The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Gnosis as 'Dark Precursor'

[idolatry and repetition: from simulacrum to gnosis]

In one of his poetic turns, Heidegger rejects the dichotomy of word and image, which in the German tradition was understood as meaning that images required space in order to be perceived, while words required time. To Heidegger, the truth of language - poetry - is image and therefore space par excellence; images, in turn, incorporate time in the form of the invisible - the truth of an image is not in the representation of the seen as conventionally understood, but in invoking what is outside itself, the 'thingness' of things, the hidden part - perhaps what Barthes calls punctum.

The reference to what is outside the immediate field of vision yet implicated in the image finds an inverse counterpart in Baudrillard's comments on photography as 'exorcism': "If something wants to be photographed, that is precisely because it does not want to yield up its meaning; it does not want to be reflected upon. It wants to be seized directly, violated on the spot, illuminated in its detail. If something wants to become an image, this is not so as to last, but in order to disappear more effectively."



Kafka, in a similar vein, equates this to writing: "We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes." The image at hand, whether a visual image or a sentence-image (to use Ranciere's term), is a fixed or bare repetition, the Platonic repetition of the same, the copy which is always haunted by the spectre of an original but which, precisely for this reason, is false, and can never truly repeat the Idea (per Deleuze), the 'thingness' of a thing. As Baudrillard puts it, "to make an image of an object is to strip the object of all its dimensions one by one: weight, relief, smell, depth, time, continuity and, of course, meaning". To this Deleuze counter-poses the simulacrum, the real repetition of the Nietzschean eternal return which is never repetition of the same. Real repetition is where the new emerges in nature.



Far from empty theoretical posturing, what this broadly evokes borders on the atavistic: in virtually every major religion there is some kind of prohibition or taboo related to visual representation - idolatry, the making of graven images, the depiction of the prophet, etc. The fact that such norms are rarely observed, at least in the strictest terms, by the mainstream forms of institutionalized religions is evidence of a tension - an internal difference - at the heart of religious traditions. The Heideggerian poetics taken up by Baudrillard and Kafka hints at an ancient gnostic principle abandoned by theologians and organized religions in their gradual transition to rationalist modernity.

Even Heidegger's rejection of the split between word and image can be accomodated within a gnostic framework. The prohibition on 'taking the Lord's name in vain', or even more explicitly, the Hebrew prohibition on writing it down at all, alternately insisting that the name, if written, be stripped of vowels (YHWH), aims precisely at this. What is holy cannot be imagined, represented or fixed in any way, and this applies to visual image and text alike. In order for it to be present, it must remain immanent. The gnostic God, to put it in Deleuzian terms, is the ultimate 'dark precursor', the differenciator of differences, the object=x which ensures the communication between disparate series by never being in its proper place, remaining a void.



An exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris a few years ago explored this very aspect of the visual image - entitled Voids, the exhibition was a retrospective of empty exhibitions over the past 50 years, starting with Yves Klein's 1958 exhibition of an empty gallery space at the Galerie Iris Clert. Empty space features as a platform for envisioning the invisible, for contemplating space in time, opening our eyes to the 'thingness' of things, their absence. It is a way of repatriating the exorcised content of the captured image, releasing the violated image back into the void, redeeming the holy.

It it this dimension again that is activated in Chinese artist Zhang Huan's "Berlin Buddha" - a performance-art piece in which a buddha sculpture made of concrete was ripped apart and reduced to dust in front of the gallery audience. This reference to the buddhist notion of 'killing the buddha' also hints at a shared element of gnosis that traverses a whole range of philosophical and religious traditions - from the Pagan ritual of the 'May King' or 'killing the god' to the Adonis myth (which echoes the earlier Sumerian 'Tammuz' and a number of other ancient myths of death/rebirth), the Crucifixion of Christ, etc. The very existence (as opposed to Being) of 'God' in any sense - as statue, flesh-and-blood, even ghost or spirit - is an imaging, a fixation, and therefore sacrilege.



Where the Kafka/Baudrillard gnostic indictment of the image and Heidegger's poetics part ways is in that Heidegger does not exclude the possibility of an authentic image. In Baudrillard's gnostic vision, the image is by necessity representation and therefore loss. But this seems too easy a dismissal for Heidegger - it is possible for an image to evoke the thingness of things, to show without representing.

It may be precisely this that makes Diane Arbus' photographs unique: it seems all too simple to say that she portrayed 'freaks'. Her uniqueness is that in her photographs, 'freaks' - giants, dwarves, transvestites, circus performers, those on the fringe of ordinary society - appeared normal, at home with themselves, ordinary; whereas the 'normal' people (i.e. couple with child strolling down 5th avenue) appeared unsettled, out of place, weird, plastic.



One shouldn't mistake this overarching theme in Arbus' work as a gesture of equation: the photographs form two distinct series. The common term between them, repeated in each series - 'freak' for lack of a better term - far from being an identity or similarity between them, is precisely what grounds their difference, what distinguishes the two series. It is the object=x, the 'dark precursor', the differenciator of differences. It establishes a point of contact between them, differenciates them, while remaining invisible, or outside the frame and without any positive content: one cannot locate it ('freakishness') precisely or explain its meaning, but it is there nevertheless, running silently througout each series. Through this displacement and repetition Arbus' photographs evoke something truly new, carving out a unique territory among images.



It is no surprise that, in her senior high school yearbook where each student was asked to provide, as a caption for their graduation photo, a statement about their goals in life upon graduating, among all the boring statements by her fellow students on career and marriage aspirations, Arbus stood out like a sore thumb with these words: "To shake the tree of life and bring down fruits unheard of."


[common humanity and resistance: quo vadis, domine?]

The first time Christ is crucified, he is merely a holy man who gives up his life for the sake of another, only one among many Judeans killed by the Romans in this gruesome manner. It is only with the second crucifixion - the repetition - that the truly new emerges, and the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth is transformed into Christ, the redeemer - it is only the second time, with a second death, that 'God' truly dies on the cross.

The dark precursor is thus constituted retroactively (per Deleuze), and 'God' - the object=x - emerges as the invisible differenciator between the series, establishing a point of communication between them but without an identity or similarity; 'God' is the pure difference between series that repeat one another, the new that emerges in each repetition. It is the 'esoteric word' that ensures communication, while establishing against the background of the 'same' the difference between each series: the spiritual 'killing of the Buddha', the pagan ritual of spring ('killing the May King'), the crucified flesh-and-blood God of Christianity.



In this sense, the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring and Iranian revolts - in opposing state/religious authority from a position of faith (in many cases), referencing religious tradition - set out from the position of Antigone/Jesus. Rather than simply resistance, Antigone's position in ethical terms circumvents state authority (Creon) to establish a direct relation to a higher authority beyond the state ("the unwritten laws of heaven…"); in much the same way, Jesus opposes the Roman empire by appealing to the 'Kingdom of God'.

This is perhaps the result of Walter Benjamin's insight that state authority rests not on a 'rule of law' but on rule by 'exception' or whim, disguised by concepts such as 'the rule of law'. If the 'rule of law' can be suspended whenever it proves inconvenient to those in power, it becomes questionable whether it ever was an authentic principle or modus operandi. Within these parameters, the form that an authentic resistance must take, rather than operating within this farcical system of rules and rights granted by the state, is to invoke an authentic exception, as Benjamin puts it - an 'unwritten' authority beyond the state - and destroy the law as such, clean the slate.



This theological dimension cannot be underestimated in the context of the struggle in the Arab world, for what may be obvious reasons: by invoking the internal difference, the Egyptian or Iranian protesters' insistence on faith, far from indicating a 'lesser evil' or reformist moderation, radically lays bare the real struggle - not between Western liberal democracy and Islam, but between the authentic personal faith of gnostic populism on one hand, and the inauthentic authoritarian faith of those in power, on the other. They share a term - Allah - but this shared term is an emptiness that in fact differenciates them and splits them apart, their 'dark precursor'. It is the same struggle that goes on worldwide, traversing systems and religions.



In her essay on Hegel and Haiti, Susan Buck-Morss relates the story of a contingent of French soldiers sent by Napoleon to put down the slaves' revolt; upon hearing a group of former slaves sing the Marseillaise (which in one verse denounces "l'esclavage antique"), the Frenchmen decide not to ambush the rebels, laying down their own weapons and wondering aloud if they aren't fighting on the wrong side. Their faith - in the ideals of the French Revolution - is authentic. "Common humanity appears at the edges," Buck-Morss concludes. Power comes from below.



If I may digress a little, to quote at length from Tolstoy, War and Peace: "in order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander (on whom the event seemed to depend) should be carried out, the concurrence of innumerable circumstances was needed without any one of which the event could not have taken place. It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power - the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and guns - should consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse and complex causes."

Asserting further that the major historical players are in the end far more caught up in the inertial momentum of history than the people they command, Tolstoy concludes, "A king is history's slave."

By contrast, in the words of Salvador Allende, "La historia es nuestra y la hacen los pueblos." It is the people who make history, whether they know it or not.

The fundamental opposition here - between the unwritten and the written, between the sacred/holy and the concrete/fixed, between the raw, volatile will of the people and established state authority - invokes what Deleuze refers to as the only real opposition in nature: between the Idea and representation. Real difference is always internal, and it goes all the way down - this is precisely the consequence of Heidegger's insight that words, through poetry, can create images, and that images in turn can express absence; like the wave/particle duality in quantum physics, the split between word and image is internal to both word and image. In the words of Walt Whitman, "I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes; We convince by our presence."

