

4

You do not know that the road from you to me
Is other than the road
From me
To you

You know nothing of my wealth
Hidden from your mighty eyes
(You do not know
That fate
Did demise
And deal me
Far more than
You may
Surmise)

You have decided to wipe me out whatever the price
But nowhere will you find the real road
To me

(I understand you:
You are a man in one space and time
Alive just here and now
You cannot know of the boundless
Space of time
In which I am
Immanent
From a distant yesterday
To a far-off tomorrow
Thinking of you

But that is not all)

Zizek is not simply itself: some thoughts on the 'communist hypothesis'

2009-03-16T10:18:00.014Z

This is still in a rough draft stage, but I am putting it up anyway and will add/modify when I have time.

Some of the highlights of the Communism conference this weekend are Zizek's retorts in general discussion, which I must admit, as much as I might disagree with him on some points. To the suggestion, advanced by Badiou and others, that there is no 'outside', that it is impossible to construct an outside to capitalism today, that everything is by now fully subsumed within the logic of capital, Zizek summed up his proto-Hegelian reply with "Capitalism is not simply itself".

Well, duh. Isn't this Marx's whole point? All those internal differences, contradictions, inconsistencies - are they not simply to show that 'capitalism is not simply itself"?

Yet this is where Zizek is fundamentally mistaken on Deleuze. For if, as Zizek claims (and has proclaimed during the conference), we have to abandon the notion that 'history is on our side', or if the emergence of communism out of capitalist society is no longer simply a matter of developing productive forces and moving history forward toward this ineluctable goal, do we not then have to abandon Hegelian dialectics - the 'false movement' of negativity - altogether in favour of Deleuze's notion of the virtual?

Is this not precisely the difference between Hegelian dialectics and the Deleuzian virtual: while Hegelian dialectics is dependent on a certain inertia or movement of history where for traditional Marxists communism is simply the 'development' of capitalism, the virtual - 'real without being actual' - must be actively struggled for at every step and made spatially possible in order to become actual, or to actualize itself. It is never inevitable or determined in advance, but always contingent on the spatio-temporal conditions of the actual: history must be made.

It is here that Deleuze's intervention - the splicing of Proustian poetics with the Darwinian notion of 'actualization' - is crucial. If we are to take seriously Zizek's pronouncement and if communism should no longer be conceived as the inevitable dialectical end of capitalism, its presence within capitalism must be conceived as the virtual 'not itself' of the capitalist idea, its internal difference. The split between the virtual and the actual means that it is never a matter of simple contingency (what Deleuze calls the 'possible' as opposed to the virtual), or of dialectical necessity.

Unlocking the revolutionary potential of a situation in this sense is equivalent to creating the conditions necessary for the expression of a gene (the virtual). There is no linear progression at stake, and it is not a matter of historical development, but simply dynamic and volatile spatial reorganization which is responsive to change and can always change direction when the conditions are right: "the world is an egg, but the egg itself is a theatre: a staged theatre in which the roles dominate the actors, the spaces dominate the roles and the Ideas dominate the spaces."

Capitalism may generate contradictions, and may have a tendency to produce the conditions of its own downfall, but this negative space should not be mistaken for the path to communism. The actual expression of the communist Idea as the internal difference of capitalism is not simply the effect of a negation (this is the mistake of dialectics), but an act dependent on concrete will, as suggested in Peter Hallward's paper at the conference, 'Communism of the Intellect, Communism of the Will': "the virtues of the communist idea are distinct from anti-capitalism. Anti-capitalism concedes too much to the idea of capitalism." Internal difference is not a contradiction actualized in the unfolding of an idea, it is there in the beginning, it is a difference and an antagonism that precludes and precedes identity and the negative.

There are two ways one could explain Zizek's turnaround. On one hand, this could be simply further insight into Zizek's polemical approach, which is to win every argument by adopting theoretically inconsistent positions on different issues if necessary, so long as the inconsistency is not immediately obvious in the moment. On the other, it could be a complex case of philosophical parapraxis, indicating Zizek's secret wish to reconcile with his philosophical father, Deleuze. (hehe)

Hardt and Negri's papers both dealt with the notion of the common in some form and, for Hardt especially, the necessity (for the actualization of the communist idea) of producing the common. What is crucial here is the opposition of the socialist model (top-down, statist) to the communist one (the common as commonly produced); which is echoed in Zizek's interpolation that, especially in view of the current financial crisis and government responses to it, the future will be either socialist (Keynesian, perhaps?) or communist.

Homage to Catatonia, #367: Socialist Wankers and the Communism Conference at the BIH

2009-03-09T09:36:00.025Z

The SOAS student union have passed a motion against the upcoming Communism conference at the Birkbeck Institute of the Humanities, largely on the issue of cost. There is a blog post by Infinite Thought about it here.

Well, yes the conference is a bit expensive. But I must say, if you really want to protest the high cost of education, a much better place to start would be the outrageous tuition fees charged to overseas students. (who don't all come from rich developed countries, and even those who do might well be poorer/less resourced than many of the UK/EU students involved.). Overseas tuition costs upwards of £10,000 per year, as opposed to the £3,000 charged to UK and EU students. This for me means that I am so deeply in debt that I cannot even think about continuing my education for at least the next ten years, unless I win the lottery or someone miraculously grants me a fully-funded MA and PhD, very unlikely in the present circumstances. It's like having a mortgage, except with no real property. Bummer! And yes, in a way, my tuition fees are paying for your education, socialist wankers.

So why hasn't there been any protest over this? I suppose that in such situations, people tend to get upset most over things that affect them personally. So much for empathy. And what's more - talk about the contradictions of charging for a communism conference. This motion is a contradiction within a contradiction.

Moreover, unlike most universities, who deploy all manner of means to ensure that tuition fees get paid, the BIH isn't fascist about the registration thing at all. Apart from the morning of the first day when they tick names off the list at the entrance, they don't tend to be terribly fussy about who goes in or out of these events, and in the past they have even told attendees to invite their unregistered friends for a closing debate, so frankly, anybody and their cousin could get in one way or another. I've always taken their registration process to be on a kind of wink wink nudge nudge ability-to-pay basis. (very much in the spirit of Marx) If the SOAS students have missed that aspect of things, this might be an indication that irony, as some have proclaimed, has indeed died, finally, with this generation of youth, who sadly seem more obsessed with straight-thinking formality than their elders.

Furthermore, while I certainly support the notion that education should be free, I do find it slightly perverse that people complain about this conference, yet they think nothing of paying hundreds of pounds to go to Glastonbury, or even worse, to see a single musician perform. Not to mention other forms of entertainment and expenditure, or the fact that the same people might think nothing of ditching their local convenience store to save a little shopping at Tesco or Morrison's, or make themselves feel better with clothes from pricey high street outlets. Sure, education should be free, but we do live in a capitalist system, and if you do spend your money on something, would you rather give it to the Birkbeck Institute of the Humanities, or Ticketmaster? As Oscar Wilde put it, people nowadays know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

In a regulated economy, when prices get too high, people go out on the streets and protest against the government. (at least they did in ex-Yugoslavia, where I grew up) Why don't people do that under capitalism, either against corporations or against the government, which can always bring in price regulations? Or when they do why do they pick easy targets, such as universities, who as we all know are struggling financially anyway? Why doesn't anyone ever pass a motion against high prices in high street retail shops, or against expensive housing? Far more productive, if you ask me.

All of this raises some interesting questions about the real motives behind this complaint, conscious or not. Is it really about the principle of access to education, or is it just about getting something for nothing, about saving a few pennies and getting some entertainment for free?

Isn't there a hidden subtext in this SOAS motion, a tacit acceptance of the basic capitalist formula, coupled with a suggestion that seeing some of the world's leading leftist intellectuals in one 3-day conference just isn't worth the ticket price? Sorry, socialist wankers, but if you're short on cash, and if you really want to be subversive about capitalism, pay the bloody registration fee and go rob a Tesco for your weekly shopping. I dare you. A little less shopping from H&M and TopShop might also do good, for your dress sense and your pocketbook alike, not to mention your sense of moral superiority.

And anyway, who ever said that in a communist system everything is 'free'? It might not cost any money in an ideal system, but that doesn't make it 'free'. Education wasn't 'free' in communist Yugoslavia, it was only paid in a different way - though taxes - and it was excellent. What annoys me to no end in all this is the wooly-eyed spoiled Western liberal studenty comprehension of communism as some system where everybody gets plushly pensioned off for life. Yep, that kind of thinking - that's why communism fails. But it has less to do with communism and more with the late-capitalist phenomenon of 'freeconomics'. Everyone wants a free ride.

Sorry to remind you, folks, but we live in a capitalist system where universities just don't get enough money from the state. If you want to drive up tuition fees and turn universities even more to private/corporate sources of funding, or give cause to university administrators who are arguing for the same, then go ahead, pass your stupid motions. If you want to be serious about access to education, think rather about your form of government and what can be done about it. It's not about how much it costs (because nothing is 'free') but about who is paying, and how. I for one would rather pay even more than go to a 'free' event sponsored by Exxon Mobil.

This is a bit like people who get upset about paying library fines, yet think nothing of spending money on Amazon.com or Waterstones (instead of local bookshops) to buy books. And then they complain that libraries have no books, or not enough books, or they can't get hold of them. And of course, by and by the libraries and independent bookshops do get smaller, or go completely extinct, and the big conglomerate chain-owned bookstores get bigger and partner with Starbucks and sponsor 'free' events, and have less and less of the books that we really want and more of the bestsellers and blockbusters, video games, etc. But no worries, at least it's cheap!

While it may appear that there is no right way out of this, remembering Woody Allen's joke about paying for analysis ("I wanted to kill myself, but my analyst was a strict Freudian - they make you pay for the sessions you miss...") - and bearing in mind that many of the BIH staff are somewhat strict Lacanians - I have registered for the conference, and I am attending. They've got my money, and if in doubt about what I'm going to live on next week, I will rob a Tesco.

Not that I was contemplating suicide - but I suppose you could say 'political suicide' because the whole world seems somehow off kilter and nobody really knows who or what anything is any more. Given that each new day I identify less and less with the remnants of what is supposed to be the 'Left' in this godforsaken world, it's really not about politics any more, but about something I could honestly refer to as 'therapy'.

The words of one L. Cohen come to mind (and I grasp even better now why Oliver Stone used this song in 'Natural Born Killers'):

Take the only tree that's left
and stuff it up the hole in your culture
Give me back the Berlin wall
give me Stalin and St Paul
I've seen the future brother
It is murder

Slovenian Rimbaud

2009-01-31T12:51:00.011Z

Recently I picked up a volume of poems by Srecko Kosovel, who is described as the Slovenian Rimbaud - this on account of having died at the age of 22 and gaining notoriety only much later. (Rimbaud didn't die that young, but one could say he died a 'poetic' death inasmuch as he stopped writing at 19, although he lived another 20 years or so after that).

Here is one piece that spoke to me, from The Golden Boat: Selected Poems of Srecko Kosovel.

I am

I am, and I'm not asking why;
my word is that I am here,
silently growing into this silent place
as if I were growing from peace.

Beyond the huts, the fields, beyond the gardens,
as if dreams were shining on them,
behind the narrow paths, the fences,
across the meadows stretches a restful silence.

I am, and I am not asking why,
with the huts, the fields, the gardens,
this place is like a sleeping lake
untroubled by waves.

Oh Bama, you had me going...

2009-01-23T20:54:00.006Z

I didn't think it would happen this soon, but it looks like it's that time again to take up my usual cynicism with regard to US politics. Prior to the inauguration I wasn't really following the news on Obama's cabinet picks - and by God, are they disappointing, some of them.

Most disappointing of all, perhaps, is the choice of Lawrence Summers - a sexist, racist, latent conservative capitalist pig - as head of the National Economic Council. As Mark Ames put it in an article for The Nation, "hiring him to fix the economy makes as much sense as appointing Paul Wolfowitz to oversee the Iraq withdrawal." Summers is not only one of the chief architects of the current financial crisis (brought on by deregulation), but is also behind many of the financial disasters brought on by neoliberal economic policies worldwide as described in Naomi Klein's book on 'disaster capitalism', The Shock Doctrine. He was also instrumental in ousting Joseph Stiglitz - a prominent mainstream liberal (Keynesian) critic of neoliberal globalization policies - from the World Bank. Summers is, bluntly put, one of the 'shock doctors' behind it all.

As Alexander Cockburn put it in another article on Obama's cabinet picks so far ('Team Obama is a slap in the face to his own base'), "as an agent of change - we do not even mention hope - the age of Obama seems over before it begins, unless worsening economic circumstances force Obama pell-mell into uncharted territory."

Well, what more could one expect in a country where, aside from the top two posts (President and Vice-president), no member of the executive branch is required to be an elected official? Even those who do come to the cabinet from elected posts - senators, congressmen, etc - are no longer subject to direct democratic approval once in office as members of the cabinet. It goes without saying that very few, or probably none of those who were crucial to Obama's campaign at the grass roots level would have voted for or worked to get into office people like Summers (see The Nation article above for the gory details), Tom Vilsack (Monsanto's pin-up boy and lobbyist for genetically engineered biocrops who opposed Obama in the primaries, now agriculture secretary), Rahm Emanuel, or Admiral Dennis Blair, who goaded on the Indonesian generals in the Church Killings in East Timor.

Well, I should have known we were in deep shit from the moment Obama said 'God bless the United States of America' in the inaugural speech. Indeed, as Dylan put it, the USA is still "with God on our side"...

When the levees broke & a black man came to the white house: drunken thoughts & poems

2009-01-21T00:18:00.019Z

Well it's finally sunk in. A black man is president of the United States. He may not be perfect, he may not be Martin Luther King, Jr. or Jesse Jackson or Jesus H. Christ or Coltrane or Nina Simone, he don't play no saxophone, he don't talk no deep shit about revolution - but he's damn good and he bound to set some things right in America. And I feel more empathy for this man than any white man ever been president, and it ain't just because he's black, or because he's 'liberal', or because he's a Democrat, or because he talks about hope & change, or because he's gonna close Guantanamo Bay, or because he's gonna sign into law the Employee Free Choice Act, which is all great, but just because. Yeah. Uh-hm. I'm a little drunk. But never mind. Halellujah. Amen.

Just been to another amazing gig at Cafe Oto (every gig I've been to there has been amazing), an Obama inauguration party, mostly spoken word over jazz and blues riffs (played by some excellent musicians) by John Sinclair, beat poet and former leader and co-founder of the White Panther party; it was excellent. A word from John:

Because the war on drugs
is about building a police state.
The war on drugs is about building prisons
& filling them up
with more & more people like us

& employing more guards,
employing more cops,
more special agents,
more narcotics police,
more wire-tappers,
more snitches,

more prosecutors,
more judges,
more wardens,
more jailers -
the worst elements
of our society.

Sounds just like Foucault to me. OK, Foucault on benzedrine. Here's another one, called my melancholy baby:

in the awful aftermath
of hurricane katrina,
amid the wreckage
of his city,

his neighborhood,
his home,
his painstaking work
& his life itself,

looking forward to nothing
but increasing pain
& suffering beyond measure
as far as he could see,

the relentless public indifference
to the fruits of his labors,
the bitter impossibility
of completing his allen toussaint film

already 15 years in the making,
songwriter: unknown,
pieced together in fits
& starts, when he could wheedle

enough bread for a shoot
or get a print made
or edit something together
so he could see it - money

he had to beg for
from people at arts agencies
who couldn't stand him
& tried to ruin his life,

or people who dug his work
but never gave him enough cash
to make it all happen
the way it was supposed to,

this beautiful cat
with a big heart
& huge imagination, & a mind
that never stopped working,

the creator of "piano players
rarely ever play together"
starring professor longhair
& tuts washington

& the great toussaint,
documenter of emmanuel sayles
& papa john creach
& jabbo "junebug" jones,

employer of my daughter celia
& treasured friend & accomplice
ever since that day in 1982
when me and harry duncans

banged on his front door
on banks street
& begged him
to let us see "piano players"

& he showed it to us -
& that's the way I'll re-
member him, a guy who gave
& gave of what he had,

smiling through the pain
that wracked his body
& his heart, in love
with his work

& his daughter nell
& the music we all love -
always & forever,
brother stevenson palfi,

always in love with the music

Happy Birthday, Dr King

2009-01-15T22:06:00.030Z

Today is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's Birthday. Below is an audio medley I have made of clips from his speeches on Vietnam, nonviolence, social change, etc. (If you cannot see the player above the photo below, click here.)

Slavoj Zizek, quoting an American professor, has said 'every child knows “I Have a Dream.” Almost nobody knows what was this guy's dream. It wasn't just racial equality.' Indeed, the version of MLK sold in high school text books is a wooly, sugar-coated placebo that almost totally obliterates the radical badass that this man was. Today, on his 80th birthday, a few days before the inauguration of the first black president of the United States - but one who I fear may betray the legacy of the civil rights struggle that spawned him (not least by his silence in the face of his own party's shameful emanations concerning the brutal war waged by Israel in the middle east, in contrast to MLK's vocal opposition to Vietnam, etc) - it is worth hearing the reverend's words again. They provide, if nothing else, an index of the moral and ideological regression of a nation and a world - a world in which a black man can be president, but at what cost to his political credentials? It is worth noting how much, and yet how little the world has changed. A key victory for the civil rights struggle has been won - and yet the United States Government is still the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today", despite years of concerted efforts to obscure this fact by magnifying the threat of terrorism, etc. A hollow victory indeed. As in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, it seems there isn't much meat left on the bones of the trophy shark. I dare you to prove me wrong, Mr Obama.

Hamas Funding, Orthodox Anti-Zionism, and Israel's Rogue State Status

2009-01-13T00:27:00.009Z

To anyone who might have thought my assertion that the Israeli Zionists' real fear is not Hamas and Islamic fundamentalism but moderate Palestinians was merely speculative or poetic, here is a clip of Zizek citing a New York Times report on the Israeli government's financial support to Hamas in a bid to oust Arafat. Kind of like the CIA and Al Qaeda, no?

