RADAR 1_eng. MUSAC's Journal of Art and Thought

MUSAC’s journal of Art and thought

issue 1 / year 2012

STRATEGIeS in the face of the REAL Limitations and challenges in times of change

William I. Robinson Néstor Kohan Christoph Brunner Roberto Nigro Gerald Raunig

Pierre Bruno Frédéric Lordon Jade Lindgaard Karim Amellal Mohamed Razane

Amador Fernández-Savater Daniel García Andújar Claire Fontaine Raqs Media Collective

INDEX

EDITORS’ NOTE. Strategies in the Face of the Real. Limitations and Challenges in Times of Change — page 4

ESSAYS William I. Robinson. Global Crisis and the Specter of 21st Century Fascism — page 11 Néstor Kohan. Rethinking the Crisis, Recovering Critical Theory — page 26 Christoph Brunner/ Roberto Nigro/ Gerald Raunig. Towards a New Aesthetic Paradigm.

Ethico-Aesthetics and the Aesthetics of Existence in Foucault and Guattari — page 38 Pierre Bruno. Loosening Up — page 48 Frédéric Lordon. The Surrealization of the Crisis — page 58 Jade Lindgaard. We are the Climate. The Fabrication of Affects Against Ecology — page 64 Karim Amellal and Mohamed Razane. Qui fait la France ? The Eventful History of a Mobilisation by Artists Against Inequality and in Favour of a Different Kind of Literature — page 72 Amador Fernández-Savater.

From “No to the War” to 15-M: Social Movements that are not Social Movements — page 89

Projects daniel garcía andújar. policía, 2011 — page 105 CLAIRE FONTAINE. Pigs, 2011 — page 112 RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE. Itch, 2011 — page 119

collaborators — page 129 credits — page 133

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/ issue 1 / year 2012 strategies in the face of the real limitations and challenges in times of change

This issue is devoted to the memory of Luis Moreno Mansilla.

One of the most important Spanish architects, he received the prestigious Mies Van der Rohe Prize, along with his colleague Emilio Tu帽贸n, for their design of MUSAC. Although the loss os this teacher and restless scholar of architecture saddens us, his achievements will remain forever.

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STRATEGIES IN THE FACE OF THE REAL Limitations and Challenges in Times of Change editors’ note

When we launched this publication with issue number 0, we presented it as a new tool for theory and reflection, as well as an open door for dialogue and creation. We felt then that the museum needed to stake out positions for itself on the various planes that relate to its tasks, its obligations, and its responsibilities, and to establish a clear approach and commitment to the kind of theoretical and artistic reflections that give the institution meaning and make it relevant to our times. The idea was to create a theoretical platform that would periodically display and discover other foci of interest for the community at large, and which would, in turn, entail an expansion of the museum’s commitment. As a consequence, and in response to the reactivation of various critical forces that are spreading globally, the magazine has begun to take on a new dimension: that of offering some hints or clues towards what we can understand as a genealogy of the present.

Without exaggerating, it seems clear that the general consensus would readily endorse the truism which argues that during the past five years—to continue what at an official level should be understood as

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THE IN ATEGIESRST LEAR THE OF FACE segnellahC dna snoitatimiL egnahC fo semiT ni e ton ’srot id e

the beginning of this most recent so-called global crisis, one which represents the backwash of neoliberalism—we have been attending and serving as witnesses of the birth of a New World Order that affects or threatens to affect each and every aspect not only of our social and political lives but of our own decisions as individuals and citizens.

This new order, however, is the result of the numerous crises that have developed and manifested themselves in each and every one of the orders, fields, and practices related to economics, society, politics, and culture, crises that began in the 1970s and became particularly pronounced following the unexpected events of September 11. The continuous and growing neoconservative and corporatist turn in the European Community and in the United States, the growing privatisation of the welfare economy in the first, and the return of the so-called “culture wars” that serve as a distraction from the radical, neoliberal politics in the second, in addition to the drastic reduction of cultural and educational budgets in the industrialised Western

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editors’ note

nations, are effects and policies tailor-made to serve the strategies and intentions of the new economic, political, and social order.

This context is a complicated one, and not easy to explain. It’s not exclusively concentrated or maintained in, or originating from, the West, nor does it respond only to the political and economic interests of Europe and the United States; rather, its scope and its reflections are global. The growing and generalised loss of trust in institutions—including the questioning of the very concept of national sovereignty—which the emergence of Wikileaks and anonymous international activism in electronic social media sites has encouraged and exposed; the unexpected revolutions and revolts in the Arab world; the acquisition and occupation of vast territories in Africa that will procure and guarantee alternative sources to compensate for food shortages in countries like China, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the USA, and some European countries; the emergence of discourses that question the very legitimacy of the democratic system as well as discourses surrounding “democracy unrealised,” all constitute situations and conditions that respond to a reality of strategies, limitations, and challenges that RADAR has wanted to review—setting forth from the knowledge, convictions, practices and imagination of its various collaborators, who come from diverse and complementary disciplines.

This particular interest responds to a reality that is in crisis but one that also poses a challenge, a reality in which our intellectual and artistic stances can no longer be subordinated to the interests of the culture industry. On the contrary: as cultural agents, in order to generate social change we must contribute to the transformation of how art and its interests are represented in the culture industry. We need to stop regarding the activities of artists and cultural agents as constituting an exception in relation to social and productive relationships, and instead must develop, with integrity, a critical reorganisation of our activity viewing it as an extra-disciplinary overflow into other fields and conflicts related to institutions and social activity.

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And that is why, in this new issue, RADAR focuses on the reality of crisis that we are experiencing, with all its limitations and challenges.

William I. Robinson first explores the nature of the global economic crisis in order to then investigate the threat of what he refers to as 21st-century fascism. For Robinson, the crisis that we’re facing is not a cyclical one but a structural one. While the present crisis shares many attributes in common with previous crises, it also presents several features that in his view make this a dangerous period for humanity. In concluding, after reviewing the identifiable signs of a neo-fascist project, he ventures that we could be headed towards a new dark age. For Nestor Kohan, we are currently witnessing the emergence of a crisis of civilisation, structure, and systems—a historical-cultural crisis of capitalist civilisation as a whole. Within the media and the culture industry, he argues, this situation simply provides an opportunity for media exhibitionism that remains in the realm of mere appearance, because it fails to capture “the interconnections and organic character of each process and relate them to a single systemic whole that can articulate, organize, and give meaning to these juxtaposed phenomena.” Thus, the “crisis” transforms itself and weakens into a harmless synonym for “difficulty” and “circumstantial anomaly,” easily absorbed within the existing institutional framework. Christoph Brunner, Roberto Nigro, and Gerald Raunig begin their reflections aimed “Towards a New Aesthetic Paradigm” by using the later books of Foucault and Guattari as a point of departure for their argument that the production of subjectivity turns into an existential territory in which social, ethical, and aesthetic transformations must be negotiated. The relationship, in Foucault and Guattari, between aesthetics and existence is not exclusively linked to art, nor does it imply art as an institutionalised practice.

On the contrary, aesthetics itself conforms to a model of existence that makes very clear the transversal relationships between subjects and objects, and between the corporeal and incorporeal forces that, together, constitute the real. The function of the arts is one of “rupturing with

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strategies in the face of the real

forms and significations circulating trivially in the social field.” For the authors, what is important is not to place these modes of creative production within autonomous domain of art, but rather to consider them in terms of their potential for transformation, disruption, and reinvention of banal affects and percepts. For Pierre Bruno, psychoanalysis is not elastic enough to provide the diving suit that we will need to protect civilisation (Kultur, in Freud’s language) from its discontents, and therefore the object ought instead to be to try to make this discomfort into a symptom—not in order to eradicate it, but in order to understand it as a vector capable of transforming the past and emancipating the present. According to Bruno, if psychoanalysis has made any progress since the moment of its extraordinary discovery (by one individual, as opposed to a great investigative laboratory), it is that it has taken note of the Freudian critique of the psychology of the masses and promoted collective logic. Frédéric Lordon believes that ideas can never have any effect on their own, nor can they move the world unless they are accompanied by an extrinsic force. Saying so isn’t a statement about the ideas themselves but about the political and practical expectations we assign to them. Art is what proposes emotions, images, and sounds. The fundamental purpose of art is to transmit not ideas but emotions, but it may also succumb to a craving to say something. What art is or is not is of no interest; the real question is whether or not “there are bodies affecting other bodies and adding their own personal arguments to the extrinsic power of affects.” Jade Lindgaard wonders what has happened since December 2009 in Copenhagen, when the world’s movers and shakers promised to do everything in their power to stop global warming. She reminds us that it’s been almost fifteen years since the creation of the IPCC report, in which the role of greenhouse gas emissions in climate change was established and confirmed beyond reasonable or possible scientific doubt. Lindgaard explains that our collective acquiescence in the face of this objectively unsustainable situation is not a product of chance, but is rather a consequence of the failure of the entire system of thought and action that has shaped

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climate as a political issue over the past twenty years. She states unequivocally that climate—as a common global cause—is today facing defeat.

But for the author this failure is not only the outcome of our models of political representation, the state of geopolitical power relations, or powerful lobbying by climate skeptics; it is also a product of the history of our customs and individual desires. Following her argument, climate is inscribed in us, in our spirits and bodies. We are climate. The climate problem is not just the burden of Western man and the capitalist individual; it is a problem regarding the relationship with oneself. Karim Amellal and Mohamed Razane, founding members of the collective Qui Fait la France?, take on the task of reviewing the eventful history— as well as the background and consequences—of a mobilisation of artists committed to the struggle against inequality and to the promotion of a different literature. Spurred by the violent riots in 2005, and in the face of discrimination and negative representation, and the stigmatisation and marginalisation of peripheral territories of large French cities, both writers felt the need to act and become involved so that public opinion would become more conscious of the social problems and discriminations that afflict nearly five million people in France. Taking its cue from the manifesto of the Danish film group Dogma 95, the group of which they are members proposed “to inscribe our literature within a performative, denunciatory form of writing, aimed at inflaming and changing the real, in opposition to an egotistical, autofictional style of literature.” But they soon realised that this was not enough, and that once the reasons for the struggle have been set forth and argued, it would be necessary to take concrete steps towards a necessary strategy for mobilisation. Amador Fernández-Savater first reviews the indisputable, imposed, “deproblematizing,” and “depoliticizing” nature of Spain’s so-called “Culture of the Transition”—the hegemonic “consensus” culture of democratic and post-fascist Spain. As FernándezSavater makes clear, the country secured its “control over reality” by means of a monopolistic vision of social and political life and through the management of fear, both of which were supposedly justified in the

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editors’ note

name of the peaceful cohesion of the nation. Gradually, however, as disenchantment with this superficial consensus has arisen from various sectors, most recently converging around the phenomenon of the 15-M, it is the very Culture of the Transition itself which has come to pose the greatest threat of future instability. In the face of this decaying consensus, the 15-M “amounts to a practical and positive experiment exploring the slogan-declaration ‘democracia real ya’ (real democracy now) in meetings, occupied places, and all kinds of social networks.

Power struggles have been replaced by active listening, the construction of collective thought, awareness about what everyone is building together, a generous trust in the intelligence of fellow strangers, a rejection of majority and minority blocks, a patient search for allencompassing truths, a constant questioning and re-questioning of the decisions that have been taken, the privilege of debating the process and the effectiveness of its results.” Fernández-Savater briefly reviews other movements, including No to the War, the 11-M, the V for Vivienda movement, and the campaign against the Sinde Law, that have investigated the common malaise underlying individual identities, and vindicates the act of vanishing, which for the author doesn’t mean “to become invisible or to build one’s realities only on the fringes,” but rather “to appear blurred, to camouflage oneself in the rules of the game in order to break them from inside.” “That is also part of the strength of 15-M: its power of non-definition, of blurring…,” for “once a phenomenon acquires an identity it loses its power to ask questions; the identity takes its place on the board… and is transformed into a predictable factor in political calculations and power relations. It becomes, in short, governable.”

Finally, this RADAR #1 is rounded out by complex and challenging ­projects by Claire Fontaine, Daniel G. Andújar, and Raqs Media Collective.

Agustín Pérez Rubio, María Inés Rodríguez and Octavio Zaya Directors of RADAR, MUSAC’s Journal of Art and Thought

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GLOBAL CRISIS AND THE SPECTER OF 21st CENTURY FASCISM William I. Robinson

The global economic crisis is generating social conflict and political turbulence around the world and deepening the already immense structural inequalities of the global political economy. How much longer can such inequalities be contained through consensual mechanisms of political authority? Is it possible that a neo-fascist response to the crisis will gain traction as global elites find it impossible to counter the erosion of the system’s authority? Below, I want to explore the nature of the global economic crisis before turning to the threat of what I refer to as 21st-century fascism.

The crisis we face is not a cyclical one but a structural one—a restructuring crisis, such as we faced in the 1930s and again in the 1970s.

Whether it becomes a systemic crisis, in which only a complete change in the system itself will resolve the crisis, will depend on how social agents respond and on the unpredictable element of contingency that always plays a role in historical outcomes.

While the current crisis shares a number of aspects with the earlier crises, it also has several unique features that in my view make this a

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ISISRC LABOLG RECTEPS THE AND YRUCENT ts12 OF FASCISM nosn iboR .I m a i ll i W

perilous period for humanity. One is that the system is fast reaching the ecological limits of its reproduction; we may, in fact, have already reached a point of no return. Another feature is the magnitude of the means of violence and social control. Computerized battle, drones, bunker-buster bombs, Star Wars, panoptical surveillance systems, and so forth, have changed the face of warfare, normalizing and sanitizing it for those not directly on the receiving end of armed aggression.

A third is the limits to the extensive expansion of capitalism, in the sense that there are no longer any new territories of significance that can be integrated into world capitalism. De-ruralization is now well advanced, and the commodification of the countryside and of pre- and non-capitalist spaces has intensified, converting them in hothouse fashion into spaces of capital, so that intensive expansion is reaching depths never before seen.

A fourth feature is the rise of a vast surplus population. The International Labor Organization estimates that some one third of the global

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William I. Robinson

working age population is unemployed or underemployed. Millions, perhaps billions of people inhabit a “planet of slums,”1 alienated from the productive economy, thrown onto the margins, and subject to sophisticated systems of social control and to destruction by a mortal cycle of dispossession, exploitation, and exclusion. A fifth is the disjuncture between a globalizing economy and a system of political authority that is based on nation-states. Transnational state apparatuses remain in an incipient stage and have not been able to play the role of what social scientists refer to as a “hegemon,” a leading actor wielding sufficient power and authority to organize and stabilize the entire system.

To understand the current conjuncture we need to first look back to the 1970s. The globalization stage of world capitalism we are now in itself evolved out of the response of distinct agents to previous episodes of crisis, in particular, to the 1970s crisis of social welfare or redistributive capitalism. In the wake of that crisis, capital went global, allowing an emergent transnational capitalist class and its political representatives to reconstitute their class power by breaking free of nation-state constraints to accumulation. These constraints—the so-called “class compromise”—had been imposed on capital as the result of decades of mass struggles around the world by popular and working classes contained within national borders. During the 1980s and 1990s, however, globally oriented elites captured state power in most countries around the world. They used that power to promote capitalist globalization, to shift the correlation of class and social forces worldwide sharply in their favor, and to undercut the strength of popular and working classes around the world in the wake of the global rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s.

Globalization and neoliberal policies opened up vast new opportunities for transnational accumulation in the 1980s and 1990s. The revolution in computer and information technology (CIT) and other technological advances helped emergent transnational capital achieve major

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gains in productivity and restructure, “flexibilize,” and shed labor worldwide. This, in turn, undercut wages and the social wage and facilitated a transfer of income to capital as well as to high consumption sectors around the world that provided new market segments fueling growth. In sum, globalization made possible a major expansion of the system and unleashed a frenzied new round of accumulation worldwide, thus offsetting the 1970s crisis of declining profits and investment opportunities.

But periods of hyper-accumulation inevitably become crises of overaccumulation. The current global crisis is one of over-accumulation, or the lack of outlets for the profitable absorption of surpluses. The 2008 collapse of the global financial system, what some have called the Great Recession, was years in the making. The system had been stumbling from one lesser crisis to another since the mid-1990s–the Mexican peso crisis of 1995, the Asian financial meltdown of 1997-98, the recession of 2001 and the bursting of the dot-com bubble. By the new century two major mechanisms for unloading surplus emerged to provide a perverse lifeline to the system: militarized accumulation and financial speculation.

The US state took advantage of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011 to militarize the global economy. The cutting edge of accumulation in the “real economy” worldwide shifted from computer and information technology to a military-security-industrial-construction-engineering-petroleum complex that accrued enormous influence in the halls of power in Washington and elsewhere. Military spending skyrocketed into the trillions of dollars through the “war on terrorism” and the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, acting to throw fresh fuel on the smoldering embers of the global economy. The spin-off effects of this spending have flowed through the open veins of the global economy—that is, through the integrated network structures of the global production, service, and financial systems.

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GLOBAL CRISIS AND THE SPECTER OF 21st CENTURY FASCISM

Financial speculation made possible by deregulation of the financial industry, together with the introduction of computer and information technology, gave rise to a globally integrated financial system.

The “revolution in finance” of the past few decades has included all sorts of financial innovations and securitization mechanisms—a vast and bewildering array of derivatives, from swaps, futures markets, hedge funds, and institutional investment funds to mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, Ponzi schemes, pyramiding of assets, and more. These innovations make possible a global casino of transnational financial circuits based on frenzied speculation and the ongoing expansion of fictitious capital. The sequence of speculative waves in this global casino since the 1980s has included real estate investments in the emerging global property market that inflated property values in one locality after another, wild stock market speculation leading to periodic booms and busts, and the phenomenal escalation of hedge-fund flows and currency speculation. Frantic speculation in global commodities markets, especially energy and food markets, has provoked repeated spikes in world prices, sparking “food riots” around the world, As speculation in the global financial casino reached a feverish pitch following recovery from the 2001 recession, the “real economy” was kept momentarily afloat by means of a massive increase in consumer debt (largely credit cards and mortgage refinancing) and by federal deficit spending in the US, which together converted that country into the world’s “market of last resort.” The Federal Reserve’s decision to reduce interest rates to about one percent in 2003 as a mechanism to overcome the recession triggered a wave of speculation in the US mortgage market, prompting investors to indulge in the infamous subprime lending spree. The bottoming out of the subprime mortgage market in 2007 triggered the collapse a year later of the global financial system headquartered on Wall Street.

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Yet in the perverse world of predatory transnational finance capital, debt and deficits themselves became new sources of financial speculation. This explains, in part, the latest round of crisis as manifested in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and elsewhere. Government debt is now being portrayed as “spending beyond means” and used to justify austerity measures and cuts in social spending. At the same time, however, this debt has become a major source of profit-making for transnational finance capital—its latest financial fix—even as social consumption continues to decline as a source of accumulation. The global bond market, which stood in 2009 at an estimated US$90 trillion, constituted the single biggest market for financial speculation in the wake of the 2008 collapse. Gone are the times when such bonds were bought and held to maturity. They are, instead, bought and sold by individual and institutional investors in frenzied 24-hour worldwide trading and are bet on continuously through such mechanisms as credit default swaps that shift their values and make bond markets a high stakes gamble of volatility and risk for investors.