Or as Louis Armstrong - jazz gnostic - put it, when asked how he would explain to the uninitiated what jazz music was all about: "some people, if they don't know, you just can't tell 'em." (The idea of jazz, beyond even the boundaries of genre or music as an art form, embodies in the purest sense the notion of repetition=difference.)

Not to miss out on a more contemporary pop culture reference when it rears its pretty little head - I've never found the song 'Royals' that interesting, despite its appropriation by Bill de Blasio in his progressive campaign for New York Mayor - musically and lyrically, 'Team' is Lorde's real gem, with this lyric especially:

    We live in cities
you'll never see on the screen
Not very pretty, but we sure know
how to run things
Living in ruins
of a palace within my dreams
And you know
we're on each other's team

It's those cross-connections again, that cut across cultures and make visible the real differences, and real allegiances - like the French soldiers and Haitian slaves singing the Marseillaise, the Syrian rebels and Bostonians exchanging messages of solidarity, or the Tahrir Square protesters in Egypt holding signs saying 'we stand with the people of Wisconsin' in the middle of Governor Scott Walker's union-busting campaign. We're on each other's team. We live in cities you'll never see on the screen - the revolution will not be televised, as Gill Scott-Heron famously put it.

*     *     *

"What becomes established with the new is precisely not the new," (Deleuze) and this is one of the pitfalls of any revolutionary struggle. A revolution can never establish itself or insinuate itself in laws and institutions, let alone state organs; it cannot make an image of itself - the revolution will not be televised. It is in this sense that effective resistance to state authority, by invoking an authentic exception, must rely on Benjaminian 'divine violence' - divine because it is 'unwritten', because it cannot inscribe itself in (written) law. In order to remain vital, revolution must remain a threatening presence, a force of nature, a pure momentum poised against organs of authority as such; its function - and its everlasting hope - can only ever be to set in motion a wheel of critical mass when necessary, to produce complex repetitions out of which emerge authentic differences, to perpetually "shake the tree of life and bring down fruits unheard of."

Universal History in The Dark Knight Rises: A Tale of Two (or More) Cities

I finally saw The Dark Knight Rises a few weeks ago, and have been mulling over some ideas ever since.

First off, I don't see the 'Occupy' reference at all - certainly not a criticism or indictment of Occupy Wall Street. I mean, seriously? Just because someone attacks the New York Stock Exchange, it's a reference to the Occupy movement? Are people really that hysterical nowadays? Did the Occupy movement have anything to do with using high-tech weaponry to take over an entire city's infrastructure and capture an atom bomb in order to blow up the city and kill everyone? Anywhere in that ballpark? Nope. I don't see it. Frankly, any suggestion that this is a criticism of the Occupy movement is plainly, on its face stupid. Or hysterical. Or both.

Yes, yes, I know - the rhetoric. When Bane blows up the tunnels and takes over Gotham City, capturing the entire police force underground, in his speech at the stadium he proclaims 'We come not as conquerors, but as liberators.' He then proceeds to talk at length about how he is giving the city 'back to the people', ridding them of their corrupt leaders who have been telling them a pack of lies all these years. I get it.

However the thing about that is, there is a pretty blatant, neatly spelled-out and virtually literal historical reference here, which it seems virtually everyone who has commented on and written about this film has entirely missed. The words spoken by Bane in the stadium speech are almost verbatim the words spoken to the Iraqi people by one General Stanley Maude in the Proclamation of Baghdad, on the occasion of the British occupation of Iraq, way back in 1917:

"Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators."



After which the British army proceeded to maim and murder a large part of the civilian population of Iraq, quelling revolt with one of the very first documented uses of air-to-ground artillery against a civilian population in recorded history, decades before Guernica - a kind of Guernica before Guernica. (As related by Sven Lindqvist in A History of Bombing)

One British officer on the scene, Arthur 'Bomber' Harris (later responsible for the firebombing of German cities in WWII; and in particular notorious for choosing to target civilians rather than, say, railway transport links, including those used to transport Jews to the death camps, despite pressure from Jewish groups in Britain) reported with enthusiasm the remarkable effect that mowing down scores of Iraqis with heavy air-to-ground artillery had on the surviving population. Talk about state-sponsored terrorism.



Needless to say, the same rhetoric also blatantly echoes that deployed in Iraq 80-something years later, this time by the Americans. Wasn't it all about "winning hearts and minds" and "we're here to free you from your corrupt regime", and so on, and so forth? Anyone remember all the talk of 'regime change'? before they started all the torturing and murdering, that is - resulting in the death of over 100,000 people in a useless war started on false pretenses. Bane, too, is on a mission to rid Gotham city of its corrupt, lying leaders and 'give it back to the people'.

Paul Wolfowitz, one of the key neocon ideologues, notoriously told a congressional hearing: "I am reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators…"



The fact that Bane, along with Ras al-Gul, seems to have a vaguely middle-eastern or central Asian origin further reinforces this link. The entire story could be seen as a complex role-reversal scenario - we are shown in vivid detail what it might look like if a foreign power occupied a major American city saying 'we're here to liberate you from your corrupt leaders' and then proceeded to commit unspeakable crimes. Gotham is Baghdad, Bane is any old US or British general in Iraq, and the underlying message is: this is how they see us, the so-called liberators...

Given that the writing/directing Nolan brothers team are a couple of well-educated Brits (Christopher is an alum of my alma mater, UCL) is a reliable indicator that this cannot be a coincidence. They even suggest as much in the script, when Commissioner Gordon tells Blake: "You're a detective now, son. You're not allowed to believe in coincidence anymore."



One could of course view the referential whole of the story as ambiguous - it could be a reference to both Occupy and the empty liberation rhetoric of imperialist overlords with ulterior motives, along with the ambiguity of revolutionary language that unites them. Nolan is reported to have acknowledged the influence of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities on the writing of The Dark Knight Rises - a story of the French Revolution, which unlike Occupy certainly involved plenty of revolutionary violence. Bane, then, is a figure in the cast of Robespierre, though undoubtedly far more extreme or fanatical, given that his commitment to revolutionary goals is nonexistent and his aim is ultimately extermination - destruction of the city. The revolutionary rhetoric is deployed purely to create chaos and buy time.



In a Rolling Stone interview, Nolan denied any intent to vilify the Occupy movement, stating "If the populist movement is manipulated by somebody who is evil, that surely is a criticism of the evil person. You could also say the conditions the evil person is exploiting are problematic and should be addressed...You don't want to alienate people, you want to create a universal story."

Right, so - legitimate concerns, genuine need for social change, exploited by a villain with ulterior motives. And we have a 'universal story' - one that speaks to different contexts, time periods, different points of view. Role reversal is precisely at the heart of this historically-grounded universality - an intersubjective collective empathy accessed by walking in someone else's shoes, or for that matter swapping places. If this is a tale of two cities, it could just as well be Gotham/New York and (the spectre of) Baghdad, for instance.



When asked whether Bruce Wayne would vote for Mitt Romney, Nolan replies "Before or after Bruce goes broke?" He is clearly hinting at a fairly materialist message about how economic circumstances dictate one's political perspective. And the implicit lesson - the moral of the story - is a variation on the old biblical 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. Or to put it in Game Theory terms, it suggests the 'TIT FOR TAT' strategy , which has been shown to be the simplest and most successful in cooperative games such as the iterated prisoner's dilemma - demonstrating that over the long term, altruism and cooperation are (paradoxically, perhaps) closely linked to self-interest, and more beneficial to the individual as well as the whole of society than selfishness and 'dog eat dog' mentality.

"What's the worst thing our villain Bane can do?" Nolan asks. "What are we most afraid of? He's going to come in and turn our world upside down...That has happened to other societies throughout history, many times, so why not here? Why not Gotham?  We want something that moves people and gets under the skin."

My thoughts exactly. The liberal hysteria about the supposed reference to Occupy seems, perhaps despite best intentions, fairly self-centered and myopic, confined to the relatively simple coordinates of recent American history and binary politics of Republican/Democrat. To me it seemed pretty obvious while watching The Dark Knight Rises that the story was an attempt to re-imagine an experience relatively foreign to Americans - a foreign military occupation by villains utilizing the same duplicitous rhetoric deployed by colonial/hegemonic forces worldwide, throughout history - on contemporary American soil, as if to say "this is what it would look like if this type of thing happened here."



And that's the important point, the key transposition. If so many critics and commentators missed it, that is rather their failure, an index of that same 'failure of imagination' that people talked of in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. It is all too easy to see the horror of Gotham in ahistorical terms, as pure fiction/fantasy, or at best a narrative that panders to xenophobic right-wing fantasies, and miss the clearly historical reference, the whiff of chickens coming home to roost. The failure to genuinely imagine and internalize the possibility that 'this could happen here' - with all its consequences, political and social - is a typical conceit stemming from the myth of American/Western uniqueness and exceptionality. But even more significant is the failure to recognize in the horrors wrought upon Gotham by Bane the very horrors that American or British troops have wrought on distant lands in military campaigns christened with poetic names such as 'Desert Storm' and 'Shock and Awe'. With the same empty rhetoric. And with similarly sinister and self-serving motives.

Even Slavoj Žižek, in a somewhat surprisingly positivist critique of The Dark Knight Rises, is unable to answer the key question:

The prospect of the Occupy Wall Street movement taking power and establishing a people’s democracy on the island of Manhattan is so patently absurd, so utterly unrealistic, that one cannot avoid asking the following question – why does a Hollywood blockbuster dream about it? Why does it evoke this spectre? Why does it even fantasise about OWS exploding into a violent takeover?