And to anyone who still buys the Israeli pretext that they have to kill more Palestinians because their goal is the destruction of the state of Israel:

Interesting, no? Yet I don't see Israel bombing Orthodox Jews back to the middle ages. Sure, they don't send rockets and suicide bombers to Israel; but neither are they living under a brutal racist occupation by Israel. Some more anti-Zionist rabbis:

Israel has now officially become a rogue state. According to a BBC report from yesterday, Olmert has declared that "nobody should be allowed to decide for us if we are allowed to strike". Fine, Mr Olmert - if that's the case, if international law and human rights mean nothing to you, and your statement in clear and precise terms declares that international law and human rights mean nothing to you, then you have no right to call upon international law and human rights. Then we don't even have to debate the validity of your blatantly false assertion that you are defending yourself from what you call 'Hamas terror'. If you are outside and above international law, if nobody should be allowed to decide for you if you are allowed to strike, then you cannot claim any right to self-defense under international law, you dirty little prick.

Protest and Hysteria

2009-01-11T16:28:00.039Z

My protest banner from the demonstration yesterday, which I lost in a scuffle with the police. Although there were a few troublemakers, at some point the police were whacking anyone they could get their hands on, anyone who came close enough. I got whacked in the ribs a few times by a cop who ran up to me and grabbed me by the neck.

A marked change in the British policing approach to protest demonstrations, which I am told is the result of a deliberate policy change by the new conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson - so it is not just my imagination. One thing that struck me when I moved to London from the USA a few years ago was the remarkable absence of riot police at protests. A huge anti-Iraq war demonstration I went to in late 2003, which began and ended peacefully, was policed only by bobbies, who stood about in the crowd all chip and cheerful, smiling and giving directions to tourists wandering about Trafalgar square. On the way there I did see riot police in vans, parked a safe distance away should anything go wrong.

Yesterday, however, most of the police around us were decked out in riot gear, lined up in echelons with shields, batons, and helmets, behind security fences; their very presence and posture being a provocation, an incitement to violence. We also noted a host of photographers in police uniforms at various points along the march route and in front of the Israeli embassy, perched on buildings taking photos of the crowd, presumably as a form of surveillance.

Good luck with that, you pervy little bastards. If anyone in the police would like my autograph on any snapshots you may have taken of me, I would be happy to provide. However I will not give out my bank account details for any payments in return.

A pro-Israel rally organized by the Board of Deputies of British Jews took place today, as reported by the BBC, with a slurry of banners hysterically declaring, 'END HAMAS TERROR/PEACE FOR THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL AND GAZA.' According to the BBC report, the organizers want 'people in Gaza and Israel to live in peace, but argued that Palestinians must accept some responsibility for the conflict...Demonstrators told the BBC they felt the rocket hits and losses Israel had suffered had been downplayed.'

How sweet. Yet I would like to ask these morally hysteric, proto-fascist peaceniks: at what point down the line were you hit by a collective amnesia that bade you forget that it is the Palestinians who for years have been living under occupation by your military, under an economic blockade without a functioning economy, without functioning basic services, with mass unemployment, behind your illegal walls and barbed wire and behind your checkpoints; that you have destroyed their livelihoods, their orchards, bulldozed their homes, wrecked their lives, murdered their families; that their 'terror' constitutes, in international law terms, resistance to an illegal occupation lasting several decades; while nothing you do against them can properly be considered retaliation, but only reinforcement of an existing, illegal, aggressive military occupation.

According to the press release on the Board of Deputies web site, 'Board President Henry Grunwald QC said, “No British government would - or could - or should have to - put up with the constant barrage of rockets and missiles from a neighbouring country, especially one ruled by a terrorist organisation whose very reason for existence is your destruction.”'

Scuse me?? Neighbouring Country?? So does that mean you recognize Palestine as a sovereign country, or recognize the Palestinians' right to self-determination and autonomy?? Cheers, mate, then we're on the same side. Surely then we agree on this small matter of occupation... Or are you also afflicted by the aforementioned collective amnesia that has struck all supporters of Israel? Of course no one should have to put up with aggression from a neighbouring country - but I am afraid that here it is the Palestinians who are in that position, not you - it is they who are under occupation by a neighbouring country, and trying to put an end to that occupation: just like your own people did when they were killing British civilians in acts of terrorism with a view to creating the state of Israel, after all - or did you forget all about that too? King David Hotel? Irgun? Any of that ring a bell? So, yes, absolutely right, Mr Grunewald QC etc etc - no one should have to put up with that, and the Palestinians have every right to resist occupation. Thanks for pointing that out.

And oh sorry, the fact that some Palestinians say they want to put an end to the state of Israel is no excuse. Of course they do - I would too if I were in their shoes. I am sure that anyone living in such circumstances would want to abolish the aggressor state, including those who lived under Nazi occupation during WWII. But try and see if people still feel that way when you give them back their lives and make reparations. (Which you do owe them, in a big way)... Even as a half-Serb, having lived through the siege of Sarajevo (my mother was at the time a prominent Serb journalist, and we received death threats from Serb nationalists before the phone lines were cut), even now I feel a slight shudder at the thought of entering Serbia, say when someone mentions they are going or have been to the Exit festival; or when I first hear someone speak with a Serbian accent, even if I befriend the person or find out that they're not bad at all. I have no doubt that many felt this way about Germany and Germans for years after WWII, and that many Palestinians, even those who do not go so far as wishing to abolish the state of Israel, feel this way about Israel and Israelis. This is a perfectly normal response to a traumatic experience.

A Bosniak friend of mine who also lived through the siege of Sarajevo in my neighbourhood, a refugee from a town 'ethnically cleansed' by the Serbs, once openly declared in an interview I conducted for a children's magazine in the USA (we were aged 14-15 at the time) that she thought the only solution was to kill all Serbs and make an Islamic state in Bosnia. She knew full well that I was half Serb. And today she can hardly be described as religious at all; a facebook group she is part of is called 'No to Wahhabism in Bosnia' (Wahhabism is an extremist, Saudi-exported brand of Islam); and her 'fan pages' include the film 'Amelie' and Zoran Radmilovic, an ex-Yugoslav actor of Serbian nationality.

The demonstrators at the pro-Israel rally also told the BBC that [my italics] "the number of Israeli deaths should not be considered disproportionate to the number of Palestinian deaths, because Israelis were lucky and escaped their houses before they were hit by Palestinian rockets."

This is truly amazing. I have in my time noted all manner of techniques deployed by nations and nationalist propaganda machines to justify or expunge their atrocities from the record - witnesses have been silenced, figures amended, legal documents and moral codes, entire histories have been rewritten. But in no instance I can think of in history - from the genocide of the Armenians by the Turks to the genocide of Bosnian Muslims by the Serbs - never before have I witnessed an attempt to re-write the laws of mathematics.

Moreover, if Israel is merely retaliating and trying to end unprovoked Hamas terror, how come most Israelis managed to escape their houses before they were hit by Hamas rockets? How come the Palestinians weren't so 'lucky'? To what do the Israelis owe this incredible luck that defies both logic and mathematics - did they all just happen to be out shopping when a terrifying barrage of Hamas rockets to equal any by the Israelis hit their homes? Moreover, why is the civilian death toll in Gaza still rising exponentially? Are the Palestinians unaware that they are being bombarded daily? Or is it possible that the scale of destruction in Gaza and the intensity of bombardment is such that there is no place where anyone can safely hide? Given the Israeli military's tendency to bulldoze through walls, houses, or entire villages to eliminate hiding places for 'terrorists' - rather than hunting them down - I wouldn't be surprised.

But guess what, Zionists - you can only go on so far in this way while pretending that you are not targeting civilians. You know that you are, and you also know why. You know full well that for every innocent you kill, you have bred 10 potential new Hamas fighters or suicide bombers whose lives will likely end before they let go of their anger and find themselves, as my Bosniak friend did. And this is indeed your goal. Deep down, you know that your real fear is not Palestinian violence and anger, which you can contain, but Palestinian freedom, which you cannot; your real fear is fear of the other - not the suicide bomber, but the Palestinian who peacefully lives next to you. Your true enemy are not the extremists, but the moderates - that is why you financed Hamas in order to get rid of Arafat. You do not fear Palestinian violence, because you can exert far more; if had any real fear of it, if you really took seriously any threat of the destruction of Israel, you would not behave as you behave - this is the very principle of Mutual Assured Destruction that kept all sides in check during the Cold War. Your real fear is not war with Palestinians, but peace with Palestinians. You know full well that neither a one-state (with Palestinians) nor a two-state solution is acceptable to you, the militant Zionist establishment, and that the only way to 'peace' you can envisage is either to radicalize the Palestinians enough to give you pretext to completely crush them, or to terrorize them enough to drive them from their land. And with this goal in mind, even the lives of your own people are relatively expendable to you: 13 dead is a fair price to pay for killing 900 Palestinians. For it is not Hamas, but the moderate, average Palestinians who are the real threat to Israel as you envision it - a mono-ethnic state for Jews, and Jews only. With each day that passes, I am less and less surprised that some of the leading Nazis - at least those who personally did not favour the Final Solution - were themselves Zionists. Like yourselves, what bothered them about the Jewish identity is its statelessness, its lack of any national chauvinism. You have now made sure to correct that. Masters of war, I can see through your masks.

Rachel Corrie, 2003

Moments of Gaza: Live Blog From Gaza

2009-01-09T18:05:00.010Z

Click here to read Moments of Gaza, a live blog from Gaza.

One entry from yesterday reads:

'Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor in Gaza, says that the number of civilians injured and killed in Gaza proves that Israel is deliberately attacking the population. The doctor also said that the hospitals have reached capacity, all the doctors are operating around the clock and there are hundreds of people untreated. "This is an all out war against the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza" he said. "They are bombing 1.5 million people in a cage".'

In occurs to me that during the siege of Sarajevo, which I lived through with my parents, the Serb forces who pounded the city from the hills and deliberately targeted civilians (using all the same excuses, verbatim, that the Israelis now use) managed to kill 10,000 people (and wound a lot more) in three and a half years. The Israelis have now killed over 700, according to the latest BBC reports - in only two weeks! Hospitals are at full capacity, doctors are working around the clock, and the Israelis keep pounding.

No matter how many they kill, they stick to their story, and for swathes of the media-saturated, brain-damaged masses, it works, because of a long-established rhetoric - 'they, the Palestinians, are the terrorists, we Israelis are a legitimate sovereign state protecting our population.' No matter how many they kill. Once the rhetorical line is established, nothing else matters, the figures don't matter, the facts on the ground don't matter. That the Palestinians are the ones living under your illegal occupation, behind your illegal wall, that doesn't matter.

The argument is, of course, that Hamas would kill more if they could; they don't because their weapons are imprecise. But wait - wouldn't that lead to more killing? Isn't having imprecise weapons just a good excuse for indiscriminate slaughter? And anyway, how could they be targeting anyone, civilian or military, with such imprecise rockets? And aren't you, Israelis, supposed to be killing less people, since you are only targeting Hamas and you have more precise weapons? Of course, you are firing more rockets. But why? Aren't these exactly the tactics of putting down revolt used by the Nazis, as I suggested earlier? For every Israeli killed, you kill 100 Palestinians.

Yes, you are targeting civilians, as you always have been, as you well know. You just have better PR, more money, and more access to media. And no, when you pull that trigger, you are not a legitimate sovereign state protecting its people. You are just a bunch of murderous fascist thugs, solidifying an illegal occupation behind an illegal wall. You are fuck-all, and you can shove your sovereignty up your ass.

It's ironic, isn't it - that a state built from the ashes of a world war that claimed the lives of millions and changed the world forever, establishing a world order symbolized for 40 years by a wall that tore asunder the very city in which the germ of the Holocaust was spawned - that that very same state has built a new wall: an even more fascist wall. It, too, symbolizes a new world order, and a transition: from the 'Cold War' to the 'War on Terror' - a war on humanity.

Yes, Israel, in 1987, in sympathy with your staunch ally the apartheid government of South Africa, you and the United States were the only two countries in the United Nations who opposed a General Assembly resolution condemning terrorism. Why? Because although resolution 42/159 condemned terrorism in the strongest terms, it also, in the opinion of the General Assembly, contained nothing that "could in any way prejudice the right to self-determination, freedom and independence, as derived from the Charter of the United Nations, of peoples, forcibly deprived of that right..., particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation or other forms of colonial domination, nor... the right of these peoples to struggle to this end and to seek and receive support [in accordance with the Charter and other principles of international law]."

Yes, you were afraid that 'terrorist acts' against a repressive, racist, murderous regime such as apartheid South Africa - or your own occupation of Palestinian lands - might be considered legitimate under international law as a result of such a resolution. You were afraid that peoples struggling against 'colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation or other forms of colonial domination' might have a legitimate right, under international law, to commit what you call 'terrorist acts'. God forbid that such a thing should happen.

Gaza Hospital Overflowing

2009-01-06T21:43:00.002Z

Talkin' World War III Blues, #8362: Assault on Gaza/Talmud in Reverse, A Case Study in Why Human Rights Are Bad For You

2009-01-05T10:28:00.063Z

The military logic that emerges from Israel's assault on Gaza the past week resembles a perverse reinscription of the well-known Talmudic proverb: 'whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.' Instead of this old wisdom we are now told, in a complex and elaborate military language, that whoever destroys one (Israeli) life, destroys the world entire, and must therefore pay back in kind. One needn't go further than the revelations in the mainstream media to catch this. According to BBC online:

"Israel says its intentions are to suppress Palestinian militant rocket attacks, which have killed five Israelis since the start of the campaign."

For five killed Israelis, all of Gaza must be brought to its knees in an all-out air assault, over 500 Palestinians must die, most of them civilians, and the logic of 'collateral damage' - a myth in any modern war - must be invoked to justify the dirty deeds. The family member of a Hamas militant, anyone who supports them, anyone who happens to live near them, their friends, neighbours, their private residence, anyone in their vicinity - all are legitimate targets, which pretty much makes any Palestinian, civilian or not, young or old, a potentially legitimate military target. In the same way in which the kidnap of 2 Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah two years ago justified an all-out war on Lebanon - with thousands of Lebanese civilian casualties, the levelling of entire neighbourhoods in Beirut, etc - five Israeli dead justify the slaughter of 500 Palestinians, and upwards.

I will be accused of taking cheap shots, but this military logic is really not all that different from strategies and tactics deployed by the Nazis in WWII. It is well known that the war broke out following Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939. What is slightly less well known is that Germany's invasion was a response to supposed Polish 'border provocations'. To Nazis and Zionists alike, all that matters is who 'provoked' whom. So long as there is a valid pretext - so long as it is the Polish or the Palestinians or Lebanese who nominally fired the first shot - anything done in retaliation (several million Jews, communists, and Poles killed by the Nazis; five hundred Palestinians killed by Israel) is justified.

It is also a fact that the Nazis, at least in the Balkans, had a habit of retaliating for partisan diversions by murdering something to the tune of 100 civilians for every German killed, unless the perpetrators turned themselves in. (In fact it was the Nazis who first used the term 'terrorist' to refer to guerilla insurgents, if my memory serves me right.) Another way of perversely rephrasing the Talmudic wisdom: whoever kills one Israeli has killed five hundred, or a thousand, or more, and must pay back in kind. An Israeli life is that much more valuable than a Palestinian one.

This is the tragic mode in which the spectre of the Holocaust still haunts us today: through the logic of Zionism, a portion of the Jewish people have internalized the racist, militaristic logic once turned against them. To make matters worse, they are given a relatively free hand by the international community: because of the collective historical burden and the spectre of Nazism, nobody is likely to lift a finger - even a diplomatic one - against Israel, least of all Europe. And like the Zionists before them, the Palestinians themselves gradually internalize the militant racism turned against them; the circle is complete. In their tragic failure of vision, the Israelis fail to see that by far the most effective way to weaken support for Hamas among the Palestinians would be to bring Hamas to the negotiating table. (It is an oft-repeated but well-proven wisdom that the present course of action will only swell the ranks of extremists everywhere. Not to mention how poorly Israel's reactionary tactics - or the habitual bulldozing of entire buildings in the West Bank and Gaza in order to root out Hamas militants - reflect on its military competence and efficiency...)

To be fair, it is hardly the Zionists alone who are to blame: in recent years no one has been better than the Americans - Republicans and Democrats alike - at playing this double game: on one hand preaching liberty and human rights, on the other placing openly a premium on protecting American lives, regardless of the cost to others. But there is no contradiction here: what this brings to light in crystal clarity is precisely the dual logic of biopolitics/thanatopolitics at its purest, as outlined by Foucault: 'liberty and human rights', the moment they are proclaimed as actualized in a concrete territorial sense (the 'free world', etc), cease to exist as universal content, but become only a relative form of dividing the world and the races and territories of the world, of valuing different lives differently. Perversely enough, it is precisely the fact that Iraqis under Saddam and post-Saddam were not formally endowed with the same rights as Americans that made them more disposable, even in the eyes of American servicemen. Being formally disempowered, they are simply not treated in the same way as Americans, or those 'naturally' endowed with rights (regardless of what 'universal human rights' might apply to them in international conventions, which for all intents and purposes are of no consequence where they are most needed). The Iraqis' formal 'rightlessness' becomes tactically useful to the occupying army, all the while it is decried in the name of 'democracy' and 'liberty'. The occupying forces are quite happy to give the locals no better treatment than what they are accustomed to. In the process they discover that fear is the greatest weapon - just as much as the Iraq War was ultimately a war on the Iraqi people, the ongoing assault on Gaza is an assault on the Palestinian people. Notions of 'collateral damage' and 'targeting militants' lose their meaning in modern urban warfare, where civilians will inevitably die, especially in a place like Gaza, whose extraordinarily high population density owes something to Israel's ethnic cleansing and settlement policy; and what, one wonders, do the Israelis and Americans expect their far outnumbered and ill-equipped adversaries to do? gather in one convenient spot in the desert far from any urban centre with a huge sign saying 'TERRORIST INSURGENTS'? No, this is indeed a war on the Palestinian people, and Israel's real aim is to strike fear into their hearts, all under the banner of 'collateral damage'.

