The Education of Henry Adams

Henry Adams

Thought had more than once been upset, but never caught and whirled about in the vortex of infinite forces. Power leaped from every atom, and enough of it to supply the stellar universe showed itself running to waste at every pore of matter. Man could no longer hold it off. Forces grasped his wrists and flung him about as though he had hold of a live wire or a runaway automobile; which was very nearly the exact truth for the purposes of an elderly and timid single gentleman in Paris, who never drove down the Champs Elysees without expecting an accident, and commonly witnessing one; or found himself in the neighborhood of an official without calculating the chances of a bomb. So long as the rates of progress held good, these bombs would double in force and number every ten years.
Impossibilities no longer stood in the way. One’s life had fattened on impossibilities. Before the boy was six years old, he had seen four impossibilities made actual—the ocean-steamer, the railway, the electric telegraph, and the Daguerreotype; nor could he ever learn which of the four had most hurried others to come. He had seen the coal-output of the United States grow from nothing to three hundred million tons or more. What was far more serious, he had seen the number of minds, engaged in pursuing force—the truest measure of its attraction—increase from a few scores or hundreds, in 1838, to many thousands in 1905, trained to sharpness never before reached, and armed with instruments amounting to new senses of indefinite power and accuracy, while they chased force into hiding-places where Nature herself had never known it to be, making analyses that contradicted being, and syntheses that endangered the elements. No one could say that the social mind now failed to respond to new force, even when the new force annoyed it horribly. Every day Nature violently revolted, causing so-called accidents with enormous destruction of property and life, while plainly laughing at man, who helplessly groaned and shrieked and shuddered, but never for a single instant could stop. The railways alone approached the carnage of war; automobiles and fire-arms ravaged society, until an earthquake became almost a nervous relaxation. An immense volume of force had detached itself from the unknown universe of energy, while still vaster reservoirs, supposed to be infinite, steadily revealed themselves, attracting mankind with more compulsive course than all the Pontic Seas or Gods or Gold that ever existed, and feeling still less of retiring ebb.

De gustibus est disputandum

Theodor Adorno

De gustibus est disputandum. — Even someone believing himself convinced of the non-comparability of works of art will find him­self repeatedly involved in debates where works of art, and precisely those of highest and therefore incommensurable rank, are compared and evaluated one against the other. The objection that such con­siderations, which come about in a peculiarly compulsive way, have their source in mercenary instincts that would measure every­thing by the ell, usually signifies no more than that solid citizens, for whom art can never be irrational enough, want to keep serious reflection and the claims of truth far from the works. This com­ pulsion to evaluate is located, however, in the works of art themselves. So much is true: they refuse to be compared. They want to annihilate one another. Not without cause did the ancients reserve the pantheon of the compatible to Gods or Ideas, but obliged works of art to enter the agon, each the mortal enemy of each. The notion of a ‘pantheon of classicity’, as still entertained by Kierkegaard, is a fiction of neutralized culture. For if the Idea of Beauty appears only in dispersed form among many works, each one nevertheless aims uncompromisingly to express the whole of beauty, claims it in its singularity and can never admit its dispersal without annulling itself. Beauty, as single, true and liberated from appearance and individuation, manifests itself not in the synthesis of all works, in the unity of the arts and of art, but only as a physical reality: in the downfall of art itself. This downfall is the goal of every work of art, in that it seeks to bring death to all others. That all art aims to end art, is another way of saying the same thing. It is this impulse to self-destruction inherent in works of art, their innermost striving towards an image of beauty free of appearance, that is constantly stirring up the aesthetic disputes that are apparently so futile. While obstinately seeking to establish aesthetic truth, and trapping them­selves thereby in an irresoluble dialectic, they stumble on the real truth, for by making the works of art their own and elevating them to concepts, they limit them all, and so contribute to the destruction of art which is its salvation. Aesthetic tolerance that simply acknowledges works of art in their limitation, without breaking it, leads them only to a false downfall, that of a juxtaposition which denies their claims to indivisible truth.

The Man Without Content

Giorgio Agamben

In a traditional system, culture exists only in the act of its transmission, that is, in the living act of its tradition. There is no discontinuity between past and present, between old and new, because every object transmits at every moment, without residue, the system of beliefs and notions that has found expression in it. To be more precise, in a system of this type it is not possible to speak of a culture independently of its transmission, because there is no accumulated treasure of ideas and precepts that constitute the separate object of transmission and whose reality is in itself a value. In a mythical traditional system, an absolute identity exists between the act of transmission and the thing transmitted, in the sense that there is no other ethical, religious, or aesthetic value outside the act itself of transmission.

An inadequation, a gap between the act of transmission and the thing to be transmitted, and a valuing of the latter independently of the former appear only when tradition loses its vital force, and constitute the foundation of a characteristic phenomenon of non-traditional societies: the accumulation of culture. For, contrary to what one might think at first sight, the breaking of tradition does not at all mean the loss or devaluation of the past: it is, rather, likely that only now the past can reveal itself with a weight and an influence it never had before. Loss of tradition means that the past has lost its transmissibility, and so long as no new way has been found to enter into a relation with it, it can only be the object of accumulation from now on. In this situation, then, man keeps his cultural heritage in its totality, and in fact the value of this heritage multiplies vertiginously.

However, he loses the possibility of drawing from this heritage the criterion of his actions and his welfare and thus the only concrete place in which he is able, by asking about his origins and his destiny, to found the present as the relationship between past and future.

For it is the transmissibility of culture that, by endowing culture with an immediately perceptible meaning and value, allows man to move freely toward the future without being hindered by the burden of the past. But when a culture loses its means of transmission, man is deprived of reference points and finds himself wedged between, on the one hand, a past that incessantly accumulates behind him and oppresses him with the multiplicity of its now indecipherable contents, and on the other hand a future that he does not yet possess and that does not throw any light on his struggle with the past. The interruption of tradition, which is for us now a fait accompli, opens an era in which no link is possible between old and new, if not the infinite accumulation of the old in a sort of monstrous archive or the alienation effected by the very means that is supposed to help with the transmission of the old. Like the castle in Kafka's novel, which burdens the village with the obscurity of its decrees and the multiplicity of its offices, the accumulated culture has lost its living meaning and hangs over man like a threat in which he can in no way recognize himself. Suspended in the void between old and new, past and future, man is projected into time as into something alien that incessantly eludes him and still drags him forward, but without allowing him to find his ground in it.

L'uomo senza contenuto

Giorgio Agamben

En un sistema tradicional, la cultura sólo existe en el acto de su transmisión, es decir, en el acto vivo de su tradición. Entre pasado y presente, entre viejo y nuevo, no hay solución de continuidad, porque cada objeto transmite a cada instante, sin residuos, el sistema de creencias y nociones que en él ha encontrado expresión. Para ser más precisos, en un sistema de este tipo no se puede hablar de una cultura independientemente de su transmisión, porque no existe un patrimonio acumulado de ideas y de preceptos que constituya al objeto separado de la transmisión y cuya realidad sea en sí misma un valor. En un sistema mítico-tradicional, entre acto de transmisión y cosa a transmitir existe una identidad absoluta, en el sentido de que no hay otro valor ético ni religioso ni estético que no sea el acto mismo de la transmisión.

Una inadecuación, una desviación entre acto de la transmisión y cosa a transmitir y una valorización de ésta última independientemente de su transmisión, solamente aparece cuando la tradición pierde su fuerza vital, y constituye el fundamento de un fenómeno característico de las sociedades no-tradicionales: la acumulación de cultura.

Al contrario de lo que puede parecer a primera vista, la ruptura de la tradición no significa de ninguna manera la pérdida o desvalorización del pasado, es más, probablemente sólo ahora el pasado se revele en cuanto tal, con un peso y una influencia antes desconocidos. En cambio, pérdida de la tradición significa que el pasado ha perdido su transmisibilidad y, hasta que no se encuentre una nueva forma de entrar en relación con él, sólo puede ser, a partir de ese momento, objeto de acumulación. En esta situación, el hombre, que conserva íntegramente su propia herencia cultural, e incluso el valor de ésta se multiplica vertiginosamente, sin embargo, pierde la posibilidad de extraer de ella el criterio de su acción y de su salud, y con ello el único lugar concreto en el que, interrogándose sobre sus orígenes y sobre su destino, le resulta posible fundar el presente como relación entre pasado y futuro. En efecto, es su transmisibilidad la que, al atribuirle a la cultura un sentido y un valor que se pueden percibir inmediatamente, permite al hombre moverse libremente hacia el futuro sin estar acosado por el peso de su propio pasado. Pero cuando una cultura pierde sus medios de transmisión, el hombre se encuentra falto de puntos de referencia y atrapado entre un pasado que se acumula incesantemente a sus espaldas y lo oprime con la multiplicidad de sus contenidos, convertidos en indescifrables, y un futuro que todavía no posee y que no le proporciona ninguna luz en su lucha contra el pasado. La ruptura de la tradición, que hoy, para nosotros, es un hecho consumado, abre una época en la que entre lo viejo y lo nuevo ya no hay ningún vínculo posible más que la infinita acumulación de lo viejo en una especie de archivo monstruoso o el extrañamiento provocado por el mismo medio que debería servir para su transmisión. Al igual que el castillo de Kafka, que se yergue imponente sobre el pueblo, con la oscuridad de sus decretos y la multiplicidad de sus oficinas, así la cultura acumulada ha perdido su significado vivo y oprime al hombre como una amenaza en la que no puede reconocerse de ninguna manera. Suspendido en el vacío, entre lo viejo y lo nuevo, entre el pasado y el futuro, el hombre es arrojado en el tiempo como en algo extraño que se le escapa incesantemente y que aun así lo arrastra hacia adelante sin encontrar en él su propio punto de consistencia.

Chernobyl Prayer, A Chronicle of the Future

Svetlana Alexievich

That’s right. We can’t catch up with reality.

Here is an example. We’re still using the old concepts of ‘near and far’, ‘them and us’. But what do ‘near’ and ‘far’ actually mean after Chernobyl, when, by day four, the fallout clouds were drifting above Africa and China? The earth suddenly became so small, no longer the land of Columbus’s age. That world was infinite. Now we have a different sense of space. We are living in a space that is bankrupt. What is more, over the last hundred years people have begun to live longer, yet our lifespan is still tiny compared to the life of the radionuclides that have settled on our land. Many of them will live for thousands of years. We can’t dream of even a glimpse of such a distant future! In their presence, you experience a new sense of time. And this is all Chernobyl, its imprint. The same thing is happening to our relationships with the past, science fiction, knowledge. The past has proved impotent, and all that is left of knowledge is an awareness of how little we know. [...]

Everything has changed, except us.

It takes at least fifty years for an event to become history, but here we have to follow the trail while it is still fresh.

The Zone. It is a world of its own. First it was invented by science-fiction authors, then literature gave way to reality. We cannot go on believing, like characters in a Chekhov play, that in a hundred years’ time mankind will be thriving. Life will be beautiful! We have lost that future. A hundred years on, we have had Stalin’s Gulags and Auschwitz. Chernobyl. And September 11 in New York. It is hard to comprehend how all this could happen within one generation, within the lifetime of my father, for example, who is now eighty-three years old. Yet he survived it!

What lingers most in my memory of Chernobyl is life afterwards: the possessions without owners, the landscapes without people. The roads going nowhere, the cables leading nowhere. You find yourself wondering just what this is: the past or the future.

It sometimes felt to me as if I was recording the future.

Francis Alÿs on his embedment with the Kurdish Army in Mosul

Francis Alÿs

I AM AFRAID IT WOULD BE DIFFICULT to give a coherent account of my embedment with the Peshmerga, for it was anything but coherent. I arrived in Iraq on October 28 with the intention of documenting the displacements caused by the Mosul offensive against ISIS. Yet, for a series of tactical reasons, I instead found myself dropped somewhere along the fourteen-mile Iraqi Kurdistan military Peshmerga’s front line on the eastern flank of Mosul, with a small bag and no plan of action. At first, the stupefying reality of combat and the smell of terror nearby numbed me and frustrated any proper creative process. However, as I had to somehow make contact with my Peshmerga guardian angels, drawing turned out to be a providential way of communicating, plus it gave me the illusion of being part of the scene. Images started filling my notebook and words soon followed.