One can only be baffled by this question, again, if one fails to see the historical reference(s), the role reversal. The echoes of OWS are purely incidental - and the ambiguously revolutionary rhetoric should only alert us to the way in which the language of revolution is appropriated by figures like Bane, just like the British colonial prelates of yore, or the modern-day military-industrialists of American empire. To view this as a criticism of Occupy is to ignore context - to heed words and ignore actions; to make the mistake of taking seriously the hypocritical American rhetoric of "spreading freedom and democracy".



Among the first to sound the liberal hysteria alarm about the allegedly conservative politics behind The Dark Knight Rises was a blog post on Slate, which asks the insidious question: is Batman part of the 1 percent? And this only on the basis of a preview, prior to the film's release.

Where Nolan's vision perhaps encounters a kind of cognitive dissonance in the commentariat is that the structure of political organization evoked in the film is the inverse of that in the Wizard of Oz, a cultural milestone that may go some way in explaining American foreign policy of the past few decades. In the Wizard of Oz, the moment Dorothy accidentally kills the Wicked Witch, the Witch's subjects, freed from her spell, suddenly become good. This type of 'magical thinking' perhaps explains in part why many Americans, including (perhaps) Paul Wolfowitz, may have genuinely believed that the Iraqis would welcome their murderous, racist troops as liberators, once they got rid of the 'evil leader'.

The Dark Knight Rises, by contrast, gives a far more realistic portrayal of a flawed proto-revolutionary moment, which even Žižek might agree with on second thought - suggesting that revolutions are necessarily violent, and that the removal of even a corrupt leader by a foreign power imposing its will, in the absence of any indigenous revolutionary program, is bound to create a power vacuum and lead to a bad end - a decidedly un-revolutionary one at that. It is in this respect that another criticism of Zizek's is mistaken - Nolan's point is not the typical conservative one, that society needs a strong central state authority to preserve law and order; rather, it is the lack of an organized indigenous revolutionary or reformist initiative of any kind, the imposition of a revolutionary program and removal of authority from the outside, by a foreign agent, that guarantees chaos.



What Žižek seems to be getting at but not quite getting, in the concluding paragraphs of the above-cited piece, is the subversive core of this spectacle - how easily the society of Gotham crumbles when key figures of authority are removed; how easily the people take up Bane's bidding and sack the palaces of the rich, turning the city upside down. This is clearly not an indictment of OWS, or of 'people power', but a fairly subversive suggestion that an unequal society, in which the maintenance of law and order depends on a few figures of authority who can easily be removed or manipulated, a society heavily reliant on a state monopoly over the use of violence, is in fact a weak society - filled with discontent waiting to be unleashed and/or manipulated. That the rule of law, along with all the lofty ideals of a progressive, democratic society, is useless if it is not, as Rousseau put it, 'in the hearts of men'.

Another interesting echo of Nolan's reference to A Tale of Two Cities is the recent campaign for Mayor of New York. Bill de Blasio, the challenger from the progressive Left and eventual winner (a true Lefty for once) has vowed to put an end to New York's 'Tale of Two Cities' - one super-rich, the other abjectly poor.

It's probably a safe bet that Bruce Wayne, if he's around, voted for de Blasio.

This is what democracy looks like

The turmoil in Tehran over the past few days manifests precisely the 'minimal difference' that belies 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. The real clash 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 - this with a flourish, and deploying a variety of tactics ranging from racially-targeted voter fraud (50,000 alleged ex-felons fraudulently purged from the register in one case, most of them black) to voter intimidation, orchestrated at various levels nationwide but most notably in Florida, by ex-president George W's dear old brother, Governor Jeb.

So what is the difference between a stolen election in the "world's greatest democracy" and a stolen election in Iran? Well, for starters, the Americans never took to the streets in revolt, never rose up in anger against the political 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 results, demanding a full recount; Gore, 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, or in the institutions of democracy - they lacked a healthy dose of cynicism. Living in a state of collective denial for 8 years, 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 should tell us, I think, is that real democracy - the 'will of the people' - cannot be guaranteed by any system. The very notion of 'democratic institutions' or 'democratic government' is already a contradiction of terms, of sorts - something to be watched over carefully. The only guarantee of democracy is the willingness of the people to revolt. A government is only 'democratic' as a function of the people's preparedness to wipe it out at the slightest whiff of corruption - by any means necessary. Democratic legitimacy can be vested in institutions and formal procedures only so long as the threat of collective violence persists, even if it is never realized.

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, under the circumstances, and given the odds against them, they appear to be far less fearful than anyone thought. They have slightly more corrupt and less democratic institutions than some countries in the west, and face greater state/police brutality; yet despite this, as a people they are clearly more capable of exercising a collective will, with or without institutions.

The real struggle in all this is not between Iran and the USA, or Islam and the West, or authoritarianism and democracy: 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 political system of any sort, within an institutionalized religion even - rather than between 'different' nations, religions, or political systems. It comes down to what Deleuze calls 'internal' difference - real differences are always internal. The USA in fighting Islamism or communism was always fighting its own demons: in the case of China it eventually reconciled not only with communism but with authoritarian rule (i.e. China was granted permanent 'Most Favoured Nation' status in 2000 by the U.S Congress). Communism became palatable for US politicians once it eliminated 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 agenda, as they well know, comes not from Islam but from any expression of collective will, from popular revolt as such. It just never seems to go their way, that's all.

Parallels to the 1979 revolution are apt, most of all because what is at stake is a repetition, in the Deleuzian sense: in 1979, the revolutionaries lost in the end, as the critical mass was hijacked by Islamic fundamentalists firmly on the side of state authority. What is needed is a repetition - authentic repetition is never repetition of the same, but the repetition of a possibility; and it is only with repetition that the truly new emerges. It is time to return to that fork in the road.

Slavoj Zizek recently 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. One divides into two. This is the only path to true universality: nous sommes tous Iraniens.* Mousavi is within Islam the emancipatory voice that the Left should be within neoliberal capitalism - not to mention the American brand of neoliberal capitalism, which happens to be paired with a fundamentalist Christian faith not all that different from the Iranian mullahs.

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 - some fifty-odd years ago. One reason why Western democracy never took root in Iran in the first place is because, when the Iranians tried to build a progressive democratic society on their own, one where women were more emancipated than they were in most Western nations at the time, and certainly more than they would be in Switzerland for decades**, their dream was crushed by the very same hegemonic powers now rooting for war on Iran. The Iranians elected a socialist government in 1951, which proceeded to enact a range of popular social reforms, including the denationalization of Iranian oil, at the time controlled by British interests under a 100-year concession granted under duress by a previous unconstitutional government; the British and Americans, prompted by a dispute 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.

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" - couldn't all that make one a little depressed? (Conveniently enough, if the side effects do appear, it's impossible to tell whether it is the drug or the disease any more.)

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 here?

A lesson we should draw from history: the most common side effects of 'spreading freedom and democracy' include "authoritarianism, religious dogma, fundamentalism, outbursts of violence, political repression, economic depression, mass killings, imprisonment of political opponents, war, 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.
**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?*

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?”

Some More Shock Therapy: I have met a German terrorist

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.

My Back Pages: From Cogitandum to Learning, Becoming, and Revolution, or ‘How to Teach Subversively’

This was drawn up from notes made during and in response to Infinite Thought's lecture this Wednesday titled 'The Confidence to be No One: Class, Culture and Education (with some help from Rancière and Badiou)'; and the two pieces discussed therein, particularly Ranciere's ‘The Ignorant Schoolmaster'.

‘When the student is ready, the teacher appears.'
-Buddhist proverb

“Some people, if they don't know, you just can't tell ‘em.”
-Louis Armstrong (with reference, I am told, to what jazz music is…)

note 1: from the production of knowledge to the (internal) process of learning; taking Ranciere by way of Deleuze

The two aphorisms above (the first of which I once used in a university admission application) illustrate precisely the insight that I think follows from Ranciere's anecdote about the Flemish students whom he ‘educated…without having taught them anything'. The teacher is not a transmitter and does not transmit or impart learning and knowledge to the learning mind; all that is imparted is language, words, numbers, raw data. But the real process of learning, of thinking and grasping, is internal to the student – the ignorant schoolmaster is a figure who stimulates the formulation of an internal difference within the learning mind, the difference between ignorance and knowledge as the mind's own difference from itself, a difference internal to the student; thus instigating an act of becoming in the individual, a becoming-itself. The teacher is an instigator, a co-formulator of this difference, a figure who causes us to know but without any necessary relation (of equality or inequality) between the knowledge of the teacher and the student. What we are caused to know, in other words, the content generated in the learning process, does not necessarily come from the teacher. In this sense the ‘teacher' fills the pre-existing role (which does not have to be a ‘person') of what Deleuze calls a cogitandum – something in the world which ‘forces us to think', a kind of violent disruptor of established patterns and givens, something that sets us on a certain path to knowledge. In this sense learning in itself has nothing to do with any external equality or inequality, or equality becomes as Jacotot puts it, something that exists ‘in the act' and for individuals, rather than something that can be imagined collectively.