All of which is to say that there is simply nothing 'universal' about the demagoguery of 'human rights' as preached from the pulpits of Washington, or in general; the term 'universal human rights' as phrased in various conventions can only refer to a very hollow universal; it draws political street credit at home (in the 'free world') from the persistent presence of oppressed, disenfranchised, dispossessed, and disempowered people everywhere abroad. Therefore it cannot for its own sake even stir to put an end to all forms of oppression worldwide. So long as there are dictators and ruthless monarchs in the world, Americans will trust their leaders enough to vote for them and more-less toe the party line (with or without universal healthcare, job security, pay equality, etc). We live in the 'free world' - we take 'freedom' for granted, whether actual or not, we have the form or semblance of freedom - and therefore can afford to cut back a little on the content. It is in the name of liberty that liberty is denied. There is no contradiction here, or the contradiction is only apparent. There are at stake two senses of liberty: the universal right, denied to all in the name of the particular, given to some at the expense of others. The reason is simple: the universal right pits all nations against all states, rather than nation-states against one another. And it is nation-states who are ultimately the masters of the rhetoric.

In this sense the tragedy at hand is not only the world's but a tragedy for the Jewish people. Through Zionism the Jewish people have merely adopted the collective notional structure of the modern nation-state, which is inherently racist, whether in a biological or a formal/territorial sense. (Most European states would fall more-less in the former category) This transaction carries with it the danger of losing a uniquely Jewish identity which, in defiance of nation-states, straddles the line between the universal and the particular - the only hope for a truly informed, cosmopolitan, authentic universal humanism.

One final piece of wisdom: whoever destroys an entire city in order to save one life, is an incompetent idiot and should be locked up in an insane asylum.

The Straight Line and the Void: Hundertwasser, Hiroshima, and the Horror of Forgetting

2008-12-28T12:27:00.028Z

Hundertwasser, the most important Viennese artist of the second half of the twentieth century, despised straight lines. Straight lines he thought immoral and atheistic. Painting is a religious experience. There are no straight lines in nature.

I have been photographing straight lines lately. They do seem mostly man-made, inasmuch as they can be called 'straight' - building cranes, jet streams, telephone cables, poles, railway tracks. But Hundertwasser is right - there are no straight lines in nature, even man-made. Everything is crooked, curved, bent, distorted, twisted - if you look close enough. Or inversely, if you stand back far enough. Straightness is a metaphor, or a mirage - and a dangerous one at that. A jet stream is nothing but a shapeless clutter of gusts, clouds, particles, hyperbolic streams.

"I venture to say that the line described by my feet as I go walking to the museum is more important than the lines one finds hanging on the walls inside. And I get enormous pleasure in seeing that the line is never straight, never confused, but it has its reasons for being the way it is in every smallest part. Beware of the straight line and the drunken line, but especially of the straight one! The straight line leads to the loss of humanity." (Hundertwasser, 27)

Hundertwasserhaus, a low-income apartment block in Vienna designed free of charge by the artist ("to prevent something ugly from going up in its place"), features undulating floors, an earth and grass-covered roof, and large trees growing inside rooms with limbs extending from windows. "An uneven floor is a melody to the feet," Hundertwasser was reported as saying.

Among the architectural features of the new Jewish Museum in Berlin designed by Daniel Libeskind is a Holocaust Void - "a void space that embodies absence, a straight line whose impenetrability becomes the central focus around which exhibitions are organized." (63) The straight line: the loss of humanity, the holocaust.

In the novel We, a somewhat superior forerunner to Orwell's 1984 which Orwell himself credited as a major source of inspiration, Yevgeny Zamyatin writes: "Taming a wild zigzag along a tangent, toward the asymptote, into a straight line: yes. You see, the line of the One State - it is a straight line. A great, divine, precise, wise, straight line - the wisest of lines." (4) The straight line: totalitarian state.

According to the author of a book on the Sarajevo Hagaddah, the Nazis' aim in looting Jewish treasures from around the world was to house them in a "museum of an extinct people." All museums and galleries, to a greater or lesser extent, unwittingly or not, furnish this project: the past is another country. The gesture of putting on display a work objectifies and distances it; the work becomes the index of a complex absence, opens up a space of alienation, a void. Every exhibition space is in a sense a 'museum of an extinct race' ... It commemorates the absence of the artist, who no longer exists, who is extinct.

(*The inclusion of the holocaust void in the New Jewish Museum in Berlin, implying a negative content, could be a saving grace or counterweight to this tendency, by displacing the trauma of extermination not on a fixed positive content, but on a kind of vanishing mediator which never vanishes, fixing the gesture of petrification/alienation in a state of incompleteness, a straight line whose emptiness negates itself, its straightness...)

Something to this effect happens to be the theme of a side exhibition at Futura Gallery in Prague titled 'Key Figures in 20th Century Art'. It consists of a series of portraits of artists who, according to the authors of the project (Avdei Ter-Oganian and Vaclav Magid), have "contributed to the elimination of avant-garde tendencies" and given rise to the capitalist notion of the work of art as an object of consumption. (also known as 'commodity') The logic of the commodity is inimical to the work of art, leading to what Ter-Oganian and Magid call an "ecological catastrophe in the cultural sphere". The artists whose portraits are hung on the 'wall of shame', ranging from Gustav Klimt to Tracey Emin, have "left the world of art and sold themselves to the production of worthless yet luxury commodities." The artists have vacated their own bodies.

A series of works by photographer Susan Hiller titled 'The J Street Project' (book by same name) documents 303 German streets which contain the word 'Jude' - 'Jew'. The research resulted in over 300 photographs, a list of places and streets with a map of Germany, a video installation and a lengthy book. Given the perverse logic of the Nazis' collecting habits, however, the persistence of the streetnames that Hiller documents is not at all at odds with the 'traumatic absence' they indicate. Street names are like museums and galleries, for the most part - they are not there to help us remember, but to help us forget. They obliterate, obliviate what was - the past present - replacing it with a petrified is, an always-was.

Forgetting is the recurring theme in all this - in Hiroshima mon Amour, the phrase 'horror of forgetting' appears. No longer the horror itself - of the bomb, of torture, of the loss of love - but horror at the loss of memory of the horror. Horror when confronted with the possibility that such intense love or suffering can fade in spite of all efforts to the contrary, that one can eventually go on living 'as if nothing ever happened'. That objects lose their signifying power. That the meaning of a sign can be reversed.

It is in this that the horror of intense love and intense suffering are one. "Just as in love this illusion exists, this illusion of being able never to forget, so I was under the illusion that I would never forget Hiroshima." (212) The woman from Nevers is constituted by the horror she suffers; she preserves her identity by preserving the memory of lost love, its intensity. Underneath, the true horror - the horror that there is no horror, that the animal survives, that no pain, torture, death, or love can kill it. This is the truly horrifying thing - the animal in us that overcomes the horror. The remainder, the Muselmann of Auschwitz, the straight line that perseveres...Vertigo, as Kundera put it, is not the fear of falling, but the fear of our own longing to fall.

One of the pitfalls to any resistance struggle, as Foucault warns, is attachment to an identity of subject instituted or coagulated in a situation of oppression, the constitution of an identity permanently marked and defined by subjugation. Even worse, by taking one's own victimization/subjection for granted one easily forgets it, freeing one's conscience to subject others, to become the very thing one struggles against. (As Israel's treatment of Palestinians shows, most recently in the attacks on Gaza the past week...) True resistance must lie somewhere inbetween - between the horror of forgetting and total oblivion. It must entail a real, mobile multiculturalism - hybrid, rhizomatic, chameleonic - rather than the liberal pandering to the other as other which fixes the other permanently in a state of subjugation and/or fixes it with a positive content. A transcendental multiculturalism whose horizon of possibility includes not mere understanding of but being the other through/as oneself.

The Nazis never managed to get their hands on the Sarajevo Haggadah on account of a clever ruse by a Muslim librarian and Islamic scholar named Dervis Korkut. When a German officer came to collect the book at the National Museum in Sarajevo, the museum curator informed him that another SS officer had just collected it and left. The straight-thinking German took the bait and left, frustrated. Korkut left by the back door, Haggadah in hand.

Korkut took the book to his home village, and hid it in the home of a Muslim family (or in a mosque, according to another version of the story), mixed in with Islamic texts. As the Germans assumed all Muslims were collaborators (on account of the simple dichotomy Muslim/Jew), they were not in the habit of searching Muslim homes. Like Poe's purloined letter, here the Sarajevo Haggadah becomes a Deleuzian virtual object, by definition displaced - it is what it is by virtue of never being where it is expected. It eludes the grasp of its pursuers because it is by definition a Jewish book rescued by a Muslim librarian.

The Haggadah survived the most recent Bosnian war and the burning of the National Library in Sarajevo by Serb artillery. It was again rescued by a Muslim, a museum curator this time. It lives, invisibly. The asymptote, the zigzag, the wandering path of an ancient book defeats the straight line of the howitzer barrel.

* * *

Restany, Hundertwasser (2008)
Saltzman & Rosenberg (ed), Trauma and Visuality in Modernity (2006)
Wolf, Daniel Libeskind and the Contemporary Jewish Museum (2008)
Zamyatin, We (2006)

New York Times article on Hitler's plans for a 'museum of an extinct race'.
New Yorker essay on Sarajevo Haggadah

Post Scriptum: Hei-digging the Tao in Haneke and the Apocalypse that has Always Already Occurred

2008-10-28T17:50:00.002Z

A new piece I wrote for Kino Fist, on the theme of film and apocalypse is available here. A few addenda for future re-workings or writings on the same topic...

Heideggerian temporality, the always-already of apocalyptic time in Haneke's films, the silences that speak volumes and the words that say nothing, the subversion of dichotomies (war/peace) all point to what ancient Chinese philosophy calls the Tao:

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

It is also what Agamben refers to in a discussion of Debord, Godard, and the Jewish Messiah (perhaps referring to the more subversive, mystical, kabbalistic interpretation, although he does not explicitly say): "In the Jewish tradition, there is a tremendous irony surrounding calculations to predict the day of the Messiah's arrival...The Messiah's arrival is incalculable. Yet at the same time, each historical moment is the time of His arrival. The Messiah has always already arrived, he is always already there." (Giorgio Agamben, 'Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord's Films', in Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, p. 328).

The film Hiroshima Mon Amour, the subject of a recent screening/talk at the Courtauld Institute of Art by artist Lisa Kolbowski ('After Hiroshima Mon Amour', a 22-minute video) takes a similarly Heideggerian/Hanekean approach, relying very little on shocking footage and far more on personal relationships and how the cataclysmic event is sublated in the ordinary, everyday present, with or without the atom bomb. The real measure of a tragedy is not difference drawn from identity - not how my plight compares to that of another - but internal difference, which asks: how do I differ from myself? How have I been alienated from myself? How is the tragic always-already event expressed or sublated in my ordinary everyday experience? The real tragedy, in other words, is when the tragedy is legitimized/normalized; when the power of shock subsides and we accept some horror as simply a part of everyday experience; when we fully identify with/assimilate the ideology of our own repression. The novel We by Russian dissident Evgeny Zamyatin, for instance - an early inspiration for Orwell's 1984 - opens with a reflection by the narrator on the pleasant sensation he gets from being watched over by his minders, who peruse every page of the book he is reading on the train.

In Society Must Be Defended, a series of lectures given at the College de France in 1975/76, Foucault elaborates the notion of political power based on the model of war, famously characterizing politics as the 'continuation of war by other means', rather than the conventional inverse way of putting it. War is everywhere, and this is perhaps one of the underlying messages of Haneke's 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, as discussed in the Kino Fist piece. Very scary, very prescient (the book, that is, although based on an analysis of history, but hey it's not all as obvious to everyone as it was to Michel in '76) - and increasingly relevant today in a world of 'disaster capitalism', market crashes, neoconservative ideology, and the 'war on terror'...

And finally, there is a fridge magnet I once saw somewhere with the following series of quotes (sadly, I couldn't find an image):

To do is to be - Nietzsche
To be is to do - Kant
Do be do be do - Frank Sinatra

Heh heh.

Talkin' World War III Blues, #642: Intersubjectivity and Global Politics

2008-09-18T10:42:00.020+01:00

Well, now time passed and now it seems
Everybody's having them dreams.
Everybody sees themselves walkin' around with no one else.

Half of the people can be part right all of the time,
Some of the people can be all right part of the time.
But all the people can't be all right all the time
I think Abraham Lincoln said that.
"I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours,"
I said that.

-Bob Dylan, 'Talkin' World War III Blues'

Heh heh. Well, I guess that explains it - all the confusion in global politics, discussed previously. It's all one big, catastrophic failure of intersubjectivity. No wonder the Left and Right trade places from one global conflict to the next, without a principle in sight, when any position they do take in a given crisis, whether substantively right or wrong, stems less from authentic, subjective political and ethical concerns, and more from a tribal/collective impulse to objectively oppose, grounded purely in the negative. To objectify the enemy as something in any given situation, and attack that. The substantive correctness of a particular position is then only a by-product, or accident, secondary to an oppositional impulse that keeps both sides trapped in a simple dialectic of historical chance.

Oh, Those Russians: South Ossetia and the New Economic Order, or Mutual Assured Distr(a)ction

2008-09-17T14:18:00.026+01:00

What is striking about the whole South Ossetia affair is that the Left and the Right have almost diametrically exchanged positions since the Kosovo war. Georgia's claim to South Ossetia is almost identical to Serbia's claim over Kosovo. Serbia's claim was in some ways even weaker, given that the Serbs, despite being in key positions of power in the military and police and dominating the social and political life of the province, were a minority in Kosovo, whose population was 90% Albanian. Serbia's claim to the territory is more based on medieval history than anything else, which brings it a bit closer to Israel's claim over the Occupied Territories, where similarly, a powerful minority (the Jewish settlers) effectively dominates the majority of the local population.

Nevertheless, while many on the far-Left fiercely opposed the NATO intervention on behalf of the Albanians in Kosovo, many now seem to - not so fiercely - support the far more brutal Russian intervention on behalf of the South Ossetians. We should greet with cheers, they say, the news that the world has another superpower besides the US. (Yay, more superpowers to bludgeon the rest of the world into obedience.) The US and Britain and other Western countries, for their part, shamelessly apply blatantly double standards, as in the case of Serbia and Israel, respectively, and their position on Georgia is full of mixed messages, doubtless because of Russia's economic prowess with respect to oil and gas supply. There is not a principle in sight anywhere.

But there is a broader issue here. There is a widespread doctrine in integrationist and communitarian circles, most notably embodied in the European Union, that greater economic integration and inter-dependence decreases the likelihood of armed conflict between states. In the aftermath of WWII, one of the key founding aims of the European Coal and Steel Community, which later became first the EC and then the EU, was to prevent another war between France and Germany. Economic integration and interdependence creates a disincentive to resolving disputes through armed conflict, or so the reasoning goes. (On a related note, some neoliberal ideologue also once declared that no two democracies have ever gone to war against each other, which was patently false at the time and has since been proven false time and time again...)

So is this really the case? Does the doctrine of integration-as-war-deterrent really deliver on its promise?

Given China's regional bullying, Russia's newly emergent interventionist stance, and the double standards applied all around, matters seem to be quite to the contrary: greater economic integration certainly reduces the likelihood of open conflict between the superpowers themselves - between countries who control a substantial portion of the global economy - but this leaves out the majority of the world's population. Sure, nobody will ever lift a finger against China, but if this is purely due to economic dependence and regardless of what China does, is this really a good thing? Is this not the very same pragmatic realist rationale that undermined any serious international opposition to the Iraq War in spite of much grumbling in mainstream political circles? And is it any different from the Cold-War doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD? Certainly, those countries who had nuclear weapons were unlikely to go to war against one another; but just like global economic prowess, the nuclear ticket leaves most of us out. The rules are made on a might-makes-right basis: the Chinese will rarely put up serious opposition to a US aggression against another sovereign country, because it sets a positive precedent for their own territorial pretensions, and vice versa. This spells even greater doom for those countries not in the club of the very rich and very powerful: if a country in possession of vast natural resources or labour power enmeshed in the global economy brutally invades a country on which very little of the world's economic output depends, or which has little in the way of political clout, nobody will do a damn thing.

And the hallowed principles invoked on all sides - international law, sovereignty, human rights - are nothing more than fictitious role-play or moral diversion in a cynical realpolitik game of give-and-take. What's more, even if in the short term there is less likelihood of a major global war between superpowers, in the long term, if they ever do come to blows...Even without open warfare, judging by the news headlines of the past few days, we may well be on the brink of what could be termed as the economic equivalent of a nuclear winter, worse than even the stock market crash of 1929.

Homage to Catatonia: Western Leftist Intellectuals and Their Apologia for Serb Ethno-Fascism

2008-09-17T12:00:00.014+01:00

Richard 'Lenin' Seymour and Pope Benedict XVI: Peas in a Pod?

Lenin's Tomb, the blog run by Richard Seymour, a.k.a. Lenin, has finally lived up to its name. One might even say that it lived up to its name since its inception, in one way or another. Yep, this is indeed Lenin's Tomb. If Heidegger is right, and Being is not simply Presence, then Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin did not die on January 21st, 1924 in Moscow, Russia; He survived that death. He died decades later, at the hands of the Socialist Worker Party and their apologia for Serbian neofascist ethno-nationalism; he died in the words and deeds of the buffoons behind this ignominious organization.

I made a declaration to that effect in a comment stream in response to a post on Seymour's blog, in which he, leaving aside facts and logic, displayed only a reasonable command of the English language, and a tenacity in deploying the 'expert' opinions of right-wing or Western imperialist UN sources sympathetic to the Serbs' neofascist project, and otherwise dubious sources, in supporting his views on the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s. In one notable instance he referred to Gen. Sir Michael Rose KCB CBE DSO QGM, an old-guard imperialist of British upper class breeding (seen in photo below and here making merry with Serb war criminal Ratko Mladic, with some good coverage of the affair) to support his view that it wasn't the Serbs besieging Sarajevo who caused the Markale massacre, but the Bosnians themselves; and that the Bosnian army generally committed "atrocities, including the deliberate attempts to provoke attacks on civilian infrastructure and buildings."