While transnational capital’s offensive against the global working class dates back to the crisis of the 1970s, the Great Recession of 2008 was in several respects a major turning point. Crises provide capital with the opportunity to accelerate the process of forcing greater productivity out of fewer workers. Spatial reorganization through globalization has helped transnational capital break the power of territorial-bound organized labor and impose new capital-labor relations based on the fragmentation, flexibilization, and devaluation of labor. Moreover, although the mass of “supernumeraries” is of no direct use to capital, in the larger picture such surplus labor is crucial to global capitalism insofar as it places downward pressure on wages everywhere and allows transnational capital to impose discipline over those who remain active in the labor market. According to one report, for instance, in the current crisis the largest employers in the US “have emerged from the economy’s harrowing downturn

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William I. Robinson

loaded with cash thanks to deep cost-cutting that helped drive unemployment into double digits….and [resulted in] huge gains in worker productivity.” 2 In Europe, North America, and elsewhere, the money mandarins of global capitalism and their political agents are utilizing the crisis to impose brutal austerity measures and attempting to dismantle what is left of welfare systems and social states. The budgetary and fiscal crises that supposedly justify spending cuts and austerity are a consequence of the unwillingness or inability of states to challenge capital as well as their own predisposition to transfer the burden of the crisis to working and popular classes. Global mobility has given capital extraordinary structural influence over state managers who seek economic reactivation and macroeconomic stability. As the crisis spreads it is generating a veritable global humanitarian catastrophe, and as a result social and political conflict has escalated worldwide.

21st Century Fascism as a Response to Capitalist Crisis

The structural crisis of the 1930s was resolved through the creation of a new model of Fordist-Keynesian or redistributive capitalism, and that of the 1970s was resolved, at least temporarily, through capitalist globalization. “Resolved” does not mean that things got better for the mass of humanity but rather that restructuring allowed for the resumption of sustained accumulation. Crises, however, open up the possibility of changes that can go in many different directions. The current crisis is resulting in a rapid political polarization in many parts of the world, and in the global system as a whole. Both rightwing and left-wing forces are resurgent. In the current conjuncture three identifiable responses to the crisis can be identified.

One is a reformism from above that is aimed at stabilizing the system– in saving the system from itself and from more radical responses

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emanating from below. Transnational elites have proposed state stimulus programs, tighter regulation of global financial markets, a shift from speculative to productive accumulation, and limited redistributive measures. In the years following the collapse of the financial system in 2008, however, it would seem that these reformers have been unable to prevail over the power of transnational finance capital.

A second response to the crisis is popular and left-wing resistance from below. Although often in fits and starts, this resistance appears to be resurgent, yet it remains spread very unevenly across countries and regions. The mass uprisings in EU countries in the wake of sovereign debt crises in 2010-2011 and the imposition of draconian new austerity programs are a reflection of this resurgence, as are the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, the turn to the left in a number of Latin American countries, and the revival of labor militancy in the US in the face of relentless anti-union and austerity campaigns by Republicans and other right-wing forces.

However, crises of state legitimacy and vacuums in institutional power provide an opening not just for popular forces from below but also for far-right forces that compete with reformist and radical responses to crisis. This third response is 21st-century fascism. The ultra-right is a resurgent force in many countries—in Latin America, for instance, in Colombia, Mexico, Honduras and elsewhere, in a number of EU countries, and in the US. The tell-tale signs of such a neo-fascist project include the fusion of transnational capital with reactionary political power; escalating militarization and extreme masculinization; economic destabilization and concomitant social anxiety among privileged strata of the working and middle classes; the drive to organize a mass base among economically insecure and socially disaffected sectors, animated by a fanatical ideology, race/ culture supremacy, xenophobia, and the embrace of an idealized and mythical past; repressive methods of social control; a racist mobilization against scapegoats, such as immigrant workers and Muslims, that

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GLOBAL CRISIS AND THE SPECTER OF 21st CENTURY FASCISM

displaces and redirects social tensions and contradictions; and charismatic leadership among far-right forces.

The accumulation and legitimation functions of the capitalist state— always in tension with one another—cannot both be met under current conditions. Economic crisis intensifies the problem of legitimation for the dominant groups; as a result, accumulation crises produce spiraling political crises. In essence, the state’s ability to function as a “factor of cohesion” within the social order breaks down as capital becomes globalized and the logic of accumulation or commodification penetrates every aspect of social life; as the social fabric frays, “cohesion” requires more and more social control.

We see, therefore, a shift from social welfare to social control or police states. The state abandons efforts to secure legitimacy among the broad swaths of the population that have been relegated to surplus labor.

Unrest, spontaneous rebellion, and organized political mobilization among the structurally unemployed, the marginalized, and the downwardly mobile pose potential threats to the system and must be controlled and contained. In 21st-century fascism, the imperative to contain real or potential rebellion on the part of the dispossessed and disenfranchised replaces, in some respects, the drive to crush the organized working-class movement towards socialism that helped propel 20th century fascism. This need to assure mass social control of the world’s surplus population and of rebellious movements from below gives a powerful impulse to the project of 21st century global fascism.

Hence, the state responds to those who are dispossessed, expelled from the labor market, and locked out of productive labor not with expanded social welfare and protection but with coercive exclusion, criminalization, and repressive social control and containment strategies. These strategies include mass incarceration and prison-industrial complexes, pervasive policing, repressive anti-immigrant legislation, and the manipulation of space in new ways so that both gated communities and ghettos are controlled by armies of private security guards

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and technologically advanced surveillance systems. At the same time, “culture industries” are mobilized to dehumanize the victims of global capitalism, depicting them as dangerous, depraved, and culturally degenerate “Others,” as criminal elements who pose a threat to society.

In the US, for instance, dominant groups have for decades waged systemic cultural and ideological “law and order” campaigns in order to legitimate the shift from social welfare to social control. Viewed analytically, these processes can be seen as taking the place of concentration camps, in so far as they conjoin with legal changes—such as anti-drug and “three strikes” laws—that criminalize the marginalized, especially youth of color. They subject a surplus and potentially rebellious population of millions of people to concentration, caging, and state violence.

More broadly, and alongside new modalities of social control, the culture of global capitalism attempts to seduce the excluded and abandoned into petty consumption and fantasy as an alternative to placing social or political demands on the system through mobilization. These campaigns deflect attention from the sources of social deprivation and channel the insecurities associated with capitalist globalization onto marginalized groups, helping political representatives of the ruling groups organize electoral coalitions and construct consensus around the new order (e.g., anti-immigrant and get-tough-on-crime campaigns). Internationally, Third World victims of abandonment–as in Somalia, Haiti, the Congo–are portrayed, at best, as passive and incompetent victims eliciting paternal sympathy, if not simply as inferiors to be dismissed and relegated to death and oblivion.

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William I. Robinson

Militarization as Social Control and as Accumulation If the imperative of social control gives powerful impetus to the militarization of global capitalism, militarization has another key function, that of sustaining global accumulation in the face of stagnation.

Militarization as a response to the crisis of global capitalism achieves the simultaneous objectives of enabling social control and repression and of coercively opening up opportunities for capital accumulation worldwide, either on the heels of military force or through the state’s contracting of corporate capital for the production and execution of social control and war. For instance, the US invasion of Iraq integrated that country into global capitalism and opened up vast new opportunities for transnational capital.

Much of warfare itself and of the related processes of social control and repression has been privatized and semi-privatized. Well beyond the traditional linkage between state warfare and corporate capital— that is, the procurement of weaponry, equipment, and military technology—militarized accumulation now ranges from the replacement of state soldiers by mercenary armies (“private security firms”), to the subcontracting of reconstruction projects, military engineering, the construction of military and conflict related installations, the supply of food, consumer items and services to occupation armies, the construction of private prisons and “security walls,” and even the subcontracting of torture and interrogation. 3 Hence the generation of conflicts and the repression of social movements and vulnerable populations is an accumulation strategy independent of specific political objectives. By way of example, undocumented immigrant labor in the US is extremely profitable for the corporate economy, in a double sense. First, it is labor that is highly vulnerable, forced into a semi-underground existence and liable to deportation, and therefore subject to super-exploitation. Second, the criminalization of undocumented immigrants and the militarization

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of their control not only reproduces these conditions of vulnerability but also generates vast new opportunities for accumulation.

The private immigrant prison-industrial complex in the US is a boom industry. Undocumented immigrants constitute the fastest growing sector of the US prison population and are held in private detention centers and deported by private companies contracted by the federal government. As of 2010 there were 270 immigration detention centers, confining on any given day more than 30,000 immigrants. Under the Obama administration, more immigrants have been detained and deported than at any time in the past half-century. Since detention facilities and deportation logistics are subcontracted to private companies, capital has a vested interest in the criminalization of immigrants and in the militarization of control over immigrants–and therefore, more broadly, a vested interest in contributing to the neo-fascist antiimmigrant movement. It is no surprise, for example, that William Andrews, the CEO of the Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private US contractor for immigrant detention centers, declared in 2008 that “the demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts…or through decriminalization [of immigrants].”4 The masculinist and militaristic culture that accompanies militarized accumulation has reached unprecedented heights. The fusion of militarization and extreme masculinization–masculine fear of female power, misogyny, and homophobia, what Goff calls “martial masculinity”–has invaded the sphere of mass culture. 5 An increasingly fascistic pop culture combines this celebration of militarization and masculinity with fantasy, mysticism, and irrationality, as epitomized in the mass appeal of extremely violent computer games, the proliferation of reality TV shows, and the glorification of military aggression, social violence, and domination in Hollywood movies. Mainstream cinema draws in enormous audiences, achieves record profits, and wins Academy Awards with such “true grit” films as The Hurt Locker

23 GLOBAL CRISIS AND THE SPECTER OF 21st CENTURY FASCISM

which, even if they fall short of formal endorsement of violence, depoliticize and normalize it, even glamorize it. Video-gaming of war and violence for pure entertainment–as in the widely popular HAWX video game–normalizes and aestheticizes the militarization of culture and everyday life as never before.

Neo-fascist movements such as the Tea Party and neo-fascist legislation such as Arizona’s anti-immigrant SB1070 have been broadly financed by transnational corporate capital. The far-right-wing billionaire brothers, David and Charles Koch, whose combined fortune of some $40 billion is exceeded in the US only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, are the prime bankrollers of the Tea Party as well as a host of foundations and front organizations, such as Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, and the Mercatus Center, that have pushed an extreme version of the neoliberal corporate agenda, including the reduction and elimination of corporate taxes, cutbacks in social services, the gutting of public education, and the total liberation of capital from government regulation. Less well known is the fact that the Koch brothers have raised funds for the Tea Party and other organizations from dozens of the largest transnational corporations operative on the US political scene.6 The actual programmatic content of the Koch brothers and the organizations and movements they finance and help lead is a deepening many times over of the neoliberal “counterrevolution” of radical free market global capitalism, and converges perfectly with the interests of transnational capital.

It must be stressed that a 21st-century fascism would not look like the 20th-century variety. Among other things, the ability of dominant groups to control and manipulate space and to exercise unprecedented control over the mass media, the means of communication, and the production of symbols, images, and messages means that repression can be more selective (as we see, e.g., in Mexico or Colombia), and also that it can be organized juridically so that mass “legal” incarceration takes the place of concentration camps. In addition, the vast new

24

powers of cultural hegemony open up new possibilities for atomizing and channeling grievances and frustrated aspirations into escapism and consumerist fantasies. The fashion and entertainment industries market anything that can be converted into a commodity. With this comes depoliticization, at best, and at worst the channeling of fear into flight rather than into fight-back. The ideology of 21st century fascism often rests on irrationality–a promise to deliver security and restore stability is emotive, not rational. Twenty-first-century fascism is a project that does not–and need not–distinguish between truth and lies.

The counterweight to a 21st century fascism must be a co-ordinated resistance by the global working class that would involve rebuilding working class organizations, including independent trade unions and democratic socialist movements, and extending cultures of social solidarity and transnational resistance. The only viable solution to the crisis of global capitalism is a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward towards the poor majority of humanity along the lines of a 21st-century democratic socialism, in which humanity is no longer at war with itself and with nature. And the only way such redistribution can come about is through mass transnational struggle from below. Otherwise, humanity may be headed for what Sing C. Chew, among others, has termed a new Dark Ages.7

25 William I. Robinson

1 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2007).

2 Tom Petruno, “Corporate Giants Awash in Cash as Economy Picks Up,” Los Angeles Times, 24 March 2010: A1, A8.

3 On the US state integrating Iraq into global capitalism, and on militarized accumulation more generally, see, inter alia, William I. Robinson, “Beyond the Theory of Imperialism: Global Capitalism and the Transnational State,” Societies without Borders, No. 2:5-26, 2007; Robinson, “The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Cyclical, Structural, Systemic?,” Op. Cit. On the privatization of warfare, see, inter alia, Jeremy Scahill’s noted work, Blackwater: the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army (New York: Nation Books, 2008), as well as Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2008).

4 See Tom Barry, “The National Imperative to Imprison Immigrants for Profit,” Center for International Policy, Americas Program, posted at CIP Americas Program webpage on 10/3/2009 and accessed on 11/16/2010 at http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/1662.

5 Stan Goff, “Sowing the Seeds of Fascism in America,” Truthdig (internet magazine), posted on October 3, 2006, and accessed on 7/21/07 from http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/200601003_white_supremacism_sexism_militarism/.

6 See, inter alia: Jane Mayer, “Covert Operations: the Billionaire Brothers who are Waging a War against Obama,” The New Yorker, August 30, 2010; and the documentary Billionaire Tea Party, directed and produced by Taki Oldham and released by Larrikin Films, 2010 (see website at http://www.billionairesteaparty.com/).

7 Sing C. Chew, The Recurring Dark Ages: Ecological Stress, Climate Changes, and System Transformation (Landham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2007).

26

Rethinking the Crisis, Recovering Critical Theory Néstor Kohan

Neither oracles nor apologetics It will not fall by magic alone or in fulfilment of a prediction from some ancient calendar. It will not collapse because of an earthquake, a bolt of lightning, or an unexpected meteor, the way it does in Hollywood disaster films. Capitalism, as a system of exploitation and world domination, must be brought down.

Even though it would never commit suicide without a fight, the reign of capital is cracking. We are now very distant from the seemingly reassuring and peaceful fantasies of the Europe of the years following the Second World War. Arrogant and vindictive, the present crisis penetrates and corrodes the entire structure of the social framework. It’s no longer simply and exclusively a “financial” crisis, revolving around relative over-production, the real estate bubble, unemployment, and stagflation,1 or even a merely political crisis characterized by the absence of governability and the lack of credibility of traditional forms of civic representation.2

27

gniknihteR ,sisiCr eht gnirevoceR yroehT lacitiCr n a hoK ro ts é N

The global turbulence of our times combines, condenses, and synthesizes an extremely diverse set of insoluble social contradictions which have converged at the same point and angle. Far from being merely a specific temporary crisis—a recurring and episodic “capitalist crisis”)—our contemporary era is witnessing the emergence of a prolonged civilizational, structural, and systemic crisis. That is, what we are faced with is a crisis of capitalism as a whole, one much more far-reaching, long-lasting, and profound than those periodic crises. It is a crisis which manifests itself as being ecological, environmental, and energetic, humanitarian and alimentary, technological, urban and rural, political and military, all at the same time, and which is characterized by structural over-production, by a recession which is being transformed into a progressive depression, by a breakdown in the chain of payments and the impossibility of covering external debt, by the bursting of the financial real estate bubble, by social decomposition and disintegration, by extreme poverty on the fringes of the world system, and by rampant

28 Néstor Kohan

unemployment, even in metropolitan capitalist societies. It’s an objective crisis affecting every level of the social order which at the same time also manifests itself as a cultural crisis affecting the forms of subjectivity that have until now predominated in late capitalism.

A new type of crisis

In short, we are witnessing a historical-cultural crisis of capitalist civilization as a whole, a new kind of crisis. Never before have so many destructive possibilities been released simultaneously against the capitalist social system at the same time.

As Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve of the United States during the governments of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, admitted in remarks delivered at Columbia University on February 21st, 2009, this systemic crisis, which today is tearing at and producing tension within the whole of the global capitalist society, is far more serious than the periods of anxiety that struck capitalism hard in 1929.

The same catastrophic view is shared by financial guru George Soros.3 Not only does it greatly surpass the uncertainties and bourgeois panic of 1929, it also promises to be much more destructive and widespread than the crisis of the dollar in the years 1968-1973.4 Added to the superabundance of unresolved tensions and unsolved antagonistic contradictions which are eating away imperialistic capitalism as a world system of domination from the inside—“new apartheid on a global scale,” is how Samin Amin has described it—is the absolute superiority of a single worldwide military, seconded by NATO and its subservient European satellites. The monopoly of weapons of mass destruction (along with the ever-present threat of the outbreak of nuclear or biological warfare), and the generation of new wars of conquest that have followed without interruption the invasion of Iraq in 1991, have left the famous theory of interdependency, which promised to

29

bring “lasting peace” hand-in-hand with a neoliberal market and international free trade, entirely in the dust.

Imperialism, far from having disappeared, as Antonio Negri had predicted in his noted study Empire, has instead expanded as the US has opened up new fronts by bombing for “humanitarian” purposes not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in Libya. At the same time, it has established seven new military bases in Colombia and unleashed a fourth imperial fleet on the world’s oceans. As the threats posed by the crisis increase, the system of domination becomes ever more aggressive.

All of the countries bombed in the name of “pluralism” and “freedom” possess immense natural resources. Is this just a coincidence?

Recovering the category of crisis for critical inquiry

As these bombings and systematic mass murders are impossible to conceal—as are unemployment5 and the collapse of fuel6 and food supplies on a global scale7—the crisis cannot easily be papered over. This is the main reason why the media and postmodern culture industry8 inundate us on a daily basis with a torrent of “chaotic” events and an uninterrupted series of irresolvable antinomies that overwhelm our daily lives.

This blatant exhibitionism—which regularly transforms bombings, starvation, financial disasters, and bloody coup d’états into media spectacle—remains purely on the level of appearances. Neither television nor film nor any of the other culture industries is able to capture the interconnections and organic character of each process and relate them to a single systemic whole that can articulate, organize, and give meaning to these juxtaposed phenomena.9 The transient and the apparent alone capture the viewer’s attention, retaining it on the epiphenomenal level and preventing a deeper critical analysis that would allow one to see beyond what is being shown and being suffered. The isolated, episodic, and recurrent capitalist crises gradually accustom our perception until

30 Rethinking the Crisis, Recovering Critical Theory

we grow used to experiencing them as “normal” and “natural.” In this manner even the word “crisis” becomes tarnished, diluted, and weak.

Abandoning along the way the insubordinate and defiant force it once possessed in the field of social sciences and critical theory, it is virtually transformed into an inoffensive synonym for “difficulty” and “circumstantial anomaly,” easily subsumed within the existing institutional framework.

Against this backdrop, the entire array of the social sciences, and in particular Marxist critical theory—which, by virtue of being both anticapitalist and anti-imperialist is the tough core of radical insubordination against the system as a whole—would need to recover the explosive potential historically possessed by the notion of “crisis,” distinguishing periodic capitalist crises from the greater crisis of capitalism as a whole.

Only by taking this distinction into account and re-appropriating its most disruptive meanings will we be able to relaunch a social, political, economical, and cultural research programme that will allow us to comprehend the complexities of the present situation on a global scale from a perspective that will be neither apologetic nor celebratory but rather critical and, therefore, mobilizing.

Without this exercise of re-appropriation the mere description of phenomena associated with the overall crises will continue to float in the ether—excuse me, I mean the Web—as simple “anomalies” or “accidents” that can be digested and absorbed by the established order of capital.

Theory of crisis, rupture, and revolution

Marxism, with its materialistic conception of history and its critical theory, its philosophy of praxis and its analysis of political economy, is not based on any theory of the equilibrium and “normal” operation of capitalism. On the contrary, its critical theory actually constitutes

31

a theory of capitalism—and, at the same time, a theory of its crisis. Its burning core is not specialized around the continuity, equilibrium, and stability of the system. Quite the opposite; all its thought and research are aimed at the crisis of the system and its potential for revolutionary transformation.