There is a Socratic undertone in this, but if so, it is the true Socrates, not the master and impostor who feigns ignorance to lead the student to an already determined and legislated truth, but rather the figure whose gesture (voluntarily or not) authentically embraces ignorance and knowledge - his/her own as well as the student's – as two poles of becoming, in which nothing or little is fully determined or legislated in advance. This is not to say that all possible knowledge is somehow mystically ‘inscribed' in our minds as Socrates perhaps suggests. Rather, the true teacher is someone who, willingly or unwillingly, relates us to our own difference from ourselves and thus inspires learning, inspires an act (or acts) of thinking and grasping, a real movement of becoming. This means to restore to the process of teaching/learning its original function, before the ‘radical point of departure' as Ranciere puts it, before it becomes a matter of explaining and comprehension and mere transmission of information – the original form of learning by which we learn ‘everything in life' before we are inducted into the formalities of institutions and institutionalized learning. The teacher only ‘appears' when the student is ready – that is, when the student, having fully internalized the ‘teacher', the cogitandum , the thing which ‘forces us to think', has formulated his/her own internal differential relation of knowledge/ignorance. What follows from this ‘exercise of the faculties' in Deleuze's account is the ‘apprenticeship or process of learning.' ... “learning always takes place in and through the unconscious, thereby establishing the bond of a profound complicity between nature and mind… We never know in advance how someone will learn: by means of what loves someone becomes good at Latin, what encounters make them a philosopher, or in what dictionaries they learn to think…There is no more a method for learning than there is a method for finding treasures, but a violent training…” ( Difference and Repetition , p 205)…

By means of what loves... – or as Bob Dylan puts it in ‘My Back Pages': “Girls' faces formed the forward path/From phony jealousy/To memorizing politics/Of ancient history…' The real problem is not to find a method for teaching ‘no one in particular' while remaining aware of class and other differences, nor to find a method for teaching everyone individually or according to ‘class', in the sense of finding in the case of each ‘student' the way he or she best ‘receives information' – but rather to establish precisely the connection between nature and mind, to open a gateway; not to impart any particular information but merely to instigate a process of learning, to inspire learning – to set the wheel in motion. This inevitably and necessarily requires an awareness of social background, class, as well as other differences – but not on the level of method or content , for these are things the learning mind discovers (and re-discovers continually) on its own; but rather on the level of building a learning relationship, a learning-instigating relation which, from the moment it is set in motion, operates according to its own internal method. This is, I believe, the lesson to be drawn from the anecdote about the ‘ignorant schoolmaster' that Ranciere draws from Jacotot. Any notion of method, if we can call it that, must be internal to the student or ‘apprentice', to the learning mind which finds its own way, both of learning and of expressing learning. Another (very Gramscian) Dylan-ism: “You don't have to write anything down to be a poet. Some work at gas stations, some shine shoes…”

But this learning, according to Deleuze must be conceived of as a process, and one which is not subordinated to the result , to the production of knowledge: “It is from ‘learning', not from knowledge that the transcendental conditions of thought must be drawn…knowledge…is nothing more than an empirical figure, a simple result which continually falls back into experience; whereas learning is the true transcendental structure which unifies difference to difference, dissimilarity to dissimilarity, without mediating between them…” ( D & R, p 206) We may recall Odysseus, who upon his descent into the underworld to consult the blind seer, Tiresias, is told off by the old man precisely for focussing excessively on the goal (of returning home), and forgetting that it is the journey itself that makes up his life... But is this not also that revolutionary theme again? One could rephrase it in these terms – the true revolution must be thought of as a process , whose value is in and of itself, in the doing, and which is not subordinated to the final goal , but rather vice versa: it is the goal that must be subordinated in order to serve the perpetuation and constant re-generation of the process, the real revolution rather than the result 'on display'...

note 2: class and the carceral in the role of social reproduction

It is also important to emphasize that the public education system is not the form by which the social order reproduces itself, but rather the form by which it masks its true reproduction by segmentation; and to draw out the real implications of the claim that the ‘logic of inequality is reproduced by the very effort to reduce it'. The school does not by itself reproduce the model of society, for at least two reasons: one, that the truly wealthy, those who truly rule society, have their own schools – private boarding schools or elite colleges, Eton, Oxbridge, etc. And they make no secret of this division. In France, for instance, all the top state officials, whichever side of the political spectrum they come from, are trained in the same schools - Paris(Sciences-Po, or Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris) and the École nationale d'administration ; and even before university, in elite private schools. This testifies both to the existence of a class of ruling elites quite apart from the public mainstream and to an exhibited, however tacit sincerity about its genesis. Nothing is truly hidden here. And what is more, within this particular class – the elite – the goal of equality within the class may well be genuine – the very purpose of establishing a separate system of education for the elite testifies at least to the sincerity, if not the realistic possibility, of this intention – to generate in all crucial ways identical members of a class-species, copies of a single prototype exemplary of a political ruler. Genuine equality – but within a (separated, squared off) social class.

But there is another reason why the progressive public education system is not the form by which the social order reproduces itself: educational ability or intelligence does not correspond to social class. In their bare form, wealth and capital reproduce themselves regardless of intellectual ability. The best example may be the current president of the United States – who certainly went to the best schools, but not on account of educational ability – he went to Yale, for instance, on account of the legacy principle – his daddy went there – and this after being rejected by a number of ‘less' respectable schools, including the University of Texas at Austin law school. What this should tell us is that the social and political power of the capital-owning elite – the real elite, the real top - manages to reproduce itself on its own terms, due simply to its power and wealth, regardless of ability and regardless of how the educational system propagates itself. Inversely, intellectual ability guarantees nothing – most often, those who come from the elite manage to reach the top in spite of lacking it, and those who are not of the elite remain below. This is the real problem, the deeper problem we should be addressing as a subset of the general problem of class…Of course, referring again to Dylan's comment above, some poets may be perfectly happy shining shoes or working at gas stations; it becomes a problem at the point when (conceptually, not chronologically) ‘lifestyle choice' becomes class proper, that is, not a lifestyle choice but an imposed order, social class , and when the not-necessarily-bright elites start to legislate (through capital investment or law/politics) ways of living and being for the gas-station attendants and shoeshine poets…

It is here that I think Foucault is more valuable – more stark, but also perhaps more empowering. His account of the school system (in Discipline and Punish ) includes it in the ‘carceral archipelago' which, along with other institutions of ‘normalization' serves to ‘transport the penitentiary technique from the prison to the entire social body.' Whether the school system reproduces society and its class differences openly or covertly, and whether or not there is a way to implement an awareness of this in teaching, the real target of ‘subversive teaching' to put it that way, should be (more directly and more simply, or to the bone) to unsettle this ‘normalizing' function, to subvert the project of ‘disciplining bodies'; one could even contend that an attempt to ‘teach to' social class (in the sense of deploying a ‘method') would be a mistake and would risk falling back into this normalization function by merely reinforcing the class element, reinforcing this ‘soul' (as Foucault puts it) instilled in the taught subject as the “correlative of a certain technology of power over the body.” ( Discipline and Punish, p 29) The goal of ‘subversive teaching', in other words, should be to build bridges – human relationships – in order to destabilize, de-construct authority, including one's own; to bring the learning mind to confidently ask questions and pose problems, to probe without fear of authority or mistake. To make learning desirable to the ‘apprentice' - to de-structure, motivate, instigate, deterritorialize…

*(on that last point, one thing my dad used to do when teaching Marxism to high school students was relate it to their personal concerns and interests – taking, say a superhero comic book someone is reading – Spider Man, for instance – and relate it to the bigger questions implicit in the storyline, the dialectical struggles, syntheses, etc…)

note 3: a powm

…one from Leonard Cohen:

'The Teachers'

I met a woman long ago
her hair the black that black can go,
Are you a teacher of the heart?
Soft she answered no.

I met a girl across the sea,
her hair the gold that gold can be,
Are you a teacher of the heart?
Yes, but not for thee.

I met a man who lost his mind
in some lost place I had to find,
follow me the wise man said,
but he walked behind.

I walked into a hospital
where none was sick and none was well,
when at night the nurses left
I could not walk at all.

Morning came and then came noon,
dinner time a scalpel blade
lay beside my silver spoon.

Some girls wander by mistake
into the mess that scalpels make.
Are you the teachers of my heart?
We teach old hearts to break.

One morning I woke up alone,
the hospital and the nurses gone.
Have I carved enough my Lord?
Child, you are a bone.

I ate and ate and ate,
no I did not miss a plate, well
How much do these suppers cost?
We'll take it out in hate.

I spent my hatred everyplace,
on every work on every face,
someone gave me wishes
and I wished for an embrace.

Several girls embraced me, then
I was embraced by men,
Is my passion perfect?
No, do it once again.

I was handsome I was strong,
I knew the words of every song.
Did my singing please you?
No, the words you sang were wrong.

Who is it whom I address,
who takes down what I confess?
Are you the teachers of my heart?
We teach old hearts to rest.

Oh teachers are my lessons done?
I cannot do another one.
They laughed and laughed and said, Well child,
are your lessons done?
are your lessons done?
are your lessons done?

Europe, Empire of Signs 2 (Some Further Notes on Language + the Blindness of Self-Representation) or, Absolutely Sweet Inferno

This is a sequel to the previous post, conceived and (for the most part) written before the comments to it, and is therefore not a reply to the comments but rather an expansion and development on the original theme, and should be read in conjunction, although the ideas, disjunctions, and fusions in both are still very raw, and perhaps in need of further elaboration and development. It is still, to put it that way, ‘under construction’. (as all writing and thinking always is, in a sense; but one must draw the line somewhere, sometimes)


>>S’i’ credesse che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria sanza piừ scosse;
ma però che già mai di questo fondo
non tornò vivo alcun, s’i’ odo il vero,
sanza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
-Dante, Inferno, Canto XXVII

Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
- Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-27)

I. Decapitating the Gorgon: Auschwitz, Blindness, and the Death of God

Having written the last relatively brief segment on this theme I was struck by the notion that the very thing Agamben is approaching in Remnants of Auschwitz - hovering, circling, circumventing, but never quite attaining it seems to me - is the problem of language already posed by Barthes in Empire of Signs. The suffering of those who 'touched bottom', the Muselmanner, the 'true witnesses' who paradoxically are unable to witness because they ‘have no voice’, Agamben tells us, cannot be borne witness to by the survivors, who are not 'true witnesses' by virtue of having survived the horror of the camps. There can be no witness ‘from the inside of death’. Towards the end of the first chapter ('The Witness') he writes [my italics]: '...it means that language, in order to bear witness, must give way to a non-language in order to show the impossibility of bearing witness. The language of testimony is a language that no longer signifies and that, in not signifying, advances into what is without language, to the point of taking on a different insignificance, that of he who by definition cannot bear witness.'