Fighting the jetlag, breaking the ice, waiting for the subjects to forgive my presence. Early night / foreground sound track of mobile phones playing Arab rap with background music of the US-led coalition bombardment.

Sunday, October 30, 2016

Earthworks. The Peshmerga offensive is a massive engineering enterprise, a monumental Land art operation. Behind each platoon there is a bulldozer waiting. Every hundred meters of gained territory results in hundreds of tons of dry earth pushed forward, all in order to move the front line ever closer to the suburbs of Mosul. Landscape is refashioned daily by the shelling, ISIS’s tunnels are behind, under, and beyond our mobile front line; the dunes are scarred by the infinite lines of trenches while on the Syrian-Iraqi border ISIS’s bulldozers breach a passage through a hill to erase the Sykes–Picot Agreement’s fatal design.

The desert is no longer an exotic escape. It’s pure naked exposure. The closest to protection from the snipers is by running from one shadow to another.

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

In an era when any insignificant event is instantly public online—and governments are tapping millions of cell phones—how on earth is it possible that no intelligence whatsoever can tell us how many ISIS fighters are left in Mosul? There lies the power of terror.

Heard among the Peshmerga returning from a village they just freed: “This morning they were shooting at us; this afternoon they receive us with open arms, as if nothing had happened.”

Thinking of the Yazidi kids of the refugee camp near Dohuk I visited in February 2016. What can we tell to a child in the face of terror? In a child’s imagination, what is the image of terror? How can one make sense of terror to a child? How can one integrate the un-acceptable? Can a human tragedy be testified to by way of a fictional work?

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

In the midst of gunfire the rain caught us all by surprise. What could the ISIS fighters possibly make of the rain? Strangely it brought us closer, we shared that moment. Did I film the rain?

Thursday, November 3, 2016

Second day of trying to match on small canvases the colors of the scenes I’m witnessing in an attempt to coincide with the moment I am living—this is the abstraction of war within the spectacle of combat. Meanwhile, I watch a Peshmerga rushing to take a selfie on the background of an exploding rocket. The smiles of this war will be well kept in cell phones, in between photos of sweethearts and motorcycles. What happens in Mosul stays in Mosul.

The Mosul offensive is like the making of a movie: 90 percent waiting, 10 percent action. With tea and Turkish biscuits served in the intermezzo.

The white flags waved on the Mosul rooftops against the sky blacked out by the smoke provoked by the bombings.

In the absence of language, I miss the way in which talking helps to materialize an idea.

Furat (Iraqi friend filmmaker), referring to European ISIS volunteers: “The young Europeans did not live a war. All they know is through video games. They come here because they live war as a fiction.”

Figures
50,000 euros = classic bomb GBU-US
200,000 euros = missile AASM
600,000 euros = cruise missile SCALP
500 to 750 USD = daily pay of a private security contractor in Iraq
435 USD = monthly pay of a Peshmerga fighter

The disturbing beauty of counter-light explosions at dusk.

Friday, November 4, 2016

Quel est l’enjeu? What’s more absurd? When the Big Friendly General fires his cannon into the suburbs of Mosul to entertain the accompanying press, or when I play my commedia dell’arte in the face of terror? What does it mean to make art while Nimrud and Palmyra are being destroyed? If ISIS’s logic is “destroy to exist,” does it mean we ought to create in order to survive? Is art just a means of survival through the catastrophe of war? Do we live because we narrate? In classic Arab literature, poetry fixes things and fractures the past from the present. Within a situation of continuous conflict, does memory allow us to reinvent/reset ourselves and escape the vicious circle in which violence calls for more violence? “It’s not about turning your back, it’s about how you turn your back.” (Elias Khoury, Beirut, November 2015)

I against my brothers,
I and my brothers against my cousins,
I and my brothers and my cousins against the stranger.
(Arab saying)

— As told to Laura Hoffmann

Empire, Resource Imperialism after the West

Martin Arboleda

Capitalism is unique, Neil Smith considered, in that for the first time in history, human beings produce nature at a world scale. When one looks at the sheer technological sophistication and the magnitude at which the mining industry wrests minerals from the soil to swiftly move them around by air, land, and sea, it becomes possible to start grasping the full extent of Smith’s provocative assertion. The relentless robotization and computerization advanced by the mining industry during recent decades makes almost any other sector of social production today seem rudimentary at best. Although Google engineers have been testing prototypes for a self-driving car that could tentatively be released into the market at some point during the 2020s, mining companies have been operating with fully robotized vehicles since 2008. These driverless trucks, pioneered by BHP in association with the Japanese giant Komatsu, are fully autonomous and dwarf, in size and cargo capacity, any type of wheeled haulage machinery. Besides autonomous trucks, mining companies have harnessed advances in robotics, control systems, and materials science in order to mechanize and computerize parts of the extraction process. This has allowed them to introduce automatic drills, smelters, locomotives, cranes, and other technological elements to diverse segments of the supply chain. Moreover, the introduction of geospatial information systems (GIS), artificial intelligence, and geological modeling tools to mineral forecasting has allowed companies to extract low-grade ore bodies profitably for the first time in history, especially without the burden, timescales, and costs of drilling boreholes. By making use of GIS, electromagnetic waves, and 3-D visualization methods imported from videogaming technologies, geologists and engineers can now develop very accurate representations of the subsurface in order to design the most effective mine plan.
According to Ernest Mandel, each epochal shift in capitalist society demands a qualitative leap forward in the technical process, which can only be attained by means of a new generation of machines. Major theories of global political economy in the Marxist tradition have typically considered epoch-making shifts and technological revolutions of the type Mandel described to go hand in hand with a new structure of geopolitical relations. Such relations are typically understood as driven by empire-building projects whereby a new “hegemon” mobilizes the powers of science and technology in order to achieve trade dominance. This was the claim advanced by the influential accounts of world-systems analysis as well as by the related approaches of dependency theory and Latin American structuralism. Studies of capitalism in the longue durée have associated the existing resource-extraction frontiers—sugarcane in the sixteenth century, peat in the eighteenth, rubber and coal in the nineteenth, oil and iron ore in the twentieth—with the pursuit for world dominance by Western imperial powers. The so-called “fourth industrial revolution,” considered by pundits to be an era of technological innovation whose breadth and dynamism supersede those of previous historical epochs, seems to be lacking its proverbial hegemon. Yet, paradoxically, this allegedly postcolonial, postpolitical context has witnessed the expansion of mineral-extraction frontiers and the concomitant clearing of peasantries from the land to an extent that is entirely without precedent in human history.
This chapter sets out to solve such a paradox by arguing that existing studies have tended to confuse the political/historical forms of appearance of capitalist imperialism with their underlying content in the production and valorization of value, a process whose existence not only transcends the political mediation of domestic spheres of accumulation but is ontologically prior to them. The purpose of the chapter is therefore to posit the world market (not the nation-state or even the interstate system) as the analytical starting point from which the nature of resource imperialism can be most adequately fleshed out. This entails an analytical dissection of the “fetishized” or “alienated” imperialist political forms, which are sensuous and fragmented (e.g., militarization, debt peonage, internal colonialism, dependency), from their essential foundations in the movement of value, a process that is suprasensuous and systemic. Philosophically speaking, this entails capturing how the essential level (the total surplus value of society) acquires phenomenal reality in sensuous experience via the messy materialities and entanglements of firms and states. The reading proposed here is thus inspired by Marx’s appropriation of the Hegelian conception of the inverted world, which posits reality as the unity of two contradictory movements. For Marx, capital is a “sensuous supersensible thing.” This means that the reality of liberal society is a product of the movement of opposites, between self-determined activity and its independent appearance in the autonomized forms of political power. The categorical critique that this chapter proposes involves deciphering the practical and human content that underlies such alienated forms.
To develop a reading of the production of resource frontiers in the context of global capital accumulation, I build upon value-theoretical interpretations of the world economy whose methodological approach has consisted of a logical progression from the determination of the total surplus value of society—the world market—to its organization into individual parts—national economies and individual capitals. Some of these approaches, the chapter shows, have emerged not only from the form-analysis tradition, but also from a radical strand of Latin American theories of dependency, which has considered class relations to precede those of the nation-state. On this basis, and as opposed to dominant readings, the chapter argues that resource imperialism is not autonomously determined by the locational strategies of transnational firms or by the political dynamics of the nation-state. According to Vivek Chibber, one of the most salient aspects of the classical theories of imperialism that emerged in the context of the Second International was that they sought to decipher the deep economic forces that underpinned what on the surface appeared to be autonomous political projects. With this, I intend to shift the focus from political theories of imperialism to those that place a greater emphasis on economic and systemic determinations. Accordingly, developing a theory of imperialism that takes seriously the essential unity of global capital accumulation is a matter of intellectual and political urgency, especially in the context of a new international division of labor that destabilizes the geometries of power of an interstate system originally structured around global North/global South and West/non-West binaries.
In the first section of the chapter, I briefly review how major intellectual traditions have traditionally considered the making of resource peripheries as linked to empire-building projects and, more generally, to the direct political-economic relations of an interstate system. By means of Mandel’s periodization of industrial capitalism, I excavate the scientific-technological revolutions that have enabled access to raw materials across previous historical cycles of accumulation. The second section goes on to assess the historical specificity of what I term the fourth machine age. “This advance in modern science and technology, I argue, has been crucial in the processes that have repositioned the gravitational center of the world economy toward the Pacific Ocean. In the third section, the chapter builds upon value-theoretical readings of global capitalism in order to lay out an alternative framework of resource imperialism that can grasp the nature of capitalism as a planetary socionatural system but also takes seriously the evolving forms of political authority and extraeconomic force that mediate its complex metabolism. The final section grounds and spatializes these theoretical insights by exploring the spaces of extraction that have emerged as the Asian Tigers consolidate themselves as the world’s main buyers of raw materials.