Marxism is a theory of rupture, not of continuity. It does not, however, view crisis and rupture in terms of an automatic, ineluctable, and predestined “decadence,” “collapse,” and “demise” determined by the Mayan calendar or the Egyptian pyramids, or by the equally magical mandate of supposed “iron laws” that operate in isolation from what takes place within the struggle of the classes. Instead, Marxism, emphasizing its socially disruptive component and radical rupture, constitutes a political theory of the revolution. Catastrophe and the descent into barbarism do not necessarily portend the terminal illness of the capitalist system or its inexorable demise; it’s well within the realm of possibility that the system will become even more barbaric and sink us further and further into the abyss without ever reaching the bottom. Things can always get worse; in fact, there is little doubt that, with capitalism, we are indeed heading towards the worst.

The civilizational crisis of capitalism that we are going through demarcates a field open to the possibility of revolution, a radical transformation which we can no longer continue to delimit within the frontiers of one particular nation-state as the likelihood of an extension of the crisis and a worldwide revolution gains strength. However, the possibilities opened up by the civilizational crisis of capitalism—which Marxist critical theory permits us to understand thanks to its rules and laws of tendencies, very different from the “iron laws” once hailed by the ideological family of positivism—can only come to fruition if a revolutionary subject is built to act and to intervene. Without an active social and political subject, the crisis, no matter how explosive, savage, and irresolvable, will not produce a revolution or overcome the capitalist bourgeois order.10

32 Néstor Kohan

We should not wait for manna to fall magically from heaven; neither should we remain passively staring at the barbarism of the capitalist crisis trusting that divine intervention will cause the system to collapse by itself, to the old Protestant cry of “God wills it.”11

Some obstacles to thinking about the crisis

One of the main obstacles which for too long have made it difficult for social critical theory to understand the seriousness of the crisis of capitalism (without falling prey to the mystic fatalism of “ineluctable collapse”) has centred upon an interpretation of social relations which artificially and illegitimately segmented them into separate, juxtaposed “instances” and unconnected “factors.”

If capitalist society is conceived of as the sum of juxtaposed “factors” (geographical, environmental, economical, industrial, financial, alimentary, juridical, political, military, religious, cultural, and so on), then the crisis of any one of these “factors” does not necessarily affect or penetrate the orbit of the others, nor does it undermine the stability of the system.

For several decades, the purportedly erudite legitimization of this schematic view of the crisis of the social order, one which owes a clear debt to functionalism, found its inspiration in the Marxism of Louis Althusser, a Marxism usually associated with the French Academy’s supposed reputation for rigour and seriousness. It was Althusser who encouraged abandoning the theory of the dialectic contradictions of the capitalist system as a totality (and of its explosive crises) in favor of a structuralist-functionalist reading of Marx. Where did he develop this promising and intelligent attempt to convert Marx into a theoretician of order? In his highly ambiguous theory about overdetermined contradiction, of course.

33

Marx a thinker of stability?

Althusser’s attempt was by no means foolish. It possessed a good deal of rationalism and sense. His project was presented as way of overcoming economicism, a vulgar interpretation of Marx and of the crisis of capitalist society that sought to reduce all of the phenomena of social life to a simple economic contradiction between productive forces and relations of production. In this approach Althusser was not original, rather, he extended the battle against economicism begun by Lenin and Gramsci. Nevertheless, he did so at the cost of resurrecting the old doctrine of the “theory of factors” which the theorists and promoters of the Second International had held in such regard, among them the famous economist Aquille Loria who was fiercely refuted by Antonio Labriola.12 By combining Stalin’s extravagant “Leninism”13 with the philosophical readings employed by Mao to differentiate the national contradictions of China and Japan from the internal class contradictions of the Chinese interior,14 and an anti-dialectical view of history (understood as “a process without subject”15), Althusser ending up tracing a theory of the crisis which was based in its turn on a theory of “instances”—a modern and elegant word for those old-fashioned, archaic “factors”—each of which supposedly possessed “relative autonomy.” Thanks to this subtle circumlocution, Althusser complicated the density of Marxist analysis at the price of reducing the intensity with which revolutionary critical theory contested the crisis affecting the whole of capitalist social life.

While the notion of dialectical contradiction (provoked by the irreducible antagonism between capital and the labour force) was supposedly “simple,” in that it denied the possibility that each social phenomenon could possess its own sphere outside the general crisis of capitalism, the contradiction defended by Althusser would be, in contrast, “complex” and “overdetermined.”16 In this manner, Althusser’s Marxism and his view of capitalist society and its crisis granted a certain legitimacy to the institutional sphere.

34 Rethinking the Crisis, Recovering Critical Theory

From this was born his embarrassing defence of Euro-Communism and the “relative autonomy” of state institutions against the reign of capital, in which one may already detect his later abandonment of Marxism after he began to question it as a “finite theory” supposedly lacking a constructive theory about the state.17 If we had to make a critical appraisal from the perspective of the present moment—the second decade of the 21st century—we might make the observation that the Euro-Communist and anti-dialectic Marxism of Althusser and his followers was the greatest (or at least the most seductive and sophisticated) theoretical work by an scholarly Marxist to be produced in the relatively stable period of western post-war capitalism that spanned the years from 1945-1974.18

The return of critical theory

The stronger and more stable the social and institutional order of western capitalism seemed, the less attractive became critical theory’s disruptive and dialectic view of the explosion of contradictions and the crisis as a totality.

The fanatical defence of “autonomous instances” and the virulent rejection of any historical dialectic—due to the supposed “risk” of diluting the richness and variety of the western European social order beneath a “simple contradiction” which would come to dwell at the core of the crisis of the mode of capitalist production—lose their attractiveness when the very stability of capitalism comes into question, and when turmoil, unease, and, instability reappear as the global crisis reaches its most acute point.

With the emergence of the global crisis of capitalism of the present moment, those oft-cited “autonomous instances” (invariably celebrated by academia, since they legitimize the division of university learning into juxtaposed, hermetic, and separate areas) give way to the explo-

35

sive crisis of the entire planetary social order. Faced by a growing crisis that cannot be covered up, the post-war market stability and Keynesian or Social Democratic regulatory pacts become exhausted or diluted.

Accordingly, the dialectic of Marxist critical theory—reviled and scorned for three decades—returns to the arena.

It is no longer useful to sing the praises of the “relative autonomy” of the bourgeois state and of the supposed immunity of institutional instances against capital. In the present situation none of these instances are vaccinated and firewalled against the explosive global crisis.

In contrast to the institutionalist view of social order, one that can only increase the fragmentation and co-optation of current rebellions (as long as they are kept apart and lack coordination and a concerted confrontational strategy against capital), today we need, urgently and without delay, to re-appropriate Marx as a revolutionary thinker of crisis and not as an alleged “economist” concerned with universal balance and the normal functioning of the laws of capitalism. It makes no sense, moreover, to reproach Marx or complain about his not having devised a theory of institutional stability which would serve to legitimize the electoral and parliamentary misfortunes of the Euro-Communists and Social Democrats of Western Europe.

If we wish to shift away from mutiny (and popular “indignation”) and begin to create alternative, long-term, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist strategies, then we urgently need to recover the most radical dialectic categorization of the crisis, as it was devised by Marx in the critical social theory he derived from his dialectic reading of Hegel. For thinking and acting in the moment in which we are living, and for laying the groundwork of a critical programme for contemporary culture, the task cannot be postponed.

36 Néstor Kohan

1 “Stagflation” usually refers to the combination of rising prices (inflation), rising unemployment, and the stagnation of the productive system. For an explanation of this process see Jorge Beinstein’s insightful book: Crónica de la decadencia. Capitalismo global 1999-2009 (Buenos Aires, Cartago, 2009), especially the chapter on “Rostros de la crisis. Reflexiones sobre el colapso de la civilización burguesa” [The faces of the crisis. Reflections on the collapse of bourgeois civilization], p. 20.

2 The political crisis assumes various forms in different societies. To mention just two examples, in the Argentinian crisis of 2001 the famous cry on the streets and in the assemblies was “Q ué se vayan todos!” [Get rid of them all!]; ten years later in Spain the protest appeared, in both the streets and in popular meetings, in the form of los indignados.

3 See Jorge Beinstein, op cit. p. 10. For a radical, insightful, and penetrating analysis of the crisis of 1929 so unlike the sad postmodern predictions that made were to make it famous and apologetic many years later see Antonio Negri: “John Maynard Keynes y la teoría capitalista del Estado en el ’29”. [John Maynard Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of the State in “29”] in El Cielo por Asalto No. 2, Year I, (Buenos Aires) Autumn 1991, pp. 97-118.

4 For a broad critical account of the crisis, which began with the decline of the dollar in 1968 and was consolidated by the devaluation of the currency and by declaring the dollar unconvertible into gold (approved by Richard Nixon on August 15, 1971) and which led to the abandonment of the Bretton Woods system and to the petrodollar boom in petrodollars of the early 1970s, see Ernest Mandel: El dólar y la crisis del imperialismo (México, Ediciones ERA, 1976), in particular, pp. 130 and following. Also, Ernest Mandel, Jacques Valier, and Patrik Florian: La crisis del dólar (Buenos Aires, Ediciones del siglo, 1973). A detailed explanation of that commotion, which began in 1968 and reached its highpoint in 1973, can be found in Giovanni Arrighi: “Una crisis de hegemonía” [A Crisis of Hegemony], in Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, André Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein: Dinámica de la crisis global (México, Siglo XXI, 2005), pp. 67-68 and 70-71.

5 On mass unemployment, see Renán Vega Cantor: Los economistas neoliberales, nuevos criminales de guerra.

El genocidio económico y social del capitalismo contemporáneo (Bogota, Editorial Prensa Alternativa Periferia, 2010), pp. 111 and following.

6 On the limits of a capitalist economy based on the extraction of fossil fuels, see Gian Carlo Delgado Ramos: Sin energía. Cambio de paradigma, retos y resistencias. (Mexico, Plaza y Valdés, 2009), in particularly pp. 9-26. See also Leonardo Boff: “¿Crise terminal do capitalismo?,” in Adital (Noticias de América Latina y el Caribe) 27/6/2011; Alfred Schmidt: El concepto de naturaleza en Marx (México, Siglo XXI, 1983); Irving Fetscher: Condiciones de supervivencia de la humanidad. ¿Es posible salvar el progreso? (Caracas, Alfa, 1988); and more recently Michael Löwy: Ecología e socialismo (São Paulo, Cortez Editora, 2005).

7 According to Atolio Borón, approximately 100,000 people die every day from hunger and curable diseases, which works out to nearly 40 million people a year. See Atilio Borón: Socialismo del siglo XXI. ¿Hay vida después del neoliberalismo? (Buenos Aires, Ediciones Luxemburg, 2008), p. 44. According to SEPLA (Sociedad de Economía Política de América Latina y el Caribe), the present capitalist crisis continues to make the workers and the world s people pay the costs. These are the 1,020 million starving people acknowledged by the FAO, and 1,000 million workers facing problems of unemployment and income according to the ILO. Declaration made by SEPLA (Declaration of the 7th Conference held in the city of Uberlandia, Brazil, June 2011).

8 For an in-depth consideration of the postmodern cultural industry and its active participation in the current crisis, see Fredric Jameson: Marxismo tardío. Adorno y la persistencia de la dialéctica (Buenos Aires, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010), especially chapters XVI and XVII, “Mass Culture as Big Business” and “Cultural Industry as Narrative,” pp. 225-242. By the same author see also El giro cultural (Buenos Aires, Manantial, 1999), pp. 203 and following.

9 On this subject Samir Amin remarks: “The facts are clear: the financial collapse is already producing, not a ‘recession,’ but a profound depression. But beyond this, other dimensions of the crisis of the system have surfaced in public consciousness, even before the financial meltdown. We know the main headings—energy crisis, food crisis, environmental crisis, climate change. Numerous analyses of the aspects of these contemporary challenges are produced on a daily basis, some of which are of the highest quality. Nonetheless, I remain critical of this mode of treating the systemic crisis of capitalism that excessively isolates the different dimensions of the challenge.”

See Samir Amin: La crisis. Salir de la crisis del capitalismo o salir del capitalismo en crisis (Madrid, El Viejo Topo, 2009), p. 14.

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10 Lenin, who opposed mechanists, mystics, and fatalists in his work and political agenda, always insisted that an “objective” economic crisis alone does not automatically lead to a social revolution: “Oppression alone, as great as it may be, does not always give rise to a revolutionary situation.” See V. I. Lenin: “The Celebration of the First of May by the Revolutionary Proletariat,” in Obras Completas (Buenos Aires, Cartago, 1960) Volume XIX, pp. 218-219.

Two years later he would return to stress the irreplaceable presence of subjectivity in the resolution of the revolutionary crisis: “Because the revolution does not arise from any revolutionary situation, but only from a situation in which the objective changes listed earlier are combined with a subjective change.” See “The Bankruptcy of the Second International” [1915], in op. cit. Volume XXI, p. 212.

11 Antonio Gramsci waxed ironic about that “fatalistic conception of the philosophy of praxis” which in the face of the crisis of capitalism appeals to political passivity suggesting that “one could write a sort of funeral elegy for it, remembering its usefulness in a specific historical period, but exactly for this reason demanding that it be finally be buried, with honours.” In an attempt to explain this exotic mixture of Marxism, mysticism, and (Protestant) fatalism which religiously believes in the automatic collapse of the system without subjective political intervention, he thought that “fatalism can be compared to the theories of grace and predestination at the beginnings of the modern world [...] The concept of fatalism was a popular substitute for the medieval cry ‘God wills it’ [...].” He went on to add that “however, even at this primitive, elementary level it was the beginning of a more modern and productive conception than the one contained in ‘God wills it’ or in the theory of grace.”

See Antonio Gramsci: Cuadernos de la cárcel (Mexico, ERA, 1982) Volume IV, p. 260.

12 Whereas Loria viewed Marxism as a theory of the “economic factor” in history, Labriola saw it rather as a holistic theory of capitalist society understood as the “totality of social relations” rather than a mere juxtaposed sum of “factors.” See Antonio Labriola: La concepción materialista de la historia (Mexico, El Caballito, 1973).

13 The reference is to Joseph Stalin: Fundamentos del leninismo (Bs.As., Lautaro, 1946).

14 Principally his theory about practice and contradiction. See Mao Tse Tung: Cinco tesis filosóficas (Buenos Aires, La Rosa Blindada, 1974).

15 See Louis Althusser: Para una crítica de la práctica teórica. Respuesta a John Lewis. (Mexico, Siglo XXI, 1974), pp. 73-82.

16 See Louis Althusser: La revolución teórica de Marx [Pour Marx] (Mexico, Siglo XXI, 1985), pp. 86-87, 93; and Para leer “El Capital” [Lire le Capital, 1965] (Mexico, Siglo XXI), 1988, pp. 199-203.

17 See Louis Althusser: El marxismo como teoría finita . In various authors: Discutir el Estado. Posiciones frente a una tesis de Louis Althusser (Buenos Aires, Folios, 1983); and Louis Althusser: Filosofía y marxismo.

[Interviewed by Fernanda Navarro] (Mexico, Siglo XXI, 1998).

18 I have tried to develop this hypothesis in the book Nuestro Marx (Caracas, Misión Conciencia, 2010), pp. 431439.

38

Towards a New Aesthetic Paradigm Ethico-aesthetics and the Aesthetics of Existence in Foucault and Guattari Christoph Brunner/ Roberto Nigro/ Gerald Raunig

Felix Guattari’s and Michel Foucault’s works on the production of subjectivity investigate the transversal relations of social, political, and ecological bodies in their biopolitical constitution. Both authors, most prominently in their late works after 1980, write in opposition to the conservative backlash that has come to dominate institutionalizing forms of enclosure and impositions of legitimized and impoverished forms of subjectivity.1 For them, the production of subjectivity becomes the very existential territory on which social, ethical, and aesthetic transformations must be negotiated. The subject—or rather a processual subjectivity—becomes the machinic foyer out of which new and more transversal accounts of the socius can be developed. These processes rely on practices of self-governance, forms of practices of the self, and modes of constitution of the subject which are recurrent features of Foucault’s late writings on the care for the self and Guattari’s deliberations on a “new aesthetic paradigm.”

39

a sdrawoT citehtseA weN mgidaraP dna scitehtsea-ocihtE fo scitehtseA eht dna tulacuoF ni ecnetsiEx irattaGu gi n ua R d l a r eG /orgi N otr eboR /r e n n ruB hpotsi r hC A mode of subjectivation does not create subjects ex nihilo; it creates them by transforming identities defined in the natural and social order into instances of the experience of a dispute. Any subjectivation involves a disidentification, a removal from the naturalness of a place. Technologies of the self or the care for the self are practices to be intended in their very political vocation. Political subjectivation is an ability to produce polemical scenes, conflicts, lines of flight, new modes of existence. It redefines the field of experience and reshapes the organization of a community. Political subjectivation is here to be interpreted as a real political experience or process of experimentation; an experience as a movement that wrenches the subject from itself and from its actual condition, an experience that by acting on the subject changes its ontology.

However, this very first movement of de-subjectivation achieves its real consistency only by means of a second movement that, almost simultaneously, comes to over-determine it. It is what we can define, with the help of Lacan, as a movement of alteration of the subjectivity, consisting

40 Christoph Brunner/ Roberto Nigro/ Gerald Raunig

of an infinite interplay between the self and an (imaginary) limit that never ceases to move on.

In their consideration of subjectivation, Guattari and Foucault take into account the diagrammatic field of power relations as bounding and capturing agents, as well as the productive aspects of desires and forces as auto-affirming properties of creative production. Guattari in particular emphasizes the transversality under which processes of subjectivation take place. His elaborations in Three Ecologies are based on the assumption that transformations of the social, as well as practices of the production of subjectivity activating new potentials of formerly harnessed power relations, need to traverse social, mental, and environmental ecologies (Guattari 2008, 28). For Guattari, ecology is not to be understood as an enclosed system but rather as a catalyst for change, a complex open-ended process to be conjured up by different modes of existence (material, social, and mental). All three ecological planes gain new importance in light of the contemporary social and political transformations in the Arab and European revolutions, the continuous increasing machinic production of desires in social media, and the environmental disasters of the present day.

Across these ecological registers, Guattari develops concrete steps to be taken toward a resingularization of subjectivity and its relational status as part of the three ecologies: “The important thing here is not only the confrontation with a new material of expression, but the constitution of complexes of subjectivation: multiple exchanges between individualgroup-machine. These complexes actually offer people diverse possibilities for recomposing their existential corporeality, to get out of their respective impasses and, in a certain way, to resingularise themselves.

Grafts of transference operate in this way, not issuing from ready-made dimensions of subjectivity crystallised into structural complexes, but from a creation which itself indicates a kind of aesthetic paradigm�

(Guattari 1995, 7).

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For Foucault and Guattari, the concern with aesthetics and its relation to existence has nothing to do with the aestheticization of life from a human perspective or, even worse, with the aestheticization of politics, a project already vehemently dismissed by Walter Benjamin in the 1930s. Guattari’s aim is to grasp subjectivity in the dimension of its processual creativity, instead of objectifying, reifying, or “scientifizing” it (1995, 13). Guattari and Foucault use aesthetics as a way to hint at the creative potential of expression and enunciation that has been silenced by the dominant force of signs and signifiers. In order to allow the three ecologies to traverse the production of subjectivity, Guattari elaborates a threefold development of aesthetic paradigms. The two primary phases (which are still operating as part of current transformations) are 1) “collective territories” of a proto-aesthetic paradigm where creativity is not yet institutionalized but drawn into collective practices of enunciation such as rituals (1995, 101-102); and 2) a modularization of subjectivity, detached from the emergence of values and overcoded by capitalist signifiers (1995, 104-105). While the proto-aesthetic paradigm underlies a pre-historical period, the second phase refers to capitalist structure. In the third movement, which has not yet arrived, we might enter an aesthetic paradigm of processual immanence: “It is a striving towards this ontological root of creativity that is characteristic of the new processual paradigm. It engages the composition of enunciative assemblages actualizing the compossibility of two infinites, the active and the passive” (1995, 116). Guattari explicitly underlines the continued impact of the two earlier paradigms. The processual aesthetic paradigm re-focuses on the production of subjectivity as an aesthetic of existence.