Barthes concerns himself with this very same lacuna, but on the broader register of language as such. The moment of Basho's awakening to the truth of Zen, he tells us, is not the moment of "an 'illumination', of a symbolic hyperesthesia, but rather an end of language: there is a moment when language ceases...and in this echoless breach...what is posited must develop neither in discourse nor in the end of discourse: what is posited is matte, and all that one can do with it is to scrutinize it...not to solve it, as if it had a meaning, nor even to perceive its absurdity (which is still a meaning) but to ruminate it "until the tooth falls out."".(p 74) For Agamben, the only language that can approximate the point of witnessing is language that descends into 'inarticulate babble', which 'fills one with consternation like the gasps of a dying man' - Celan's poetry, perhaps, or the senseless muttering of a single incomprehensible word by a paralyzed, speechless child whom the other prisoners have named 'Hurbinek'. But after positing this at the end of the first chapter, he quickly slides back into negativity and binary opposition and resumes the search for clues, for meaning, for the descriptive substance behind the figure of the Musselman, searching through language (writing) for the ‘non-language’ behind the ‘last gasps of the dying man’; and even his insistence on the 'impossibility' of such testimony or the need to descend into the absurd (Celan’s ‘inarticulate babble’) already appears merely as a limitation arising from Christian-Platonic thought. The haiku, by contrast, Barthes tells us, 'never describes' but rather achieves a 'suspension' or 'exemption from meaning', (81-83), and is:

'...[A]rticulated around a metaphysics without subject and without god, corresponds to the Buddhist Mu, to the Zen satori, which is not at all the illuminative descent of God, but "awakening to the fact," apprehension of the thing as event and not as substance, attaining to that anterior shore of language...to constitute a space of pure fragments, a dust of events which nothing, by a kind of escheat of signification, can or should coagulate, construct, direct, terminate. This is because the haiku's time is without subject...this self, by infinite refraction, is never anything but the site of reading...' (p 78)

Agamben performs, at the outset, all the right gestures – but nonetheless by insisting on the existence of a ‘lacuna’, a specific ‘impossibility’, something missing in or from language at a particular point in relation to being (thus affirming the validity of that relation and our attendant expectation from language), something in language, a precise point where language fails to correspond - rather than simply the positive limit of language, the point where we arrive at the realization that it is not merely the 'language of testimony' but all language that must 'no longer signify' in order to communicate the pure 'dust of events'. What Agamben reveals as a limitation or failure of language to bear witness to horror may be simply a limitation in our thought and the error in the expectation we place on language to directly ‘bear witness’, to signify, to subordinate the signified reality to the signifier; our assumption that there is a beyond, that there is something else, something that is left out of account but in theory could be spoken in language, a dimension of the horror not already captured.

The ‘lacuna’ is not merely one that appears in relation to testimony from ‘the inside of death’ – the ‘extreme situation’ of Auschwitz brings us face to face with a far more widely distributed, more profound problem of language, shaking to the core some deeply held and cherished preconceptions: it confronts us, on one hand, with the very impossibility or inoperability, through a constant displacement, of subjective ‘self-representation’ as such (by the speaking subject, by ‘Europe’, by the Musselman, who is only an extreme instance) and the ‘error’ of subordinating the signified to the signifier and thus falling back on negativity, on binary oppositions (language/non-language); and on the other, the ‘impossibility of bearing witness from the inside of death’ as merely an instance of the impossibility of bearing witness as a ‘true witness’ (what Agamben posits as superstes) to anything besides our own subjectivity. It is entirely conceivable that the horror of those who have 'reached bottom' already belongs to the ‘survivors’ in a sense, and that in fact the point where the transition occurs - where a 'not-true witness' or survivor becomes a Musselmann or 'true witness' - is in fact the point where the sufferer is divested of his own tragedy, where it is not only the ability to give voice to one's horror that ceases, but one's ability to apprehend it.

Agamben is on the very brink of recognizing the ‘lacuna’ as a positive (non)-Being (to use Deleuze’s term), rather than a negative lack: “The Musselman has neither seen nor known anything, if not the impossibility of knowing and seeing. This is why to bear witness to the Musselman, to attempt to contemplate the impossibility of seeing, is not an easy task.” (p 52) If we attempt to view this silence not as a ‘lacuna’ or ‘impossibility’ but rather a positive (non), an absolute limit, the task may be made easier. The greatest suffering, or the height of tragedy (its ultimate birth, even), the true ‘bottom’ may well be the moment in consciousness immediately before the transition from 'survivor' to Musselmann, before Power over the individual is totalized - and therefore not in the negative and subjective experience of the Musselmann but rather the positive experience of the 'survivor' recognizing himself as object in the figure of the Musselmann - his own immediate future, the “fatal threshold that all prisoners are constantly about to cross”, the Musselman as the “great fear of the prisoners.” (Agamben, p 51) This insight may well hold the key – what the Musselman represents may well be the point when horror, reaching its apex, is shut out, excluded from consciousness and transferred to the Other, to the ‘survivor’ who becomes the only witness not merely by virtue of the fact that the Musselman is prevented from witnessing, but by virtue of the fact that there is nothing more profound to witness, no ‘inside’ and no ‘outside’. We are in fact told:

“The Muselmann is universally avoided because everyone in the camp recognizes himself in his disfigured face.” (p 52)

What seems striking is that Agamben never draws out the full implications of one of the central themes in the figure of the Musselman: the fact that a Musselman is, in the lingo of the other prisoners, ‘one who has seen the Gorgon’. The Gorgon is the mythical Medusa whose mien, if looked upon, turns the looker into stone. The Greek hero Perseus, as the story goes, succeeded in slaying this creature by utilizing his polished bronze shield as a protective mirror, in which he could see her reflection without being affected by the deadly charm. If ‘everyone in the camp recognizes himself’ in the ‘disfigured face’ of the Musselman, and the Musselman ‘has seen the gorgon’ – if the Musselman is, then, a kind of mirror of humanity – have the survivors not themselves seen the ‘Gorgon’ too, reflected in this mirror? Derrida, in Memoirs of the Blind, a book-length essay published on the occasion of his curating a collection of self-portraits from the Louvre, uses the metaphor of Medusa to explain the very nature of the self-portrait and the paradox of ‘self-representation’, our ‘blindness’ vis-à-vis ourselves, the impossibility of seeing ourselves with our own eyes except as reflected in a mirror; and by extension the ‘impossibility’ of all ‘representation’, the impossibility of speaking of or from an ‘inside’ except from the perspective of an ‘outside’, and vice versa. The mask worn by Perseus when slaying the Gorgon is a deeper metaphor for this impossibility of ‘seeing’ or ‘representing’ – what he calls the ‘Medusa’ effect, or ‘coming face to face with a petrified objectivity’:

‘Perseus sees without being seen. He looks to the side when he decapitates the monster and when he exhibits her head to his enemies in order to make them flee with the threat of being petrified.’ (p 73)

Is this not all that we can, in the end, do in regarding Auschwitz and the figure of the Musselman? To search for meaning is futile – ‘true’ testimony, representation is not merely impossible, its very insistence in our minds is the trace of a ‘false movement of dialectics’ as Deleuze puts it; all there is to be done in the end, and what Agamben perhaps manages to do, is look to the side, gaze at the Musselman – the mirror, or shield – as we ‘decapitate the Gorgon’ and exhibit its head to our enemies, making them flee.



II. Inside/Outside – Silence, Darkness and the ‘Theatre of Production’ as Bunraku...

What Agamben in the end fails to come to terms with is the death of God as a metaphysical event, or the true implications of what Barthes calls a ‘metaphysics without subject and without god’ - and his search for meaning in Auschwitz, in the figure of the Musselman, may be precisely what obstructs the possibility of comprehending the event, or the 'dust of events'. The point is 'not to solve it...nor to perceive its absurdity (which is still a meaning)' Barthes tells us, and Agamben, at his best, appears to be stuck on the latter option - the 'inarticulate babble'. Or even further, when he tells us that language must 'give way...to a non-language...the voice of something or someone that...cannot bear witness' he remains under the spell of negativity, of a Christian-Platonic belief that there is an 'inside of death' to be borne witness to. This could be taken as indication that the Christian God is embedded in the very way we think and speak about things, woven in the very fabric of our thought-language, even when we speak of the ‘death’ of God. The way forward, then, is clear: to produce a re-birth of language, its re-subordination to act and event, a reversion and de-destabilization of the chain of sign-signifier-signified…