Empire and Technologies of Extraction

An exploration of the colonial histories and geographies of the last six centuries reveals how natural-resource frontiers are internally related to the constitution of the very fabric of modernity. Without the fabulous material wealth drawn from the sugarcane plantations of Brazil and the silver mines of Potosí (now in Bolivia) in the sixteenth century, for example, the cultural, artistic and political efflorescence that characterized the so-called Golden Century of the Habsburg dynasty in the Iberian Peninsula would have never existed. Likewise, the first industrial revolution that took place in nineteenth-century England would have been unthinkable without the rubber, guano, and coal frontiers that dramatically expanded across the Atlantic Ocean in order to feed machines, crops, and workers in the heartland of the British Empire. World-systems analysis is perhaps one of the most, if not the most, influential intellectual traditions explaining such relations of interdependence in the configuration of the space economy of capitalism. Immanuel Wallerstein, a key proponent of this strand of thought, starts from the assumption that states are the expression of power in a capitalist world economy as they enforce the appropriation of value from the bourgeois class. As a fractured and uneven system, such appropriation of value unfolds along constant pressure from the strong against the weak, and thus a polarized system of “core” and “peripheral” states is summoned into existence. The political relations of imperialist expansion, so the argument goes, translate into economic relations of unequal exchange between cores and peripheries.
Such world systems are dispersed across space but also across time, and for this reason one of the key features of world-systems analysis is its opposition to the so-called “two-century model” that views the capital form as an offspring of the first industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. Giovanni Arrighi’s influential account of systemic cycles of accumulation explains the genesis and evolution of world systems in the longue durée, with the fifteenth century as its starting point. For him, the initial formation and subsequent expansion of the world system to its present global all-encompassing dimensions can be broken down into four, partly overlapping systemic cycles of accumulation: a Genoese-Iberian cycle that stretches from the fifteenth through the early seventeenth; a Dutch cycle, stretching from the late sixteenth century to the late eighteenth; a British cycle, stretching from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth; and a US cycle, stretching from the late nineteenth century to what he saw as the wave of economic expansion taking place in the late twentieth and early twenty-first. In Arrighi’s formulation, a systemic cycle is superseded once an emergent core state is able to consolidate itself by means of material and financial expansion and achieve trade dominance.
The inherited epistemological frameworks and historical assumptions introduced by world-systems analysis have been fundamental to how primary-commodity production has been understood across disciplines and intellectual traditions. Stephen Bunker and Paul Ciccantell’s “new historical materialist” study of natural resource frontiers, for example, is directly anchored to Arrighi’s formulation of systemic cycles of accumulation. However, Bunker and Ciccantell depart from Arrighi’s reading because they place the gravitational focus not on finance but on primary commodities. The crux of the question, these authors argue, lies in the capacity of ascending imperial powers to secure and maintain access to raw materials through scientific and technological innovation. As industries in the “core” become more capitalized and the ratio of dead labor to living labor rises along with productivity, access to an increasing amount of resources in increasingly remote “peripheries” needs to be secured. This imposes the need to reduce transport costs, so a characteristic feature of each systemic cycle of accumulation is that the ascending economy is able to introduce technological innovations that allow for an increase in the scale and efficiency of transport. Larger and more efficient ships, ports, railways, warehouses, and other forms of transport infrastructure, according to Bunker and Ciccantell, have played fundamental roles in the competition of states for global trade dominance.
The ascent of the Dutch to trade dominance, for example, was to a large extent a result of the introduction of technologies to maneuver oak and pine wood in order to build lighter and more efficient hulls—the Dutch fluyt. In this dawn of modern technics, which Lewis Mumford terms the eotechnic phase, the water-and-wood industrial complex set the foundations for experimental science on mathematics, exact measurement, and timing. The shift to the paleotechnic phase—which in Mandel’s periodization corresponds to the first technological revolution—built upon the previous scientific revolutions and inaugurated a coal-and-iron complex that relied on new resources such as aluminum, cassiterite, manganese, petroleum, and rubber. The production of automatic systems of machinery feeding upon and at the same time expanding these new resource frontiers, Bunker and Ciccantell argue, allowed the British to achieve trade dominance and set into motion a new systemic cycle of accumulation. Innovations in motor design allowed them to introduce mechanized ships that gradually but irrevocably doomed the sailing ships inherited from the previous systemic cycle. This opened new possibilities for expanding resource peripheries in more remote geographies. Rubber, in particular, performed key mechanical functions in conveyor belts, pads for moving parts that rubbed against each other, insulation for cables, and tires for wheels that made machines mobile. The rubber boom that followed the consolidation of the British Empire, Bunker and Ciccantell note, vastly reconfigured the geography of the Amazon, producing major social and environmental destruction. The British Empire remained unchallenged until the United States pioneered the process of Bessemer conversion for iron-ore smelting, which made durable steel that was cheap enough for mass production.
Bessemer steel production facilitated unprecedented mechanization of agriculture, extraction, and industry, as well as the rapid transport of raw materials that consolidated the US as a new imperial power after the mid-nineteenth century. Maximum ore cargos increased from 1,000 tons in the 1870s to 3,000 tons when the first steel ships were built in 1886. The invention and proliferation of the internal-combustion engine, which for Mandel marks the “second technological revolution,” allowed the US to further improve transport technologies and substantially reduce the turnover times of capital. Iron-ore mines swelled in size and grew in numbers after these key technological breakthroughs, which ensured US hegemony until Japan devised new computerized technologies for iron-ore smelting, which in turn dramatically improved ships in both propulsion and cargo capacity. The systemic cycle that Bunker and Ciccantell ascribe to the ascendancy of Japan corresponds to the “third technological revolution” (electronic and nuclear-powered apparatuses) in Mandel’s periodization.
Despite their differences in scope and method, what cuts across these world-systems perspectives on resource extraction is that they are underpinned by a deeply rooted methodological nationalism that views these historical transformations as a result of interactions between states or systems of states. In general terms, methodological nationalism has been understood as a metatheoretical orientation that conflates society with the state and the national territory. Most importantly, though, it has also been understood as an approach that isolates internal and external factors in explanations of development, giving more prevalence to the former. As Brenner suggests, although Wallerstein’s concept of the modern world system is framed on the basis of an attempt to supersede state-centric models of capitalist modernity, national territories remain pivotal within the whole theoretical edifice. Although the division of labor in the capitalist world economy is considered to be structured in accordance with three supranational zones (core, periphery, semiperiphery), Wallerstein’s reading consistently places the focus on the specific historical trajectories and dynamics of nation-states. Transnational corporations, infrastructural megadevelopments, and circuits of capital, according to Brenner, remain secondary in Wallerstein’s approach. In the end, the primary geographical units of global space remain defined by the territorial boundaries of domestic spheres of accumulation.
A very similar methodological and metatheoretical orientation informs other predominant approaches to natural-resource governance and extraction, such as theories of natural-resource curse, ecological economics, and the Latin American schools of structuralism, dependency theory, and post-extractivismo. Latin American structuralism is perhaps the most influential intellectual tradition of this group. Its most renowned author was the Argentinean economist Raúl Prebisch, who also served as the executive director of the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in the 1950s. Prebisch’s ideas, it should be pointed out, were formative in Wallerstein’s theorization of the modern world system and in the theories of dependency that emerged from the 1960s onward. The basic tenet of the structuralist framework, according to Cristóbal Kay is that international commerce reproduces the inequalities between the center and the periphery. This theoretical framework was devised by ECLAC structuralist economists to make sense of the incorporation of Latin American nations into the international division of labor as suppliers of raw materials. The common thread that cuts across all such approaches, according to recent critiques, is a presupposition of the nation-state as internally constituted by its own domestic context. Accordingly, international commerce is therefore construed as being the process of interaction between these abstractly autonomous spheres of national accumulation. As Enrique Dussel explains, Latin American theories of dependency gave prevalence to the surface appearance of dependency—i.e., its historical manifestation in underdeveloped economies. This, in his view, led to a state-centric reading of the interstate system that was oblivious to the operation of the law of value on a world scale—its essence.

The Theater and Its Double

Antonin Artaud

Every real effigy has a shadow which is its double; and art must falter and fail from the moment the sculptor believes he has liberated the kind of shadow whose very existence will destroy his repose. 

Like all magic cultures expressed by appropriate hieroglyphs, the true theater has its shadows too, and, of all languages and all arts, the theater is the only one left whose shadows have shattered their limitations. From the beginning, one might say its shadows did not tolerate limitations. 

Our petrified idea of the theater is connected with our petrified idea of a culture without shadows, where, no matter which way it turns, our mind (esprit) encounters only emptiness, though space is full. 

But the true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way. The actor does not make the same gestures twice, but he makes gestures, he moves; and although he brutalizes forms, nevertheless behind them and through their destruction he rejoins that which outlives forms and produces their continuation. 

The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything—gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness-rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. 

And the fixation of the theater in one language—written words, music, lights, noises—betokens its imminent ruin, the choice of anyone language betraying a taste for the special effects of that language; and the dessication of the language accompanies its limitation. 

For the theater as for culture, it remains a question of naming and directing shadows: and the theater, not confined to a fixed language and form, not only destroys false shadows but prepares the way for a new generation of shadows, around which assembles the true spectacle of life.

Noise - The Political Economy of Music

Jacques Attali

LISTENING
For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. 
Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise. 
Today, our sight has dimmed; it no longer sees our future, having constructed a present made of abstraction, nonsense, and silence. Now we must learn to judge a society more by its sounds, by its art, and by its festivals, than by its statistics. By listening to noise, we can better understand where the folly of men and their calculations is leading us, and what hopes it is still possible to have. 
In these opening pages, I would like to summarize the essential themes of this book. The supporting argument will follow. 
Among sounds, music as an autonomous production is a recent invention. Even as late as the eighteenth century, it was effectively submerged within a larger totality. Ambiguous and fragile, ostensibly secondary and of minor importance, it has invaded our world and daily life. Today, it is unavoidable, as if, in a world now devoid of meaning, a background noise were increasingly necessary to give people a sense of security. And today, wherever there is music, there is money. Looking only at the numbers, in certain countries more money is spent on music than on reading, drinking, or keeping clean. Music, an immaterial pleasure turned commodity, now heralds a society of the sign, the immaterial for sale, the social relation unified in money. 
It heralds, for it is prophetic. It has always been in its essence a herald of times to come. Thus, as we shall see, if it is true that the political organization of the twentieth century is rooted in the political thought of the nineteenth, the latter is almost entirely present in embryonic form in the music of the eighteenth century. 
In the last twenty years, music underwent yet another transformation, forecasting a change in social relations. Already, material production is supplanted by the exchange of signs. Showbusiness, the star system and the hit parade signal a profound institutional and cultural colonization. Music makes mutations audible. It obliges us to invent categories and new dynamics to regenerate social theory, which today has become crystallized, entrapped, moribund. 
Music, as a mirror of society, calls this truism to our attention: society is much more than economistic categories, Marxist or otherwise, would have us believe. 
Music is more than an object of study: it is a way of perceiving the world; a tool of understanding. Today no theorizing accomplished through language or mathematics any longer suffices; it is incapable of accounting for what is essential in time – the qualitative and the fluid, threats and violence. In the face of the growing ambiguity of the signs being used and exchanged, the most well established concepts are crumbling and every theory is wavering. The available representations of the economy, trapped within frameworks erected in the seventeenth century or, at latest, towards 1850, can neither predict, describe nor even express what awaits us. 
It is thus necessary to imagine radically new theoretical forms in order to speak to new realities. Music, the organization of noise, is one such form. It reflects the manufacture of society; it constitutes the audible waveband of the vibrations and signs that make up society. An instrument of understanding, it prompts us to decipher a sound form of knowledge. 
My intention here is thus not only to theorize about music, but to theorize through music. The result will be unusual and unacceptable conclusions about music and society, the past and the future. That is perhaps why music is so rarely listened to and why – as with every facet of social life for which the rules are breaking down (sexuality, the family, politics) – it is censored; people refuse to draw conclusions from it. 
In [Noise: The Political Economy of Music], music will be presented as originating in ritual murder, of which it is a simulacrum, a minor form of sacrifice heralding change. We will see that in this capacity it was an attribute of religious and political power, that it signified order, but also that it prefigured subversion. Then, after entering into commodity exchange, it participated in the growth and creation of capital and the spectacle. Fetishized as a commodity, music is illustrative of the evolution of our entire society: de-ritualize a social form, repress an activity of the body, specialize its practice, sell it as a spectacle, generalize its consumption, then see to it that it is stockpiled until it loses its meaning. Today, music heralds – regardless of what the property mode of capital will be – the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen any more. But at the same time, it heralds the emergence of a formidable subversion, one leading to a radically new organization never yet theorized, of which self-management is but a distant echo. 
In this respect, music is not innocent: unquantifiable and unproductive, a pure sign that is now for sale, it provides a rough sketch of the society under construction, a society in which the informal is mass-produced and consumed, in which difference is artificially recreated in the multiplication of semi-identical objects. 
No organized society can exist without structuring differences at its core. No market economy can develop without erasing those differences in mass production. The self-destruction of capitalism lies in this contradiction, in the fact that music leads a deafening life: an instrument of differentiation, it has become a locus of repetition. It itself becomes undifferentiated, goes anonymous in the commodity, and hides behind the mask of stardom: it makes audible what is essential in the contradictions of the developed societies: an anxiety-ridden quest for lost difference, following a logic from which difference is banished. 
Art bears the mark of its time. Does that mean that it is a clear image? A strategy for understanding? An instrument of struggle? In the codes that structure noise and its mutations we glimpse a new theoretical practice and reading: establishing relations between the history of people and the dynamics of the economy on the one hand, and the history of the ordering of noise in codes on the other; predicting the evolution of one by the forms of the other; combining economics and aesthetics; demonstrating that music is prophetic and that social organization echoes it. 
This is not an attempt at a multidisciplinary study, but rather a call to theoretical indiscipline, with an ear to sound matter as the herald of society. The risk of wandering off into poetics may appear great, since music has an essential metaphorical dimension: ‘For a genuine poet, metaphor is not a rhetorical figure but a vicarious image that he actually beholds in place of a concept.’ (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy) 
Yet music is a credible metaphor of the real. It is neither an autonomous activity nor an automatic indicator of the economic infrastructure. It is a herald, for change is inscribed in noise faster than it transforms society. Undoubtedly, music is a play of mirrors in which every activity is reflected, defined, recorded and distorted. If we look at one mirror, we see only an image of another. But at times a complex mirror game yields a vision that is rich, because unexpected and prophetic. At times it yields nothing but the swirl of the void. 
Mozart and Bach reflect the bourgeoisie’s dream of harmony better than and prior to the whole of nineteenth-century political theory. There is in the operas of Cherubini a revolutionary zeal rarely attained in political debate. Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix say more about the liberatory dream of the 1960s than any theory of crisis. The standardized products of today’s shows, hit parades and showbusiness are pathetic and prophetic caricatures of future forms of the repressive channeling of desire. 
The cardinal importance of music in announcing a vision of the world is nothing new. For Marx, music is the ‘mirror of reality’ ‘expression of truth’; for Freud, a ‘text to decipher’. It is all of that, for it is one of the sites where mutations first arise and where science is secreted: ‘If you close your eyes, you lose the power of abstraction’ (Michel Serres). It is all of that, even if it is only a detour on the way to addressing man about the works of man, to hearing and making audible his alienation, to sensing the unacceptable immensity of his future silence and the wide expanse of his fallowed creativity. Listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political. 