In a transversal manner (relating abstract as much as concrete dimensions), the production of subjectivity aims first and foremost to “reinvent social practices” (Guattari 1996, 119). The remaking of social practice goes hand in hand with Guattari’s critique of the ecological crisis that “can be traced to a more general crisis of the social, political and existential” (1996, 119).

42 Towards a New Aesthetic Paradigm

From this point of view, the aesthetic paradigm resonates well with the desires and demands of 21st-century activism. In order to develop such activism as part of the new aesthetic paradigm, one must investigate the ecological status and the formation of new subjectivities as part of an aesthetics of existence. For Guattari, the production of subjectivity as motor for the flourishing of such an aesthetic paradigm has to include the active role of incorporeal “Universes of Value” (1995, 99) as much as it includes the function of collective enunciations and things or objects that are pragmatic functions of existence (1996, 177). Instead of founding his aesthetic paradigm on a clear separation between objects and subjects or between concrete and transcendent, Guattari folds the dimensions of material and immaterial forces into each other, leaving each of them to a certain extent autonomous and at the same time always relationally entangled with other forces.

The aesthetic paradigm is therefore interwoven with ethical and scientific paradigms: “The new aesthetic paradigm has ethico-political implications because to speak of creation is to speak of the responsibility of the creative instance with regard to the thing created, inflection of the state of things, bifurcation beyond pre-established schemas, once again taking into account the fate of alterity in its extreme modalities.

But this ethical choice no longer emanates from a transcendent enunciation, a code of law or a unique and all-powerful god” (1995, 107). The genesis of an enunciation is co-emergent with processual invention or creation, and even in scientific statements forms of subjectivation surface as individual and collective-machinic.2 What Guattari identifies as “chaosmosis” defines a practice and tool of analysis at the same time. It is an immanent activism of ethico-aesthetic relevance taking into consideration and shaping the interplay of the three ecologies. Chaosmosis “is a force for seizing the creative potentiality at the root of sensible finitude–‘before’ it is applied to works, philosophical concepts, scientific functions and mental and social objects” (1995, 112).

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The relation between aesthetics and existence in Foucault and Guattari is neither exclusively attached to art nor does it involve art as institutionalized practice. On the contrary, aesthetics itself shapes a mode of existence that accounts for the transversal relations between subjects and objects, and between corporeal and incorporeal forces, that together make up the real. Nevertheless, art can function as a useful “entrance” to investigating aesthetics of existence in their ethico-aesthetic impact on how the “real” is constituted (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 3). Modestly put, there is a chance that art might enable us to surpass antagonisms such as those between orality and writing. Guattari foregrounds performance art and concrete poetry: “… this art doesn’t so much involve a return to an originary orality as it does a forward flight into machinations and deterritorialised machinic paths capable of engendering mutant subjectivities” (1995, 90). From here a new world might be assembled and augmented where new forms and modalities of being can flourish through productions of subjectivity: the deconstruction of structures and codes, a chaosmic plunge into materialities of sensation, an aesthetic decentering of perspectives.

According to Guattari and Foucault, one must account for the transversal and machinic constellation in which all existence is enmeshed. In this regard, aesthetic machines are of utmost importance, because they undermine the general aestheticization of everyday life by generating mutant and heterogeneous blocks of sensation, percepts, and affects.

The function of art is one of “rupturing with forms and significations circulating trivially in the social field” (1995, 130-131). Especially in a society where the circulation of images and aesthetic productions of affects and percepts rises, we require renewed expertise in the aesthetic field. The important point is to not consign these modes of creative production to an autonomous domain of art, but rather to consider them in their potential to transform, break, and re-invent trivial affects and percepts. In an essay contemporaneous with Chaosmosis, Deleuze comments in a similar fashion: “Creating has always been something differ-

44 Christoph Brunner/ Roberto Nigro/ Gerald Raunig

ent from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control” (Deleuze 1995, 175). For Guattari, in a similar vein, artistic and aesthetic cognition detaches segments of the real and deterritorializes them to become partial enunciators. The effects of these quasi-animistic language aspects of a work of art are both the re-modeling of the relation between artist and consumer and the (in-)formation of everyday existence (see Guattari 1995, 131). Aesthetics as an ethics according to the transversal aspect of the three ecologies and the aesthetic paradigm always relates to modes of existence and of life.

Through his notion of “aesthetics of existence” Foucault conceives of the “bios as beautiful work” (Foucault 2011, 162). In his last years, he investigated this question of an aesthetics of existence in the ancient writings on parrhesia. According to Foucault, artists, especially during the course of the 19th century, have adapted the parrhesiatic forms of life of the Cynics. As a first principle, artistic life gains its relevance in the 19th century through the life of the artist as an enabling condition for an artwork to emerge, or even through the life of the artist as work of art giving relevance to the artistic existence of that epoch: “Art is capable of giving a form to existence which breaks with every other form, a form which is that of the true life” (Foucault 2011, 187). The second principle for Foucault lies in art’s capacity for “laying bare, exposure, stripping, excavation, and violent reduction of existence to its basics” (2011, 188).

For Foucault, figures such as Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Manet take on the task of constituting “art as the site of the irruption of what is underneath, below, of what in a culture has no right, or at least no possibility of expression” (ibid.).

The relations between artistic or rather aesthetic practices and existence are part and parcel of the way Foucault and Guattari envision the aesthetic paradigm as a paradigm of resingularization. Both thinkers are concerned with existence as a way to enable new tastes of life and for life, to create a novel smoothness between sexes, generations, and ethnic

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groups–as much as compositions of virtual ecologies of “unprecedented formations of subjectivity” (Guattari 1995, 91). Concerning the invention of new forms of life and existence, Guattari writes in Chaosmosis: “One creates new modalities of subjectivity in the same way that an artist creates new forms from the palette” (1995, 7). Hence, as Deleuze points out in a commentary, to “constitute ways of existing or styles of life …. isn’t just an aesthetic matter, it’s what Foucault called ethics, as opposed to morality” (Deleuze 1995, 98-100). In their overlapping of ethics and aesthetics, ways of existing underlie rigorous immanent criteria: “Foucault even makes allusion to ‘aesthetic’ criteria, which are understood as criteria for life and replace on each occasion the claims of transcendental judgment with an immanent evaluation” (Deleuze 1991, 163).

Foucault’s late formulation consists in the risky Cynic practice of parrhesia as a formation of life. He foregrounds the creation of relational fields between singularities over an emphasis on individualized retreat from society. For us the question then is: What happens if these revolutionary ethico-aesthetic practices define not only a political project but a molecular revolution as a remodeling of modes of life and existence?

Such a molecular revolution underlines an aesthetics of existence and/or pairs it off with a political project as “constantly renewed work of giving form” to life (Foucault 2011, 162), or in-forming a living-collectively.

Existence as bios and form of life, as much as cutting across all registers of the three ecologies, defines for us a major domain of future investigation, extending and reconsidering the propositional outlines provided

by Foucault and Guattari. In particular, it is the transversal relation between modes of existence that interests us. For Foucault, the turn to an aesthetics of existence as ethical concern defines a new terrain lodged between general aesthetic processes of formation and a metaphysics of the soul (ibid.). An aesthetics of existence always produces and leaves traces of ways of being. Being, then, is not entirely tied to a world of concreteness available for human encounter. On the contrary, as Guattari points out: “Being is first auto-consistency, auto-affirmation, existence

46 Towards a New Aesthetic Paradigm

for-itself deploying particular relations of alterity. The for-itself and for-others stop being the privilege of humanity, they crystallise everywhere that machinic interfaces engender disparity and, in return, are founded by it� (1995, 109).

In its machinic productivity, existence is a process and aesthetics becomes an ethical practice of becoming with the overall “worlding� of existence. The production of subjectivity therefore is neither an exclusively human affair nor entirely detachable from society. To account for an aesthetics of existence offers an investigation of practices of attention and insertion at the heart of a subjectivity that is always with the world and existence instead of in the world. To reconsider social practices on the basis of existence requires an ethics and an aesthetics that are always subjective-objective across the boundaries of mental, social, and environmental ecologies.

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1 Guattari expresses a striking example of his critical remarks on conservative developments in the early 1980s in his poignant book title Les annés d hiver 1980-1985 (The Winter Years).

2 In their last co-authored work, What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari expose the relation between science, art, and philosophy as different modes that all involve processes of creation and creativity (Deleuze/Guattari 1994).

References Deleuze, Gilles, “What is a dispositif?,” in Michel Foucault, Michel Foucault Philosopher (New York: Routledge, 1991), 159-166.

——, Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

——, Two Regimes of Madness (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2006).

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

Guattari, Félix, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995).

——, The Guattari Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996).

——, The Three Ecologies (New York/London: Continuum, 2008).

Foucault, Michel, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Paul Rabinow (ed.), Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984: Ethics. Vol. One (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 253-280.

——, The Courage of the Truth (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2011).

Lazzarato, Maurizio, Expérimentations politiques (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2009).

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Loosening up Pierre Bruno

“Anyway” Psychoanalysis is probably not elastic enough to provide the kind of diving suit needed to protect civilisation (Kultur, in Freud’s language) from its discontents. To put my cards on the table, let’s say that the object here is to make discontent a symptom, not in order to eradicate it, but to use it as a vector in order to transform the past, so as to free the present from its debt, even by the very act of beginning to talk. When a symptom is interpreted it doesn’t disappear, it becomes insurrectionary. To establish with some effectiveness what this recourse is about, we can begin with what three largely unrecognized ancestors of Freud—the Apostle Paul, St. Francis of Sales, and François Fénelon—understood by the term “impossible supposition”: namely, that God exists and curses me even—and above all?—if I dedicate myself to loving him absolutely.

This bold trio did not recoil in the face of this eventuality—which is less impossible than people suggest—and they declared with one voice, “I

49

up gninesooL on ruB e rr e iP

would love Him anyway.” In Freud, this “anyway” is echoed in the only recognised injunction addressed by the analyst to the analysand: “say it anyway.” Once it is heard and applied, this “anyway” effectively ceases to be a command and becomes the beginning of an emancipation, because the speech that emerges thanks to this “anyway” irremediably creates a distance in relation to the sagacious sachem (God, maybe, or an analyst) whose existence it thereby questions, without necessarily realising that it is doing so. (Indeed, that is why Fénelon, devoted believer that he was, found himself suspected of heresy by Bossuet, that worthy representative of the ecclesial nomenklatura).

50 Pierre Bruno

A leader induces sleep From this emerges the fact that the contestation of an order, which is to say of a disorder made permanent, is never generated by anything other than a single subjective spark, and not—this mistaken perspective is due perhaps to a hasty reading of Marx—by the kindling of the masses. If psychoanalysis has made any progress since its extraordinary discovery by one person (not by a great research laboratory), it is because it has taken up the Freudian critique of mass psychology and, with Lacan, promoted a collective logic. This is articulated one to one, but the real question is why this one acts. Now this singular act is inconceivable without the other. This is, first of all, the other on whom I count and for whom there can be no question of that other not, in turn, counting on me. Next there is a second other, whose function is to prevent the subject from being satisfied with being the one on whom the first other could count.

From here, one acts and, above all, the first other, moving to where the act first took place, acts in turn, and likewise for the second other, and so on for as long as the algorithm remains unbroken. It is essential to add that in this configuration the act is never what is deduced from knowledge (the line trotted out by old spiritualist philosophy), since there is no act that does not precede knowledge. Seeing things in this light, we can get an idea of what structures a revolutionary movement, whose first characteristic is unpredictability even if the “conditions” have, as they say, all been met (but we also know that the conditions can have long been met without anything actually happening). We can also understand why the best way to asphyxiate a revolutionary movement is to provide it with a leader, whose very presence gives mass psychology primacy over collective logic. This sleep-inducing action of the leader may have the virtue of fixing the revolution in place, of preventing its permanence and elation, of ordering its stasis, but it also brings the risk of ablating what it is about, or even of perverting its goals.

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The desiring discard Let’s be daring and take the next step. In psychoanalysis, only one thing is demanded of the analyst, which is that, in this two-step with the analysand, he or she should allow himself or herself to be, in the end, discarded like rubbish. That is where the psychoanalyst’s reluctance to act (by hearing, interpreting, or ending the session) comes from, not from some prudent fear of doing harm. Not to act, that is to say, to inscribe oneself within an inertia out of which hollow speech is bound to emerge the winner, means the assurance of staying in the warm place that is transference, or in the refrigerator of hatred, because you can always justify yourself being hated, against the analysand, whereas nothing compensates for being dumped on the side of the road when the analyst’s psychoanalysis has not led to the point where this demotion is coloured positively by desire, in that it puts a seal on both parties’ freedom.

Here, perhaps, art could learn a thing or two, for, like psychoanalysis, it is always at risk of being ambushed by the mortal sin of religion, which constructs love as servitude. Kierkegaard, long ago, said that an artist must content himself with being a “medium” (not in the parapsychological sense but in the sense of a binding agent in painting). It’s not easy to say exactly how religion threatens art, or rather, how it threatens to turn art into religion. Let us set aside cases where art is explicitly in the service of religion because it treats religious subjects (Christ on the Cross, for example, or the Last Supper). For one thing, we cannot prohibit such a choice—on what grounds would we do so?—and for another, the way the subject is treated may on occasion amount to a stone tossed through the window of religion. However, there is a danger when art is assigned as its sole purpose that which we call beauty. Freud doesn’t have a lot to say about beauty, but we may note that in a dialogue with Rilke, who had lamented that the beauty of a summer landscape with flowers in bloom would disappear in winter, Freud maintained that the ephem-

52 Loosening up

eral character (Vergänglichkeit) of beauty is precisely what makes it valuable. Even more moving, in 1926, when a journalist asked him if he was concerned about posthumous glory, Freud answered: “I am far more interested in this blossom than in anything that may happen to me after I am dead.”1 These words should be sufficient to convince us that Freud’s idea of beauty was anti-religious (what “may happen to me after I am dead” is of little importance) and, above all, that he did not see beauty as being something perennial that would guarantee its creator (whether man or God) the eternal survival of his name.

What justifies the idea of art as irreplaceable is its relation to what Freud called das Ding and Lacan la chose. This “thing” is what emerges when the symbolic part of language has abdicated. To take only a minimal example, the cast made of the empty space between the legs of a chair (Bruce Nauman) transcends, by its simple presence, the classical geometric problematic of space, in the same way that the invention of perspective (and there are sound reasons for the debate over whether this innovation was primarily artistic or scientific) rendered earlier symbolic coordinates obsolete.

Now, in this sense, beauty does not march at the same pace or in the same direction as art. To set the tone here, can an artist, if he is to be worthy of the title, not have sat beauty on his knees, as did Rimbaud, and found it “bitter”? In his seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan questions the function of beauty and offers the beginnings of an answer: beauty is a “second barrier” that, coming after the good, excludes us from the radical field of desire, which is the field of the death instinct. At the same time, it awakens us to desire in its function as an illusion, and in this sense is not unrelated to the function of fantasy. This thesis is reaffirmed in the seminar, and remains unchanged thereafter: “This reference point, in so far I properly designated it as being that of beauty, in so far as it ornaments, has the function of constituting the last barrier before this access to the last thing, to the mortal thing, to this point at which Freud’s meditation came to make

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its final avowal under the term of death instinct.”2 This only heightens our sense of perplexity at the functions of art and beauty. On one side we have the Thing, whose presence art is supposed to produce, and on the other the death instinct, that is to say, the radical version of the equivalence between death and nirvana, which beauty is supposed to wall off.

Perhaps we could displace the question by transforming it in order to make it more legible. The death instinct is deduced from symbolisation, which, by means of language, perpetrates the murder of things.

Still, langage, in its concrete presence as langue, is not immaterial but has its own materiality which constitutes the writer or poet’s raw material. Nevertheless, at the same time, language and virtualisation have their own inclination, whose raison d’être can be found in what we call semantics, which is indeed immaterial. Art bestrides this razor’s edge, between, on one side, an iteration of forms already given to matter, tending to hide that materiality, making art an increasingly funereal manifestation, and, on the other, an extraction of that which, in the field of the death instinct, is not dead so long as a form is made for it.

(That is why, strictly speaking, there is no creation that is not ex nihilo.)

Here we need to consider dream work, which consists of the making of such a form, and the question that arises is whether that form was not already a kind of writing (écriture) even before it actually appeared.

Finally, I should point out that it is not a question here of old and new, since old forms can always confront us with the presence of the Thing.

The capacity to endure remains the only non-negotiable criterion for judging the value of a work of art.

Bitter Beauty So what about beauty? Beauty could be the very form of the presence of the Thing, but that would be to forget its other face. If, indeed, the function of beauty is primarily to offer us a barrier against access to the field

54 Pierre Bruno

which also happens to be the only one that can open us to what, in the supposed emptiness of death itself, is full, it would not be absurd to say that beauty goes in the opposite direction of art. So as not to adopt this extreme viewpoint, it would be possible to consider beauty as the filter that allows us to see the sun without being blinded, and that beauty is ultimately less the form of the Thing, which is a matter of art, than its framework, which makes it pleasant to contemplate. Be that as it may, to return to Rimbaud’s adjective for beauty—“bitter”—art that would not involve, or have involved, the destruction of this frame, could never be of any interest to us. Kant’s act of genius was no doubt to have had this insight when he distinguished between the sublime and the beautiful, connecting the first directly with the noumenon.

On fetishes In what way is this meditation on the beautiful essential when it comes to experiencing other civilisations and solutions than that of financial capitalism, which has now reached a dead end? With Freud, beauty is a moment of grace for the subject in the presence of an object that reveals das Ding, that is to say, as I stated above, that part of being which does not depend on the symbolism of language. True, one could no doubt define the horrible in the same way, but that would only highlight the polarity between the two. To distinguish between them, is it enough to note that beauty implies acceptance by the subject whereas the horrible implies rejection? On this question, Baudelaire’s thesis is economical: too much beauty turns to horror. Perhaps we could limit ourselves to a simpler explanation: from the very beginning of human history, men have selected the aesthetic forms that corresponded to the needs of survival, just as (forgive the prosaic comparison) in the history of taste we have, at least up to the present, preferred the caloric to the non-caloric.

Either way, Lacan continues in the Freudian vein, but while he is not

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indifferent to the presentification of the Thing in beauty, he also grasps the fetishisation that goes along with this, and then conceptualises it, whereas Freud, in his indifference to his posthumous existence, merely evoked it. In a recent book, Le capitalisme à l’agonie,3 Paul Jorion recalls an observation in which Marx says that it is not man who inherits, but the Earth that inherits a man. We can plausibly generalise this observation and say that it is not the demands of financial capitalism that command money but the demands of money that command financial capitalism. Now, while there is certainly some truth in this observation, this truth is not the real (ce vrai n’est pas le réel); it stems from a fiction that gives appearance the sanction of its realism. One couldn’t dream of a better illustration of what Marx calls commodity fetishism in order to illustrate this fiction. Under certain material conditions, social relations between men, and depending upon men, assume in a fantastic manner the form of relations between things. Marx evokes the kinship of fetishism and religion, in which the products of human thought (the idea of God) are presented as real beings (the existence of God). The relation between this fetishism and the fetishism spoken of by Freud in 1926 is striking. In Freud, too, there is an opposition between the—real—recognition of castration, and the fantasy of denial by means of the fetish as a stand-in for the absent penis. In an interview given to philosophy students in 1966, Lacan recognises that Marx preceded Freud in his interpretation of fetishism, but also states that the fetish supports what we call work value, by erasing the fact that this value is the product of a determined social relation between men, and by presenting this value as intrinsic to the commodity, that is to say, independent of the relations between commodities.4 There is no need to spell out the way in which this neat schema for explaining the fetish can be applied to beauty, thus making us attentive to what, in the fascination with beauty (on the part of both of the artist and the public) can lead to the mutation of exhibition galleries and museums into churches.