Gen Ratko Mladic (left) and Gen Michael Rose shaking hands

After I pointed out to him :

1. That this kind of logic is generally used by military aggressors to justify the campaigns of terror they unleash on cities;
2. That one cannot speak in these terms when practically everything in any modern city is in one way or another 'civilian infrastructure';
3. That this is precisely the kind of logic used by Israelis to justify civilian casualties in the West Bank, or the by Americans in Iraq, an extreme variant of the logic of 'collateral damage' which only serves to conceals the intentionality in any act of war (sure, the Americans in Iraq do not deliberately target civilians, at least not always; but they knew very well that civilian deaths were inevitable, and are inevitable in any act of war)
4. That this is precisely the logic that states in general use to make the distinction between 'terrorism' and state violence (as in, when the stateless terrorists blow up people, that's 'terrorism', yet when states blow up people it's 'collateral damage' or the terrorists were using civilian infrastructure as bait); and
5. That this is precisely one of the main reasons why war is a profoundly unethical enterprise, except in the case where it is self-defensive, and only to that extent to which it is purely self-defensive (and pre-emptive warfare is by no means self-defensive but only a sneaky way of passing off an aggressive war as a defensive one)

Seymour finally insisted that he never meant to be apologetic for the Serbs, and asked "where do I state that the BiH provocations reported by UNPROFOR justified the attacks by the SRK?"

Well, it seems to me that already his question contains its own answer; for the very deployment of the neutral "BiH provocations reported by UNPROFOR" suggests redemption or endorsement of the cited views; kind of like if I were to say something like 'Hamas provocations reported by the UN' in relation to a massacre of Palestinian civilians. BiH, or Bosnian army attacks on Serb positions and artillery around Sarajevo, in an attempt to break the siege of Sarajevo, the longest siege on European soil in modern history, were according to Seymour simply 'provocations', intended, as Seymour's other statement (above) suggests, to draw fire on civilian infrastructure and demonise the Serbs. The Bosnian army, in other words, had nothing better to do than sneakily draw fire on their own civilian population, just like Hamas and Hezbollah and the Iraqi resistance habitually do. Poor Serbs, poor Americans, poor Israelis, for having such devious, demonic foes.

The final step of Seymour's pathetic denial is that he was merely quoting UN sources; these were not his words. (Although they were not in quotation marks, nor did he qualify his statements with words like 'alleged' but used them to support his overall view).

This is what I call the Papa Ratzi (or 'Papparazzi) defence; that's after Joseph Alois Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, who famously deployed it in a controversy over a lecture he delivered at the University of Regensburg, wherein he said of the Islamic faith, to the dismay of many, "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

Not to worry though, the Pope thinks Islam is a kind and peace-loving religion, he was only quoting a 14th century text, “Dialogue Held With A Certain Persian, the Worthy Mouterizes, in Anakara of Galatia”, which for its part cites the views not of the author but of Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus. Nothing to do with the views of the Pope himself (twice removed), who was really only using the quote to illustrate the 'astoundingly harsh' way in which the interlocutor expresses himself. He was just making a drab, theological point, nothing remotely of interest to us, the general public.

I can just imagine the put-downs: "In the words of a 14th century Byzantine emperor...your mama is a whore!"

The Markale massacre, to note, against the view of Serb-sympathiser Rose, was declared by the Hague Tribunal (ICTY) to have been caused by an artillery shell fired from Serb positions.

My Position

The entire comment streams, in 2 discussions, can be seen here and here; I have saved them as html files, just in case Seymour, having blocked me from further posting and having deleted some of my comments, deletes them from his blog. Therein one may see on full display the irrationality, rhetorical incapacity, and factual deviance of these playground socialists who can't even spell the M in Marxism-Leninism.

In another instance, a blogger named QLIPOTH claimed that Alija Izetbegovic, the wartime President of Bosnia, "tried to prevent" Jews from leaving Sarajevo at the start of the war, and posts as evidence of this fact an article which clearly states that Izetbegovic rather kindly made a "request" of the leader of one Jewish community organization that the Jews don't all leave, since that would spell doom for the city (making it easier for the Serbs preparing their artillery in the hills to intensify hostilities without scruples) and since many foreign journalists were asking whether there was a mass exodus of Jews from the city.

These people can't even read their own sources properly, so go figure.

My position, as elaborated in the discussion, and my beef with leftist intellectuals who put forward an apologia for Serbian neofascist ethno-nationalism in the guise of socialism, can be boiled down to four points, broadly outlined as follows:

1. Multiculturalism vs Nationalism: The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s were not between a number of ethnic groups, fueled by ancient religious/ethnic rivalries and hatreds, but between two forces; the forces of ethno-fascism on one side, and the forces of Titoist socialist multiculturalism on the other. The places that saw the greatest destruction in the conflict, particularly in Serbia and Croatia, were not those where ethnic tensions were the highest; rather they were those - Sarajevo, Vukovar, Mostar, Dubrovnik - that best symbolized, throughout the existence of Tito's Yugoslavia, and even before, the inter-ethnic harmony that made the region famous. Even during the war it survived. Izetbegovic shared the Presidency with Mirko Pejanovic, a Serb; the war time government was composed of Muslims/Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats, from various parties, including the SDP (Social Democratic Party), the former League of Communists of Bosnia, which is still today the only truly multi-ethnic party in postwar Bosnia, led by Zlatko Lagumdzija (Bosniak), Bogic Bogicevic (Serb) and Ivo Komsic (Croat); Many Serbs and Croats were in the military, including command posts, such as Jovan Divjak, a Serb, who organized the initial defence of Sarajevo before becoming a commander in the Bosnian army, and is today a well-known peace and education activist. My own mother, a Serb, edited the only daily newspaper to continue publication throughout the war, Oslobodjenje (Liberation), with her Muslim, Serb, and Croat colleagues. The population of Sarajevo was itself multi-ethnic, and many Serbs and Croats, as well as Bosniaks, died in the Serb shelling of the city. (Even though Serb extremists later tried to pass off many of these as victims of ethnic cleansing by Muslims or some such drivel). If there was anything left of Tito's Yugoslavia in the 1990s, it was held together, however shakily, by the Bosnian government in Sarajevo.

Many leftist intellectuals in the West, however, were either indifferent or apologetic for Serbian nationalism, or openly supported Milosevic's murderous regime and his murderous thugs in Bosnia (Karadzic, Mladic, and co.); largely, presumably, on account of Milosevic being a socialist - although his party, the Socialist Party, formerly the League of Communists of Serbia, was never admitted into the Socialist International, by an almost unanimous vote of 150 parties from 130 countries, on charges of 'nationalism and warmongering'. No party from Serbia, in fact, has full-member status in the SI to this day. The SDP of Bosnia, on the other hand, along with the main Socialist parties from all the other former Yugoslav Republics, have been full members almost since inception.

2. Milosevic: The key agent in Yugoslavia's destruction was Slobodan Milosevic, whose relationship to the West was no less complex than that of Saddam. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had effectively ceased to exist as such before Croatia and Slovenia ever declared independence. The Yugoslav constitution of 1974 stipulated that any unilateral change of borders by any Republic within the Federation would result in the Federation effectively being dissolved. And before there was any talk of independence, before nationalist parties swept the 1990 elections, in 1989 Milosevic, in an aggressive expansionist move, annexed the provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo, in an attempt to control 3 of the 8 votes in the federal League of Communists. (Imagine, say, Gordon Brown abolishing the devolved powers of the Welsh and Scottish assemblies in order to control their votes in the EU Parliament and have legislation crafted to his liking) Prior to this he gave a historic speech in Kosovo (a majority-Albanian province which for decades had been dominated politically and militarily by a 10% Serb minority, whose position at the time therefore, as well as their historic claim to the land, is very similar to that of Jewish settlers in Palestine, who base their claim on even more remote history); this was on the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, which took place in 1389, when the invading Turks defeated the Serbs.

Milosevic's 1989 annexations are what led to the walkout of the Croatian and Slovene representatives in the League of Communists - before Tudjman ever appeared on the scene. What they wanted, in view of the constitutional provisions, was a re-negotiation of the constitutional terms of the Federation, for various reasons, but most notably on account of Milosevic unilaterally taking 3 of the 8 votes in the League of Communists. (especially given that Kosovo and Vojvodina had their own representatives precisely on account of their autonomy). The Serb representatives (who were now 3) shouted down all proposals and refused any re-negotiation or loosening of the Federation; they wanted to keep the enormous power they had just obtained by constitutional fraud.

From that moment on, Milosevic's power grab is just what led to the erosion of the League's credibility and power in the Republics and the rise in popularity of nationalist movements, eventually leading to the election of people like Tudjman and declarations of independence. Milosevic himself coming ostensibly from the Communist party (a wolf in sheep's clothing, for lack of a better analogy), the Communist leagues of the other republics - which in the 1990 elections in Bosnia ran as the SDP, or Social Democratic Party - had little chance of distancing themselves completely from Milosevic in the eyes of the electorate. The same wave of nationalism swept all over Yugoslavia in the 1990s - except that in Serbia, where it originated, in typically covert fashion the nationalists came from within the Communist party itself, and undermined it from the inside, eroding its credibility throughout the country (not just in Serbia). It is a travesty of Tito's Yugoslavia that many people on the left have no clue about this.

3. Atrocities: one tactic often deployed by Western politicians, especially right-wingers such as Cyrus Vance and Lord Owen, in arguing against any kind of intervention in the Balkans, is that 'all sides are equally guilty' - there are atrocities on all sides, some have only committed more. This neutral stance the right-wing militarists wished to disseminate in the West was aimed precisely at doing nothing and maintaining the arms embargo - because Western neutrality favoured Serbia, given that, at least in 1991-92, it had the overwhelming military superiority, having inherited the Yugoslav National Army, and maintaining the international embargo on Yugoslavia meant Bosnia and Croatia could not, without difficulty, arm themselves.

Yet the fact that the Allies in WWII committed atrocities never seems to have led anyone to such an ambiguous stance or to any doubt that the Nazis were the bad guys and the ones we should be fighting. The simple fact is that the Bosnian side wasn't the 'Muslim' side as often mistakenly described by western media; it was the multi-ethnic side, and it just so happens that most Bosnian Muslims or Bosniaks - though not all - were on that side. As for war crimes committed by the Bosnian army - by Bosniak units in particular - they tended to be individual or at relatively low levels of command responsibility; to the extent that they were not, they were largely dealt with during the war or in prompt fashion, with no delay in delivering defendants to the Hague court (note the contrast with the recent Karadzic case, over 10 years after the end of the war, or the fact that Mladic is still at large). Musan Topalovic Caco, one of only a handful of Muslim war criminals with any major command responsibility and by far the most notorious - was apprehended during the war, in 1993/4, by Bosnian army police, and shot while trying to escape. It is also noteworthy that his crimes were by no means directed at Serbs and Croats alone, but at any Sarajevans he felt like harassing.

4. Intervention: When Croatia, Slovenia, and finally Bosnia declared independence, and following massive desertions of non-Serbs from the Yugoslav National Army (JNA), the 'rump' state of Yugoslavia, now dominated more than ever by Serbia, inherited what in 1992 was still considered the 4th largest army (in terms of equipment) in the world. In the months prior to the Bosnian war, they had even confiscated weapons caches of the Bosnian Territorial Defence (in the old SFRJ, each republic had one, in addition to the federal army). If the leftist apologists for Serb nationalism and Greater Serbia believe that secession is a good enough excuse for starting a genocidal war; or that protecting Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia, where they certainly weren't threatened prior to the JNA's aggression (not to mention the attack on Slovenia, where there hardly were any Serbs, or the fact that in the shelling of Sarajevo they killed Serbs - their own - as well, including people I knew), is a good enough excuse for a genocidal war, they really, seriously need to think again. When Karadzic made his famous threat in Parliament, saying that if the referendum on independence was held, "we will destroy you", many Serbs, including my own mother and the Serb member of the Bosnian presidency at the time, Mirko Pejanovic, signed a petition saying that neither he nor Milosevic spoke in their name. They voted in the referendum on Bosnian independence, and with over 98 percent turnout and 64 percent of those in favour, Bosnia declared independence. And then the JNA struck. Many Western politicians, as mentioned, especially those on the Right, favoured neutrality, because they saw it as the quickest solution in light of the JNA's and Serbia's military superiority - the thinking went, maintain the embargo, let them fight it out, the Serbs will take control and stability will return.

By 1995, however, the situation had changed. The Bosnian army (remember, led by people like Jovan Divjak, a Serb himself) had grown into a formidable force, and was on the offensive. They had retaken swathes of territory from the Serbs, especially in northern Bosnia and were closing in on Bihac. Ironically, that was when the international community and NATO decided to intervene to stop the war, after three years of bloodshed and Bosnian government pleading with the UN to do something - they intervened when Karadzic and Mladic's Bosnian Serb fascist army was about to lose the war, without NATO's help. Thus the NATO intervention in Bosnia, although tactically, ostensibly targeting Serb positions, was not in reality strategically directed at the Serbs, at the Serb army, or at Serbia. If one followed the conflict carefully at the time, and knew what was going on, this would be pretty clear. And in the end, the intervention amounted to nothing more than destroying a few Serb tanks and artillery pieces - a symbolic gesture at most, and a good enough pretense to order the Bosnian army to halt their offensive and pull back.

So they stopped the Bosnian army offensive, destroyed a few Serb tanks, and sat everybody down to carve up the country along ethnic lines in the notorious Dayton Accords; ethno-nationalism had won the day, with NATO's help. The Bosnian government was even forced to give up territory they had just captured in the offensive; and many formerly majority ethnic-Muslim towns - now cleansed - ended up in Republika Srpska, the Serb entity. If NATO hadn't intervened, there would likely have been no partition, no Dayton accords, no Republika Srpska. The intervention effectively ensured partition and ensured the existence of Republika Srpska, an ethnically defined cantonal entity within what is ostensibly a united, single state. And given Milosevic's relationship to the West - no less complex than Saddam's - I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if he had something to do with it.

Early Chaplin Shorts: The Little Tramp as Critical Tool

2008-09-16T15:00:00.015+01:00

I have been going to the BFI a lot lately, mostly to watch the selection of early Chaplin shorts they have been showing, with live piano accompaniment. What strikes me after watching these early gags is that they amplify my (already substantial) appreciation of Chaplin's later, and truly great work a la Modern Times, City Lights, The Circus...

They illustrate retrospectively the enormity of the critical leap made by Chaplin: transferring the 'little tramp', a comedic character designed for these 15-20 minute slapstick, slapdash, silent 'sitcoms' whose sole purpose is entertainment, into the radically different context of full length feature films dealing with 'big themes'; turning the Tramp's apparent weaknesses as a 'serious' dramatic instrument - principally his vaudevillean, two-dimensional silent-screen naïveté - into a superb critical tool, and casually deploying along the way a wealth of excellent commentary on everything from love and relationships to social class, capitalist industrialization, and the rise of Nazism. (at a time when Hitler was still somewhat of a visionary hero in America and Time's 'man of the year', while Chaplin's The Great Dictator was received with derision by the public at large, only later to be hailed as a work of prescient genius.)

One could argue that Benigni does something like this in La Vita è bella; but the achievement is clearly nowhere near as original, extensive, or impressive. I do not necessarily agree with those of his critics who found his treatment of the Holocaust as offensive; he simply never achieves anything like the same critical depth or richness. One could even argue that there are grounds for 'offensiveness' in Benigni's treatment, not so much for his use of comedy, but for his doing it without the two-dimensional naïveté and innocence of Chaplin's Tramp, without the proper distance (Benigni's is ultimately a serious character who knows what is going on but protects his son by inventing a fairy tale)...

Admittedly, even in some of Chaplin's early shorts there are occasional flashes of brilliant social commentary, particularly on matters of social class. And the Tramp's very being who he is, is in a sense already a subversive move which it is all too easy to take for granted: it is not simply that he is a 'tramp', a specimen of the lowest of the 'lower classes'; it is precisely his free-wheeling nonchalance, his lack of any acute awareness of or anger about his own plight - his two-dimensionality - that is most subversive...

The Tramp, despite the passage of time, is simply unparalleled.

Those Theremin Blues

2008-09-11T13:49:00.014+01:00

Tuesday night I went to an experimental/noise gig at Oto Cafe in Dalston, PAMELIA KURSTIN + JOHN BUTCHER. Pamelia Kurstin (the headline act) plays the theremin, one of the earliest electronic instruments, and the first instrument ever to be played without being touched. It was designed by Russian scientist Leon Theremin in 1919.

Theremin demonstrated the theremin shortly thereafter to Lenin (that's Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, not John...Lennon); the latter was so impressed that he started taking lessons on it, and later commissioned hundreds of them to be built and distributed around the Soviet Union - and the world, to demonstrate Russian technology and promote electronic music.

A modern-day theremin; the rod controls the pitch/modulation, while the loop controls the volume/texture, which is done simply by adjusting the position of your hands in the air.

Anyway, Kurstin is apparently one of only a very few people who play this instrument as a real instrument, and as a trained musician (rather than a geek fooling around with a sci-fi gadget); and she is bloody good, in spite of being very drunk from the start. Watching someone play it, especially in a particular kind of setting, with dim lighting and in total silence, was a bit surreal. It inspired me to make an eerie horror/mystery film using only her music. Something to think about.

John Butcher was good too, and way more experimental. Tapping on the saxophone keys, on the reed, without blowing, passing air through the holes, squeaking, grinding, twisting, turning - at one point stuffing the microphone into the hole of the sax...

Both acts, but especially John Butcher, made me think of Heidegger and 'tools'. How things emerge in consciousness only when they break down/cease to function as they should; how any instrument, even when played 'normally' makes a whole range of sounds that we never hear or associate with it - a whole world of sonic exertion that in 'normal' circumstances remains hidden from our ears.