THE SOUNDS OF POWER - NOISE AND POLITICS
More than colors and forms, it is sounds and their arrangements that fashion societies. With noise is born disorder and its opposite: the world. With music is born power and its opposite: subversion. In noise can be read the codes of life, the relations among men. Clamor, Melody, Dissonance, Harmony; when it is fashioned by man with specific tools, when it invades man's time, when it becomes sound, noise is the source of purpose and power, of the dream-Music. It is at the heart of the progressive rationalization of aesthetics, and it is a refuge for residual irrationality; it is a means of power and a form of entertainment. 
Everywhere codes analyze, mark, restrain, train, repress, and channel the primitive sounds of language, of the body, of tools, of objects, of the relations to self and others. 
All music, any organization of sounds is then a tool for the creation or consolidation of a community, of a totality. It is what links a power center to its sub- jects, and thus, more generally, it is an attribute of power in all of its forms. Therefore, any theory of power today must include a theory of the localization of noise and its endowment with form. Among birds a tool for marking territorial boundaries, noise is inscribed from the start within the panoply of power. Equivalent to the articulation of a space, it indicates the limits of a territory and the way to make oneself heard within it, how to survive by drawing one's sustenance from it. And since noise is the source of power, power has always listened to it with fascination. 

Rabelais and his world

Mikhail Bakhtin

Rabelais' images have a certain undestroyable nonofficial nature. No dogma, no authoritarianism, no narrow-minded seriousness can coexist with Rabelaisian images; these images are opposed to all that is finished and polished, to all pomposity, to every ready-made solution in the sphere of thought and world outlook. This accounts for Rabelais' peculiar isolation in the successive centuries. He cannot be approached along the wide beaten roads followed by bourgeois Europe's literary creation and ideology during the four hundred years separating him from us.

[...] Let us say a few initial words about the complex nature of carnival laughter. It is, first of all, a festive laughter. Therefore it is not an individual reaction to some isolated “comic” event. Carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people. Second, it is universal in scope: it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival's participants. The entire world is seen in its droll aspect, in its gay relativity. Third, this laughter is ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives. Such is the laughter of carnival. 

Let us enlarge upon the second important trait of the people's festive laughter: that it is also directed at those who laugh. The people do not exclude themselves from the wholeness of the world. They, too, are incomplete, they also die and are revived and renewed. This is one of the essential differences of the people's festive laughter from the pure satire of modern times. The satirist whose laughter is negative places himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it. The wholeness of the world's comic aspect is destroyed, and that which appears comic becomes a private reaction. The people's ambivalent laughter, on the other hand, expresses the point of view of the whole world; he who is laughing also belongs to it. 

Let us here stress the special philosophical and utopian character of festive laughter and its orientation toward the highest spheres. The most ancient rituals of mocking at the deity have here survived, acquiring a new essential meaning. All that was purely cultic and limited has faded away, but the all-human, universal, and utopian element has been retained. 

The greatest writer to complete the cycle of the people's carnival laughter and bring it into world literature was Rabelais. His work will permit us to enter into the complex and deep nature of this phenomenon.

The problem of folk humor must be correctly posed. Current literature concerning this subject presents merely gross modernizations. The present-day analysis of laughter explains it either as purely negative satire (and Rabelais is described as a pure satirist), or else as gay, fanciful, recreational drollery deprived of philosophic content. The important point made previously, that folk humor is ambivalent, is usually ignored.

Museu

Georges Bataille

Segundo a Grande Enciclopédia, o primeiro museu no sentido moderno da palavra (quer dizer, a primeira colecção pública) teria sido fundado em 27 de Julho de 1793 na França, pela Convenção. A origem do museu moderno estaria pois ligada ao desenvolvimento da guilhotina. No entanto, o Ashmolean Museum de Oxford, fundado no final do século XVII, já era uma colecção pública que pertencia à universidade. Como é evidente, o desenvolvimento dos museus chegou mesmo a ultrapassar as esperanças mais optimistas dos fundadores. Não só o conjunto dos museus do mundo hoje representa um colossal amontoado de riquezas, mas o conjunto dos visitantes dos museus do mundo representa sobretudo, e sem dúvida nenhuma, o mais grandioso espectáculo de uma humanidade libertada das preocupações materiais e votada à contemplação. Há que levar em conta o facto de as salas e os objectos de arte não passarem de um contentor cujo conteúdo é formado pelos visitantes: o conteúdo é que distingue um museu de uma colecção particular. Um museu como que é o pulmão de uma grande cidade: todos os domingos a multidão aflui como sangue ao museu, e de lá sai purificada e fresca. Os quadros não passam de superfícies mortas, e é na multidão que os jogos, os esplendores, os escorrimentos de luz descritos tecnicamente pelos críticos autorizados se produzem. Aos domingos, às cinco horas, é interessante admirar à porta de saída do Louvre a onda dos visitantes visivelmente animados pelo desejo de em tudo serem iguais às celestes aparições que ainda continuam a encantar os seus olhos. Grandville sistematizou as relações que há nos museus entre contentor e conteúdo exagerando (pelo menos na aparência) os laços que provisoriamente se estabelecem entre os visitados e os visitantes. De igual modo, quando um natural da Costa do Marfim põe machados de pedra polida da época neolítica num recipiente cheio de água, se lava nesse recipiente e oferece galinhas ao que ele julga serem pedras de trovão (caídas do céu com um trovão), apenas prefigura a atitude de entusiasmo e comunhão profunda com os objectos que caracteriza o visitante do museu moderno. O museu é o espelho colossal onde o homem enfim se contempla em todas as faces, onde se vê literalmente admirável e abandona ao êxtase expresso em todas as revistas de arte.

Museum

George Bataille

According to the Great Encyclopedia, the first museum in the modern sense of the word (meaning the first public collection) was founded in France by the Convention of July 27, 1793. The origin of the modern museum is thus linked to the development of the guillotine. Nevertheless, the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, founded at the end of the seventeenth century, was already a public one, belonging to the university.

The development of the museum has obviously exceeded even the most optimistic hopes of its founders. Not only does the ensemble of the world's mu-seums now represent a colossal piling-up of wealth, but the totality of museum visitors throughout the world surely offers the very grandiose spectacle of a hu-manity by now liberated from material concerns and devoted to contemplation.

We must realize that the halls and art objects are but the container, whose content is formed by the visitors. It is the content that distinguishes a museum from a private collection. A museum is like a lung of a great city; each Sunday the crowd flows like blood into the museum and emerges purified and fresh. The paintings are but dead surfaces, and it is within the crowd that the stream-ing play oflights and ofradiance, technically described by authorized critics, is produced. It is interesting to observe the flow of visitors visibly driven by the desire to resemble the celestial visions ravishing to their eyes.

Grandville has schematized the relations of container to content with respect to the museum by exaggerating (or so it would appear) the links tentatively formed between visitors and visited. When a native of the Ivory Coast places an axe of neolithic, polished stone within a water-filled receptacle, then bathes in that receptacle and offers poultry to what he takes to be thunder stones (fallen from the sky in a clap of thunder), he but prefigures the attitude of enthusiasm and of deep communion with objects which characterizes the modern museum visitor.

The museum is the colossal mirror in which man, finally contemplating himself from all sides, and finding himselfliterally an object of wonder, aban-dons himself to the ecstasy expressed in art journalism.

The Accursed Share, An Essay on General Economy

Georges Bataille

The “Potlatch” of the Indians of the American Northwest

[...]

The “merchants” of Mexico practiced the paradoxical system of exchanges that I have described as a regular sequence of gifts; these customs, not barter, in fact constituted the archaic organization of exchange. Potlatch, still practiced by the Indians of the Northwest Coast of America, is its typical form. Ethnographers now employ this term to designate institutions functioning on a similar principle; they find traces of it in all societies. Among the Tlingit, the Haida, the Tsimshian, the Kwakiutl, potlatch is of prime importance in social life. The least advanced of these small tribes give potlatches in ceremonies marking a person's change of condition, at the time of initiations, marriages, funerals. In the more civilized tribes a potlatch is still given in the course of a festival. One can choose a festival in which to give it, but it can itself be the occasion of a festival.

Potlatch is, like commerce, a means of circulating wealth, but it excludes bargaining. More often than not it is the solemn giving of considerable riches, offered by a chief to his rival for the purpose of humiliating, challenging and obligating him. The recipient has to erase the humiliation and take up the challenge; he must satisfy the obligation that was contracted by accepting. He can only reply, a short time later, by means of a new potlatch, more generous than the first: He must pay back with interest.

Gift-giving is not the only form of potlatch: A rival is challenged by a solemn destruction of riches. In principle, the destruction is offered to the mythical ancestors of the donee; it is little different from a sacrifice. As recently as the nineteenth century a Tlingit chieftain would sometimes go before a rival and cut the throats of slaves in his presence. At the proper time, the destruction was repaid by the killing of a large number of slaves. The Chukchee of the Siberian Northeast have related institutions. They slaughter highly valuable dog teams, for it is necessary for them to startle, to stifle the rival group. The Indians of the Northwest Coast would set fire to their villages or break their canoes to pieces. They have emblazoned copper bars possessing a fictive value (depending on how famous or how old the coppers are): Sometimes these bars are worth a fortune. They throw them into the sea or shatter them.¹

Theory of “Potlatch”

1. The paradox of the “gift” reduced to the “acquisition” of a “power.”

Since the publication of Marcel Mauss's The Gift, the institution of potlatch has been the object of a sometimes dubious interest and curiosity. Potlatch enables one to perceive a connection between religious behaviors and economic ones. Nevertheless, one would not be able to find laws in common between these two types of behavior — if by economy one understood a conventional set of human activities, and not the general economy in its irreducible movement. It would be futile, as a matter of fact, to consider the economic aspects of potlatch without first having formulated the viewpoint defined by general economy.² There would be no potlatch if, in a general sense, the ultimate problem concerned the acquisition and not the dissipation of useful wealth.