56 Loosening up

Association and gravitation To conclude, in a society forcibly modelled on the workings of mass psychology, the other is my fellow, but he or she is simultaneously foreclosed as alterity. The eugenic ideal of beauty is not far off. The only wind of freedom still blowing here comes from the fact that by borrowing a feature from the person who embodies my ideal, in a process of identification, I move from having to being, thereby staking out a distance—an unconscious one—in relation to this incarnate ideal. As emancipation goes, it’s not much. In collective logic, on the contrary, the basic axiom is that the other counts only as alterity and is worth nothing as a clone.

The only thing that can bring together a Martian and a Venusian is a common undertaking, which is an ambition that has always implicitly haunted the actions of artists. Seen from this point of view, the contemporary period is fraught with a tension between increasing socialisation, which must be reckoned on the positive side, and a hyper-mediatisation of individuals who, however, are more interchangeable than we think (the cinema of the 21st century is exemplary in this respect). The latter aims to neutralise the former but, fortunately, its efforts will no doubt be in vain. Why this methodological optimism? Because, whatever pleasure he or she may derive from it, no subject can agree to be reduced to merely the surplus value of an Other, parental or otherwise. Psychoanalysis and art, scandalously enough, are concerned with the human, not with the Thing. The need is to find in the work a mode of association that affords access to its gravitation. This implies a rejection, on the one hand of the religious path, which sterilises everything by rejecting sex as an accident, and on the other of the psychological path, which is merely another of those false sciences that Molière taught us to laugh at.

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1 2 3 4

Ernest Jones quotes this reply in his Life and Work of Sigmund Freud.

Lacan, Jacques, Le Seminaire VIII, Le transfert, Paris: Seuil, 1991, p. 15.

Jorion Paul, Le capitalisme à l’agonie, Fayard, 2011.

Lacan, Jacques, Autres écrits, Seuil, 2001.

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The Surrealization 1 of the Crisis Frédéric Lordon

“Real knowledge of good and evil cannot suppress any affects, since it constitutes real knowledge only insofar as we regard it as an affect” is Spinoza’s2 categorical and unappealable statement, one that bluntly declares the impossibility of purely intellectual conversions and affirms that ideas have no effect whatsoever by themselves. (Pierre Bourdieu was to make this declaration his own when he stated that real ideas have no intrinsic power.) It would take all the sociocentric blindness of the demi-intellectuals—those who labour under the conviction that they are the bearers of the “ideas that move the world”—not to see that pure ideas have never moved anything, except as they have been accompanied by affects, which are the only things that can endow them with power (an extrinsic power, to be sure). Perhaps academics, or at least those of them who really harbour such illusions, will here encounter one of the causes of their resentment at seeing the meagre consequences of all their critical efforts. They will, therefore, have to get used to the idea that abstraction, of all possible arguments, is, in principle, the least potent,

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ehT noitazilaeSurr 1 sisiCr eht fo nod ro L ci r éd é Fr

precisely because it deploys itself in an atmosphere devoid of affects.

This realization doesn’t detract in the least from the solid foundations of their efforts, but it does demand, simply, that they temper their political and practical expectations.

It is art that by its very nature is able employ of all the means to create affects, first and foremost because it is aimed at bodies, to which it offers immediate affects in the form of images and sounds. The fundamental purpose of art is not to convey ideas; in fact it can be viewed primarily as the production of intransitive affects, in the manner of Deleuze’s “percepts.” Nevertheless, art can also succumb to a craving to say something. To be sure, this form of art has fallen out of the favour it had in the latter half of the 20th century, to such an extent that the label of “committed art,” where intentions are burdened with a surfeit of meanings, ponderous words, and hard lessons, has become practically a joke. We can list any number of complaints against art-that-tries-tosay-something, but the problem is that remaining on the “opposite side”

60 Frédéric Lordon

are all the things that are waiting to be said. These things still have an urgent need to become affects, and with the retreat of “political art” they run the risk of having to retreat themselves, or of surviving with their vitality diminished, in the feebleness of mere analysis. Who will provide the affects that these things require? Without affects, how will they grow powerful, in other words, how will they be granted the power of being affective, empowered to enter into heads, that is to say, into bodies, where they can produce effects in the form of movement: acceleration of the heartbeat, elevated blood pressure, choleric disturbance, eventual uncrossing of the legs, the action of prompting them into motion, into locomotion that will lead to a place, to participation in a meeting, to entering the premises of a group, perhaps finally to taking to the streets?

Of course, the arguments we are characterizing as “pure” are never entirely so: do they not display themselves from the outset as signs that have already been viewed/read or as words that have already been heard—and therefore as affects of the body? Philosopher-stylists know this well, as they employ style specifically as a means to achieve the intensification of affects, in other words, to confer greater power on their words. The moment comes, however, when one needs to shift into high gear…

As much as we analyse the various aspects of the financial crisis, refine our arguments, dismount the systems, and expose the gears, nothing compares to an image for setting the blood boiling or, as the very pertinent popular saying goes, for giving you a brisk slap in the face (the face: the body). It’s not enough to talk about the crisis of capitalism; we need to show it, to make it heard. What makes this all the more necessary is the fact that the dominating power has time on its side: the time during which things are forgotten, the time of dislocation which, fraying the link between effects and causes, destroys the real sequence in our minds. Who, for example, would now think of connecting the suicides in France Télécom with an obscure privatization carried out more than

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fifteen years ago? Who’s going to be saying anything ten years from now about the de-regulation of the postal service? Once the frenzy of private finance has been forgotten, are we not now faced with a public financial crisis? Time also brings resignation, and recovery by means of the usual channels, washing away all the scandals. Will capitalism really be unable to bear the excessive abuses of the current crisis, will it be unable to withstand the incredible intellectual and moral collapse that ought to engulf it? Any means may be of use against the inertial advantages of domination, anything is worth considering: film—whether fiction or documentary—literature, photography, comics, installations; we may consider all the methods of building affective machines. The theatre is one of them.

We can toss out the window all general discussions about “art,” that is, about what it “is” and what it “is not,” and we can dispense with the underhanded game of making claims that are foredoomed to be laughable, in order to return all the better to what is essential. Whether or not there is “art” here is the least of our concerns; what matters is that there are bodies affecting other bodies and adding their own personal arguments to the extrinsic power of affects. The condensed time of dramatic representation re-concentrates that which real social time has diluted and dismembered; it restores in their completeness the broken sequences, the missing links, it recouples the chain of events of the scandal and confers upon them a new density. One thing is visibly derived from another, everything is re-presented just once, and in this singleness an affective idea is regained. This is only possible, however, thanks to the power of theatrical affects to act as deputies, albeit surreal ones, of a reality that otherwise defies comprehension. The theatre of the crisis serves to surrealize the crisis, a pressing political urgency when all the temporal distensions of the social world tend to work to under-realize it and when every effort of the dominant discourse is aimed at de-realizing it.

62 The Surrealization of the Crisis

The preconceived posture of this theatre is easier to understand if the idea is, first and foremost, to highlight the reality of the crisis. It is not about the torments of individual existence; minds are not probed and hidden corners are not explored. The characters are stock ones and, all in all, quite simple. With the exception perhaps of an overly idiosyncratic President of the Republic, we could exchange them for any number of others of their same kind. By themselves they are uninteresting: they are voices. These voices do not convey their moods but rather their positions: bankers talk about banking, traders banter about markets, governments discourse on power (or what remains of it), and, in very general terms, the dominators speak about domination. Critique, condemned to flow through unlikely characters, slips between the interstices. But all of them, borne along by one force or another, speak about the forces that carry them, or about the delirium in which, because of these forces, they are obliged to live, about the outer limits of ideological discourse where it is no longer known whether the speakers are cynics or idiots or whether they only pretend to believe or they blindly believe, about the indistinctness of a view of the world that presents itself as (and, moreover, believes itself to be) completely general, a view which effectively and perfectly adjusts itself to suit its own personal concerns. All of them are ventriloquists of their position and their personalities are constrained by the nature of their kind.

In addition, this theatre lacks profundity. This may be the one thing it can claim as its own: to be superficial, in other words, to inhabit only the surface of the force field. Consequently, it is a theatre of the surface, of these forces and of the exterior: a materialistic theatre, if you will.

And in alexandrines3‌? Oh gods on high, what a crazy idea! A principal justification might be because collisions by themselves produce effects, and the collision between the language of classical theatre on the one hand, armed with its refined golden-age universe, against contemporary capitalism’s all-encompassing vulgarity on the other, produces quite a few collisions indeed. We know that alexandrines are suitable

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for Bossuetian pomposity and for tragedy, but we also find that they’re capable of making people laugh, perhaps even more so when they’re tinkered with a bit—not such a trifling advantage when everything else makes you want to break down and cry. Applying a form known for accompanying lofty ideals to the most miserable manoeuvres of the world of finance may be one way of not completely succumbing to despair when we see the scandalous success with which those same manoeuvres are met in reality.

Those who are satisfied with the current state of affairs are happy to see in the potential exercise of mockery the indisputable signs of our wonderful freedom and “democratic” health. But it’s just the opposite! Once a certain level of generalization has been reached, we would do better to regard mockery as a disturbing symptom of a state of democratic decay, one in which—given that all protests will be overlooked—all the mediators have stopped mediating, all of the “representatives” have betrayed representation, and the final refuge of the great majority of the governed is laughter. Mockery is a desperate last resort for those who have nothing else, their last remaining weapon before, perhaps, they brutally rebel and take to the streets. In this, alexandrine verse brings all of its ambivalence to bear: it mocks with great liberality and, like Molière, ridicules the “pretty ones,” but it can also summon up dark clouds that herald storms to come. And precisely not the clouds of tragedy, if we take that to mean the collision of two just and irreconcilable rights or of two equally legitimate claims. For once, we can keep things uncomplicated: the situation of financial capitalism is not tragic—it is plainly and simply despicable.

1 This essay was written to accompany the theatrical piece D’un retournement l’autre, comédie sérieuse sur la crise financière en quatre actes et en alexandrins (“From One Radical Change To Another: A Serious Comedy About the Financial Crisis, Written in Alexandrine Verse in Four Acts”), Senil, 2011, Paris.

2 Ethics, IV, 14.

3 Here I might make a brief allusion to the conventions I have followed: in addition to various other abuses, and aside from odd, easily identifiable exceptions, I have employed the systematic form of elision in the hemistich and the syneresis.

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We Are the Climate The Fabrication of Affects against Ecology Jade Lindgaard

Air-conditioned stadiums in Qatar for the football World Cup. A UN climate summit held in a resort that has devastated the Mexican coast.

Plans for an airport on an artificial island near the Maldives, with another already under construction on agricultural land in France. Still to come: drilling for oil in the tar sands of Madagascar. Facebook’s new server farm will be powered by a coal-fired generator, and the energy needs of the most famous social network may soon exceed those of many developing countries. Nearly every day a new plan is hatched that will consume massive amounts of useless or dirty energy, auguring further costs down the road. The list of horrors could go on forever.

How can this be? In December 2009, the movers and shakers of this world met in Copenhagen and promised to do everything they could to stem global warming. It’s now nearly fifteen years since the IPCC published its report establishing, beyond reasonable scientific doubt, the role of human greenhouse gas emissions in climate change. The human and natural risks for the biosphere caused by rising temperatures are of deep

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eht eAr eW etamiCl stceffA fo noitacibraF ehT ygolocE tsniaga d r a agd n i L ed aJ

concern to far more people than just climatologists and militant ecologists: the Red Cross and the UN food rights rapporteur are also alarmed, as are insurance companies who are calculating the massive sums they may have to pay out in compensation for victims of a climate spinning out of balance. As for the Earth, in a very recent study researchers inform us that it will take more than a thousand years to erase the traces of a century of CO2 emissions.

Given the general state of alert as to the disastrous consequences of global warming, you would expect emissions of greenhouse gases to be as sparing as possible. Letting the Paris-Dakar rally go ahead for the 33rd consecutive year, or travelling to Mexico or the Dominican Republic (a favourite destination for French travellers in 2010) for Christmas, should be as unthinkable as organising a world summit on human rights in countries that still practice slavery, or as making the reinstatement of child labour the central plank of a plan to revive the economy.

The petroleum company Exxon should not be reaping record profits

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thanks to the considerable rise in its barrel output, as it did in 2010. This orgy of fossil fuel use is a daily event, and we are all implicated in it.

The situation has become so crazy and so dangerous that it is not farfetched to imagine that in 50 or 100 years from now associations of climate victims will be demanding the banning of Tintin - Land of Black Gold, or Kerouac’s On the Road, or that tour operators’ catalogues will be hidden away in the dark recesses of national libraries reserved for “corrupting” literature, just as others have argued that the word “nigger” should be expunged from Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The yawning gap between what we know about the state of our climate and the threat that it represents to the daily lives of millions of people, on the one hand, and the behaviour of our societies on the other, is one of the most significant phenomena of the early 21st century. It reveals an adversarial relationship towards scientific knowledge that seems paradoxical in our technophile age. We prioritise fields of knowledge: some are immediately taken up by governments and decision-makers, who set about putting them into practice (witness the explosion of new information technologies, the development of medical research and nanotechnologies), while others are left by the wayside. This is the case with much of what we know about nature: the loss of biodiversity, the exhaustion of natural resources, climate disorder—even as the data continues to pile up, governments talk about it, and sometimes devise policies to deal with it, but these responses are so feeble that they are all but irrelevant.

Our collective acquiescence to a situation that is objectively untenable has not come about by chance. It is the product of the failure of the whole system of thought and action that, for twenty years now, has been constructing the climate as a political object (the Kyoto Protocol, the UN Convention on Climate Change, climate summits, IPCC, etc.). In spite of the many virtuous declarations of intent on the part of heads of state and captains of industry, climate as a common global cause is now suffering serious defeat.

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The reasons for this failure lie not only in our modes of political representation, in the state of play between geopolitical forces and the powerful lobbying of climate change sceptics. They are also linked to ways of life and individual desires. The damage done to nature is not just the result of the globalised economic system and productivism; it is the outcome of a whole economy of affects, constructed by the ideals of growth and progress of the prosperous post-war decades, by advertising, individualism, and the forgetting of the question of need in favour of the exponential search for pleasure, by the denial of the politics of limits. We’re not just dependent on CO2, we are addicted to it. It has become consubstantial with us. We love it for the feeling of freedom that it gives us and for the reassuring alienation in which it confines us. It has created new pleasures of warmth and light which we can no longer do without. Winter now ushers in cases of seasonal depression, of greysky blues. In blocks of flats, the central heating is set high, that being the supposedly consensual criterion of individual comfort. More and more swimming pools lie alongside individual houses, like a promise of summer and relaxation. Every Sunday night, the feeder roads linking our major cities to the motorways are clogged with traffic returning from the weekend—a moment so much a part of our habits that it has inspired the name of a French radio programme, “Sunday Return.”1 For their Christmas holidays, many European tourists fly out “to the sun” in Mexico, Egypt, Tunisia or the West Indies – a must for the overstrained worker. It is both a sensorial system and the backdrop for an entire imaginary world; the lights of the giant luminous screens in Shanghai now fascinate the Western gaze just as the neons of Broadway once attracted European emigrants. Whereas Hell always used to be synonymous with sweltering torment, it would seem that the temperature in today’s Hollywoodian apocalypses (2012, The Road, etc.) is getting lower and lower. I’m willing to bet that if climate change meant that things would get colder rather than hotter, the average American and European would feel far more concerned. Countless times I have heard people

68 We Are the Climate The Fabrication of Affects against Ecology

say, “I don’t like being cold, I’m in favour of global warming.” This is, unfortunately, more than just a joke. Carbon dioxide is such an addiction that it now even has its reformed junkies, “born again” believers like Nicolas Hulot,2 who base their ecological discourse on repentance, on a virulent critique of their past way of life.

Ever since the industrial revolution, we have not only been dependent on fossil fuels and their emissions of greenhouse gas; we have become attached to them in a way that is beyond what is reasonable, indeed, beyond rationality. By means of a continually revived bond of emotional dependence and constantly renewed choices, climate is inscribed within us, in our spirit and in our flesh. We are the climate. In this Anthropocene age, in which, for the first time, human activities are causing profound changes in the natural environment, climate is the product of our daily actions but at the same time it is what “produces” us and shapes us, because it lies at the heart of a whole sensorial system and mindset. The climate question is not just the burden of Western Man and the capitalist individual: it is a fundamental problem of how we relate to ourselves.

On the one hand we have our tastes and desires (the pleasure of a journey in the tropical sun, or of a weekend car trip); on the other the economic, social, and cultural system in which these things flourish: the permanent incitement to seek new tastes, new sensations, the endless hunt for lower prices, the promise of getting our money’s worth and luxury for all, the importance of quotidian comfort in a world of precarious jobs and a crumbling welfare state. This factory of affects has been created in opposition to ecology: by its distancing of nature and seasonal rhythms (the rise of mass distribution and permanent availability) and erasure of geographical distance (the explosion of fast transport by road and air, the globalisation of trade), by the culture of the ready-prepared and automatic that makes us forget skills and lose our taste for cultural autonomy. To actually repair a washing machine, a coffee maker, a television, or a computer has become an embarrassment. It’s easier and cheaper to simply replace an appliance than to get it mended.

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There are, to be sure, legitimate reasons for this constitution of the self against ecology. During the decades of post-war prosperity, the mechanisation of life, urbanisation, and great transport and energy infrastructure projects went hand in hand with a higher standard of living, starting with the emancipation of women, whose domestic working time was reduced by the introduction of the washing machine and the dishwasher. The extension of paid leave democratised holidays. In short, our consumption of energy—and therefore of CO2—became the hallmark of social progress, and it’s not so easy for us to abandon that legacy.

The issue cannot be reduced to a matter of individual feeling. For at the same time as this economy of desires, this factory of affects, plays against ecology, the climate also accompanies a social system. This is not new: the history of the environment teaches us that at least since the 18th century, climate has been a moral and political category, and not a strictly meteorological question. Historically, the notion of “environment” was conceived of as an ensemble comprising scientific knowledge and controversies. This social dimension of climate faded, however, in the second half of the 20th century, as the “hard” climate sciences (physics, geophysics, oceanography, ecology, palaeoclimatology) were consolidated.

Today—and this is not the least of the paradoxes—we find ourselves in need of de-ecologising the climate, of denaturalising it so as to restore its full social dimension. For the effects of climate change are very real. It’s not just a matter of imagination and feeling; climate change is also a creator of inequalities, of geopolitical tensions, of economic competition.

What a political conundrum! For climate is constantly changing scale: an individual, personal question, it is also global, perhaps the first phenomenon to be global in this way, since it connects the fates of all humans, together, and to the rest of the biosphere. It is, you might say, globally intimate. What can be done with this strange, hybrid entity, at once a meteorological reality, a moral category, a personal experi-

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ence, and a social construct? Is it any surprise that public discourse has struggled, and continues to struggle, to make this reality plain on a par with what is at stake? We need to change our relation to politics, leaving behind the paradigm of class struggle since solving the problem may at times entail struggling against ourselves.