In Praise of Invective

2008-09-09T14:26:00.023+01:00

Reading Zizek's recent piece in In These Times on the 'audacity of rhetoric', and on the heels of my vituperative tirades against leftist apologia for Serbian ethno-fascism in a lengthy exchange of comments on Lenin's Tomb (of which I will write more later), an SWP mouthpiece operated by blogger Richard Seymour ('Lenin'), I was reminded of this piece (below) published in the 'Readings' section of Harper's a few years ago. Despite its vaguely anti-Communist or at least apolitical stance, I like the way it smacks soothingly of Heideggerian 'resoluteness'. In fact, given that Simic is writing here as an American for an American audience, the neutralising sentiment perhaps isn't even vaguely anti-Communist; it aims precisely at leveling, insisting that even in "our democratic society" one must equally be alert as in any the 'Communist countries', suggesting that the liberal notion of 'freedom of speech', in its negative determination defined according to constitutional prerogative - a freedom embedded or 'objectified' in collective thinking in a liberal society - is, well, a bit of a myth. (I love the bit about the boy writing to President Johnson.) So perhaps it isn't even so much apolitical as anti-ideological, encouraging the cleansing operation of undermining or disturbing the background, encouraging one to reveal the hidden suppositions embedded in our speech and thought, the almost inevitable embeddedness of our daily existence, the pernicious presence of 'the they'. (And mind you, given Simic's Yugoslav background, I might add, if there is a single reason for any foreigner to learn our needlessly complex and obscure language, it is for its notoriously rich and varied 'stock of maledictions'):

***

[Appreciation]
IN PRAISE OF INVECTIVE

From an essay by Charles Simic in Orphan Factory, a collection of Simic's writing to be published in October by the University of Michigan Press. Simic was born in Yugoslavia; he now lives in New Hampshire. Simic received the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

At the end of a murderous century, let's curse the enemies of the individual. If, in order to do so, we must fall back on the vocabulary of abuse, so be it.
This is what I learned from twentieth-century history: Only dumb ideas get recycled. Every social reformer longs to be the brains of an enlightened, soul-reforming penitentiary. Everyone who is vain, dull, peevish, and sexually frustrated dreams of legislating his impotence. The image of a billion people dressed in Mao's uniforms and shouting from his little red book continues to be the secret hope of new visionaries.
So, against ideologies from nationalism to racism, let us wield what the poet Cornelius Eady calls "the tongue we use when we don't want nuance to get in the way."

The first and never-to-be-forgotten pleasure that language gave me was the discovery of "bad words." I must have been three or four years old when I overheard my mother and another woman use the word "cunt." When I repeated it myself, when I said it aloud for all to hear and admire, I was slapped by my mother and told never to use that word again. Aha, I thought, there are words so delicious they must not be said aloud!
I had a great-aunt who used such language every time she opened her mouth. My mother would beg her, when she came to visit, not to speak like that in front of the children, but my aunt paid her no mind. To have a temper and a foul mouth like that was a serious liability in a Communist country. "We'll all end up in jail because of her," my mother said.
There are moments in life when true invective is called for, when it becomes an absolute necessity, out of a deep sense of justice, to denounce, mock, vituperate, lash out, in the strongest possible language. "I do not wish to be weaned from this error," Robert Burton wrote long ago in his Anatomy of Melancholy. I agree. If there is anything I want to enlarge and perfect, it is my stock of maledictions.

Once one comes to understand that much of what one sees and hears serves to make fraud seem respectable, one is in trouble. For instance, long before Parisian intellectuals did so, my great-aunt had figured out that the Soviet Union and the so-called people's democracies were a scam and a lie from the bottom up. She was one of these women who sees through appearances instantly. To begin with, she did not have a good opinion of humanity. Not because she was a sourpuss and a viper's nest of imaginary resentments. Far from it. She liked eating, drinking, a good laugh, and a quick roll in the hay behind her elderly husband's back. It's just that she had an unusually uncluttered and clear head. She would tell you that our revolutionary regime, which regarded loose tongues and levity as political crimes and those caught in the act as unhealthy elements, was a huge pile of shit, and that included Marshal Tito himself. Her outbursts were caused by what she regarded as other people's gullibility. As far as she was concerned, she was surrounded by cowards and dunces. The daily papers and the radio drove her into verbal fury. "Admit it," she'd yell at my mother and grandmother. "Doesn't it turn your stomach to hear them talk like that?"
If they agreed and confided in a whisper that yes, indeed, these Commies are nothing but a bunch of murderous illiterate yokels, Stalinist stooges, and whatnot, she still wasn't happy. There was something about humans as a species that worried her to no end. Cursing them, I imagine, gave her royal pleasure and, unknown to her, gave pleasure to me too, listening behind the closed door with a shameless grin.

I knew a thirteen-year-old boy who wrote a letter telling off President Johnson for the conduct of the Vietnam War. It was some letter! Our president was an idiot and a murderer who deserved to be napalmed himself, and worse. One evening, as the boy and his mother and sister were sitting around the kitchen table slurping their soup, the doors and the windows leading to the fire escape flew open at the same time, and men with drawn guns surrounded the table. "We are the FBI," they announced, and they wanted to know: Who was Anthony Palermo? The two women pointed at the boy with thick glasses and crossed eyes. Well, it took a while to convince them that he was the one who wrote the letter. They were expecting a full-grown assassin with long hair and an arsenal of weapons by his side.
The obvious point here is that the vileness and stupidity my aunt found so enraging is not limited to Yugoslavia or Eastern Europe or Communism but is alive and well and should be railed at, with our most pointed and inventive tongues, in our own democratic state.
"What do you want from me, blood?" I once heard an old woman shout at the workers in a New York City welfare office. She then kept cussing for another five minutes, not because she had any expectation that the wrongs done to her would be righted but simply in order to make herself feel good and clean for one brief moment.

-Charles Simic

***

Amen and Hallelujah. So, here's to Richard Seymour 'Lenin' and all the other proto-fascist imbeciles and leftist apologists for Serb genocidal pretensions, at the SWP and elsewhere, for whom my only wish is that they rot forever in hell, preferably under intense Serb artillery bombardment with their friends Karadzic and Mladic at the helm.

Weaning Hearts and Minds

2008-09-05T20:51:00.014+01:00

Present-day British and American colonialists in Iraq and Afghanistan, with all the bullshit rhetoric about 'winning hearts and minds' could really learn something (about not invading countries) from the Partisan example. The only real victory in war is 'moral' victory, and after more than five years - longer than WWII - neither conflict (Afghanistan/Iraq) is over. Here are a couple more interesting bits from Hoare's book, Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia: The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941-1943:

"The Serb Partisan Ilija Vukoman recalls that in Central Bosnia: 'The Muslim women used to hide themselves - they wore the veil. I passed hundreds of times by the house of Muharem Baric and his wife without ever seeing her face. When the uprising began and work for the People's Liberation Movement got underway, Muharem's wife and many other Muslim women ceased hiding themselves from us.' [footnote omitted]"

"Zaga Umicevic-Mala recalls a young Muslim woman she met in Banja Luka, Nazifa Isakovic, who was recruited into the NOP by her brother Zaim, a Communist. Nazifa worshipped her brother and would carry out any task for the movement that he asked of her but, she told Umicevic-Mala, 'the only thing I could not do would be to take off my veil'. Two years later Umicevic-Mala met Nazifa again, as a Partisan and without her veil. 'Her blonde hair was flowing in the wind and her big blue eyes were happily gazing at the world around her.' Umicevic-Mala asked: 'Naza, what's happened to your veil? Do you remember what you said to me at Banja Luka?' Nazifa replied: 'I did not know how wonderful it is to gaze at the world without a headscarf'."...(287)

Yep, that's what happens when you actually inspire people. And guess what, boys - you don't inspire people by invading and demolishing their countries and homes, terrorising them, murdering their relatives, putting them in prison, cuffing them, stuffing them full with McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken and Burger King and bullshit rhetoric about democracy and human rights, and shoving ballots in their faces. Nope. Capitalism inspires fuck all.

Partisan Women: Bloodthirsty Harpies of National Liberation?

2008-09-05T10:20:00.043+01:00

Since I started writing about my communist partisan grandparents, I have done some casual research into Yugoslav/Bosnian WWII history. One interesting recent book I came across covers the period 1941-43, and in particular the 'civil war' between the Partisans on one side, and the Chetniks - Serbian nationalist/royalist paramilitaries, predecessors of contemporary Serbian nationalists, i.e. Karadžić, Milošević, et al. The Chetniks, on account of very effective propaganda through a long-established and influential Serbian lobby in the West (descendants of the Royal family reside in England to this day)**, actually received the bulk of Allied support until 1943, when Allied spies dispatched to both sides reported that the Chetniks were actually collaborating with the Germans while the Partisans were viciously fighting them. The Allies officially (and grudgingly, given the Partisans' communist agenda) switched their support at the Tehran conference.

The feats of the Yugoslav Partisans in WWII are the stuff of legend. These were not mere warriors - they were a representative cross-section of the society that spawned them, and included, among others, some of the greatest artists and writers of 20th century Yugoslavia, who later (or even during the war, those of them who died) immortalized their struggle in literature, film, fine art. For those of us who grew up with these stories the names of places and battles reverberate with a mythological power - The Battle of Sutjeska, The Igman March, the Battle of Neretva...Through the haze of childhood recollection the protagonists of these tales are endowed with an almost super-human strength and cunning in overcoming their far more powerful Nazi opponents. But what if there is indeed a real dimension of this struggle that is, well, not super-human, but super-(man)?

It is generally accepted that in spite of their technological and military weaknesses early in the war, the Partisans had two main advantages over their enemies:
1. a small but very effective cadre of Spanish Civil War veterans from the International brigades who, unlike even many German troops, had valuable experience of modern warfare (the Spanish Civil War is arguably the first truly modern war, at least on European soil), and
2. broad popular appeal due to the fact that their founding aims were political rather than ethnic or religious, allowing them to draw recruits across national, ethnic, religious, and other boundaries.

There is one under-explored dimension of this second point: the role of women. Many people don't realize just how radical Tito and co's project of national liberation was, and how deliberate some of the measures were that they took to reshape society from top to bottom. Just in case anyone reading my last post thought I was being merely facetious when I said, in the caption to the photo of my grandma and a comrade in wartime Mostar, that the Nazi Scourge had never yet encountered such a tough nut, read this passage from Hoare:

"...The group of Bosnians most excluded from political life prior to the Axis invasion was the female half of the population, which represented a larger proportion of the country's inhabitants than Serbs, Muslims, or Croats. In his seminal study of the Chetnik movement, Jozo Tomasevich noted the role of women in the Partisan victory: 'One of the fundamental differences between the Chetnik and Partisan movements was in their attitude toward women. The participation of women in Partisan fighting ranks and mass organisations of the Partisan movement was of such importance that all Partisan officials agreed that without the women the Partisans could never have won.' [footnote omitted] ...Male supremacy over women was as much a part of traditional rural society as religious semi-segregation. In overturning the one the KPJ helped to undermine the other, for the dissolution of traditional boundaries between men and women and between Orthodox, Muslims, Catholics, and Jews was part of the same process of turning 'peasants into Bosnians', a process inimical to the Chetnik project that upheld traditional social distinctions." (Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia: The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941-1943, 285-86.)

On the point about 'turning peasants into Bosnians' my grandpa's story, as told in the last post, is a case in point. How successful this was, well, my grandma may have a few things to say about it, but I think we're in overall agreement. (Although another thing I recall, at least from stories, is that whenever people tried to psychologize my grandpa's behaviour, she would explain that, as a peasant at heart, he had no such thing as a 'psyche')

Nevertheless, it gets even more amusing. To anyone interested in this topic I would recommend reading the entire chapter in Hoare's book which chronicles, among other things, touching episodes of Muslim women shedding veils and other niceties in joining or collaborating with Partisan ranks. Here are some other interesting bits:

"The prominent role of women in the Partisan movement inevitably found a role in the demonology of its right-wing enemies. An Ustasha report on Partisan atrocities in Prijedor, following the capture of the town in May 1942, claimed: 'Women, both from Prijedor and from the surrounding area, played a particularly prominent role in these bestialities'. [footnote omitted]...The Ustashas' Department of Public Security claimed in an internal report of September 1942 that the Partisans 'are in many places bloodthirsty, particularly the female persons in their ranks.' [footnote omitted] For their part, the Chetniks distributed a pamphlet in eastern Hercegovina in late 1942 claiming that among the Communists were many 'fallen and unfortunate women and girls without morals' [footnote omitted]...Partisan women were therefore the polar opposite of true, martyred Serb women. In Draza Mihailović's view: 'Communist women are recognisable by the fact that they are immoral; using free love they approach and seduce our men, particularly those who place fun above duty.'[footnote omitted]" (288-89)

Step aside, Diamanda Galas, you've got nothin' on these girls - not till you've seen some real combat...

While I am having difficulty picturing my grandma as a bloodthirsty berserker harpy, I find it very amusing to imagine the chill these fascists must have gotten to see women carrying guns and screaming communist slogans. One old Partisan anthem we all sang as kids is about a mlada partizanka - a young Partisan woman - who threw grenades at the enemy...

One could even argue that the presence of women helped turn the tide of the war not just quantitatively by inflating the ranks of the Partisans, but additionally in a qualitative way, by the effect on morale - building solidarity in the ranks irrespective of religious, ethnic, or gender differences, and demoralising their enemies, or simply scaring them shitless at the sight of this weird hybrid fighting machine.

This should in no way lead to any sympathy with the contemporary American project of nation-building or reshaping other societies: the partisans, who sought to reshape their own, were strategically precisely in the position of the mujahideen - the crucial difference being that they were fighting for unification and liberation, rather than segregation and imposition of strict religious codes. The crucial element in the effectiveness of their struggle, though, and in the unique position of Yugoslavia in the Cold War world after its break with the Soviet Union, is national self-determination.

Nor is this to advocate some brand of butch-feminism, i.e. the notion that women attain equality by adopting/imitating dominant macho male behaviour, etc. Rather, the idea is simply that there are no assigned roles - that women can, when the occasion arises, perform the same work as men, join the struggle, etc - and vice versa...

Going back to the broader issue of political appeal and the enfranchisement of the excluded, does this not go some way toward explaining why the vast majority post-colonial national liberation movements worldwide - even those spawned without any direct outside superpower involvement - were communist or socialist? Doesn't any national liberation struggle, in order to be truly successful, require this kind of breaking-down of ethnic, religious, gender, and other boundaries?

This is precisely the way to unite the different struggles: workers, women, oppressed minorities... In order to effectively confront a common external enemy, a nation must first shed its own internal demons; and perhaps the reason why Yugoslavia broke apart in the end is because this work was never thoroughly completed. The decades of Tito's 'brotherhood and unity' only relatively froze the post-war breakdown, nationalism in particular was never properly dealt with...(And here it may be worthy to concede, grudgingly, Žižek's point about the Jacobins and revolutionary terror - the French republic they inaugurated remains intact 200 years later, and it looks like it will survive even Sarkozy - so perhaps the Partisans simply weren't extreme enough...)

One should equally not be deterred here by the fact that Capital - once the sole preserve of wealthy white men - has in the meantime found ways to accommodate, commodify, and even commandeer the rhetoric of multi-culturalism, human rights, equality, etc. This is in its nature, as Deleuze and Guattari argue - deterritorialization. Yet we should never forget that these are the fruits of hard-won battles against Capital - even against liberalism,in its earliest incarnation. Why simply give up on this legacy and allow liberal Capital to mediate its impact and reterritorialize the gains for political 'street cred'?

One thing that some people today are shocked to hear, for instance, is that Swiss women - Switzerland being the darling of Global Capital, hosting a number of multinational corporations way out of proportion to its size - only gained the right to vote in 1971, by a national referendum in which one-third of the all-male electorate voted against suffrage. (One Swiss canton only granted women full suffrage in 1990!) And even after suffrage many discriminatory measures remained in place for years, such as husbands' control over their wives' property and capital, the husband's right to decide on the couple's place of residence, etc. Switzerland, until fairly late in the 20th century, is like some perverse modern capitalist version of the Taliban. Isn't this the best proof that modernity alone, not to mention its capitalist variant, is no guarantee of freedom, equality, human rights, etc - and that simply imposing 'democracy' is a hollow gesture when it comes to true liberation?

Not to overemphasize the value of the democratic vote, either - one always has to wonder why a particular freedom is being granted from the top at a particular time and to what end the political credit gained by those in power is being deployed. The end of colonialism is often seen as merely the transition or sublation to another form of colonialism - a version of what Hardt and Negri call Empire, what others have called economic imperialism (although 'Empire' goes beyond political economy, as a new incarnation of old state sovereignty); similarly, one could say that democratic reform is permitted when the power elite has sufficiently insulated itself from it, and this is ultimately the problem with gradualism.

But the answer to this predicament is not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. It is rather, keep the bathwater, and throw out the baby - insist on change, democratic or otherwise, but insist on it, as Martin Luther King did, now. Not when those in power find it suitable to throw some scraps from the table. Seize the revolutionary moment, intervene to change the very coordinates of what is deemed 'possible', to put it in Žižekian terms.

**This same lobby/propaganda machine has in recent years caused much of the confusion surrounding the Balkan wars of the 1990s, ironically pulling many Western leftist intellectuals (notably Chomsky and Parenti) into the ranks of apologetics for military aggression and ultimately genocide, under the banner of Serbian nationalism. This is largely due to the grossly mistaken impression that people like Milošević- a rabid nationalist who inaugurated his tenure in 1989, on the 600th anniversary of the battle of Kosovo, by annexing Kosovo and Vojvodina and thus giving Serbia 3 votes in the 8-member national council, prompting the walkout in protest of Croatian and Slovene members - were somehow carrying on the legacy of Tito's Yugoslavia, rather than actively working together with the West to destroy it. One prominent and oft-quoted (ironically even by Chomsky) figure in this project was Gen. Lewis Mackenzie, a Tory politician in Canada and commander of UN forces in Sarajevo early on in the war, who gave testimony before the US congress in 1992 arguing against any intervention - even humanitarian aid - in the conflict, saying that "all three sides were equally guilty". Mackenzie was later revealed to have been on the payroll of a Serbian-American lobbying group while on a speaking tour following the publication of his book on Bosnia. Similarly, Diana Johnstone, who published a book supposedly debunking Serb atrocities in Bosnia, was refused further publication by In These Times - a leftist paper in the US for which she had regularly written - when the editors discovered that she was an old college friend of Mirjana Markovic, Slobodan Milošević's wife. (For the sake of comparison, just imagine a supposedly objective journalistic account justifying the Iraq war, presenting 'evidence' that there were indeed WMD in Iraq, that the Abu Ghraib photos were faked, there was no torture, the civilian death toll was exaggerated, etc - written by an author who turns out to be an old college friend of, say, Dick Cheney's wife. I actually had an e-mail debate about this with Chomsky, and I gotta say, Noam, I know it's hard to admit you were wrong, let alone taken for a complete fool, but sometimes you just gotta do it.)