The study of this strange yet familiar institution (a good many of our behaviors are reducible to the laws of potlatch; they have the same significance as it does) has a privileged place in general economy. If there is within us, running through the space we inhabit, a movement of energy that we use, but that is not reducible to its utility (which we are impelled by reason to seek), we can disregard it, but we can also adapt our activity to its completion outside us. The solution of the problem thus posed calls for an action in two contrary directions: We need on the one hand to go beyond the narrow limits within which we ordinarily remain, and on the other hand somehow bring our going-beyond back within our limits. The problem posed is that of the expenditure of the surplus. We need to give away, lose or destroy. But the gift would be senseless (and so we would never decide to give) if it did not take on the meaning of an acquisition. Hence giving must become acquiring a power. Gift-giving has the virtue of a surpassing of the subject who gives, but in exchange for the object given, the subject appropriates the surpassing: He regards his virtue, that which he had the capacity for, as an asset, as a power that he now possesses. He enriches himself with a contempt for riches, and what he proves to be miserly of is in fact his generosity.

But he would not be able by himself to acquire a power constituted by a relinquishment of power: If he destroyed the object in solitude, in silence, no sort of power would result from the act; there would not be anything for the subject but a separation from power without any compensation. But if he destroys the object in front of another person or if he gives it away, the one who gives has actually acquired, in the other's eyes, the power of giving or destroying. He is now rich for having made use of wealth in the manner its essence would require: He is rich for having ostentatiously consumed what is wealth only if it is consumed. But the wealth that is actualized in the potlatch, in consumption for others, has no real existence except insofar as the other is changed by the consumption. In a sense, authentic consumption ought to be solitary, but then it would not have the completion that the action it has on the other confers on it. And this action that is brought to bear on others is precisely what constitutes the gift's power, which one acquires from the fact of losing. The exemplary virtue of the potlatch is given in this possibility for man to grasp what eludes him, to combine the limitless movements of the universe with the limit that belongs to him.

2. The apparent absurdity of gifts.

But "you can't have your cake and eat it too," the saying goes.

It is contradictory to try to be unlimited and limited at the same time, and the result is comedy: The gift does not mean anything from the standpoint of general economy; there is dissipation only for the giver. 

Moreover, it turns out that the giver has only apparently lost. Not only does he have the power over the recipient that the gift has bestowed on him, but the recipient is obligated to nullify that power by repaying the gift. The rivalry even entails the return or a greater gift: In order to get even the giver must not only redeem himself, but he must also impose the “power of the gift” on his rival in turn. In a sense the presents are repaid with interest. Thus the gift is the opposite of what it seemed to be: To give is obviously to lose, but the loss apparently brings a profit to the one who sustains it.

In reality, this absurdly contradictory aspect of potlatch is misleading. The first giver suffers the apparent gain resulting from the difference between his presents and those given to him in return. The one who repays only has the feeling of acquiring — a power — and of outdoing. Actually, as I have said, the ideal would be that a potlatch could not be repaid. The benefit in no way corresponds to the desire for gain. On the contrary, receiving prompts one — and obliges one — to give more, for it is necessary to remove the resulting obligation.

3. The acquisition of rank.

Doubtless potlatch is not reducible to the desire to lose, but what it brings to the giver is not the inevitable increase of return gifts; it is the rank which it confers on the one who has the last word.

Prestige, glory and rank should not be confused with power. Or if prestige is power, this is insofar as power itself escapes the considerations of force or right to which it is ordinarily reduced. It must be said, further, that the identity of the power and the ability to lose is fundamental. Numerous factors stand in the way, interfere and finally prevail, but, all things considered, neither force nor right is the human basis of the differentiated value of individuals. As the surviving practices make clear, rank varies decisively according to an individual's capacity for giving. The animal factor (the capacity for defeating an adversary in a fight) is itself subordinated, by and large, to the value of giving. To be sure, this is the ability to appropriate a position or possessions, but it is also the fact of a man's having staked his whole being. Moreover, the gift's aspect of an appeal to animal force is brought out in fights for a common cause, to which the fighter gives himself. Glory, the consequence of a superiority, is itself something different from an ability to take another's place and seize his possessions: It expresses a movement of senseless frenzy, of measureless expenditure of energy, which the fervor of combat presupposes. Combat is glorious in that it is always beyond calculation at some moment. But the meaning of warfare and glory is poorly grasped if it is not related in part to the acquisition of rank through a reckless expenditure of vital resources, of which potlatch is the most legible form.

4. The first basic laws.

But if it is true that potlatch remains the opposite of a rapine, of a profitable exchange or, generally speaking, of an appropriation of possessions, acquisition is nonetheless its ultimate purpose. Because the movement it structures differs from ours, it appears stranger to us, and so it is more capable of revealing what usually escapes our perception, and what it shows us is our basic ambiguity. One can deduce the following laws from it. Of course man is not definable once and for all and these laws operate differently — their effects are even neutralized — at different stages of history, but basically they never cease to reveal a decisive play of forces:

• a surplus of resources, which societies have constantly at their disposal at certain points, at certain times, cannot be the object of a complete appropriation (it cannot be usefully employed; it cannot be employed for the growth of the productive forces), but the squandering of this surplus itself becomes an object of appropriation;

• what is appropriated in the squander is the prestige it gives to the squanderer (whether an individual or a group), which is acquired by him as a possession and which determines his rank;

• conversely, rank in society (or the rank of one society among others) can be appropriated in the same way as a tool or a field; if it is ultimately a source of profit, the principle of it is nevertheless determined by a resolute squandering of resources that in theory could have been acquired.

5. Ambiguity and contradiction.

While the resources he controls are reducible to quantities of energy, man is not always able to set them aside for a growth that cannot be endless or, above all, continual. He must waste the excess, but he remains eager to acquire even when he does the opposite, and so he makes waste itself an object of acquisition. Once the resources are dissipated, there remains the prestige acquired by the one who wastes. The waste is an ostentatious squandering to this end, with a view to a superiority over others that he attributes to himself by this means. But he misuses the negation he makes of the utility of the resources he wastes, bringing into contradiction not only himself but man's entire existence. The latter thus enters into an ambiguity where it remains: It places the value, the prestige and the truth of life in the negation of the servile use of possessions, but at the same time it makes a servile use of this negation. On the one hand, in the useful and graspable thing it discerns that which, being necessary to it, can be used for its growth (or its subsistence), but if strict necessity ceases to bind it, this “useful thing” cannot entirely answer to its wishes. Consequently, it calls for that which cannot be grasped, for the useless employment of oneself, of one's possessions, for play, but it attempts to grasp that which it wished to be ungraspable, to use that whose utility it denied. It is not enough for our left hand not to know what the right hand gives: Clumsily, it tries to take it back. 

Rank is entirely the effect of this crooked will. In a sense, rank is the opposite of a thing: What founds it is sacred, and the general ordering of ranks is given the name of hierarchy. It is the stubborn determination to treat as a disposable and usable thing that whose essence is sacred, that which is completely removed from the profane utilitarian sphere, where the hand — unscrupulously and for servile ends — raises the hammer and nails the timber. But ambiguity encumbers the profane operation just as it empties desire's vehemence of its meaning and changes it into an apparent comedy.

This compromise given in our nature heralds those linked series of deceptions, exploitations and manias that give a temporal order to the apparent unreason of history. Man is necessarily in a mirage, his very reflection mystifies him, so intent is he on grasping the ungraspable, on using transports of lost hatred as tools. Rank, where loss is changed into acquisition, corresponds to the activity of the intellect, which reduces the objects of thought to things. In point of fact, the contradiction of potlatch is revealed not only throughout history, but more profoundly in the operations of thought. Generally, in sacrifice or in potlatch, in action (in history) or in contemplation (in thought), what we seek is always this semblance — which by definition we cannot grasp — that we vainly call the poetry, the depth or the intimacy of passion. We are necessarily deceived since we want to grasp this shadow.

We could not reach the final object of knowledge without the dissolution of knowledge, which aims to reduce its object to the condition of subordinated and managed things. The ultimate problem of knowledge is the same as that of consumption. No one can both know and not be destroyed; no one can both consume wealth and increase it.

6. Luxury and extreme poverty.

But if the demands of the life of beings (or groups) detached from life's immensity defines an interest to which every operation is referred, the general movement of life is nevertheless accomplished beyond the demands of individuals. Selfishness is finally disappointed. It seems to prevail and to lay down a definitive boundary, but it is surpassed in any case. No doubt the rivalries of individuals among themselves take away the multitude's ability to be overrun by the global exuberance of energy. The weak are fleeced, exploited by the strong, who pay them with flagrant lies. But this cannot change the overall results, where individual interest is mocked, and where the lies of the rich are changed into truth.

In the end, with the possibility of growth or of acquisition reaching its limit at a certain point, energy, the object of greed of every isolated individual, is necessarily liberated — truly liberated under the cover of lies. Definitively, men lie; they do their best to relate this liberation to interest, but this liberation carries them further. Consequently, in a sense they lie in any case. As a rule the individual accumulation of resources is doomed to destruction. The individuals who carry out this destruction do not truly possess this wealth, this rank. Under primitive conditions, wealth is always analogous to stocks of munitions, which so clearly express the annihilation, not the possession of wealth. But this image is just as accurate if it is a matter of expressing the equally ludicrous truth of rank: It is an explosive charge. The man of high rank is originally only an explosive individual (all men are explosive, but he is explosive in a privileged way). Doubtless he tries to prevent, or at least delay the explosion. Thus he lies to himself by derisively taking his wealth and his power for something that they are not. If he manages to enjoy them peacefully, it is at the cost of a misunderstanding of himself, of his real nature. He lies at the same time to all the others, before whom on the contrary he maintains the affirmation of a truth (his explosive nature), from which he tries to escape. Of course, he will be engulfed in these lies: Rank will be reduced to a commodity of exploitation, a shameless source of profits. This poverty cannot in any way interrupt the movement of exuberance.

Indifferent to intentions, to reticences and lies, slowly or suddenly, the movement of wealth exudes and consumes the resources of energy. This often seems strange, but not only do these resources suffice; if they cannot be completely consumed productively a surplus usually remains, which must be annihilated. At first sight, potlatch appears to carry out this consumption badly. The destruction of riches is not its rule: They are ordinarily given away and the loss in the operation is reduced to that of the giver: The aggregate of riches is preserved. But this is only an appearance. If potlatch rarely results in acts similar in every respect to sacrifice, it is nonetheless the complementary form of an institution whose meaning is in the fact that it withdraws wealth from productive consumption. In general, sacrifice withdraws useful products from profane circulation; in principle the gifts of potlatch liberate objects that are useless from the start. The industry of archaic luxury is the basis of potlatch; obviously, this industry squanders resources represented by the quantities of available human labor. Among the Aztecs, they were “cloaks, petticoats, precious blouses”; or “richly coloured feathers ... cut stones, shells, fans, shell paddles ... wild animal skins worked and ornamented with designs.” In the American Northwest, canoes and houses are destroyed, and dogs or slaves are slaughtered: These are useful riches. Essentially the gifts are objects of luxury (elsewhere the gifts of food are pledged from the start to the useless consumption of feasts). 

One might even say that potlatch is the specific manifestation, the meaningful form of luxury. Beyond the archaic forms, luxury has actually retained the functional value of potlatch, creative of rank. Luxury still determines the rank of the one who displays it, and there is no exalted rank that does not require a display. But the petty calculations of those who enjoy luxury are surpassed in every way. In wealth, what shines through the defects extends the brilliance of the sun and provokes passion. It is not what is imagined by those who have reduced it to their poverty; it is the return of life's immensity to the truth of exuberance. This truth destroys those who have taken it for what it is not; the least that one can say is that the present forms of wealth make a shambles and a human mockery of those who think they own it. In this respect, present-day society is a huge counterfeit, where this truth of wealth has underhandedly slipped into extreme poverty. The true luxury and the real potlatch of our times falls to the poverty stricken, that is, to the individual who lies down and scoffs. A genuine luxury requires the complete contempt for riches, the somber indifference of the individual who refuses work and makes his life on the one hand an infinitely ruined splendor, and on the other, a silent insult to the laborious lie of the rich. Beyond a military exploitation, a religious mystification and a capitalist misappropriation, henceforth no one can rediscover the meaning of wealth, the explosiveness that it heralds, unless it is in the splendor of rags and the somber challenge of indifference. One might say, finally, that the lie destines life's exuberance to revolt.