The question of ways of life, of individual responsibility in climate disorder, has become taboo in political debate on climate. It’s the same in the private sphere. I’ve chosen to stop taking the plane for leisure and, holidays excepted, to take it as little as possible. I haven’t been to the United States for ten years. I have never been to China. These are the constraints I put on myself in striving for an ecological way of life. They are small sacrifices. I don’t have a car—a car is the last thing I want.

I take the train, public transport, and get about town by bike. I avoid hypermarkets for my shopping and buy my vegetables from a small farmer near Paris. As I do so I note that it’s almost impossible to talk about these choices with people who don’t live this way. The discussion soon gets of out control. Hackles are raised high on both sides. These are touchy subjects. I always get accused of trying to make other people feel guilty, and I accuse them more or less overtly of egotism.

How can we take up this discussion where we left off? We need to avoid the pitfall of guilt-inducing in order to explain the importance of individual behaviour in matters of ecology, even if its effects are invisible.

We need to bring out the underestimated links between the personal and the political, and to alert people to the great difficulty of responding to the climate crisis as long as our societies are organised as they are today. Above all, we must realise that we breathe, dream and desire CO2.

It is the invisible, yet central actor of our economy of affects.

Who, in the end, is the “subject” of climate? What climatic struggles do we face? How can we articulate individual behaviour and collective fate? Is it still possible to speak of social transformation, emancipation, and revolution in climate struggles? A whole grammar of collective action needs to be reinvented.

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1 Les retours de dimanche.

2 The presenter of Ushua誰a, a TV programme involving adventures in spectacular natural settings, who since 2007 has been trying to build a political career as an ecologist.

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Qui fait la France ?

The eventful history of a mobilisation by artists against inequality and in favour of a different kind of literature Karim Amellal and Mohamed Razane

When, as founding members of the collective Qui Fait la France?, we published our first novels in 2005 and 2006, the proximity of the “crisis in the banlieues”1 was on everyone’s mind. As always in this respect, we wondered what name to give to this terrible moment of confrontation, contestation, and protest, which had begun in Clichy-sous-Bois, in Seine-Saint-Denis, in October 2005.2 We are in a sense the children of those riots – or of that revolt. Moved and made indignant by the fate of these lost territories, which have been neglected by the state and public authorities for decades, we could not sit idly by and watch from our ivory towers on the pretext that we—writers, artists, teachers—had ourselves managed to escape the ghetto by the work of our pens and minds.

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tiaf iuQ ? ecnaFr al fo yrotsih ulftneve ehT stsitra yb noitasilibom a dna ytilaqueni tsniaga dnik tnereffid a fo urovaf ni eurtaretil fo e n a z a R d e m a hoM d n a l a ll e m A m i r a K

Trapped in the ghetto Since roughly the 1980s, when the “problem of the banlieues” began to appear, we in France have gotten into the habit of not looking at reality, of throwing a veil of ignorance over the tragic situation of these zones which lie just outside our major cities, Once the promising new homes of immigrants in the 1950s and ’60s, the banlieues have gradually been transformed into true urban ghettos, due partly to the economic crisis of the 1970s and its social effects, but also to the indifference of public authorities.

To employ the term “ghetto” in reference to those peripheral areas, which the official euphemism calls “sensitive urban zones” (zones urbaines sensibles), raises a central problem: was the condition of these districts and their inhabitants the result of the deliberate, premeditated intent of the public authorities, or did it occur spontaneously, as a result

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of socio-economic segregation? The answer, in France, is very clear: there has never been any institutionalised urban segregation and, from this point of view, and given the historical connotations of the term, it is highly contentious to speak of “ghettos.” And yet, given the nature of these quarters, it seems not only possible but necessary to do just that.

With youth unemployment approaching 40% in some areas, an absence of health and employment infrastructure, and a concentration of pauperised inhabitants who are mainly of immigrant origin (and therefore subject to intense social and racial discrimination), these quarters are very much zones of social demotion or isolation, or—and for some of them this metaphor is not excessive—open prisons that it is almost impossible to leave, places where families live in isolation, in insalubrious housing, deprived of essential public services. From this point of view, yes, there are indeed urban ghettos in France.

This situation is, as we have said, the result of several decades during which political will and the public authorities were anaesthetised in relation to the development of urban ghettos. It is a consequence of the inadequacy of an “urban policy” which was supposed to act in a coordinated fashion, simultaneously addressing buildings, urban development and the urban fabric, and the social characteristic of the “difficult quarters,”3 notably through the zoning policy initiated in the 1980s.

At the start of the new millennium, more than thirty years after the first measures to promote “urban renewal” and social diversity, the changes in these quarters left much to be desired. Given the conditions in the banlieues, especially for the young, the recourse to violence and delinquency were at one and the same time symptoms of the difficulties experienced in a worsening environment and also a radical means of expression and protest, as expressed in rap or, on a more political level, by the MIB (Mouvement de l’Immigration et des Banlieues), founded in 1991. Thus, on several occasions in the early 1980s and in early 1990s, violent riots broke out in the most deprived quarters of the banlieues,4

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like prolegomena or dress rehearsals for the much more widespread riots of autumn 2005.

Neither the governments of the Left, which were in power from 1981-1993 and again from 1997-2002, nor those of the Right of 19931997 and 2002 to the present, have been capable of truly registering or understanding the changes afoot in these territories, or of identifying figures capable of giving coherence to the social movements, let alone of providing satisfying solutions in the various fields of public action for the people who live there, in terms of jobs, education, security and housing.

The sad fate of “persons of immigrant background”5 In this very gloomy situation, the fate of people of immigrant background needs to be emphasised, for to us, most of whom are French nationals of foreign origin, the way in which this segment of the French population was perceived and constantly vilified on all kinds of pretexts was intolerable, and deeply opposed to republican principles and ideals of equality, universalism, and humanism.

In the first place, and since, in the 1980s, questions of integration and immigration have become mixed up in political discourse, driven by the rise of the Far Right. The banlieues, home to high concentrations of people of immigrant background, have become an object of fear and intense distrust to many among the French population. The great victory of the Far Right, and of the National Front in particular, is to have imposed and validated in public and media discourse the idea that “the problem of immigration” can been conflated with the “problem of integration,” and, by extension, with the “problem of the difficult quarters” where most of the populations concerned live. By the first decade of the 21st century this confusion had become systemic. It reached its paroxysm in the presidential campaign of 2002, in which the Right made security

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one of the central issues—in counterpoint, therefore, to the integration of populations of immigrant background. Nicolas Sarkozy, who was then the Interior Minister, was already the politician who most obviously symbolised this determination, imposed by the electoral power of the Far Right, to prioritise themes taken from the National Front in order to maintain or win back the electorate lost to the extreme.6 Secondly, in this general context in which fear and distrust with regard to the disadvantaged neighbourhoods and those who live there are stoked by much of the media—which, to a large extent, have little knowledge of these territories—people of immigrant background are the victims of various forms of stigmatisation and rejection that fuel the machinery of discrimination. We might consider in this regard the negative light in which Islam has been viewed by mainstream public opinion over the last decade,7 encouraged or influenced by a large section of the political class and the elites on the insubstantial basis of micro-phenomena8 that have been blown out of all proportion and have quickly come to be presented as general phenomena in order to distract opinion from the true problems of French society, which they are desperately powerless to change. This sadly rather successful attempt to scapegoat the Muslims of France (or those associated with them), and make them expiatory victims in order to satisfy fantasies and feed the fears of the public, is nothing new. Its history extends from the pharmakoi of ancient Greece to the infinitely more tragic fate of other religious minorities in our history, in particular, of course, the French Jews.

This example of negative representation of part of the population, which is only one among many, feeds a discriminatory mechanism that afflicts the same segments of the population twice over: first, in the imagination and in representations (notably in the media), with consequences that are psychological or symbolic (stigmatisation, the revelation of a stigma, that is, a physical or social characteristic constructed, perceived, and articulated in discourse as a handicap or a taint), and, secondly, through discriminatory actions, for example in the field of access to jobs, which,

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beyond the psychological impact (the feeling of being excluded, marginalised, or ostracised) also has a consequence that is more serious, because it is more material and tangible, namely that of being deprived of a good, a service, or an opportunity. The fact of discrimination in employment means that the victim is refused work, and therefore excluded and left in a precarious state.

Finally, the social consequences of racial or religious discrimination reflect the fact that in France, despite the legal arsenal inherent in what is still presented as a republican “model,” cultural differentiation is a factor in social hierarchisation. In other words, in France, despite the “colour-blind” character of our institutions and legal principles (founded on the foremost among these, the principle of equality), cultural, ethnic, or religious difference, once it is constructed and perceived as a stigma, frustrates social trajectories and, as a result of discrimination, but also other less informal but equally formidable mechanisms (such as school orientation), blocks or narrows existing opportunities. It is not “being black” but the fact of being perceived as “a black” that is problematic, as it engenders mechanisms of repulsion, rejection, and ostracism which are manifested notably in racial discrimination, thus leading the victim, who may not have perceived himself as “a black” before that, to become conscious of his cultural difference insofar as this may constitute a handicap. At this point, either he interiorises this and of his own accord drops by the wayside, telling himself that he’s worthless because that is the message society sends him, or he radicalises his identity and puts it in the foreground, trying to make something positive out of that identity9 or turning it into a destructive weapon aimed at society. (Here, to simplify, we can observe the two tendencies of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and ’70s, with on one side the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam (promoters of a radicalised identity in opposition to American society, even to the point of severance from the social body, of secession) and, on the other, the upholders of the non-violent, integrationist approach of the NAACP.

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The collective after the urban riots of 2005 For all the above reasons, the violent protest movements that broke out in the French banlieues were highly predictable, and the only ones not to know this were the politicians and public authorities, who had been guilty of decades of blindness and inactivity.

The accumulated mistrust, especially among the young inhabitants of these disadvantaged neighbourhoods,10 who were massively impacted by unemployment,11 precariousness, and exclusion, notably at school, was bound to be expressed, as it already had in the past, by an explosion of violence directed against the state, against, that is, those politicians and political actors—or the buildings symbolising them—whom they saw as being part of or responsible for their predicament. All it took was a spark—the death of two young people chased by the police in Clichysous-Bois—for a cycle of violence nearly two months in duration to be sparked in many of the French banlieues. While this violence may not have been translated into political terms at the time, it did express the general frustration of that part of the population.

As founding members of the collective Qui Fait la France?, we were of course aware of the underlying causes of these protests and this violence.

Having experienced them ourselves, we understood their workings and motivations, even if the form of expression did not strike us as the most pertinent or likely to achieve anything. At the same time, in the absence of a political movement capable of carrying these very old claims, which had always been ignored, we thought it inevitable that they would one day take a radical turn. That is why, after the riots of 2005, we preferred to speak of “revolt” since, from our point of view, this term better expresses the legitimacy of a radical reaction to a situation of inequality, injustice, and exclusion that for 25 years had steadily worsened.

In short, as artists, authors, and creative workers we could not just sit by and do nothing in the face of a crisis on such a scale. The distance separating the young people in the banlieues from the rest of the population

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had grown as wide as an ocean and we saw a need to act and to work on our own level in order to make public opinion aware of the magnitude of the social problems and discrimination affecting some five million people in France.12

The collective’s goals The collective Qui Fait La France?—its name means both “Who Makes France?” and “Who Loves France?”13—wanted to endow our shared indignation and taste for a social and militant literature of reality with a collective meaning. Whether established or novice authors, we also shared a militant sensibility that clamoured for real recognition of the suffering territories and their inhabitants and, more generally, of all those who are without a voice in our country. The coming into existence of our collective was formalised by the publication of a joint text14 and a manifesto15 explaining what we were doing.

The objectives that we set ourselves when setting up this collective were to create the intellectual conditions for a total participatory struggle with a view to ending all the above-mentioned scourges: to declare a state of total war against the current elite, be it in politics, the media, or intellectual circles, their consanguinity being a basic postulate here; to use all available means of symbolic violence to fight against the impunity of the media; to work for the systematic narratisation of suffering so that it might serve as a constant spur to our desire for change; and, finally, to give up our struggle only when France becomes the new country that exists within us all. Concomitantly, and in the vein of the cinema movement Dogma 95,16 launched in 1995 by Danish filmmakers, we undertook to inscribe our literature within a performative, denunciatory form of writing, aimed at inflaming and changing the real, in opposition to an egotistical, autofictional style of literature.

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This, among other reasons that we shall return to later, is why we decided to preface our volume of short stories, illustrating our collective approach, with a manifesto. Wearied and nauseated by the Parisieniste literature that blooms endlessly among the literary cliques in a hothouse of eulogistic articles penned on the principle of I’ll-scratch-your-backyou’ll-scratch-mine, we felt it was urgent to revive another literary tradition that was more realist, that is to say, more grounded in the real, in the territories, evoking the everyday lives and concerns of ordinary people, including, of course, those of the banlieues and, more generally, all the afflicted territories, both rural and urban, which suffer from the same problems of confinement, isolation, and abandon. This was not some concoction of our puerile, uncultivated minds; this was a very French tradition of “realism” that had been the glory of French literature in the 19th century, with Émile Zola at its head. While this tradition had faded somewhat in the 20th century, notably after the advent of the nouveau roman, it continued to survive in the work of a good number of French-language authors—that is to say, ones on the margins, like ourselves. It seemed cleared to us—and to others as well— that current French literature owed its vitality in large part to all those foreigners with French culture, the Francophones abroad who were nourishing it with their fiction.17 At our own level, we too were part of that tendency: we were authors from France, French men and women, but we approached literature, writing, and fiction from an outside position, , and therefore with a different point of view. That is what our manifesto meant, and that is what was misunderstood—perhaps because we weren’t clear enough.

How to act?

To do this, we developed a mode of action, in which we would intervene in the media circus in order to reveal its obscenity and sclerosis, its

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contempt for the people, its deep racism, ignorance, and mendacity. All public spaces were potential fields of expression and revolt. The aim, in concrete terms, was to produce a way of thinking that would go against the grain of dominant discourse (articles, participation in symposia, and radio and television programmes) and to carry out flash actions such as taking over television sets, seizing hold of public speech at all levels, and physically investing the common space with messages and slogans.

In order to encourage our fellow citizens to act along these lines, we put together and promoted a booklet of resistance,18 laying out the possibilities for practical engagement. And, to set an example, we put these possibilities into practice. We invaded the set of a popular TV programme,19 we carried out raids applying our “H de la honte” sticker,20 and we delivered ripostes to a number of media, the most emblematic of these being the one addressed to the Nouvel Observateur.21

Supporting peripheral creation Extending our modes of action and literary ambitions, we formed an association to support and finance projects on behalf of the places and people that are the subjects we feel most strongly and urgently about.

The idea was to identify, support, and finance—not least with the royalties generated by the sales of our collective book—projects by people in abandoned, forgotten, and neglected zones, either rural or urban, so as to enable them to pursue their own dreams. The role of the association is not to stand in for the state by meeting the elementary needs of individuals and thus ensuring their dignity. It acts on the margins, by attempting to meet the needs for recognition, expression, and presence in public space, which, to varying degrees, are essential to each person’s sense of fulfilment. This need to speak out successfully and productively is very intense in the neighbourhoods we aimed at, yet it rarely receives attention, support, or consideration.

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We also wanted to have a general influence on public policies—urban and cultural policy, the state and local authorities—so that they would help finance the association’s projects and also, more generally, help prioritise the flow of public funds to suffering neighbourhoods.

Finally, the aim was to conceive and set up spaces for debate and consciousness-raising (websites, accessible afternoon debates, symposia, workshops in schools and cultural structures, and so on).

On the difficulty of mobilising our fellow citizens After six years of existence, the results of our actions are mixed. Our hopes, which were certainly ambitious, have met up with realities that we did not foresee, motivated as we were by our initial, sincere desire to give an existence in public space to this lowly part of the population, once feared and now despised by a ferocious, neurotic, and voracious caste of heirs.

While many people supported us and found our manifesto and calls for action meaningful, very few actually took part in the concrete actions which we tried to mobilise. We thought, in our initial enthusiasm, that since the struggle was legitimate and its concerns widely shared, it would be enough for us to create the pretext and the organisation in order to make it a reality, and that it would then be able to continue independently without us. But there’s no avoiding the fact that this by itself is not enough, that it is important to act—once the reasons for the struggle have been set out and argued—on a necessary strategy of mobilisation. And putting in process such a strategy implies resources (both material and human) that we did not have, since we were ourselves involved with everyday realities that limited our time, such as family and professional commitments.

Thus, the actions that we were able to carry out were due exclusively to the founding members of the collective and one or two supporters.

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The most emblematic of these actions was when we burst onto the set of a popular television show and read out a message of resistance and hope in a verbal intervention lasting six minutes. This action stirred a lot of reactions, mainly supportive ones in the form of hundreds of e-mails sent to our website. With this action we wanted to give a concrete, committed example of the possibilities of resistance that we had set out in a booklet published on our website. Unfortunately, that example did not lead to similar, independent actions by others, nor did it allow people to implement in a practical manner the possibilities for struggle that we formalised.

We also tried to produce, on a regular basis, articles on topical issues that would be meaningful in relation to our struggle, to act alongside adults and young people, notably in schools and in symposia in France and abroad, and on radio and television shows. Finally, we organised a short story competition and organised public debates in conjunction with a suburban association and the rapper Disiz La Peste. While all these initiatives do give us the feeling that we have contributed to the overall discussion, and helped draw attention to the problems about which we feel so strongly, they have not, to our knowledge, given rise to any movements of struggle independent of ourselves.

The basic limitations inherent in our approach The first limitation is cruel: by trying to produce another kind of literature out of the ghetto where it was confined (and, with it, the subjects and settings that form the backdrops to our stories), have we simply created another ghetto, have we locked ourselves in again, cutting ourselves off from the world? Our desire to assist the emergence of a popular literature from the margins, dealing with authentic social subjects (isolation, violence, unemployment, racism, and drugs, for example, as well as love and friendship) was, in effect, immediately paralleled by

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an approach that sought to group us together, notably within the Collective, in the hope that we would have more clout and would, together, be able to promote a form of engaged literature that would be attentive to the sufferings of the excluded and capable of making the voice of the “voiceless” and invisible heard well beyond Parisian literary circles. But this approach, organised around the group and the affirmation of a social, cultural, and artistic identity, mechanically introduced the risk that we would be seen as representatives of the banlieue, proponents of a literature of the banlieue, of the housing projects, of the urban world, dependant on that world—meaning, basically, that we would be seen as the proponents of a literature that, because it described and affirmed itself as being “from the margins,” was ontologically on the margins: a marginal literature, therefore, to be relegated to the outskirts of French literature. In other words, a subculture.

Given the weight of the negative representations that are attached to people of immigrant background in France and the ferocious elitism that obtains, especially in the literary circles of the capital, it was fairly obvious that we were going to suffer from a biased perception of what we were doing, of our objectives and motivations. To many observers, our approach was equivalent to political commitment rather than to an artistic, let alone a literary engagement, and our whole conception of a literature of the real, of talking about people’s lives, about the ghetto, of using their language, was akin to the manifestation of an urban “subculture,” a product of the banlieue, and therefore an object to be set alongside other products of urban culture such as rap, hiphop, slam, street art, etc. For the apparatchiks of the Parisian journalistic and literary milieu, our texts, especially when coupled with an assertive and rather radical manifesto, constituted, in a sense, a kind of literary form that was seen as a perversion of “classical” stylistic canons and forms of expression. The rhythms of our sentences, the themes of our stories, the use of spoken language, the language of the street

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and verlan22 in the dialogues was, for them, an unbearable assault on a certain idea of literature.