Panta Rei: My Grandpa's Rags-to-Socialist Glory Tale of War and Peace

2008-08-30T15:40:00.070+01:00

My grandpa was an economist. He was recently mentioned by a former student - now a middle-aged magazine columnist - in a piece for Dani, a popular political weekly in Bosnia; this inspired me to write a few words about him. The above photo is of him and my grandma - my mom's parents - in Bosnia circa '68.

My grandpa was born in Donje Selo, a small village near Konjic, in Herzegovina, the southern bit of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This is a region known for its rugged, craggy landscape of rocky mountains and wild deciduous and evergreen forests dotted with limestone plateaus - and some very stubborn people.

Konjic, Bosnia-Herzegovina

Back in those days (between the world wars) and in that social milieu, education was not valued very highly; my great-grandpa preferred to have his children tending the sheep and goats rather than studying and doing homework, so my grandpa had to just take a book along when doing his chores around the pasture. Sometimes the goats chewed up his books, or the odd greasy page of homework.

As the village school only had two grades, education typically ended around age 9. It was the village teacher who convinced my great-grandpa to send my grandpa to the city to be schooled further. This was initially arranged with some cousins in Mostar, who provided him with room and board in exchange for chores around the house; later he got his own place and supported himself by tutoring younger children in mathematics.

He graduated from the gymnasium (high school) in Mostar in 1942, and promptly joined Tito's communist partisans.

People from Herzegovina, as I said - and Bosnians in general - are known to be very stubborn, or 'hard-headed' (literally and figuratively); so it is no surprise that almost all the key battles on the Yugoslav front in WWII took place in and around there. It is also notable that Yugoslavia was liberated with little or no direct British, American, or Soviet involvement and spawned the first, largest, and most successful resistance movement in WWII - a ragtag multi-ethnic band of Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Jews, and others unified under the command of Marshal Tito.

"Death to fascism-freedom for the people."

This in spite of seven major German offensives, over 1 million civilian and military casualties (the second-highest in Europe, after Poland), mass executions, ruthless Nazi 'anti-terrorist' tactics, and the combined anti-Partisan efforts of the Wehrmacht, the SS, fascist Italy, Croatian nationalist Ustaše, Serbian nationalist-royalist Chetniks, as well as Hungarian and Bulgarian collaborationist forces. Phew!

My grandpa was wounded in the Battle of Neretva, the 4th Anti-Partisan Offensive. There is an Oscar-nominated feature film about it, starring Yul Brynner and featuring an original poster by Picasso. In the battle, the far-outnumbered, under-nourished and ill-equipped partisans manage to thwart the Nazis' aims by an elaborate and very clever ruse. It is a true modern-day David and Goliath story.

My grandpa carried to his grave (at age 82) several pieces of shrapnel in his chest from the injury. During the 1992-95 war in Bosnia, which we both spent mostly under siege in Sarajevo, my mom teased him saying he must be bulletproof, what with all that metal in his body... It never gave him trouble though, and he never had any health problems until prostate cancer hit him in his mid-70s. (That should make you wonder about all the chemicals generations since have ingested that our grandparents weren't exposed to...)

After WWII he was appointed president of an administrative court in Konjic, although he had no legal training, or any kind of post-secondary education for that matter; the Party just didn't have enough qualified personnel.

There he met my grandma, Olga, who was a middle class city girl from Trebinje and had also taken part in the underground resistance during the war, as part of a SKOJ unit in Mostar. SKOJ (pronounced SKOY) was the youth wing of the partisans, and stands for Savez komunističke omladine Jugoslavije, or Communist Youth League of Yugoslavia.

My grandma Olga (right) with a friend and fellow resistance member in Mostar, 1942. The Nazi Scourge had never yet encountered such a tough nut.

She was the court secretary, and according to my grandpa, regularly paid secret home visits to the pre-war judge whom my grandpa had replaced - a trained professional from the Kingdom of Yugoslavia - to get tips on handling cases, which she passed on to my grandpa. It would have been a disaster had the Party got wind of their scheme.

Sadly, my grandma died when I was about seven years old, so my memories of her are very vague and infused with an aura of childhood ethereality. I do know that throughout their marriage she teased my grandpa mercilessly for his peasant ways, on account of certain habits he just never could shake, I guess. "Peasant!" she cried.

Olga and Momir circa 1947, near Konjic, with my aunt Dubravka as a baby.

As an official in charge of the Jablanica dam construction project, my grandpa was responsible for the flooding of the Neretva valley, including the orchard that my dad had grown up in with his aunt. (I'm not kidding) This is about twenty years before my parents ever met; they only later discovered the coincidence. And yes, it's the same river on which he was wounded in battle.

Prior to the flooding my great-aunt, Danica - we called her grandma because there was no other family on my dad's side, as he was an orphan - made a living selling the apples and pears in her orchard. Every year she loaded the produce on a truck and took it to the market in Dubrovnik. My dad talked about evenings spent reading or just hanging in her attic, laying on a bed of apples.

When they evacuated the valley, she was given a cramped flat in Konjic as compensation. The rest of her working life she spent as a waitress, which certainly didn't help the varicose veins she ceaselessly complained about in old age. (Before she died, though, she passed on to yours truly her best-kept secret - her recipe for šape, the tastiest mold-baked walnut cookies ever.)

After a few years working for the court, my grandpa enrolled at the law faculty in Belgrade. The Party considered this a bourgeois move, and reprimanded him. Despite this he continued his studies, because he figured the Stalinist mood wouldn't last, and that the country would need a trained professional cadre. He was soon proved right when Tito broke with the Soviet Union in 1948.

As the kind of work he eventually did in government mostly had to do with economics, at some point he completed a PhD in economics and became a full-blown economist. He later worked at the UN a few years, in Iran and Indonesia, before taking up a teaching post at the university of Sarajevo.

Among many crazy stories from that time that come to mind, one that my mom once told me was of the two of them driving through the desert to Tehran when she was about 18. My grandpa hadn't slept and the journey was long; my mom couldn't drive. Nevertheless, since the road through the desert was perfectly straight for hundreds of miles, he put her at the wheel and fell asleep. Hours later, the city emerged from the dunes like a mirage...

Once, while on a Ford Foundation fellowship lecture tour in the US, extolling the virtues of Yugoslav self-management, my grandpa was blacklisted and later barred from entering the United States. He eventually cleared that up with the help of his friend the American Ambassador in Jakarta. Yugoslavia wasn't part of the Soviet bloc (it was in the non-aligned movement) but it was socialist...

The McCarthyite censors must have got spooked when they realized the idea of workers councils voting on management decisions in non-state but socially-owned and run enterprises - something between workplace democracy and institutionalized/constitutional unionism - might actually sound kind of nice to populist American ears. Can't really dismiss that as 'evil empire'. At the same time, I can think of no better real-world embodiment of Marx's 'factories to the workers' premise. (The fact that it was screwed up reflects more than anything the incompetence of generations since who inherited this great idea...)

One summer at the seaside, my grandpa gave me a swimming lesson. He pushed me off into the deep water with my inflatable, which he had first unplugged, so that the air would slowly escape as I got further and further out. Needless to say my parents were horrified, and I struggled to stay afloat kicking and screaming, but looking back on it I kind of like the guy for that.

At other times, us kids climbed on his back and rode him like a donkey, so it wasn't all that one-sided.

From left to right: grandpa, my brother Igor, me, and my cousin Jelena.

One long-time colleague of his referred to him as 'Moby Dick' - because he "swam alone". I wonder what it must have been like for him to see another war at home, having lived through WWII already and having grown up in the aftermath of WWI. I never got to ask him that, or at least I don't remember him ever talking much about it. (Though he was quite keen on reminiscing about a lot of other things, in particular our family history.)

We left Sarajevo together two years into the siege, in 1994. Although there was a ceasefire, only those too old or too young to fight were allowed to leave. After being delayed in Visoko, just outside of Sarajevo for two days, we spent about 2 days on the bus to Zagreb, usually a 10-hour journey. I vomited a lot by the end of it.

After a couple of weeks staying with friends in Zagreb, my sister and I joined him at his house in Orebić, on the Dalmatian coast.

It was a welcome change for all of us, except when he and I argued; our arguments were vicious at times.

One day, he took me out fig-picking. There were some figs in our yard and some neighbours also kindly offered theirs. I climbed trees and picked the figs and handed them to him, and he put them in a basket. We took them home and he made a horrible jam out of them - so hard you could stick a knife into it and it would stand up straight. It was practically sugar candy, and the taste was awful. He made us eat it for breakfast - there were jars and jars of it - until even he couldn't handle it any more and agreed to buy some decent jam from the shop. He was just no good at cooking, and he finally had to accept it.

Anyway, so there was this piece in Dani by the columnist Svetlana Cenić, a former student of his. In the column she recounts an anecdote that might get you, the odd reader, to appreciate my grandpa - and the note of socialist self-criticism - even more than you already do (my translation):

"I remembered my professors who even in those days debunked the demagoguery of power...I remember well what Momir Ćećez once told a colleague of mine, who during an oral exam stood on all fours to unreservedly sing the praises of the economic system of SFRJ [Socialist Yugoslavia]... Professor Ćećez then asked her what her mother says when she comes back from the market. Confused, my colleague replied that her mother curses, swears, moans about high prices, and so forth; at this the professor, handing back her indeks [a marking booklet], simply informed my colleague that while mother would most certainly have passed the exam, her daughter, at least in this term, would not."

Yep, that sounds like grandpa. A mean old bastard he was, but we loved him. And he had a point. You kiss ass, you fail. Here's to you, grandpa. I hope that the socialist dream you took all that shrapnel for isn't totally dead, yet.

In Pittsburgh, USA, 1961.
Momir Ćećez, lovable mean old bastard (10 December 1923-4 June 2006)

The Ideological Mediation of (Feminine) Desire: Sex and the City of God

2008-08-26T22:00:00.048+01:00

As I haven't had time to write much lately on account of moving house and other real world annoyances, here is a piece culled from some comments I contributed recently to a discussion on women, cinema, and mediation on Infinite Thought(henceforth known as IT). It started with this post concerning the absence of women talking in mainstream cinema - about anything other than men, babies, and marriage, that is. Does Sex and the City represent some kind of liberation or is it just the same old patriarchal crap, only repackaged for a modern liberal consumerist audience? One recurring theme in the discussion seems to be the search for 'the one' and the theological underpinnings of this notion...

1. 'The One' and for All

IT:...There is something strange about the weird absence of women talking from cinema. Aren't women supposed to always be talking? Of course, they're not meant to be talking about anything important, which is presumably why the camera only turns to them when men are mentioned.

Films that appear to be 'all about women', such as Sex and the City are paeans to a curious combination of ultra-mediation and a post-religious obsession with 'the one'. You go to the City in search of 'labels and love'; the one mediating the other – the nicest thing your boyfriend can do for you is have a giant wardrobe installed for all your 'labels'. Drinks with 'the girls' are dominated by discussions about whether he is 'the one' or not. What does this obsession with 'the one' mean? The bourgeoisie may have 'drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation', as Marx and Engels observed, but certain religious motifs are harder to shake than others. The 'one' as the transcendent culmination of an entire romantic destiny demonstrates a curious melange of the sentimental ('we were always meant to be together!') and the cynical (if there's a 'one' then the 'non-ones' don't count; the sex with them is of no importance, there is no need to behave even moderately pleasantly towards them).

There is no emancipation here, if all effort is ultimately retotalised onto the project of 'the one'; if all discussions with 'friends' are merely mediating stepping-stones in the eschatological fulfillment of romantic purpose. Contemporary cinema is profoundly conservative in this regard; and the fact that it both reflects and dictates modes of current behaviour is depressingly effective, and effectively depressing.

Deleuzer: The notion of 'the one' on a broader level in its basic religious coordinates (as you suggest) I think provides the link between the different levels on which ideology operates (economy, sex, familial relations) - this is what has always irritated me about the Matrix and its pretense to cult status in the geek/techno/alternative cultural milieu. Aside from Keanu Reeves being better suited to roles like Ted in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, I found the amount of fetishistic reification of his status as 'the one' (who decides these things?) debilitatingly mind-numblingly appalling. The messianic overtone by a kind of short circuit puts it in close proximity to the notion of 'the one' in Sex and the City. (It would be interesting to splice the two together in a montage of sorts, with perhaps some clips of Mel Gibson's crucifixion movie as a possible third...I can just imagine Sarah Jessica Parker in one of those slow-motion fight scenes a la Matrix, karate kicking for a handbag...)

Foucault was right, if we can read him to mean this: that the 'sexual revolution' never took place, or that it wasn't so much a revolution as a repackaging of the same old paradigm for a new era. Two or three thousand bloodyfucking years later, and the mainstream of our culture still revolves around some abstract mass-produced figure of the saviour or messiah, the only original contribution of our post-Fordist age being its reproducibility for personal consumption. (I cannot help but think of the assembly line bread-dough christs in The Holy Mountain, being devoured by a Christ lookalike...)

The absence of women talking (about anything other than men, babies, etc) in mainstream cinema is perhaps not so much an absence as a positive incarnation of what Foucault calls the 'incitement to discourse' - the camera being, for the moment, not an attempt (even a skewed one) at reproducing reality but rather creating it - a directly ideological tool that opens up the space and sets the coordinates within which reality is to take place.

I think the really pressing question is not so much 'does reality pass the test?' but rather 'how do we, or can we, collectively escape from the grip of the incitement to discourse embedded in the cultural output we are daily bombarded with?

2. The (Formula) One of Desire and the Purple Rose of Surplus Value

IT: Dave sent me some comments and a question with regard to the women/cinema debate:

I think it is wrong to assume that, whilst almost certainly an index of unfreedom, women "talking about men" is unambiguously flattering to men. Many men would likely tell you that they find women-talking-about-men-type conversations alienating, in much the same way, perhaps, as they feel alienated and frustrated by an hour or so of Sex and the City.

Perhaps this sense of alienation comes from the fact that "talking about men" points, in a paradoxical way, to the lack of "the one", its eternally elusive character, as if all this Sex and the City-type talk is 'motored' by an absence, by an impossibility of fulfilment. That's perhaps why, watching Sex and the City, it was difficult to imagine how it might be concluded without a catastrophic change in the construction of love relations, or else some 'betrayal' of the 'search', which at its heart is designed to be gratifyingly infinite. To talk about men in the context of "the one" is to talk about no man in particular, just a mirage concealing a no-man-land (sorry).

In short, my question would be: how much "talking about men" really is talking about men?'

It's true - perhaps the only thing worse than wondering about what women are talking about is seeing them actually do it, at least as far as SATC goes. If cinema tends to show women talking to each other only about men (or marriage, or babies) perhaps the most important aspect of this is brevity. An entire film given over to such things would be obscene according to the logic of mainstream cinema, which can barely tolerate a few minutes of such footage, even in its 'unambiguously flattering' mode. I think this is indicated by Dave's comment above that '[men] feel alienated and frustrated by an hour or so of Sex and the City'. A winsome few moments of love-lorn anguish shared between two friends is ok, lengthy discussions of fellatio are not.

Deleuzer: I think it would equally be wrong to assume - if that is being assumed - that because some men find an hour of SATC alienating, this points to some subversive or liberating aspect in SATC. Such an assumption is just one of the pitfalls of the negative in thought...("any enemy of ---...is a friend of mine", etc)

And it is certainly not my assumption that "women talking about men" is unambiguously flattering to men, of course - many conversations I have witnessed in reality, at least, are definitely not, but that's not the point, because the issue is simply the choice of subject matter; nor am I suggesting that talk about "the one" is about any particular man. The reason why the Matrix and the adjective 'messianic' (in the mystical/cabbalistic sense) came to mind is precisely because of the impersonal, fetishistic and continually displaced or postponed character of 'the one'. (I like the characterization 'no-man-land'; could this be what Dylan means when he writes/sings: "Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands/where the sad-eyed prophets say that no man comes..." ?)

Another film that comes to mind - which I think provides a very effective and sublimely comic and touching critique here - is Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo. It makes the very same point (made by Dave) about the search being 'gratifyingly infinite' and 'the one' being a mirage concealing a 'no-man land'. The male lead in the film is split precisely between the fictional, 'perfect man', who literally steps out of the screen, and the real-world actor who plays him. At the end (spoiler alert!), she dumps the fictional guy (who is 'really' in love with her) and goes off with the real guy (who has only seduced her so that they could get the fictional character back into the screen), who subsequently dumps her... When dumping the fictional guy she even says something along the lines of "I'm a real person...I have to live in the real world." The fictional mirage, in other words, is the Lacanian objet petit a. He cannot be the 'messiah' because the messiah is forever-to-come.

But there's a great deal more one could mine out of this, I think very telling cinematic critique, one question for instance being, where does this absence/mirage come from, and whom does it really serve? What I think Woody suggests is that the patriarchal figure of the real-world male asshole nevertheless carries a trace of the idealistic mirage (played by the same actor) - 'the one' - as a kind of lure to trap the woman within the confines of the 'real world'...(Her real-world relationship to the asshole who dumps her is, in spite of everything, mediated by the idealistic mirage of his fictional screen persona who is 'really' in love with her and whom she dumps.)

Or more to the point, in anti-oedipal terms, the notion of 'the one' perhaps serves to trap desire in general (male and female) within the Freudian/capitalist logic of 'desire as lack' by situating us within the matrix of a search whose fulfillment is by definition continually postponed. (And The Purple Rose of Cairo being set in Depression-era US certainly hints at this dimension...)