¹ These facts are drawn from the authoritative study by Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques, in the Année sociologique, 1923-24, pp. 30-186, translated as The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: Norton, 1967.
² Let me indicate here that the studies whose results I am publishing here came out of my reading of the Essai sur le don. To begin with, reflection on potlatch led me to formulate the laws of general economy. But it may be of interest to mention a special difficulty that I was hard put to resolve. The general principles that I introduced, which enable one to interpret a large number of facts, left irreducible elements in the potlatch, which in my mind remained the origin of those facts. Potlatch cannot be unilaterally interpreted as a consumption of riches. It is only recently that I have been able to reduce the difficulty, and give the principles of "general economy" a rather ambiguous foundation. What it comes down to is that a squandering of energy is always the opposite of a thing, but it enters into consideration only once it has entered into the order of things, once it has been changed into a thing.

The accursed share

Georges Bataille

The Necessity of Losing the Excess Energy that Cannot be Used for a System's Growth
At first sight, it is easy to recognize in the economy - in the pro­duction and use of wealth - a particular aspect of terrestrial activity regarded as a cosmic phenomenon. A movement is produced on the surface of the globe that results from the circulation of energy at this point in the universe. The economic activity of men appro­priates this movement, making use of the resulting possibilities for certain ends. But this movement has a pattern and laws with which, as a rule, those who use them and depend on them are un­acquainted. Thus the question arises: Is the general determination of energy circulating in the biosphere altered by man's activity? Or rather, isn't the latter's intention vitiated by a determination of which it is ignorant, which it overlooks and cannot change? 
[...]
It is not easy to realize one's own ends if one must, in trying to do so, carry out a movement that surpasses them. No doubt these ends and this movement may not be entirely irreconcilable; but if these two terms are to be reconciled we must cease to ignore one of them; otherwise, our works quickly turn to catastrophe.
I will begin with a basic fact: The living organism, in a situa­tion determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintain­ing life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, will­ingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically. 

The Poverty of Organisms or Limited Systems and the Excess Wealth of Living Nature
Minds accustomed to seeing the development of productive forces as the ideal end of activity refuse to recognize that energy, which constitutes wealth, must ultimately be spent lavishly (with­out return), and that a series of profitable operations has abso­lutely no other effect than the squandering of profits. To affirm that it is necessary to, dissipate a substantial portion of energy produced, sending it up in smoke, is to go against judgments that form the basis of a rational economy. We know cases where wealth has had to be destroyed (coffee thrown into the sea), but these scandals cannot reasonably be offered as examples to fol­low. They are the acknowledgment of an impotence, and no one could find in them the image and essence of wealth. Indeed, involuntary destruction (such as the disposal of coffee overboard) has in every case the meaning of failure; it is experienced as a misfortune; in no way can it be presented as desirable. And yet it is the type of operation without which there is no solution. When one considers the totality of productive wealth on the sur­face of the globe, it is evident that the products of this wealth can be employed for productive ends only insofar as the living organism that is economic mankind can increase its equipment. This is not entirely - neither always nor indefinitely - possible. A surplus must be dissipated through deficit operations: The final dissipation cannot fail to carry out the movement that animates terrestrial energy. 

La machine à guérir

François Beguin

L'architecture, la machine et les ruines 

Mais sans doute ne suffit-il pas encore d'avoir repéré quelques-uns des effets auxquels ces «machines» pouvaient être associées pour que l'image cesse de résonner. Sa force vient aussi d'ailleurs. Bien sûr, de ce qu'elle excède les performances ordinaires de l'objet et déroute notre perception habituelle de l'institution, mais ces deux écarts ne nous indiquent encore que la part du rêve. Restent ces lignes, qui fuient à mi-chemin du réel et de l'imaginaire, pour dire les formes idéales où les médecins et les architectes de la fin du XVIIIC siècle réfléchirent l'hôpital moderne. La formule de Tenon exprimerait alors autant les pouvoirs réels du futur équipement que les grands principes qui orientèrent sa formalisation: principe de composition des effets; principe d'inter-dépendance entre la partie et le tout; principe d'économie maximum, puisque penser l'hôpital comme une machine, c'était aussi le concevoir en sa totalité comme une masse active, comme une masse où chaque élément ne pouvait être orienté que positivement ou négativement, et dont il fallait par conséquent exclure toute neutralité. 

Au moment de la synthèse, l'enquête achevée, l'image suggérait aussi un passage à la limite, une manière de faire tendre chaque agencement vers ce point idéal où l'institution commencerait à fonctionner toute seule, où le délit dénoncerait immédiatement et infailliblement le coupable, où les formes épouseraient si bien la circulation des fluides qu'elles en garantiraient le contrôle parfait. 
Rêve d'une auto-régulation qui suivrait les lignes de pente naturelles de la matière de la maladie, de l'esprit, où le facteur humain ne s'exprimerait plus sous la forme de l'initiative, du bon vouloir, ou de compétences extraordinaires mais d'une probabilité, d'une régularité, d'une interchangeabilité toujours possible. 

Rêve d'un hôpital où le passage de la nature à l’institution pourrait s'opérer sans heurt, sans discontinuité, jusqu'à ce que la marche des soins parvenue à s'ajuster au régime de la maladie, l'hôpital viendrait se confondre avec les forces qui, à l’intérieur de l'organisme, luttent contre le mal. 

Mais on ne peut également passer sous silence le poids de cette image dans le domaine de la conception architecturale, car au fond, et aussi paradoxal que cela puisse paraître, il semble bien qu'elle ait constitué avec les ruines, une deuxième grande ligne de fuite pour l'architecture de la fin du XVIIIe siècle. 

Les ruines répondaient au désir d'une architecture imprégnée d'histoire, d'une architecture pittoresque et poétique à la fois; la machine exprimait le désir d'une architecture istrumentale, efficace, socialement utile et entièrement positive. Rien de commun dira-t-on entre ces deux aspirations; rien, si ce n’est deux modèles qui permirent de penser l'architecture en dehors des catégories et des systèmes de reférénces traditionnels, et de prendre ainsi à revers le discours académique et le savoir spécialisé. Il y avait bien là deux points d'appui qui allaient permettre de critiquer mais aussi de concevoir; dans un sens diamétralement opposé, certes, mais sur une base néanmoins commune, puisqu'il s'agissait bien, dans les deux cas, du même désir d'une architecture entièrement active, libre de toute convention, mais en prise directe sur des transformations réelles. Transformations dans le registre de l'individualité sensible pour ce qui est des ruines: machines à émouvoir et à voyager dans le temps; transformations dans un registre d'effets sociaux quantifiables et de résultats positifs pour ce qui est des machines à guérir.

Peut-être faudrait-il alors envisager ces deux modèles comme deux grands opérateurs d'une même entreprise d’épuration des formes et du vocabulaire architectural conventionnel; une attaque lancée à partir d'images et d'expériences extérieures à la profession, mais dont la charge imaginaire était suffisante pour suggérer une alternative. Ils témoigneraient ainsi de la recherche amorcée à la fin du XVIII siècle d'une autre dynamique architecturale, dont le principe aurait été de partir des effets réels pour concevoir des formes, et de n'admettre pour règles que celles découvertes dans l'activité même des formes. Mais d'un autre côté, si les machines et les ruines furent bien, à la même époque, placées à l'horizon des deux grandes lignes de fracture ouvertes par la décomposition des formes classiques, ces points de fuite n'étaient pas sans annoncer aussit, et silencieusement, deux fins possibles pour l'Architecture : l'une par dissolution de l'art dans un univers de techniques de contrôle de l'environnement (cf. R. Banham, L’«effet Wampanoag» en architecture), l'autre par la dérive au-delà de toute connexion sociale possible (cf. Boullée).

Il semble biene n tout cas que, dressées l’une en face de l’autre, ces deux images aint déjà signalé qu’une point de non-retour avait été Franchi.

Aprés, il n’y aura plus de véritable beauté qui ne soit définitivement inutile, ni d’utilité qui ne soit socialmente positive. Tout le reste n’étant plus que tentatives éphémères pour réconcilier l’inconciliable. L’utopie des utopistes? Avoir cru possibles des machines à guérir qui seraient aussi des machines à rêver.

The Capital of the Ruins

Samuel Beckett

ON WHAT A YEAR AGO was a grass slope, lying in the angle that the Vire and Bayeux roads make as they unite at the entrance of the town, opposite what remains of the second most important stud-farm in France, a general hospital now stands. It is the Hospital of the Irish Red Cross in Saint-Lô, or, as the Laudiniens themselves say, the Irish Hospital. The buildings consist of some 25 prefabricated wooden huts. They are superior, generally speaking, to those so scantily available for the wealthier, the better-connected, the astuter or the more flagrantly deserving of the bombed-out. Their finish, as well without as within, is the best that priority can command. They are lined with glass-wool and panelled in isorel, a strange substance of which only very limited supplies are available. There is real glass in the windows. The consequent atmosphere is that of brightness and airiness so comforting to sick people, and to weary staffs. The floors, where the exigencies of hygiene are greatest, are covered with linoleum. There was not enough linoleum in France to do more than this. The walls and ceiling of the operating theatre are sheeted in aluminium of aeronautic origin, a decorative and practical solution of an old problem and a pleasant variation on the sword and ploughshare metamorphosis. A system of covered ways connects the kitchen with refectories and wards. The supply of electric current, for purposes both of heat and of power, leaves nothing to be desired. The hospital is centrally heated throughout, by means of coke. The medical, scientific, nursing and secretarial staffs are Irish, the instruments and furniture (including of course beds and bedding), the drugs and food, are supplied by the Society. I think I am right in saying that the number of inpatients (mixed) is in the neighbourhood of 90. As for the others, it is a regular thing, according to recent reports, for as many as 200 to be seen in the out-patients department in a day. Among such ambulant cases a large number are suffering from scabies and other diseases of the skin, the result no doubt of malnutrition or an ill-advised diet. Accident cases are frequent. Masonry falls when least expected, children play with detonators and demining continues. The laboratory, magnificently equipped, bids well to become the official laboratory for the department, if not of an even wider area. Considerable work has already been done in the analysis of local waters.
These few facts, chosen not quite at random, are no doubt familiar already to those at all interested in the subject, and perhaps even to those listening to the present circumlocution. They may not appear the most immediately instructive. That the operating-theatre should be sheeted with an expensive metal, or the floor of the labour-room covered with linoleum, can hardly be expected to interest those accustomed to such conditions as the sine qua non of reputable obstetrical and surgical statistics. These are the sensible people who would rather have news of the Norman’s semi-circular canals or resistance to sulphur than of his attitude to the Irish bringing gifts, who would prefer the history of our difficulties with an unfamiliar pharmacopia and system of mensuration to the story of our dealings with the rare and famous ways of spirit that are the French ways. And yet the whole enterprise turned from “the beginning on the establishing of a relation in the light of which the therapeutic relation faded to the merest of pretexts. What was important was not our having penicillin when they had none, nor the unregarding munificence of the French Ministry of Reconstruction (as it was then called), but the occasional glimpse obtained, by us in them and, who knows, by them in us (for they are an imaginative people), of that smile at the human conditions as little to be extinguished by bombs as to be broadened by the elixirs of Burroughes and Welcome,—the smile deriding, among other things, the having and the not having, the giving and the taking, sickness and health.
It would not be seemly, in a retiring and indeed retired storekeeper, to describe the obstacles encountered in this connexion, and the forms, often grotesque, devised for them by the combined energies of the home and visiting temperaments. It must be supposed that they were not insurmountable, since they have long ceased to be of much account. When I reflect now on the recurrent problems of what, with all proper modesty, might be called the heroic period, on one in particular so arduous and elusive that it literally ceased to be formulable, I suspect that our pains were those inherent in the simple and necessary and yet so unattainable proposition that their way of being we, was not our way and that our way of being they, was not their way. It is only fair to say that many of us had never been abroad before.
Saint-Lô was bombed out of existence in one night. German prisoners of war, and casual labourers attracted by the relative food-plenty, but soon discouraged by housing conditions, continue, two years after the liberation, to clear away the debris, literally by hand. Their spirit has yet to learn the blessings of Gallup and their flesh the benefits of the bulldozer. One may thus be excused if one questions the opinion generally received, that ten years will be sufficient for the total reconstruction of Saint-Lô. But no matter what period of time must still be endured, before the town begins to resemble the pleasant and prosperous administrative and agricultural centre that it was, the hospital of wooden huts in its gardens between the Vire and Bayeux roads will continue to discharge its function, and its cures. “Provisional” is not the term it was, in this universe become provisional. It will continue to discharge its function long after the Irish are gone and their names forgotten. But I think that to the end of its hospital days it will be called the Irish Hospital, and after that the huts, when they have been turned into dwellings, the Irish huts. I mention this possibility, in the hope that it will give general satisfaction. And having done so I may perhaps venture to mention another, more remote but perhaps of greater import in certain quarters, I mean the possibility that some of those who were in Saint-Lô will come home realising that they got at least as good as they gave, that they got indeed what they could hardly give, a vision and sense of a time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again. These will have been in France.