It is not a peremptory generalisation to write that, for historical and political reasons, everything that comes out of the banlieue 23 these days is seen as dangerous, threatening, and potentially destabilising for national unity and collective identity, especially when it comes from young people or, to use the standard euphemism, “youth from the quartiers.” The anathema hanging over this marginal territory is compounded by generational mistrust. All artistic forms rooted in these sulphurous territories induce a twofold response: on the one hand they are seen as potentially destabilising; on the other, they never quite correspond to the established standard and tradition—or to what is given that name. In other words, “banlieue art,” “urban” art, “street art”—whatever you want to call it—is expected to be less good, a little bit inferior, or, in that falsely kind and paternalist tone that our elites so often take, not bad, on the right track, lacking just that little something that would make it acceptable, help it to cross the border separating the rank depths of subculture from the bright airy spaces of Culture.

Another important limitation which may explain why we were misunderstood24 by some1 has to do with the political, or rather engaged quality that we tried to give to our approach by means of our prefatory manifesto, which, in its tone and rhythm, appeared vindictive, injunctive, and rather radical. Some people criticised us for introducing such a dimension into a collection of short stories: for them, “that” was totally out of place. Never mind that France could claim to have invented engaged literature and engaged writers. Never mind that the form of the manifesto could even be regarded as a sub-genre, or rather, a literary “inter-genre.” Never mind that in other times, in the era of the Oulipo25 or well before, the manifesto still possessed a certain legitimacy on the literary continent. For us, artists from the disadvantaged territories, with our mixed cultures, it seemed essential to say out loud, in a separate text, why we had decided to work together and create a collective:

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to do what, and on what basis? But also because, as citizens, artists, and writers, we considered that in a country like France, which for over a century now has accorded such a position to the grand idea of the “intellectual”—of the person who, to quote Sartre’s definition, “meddles in what is not his business”—it was our duty and our responsibility to take position on subjects that we felt were important: deepening inequality, the development of fractures and divisions in our country, the potency of discrimination, racism, and violence… As writers, we tell stories, we imagine personae, we invent characters, but everything we create is created out of raw material: reality, the very reality that we find unbearable and that we want, in our stories, to convey in all its cruelty. And that is also what our manifesto says: our inability to remain indifferent and our resolute intention, using the weapons we have, which are those of writing and literature, to contribute to change, to have an impact, even a very modest one, on the course of events.

What prospects?

After these six years of existence, we have decided to match our ambitions to our resources. From now on, or at least for as long as we have the right means, we have decided to focus on two aspects: the literature of the real and the organisation of debates.

We have defined our priority as developing our literature further, literature in the Stendhalian tradition, the tradition of the real, the literature that speaks of individual suffering, that gives visibility to the oppressed and does justice, at least symbolically, to thwarted and burdened lives. We are thus putting the finishing touches to our second collective work, which can be read for free on our website. A third work, the final phase in our process of collective writing, is currently in progress. Taking the form of a novel, it will open out onto the world and introduce characters who are dealing with contexts and situations

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of oppression. As in the Arab Spring, it will evoke revolt, like a breath of freedom and final rampart against alienation.

We are also planning to organise debates bringing together different disciplines (philosophers, historians, engaged singers, ethnologists, etc.) that may help understand the real, and give meaning to the struggle that is required.

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1 Although the standard translation of the French word banlieue is “suburb,” it is widely agreed that this English word fails to convey the more ghetto-like, housing-project connotations of the French term, especially in this context. I have therefore retained the term banlieue. –Trans.

2 The event that triggered these riots was the deaths of Zied Benna (age 17) and Bouna Traoré (15) in Clichysous-Bois on October 17, 2005 while the pair were fleeing a police patrol.

3 The idea of the “quartier sensible”refers to the term “zones urbaines sensibles” used in urban policy after 1996 to designate struggling infra-urban areas to which special resources would be allocated.

4 Notably in the early 1980s, starting in the Minguettes housing project at Vénissieux in the suburbs of Lyon, and then in the early 1990s at Vaulx-en-Velin, again in the Lyon area, provoked by police blunders.

5 This is a translation of “issu(e) de l’immigration,” the term used in France to designate people living in France who may or may not have French nationality and whose foreign origins go back one or several generations.

6 In June 2005, Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, promised to “clean the banlieues with a Kärcher” (an industrial water-hose cleaner).

7 There are many reasons for this: an ancestral fear of Islam, the Iranian revolution of 1979, 9/11, the Algerian civil war, etc.

8 Like the affair of the niqab, the complete veil worn by no more than roughly 1,500 women in France, which became the subject of a true politico-media feeding frenzy drawing on fears of rampant Islamism and led to a ban on wearing it.

9 As in the popular American slogan from the 1960s, “Black is Beautiful.”

10 Where the proportion is as high as 40% or even 50%. In 2005, Clichy-Monfermeil, where the riots started in 2005, youngsters aged under 20 made up 41% of the population.

11 Also in Clichy-Monfermeil, unemployment among 15-24 year-olds was 37%. In the La Madeleine neighbourhood of Evreux (Normandy), the number of employed rose by 42.2% between 1990 and 1999.

12 The population of the “sensitive urban neighbourhoods” is calculated at 4.4 million. To their number must be added those individuals of immigrant background who don’t live in the ZUS but who are subject to racial and religious discrimination.

13 “Kiffer” (pronounced the same as “Qui Fait”) is a slang verb derived from the Arabic “kif ” and meaning “to really like.”

14 Chroniques d’une société annoncée, 2007, Editions Stock.

15 http://www.quifaitlafrance.com/content/view/45/59/.

16 Dogma95 was launched in 1995 by Danish filmmakers led by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. Its aim, among other things, was to return to a more expressive and more original formal sobriety better able to express contemporary issues. Free of aesthetic ambition and in direct contact with reality, the style of the films produced by this movement was lively, nervy, brutal, and realistic.

17 See in this respect the “Manifeste pour une littérature-monde en français” written and published in 2007, or, around the same time, Donald Morrison’s analysis in Time of “The Death of French Culture.”

18 “Democratic Panthers, possibilités d’un engagement concret, démocratique, efficace et joyeux.” http://www.quifaitlafrance.com/content/view/116/65/ 19 Call made on the programme “T’empêche tout le monde de dormir,” le 15/04/2008. http://www.quifaitlafrance.com/content/view/91/61/ 20 “H de la honte” (= S for Shame) sticker, used as a riposte to media obscenity: http://www.quifaitlafrance.com/content/view/96/65/ 21 Reply to the Nouvel Observateur, http://www.quifaitlafrance.com/content/view/43/55/ 22 Verlan is a form of French slang, which originated in the banlieues, based on the inversion of syllables in a word, the word verlan itself being l’envers – other way round – in reverse. –Trans.

23 Etymologically, the word means “lieu du ban,” the place of the ban, marking the point beyond which the feudal lord could no longer recruit serfs to wage war: in other words, an ancient psychological and geographical frontier marking the limit between the centre and its periphery, the margins.

24 The publication of our collection Chroniques d’une société annoncée was greeted by a number of articles that took a contemptuous, even sarcastic tone, as if the fact of attaching a manifesto stating our conception of a more realist form of engaged literature to a set of works of fiction automatically reduced the weight of our narratives.

25 The Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais in 1960, is dedicated to the investigation of experimental literary forms. –Trans.

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from “no to the war” to 15-M: social movements that are not social movements Amador Fernández-Savater

Culture of the Transition The journalist Guillem Martínez1 has coined the term “Culture of the Transition” (CT) to describe the culture – strictly speaking, the set of ways of seeing, doing and thinking – which has predominated in Spain during the last 30 years, ever since the defeat of the radical movements of the 1970s (the independent workers movement, the counterculture, etc.).

In its essence, CT is a consensus culture, not in the sense that it reaches agreements by debating disagreements, but rather in the sense that, from the outset, it establishes the boundaries of what is possible: democracy and the market provide the only acceptable framework for coexistence and the organization of communal life – end of story. The CT has labored for 30 years, again and again, to impose this “end of story,” declaring “this is above argument,” “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” “the past is the past,” “there is no alternative,” “it’s either this or anarchy,” and so on.

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Conflicts and problems represent potential rifts in the status quo and its division of places, tasks, and power, its determination of who may speak and who may not, of who makes decisions and who must simply obey them, of which words are of value and which ones are merely noise, of which proposals are viable and which ones are foolish, and so on. Since politics consists mainly of asking questions about the ways we can live together, the CT is a profoundly de-politicizing culture: one cannot ask questions about other ways of organizing communal life outside the range of authorized possibilities.

As a consensual, de-problematizing, de-politicizing culture, for three decades the CT ensured its control over reality through its monopoly on discourse and memory, determining how words should circulate and what they should mean, what we should think about and in what terms. It decided what we should remember and from which present day we should do so. For years this monopoly on meaning was put into effect largely by means of a centralized and one-way system of

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information in which only the media had access, the public served as a passive audience, and some subjects were excluded as untouchable.

The CT’s objective, its obsession, is “cohesion.” Its notion of cohesion requires that all of us identify with the roles that we have been assigned to perform: politics is for politicians; communication is the concern of the media; authoritative statements are a privilege reserved for intellectuals and experts; fringe alternatives are the terrain of social movements; and lastly, the war of everyone against everyone else is society’s secret law. Maurice Blanchot defined as “political death” a situation in which we delegate all of our capacities (of thought, of expression, of decision) to a “power of salvation.”2 The CT is this power of salvation. Its form of political death is cohesion; its authority to classify and distribute social roles is based on the management of fear.

Over time, the power of the Culture of Transition has gradually weakened. On the one hand, the fears – of a military coup, of ETA terrorism, of a divided Spain – that were administered and exploited by the CT as its “power of salvation” have gradually diminished. On the other hand, the collective rights associated with the welfare state, which were also part of the consensus, have been progressively lost to privatization, cuts, and general precariousness. The CT is now increasingly viewed as the source of contemporary perils instead of as protection against them.

This disenchantment with the culture of consensus has a long history and has been expressed in a thousand different ways over the years, from abstaining from voting to social movements. It has led to the appearance of the 15-M [15th of May Movement] as a fully central (as opposed to fringe) mass phenomenon in society. On the one hand, 15-M is a defiant, explicit, and noisy rejection of the politics of politicians of every stripe. Its most representative chants and slogans are “they don’t represent us” and “they call it democracy, but it isn’t.”

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On the other hand, it amounts to a practical and positive experiment exploring the slogan-declaration “democracia real ya” (real democracy now) in meetings, occupied places, and all kinds of social networks.

Power struggles have been replaced by active listening, the construction of collective thought, awareness about what everyone is building together, a generous trust in the intelligence of fellow strangers, a rejection of majority and minority blocks, a patient search for allencompassing truths, a constant questioning and re-questioning of the decisions that have been taken, the privilege of debating the process and the effectiveness of its results, to name just a few characteristics.

Social Movements That Are Not Social Movements Although 15-M is the biggest breach we have ever seen in the CT’s wall, it is not without precedent. Other movements have posed questions from below about our life in common and have debated the meaning of what is being done and what is being done to us. They have brought other pasts into the foreground, proposed alternative images of coexistence and presented them in their own images and words, thereby evading the filters of politics and the media.

The gestures and words with the greatest political importance in recent years have invariably come from unforeseen places and groups: examples are the actions of the anti-war titiriteros (puppeteers) during the Goya Prize ceremony in 2003, the SMS messages which brought crowds together in front of the headquarters of the conservative Partido Popular on March 13, 2004, the speech delivered by Pilar Manjón of the Asociación 11-M Afectados del Terrorismo, the anonymous email which led to the V de Vivienda movement in 2006, and the recent tweet rebellion against the Sinde Law. On each of these occasions a strong critical viewpoint was expressed in ways cleverly designed to avoid criminal prosecution, social issues were raised

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without providing a soapbox for politicians, and marginalization or pigeon-holing into “political” or “ideological” categories was avoided.

Being anybody, talking to anybody, and shouting like anybody, was the order of the day. Who was the “we” of “No to the War” or 13-M, of the V de Vivienda or the fight against the Sinde Law? Everyone and no one – people originating from a variety of engagements could be found together in open spaces working politically on solving common problems. Radical action never crops up where it is expected and today that is truer than ever before.

The modes of politicization set in motion by these movements don’t align with the modes of other social movements, old or new. They aren’t incited, managed, or led by militants or activists, as has been the case with squatters or with the civil disobedience or anti-globalization movements, but instead are created by people with no prior political experience. They don’t draw their strength from a programme or an ideology, but rather from a simple personal connection with something that is happening; they don’t identify with the Left or the Right of the political chessboard of the CT; instead they propose an open, all-inclusive, non-identificatory “we” in which there is room for all. Unconnected with any global utopian or alternative schemes for society, they don’t seek to destroy this world in order to build another, but rather to defend and enjoy the only world we have against those who would despoil it.

Thus, these “social movements that are not social movements” might be better described as Unidentified Political Objects. They’re difficult to detect with the radar of traditional critical thinking, due to the lack of purity in what they say and do, to the difficulty of including them alongside alternative or anti-system social movements. A few of us, the devoted abductees of these UPOs, have been tracking them for years. This unseen phenomenon of atypical politicization had its “close encounter” with the advent of the 15-M.

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“No to the War” What lit the spark of the massive protest against the Iraq war? Where did it come from? The strength of the “No to the War” movement arose from the fact that it repeatedly overwhelmed traditional forms of protest in the number and variety of people involved, the languages and ways of taking the streets, and the appearance of unforeseen political actors.

The official Left and its news outlets amplified the discontent, revulsion, and anger. They did not, however, create, induce, rouse, or provoke it. The alternative Left offered meetings, dates, and places where the malaise could be expressed and organized. It did not lead, shape, or give it voice. “No to the War” politically activated countless pre-existing forms of sociability revolving around affinities, kinship, lifestyles, and so on. The protest penetrated the whole of society. It was impossible to marginalize or criminalize the protests by identifying them as the actions of “extremists” or “subversive groups.”

This profoundly radical, decentralized, common ground unexpectedly set into crisis the CT’s basic conceptions of citizenry, democracy, participation, political representation, legality, public space, and so on, conceptions which heretofore had seemed so firmly entrenched.

The mobilization was not only decentralized, it was also completely undefined. The “war politicians” were hounded wherever they appeared. The workplace was transformed into an impromptu debating room. Across the city of Madrid, demonstrations were prolonged in unforeseen ways, preventing an early return to “normality.” Numerous slogans were invented for the occasion, providing a common expressive space with room for everyone. The famous red and black stickers (“No to the War”) were seen everywhere, posters were hung from balconies, groups of friends or schoolmates produced their own banners. The epitome of this extraordinary process may have been the boy in Arganda del Rey who shouted “no

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to the war!” during a meeting with José Aznar, Spain’s Premier at the time, before being forcibly removed from the premises. In short, the mobilization combined the interruption of the monologue of power, the spontaneity and unpredictability of protest, the anonymity of its participants, a touch of “apolitical” naivety or innocence, and, naturally, the hysterical backlash of the powers-that-be.

Out of this rich magma new collective assemblages of enunciation emerged, as in the case of the Cultural Platform Against the War. The unusual Goya Prize ceremony had provided a real rallying cry at the beginning of the mobilization, as protest emerged from precisely the corner from which it had been least expected. Subsequently, the Cultural Platform, which brought together without distinction artists of all kinds and conditions (actors, technicians, musicians, etc.) was established. This group of culture workers played an important role in performing, with “natural” ease, some of the gestures that were to have a profound influence on the style and the imaginary of the demonstrations, including the protest inside Parliament, the banners with the faces of conservative MPs that were borne at the head of one of the big demonstrations, the black balloons of mourning that floated towards Parliament at the end of the demonstration that coincided with the entry of the American military in Iraq, etc. Unidentified political actors, indeed.

“We were all on that train” Contrary to the view of those who were in a hurry to bury the “No to the War” movement, the power of those demonstrations did not diminish as a result of the sequence of events that followed the terrorist attack in Madrid on March 11, 2004. In the wake of the attack, the CT mustered together as one (gathering its notorious “sense of State”) to keep everything under control. Although the slogan of the

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official demonstration, organized by the government the day after the attack, was “with the victims, with the Constitution, for the defeat of terrorism,” the implicit message was: “everybody with their representatives.” Nevertheless, 11-M did not become another 9/11. Quite the opposite: the state of siege imposed on the news media failed to work, racism did not flare up, the security argument did not convince, and the lines dividing friends and enemies were erased, not re-inforced.

Fear, and appeals to the “power of salvation” – that is, the CT – failed to empty the streets. Instead, ordinary people who went out to express their grief and to protest refused to allow the form or content of their protest to be dictated, and in doing so they scuppered the monopoly on feelings and challenged the condition of “political death.”

The hierarchical arrangement of the venues and actions of the CT was suddenly revoked: politicians lost their faculty to represent, the street refused to be silent, the media lost its ability to mould “public opinion.” Emotions could not be relegated to the sphere of privacy; for a moment, society was not primarily defined by “every man for himself,” but rather by a sense of what we have in common.

A powerful upwelling of popular expression shook the monopoly on words — words of grief, of support, of criticism. Mixed, delocalized and wide-ranging words. Slogans, poems, and messages were written in every imaginable medium, place, and language, in improvised shrines, in the streets, and online. This taking control of words overwhelmed the authorized channels and their pet words for representation. At the top they talked about “Spain,”; on the ground they said “all of us are Madrid.” At the top they spoke about “the fight against terrorism,”; on the ground they called for “peace.” It was a discordant multiplication of the word, not arranged in the traditional collective categories of trade unions, political parties, community associations, or social movements.

In the face of the monopoly of subjects, automatic reactions were challenged and questions were posed from the ground up: “who did it?”

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Suddenly, the type of cohesion constantly demanded by the CT became perfectly clear: it was the cohesion of troops or of a herd united by fear of the enemy. But the enemy on the 11th of March was indeterminate.

Was it ETA, al-Qaeda, Basque nationalism, radical Islamism, or Arabs in general? The fact was that a war (an “illegal and unlawful” one) was being waged in Iraq. The fact was that the Spanish government had supported that war and sent troops to participate in it. The fact was that it had shamelessly lied about the causes of that war. The fact was that nearly half the victims of the terrorist attacks were immigrants, many of them Arabs. On the streets the name of the 13-M enemy was radically turned about: “the enemy is the war,” “Madrid = Baghdad.”

Against the monopoly of memory, thousands of improvised shrines sprung up everywhere, while the official minutes of silence were ignored. No one was willing to let others prescribe what they should feel or when they should express it. This very clearly reflected a profound need for open channels of communication and interchange, free of the filters of politics or the media. Put simply, all the power of the CT — its politicians, its media, its experts, and its rituals — provided no help to those who wanted to think and feel freely about what was happening. In this way a whole culture was engulfed by crisis.

“You’re never going to have a house in your whole fucking life” For months, an anonymous email spread like wildfire across the Internet. It called on people to come to demonstrations and sit-ins in the main plazas of Spanish cities on the May 14th, 2006. The objective: to protest against the catastrophic housing situation in Spain. Thousands of people responded to the call and came out to the plazas.

The summons had not originated in a centralized manner, nor had it been arranged by any major group or organization. The call was not to protest against an enemy, but simply to provide expression for a state

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of malaise, a problem, with slogans like “mortgage = life imprisonment.” In a style that evoked the Mexican Zapatistas, the movement used catchwords, like “decent housing,” that were pointedly devoid of explicit political meaning. The sit-ins avoided politicization and the pigeonholing of the subject into Left against the Right or vice versa.