IT: It's surprisingly difficult to break with the logic of the one, even if everything has been secularised to bits. It keeps coming back.

Deleuzer: It must be that dialectical bent. Bloody Hegel...

IT: I wonder if we could do for the one of love what Badiou does to the one of mathematics. Hmm....

Deleuzer: Brilliant idea! So we simply say: there is no one, only sets...I agree in principle, but how does one go about it, or what does this mean in practical terms? Hmm.... I suppose that perhaps the reason why Being from the Greeks onwards was singular is precisely as a consequence of having an ideal, the one (Being) against which everything else is an imperfect copy or simulacrum, marred by a lack - again that logic of the objet petit a.

The psychoanalytic answer is, of course, to formulate that remainder of the unconscious/real; but if the object petit a is as Zizek has it, a surplus meaning or a 'hole at the centre of the symbolic order', then 'plugging the hole' is no way out of the predicament. Going back to the analogy with Marx and surplus value on which Lacan draws, by formulating desire one still remains within the symbolic, within language: no revolutionary seizing control of the means of production there, for the process that generates the surplus in the psychoanalytic case transcends the symbolic order.

To break out of the dialectical/capitalist/theological cycle of production of the one/objet petit a, there must be a (revolutionary) disturbance to the ordinary process of production, a fundamental change in power relations. One must work not through language, but through the (desiring) body itself to grasp that there is no 'one'; or that, as Deleuze and Guattari claim, desire is a productive force; rather than searching for objects to fill a pre-existing lack, we encounter objects that as a result of specific couplings produce desire in us. As Leonard Cohen puts it, "I am not the one who loves...It's love that chooses me."

The object itself does not by definition fall short of some ideal ('the one' does not exist) or haunted by the spectre of a lack that by definition remains unfulfilled. The byproduct it generates, far from being a lack or an unfulfilled ideal is merely an excess of desire - an added value - that keeps the productive-desiring machinery in motion by maintaining a connection to the social body.

In Badiouian terms, if we imagine a set containing a single element(the real, physical object of desire), the surplus value or remainder (objet petit a) - the excess - is a term in the equation defining the set that leaves open the possibility of incorporating other objects and sets into that set. Which I think makes it even clearer why the transposition of this excess into 'the one' is a trompe l'oeil. It is precisely the opposite of 'the one' - it is what keeps the set open, connected to other sets, to the social body.

This is not quite the contradiction in terms that it may appear to be - the one/set, the unambiguous 'one' that contains the germ of a multiple. The point is simply that the excess of desire produced is necessary to keep the desiring machine moving; it is produced not because desire is never fulfilled, but precisely because it is fulfilled: object encountered, desire produced, fulfilled. Yet without the excess then produced, the machinery at this point would grind to a halt; it must always pump out that excess or surplus value (desire=object+x) in order to remain operational, to breathe. So although that excess is something more in relation to the given object (mistaken for 'the one'), it is neither a lack nor another object (a two), but simply a placeholder, an empty place in the set.

Blah blah blah. Well that's about the best I can do with two hours' sleep in oversimplifying D&G (Dolce & Gabbana or Deleuze & Guattari?) and Badiouizing the notion of desire as a productive force.

3. Objectively Fucked: Diamanda's Revenge and the Transmission of Ideology

IT: Mainstream cinema mediates the relationship between men through the odd woman, who rarely gets to mediate anything at all through anyone else. But in the 'real world' do women mediate their relationships through discussion of men? I think this is Dave's point when he asks 'how much "talking about men" really is talking about men?' One could ask a similar question about make-up and fashion. Prettifying for the boys or warning signs for the other ladies? Obviously the idea that straight women are constantly 'competing' for men is an awful one, but they are most definitely supposed to, according to the batshit crazy logic of scarcity that consumerism depends upon. He's the one! That handbag is the one! Hands off my bag/man!

Diamanda Galas has a fine solution to this problem, which acknowledges the issue of mediation but, ahem, subtly undermines it:

'I think women should have an "ideal": the only people you treat as equals are other women. And when you want subordinates, you can fuck a man in the ass! That basically is probably the future. Some men get angry because they think I view them just as sex objects. But I say, "You don't need to read to me - I can read. And conversation - I can get that from my friends. So you should feel lucky that you at least have this service you can offer me.' - from Angry Women, Re/Search #13, 1991.

Perhaps a little harsh, but it might definitely mean that straight women could talk to each other about things other than whether-they-should-ring-him-back-or-wait-for-him-to-call or-is-that-too-forward?'

Deleuzer: Is that a German word? Hm... Yet she is still the subject of mediation between two (or more) men. I mean, it is obvious that she is bitter because - like many women - she has been fucked over by men. So her answer is 'fuck a man in the ass'? Yet this means in effect that through her, the asshole(s) who fucked her over also fuck(s) over the (potentially) nice guy whom she 'fucks up the ass', turning him (potentially) into just another male asshole. (sic)

This is, needless to say, only another way of remaining within the service of dominant (male/chauvinist) ideology; or even more, ideologizing personal relations by turning what was initially subjective violence (getting fucked over by individual assholes) into systemic or objective violence (by/against all men...'if you want subordinates...fuck a man up the ass'). Through her, the dominant chauvinist ideology is communicated/propagated from one man to another. She becomes the incubating medium of ideological transmission, or even better, the ideological 'egg'.

This is why Nietzsche talks about breaking the cycle of revenge - it is precisely about the pitfalls of dialectical mediation. I am afraid that our dear Diamanda simply reverses the roles, replacing one form of domination with another, sublating one within the other in a dialectical reversal that hardly undermines the patriarchal order. Let's imagine that instead of her, we have a man writing the same..."If you want subordinates, fuck a woman up the ass..." etc. My question is, what's the difference? Because I see none. This is just how the initial propagator - the asshole who fucks over Diamanda in the first place - might have put it. So we come full circle.

In fact, by fully internalizing the logic of chauvinist domination, she is - perversely enough - perhaps the ultimate prototype of female subordination, insofar as this is precisely the kind of behaviour that male domination is meant to produce in the female as its dialectical counterpart under the conditions of late capitalism...

IT: I meant, she solves the problem of mediation between women by sidelining men to their sexual role. I don't agree with her, I just thought it was an interestingly aggressive point.

Deleuzer: I see...But you started out saying that mainstream cinema mediates the relationships between men through the 'odd woman'...Anyway, the point still holds - the price of this rediscovered immediacy in relationships between women is more alienation, more mediation (of another kind), deferral of the real struggle against the status quo...By sidelining men to their sexual role, she also sidelines the struggle itself, and any possibility of being truly subversive and effecting a change in sexual relations...This is simply an act of ineffectual subtraction.

Philosophy Football: The Political Economy of UEFA and the Future of Democracy

2008-06-13T21:42:00.027+01:00

The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, an anthology of country-themed essays published in anticipation of Germany 2006 with the goal of promoting to the American public the game known everywhere else in the world as football, featured an afterword by lefty fellow traveler Franklin Foer (brother of Jonathan Safran) in which the author made one bold assertion regarding the form of political organization most likely to produce a world cup victory: social democracy. Social democracy, Foer calculates, performs better than either fascism, communism, military junta, liberal democracy, or any other political system - and this on account of the fact that it achieves the ideal balance between team spirit and individual valour.

Taken in a relative rather than an absolute sense, countries with left-leaning, pro-welfare-state governments, win the most cups. And indeed, Foer's prediction bore fruit at the time - Italy, the eventual winners in 2006, had just ousted Berlusconi and elected Prodi. Again, without commenting on the real assets (or lack thereof) of Prodi's leadership, we are talking in relative terms - a left wind blew, a communitarian sentiment came over the Italian people, and they won the cup.

Fast forward 2 years to Euro 2008: the same team, with Berlusconi back at the helm of the Italian nation, is performing dismally. After a catastrophic loss to the Dutch, they barely scraped by with a draw against Romania; their now very slim chance of advancing to the next round hangs on the hope of trouncing none other than one-time world champions France who, with Sarkozy in office, have performed just as dismally. The reigning world champions, Germany, having elected Angela Merkel after a decade-long and steady decline to the right, have fared only slightly better. And the unquestionably best performances so far? Portugal, Croatia, Netherlands, and Spain. Two of these, Portugal and Spain, represent the only remaining left-wing governments in the European Union, however compromised (remember, relative terms).

Sweden too, with Bosnian-born Ibrahimovic, is doing well, so the game with Spain should be interesting; though the current government may not be exemplary, it nevertheless has a deeply embedded and institutionalized social democracy. Croatia, though still led by the nationalist HDZ, has a left-wing president (Mesic), and has even seen the HDZ themselves take a decisively more moderate tone compared to the Tudjman years. Netherlands, although still led by a coalition government, has clearly taken a turn to the left - the current government, the 4th Balkenende coalition, formed as a result of the 2006 election in which the Socialist Party made the greatest gains against the centre-right's decline in popularity, now includes the Labour Party. The Socialists themselves were excluded from the coalition, but nevertheless have substantially increased their share of seats in parliament. And let's remember, folks, that this is after all the first country to de facto legalize marijuana...Simply put, the relative tilt favours the left - the Netherlands, even with a slight shift in the direction of social democracy, have trounced France and Italy (4-1 and 3-0!) who have both taken decisive turns to the right with Sarkozy and Berlusconi, respectively.

Sadly, few people have caught on, or more nations would be clamouring for social democracy as fervently as they do for the world cup. Social democracy has not 'arrived' yet, in the sense that - if anyone recalls the famous 'Philosophy Football' Monty Python sketch - the global collective consciousness still has not grasped the object of the game - to kick the ball away from the centre and into the opponent's goal. Victory would undoubtedly be ours if we only applied ourselves to it, given how vastly the underprivileged of the world outnumber the privileged. The game, in other words, has still not truly begun, and social democracy has still not found its Archimedes to shout 'Eureka!' and run for the ball. Marx only gets us as far as comprehending the line rules and shouting 'offside!' while the capitalists get away with murder.

Money Doesn't Talk, It Swears

The future is worrying - and this in real, not football terms. This week, University College London (where I work) is hosting the China Research Festival, part of China Now, a nationwide (UK) festival of Chinese culture, to "reveal the dynamic heart of modern China."

Harmless, no? May be, until one has actually read some of the promotional material and done a bit of contextual thinking about the long term. Contemporary China, as Naomi Klein recounts in The Shock Doctrine, is perhaps the most successful implementation of Chicago School economic doctrine anywhere in the world. The brutally repressed Tiennamen Square protests in 1989 were in favour of democracy, but they were not, as many mainstream western media would have us believe, against the 'old guard' of Chinese communism and the status quo; they were directed, rather, at precisely the free market reforms of Deng Xiaoping which reduced millions of people to poverty overnight and fundamentally restructured the Chinese economy, creating fertile ground for exploitation, Free Trade Zones beyond the reach of unions and labour regulations, and turning China into the world's working class - playing Labour to the west's Capital, as Zizek put it.

Universities, once sanctuaries and hotbeds of radicalism and resistance to state power, are now being transformed into a key component not only of state power, but of trans-national governmentality, here playing a critical role in a shell game of cross-promotion between governments, corporations, and research institutions to construct one hefty global capitalist empire. The bloody legacy of repression, killing and torture on which it is built - from Tiennamen square to the pillaging of Russian democracy, Chile, Bolivia, etc - is safely tucked away in the past. One promotional banner in the North Cloisters at UCL is emblazoned with a quote from Deng Xiaoping touting the compatibility of communism and the capitalist free market. Sure, I thought, so long as you kill and jail the opposition, and make sure that you take only the worst of both worlds - authoritarian Stalinist repression (the 'Pinochet option' as Naomi Klein describes China's 'transition to democracy') and rampant, unchecked sweatshop exploitation in an unregulated free market at the mercy of the whims of corporate greed.

The betrayal by the Communist elite in China is the very same betrayal carried out by Solidarnosc in Poland - the difference being that the Poles, through the democratic process, were able to halt the free market reforms half-way. And given that much of this was done in China (as in Russia, Poland, and elsewhere) with the strong financial and political backing of western governments and international monetary institutions (IMF, World Bank) who had no qualms about directly opposing the democractic process and putting their bucks behind brutal repression and torture while at the same time touting the unpopular reforms as a 'transition to democracy', it may well be time to take seriously Zizek's remark in a recent lecture that China - capitalism without democracy - is the future. Instead of social democracy we will have capitalist autocracy.

Many of the changes implemented throughout UCL in the past couple of years to bring departments in line with the university's new 'corporate identity', from proto-fascist design guidelines, the outsourcing of an ever greater number of services and functions such as catering, the moving of books from one end of the library to another (done by a supposedly 'library specialist' moving company who left the shelf sequence in a tragic mess) to the Orwellian doublespeak about 'excellence' (theme of the library staff conference this week), certainly point in this direction. Not to mention the fact that the main, if not only motive for the reshuffle in the library is to situate the Law collection in the Donaldson room, the lovely palatial hall just under the UCL dome which until recently housed Art, Philosophy, and Economics, among others - in a bid to attract investment from top City law firms. So what is UCL doing pandering to and promoting China? Well when money talks...

Or as Bob Dylan put it, 'money doesn't talk, it swears.'

Some More Shock Therapy: I have met a German terrorist

2008-05-11T14:24:00.020+01:00

Well that's at least how Wikipedia describes Astrid Proll, who used to be in the infamous Baader-Meinhof gang in the 1960s and who gave a talk at the 1968 and All That! conference at Conway Hall this weekend. She seemed quite nice. I would never have thought her capable of robbing banks, forging documents, and being an expert car thief!

The conference was good, although a bit chaotic - the sessions were held back to back with no intervals (not even five minutes), with several going at a time in different rooms, and if you weren't there early or at least on time for each one it's likely you found yourself sitting on the floor or standing, at least in the more popular sessions, which discouraged any mid-hour drifting between talks. The following disclaimer was included in the programme:

'The Organizers warn that due to the volatility of finance capital and the spontaneous manifestations of class struggle there may be last second changes to the programme...If it turns into a complete fiasco the Organizers will be found drowning their sorrows in the Guy Debord Bar in the Foyer. Please join us."

At the end of the day they brought an enormous sack of unused bagels (which prior to that were on sale in the bar) out into the foyer for general rationing, free of charge. They even provided plastic bags for people to take them home in. I packed about 10 and strapped them on the back of my bicycle.

From the final rally, left to right: Astrid Proll, Adrian Mitchell, moderator (?), Sheila Rowbotham, Alain Krivine, and Eamon McCann.

Among other highlights were Alain Krivine (French Trotskyist politician), Sheila Rowbotham (British socialist feminist theorist), Chris Harman (editor of International Socialism) and Jean-Pierre Dutueil. There was a book fair going on in the main hall, where in addition to some funky revolutionary postcards and a copy of the Socialist Review I purchased a copy of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine and A Rebel's Guide to Gramsci. I felt very tempted to purchase a Trotsky t-shirt but then thought better. Somehow the idea didn't seem fitting. (heh heh)

At the book fair there was also a stall selling the War on Terror board game, which looks like a pumped-up version of risk, complete with an 'axis of evil' - a dial on the board which you can spin and which serves some purpose in advancing the game.

Naomi Klein is also giving a talk as part of the '68 season around London - Monday May 19, 7 pm, Friends' House on Euston Road (good old Quakers). Tickets are £7, £5 concessions (it's for a good cause!) and can be booked on the waronwant website. Full season programme can be viewed here: www.1968.org.uk.

A word from my mother on '68 in (ex-)Yugoslavia, excerpted and translated (by me) from an e-mail:

"In 1968 we had student demonstrations too. They were a sort of echo of the French demonstrations, but they were different in content. The young were rebelling against the betrayal of socialism, against injustice, poverty...Dad took part in those demonstrations.
We also protested to give support to the Czechs. Tito was the first foreign statesman to condemn the Russians for invading Czechoslovakia. The Czechs who found themselves in Yugoslavia were offered asylum and given all possible assistance.
We also protested against the war in Vietnam. In my high school we organized evenings of Vietnamese poetry and all sorts of other activities. We wore shirts with anti-war slogans..."

I might get more of these from other ex-Yugoslavs alive at the time, which I will duly translate and post here, so stay tuned.

I said ex-Yugoslavia because I wish to avoid any confusion with Milosevic's post-1990 Yugoslavia, a fraud and an abomination of Serbian nationalism which, despite the claims of many Western leftists (equally guilty of 'orientalism' in this case as their right-wing counterparts), had nothing to do with socialism or leftism but was a thoroughly right-wing nationalist diktatura. (And my mother is a Serb born in Belgrade, by the way. She grew up in Sarajevo.)

She also added, "Tomorrow is the election in Serbia. At the time of the last one someone said 'may the worse one win!' Well I think that will happen this time around."

On that note I must ask, what the fuck is happening to Europe at the moment? I'm talking about the Italian and British (local) elections. I happen to have recently visited two places that serve the exception to the current right-wing political trend: Madrid (Spain being one of only 2 remaining leftist governments in the EU, not counting Britain's Labour which is a hoax) and Bremen, which is the only remaining German city-state with a left-wing government. (Until a few years ago most of them were left-wing, I am told)

This is not a case of political/socialist tourism: in one case it was a friend's birthday/holiday, in the other case a wedding. I suppose you could say that it's not entirely coincidence, either. Anyhow, in terms of national governments we are basically left with two (again not counting Labour): Spain and Portugal. The Iberian peninsula, once the bulwark of Western Christianity and the Inquisition, is now the only remaining lefty stronghold. I am tempted to speculate cynically whether the simple reason is relational economics: both countries are among the least developed in Western Europe (Eastern Europe is upwardly-mobile and perhaps also still in the throes of post-Communism and therefore wary of lefty governments), and Bremen is apparently the poorest German stadt. When people are poor and can't afford the rent or pay for healthcare, they vote socialist. When they get rich, they vote in the government that will keep the immigrants out and keep them rich. Am I being too simplistic?