Agamben seems to hover over two parallel utterances which are mentioned at the outset and returned to at the end of the book - the 'inarticulate babble' of Celan's poetry, and the solitary and repeated utterance of the child Hurbinek (mas-ti-klo) – which he suggests may be the closest we can get to ‘true’ testimony from Auschwitz. They recall two similar themes. On one hand, the impossibility of testimony from the gates of hell (as Agamben himself puts it), except, perhaps, by way of the inarticulate babble emanating from the florid imagination of a poet - "The Shoah is an event without witnesses in the double sense that it is impossible to bear witness to it from the inside of death, and there is no voice for the disappearance of voice - and from the outside - since the 'outsider' is by definition excluded from the event..." Is this not the very theme, or one of the many themes, woven through Dante's Inferno? The 'shade' speaking in the quotation above agrees to speak to Dante for precisely this reason - the (presumed) impossibility of bearing witness from the 'inside of death', the impossibility that Dante will return among the living, or depart from the inferno. While Agamben's vision at first appears thoroughly secular, and while he seems to have come to terms with a Godless world in which there is no Hell and no poet to descend into Hell and bear witness to it from the inside, to death 'from the inside of death' - he is only half-way there, for in believing that there is an 'inside of death' to be borne witness to he is still trapped in Occidental-Christian thought, in conventional transcendental notions of inside/outside, of the afterlife, of this world and the next. Turning again to Barthes, we are told that in Western theatre, the aim is to "manifest what is supposed to be secret...while concealing the very artifice of such manifestation." On the other hand, in Japanese Bunraku:

'the agents of the spectacle...are at once visible and impassive...what is carefully, preciously given to be read is that there is nothing there to read...what is expelled from the stage is hysteria, i.e. theater itself; and what is put in its place is the action necessary to the production of the spectacle: work is substituted for inwardness...In Bunraku, the puppet has no strings...no more metaphor, no more Fate...the inside no longer commands the outside.' (p 61-62)

What is suggested here does not import 'aestheticizing testimony' as Agamben claims in criticizing Felman and Laub - for they, like Agamben, are also trapped in notions of inside/outside, only seeking to create a connection between them through the 'deus ex machina of song'. (p 36) The point here, rather, is to take the Christian-Occidental bull by the horns and bring it down to the ground all the way, rid ourselves of this mythical, transcendental 'inside of death'. Does not Dante, by the very act of writing his 'experience' of passing through hell and returning, destabilize the very Christian notion of the Afterworld? Is not the very idea - of paying a visit to the underworld without being detained there - if not secular, at least thoroughly pagan, and by that route, by reducing the three afterworldly realms to the imagination, to literature, to the possibilities of imagination and visitation, becoming secular - levelling, reducing the afterworld to the same plane of reality as this world, casting it in the same mold, turning it into something 'imaginable' and 'sayable' and 'accessible' to the living? It is after all Virgil, the great pagan poet of antiquity, who guides Dante through the realms.

Here we may recall Werner Herzog's The Land of Silence and Darkness - a documentary about the deaf and blind filmed in the 1970s in Germany, which follows the activities of one woman, Fini, who is an activist for the deaf/blind, and is blind herself. Through her, we are told the stories of the various people she visits, in institutions, at social gatherings, in their homes. In one scene, we are made to observe uninterrupted for several minutes (in typical Herzog fashion) the bodily movements (accompanied by some ‘inarticulate babble’) of Vladimir, a 22-year-old Russian who was born deaf, blind, and practically speechless. At first sight one may be struck by the thought - it is impossible to know how this feels. The first temptation, that is, is to take up Susan Sontag’s suggestion (taken out of context here but still relevant) that we have “never experienced anything like what they went though…We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like…how dreadful, how terrifying…and how normal it becomes.”( p 126)

But then another thought comes to mind – that it doesn’t matter, for neither can this congenitally blind and deaf human being perceive how we feel, how we live. There is no reference point between us. One can never relate one’s own subjectivity, and this is only an extreme case: the 'silence and darkness' of Vladimir's world is not only inaccessible and incomprehensible to us, but it simply cannot be - for precisely the reason that it is inaccessible - morally, ethically, politically, or in any other way relevant to us as a thing in itself on or from an 'inside', as something to be borne witness to 'from the inside', or from an ‘impossible inside’, one that has no reference point to the outside - the only way in which it ever can be relevant is the way in which we can comprehend it from what we are told of it, what we can gather by 'ruminating...until the tooth falls out', establishing our own maximal relation to it, at the limit of our conscious ability to perceive; by recognizing ourselves as objects in the deaf, blind, speechless human beings of 'silence and darkness', or the Musselmanner of Auschwitz. That is the limit. There is no 'inside' beyond what can be established. We may blindfold ourselves, plug up our ears, sew our mouths shut for a time, but precisely due to the temporality and optionality of such an experience, it brings us no closer to the reality of this mythical 'inside'.

The outcome of elaborating this insight further should be to expurgate all the faces of negativity – the ‘hidden’ or ‘impossible’, etc – from the Deleuzian ‘theatre of production’: constructing this theatre on the model of the Japanese Bunraku – where the inside no longer commands the outside.



III. From Horror to Discourse: The Hegel in Nietzsche Whose Face is Well Hidden

The second theme arising here, propping itself up in the imagination out of the closing reflections of Agamben’s first chapter (‘The Witness’), the second motif of ‘non-language’, which Agamben suspects that Primo Levi, on whose writing he draws heavily, “discerned in the ‘background noise’ of Celan’s poetry” – comes from the speechless, nameless ‘child of Auschwitz’ whom the other prisoners named Hurbinek, and who ‘at a certain point…begins to repeat a word over and over again, a word that no one in the camp can understand and that Levi doubtfully transcribes as mass-klo or matisklo…They all listen and try to decipher that sound, that emerging vocabulary…despite the presence of all the languages of Europe in the camp, Hurbinek’s word remains obstinately secret.” (p 38)

Hurbinek’s word – is it not a bit like Kurtz’s word, the Kurtz of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness? Just as ‘all the languages of Europe’ could not decipher Hurbinek’s word, ‘All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’, the ‘universal genius’, the son of Europe who, before his ‘unlawful soul’ was ‘beguiled beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations’, was destined for great things. Kurtz’s decipherable but hardly intelligible word – ‘The horror! The horror!’ – designates the inverse of the apoplexy of Hurbinek. The two seem to meet in what Agamben calls the ‘gray zone in which victims become executioners and executioners become victims’, a ‘brotherhood in abjection’ (p 17) – the site (in our collective consciousness, perhaps) designated by Auschwitz. But it is also by this very recognition, by the inclusion of Kurtz in it, the site of European colonialism – the two are not only historically contingent, as some (like Sven Lindqvist) have argued, they also share in our collective memory what Deleuze might call a ‘dark precursor.’



The theme woven throughout Heart of Darkness is one of civilizational displacement and inversion of paradigm, of false binaries – Marlow, the narrator within the story, seeing Kurtz on his deathbed finds him “avid of lying fame, of sham distinction, of all the appearances of success and power” – and returning from Africa to Brussels, the ‘sepulchral city’ finds himself “resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence… commonplace individuals… outrageous flauntings of folly…I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.” (113-114) And at the very end as Marlow completes the spinning of his yarn and the group sailing on the Thames are reduced to silence, the final revelation which silently pervades the story up to that point, teeming below the surface, is finally crystallized and brought out in the last paragraph of the novel:

'Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. 'We have lost the first of the ebb,' said the Director, suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky - seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.'

Thus all the rivers of humanity – the Thames no less than the Congo - are reduced to one impenetrable waterway leading to an immense darkness, the darkness of the human heart. But another cultural displacement is performed here – we are told of Marlow sitting 'in the pose of a meditating Buddha'. This is important - for what Conrad leaves us with here may be precisely what Barthes repeatedly suggests of the universe of his ‘Japan’ - that there is nothing beyond, no 'inside', no 'meaning', nothing 'signified'. The last words spoken by Kurtz, that phrase we are left with – ‘The horror!’ in spite of the various attempts by critics to get behind it, is the sum total of what there is to be said 'from the inside' - of death, or simply the darkness of the human heart - there is nothing to be interpreted, taken apart, or analyzed. That is the limit. Here at the end, in a closing feat of cultural and civilizational displacement we see Marlow, the 'meditating Buddha', awakened to what Barthes calls the ‘truth of Zen.’ And by that same movement, the truth of European colonialism and of what follows it - Nazism, Auschwitz - is fully constituted on its outside, which is all there is - we may not yet have pondered it sufficiently, ruminated long enough on the cosmic trail left in its wake by the sacral 'dust of events', we may not have submitted this long enough to meditation - but all the elements are in place, nothing more is needed in order for us to 'awaken to the fact.'

It is on this ground that Nietzsche fails us, and is in fact counter-productive. Conrad, from the vantage point of an unwilling participant in European colonialism, as one who has seen it 'in the flesh' so to speak - a witness, and a 'true' one at that (one could call him a sonderkommando of the vast ghetto that the African continent was eventually turned into) - indeed strikes at the very core, at the very idea of a Europe, a European subject - in a sweeping, leveling gesture that (especially extraordinary for its time) reduces and relegates any and every notion of civilized 'European man' to the same dark matter where Europeans had by then long relegated all non-Europeans. Nietzsche's operation, on the other hand, is one of substitution - he merely substitutes the classical self-reflecting notion of Europe with a vision more to his taste, exchanging one form of 'racialization' for another. And it seems to me insufficient merely to say 'despite the unsavoury reasons for this civilizational dislocation...' as Savonarola does, given that the exchange, the substitution he performs is not merely a 'reason' but precisely what constitutes the dislocation, its goal, what is embedded in it – Nietzsche, in an exquisitely Hegelian-dialectical turn, falls pray to the Big Other. (Incidentally, for all it’s worth – both Conrad and Nietzsche were of Polish descent, both orphaned at an early age, and both wrote exquisite, cynical prose.)