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WESTERN COLONIALISM SINCE 1450

AFRICAN SLAVERY IN THE AMERICAS 
Slavery, a fairly universal development across many of the world’s ancient and early modern societies, took myriad forms reflecting a number of variables within a given historical setting. The enslavement of both Native American and African peoples in the Americas was no different, in this respect, from previous developments. Yet slavery in the Americas was exceptional as the transatlantic slave trade developed concurrently with a nascent capitalist system that touched much of the Western world. During this transformation, older forms of slavery—where enslavement was often a temporary status mediated by tribal customs or protective legal codes— were transformed into an institution in which the enslaved were marked as chattel, that is, personal property, and of inferior racial status. 

THE INTRODUCTION OF AFRICAN SLAVERY 
Spain and Portugal led Europe’s initial efforts to colonize the Americas and first introduced African slavery to the hemisphere. Given their late medieval history, both powers were uniquely suited for experimenting with African slavery in the Americas. While the institution of slavery declined in importance throughout much of Europe following the collapse of the western half of the Roman Empire during the fifth century CE the institution was revitalized in Iberia (the peninsula now occupied by Spain and Portugal) with the invasion of the Moors in 711 and the intermittent Christian campaign to retake lost territory over the subsequent seven centuries. As Christian and Muslim kingdoms collided and competed with one another, raids and warfare led to the occasional enslavement of captives and subjugated populations. 
The Portuguese Crown completed its campaign of reconquest by the mid-thirteenth century, which led within a few decades to a shift of commercial aspirations and the crusade impulse into the Atlantic. Portuguese maritime activity involved the exploration of the western coast of sub-Saharan Africa and various uninhabited Atlantic islands (e.g., Madeira, the Azores, and the Cape Verdes). The Portuguese sought to tap into the lucrative, preexisting trade network of the West African coast, bringing to Lisbon cargoes of ivory, peppers, gold, and some African slaves. 
European demand for enslaved Africans during the fifteenth century was relatively small compared to later developments and probably exerted a negligible influence on sub-Saharan slave markets. The impact of the slave trade was soon noticeable in Iberia, however; by the start of the sixteenth century, several thousand enslaved and freed people of African descent resided in such Iberian cities as Lisbon and Seville. The expulsion of the Moors from the Christian kingdoms of Spain took longer, but Spanish ships soon joined their Portuguese counterparts in plying the Atlantic. Spanish efforts concentrated on the conquest of the Guanches, the original inhabitants of the Canary Islands, at the close of the fifteenth century. 
Following earlier Portuguese precedent, particularly on Madeira, plantations were established to cultivate sugar for the insatiable European market. Throughout these Atlantic islands, and eventually São Tomé off the African coast, various enslaved groups were shipped to the plantations, including conquered Moors from Spain, the Guanches of the Canaries, and finally Africans purchased along the western coast of Africa. These initial experiments with sugar plantations and imported African slaves served as a harbinger for later developments in the Americas. 

THE CARIBBEAN 
While the Portuguese developed trade relations along the western and central African coast, Spain benefited from the fortuitous discovery of the American hemisphere through its support of the Genoese navigator Cristóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus, 1451–1506). Columbus made landfall in late 1492 in the Lesser Antilles and eventually Hispaniola (the island comprising the modern nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic). While he famously searched for the ‘‘Great Khan’’ of China, Columbus also sought potential commercial opportunities for his royal sponsors, including the traffic of Indian slaves. He noted the servile and peaceful nature of the Arawak inhabitants of the Caribbean, who might be coerced into laboring in the gold mines that he rightly guessed would be discovered on Hispaniola. 

Slave arrivals in the Americas, 1451–1870 

1451–1600                       274,000
1601–1700                    1,341,100
1701–1800                   5,729,100
1801–1870                   2,902,400
Total                            10,247,500 

Spanish colonization of the Caribbean began in earnest with Columbus’s second voyage in 1493. Discipline and work were concepts difficult to instill in a colonist population seeking fortune and a quick return home. Spanish-Indian relations thus turned sour as colonists demanded greater access to native labor and provisions. A version of the Iberian encomienda, through which non-Christians were placed under the vassalage of a Christian lord, was adapted to the Caribbean context to satisfy these demands. In its various guises, the encomienda would serve as the initial instrument for tapping indigenous labor and goods as the Spanish expanded their control over new lands and peoples. 
Old World diseases and exploitation decimated Hispaniola’s native population, spurring colonists to begin raiding much of the Caribbean basin for substitute labor. Such actions were commonly justified by the Spanish perception of the existence of hostile, man-eating Caribs (from which the term cannibalism originates). Slave raiding emptied out the Bahamas by 1513, while the military conquest of Puerto Rico in 1508 and Cuba in 1511 supplied even larger numbers of war captives. 
This initial experimental phase raised profound questions for Spanish jurists concerning the nature of the colonial enterprise, Spanish obligations to autochthonous groups, and eventually a rationale for importing African slaves. Spain’s initial claim to sovereignty over the Americas rested largely on a series of papal bulls (decrees) and treaties promulgated after the return of Columbus’s first voyage to the New World. Pope Alexander VI (1431–1503) had effectively divided the world into two spheres of influence, providing Spain a monopoly over most of what would become the American continents while setting aside Africa and the Far East for rival Portugal. This decision, however, rested upon the moral obligation of the crown to evangelize newly discovered pagan peoples and to establish a protective tutelage over them. 

These early ideological underpinnings of the colonial enterprise brought significant consequences for how the Spanish monarchy approached its indigenous subjects and the topic of slavery. Facing a demographic cata- strophe in its Caribbean colonies by the second decade of the sixteenth century, the crown responded with decrees that restricted conditions for waging ‘‘just war’’ against hostile Indians and limited enslavement to known cannibals. Enforcement proved difficult, however. The invasion of Central America in 1500, for example, led to a half century of Indian slaving that resulted in the export of tens of thousands of captives out of the region. In response to the precipitous decline of indigenous groups throughout the mainland, the so-called New Laws of 1542 banned definitively Indian slavery, although the practice persisted well into the eighteenth century in precariously held frontier zones in northern Mexico, Chile, and Argentina. As the legality of Indian slavery became more nebulous and their numbers dwindled, the demand for compliant labor took a different direction. 
The introduction of slaves of African descent to the Americas took place within this larger juridical conversation regarding the crown’s obligations to the indigenous population. Small numbers of black slaves had been present since the earliest stages of the colonization of the Caribbean. Originating from Iberia, many of these individuals were considered ladino, a term indicating they had assimilated elements of Hispanic culture and spoke Spanish. Concerns regarding the presumed fragility of the New World’s population, coupled with a desire to maintain the economic viability of the Caribbean colonies, led to an escalation of African slavery as a replacement for various forms of coerced indigenous labor. Simultaneously, with the opening of the transatlantic slave trade in the 1530s through the Portuguese-held trade factory of São Tomé off the African coast, a growing number of Africans were shipped to the New World who had very little or no Hispanic acculturation. They were called bozales. 

[...]

ASSIMILATION, AFRICA 
The word ‘‘assimilation’’ comes from the Latin term assimilatio, which means, ‘‘to render similar,’’ or ‘‘cause to be similar.’’ The import of this idea in French colonial politics may be linked to the ideals of fraternity, equality, and freedom emerging from the 1789 revolution there. Although colonial subjugation mitigated these core radical values, late-eighteenth-century France considered it appropriate to extend rights of citizenship and political rights to the African residents of Dakar, Gorée, Rafisque, Saint Louis, and Senegal. This foremost French colonial enclave in West Africa became the experimental laboratory for assimilation practice. 
As an imperial policy, assimilation tried to affirm the assumed superiority of French culture to those of its non-European colonies. Generally, the various European imperial powers—Britain, Germany, France, Holland, Spain, and Portugal—had claimed the obligation to civilize the ‘‘barbaric’’ peoples of the world as the major motive behind colonial exertion. In other words, ‘‘civilization’’ for the peoples of French Africa involved the imposing of French values on African culture. This implied, unquestioned acceptance of French language, dress, food, education, mannerisms, and ways of life distinguished France from its colonial peers. Instead of an indirect approach, France treated African political institutions and culture as if they were irrelevant. 
However, a big dilemma confronted the implementation of assimilation policy. Theoretically, assimilation expounded the potential equality for people of all races. This implied political, economic, and social equality among the French and the inhabitants of their overseas extensions, including Africans. But the consequences of this understanding and the attempt by the French to evade them drew indignation of the colonized people, while provoking a nationwide debate among politicians, academics, and colonial officials in France. The conservative monarchists and their Catholic allies confronted the more liberal-minded republicans. Consequently, the intention to assimilate was restricted to Senegal, while being subjected to closer scrutiny, revisions, and changes—especially between 1815 and 1945. 
These changes underpinned the dilemma facing an imperial France that tried, with limited success, to clothe its colonial interests in a liberal and progressive garb. France’s intentions became more obvious in the 1860s when Louis Léon César Faidherbe (1818–1889), the governor of French West African territory, received orders to embark on a more aggressive and ambitious territorial acquisition. While Faidherbe strengthened French possessions in Senegal from one to four communes, now comprising Dakar, Gorée, Saint Louis, and Rafisque, the privileges of the four communes were denied to the vast population of Africans that eventually came under French control. The great majority of Africans were denied assimilation and French citizenship. Only the African citizens of the French communes in Senegal were granted the right to elect deputies to the National Assembly in France. Prior to 1914, the African deputies to Parliament had come from a small class of elite, mainly people of European descent or of mixed race. But by 1914 a new African educated elite had emerged. Among them was Blaise Daigne, whose election in 1916 marked the first appearance of an African deputy in the French Parliament. 
Meanwhile, as the French expanded its African empire in the late nineteenth century more voices joined the rank of conservatives in the debate over the appropriateness of assimilation in colonial administration. Some held the view that Africans were unfit for complete assimilation. Others opposed the huge costs of educational programs needed in making assimilation a success, arguing that only rudimentary education was more proper for the Africans. There also were groups who desired that colonial development focus more on Algeria with its huge and influential French population. 
These relentless attacks on the policy resulted in restricting full citizenship rights and privileges to very few Africans in the colonies. In 1912, for instance, a law established that no one except those in West Africa could gain French citizenship. Additionally, those hoping to acquire citizenship were to meet a certain level of Western education, speak French, and accept both Christianity and European mannerisms. For the Africans, these conditions entailed a total rejection of their indigenous roots and African personality. In effect, between 1914 and 1937, the total number of assimilated Africans in Senegal was roughly 50,000. 
In the late 1930s, the French eventually began to acquiesce to the reality that Africans had a very different culture. The logic was then accepted that a different policy was required to make colonial administration attuned to African needs. This understanding led to the adoption of ‘‘association’’ as a new policy for building a better colonial order.