Economics aside, there are several interconnected ways one could explain the recent rise of the Right. It may be a little too comforting to think that the British election, and in particular the election of Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, is a reaction against Labour - though there is certainly some of that involved. The fact is that turnout has gone up - by a whopping 10%. Several hundred thousand more Londoners voted this time around, compared to the 2004 election. And the turnout is up on all sides - by sheer numbers, even Ken Livingstone got some 200,000 votes more than in 2004. It's just that the conservative vote has increased more - by about half a million votes. (See results on London Elects)

One way to look at this - and I think the last two Italian elections support this view - is that we are witnessing the decline of government as such. Basically, the social and political structure of the world we live in is disintegrating. Nobody can govern, left or right, and every election the people just elect whoever is in the opposition, whoever hasn't fucked up this time. They come to power, fuck up, and the likelihood of them staying in power for another term or so only depends on how badly they fucked up. But to be even more dismal, one has to take into account the increasing convergence of mainstream political parties at the centre. I don't think this is an indication of the will of voters, but rather the result of a simple realization on the part of mainstream politicians: right-wing voters will vote right-wing anyway or abstain, and left-wing voters will vote left or abstain. If the election is critical (as the London Mayoral one was), they will vote for the mainstream candidate (Ken or Boris) rather than their true (left or right) preference, which they can list as second preference anyway. Which pretty much leaves the voters in the middle to be fought over - those who switch sides, or who have no strong left or right commitment. Swing voters, in other words.

What makes this dismal is that this middle may well be a relative minority of voters - but it is enough to capture a sufficient number of them to win. In other words, for those of us who do have a definite left/right committment, the mainstream candidates aren't particularly after our votes, deep down - because they know that when it comes to the crunch we will not vote for the mainstream opposition. Sure, they will do lip service to whatever agenda they are meant to support, but ultimately what they are after are those voters who switch sides. In the simplest terms, Ken is after swingers who are thinking of voting Tory or who may have voted Tory last time around, and Boris is after voters who are thinking of voting Ken or voted Ken last time around. Each is after the other's game, the left is playing right, the right is playing left. They eventually meet in the middle.

In dialectical terms this can be characterized as the articulation of a hegemonic or universalized particular; rather than being what Laclau calls a 'chain of equivalences' or some shared content or thing in common between various political orientations (the universal as a constitutive lack), the case is one of a particular (the interests of a minority of 'swing' voters who are mostly, presumably, middle class, white, British, and probably wealthy or reasonably well off) which becomes universalized and comes to dominate the entire field of particulars; not through the common denominator of shared values but through a dichotomic electoral mechanism which invariably functions in such a way that those who tip the balance are those whose will is actualized by the power elite, overshadowing or even extinguishing all other particulars - not in the electoral process itself (because in the end it makes little difference who is elected) but in the actual affairs of state, in what governments do between elections. Regardless of who is elected, the political programme enacted is almost exclusively that of the balance-tippers, the side-switchers, the swing voters.

The Good News from Newsweek: Shock Therapy is Good For You

2008-05-10T21:06:00.024+01:00

I recently bought a copy of Newsweek - figured it would be something like the Economist, which I do read now and then for informational purposes. Not so. Compared to the Economist, Newsweek is a shameless neoliberal capitalist propaganda tool, believe it or not. Or inversely, compared to Newsweek, the Economist seems an objective, balanced, non-partisan news source. In the most recent issue of Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria, who is the paper's international editor, saw it fit to include (as cover story) an excerpt from his book, The Post-American World.

One has to be suspicious whenever a token 'intellectual' of vaguely Third-World descent in the service of a global superpower engages in self-flagellation in the name of that superpower. The good news that Zakaria wants us to know is that although there are other big global players coming on the global economic-political scene (China, India, etc), America will be OK. The reason: low unemployment, low inflation, low interest rates, the spread of democracy and American ideas, etc. And in the final flourish we are told of this 'rise of the rest' that it is 'one of the most thrilling stories in history' as 'Billions of people are escaping from abject poverty...'

Say no more. Billions of people? There are only six billion of us, dude. Are we counting other planets? Where Zakaria's figures come from is of course not worth the asking, as this is not a scholarly journal or a serious publication in any sense (nor is Zakaria's book it would seem), and no sources are cited. Hey I'm not asking for footnotes, but sometimes it's enough to say "According to..." Billions? Give me a break.

Well, according to Mike Davis's acclaimed book Planet of Slums, which does cite sources, lots and lots of sources, including various UN bodies, the IMF, and World Bank (far from being bastions of lefty scholarship), the urban population in proportion to the rural has skyrocketed in recent decades, within the urban population the number of those living in slums is on the rise, income disparity between rich and poor everywhere (except perhaps in Scandinavia, although this is not discussed) is on the rise, and any reversal or slowing of these trends is nowhere in sight.

All this is the result of the process that Zakaria describes in these pompous, celebratory terms: "For 60 years, the United States has pushed countries to open their markets, free up their politics, and embrace trade and technology. American diplomats, businessmen, and intellectuals have urged people in distant lands to be unafraid to change..."

For better or worse? Needless to say, income disparity between the richest and poorest in the United States is officially closer (in terms of ratios) to that of developing nations than other developed ones (i.e. Europe, Canada, Japan), and is also on the rise - no exception. But perhaps what Zakaria means is that billions of people are escaping abject poverty, as opposed to just poverty or even destitution or slum life, starvation, or something worse. Perhaps he just means that things are changing, that's all. No harm in that! White lies! In other words, while some people are going from merely 'wealthy' to 'filthy rich', others are migrating from 'abject' to other kinds of poverty, better or worse.

But never mind all that - the global economy is growing, global trade is increasing, and as Zakaria jubilantly reminds us, isn't it great that these days stock markets no longer plummet in response to disasters and wars but rather the opposite - they soar! (on account of defense spending, etc - part of the phenomenon that Naomi Klein calls 'disaster capitalism', spread by the technique of 'shock therapy'; See the shock doctrine video) Growth, growth, growth! So we don't have to avoid wars and disasters, and can in fact cash in on them! America is no longer first - the world's largest Casino is in Macao (no democracy there) rather than Las Vegas, Zakaria tells us, The Mall of America is no longer even in the top ten, the largest ferris wheel is in Singapore (a dictatorship) and only two of the world's richest people are American - so that should at least make all the poor people in those other countries ('the rest' as Zakaria lovingly calls them) happy, even if they're still poor. At least somebody gets to spend lots and lots of money in the name of their national pride.

As for the low unemployment and low inflation in the US, an article in the latest issue of Harper's is definitely worth a read for anyone interested - 'NUMBERS RACKET: Why the Economy Is Worse Than We Know' by Kevin Phillips, which documents the the rise of 'polyanna creep' or doctoring of calculation methods in federal accounting and labour statistics by successive US governments since the Kennedy administration. An example: American officials often cite a figure they call 'core inflation' - which doesn't exist anywhere else and which, on account of volatility in prices doesn't include - get this, folks - food and housing. So when they say 'core inflation' rather than simply 'inflation' what they're really saying is 'we're not telling you the truth'. Similarly, US unemployment statistics do not include many categories included by other governments, and among them are 'discouraged workers': people who have been looking for a job for a long time and haven't found one yet, basically, aren't counted as 'unemployed'. They don't exist. The real numbers, Phillips points out, are actually much higher, and the day of reckoning grows near. Fie on you, Fareed.

A Note on Balibar, Cosmopolitanism, and Immigration

2008-05-10T09:34:00.006+01:00

Yesterday I went to a lecture by Etienne Balibar at King's College, 'Towards a Diasporic Citizen? Internationalism to Cosmopolitics'. I have also been in Balibar's masterclass at Birkbeck College this week (two more sessions to go next week). I plan to write more about this at some point, but for the moment only a note on a point I raised during the discussion and which Balibar did not take to all that well. My suggestion was that the failure of the universal rights of citizenship addressed to the individual in the great proclamations of our times (i.e. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), and the severe restrictions on free circulation may stem from Marx's formulation that in bourgeois (capitalist) society, only capital has individuality and is independent; while the real human being has no individuality and is dependent on capital.

Of course there are various reasons why rights fail in their implementation and why free movement and circulation is restricted. But in the end, they are all trumped by capital. Example: as a matter of official policy and immigration law, if you invest $100,000 in the U.S. economy, you get a green card automatically. It doesn't matter who you are or what passport you hold. The usual restrictions don't apply. In the UK, the story is similar, though even less formal, but still a matter of official policy and law - here the Russian and Middle Eastern millionaires who buy up houses in Hampstead simply claim what is known as 'undomiciled' status, which is a way of saying "I'm filthy rich and I want to come and buy a house and live in your country", and the UK government just nods and says 'OK'. In fact, following the resurgent boom that put the City back on the map and made London Europe's (if not the world's financial capital), Peter Mandelson, a key figure of New Labour, was noted as saying "We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich."

What all this amounts to is that aside from all categories of immigration and citizenship, and all restrictions and borders, the underlying assumption beneath all the various forms of exclusion that categorize humanity in the eyes of immigration authorities is that the immigrants, the huddled third-world masses knocking on the doors of developed nations, have no money. If they do, or in the case of those few who do, it doesn't matter what nationality they are, where they come from, what passport they hold. So yes, Marx was right. It can all be reduced to one primary distinction. Only capital is independent. The universal rights addressed to individuals are ours to have in the measure in which we have access to capital - often not only as a matter of practice, but as a matter of law and official immigration policy.

My corollary point was that Deleuze and Guattari's formulation in Anti-Oedipus expresses precisely the paradox of the border: the idea that capitalism through its process of production strives continually toward its limit (globalization, full development of means of production, accumulation of capital) but at the same time expends a massive amount of energy to avoid reaching this limit - one might say, because it would be a step further toward socialism; because while the accumulation of capital requires free circulation, it also requires the restricted circulation of labour; therefore the border must be maintained at all costs, even while it is continually chipped away.

faKulty of lawZ: six degreez of separation and the art of ap-RAP-riation

2008-03-19T20:21:00.036Z

I received an e-mail recently from a Bosnian painter friend who lives in the states, with a link to the review of a new album by Bosnian rapper Edo Maajka. (think Eminem, Balkan-style...'Maajka' is a play on 'majka' - 'mother' - so...'mutha'?) The album cover, designed by Ideologija ('Ideology'), a collective based in Sarajevo, depicts a boy wearing a blue cap and red scarf, trademark of the pioniri - Tito's pioneers, a communist youth group we all took part in at school in ex-Yugoslavia - photoshopped in the colour pattern of the U.S. star-spangled banner.

Namik (that's my friend's name) sent me the link (www.menart.hr/index.php?news_id=4396) asking if I could tell who was in the picture. I thought perhaps it was one of his own paintings, and that perhaps the boy was he himself, since he often uses photos as source material for his paintings. (There is even a painting of me playing guitar somewhere in his collection...)

As it turns out, it had nothing to do with him - the photo is of a mutual friend of ours, Emir, who knew nothing about it. None of us did. Mr. Maajka presumably stumbled upon the photo on the internet, perhaps on Emir's home page at Rice University where he is a postdoctoral research fellow in computer science - homepage.mac.com/pasalic/p2/personal.html - and decided to app-RAP-riate it for his album cover. Perhaps he googled 'pionir' and it came up in the image search - the name of the file is pionir3.gif. In fact, when I performed the same google search, I found his image on another totally unrelated site - sistermadeleine.blog.hr.

Maajka's album, titled 'Sjeti se' - 'remember' - in the pre-release phase, is now officially released as 'Balkansko a nase'. ('Balkan but ours' - doesn't really make sense in literal translation, can't explain here).

It just so happens that a conversation I had recently (before Namik's e-mail) over dinner with a friend in London reminded me of an article published last year in Harper's magazine concerning art, politics, and copyright. ('On the Rights of Molotov Man: Appropriation and the Art of Context', February 2007) Being employed in the art world, my friend mentioned she was reading a law book on art and copyright, so I shared some of my own thoughts as a law grad and later sent her the article - and in the process re-read it myself.

The piece, culled from a symposium held at NYU last year, takes the form of a conversation between two artists, painter Joy Garnett and photographer Susan Meiselas, concerning a past copyright dispute between the two. Garnett had inadvertently plagiarized a celebrated photograph taken by Meiselas of a Nicaraguan Sandinista rebel lobbing a grenade at one of the last outposts of the Somoza regime, and had used the resulting painting on the announcement card for her new exhibition. After some threats from Meiselas' lawyers and informal squabbling, Garnett dropped the image from the announcement cards, which led to an all-out internet war in a solidarity campaign with her use of the image after she posted comments asking for advice on rhizome.org. The story went global and pretty soon bloggers and artists around the world began posting their own appropriations/renditions of the same image elsewhere, many speculating that Pepsi was behind the threatened lawsuit because of the bottle used for the molotov cocktail in the photo. In the end, Meiselas never sued and they came to an understanding.

In the Harper's article, Garnett concludes her contribution with the question: 'Who owns the rights to this man's struggle?' Meiselas turns this claim around, insisting that it is precisely her subject's struggle that is at stake for her, that what she resents about the appropriation and decontextualization of the image is precisely its reduction to an 'abstract riot':

'My own relationship to this picture obviously is very different from Joy's. No one can "control" art, of course, but it is important to me - in fact, it is central to my work - that I do what I can to respect the individuality of the people I photograph, all of whom exist in specific times and places. Indeed, Joy's practice of decontextualizing an image as a painter is precisely the opposite of my own hope as a photographer to contextualize an image.'

So she provides the context for 'molotov man' Pablo Arauz, telling his story, and along the way recounts various other appropriations of the same image she has tolerated in the past, from matchbox covers celebrating the anniversary of the Sandinista revolution, to the cover of a magazine published by the Nicaraguan Catholic church (they noticed 'molotov man' was wearing a crucifix), to sprayed-on stencil graffiti in a Sandinista recruitment campaign - and even down to the Contras themselves in a recuitment campaign against the Sandinistas. She concludes on the following note:

'There is no denying in this digital age that images are increasingly dislocated and far more easily decontextualized. Technology allows us to do many things, but that does not mean we must do them. Indeed, it seems to me that if history is working against context, then we must, as artists, work all the harder to reclaim that context...I still feel strongly, as I watch Pablo Arauz's context being stripped away - as I watch him being converted into the emblem of an abstract riot - that it would be a betrayal of him if I did not at least protest the diminishment of his act of defiance.'

Inspired by these words, I decided in this post to reclaim my friend Emir's context, following the careless app-RAp-riation of his image for Edo Maajka's album cover, turning him into a poster-boy for some kind of new-fangled whiteboy rap cultural critique of post-communist Balkanism. Emir, who hails from Prijedor, Bosnia (scene of the most notorious concentration camps for Muslim prisoners during the war) is a genius, if I ever met one. Think Zizek to the nth power (beard and gut included), with (proportionally) more jokes and less Lacan and Hegel. And more poetry. And totally unknown.

In Emir's own words:

'The Young Pioneer, having sworn an oath that involved hard work, study, and general if vaguely defined benevolence toward one's fellows, finds himself in Texas some twenty years later. Point A. Point B. And along the way: goetterdammerung of Brotherhood and Unity, war, exile, friendships and books, families of choice or of necessity, "new countries, new idiocies of men or of the gods."'

I would only contest Emir's loyalty with regard to the first part of the oath in question. I lived with Emir for about a month at his bachelor pad in Beaverton, Oregon (a post-industrial quasi-suburb of Portland) and found him to be an inveterate slob, even by my own fairly lax standards. When I arrived, apart from the general chaos in his tiny flat and the fact that - literally - every single dish in the kitchen was dirty, there were pots with leftover rice and beans on the stove, unrecognizable for the layers upon layers (I mean it) of multi-coloured mold growing on the inside. A micro-cosmos unto itself. The living room coffee table was piled high with stacks of dirty plates, cups, utensils and candy wrappers, and there was not a square inch of the floor or carpet visible for miles around from all the clothes, books, papers, and random paraphernalia strewn about. In the evenings he would come home and for weeks on end consume only a box of satzuma oranges for dinner until either he or I gathered up the courage to wash up.

Apart from that, the rest is more or less true and he has held his oath to Marshal Tito without exemption.

As for music, although Emir did on one occasion, years ago, submit me to a Maajka-listening session and even knew many of the rapper's lyrics by heart, his eclectic taste can hardly be summed up. If you didn't know him and you heard him playing Bach on the piano, you might be slightly jarred to also hear him rapping along to Public Enemy's 'Fear of a Black Planet' or 'Anti-Nigger Machine' while driving the beat-up old Toyota Corolla which we had to do minor claptrap repairs on from time to time. In both cases, he played and rapped with gusto.

And it is owing to Emir's frequent unannounced visits to the duplex my ex and I shared in Portland, and his temporary appropriations of my computer during these visits for the purpose of 'sailing under the flag of piracy', that my digital music collection includes items as varied as Leningrad Cowboys, Italian songsters Conti and Guccini, Beastie Boys, Weird Al Yankovic, a small compilation of Welsh folk choral music (including a rendition of the Welsh national anthem), and about ten different versions of 'Waltzing Matilda' by everyone from Tom Waits to Harry Belafonte to a choir performing it as the Australian national anthem.

Again, in his own words:

'I once categorically declared: "I don't like music. Of any kind. Period." But that was under duress. So, I do like music, all kinds. I'm a big fan of Karen Zoid, They Might Be Giants, Lou Reed, and, of course, the amazing tractor-driving superstars that make the tundra rock and make the Ulan Bator girls scream, the Leningrad Cowboys. In classical music, I have a great weakness for the renaissance masters, especially Palestrina [my Dum Complerentur in the shower makes the shrubbery wilt for miles around]. Also, somewhat soppy, I know, but Bach's passion oratoria are the coolest. Oh yeah, and Shostakovich's 8th Symphony, though I could never do it justice in the shower.'

Well, that's about it for now. I only wanted to expose the reduction of Emir's image to the post-Communist emblem of an 'abstract pionir' of the Brave New Balkans and protest the diminishment of his act(s) of defiant and subversively profound laziness, taken out of context in the service of a new-fangled critique of a new-fangled Balkan society. Nobody owns the rights to the fungous micro-cosmos that once blossomed on the stove of his bachelor flat in Portland - but neither does anyone have the right to strip it away from his image without protest and re-appropriation.