There is a profound moment in Foucault, a recurring element of his thought which follows a line very similar to Lacan's 'Big Other', but on a more exhaustive register - and this is where Foucault, in spite of being influenced by Nietzsche, supersedes him - it is his ability to expose continuities where there are none apparent, or where conventional historical thinking has seen discontinuities, even conflicts. From the earliest of Foucault’s works (Civilization and Madness) to the latest (History of Sexuality, vol. 1), this central theme in Foucault can be summarized in the question: have we really made a break with the past? Does this or that historical development (psychoanalysis, modern medicine, liberal humanism, the sexual revolution) truly represent a break with what preceded it, what it has traditionally defined itself as being opposed to? For this very reason, Foucault has been accused (by Derrida, I believe, among others) of being Hegelian, but this accusation is misplaced - he may be the only true anti-Hegelian, or one of the few who have truly grasped and come to terms with Hegel and grasped the true enormity of the task before us. In other words, in seeing continuities and immanences where we have been taught to see breaks and ruptures, Foucault serves as a lookout, an agent of warning, a reminder that we should always be alert, suspicious of all-too-easy victories, false breaks, wolves in sheep’s clothing - be wary of false prophets, in one way of putting it. If Foucault is Hegelian, he is the Hegelian on our side, who may help us defeat Hegel-the-liberal-totalitarian. (Just as Woody Allen says "Yeah, I'm a bigot. But for the Left.") What we should always be wary of when claiming to have made a break with the past is that we may merely be developing its inherent or immanent potential, playing the same old dialectical game that, beneath all apparent changes and revolutions, only serves to preserve the status quo.

(It is entirely possible that, as Zizek put it in a lecture, Nietzsche's 'madness' was the result of his final realization - he 'finally got it' - having reached the very brink, and in the very moment when he believed himself totally free of Hegel, he turned around only to see the slimy slithering Hegelian monster right behind him, breathing down his neck, waiting to devour him whole.)



And this is where we return to the problem of the EU Constitutional Treaty and the preamble. It is not merely that by engaging in the ‘game’ of interpretation even to contest the particular ‘self-representation’ of Europe embodied in a particular vision or to contest the link between that vision and the lived reality, we affirm (mistakenly) the subjective possibility of such a ‘self-representation’. What we should at all times be asking ourselves in this context is what any particular expurgation from or addition to a text really means, what implications any particular silence truly carries: whether what is excised from the text is truly silenced or repressed (or if repressed, what that repression truly constitutes, i.e. whether it is merely sublimation and the rendering of a different kind of voice), whether the repressed element is truly severed from action or event, from the discourse of power, or whether its continued operation in the shadows only serves to transform, extenuate, and precisely extend the very discourse of power we believe we have just overcome, as Foucault argues:

“Silence itself – the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers – is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies. There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things…There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.” (p 27)

In other words, what we should be wary of is that, as Bob Dylan puts it, “the executioner’s face is always well hidden…” What is repressed (i.e., in the formation of a European subject, even one of Nietzsche’s design) always returns, but more importantly, while still ‘repressed’ is capable of functioning in and operating on reality. A hidden reference to Christianity, for instance, may be only more dangerous than an explicit one – we have less possibility of acting on it, shifting its meaning – and this is another reason not to think in terms of binaries. Or, in another way of putting it, the very fact that the preamble does not say anything about the ‘accumulation of capital in the hands of fewer and fewer of Europe’s citizens’ may make this unspoken project all the more dangerous – for it is nevertheless there. The text of any constitutional document (or any text, for that matter), rather than a ‘reflection’ or ‘self-representation’ to be set against a ‘reality’ and lambasted for its hypocrisy, should for our purposes (whatever it says) be thought of instead as a locating device, like Perseus’ shield – which does indeed serve to emit an imperfect reflection of the Gorgon (it is after all only polished bronze, and spherically shaped), but a ‘reflection’ (precisely for this reason) meant not to convey the image, but to the contrary, insulate us from it, from the stony gaze of the Medusa while at the same time locating the monster, this monster we may in our day call ‘Europe’, so that we may slay it.



IV. Remaining Human, All Too Human – the Yellow Rose and the ‘Gaze Veiled by Tears’

This brings us back by a side route to Agamben and Auschwitz. Both he and Foucault set themselves the task of ‘interrogating silence’, of investigating and interpreting what is not said or ‘hidden’: the difference being in that Foucault never wanders into the territory of negativity, into strictly or simply binary oppositions – language/non-language, hidden/not hidden, possible/impossible, absurd/meaningful, etc – and in fact explicitly makes it part of his project not only to avoid but to reject such oppositions and divisions. For Foucault, the ‘silence’ or what at first appearance ‘one does not say’ is not a ‘lacuna’ in discourse or in language (as it is for Agamben), but merely what is not explicit, what is said or expressed in a different way, and therefore must be listened to and thought in a different way. Similarly, for Barthes (cited above) “what is posited must develop neither in discourse nor in the end of discourse: what is posited is matte, and all that one can do with it is to scrutinize it...not to solve it…nor even to perceive its absurdity.”

What is posited is matte: “By a singular vocation, the blind man becomes a witness; he must attest to the truth or the divine light. He is an archivist of visibility,” Derrida tells us. After all the talk of blindness and darkness, 'inside' and 'outside', it may be a good idea to turn to a blind writer – a true seer – for the simplest, most succinct, and most profound expression of everything that Barthes, Derrida, and others spend volumes trying to illuminate. Borges, in a half-page vignette pondering the last dying hours of the poet Giambattista Marino, ends with this thought:

‘Then the revelation occurred. Marino saw the rose, as Adam had seen it in Paradise, and he realized that it lay within its own eternity, not within his words, and that we might speak about the rose, allude to it, but never truly express it, and that the tall, haughty volumes that made a golden dimness in the corner of his room were not (as his vanity had dreamed them) a mirror of the world, but just another thing added to the world’s contents.’

Just another thing added to the world’s contents – that is how, in the end, we should view the EU Constitutional Treaty: something to be used, discarded, rejected, accepted, repackaged, modified, preserved, utilized – but never something whose relation as sign to represented reality should be either affirmed or contested. Instead of pondering the relation of language to reality, the possibility/impossibility of representation, we should embrace all language as something added to the world, as another way of acting on and in the world rather than representing it, embrace our metaphysical ‘blindness’ and go forth, speak and act. Even Conrad gives us this hint, ironically putting it in the mouth of Marlow, the narrator within the text, the frame narrative:

‘No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence – that which makes its truth, its meaning – its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream – alone…’ (p 57)

And so the Lessons of Darkness continue, as Herzog puts it. (Out, out brief candle!) There is another Nietzsche here who may be rescued from the jaws of Hegel, the Nietzsche who truly felt, the truly visionary, truly ‘blind’ Nietzsche of Zarathustra who, rather than merely substituting bid us to ‘break the old law-tables’, to clear the slate as an act for itself. The Nietzsche who wept, and in that weeping felt his thoughts, not as reflections of things, but as the things themselves. Derrida:

‘…And Nietzsche wept a lot. We all know about the episode in Turin, for example, where his compassion for a horse led him to take its head into his hands, sobbing…if tears come to the eyes, if they well up in them, and if they can also veil sight, perhaps they reveal, in the very course of this experience, in this coursing of water, an essence of the eye…if the eyes of all the animals are destined for sight…scopic knowledge of the animal rationale, only man knows how to go beyond seeing and knowing [savoir], because only he knows how to weep…The revelatory or apocalyptic blindness, the blindness that reveals the very truth of the eyes, would be the gaze veiled by tears. It neither sees nor does not see: it is indifferent to its blurred vision. It implores…’ (p 127)

And Sontag, also writing of tears, and (incidentally) of Bunraku, makes this observation:

‘Performances of Chushingura, probably the best-known narrative in all of Japanese culture, can be counted on to make a Japanese audience sob when Lord Asano admires the beauty of the cherry blossoms on his way to where he must commit seppuku – sob each time, no matter how often they have followed the story (as a Kabuki or Bunraku play)…They weep, in part, because they have seen it many times. People want to weep. Pathos, in the form of a narrative, does not wear out.’ (Sontag, p 82-83)

This is perhaps the greatest ethical gesture then, going back to the meaning of Auschwitz. To turn suffering into narrative – not to forget. To say, as Borges does in another story, incidentally titled ‘The Witness’, that “the world will be a little poorer when this Saxon man is dead.” Agamben, after carefully introducing, proposing and methodically rejecting every conventional rationalization of the specific ‘ethical problem’ to humanity posed by Auschwitz (it is not about remaining ‘human’, or about human dignity, respect, ethics, or the degradation of death, etc.), deconstructing and flattening all hitherto known ‘ethical categories’ to their juridico-theological origins, at the end concludes that “What cannot be stated, what cannot be archived is the language in which the author succeeds in bearing witness to his incapacity to speak…Just as in the starry sky that we see at night, the stars shine surrounded by a total darkness that, according to cosmologists, is nothing other than the testimony of a time in which the stars did not yet shine, so the speech of the witness bears witness to a time in which human beings did not yet speak…” (p 161-162) The mistaken assumption here is that now is a time in which human beings ‘do’ speak and understand each other in a way in which the witness cannot speak and be understood, that there is a difference. To use another metaphor from science, parallel to Agamben’s, the problem of ‘testimony’ as he lays it out is analogous to the ‘measurement problem’ in quantum mechanics – the impossibility of ‘witnessing’ the state of a wavefunction ‘from the inside’. According to the Schrödinger equation, the wavefunction evolves a ‘linear superposition’ of different (possible) states, but any measurement made on the system finds it in a definite state – indicating that the measurement itself ‘skews’ the operation. The Copenhagen interpretation of this problem, however – the most widely accepted – concludes, rather, that this means simply that our universe is in fact probabilistic. It is not that it is impossible to get accurate or complete knowledge ‘from the inside’ but rather, the universe itself is not at all times entirely sure, has nothing definite to tell us about itself.