“A chalet like ZP’s (José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s),” “a little flat like the little prince’s,” they demanded. They engaged with everyone and were well received by the public, with smiles, applause, and patient reactions to blocked thoroughfares. They didn’t resort to the urgent “don’t look at us, join us” that was to become one of the slogans used by the indignados of 2011 They took pains to avoid confrontation with the police, even in the wake of the brutal police charges and arbitrary arrests that took place during the second week of the sit-in in Madrid.

“Your children have mortgages too,” demonstrators shouted at police.

Irrespective of its power to draw people, the movement resisted its own ghettoization and in doing so helped to spread the joy.

The movement chose a jokey name: “V de Vivienda” — literally, V for Housing — in reference to the comic book and film V for Vendetta. It did so because its aim was to avoid being named or represented or even identified. “V de Vivienda” had no deep meaning; it was just a funny name which – precisely because there was nothing special about it – allowed everyone to be involved. It’s well-known war cry, which had a profound impact on the social imagination, was “you’re never going to have a house in your whole fucking life.” It was a slogan which broke the common sense associated with the kind of slogans normally employed by social movements: it offered no hope at all (“yes, we can!”), no future (“for a future without poverty!”) and no alternatives (“another world is possible!”). It did, however, pinpoint and bring to light a collective malaise, which until that moment had been experienced – and suffered – in silence and alone.

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If what happened in the wake of 11-M activated the underlying imprint of “No to the War,” the 13-M demonstrations likewise had an obvious effect on V de Vivienda. A self-named, self-organized protest, it concocted slogans on the spur of the moment and was jubilantly regarded as welcoming anonymity and plurality, as providing an accessible, horizontal space in which there were no fights over the authority of its slogan. Its unity was based on listening to one another, since it was clear to everyone that the important thing was not what each person brought individually from their homes, but rather what they could create together. It was a mobilization that sought to communicate, be copied, go viral, and become widespread, and to investigate a common malaise underlying individual identities.

“Online Freedom” At the end of 2009, the governing socialist PSOE party announced its intention to approve the Sinde Law. The objective of this legislation was to allow a committee, dependent on the Ministry of Culture, to shut down file-downloading websites, without trial, simply by obtaining a judge’s approval. The alliance between the culture industry, the star system, political parties, and mass media companies that came together to pass the Sinde Law revealed some of the power lines driving the CT, just as the unprecedented struggle against it, online and off, heralded the rise of a new social power.

From the outset, the anonymous citizenry populating and constructing the Internet began to organize itself, without political parties or ideologies, in order to avoid the creation of an “Internet police” and to defend the Internet as a neutral, free, and common zone. The struggle ran roughshod over classic political dichotomies of Left and Right to bring people together around a single concern: the future of Internet as a space of freedom and interchange. From the activist group called

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Anonymous to the Right-wing blogosphere, opposition to the Sinde Law was at once so massive and so heterogenous that it proved impossible to identify, isolate, or criminalize it. The culture of transversal cooperation transformed the very obstacle of its internal differences into an asset for the purposes of winning a particular fight.

To a large extent the strength of Internet is that it has no representatives. Here and there a few influential people (bloggers, lawyers, etc.) may serve as reference points and may occasionally be invited to discuss matters with the politicians of the moment, but they’re nothing more than temporary spokespersons for a collective intelligence, and they don’t think of themselves as “representatives” of the Internet or its users. Perfectly aware their legitimacy derives only from the fact that they know how to listen to what is happening online, they publicly convey the changes going on beneath the surface and, in the words of the Zapatistas, “give orders while obeying.” This is the exact opposite of how, for example, trade unions function in the world of labour. A union is a fixed, established, and self-referential organ of representation, one which subtracts from and undermines the power of those it represents. As Margarita Padilla has explained, today’s struggles no longer need a vanguard to lead the way, but rather groups to provide political tools while waiving their control over them. Activist groups like the Hacktivists and Anonymous, which played an important role in the fight against the Sinde Law, behave in precisely this fashion.

Designing and setting in motion unfinished mechanisms, they let others act and make decisions, invariably trusting in the intelligence and independence of each individual node on the Internet. 3 In spite of the fact that the proposed law was rejected by Parliament, that its wording was highly dubious from a legal and technical point of view, that the cables released by Wikileaks revealed it to be the consequence of pressure from the USA, and that it was being challenged by a massive social response, the governing PSOE insisted upon passing the law and finally managed to do so, thanks to the votes

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of the conservative Partido Popular and the Catalonian party CiU (Convergence and Unity). The law, however, is utterly delegitimized and dead on arrival; its approval revealed to all not only the basic unity between the establishment Left and Right with regard to the CT, but also a combined insensitivity towards public opinion whenever such opinion refuses to be exploited, not to mention a disdain for any political participation outside of established channels.

15-M: The art of vanishing The CT is a power of representation, classification, and de-politicization. Against it, the “social movements that are not social movements” employ “the art of vanishing.” I am not referring to a style of disappearance, but rather to the sfumato technique which Leonardo made famous, blurring the outlines of shapes to achieve a misty effect in the work of art. This is the secret behind the famous mystery of the Mona Lisa: a rebellion against the sharpness and precise lines which predominated in the academic painting of the day, a positive acceptance of uncertainty and ambiguity, and an openness to change and the unexpected. To vanish is not to become invisible or to build one’s realities only on the fringes; it means to appear blurred, to camouflage oneself in the rules of the game in order to break them from inside, to blur classificatory divisions in order to cross the sociological and ideological boundaries that separate us, to create a protective mist against the labels that would stigmatize or criminalize us. That is also part of the strength of 15-M: its power of non-definition, of blurring.

The movement blurs the traditional opposition between reformers and revolutionaries. Occupying all the public plazas in Spain is the most radical act since the spontaneous demonstration in front of the headquarters of the conservative PP party on the día de reflexión (the day before the general elections) in 2004. Paradoxically, this mass chal-

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lenge has been built with the simplest of tools: non-violence, the idea-power of respect, de-politicized and humanistic language that is accessible to all, the search for consensus at all cost, positive treatment of the police, and so on. Without the element of conflict, the movement would be just another nice “alternative” lifestyle. Without its empathetic and all-inclusive character, it would be just another small, separate “radical” group out of touch with reality.

The movement blurs the classificatory power of stereotypes. Stereotypes are a technique and strategy used by governments, who seek to separate protestors from the rest of the population as though they have nothing in common. “You see, they aren’t normal, they’re violent, they’re hippies, subversives, in short, wolves in sheep’s clothing.” These stereotypes distance us from each other and keep us from sharing a joint space of recognition. They replace sensitive understanding with a prefabricated – and generally disparaging – image. The 15-M protests, however, proved to be very intelligent in this aspect; from the beginning they employed time and ingenuity to defuse the seductive power of labels that are wielded to divide ordinary people. “We are not antisystem,” they declared; “it is the system that is anti-us.”

The movement blurs the borderlines between inside and outside. The people who camped in the Plaza de la Puerta del Sol in Madrid knew from the start that their true strength lay outside the Plaza. In other words, their strength was in a living link to what a friend of mine calls “the motionless part of the movement,” namely the people touched and affected by events in the Plaza even though they have not taken a direct part in the camp. Those who did camp out in didn’t seek separation; they created numerous channels of solidarity, both within the camp and without (by the third day an announcement had to be made asking the people of Madrid to stop donating food because there was no longer anywhere to store it). It was never planned as a utopian “outside” or as another possible world, but rather as an invitation to strangers to come together as equals to join the fight.

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The demand for clarity and precise description which predominates in politics is brought up short by 15-M. Is the movement PSOE or PP? Left or Right? Libertarian or social democratic? Apocalyptic or integrated?

Reformist or revolutionary? Moderate or anti-system? It is, in fact, neither one thing nor the other. The nature of the movement raises as many intriguing questions as the Mona Lisa’s smile. There is no answer to the question, one inevitably raised by the police, about identity. Who are they? What does the 15-M movement want? 15-M is a political antipolitical force: the movement poses radical questions about the ways of organizing communal life that overstep and disrupt the political chessboard of the CT. In order to neutralize its power of questioning, the movement must be assigned an identity: “it’s them,” “they want this,” and so on. Politicians and the media pressure 15-M to become a “reliable delegate,” armed with proposals, programmes, and alternatives at the ready. They know that once a phenomenon acquires an identity it loses its power to ask questions; the identity takes its place on the board (or aspires for one). It is transformed into a predictable factor in political calculations and power relations. It becomes, in short, governable.

Old political practices have conspired, both inside and outside the movement, to try to bring to an end the movement’s power of indefiniteness. From outside by means of repression, by media coercion, by an insistence that “you must define yourselves” in order to be a serious political player; from inside by means of the fear of nothingness, by a fetishism for “results” (as though the results were not already embodied in the process itself), by the urgency in the rhythm of the demonstrations, as well as by ideological elements that would like the movement to be more explicitly something (a social movement, a leftwing movement or a revolutionary movement). Because of this, we must conclude by firmly declaring, as was observed at a meeting in the Plaza de la Puerta del Sol, that “haste and definition are our enemies.”

1 http://www.guillemmartinez.com/ 2 Maurice Blanchot, Escritos políticos, Madrid, Acuarela, 2010.

3 http://www.unalineasobreelmar.net/politizaciones/index.php?title=Politizaciones_en_el_ciberespacio

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Corps charged with maintaining public order and the security of citizens, under orders from the political authorities

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CLAIRE FONTAINE PIGS, 2011

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RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE ITCH, 2011

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Even as it conducts a grand orchestra from one movement to another from clamour to silence and back again the invisible hand, the phantom limb, wonders how to scratch the future it doesn’t have.

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129 COLlABORAtORS

Karim Amellal, a French writer of Algerian descent and professor of political science who lives and works in Paris, is a founding member of the group “Qui Fait la France?”

His work explores multiculturalism, minorities, and discrimination. He is the author of the essay Discriminez-moi!: Enquête sur nos inégalités (Flammarion, Paris, 2006), as well as a novel, Cités à comparaître (Éditions Stock, Paris, 2006). His work also appears in Chroniques d’une société annoncée (Éditions Stock, Paris, 2007), an anthology of short stories.

A philosopher and cultural theorist, Christoph Brunner is currently an associate researcher at the Institute of Critical Theory in the Hochschule der Künste (Zurich). He is completing a doctoral thesis on creativity, research, and the politics of aesthetics at Concordia University in Montreal. He is on the editorial staff of Inflexions: A Journal for Research Creation (www.inflexions.org) and is a member of SenseLab in Montreal (www. senselab.ca). His most recent publications include “On digital mattering, thought and immediation” in Journal for Aesthetics and Culture (forthcoming), “Research-Creation: The Invention of Novel Textures” in Acoustic Space 9 (May 2011), and, as co-editor, Practices of Experimentation: Research and Teaching in the Arts Today (Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich, 2011).

Born in Marseilles, Pierre Bruno lives and works in Paris. He is professor of psychoanalysis at the University of Toulouse II and in the Department of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII. He is author of the recently published books Antonin Artaud, réalité et poésie (L’Harmattan, Paris, 1999), Papiers psychanalytiques, structure et expérience (Presses Universitaires du Mirail, Toulouse, 2004), La passe (Presses Universitaires du Mirail, Toulouse, 2003), and Lacan passeur de Marx (Éditions Érès, Paris, 2010). He has directed the magazines Barca!, devoted to poetry, politics, and psychoanalysis, and Psychanalyse.

Amador Fernández-Savater lives and works in Madrid. He works as an editor at Acuarela Libros (acuarelalibros.blogspot.com). For many years he has directed the magazine Archipiélago and has played an active role in various collective actions in Madrid, including the student, anti-globalization, copyleft, “No to war,” V de Vivienda, and 15-M movements. He is the author of Filosofía y acción (Editorial Límite, Santander, 1999), co-author of Red ciudadana tras el 11-M: cuando el sufrimiento no impide pensar ni actuar (Acuarela Libros, Madrid, 2008), and the coordinator of Con y contra el cine: en torno a Mayo del 68 (UNIA, Seville, 2008). He currently broadcasts the programme Una línea sobre el mar (www.unalineasobreelmar.net), which deals with garage philosophy, on Radio Círculo.

Claire Fontaine describes herself as a “readymade artist,” whose works frequently propose open, choral explorations with an emphasis on social critique, and who is known for her textual installations, making use of messages, billboards, and neon or fluorescent signs situated either in city spaces or art venues. Some of these devices question the onlooker, as is the case of Extranjeros en todas partes and Please, Come Back.

Since its inception, Claire Fontaine’s oeuvre has obtained major recognition, and has been featured in exhibitions in institutions such as the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, PS1 in New York, and, more recently, the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City.

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A visual artist and net activist, Daniel G. Andújar was born in Almoradí, Spain, in 1966, and lives and works in Barcelona. His artistic work deals with control mechanisms and social inequality. In Technologies to the People, he invented a fictitious virtual corporation which seeks to make technological advances accessible to the socially disadvantaged. The project reproduces the imprecision, dissuasive language, mannerisms, and visual archetypes associated with businesses in the digital field. In X-Devian: The New Technologies to the People System (2003), he provided an example within contemporary art of an exploration of the critical and imaginative potential of the world of freeware.

In 2005, he created Postcapital Archive (1989­-2001), a project, consisting of more than 250,000 Internet documents, that traces geopolitical transformations and the situation of communist and capitalist ideologies in the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attack on New York’s Twin Towers. In 2011 he performed A vuelo de pájaro, a series of flights around the Spanish coasts trailing a banner printed with the slogan “Let’s democratize Democracy.”

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Néstor Kohan is assistant researcher at CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas), doctor in social science (Faculty of Social Science, University of Buenos Aires) and assistant professor in sociology in the same faculty. He has published more than fifteen books on social theory. His research, books, articles, and essays have been translated into English, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Basque, Arabic, and Hebrew.

Jade Lindgaard lives and works in Paris. She is a journalist for Mediapart, where she writes about ecology, university politics, and research. She has co-authored Le B.A. BA du BHL: Enquête sur le plus grand intellectuel français (Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 2004) with Xavier de la Porte and co-directed the volume France Invisible (Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 2006) with Stéphane Beaud and Joseph Confavreux. A member of the editorial committee of Mouvements magazine, she has contributed to numerous volumes, including Le dictionnaire des racismes, de l’exclusion et des discriminations (Larousse, Paris, 2010) and La république et ses démons (Éditions Érès, Paris, 2007). She has taken part in numerous critical forums and alterglobalist movements, and since 2007 has played an active role in the Camp Action Climat (campclimat.org) movement.

Frédéric Lordon, who lives and works in Paris, has explored markets and financial crises in numerous research projects over the last 15 years. A researcher at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), he is working on developing a “Spinozist” political economy. He has published L’Intérêt souverain: Essai d’anthropologie économique spinoziste (Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 2006, new edition 2011), Spinoza et les sciences sociales [with Yves Citton] (Paris, Éditions Amsterdam, 2008), Conflits et pouvoirs dans les institutions du capitalisme (Presses de la Fondation des Sciences Politiques, Paris, 2008), Capitalisme, désir et servitud: Marx et Spinoza (La Fabrique Éditions, Paris, 2010), Jusqu’à quand? Pour en finir avec les crises financières (Raisons d’Agir, Paris, 2008), La crise de trop (Fayard, Paris, 2009), as well as a play about the financial crisis, D’un retournement l’autre: Comédie sérieuse en quatre actes et en alexandrins (Éditions Seuil, Paris, 2011).

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Born in Italy in 1971, Roberto Nigro works in Zurich and is Head of Studies at the College Internacional de Philosophie in Paris. He studied philosophy at the universities of Bari, Frankfurt, Paris VIII and Nanterre X, and taught at the American University of Paris, the Freie Universität of Berlin, the University of Basel, and Michigan State University before joining the Institute of Critical Theory in the Hochschule der Künste (Zurich). His publications include essays about Foucault, Althusser, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger. He is the editor of Michel Foucault’s Introduction to Kant´s Anthropology (Semiotexte, Los Angeles, 2008) and, together with Isabell Lorey and Gerald Raunig, of Inventionen: Zur Aktualisierung poststrukturalistischer Theorie (Diaphanes, Berlin and Zurich, 2011). His most recent research projects are two books, one exploring the relationship between Marx and Foucault, and the other with the theory of the coup d’état in modern political thought.

Raqs Media Collective is an arts group, based in New Delhi, consisting of Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Its members have been described variously as artists, media creators, curators, researchers, publishers, and catalysts of cultural processes. Their work, which usually take the form of installations, online and offline media objects, performances, and meetings, and which has been widely exhibited at leading international venues and events, situates them at the crossroads of contemporary art, historical inquiry, philosophical speculation, research, and theory. In 2000 they co-founded Sarai, as part of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDES), in Delhi, and they are members of the editorial staff of the Sarai Reader series.

They took part in curating Manifesta 7 (2008). Raqs is a Persian, Arabic, and Urdu word describing the trance state attained by dervishes as they spin. In a more general sense, the word also means “dance.”

A philosopher and art theorist at the Departement Kunst & Medien, Vertiefung Theorie, of the Hochschule der Künste (Zurich), Gerald Raunig is also co-director of the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies in Vienna (EIPCP), and coordinator of the transnational research projects Republicart (republicart.net, 2002-2005), Transform (transform.eipcp.net, 2005-2008) and Creating Worlds (creatingworlds.eipcp.net, 20092012). In addition, he is a member of the editorial staff of Kulturrisse: Journal for Radical Democratic Cultural Politics (http://www.igkultur.at/kulturrisse). His most recent books are Producción cultural y prácticas instituyentes: Líneas de ruptura en la crítica institucional [edited with Marcelo Expósito and Transform] (Traficantes de Sueños, Madrid, 2008); and Mil máquinas: Breve filosofía de las máquinas como movimiento social (Traficantes de Sueños, Madrid, 2009).

Mohamed Razane, a novelist of Moroccan descent, lives in Épinay-sur-Seine and works in Paris. His writing mirrors our society and other societies marginalized by it. The author of Dit violent (Gallimard, Paris, 2006) and Bêta et Alpha (Éditions Storylab, Paris, 2011), he has also contributed two stories, Garde à vue and Abdel Ben Cyrano, to the anthology Chroniques d’une société annoncée (Éditions Stock, Paris, 2007). He is a founding member and director of the group “Qui Fait La France?”

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William I. Robinson is professor of sociology, global studies, and Latin American studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Originally from New York City, he spent nearly two decades in Central and South America and in East and West Africa.

He is the author of seven books and numerous articles and commentaries about globalization, global society, politics, international relations, social change, development, and Latin American affairs. His most recent book, Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Globalization Perspective (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2008), was awarded the prize for best book about international political economy by the British International Studies Association. His web site is http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/ faculty/robinson.

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JUNTA DE CASTILLA Y LEÓN CONSEJERÍA DE CULTURA Y TURISMO Councillor Dña. Alicia García Rodriguez General Secretary D. José Rodríguez Sanz-Pastor General Director of Cultural Policies D. José Ramón Alonso Peña General Director of Fundación Siglo para las Artes de Castilla y León D. José Luis Fernández de Dios

MUSAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León Director Agustín Pérez Rubio

Press and Communication Professional services by Izaskun Sebastián

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Education and Cultural Action Belén Sola and professional services by Pamela Gallo, Estér Ugarte y María Victoria García Salas Maintenance Mariano Javier Román and professional services by Elecnor S.A. Supporting Services Dalser, S.A. Adquisition Committee D. Agustín Pérez Rubio Dña. María Inés Rodríguez D. Octavio Zaya Dña. Estrella de Diego D. José Guirao Cabrera D. Javier Hernando D. Víctor del Río

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/ collection / issue 0 / year 2010

Model kits Aspects of contemporary LATIN american culture

/ issue 1 / year 2012

strategies in the face of the real limitations and challenges in times of change

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