It is noteworthy that Agamben, whose book is titled Remnants of Auschwitz, reflecting towards the end on the ‘non-language’ that testifies to the impossibility of testimony (Celan’s ‘inarticulate babble’, mastiklo), speaks of ‘remnants’, both as a ‘theologico-messianic concept…the remnant of Israel’ and as ‘remnants of a dead language’ – a metaphor for the impossibility of testimony from Auschwitz; and that Derrida, whose book is titled Memoirs of the Blind: the self-portrait and other ruins, speaks of ‘ruins’, with reference to the impossibility not only of ‘self-representation’ but by extension, any ‘representation’ at all, for we see ourselves, like others, from an outside, reflected, and even our own language, our own words, constitute an ‘outside’: “If what is called a self-portrait depends on the fact that it is called ‘self-portrait’, an act of naming should allow or entitle me to call just about anything a self-portrait, not only any drawing…but anything that happens to me, anything by which I can be affected…[the self-portrait] is like a ruin that does not come after the work but remains produced, already from the origin…In the beginning…there was ruin.” (p 65) This is precisely what Zizek, in a recent lecture, noted of Europe and the 4th movement of Beethoven’s 9th, the ‘ode to joy’ which – he argues – from the very outset deconstructs itself into the ‘Turkish march’ at the end, before we even hear the latter – the 'ode' shows up an ‘empty signifier' in the concept of 'Europe'…But Derrida goes on, “The ruin is not in front of us; it is neither a spectacle not a love object. It is experience itself…this memory open like an eye…that lets you see without showing you anything at all, anything of the all.” (p 69) Yet this memory - is it not the memory of a 'pure past' in Deleuzian terms, the object=x - the past that exists only in memory, always 'displaced in relation to itself'? The virtual object that is 'where it is only on condition that it is not where it should be...found only as lost...[existing] only as recovered...' (Deleuze, p 126-127) Does this not apply, not only to Agamben's idea of testimony, but also to Hurbinek's and Kurtz's word - 'esoteric words' which "state their own sense but do so only by representing it and themselves as nonsense...esoteric words are properly linguistic cases of the object=x...two series of heterogeneous differences...call forth their own communication through various signs...until the inauguration of a dark precursor...which plays the role of a differenciator of their differences...relates them to one another." (Deleuze, p 150) The 'testimony' from Auschwitz, together with what Agamben makes out of it, together with the 'esoteric words' of Kurtz and Hurbinek, is only another series contemporaneous with the others, carrying an object=x and linked to the others by means of the 'dark precursor' - none deriving from the other or following on the other. What Agamben finally achieves, it could be said, is to address this lacuna on his own terms, adding another series.

This, it could be said, is what does indeed make us human, and what encapsulates the ‘ethical problem’ of Auschwitz, contrary to Agamben but (perhaps) unwittingly proved by his gesture – not any particular meaning or testimony that can be drawn from Hurbinek’s word or Kurtz’s horror, nothing reflected in the text, nothing to be witnessed or represented, nothing to be drawn from the inside. It consists simply in the gesture that Agamben (among others) performs in relation to Auschwitz by writing his book, the language he creates, orders, accumulates, and adds to the world as another object for contemplation, ‘decapitating the monster’, the Gorgon – like the hero Perseus, and showing its head to the enemy – this uniquely human ‘revelatory or apocalyptic blindness,’ this ‘gaze veiled by tears’.


***



Drawing by a child in Terezin Camp
(Pinkas Synagogue, Jewish Museum, Prague)


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V. Instead of a Conclusion, Another Spin of the Wheel: Away From State Politics, Representation, and the Cinema of Truth; Toward ‘Ecstatic Truth’ and the Sweet Inferno of Revolutionary Politics

To construct on this fertile ground a ‘politics of truth’ one must first ask – what kind of ‘truth’? Given the ‘blindness’ of language and the impossibility of representation, we must isolate a site of ‘truth’ founded in language that does not vainly seek to represent or distribute reality; language-as-object, language that instead of trying to mirror the world is contiguous with it, is added to it as another object – to transform, ignite, create real movement, rather than the ‘false movement of dialectics’. This site, borrowing a notion from Werner Herzog, we may call ‘ecstatic truth’. Herzog, in his fervent opposition to ‘cinema verite’ – whose ‘truth’ he calls the truth of ‘facts’ or the ‘truth of accountants’, a futile search for a ‘hidden’ truth – notoriously rejects the strict binary categorization of his films as either ‘documentary’ or ‘fiction’. In his ‘Minnesota Declaration’ he states that “fact creates norms, and truth illumination…there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” A ‘truth of the eyes’ as Derrida puts it.

Is this not where all literature and religion derive their force of meaning? Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, despite being ‘fiction’, is more ‘true’ and is bound to outlast most ‘factual’ or accountants’ truth accounts of European colonialism (especially the pro- ones)…Does not the value of many religious texts derive from precisely their double or triple status (and the constant interplay of ‘levels of meaning’), among believers and non-believers alike, as historical document, literature or ‘fiction’, and ‘word of God’? Does not Nietzsche himself, most notably in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, straddle the gap between ‘fiction’ and ‘philosophy’, between ‘literature’ and ‘commentary’, between metaphorical, elusively poetic writing and direct commentary, between invention and representation? Demanding of language the impossible, demanding that it ‘represent’, sometimes only serves to debase our purpose. We should be seeking instead to construct a narrative of action, a narrative not tangled up in representation.

Rather than provoking subjects (as cinema verite filmmakers tend to do) to extract from them some ‘hidden’ truth or meaning, we should construct and seek the ‘truth’ of the surface, of what is there already, there for the taking if we hang onto it – what we get by watching Herzog’s deaf and blind subjects in Silence and Darkness, or in the footage of gushing, flaming oil wells during the Gulf War in Lessons of Darkness - the gushing, poetic, ecstatic truth to be gotten simply by staying with the subject, lingering, observing, meditating, keeping it in the frame and either posing it or simply waiting for that illuminating glimmer of cinematic magic that will sometimes flicker past, if we are patient – less passive but more ‘truth’, for we are not simply given it as an audience, it requires from each of us individually our active participation and effort, our own personal anguish of apprehension. This may be precisely be the answer to the politics of ‘sound bites’ and snap elections – not getting caught up in or playing the game, not letting our attention float from one sound bite to the next but keeping everything in the frame…

Thus what is required is indeed a ‘politics of truth’, but a very different kind of ‘politics’ involving a very different kind of ‘truth’: bypassing the politics of the state, in whole or in part, building from the ground up, out of the socius, and ridding ourselves of the notion that ‘truth’ can be found in representation, would certainly seem to require an even greater measure of ‘truth’ – as Bob Dylan (incidentally, paraphrasing a line in Don Siegel’s 1958 film noir, The Lineup) puts it, in Absolutely Sweet Marie: ‘to live outside the law, you must be honest.’ This may mean some kind of direct or absolute democracy as a final sign-post, a Hardt-Negrian ‘multitude ruling itself.’ To recall Dante again (not only as another proponent of courtly love, though this will be relevant below), with reference to the state of souls in limbo (the first circle of hell), those who ‘have not sinned’ but only had the ‘misfortune’ of being born before Christ and (not being baptized) are therefore not subjected to punishment, we are told -

In this alone we suffer:

Cut off from hope, we live on in desire.

This on a secular reading we may take as expressing on one hand the modern human condition – living on in desire, we are all effectively pagans, unbaptized, in Limbo: the ‘hope’ we are cut off from (something that is lost in translation) is the hope ‘of seeing God.’ Being ‘cut off from hope’ for our purposes then must necessarily correlate to, as Barthes puts it, ‘awakening to the fact’ in a pre-Christian universe ‘without subject and without god’. And in this condition, in this element of desire we may find the true form of all revolutionary politics – the point, to put it in proto-Marxist terms, is to change the social body, and the mind will follow. “Build it, and they will come.” For a revolution to be successful, it is necessary for the work never to be thought completed – and this is precisely why it is necessary to liberate the signified – the body – from the signifier: we must never settle once and for all, never set in stone any particular signifying relation - break the old law tables, as Nietzsche exhorts us in Zarathustra. Hence it is worth remembering that the true object of desire is by definition beyond our grasp (as C.S. Lewis put it, “we live in the shadowlands; The sun is always shining somewhere else...around a bend in the road...over the brow of a hill.”).

The same is true of revolution: the only truly successful revolutionary movement is one whose ultimate goal is continually postponed – hasta la victoria siempre, ergo ‘we live on in desire’ – and if we remember that desire is (by definition, again) the remainder we are left with when our demand for love is unsatisfied, here is one straight from the horse’s mouth, Che Guevara: “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” Thus the only truly successful revolution is one that is continually repeated, or one that always in turn spawns its successor, always leaving ‘something more to be desired’ as the expression goes, a 'remainder' – if we think of a continually spinning wheel, a social revolution is precisely what it is literally – one full turn of the wheel, nothing more. But the wheel must keep turning, revolving. Or, as one Buddhist proverb puts it: ‘when you get to the top of a mountain, keep climbing.’






Some References

Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz : the witness and the archive, New York, 1999.

Alighieri, Dante, The divine comedy. Volume 1, Inferno, New York; London, 2003.

Barthes, Roland, Empire of signs, New York, 1982.

Borges, Jorge Luis, Collected Fictions, New York, 1998.

Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, London, 1983.

Derrida, Jacques, Memoirs of the Blind, Chicago; London, 1993.

Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition, London, 2004.

Foucault, Michel, The history of sexuality. Vol. 1, The will to knowledge, London, 1998.

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Penguin. (transl. R.J. Hollingdale)

Sontag, Susan: Regarding the pain of others, New York, 2003.

Herzog’s Minnesota Declaration