A obra de arte na época da sua possibilidade de reprodução técnica

Walter Benjamin

A proletarização crescente dos homens de hoje e a formação crescente de massas são os dois lados de um e do mesmo fenómeno. O fascismo tenta organizar as massas proletarizadas recentemente formadas sem tocar nas relações de propriedade para cuja abolição elas tendem. Vê a sua salvação na possibilidade que dá às massas de se exprimirem (mas com certeza não a de exprimirem os seus direitos). As massas têm o direito de exigir a transformação das relações de propriedade; o fascismo procurava dar-lhes expressão conservando intactas aquelas relações. Consequentemente, o fascismo tende para a estetização da política. À violentação das massas, que o fascismo subjuga no culto de um Führer, corresponde a violentação de todo um aparelho que ele põe ao serviço da produção de valores de culto.

Todos os esforços de estetização da política culminam num ponto. Este ponto é a guerra. É a guerra e só a guerra que torna possível dar uma finalidade aos mais amplos movimentos de massas, conservando as relações de propriedade herdadas. Assim se apresenta a actual situação do ponto de vista político. Do ponto de vista da técnica, ela apresenta-se da seguinte maneira: só a guerra torna possível mobilizar todos os meios técnicos que actualmente existem, conservando as relações de propriedade vigentes. É claro que a apoteose da guerra pelo fascismo não se serve destes argumentos. Contudo, será proveitoso dar-lhes alguma atenção. No manifesto de Marinetti sobre a guerra colonial etíope pode ler-se: «Há vinte e sete anos que nós, futuristas, nos erguemos contra o facto de a guerra ser considerada anti-estética….De acordo com isso, verificamos que:….A guerra é bela porque graças às máscaras de gás, aos horríveis megafones, aos lança—chamas e aos tanques pequenos, consegue fundamentar a supremacia do homem sobre a máquina subjugada. A guerra é bela porque inaugura a tão sonhada metalização do corpo humano. A guerra é bela porque enriquece um prado florido com as orquídeas flamejantes das metralhadoras. A guerra é bela porque reúne numa sinfonia os tiros de espingarda, de canhão, as pausas do cessar-fogo e os perfumes e odores dos cadáveres em decomposição. A guerra é bela porque cria novas formas arquitectónicas, como as dos grandes tanques, das esquadrilhas geométricas de aviões, das espirais de fumo das aldeias incendiadas e muitas outras coisas…Poetas e artistas do Futurismo…, lembrai-vos destes fundamentos de uma estética da guerra, para que a vossa luta por uma nova poesia e uma nova escultura…seja por eles iluminada!»

Este manifesto tem a vantagem da clareza. A maneira como aborda a questão merece ser adoptada pela dialéctica. A estética da guerra contemporânea coloca-se-lhe da seguinte maneira: se o aproveitamento natural das forças produtivas é retardado e impedido pelas relações de propriedade vigentes, a intensificação dos recursos técnicos, dos ritmos de vida, das fontes de energia, leva a que elas sejam aproveitadas de um modo não natural. É o que se passa na guerra que, com as suas destruições, prova que a sociedade não estava suficientemente madura para se servir da técnica como um órgão seu, que a técnica não estava suficientemente avançada para dominar as forças sociais elementares. Nos seus traços mais horrendos, a guerra imperialista é determinada pela discrepância entre os meios de produção poderosos e o seu aproveitamento insuficiente no processo produtivo (por outras palavras: pelo desemprego e falta de mercados). A guerra imperialista é a revolta da técnica que recolhe no «material humano» os direitos que a sociedade lhe retirou do seu material natural. Em vez de canalizar cursos de água, a técnica canaliza a corrente humana para o leito das suas trincheiras, em vez de lançar sementes do alto dos seus aviões, espalha bombas incendiárias pelas cidades, e na guerra do gás encontrou uma nova maneira de acabar com a aura.

Fiat ars – pereat mundus, diz o fascismo que, como confessou Marinetti, espera da guerra a satisfação artística da percepção transformada pela técnica. Trata-se visivelmente da consumação da arte pela arte. A humanidade, que antigamente, com Homero, foi objecto de contemplação para os deuses olímpicos, tornou-se objecto de contemplação para si própria. A alienação de si própria atingiu o grau que lhe permite viver a sua própria aniquilação como um prazer estético de primeira ordem. É assim a estetização da política praticada pelo fascismo. O comunismo responde-lhe com a politização da arte.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Walter Benjamin

The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.¹ The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system.

This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today's technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments. Still, Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war: "For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as antiaesthetic .... Accordingly we state: ... War is beautiful because it establishes man's dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates Illumination! new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others .... Poets and artists of Futurism! ... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art ... may be illumined by them!"

This manifesto has the virtue of clarity. Its formulations deserve to be accepted by dialecticians. To the latter, the aesthetics of today's war appears as follows: If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war.

The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production-in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of "human material," the claims to which society has denied its natural material. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.

"Fiat ars-pereat mundus," says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of "l’art pour l'art." Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.

¹ One technical feature is significant here, especially with regard to newsreels, the propagandist importance of which can hardly be overestimated. Mass reproduction is aided especially by the reproduction of masses. In big parades and monster rallies, in sports events, and in war, all of which nowadays are captured by camera and sound recording, the masses are brought face to face with themselves. This process, whose significance need not be stressed, is intimately connected with the development of the techniques of reproduction and photography. Mass movements are usually discerned more clearly by a camera than by the naked eye. A bird's-eye view best captures gatherings of hundreds of thousands. And even though such a view may be as accessible to the human eye as it is to the camera, the image received by the eye cannot be enlarged the way a negative is enlarged.
This means that mass movements, including war, constitute a form of human behavior which particularly favors mechanical equipment.

Paralipomena to "On the Concept of History"

Walter Benjamin

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely, the human race – to activate the emergency brake.

Thesis on the Philosophy of History

Walter Benjamin

The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical timelapse camera. And, basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance. Thus the calendars do not measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not· the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years. In the July revolution an incident occurred which showed this consciousness still alive. On the first evening of fighting it turned out that the clocks in towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from several places in Paris. An eye-witness, who may have owed his insight to the rhyme, wrote as follows:

Qui le croirait! on dit, qu'irrités contre l'heure
De nouveaux Josués au pied de chaque tour,
Tiraient sur les cadrans pour arreter le jour.-

Sobre o Conceito da História

Walter Benjamin

Marx diz que as revoluções são a locomotiva da história universal. Mas talvez as coisas se passem de maneira diferente. Talvez as revoluções sejam o gesto de accionar o travão de emergência por parte do género humano que viaja nesse comboio.

Sobre o conceito da História

Walter Benjamin

A consciência de destruir o contínuo da história é própria das classes revolucionárias no momento da sua acção. A Grande Revolução introduziu um novo calendário. O dia com que se inicia um calendário funciona como um dispositivo de concentração do tempo histórico. E é, no fundo, sempre o mesmo dia que se repete, sob a forma dos dias feriados, que são dias de comemoração. Isto quer dizer que os calendários não contam o tempo como os relógios. São monumentos de uma consciência histórica da qual parecem ter desaparecido todos os vestígios na Europa dos últimos cem anos. Na Revolução de Julho aconteceu ainda um incidente em que esta consciência ganhou expressão. Chegada a noite do primeiro dia de luta, aconteceu que, cm vários locais de Paris, várias pessoas, independentemente umas das outras e ao mesmo tempo, começaram a disparar contra os relógios das torres. Uma testemunha ocular, que talvez deva o seu poder divinatório à força da rima escreveu nessa altura: 

Qui le croirait! on dit qu'irrités contre l'heure 
De nouveaux Josués, au pied de chaque tour, 
Tiraient sur les cadrans pour arrêter le jour. 

[Incrível! Irritados com a hora, dir-se-ia, 
Os novos Josués, aos pés de cada torre, 
Alvejam os relógios, para suspender o dia.]
 

All That Is Solid Melts into Air

Marshall Berman

What is it that the members of the bourgeoisie are afraid to recognize in themselves? Not their drive to exploit people, to treat them purely as means or (in economic rather than moral language) as commodities. The bourgeoisie, as Marx sees it, doesn't lose much sleep over this. After all, they do it to one another, and even to themselves, so why shouldn't they do it to everybody else? The real source of trouble is the bourgeois claim to be the "Party of Order" in modern politics and culture. The immense amounts of money and energy put into building, and the self-consciously monumental character of so much of this building-indeed, throughout Marx's century, every table and chair in a bourgeois interior resembled a monument-testify to the sincerity and seriousness of this claim. And yet, the truth of the matter, as Marx sees, is that everything that bourgeois society builds is built to be torn down. "All that is solid" - from the clothes on our backs to the looms and mills that weave them, to the men and women who work the machines, to the houses and neighborhoods the workers live in, to the firms and corporations that exploit the workers, to the towns and cities and whole regions and even nations that embrace them all - all these are made to be broken tomorrow, smashed or shredded or pulverized or dissolved, so they can be recycled or replaced next week, and the whole process can go on again and again, hopefully forever, in ever more profitable forms. The pathos of all bourgeois monuments is that their material strength and solidity actually count for nothing and carry no weight at all, that they are blown away like frail reeds by the very forces of capitalist development that they celebrate. Even the most beautiful and impressive bourgeois buildings and public works are disposable, capitalized for fast depreciation and planned to be obsolete, closer in their social functions to tents and encampments than to "Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, Gothic cathedrals”.
 

Wittgenstein’s Nephew

Thomas Bernhard

My relations with Paul, which began in our friend Irina’s apartment in the Blumenstockgasse, were naturally difficult. It was the kind of friendship that has to be daily renewed and re-won, and in the course of time this proved exceedingly strenuous. Our friendship constantly shifted between high points and low points, relying for its continuance on repeated proofs of friendship. I recall, for instance, the important part that Paul played on the occasion when I was awarded the Grillparzer Prize—how he alone, apart from my companion, saw through the contrived absurdity of the award ceremony and hit upon the proper designation for such a grotesque: a piece of genuine Austrian perfidy. I recall that I bought a new suit for the occasion, believing that I could not appear at the Academy of Sciences unless I wore a suit. Accompanied by my companion, I went to an outfitters in the Kohlmarkt and chose one that seemed appropriate. Having tried it on, I decided to go on wearing it. It was gray-black, and I believed that in this gray-black suit I would be better able to play my part than in my old suit. On the morning of the ceremony I still regarded the conferment of the prize as a great occasion. It was the hundredth anniversary of Grillparzer’s death, and to be singled out for the award of the Grillparzer Prize on the hundredth anniversary of the poet’s death seemed to me a signal distinction. I’m now being honored by the Austrians, I thought, by my fellow countrymen, who up to now have done nothing but kick me, and, what’s more, by the award of the Grillparzer Prize. I really thought I had reached some peak of achievement. It is possible that my hands were trembling that morning, and that I was somewhat lightheaded. That the Austrians, having previously scorned or ignored me, should be giving me their highest award struck me as a kind of overdue compensation. It was not without a certain pride that I emerged from the clothing store into the Kohlmarkt, wearing my new suit, and walked over to the Academy of Sciences. Never in my life have I walked along the Kohlmarkt and the Graben and past the Gutenberg monument with such a sense of elation. Yet although I felt elated, I cannot say that I felt comfortable in my new suit. It is always a mistake to buy clothes under supervision—in company, so to speak—and I had made the mistake yet again: the new suit was too tight. All the same, I probably look quite good in my new suit, I thought as I arrived in front of the Academy of Sciences with my companion and Paul. If one disregards the money that goes with them, there is nothing in the world more intolerable than award ceremonies. I had already discovered this in Germany. They do nothing to enhance one’s standing, as I had believed before I received my first prize, but actually lower it, in the most embarrassing fashion. Only the thought of the money enabled me to endure these ceremonies; this was my sole motive for visiting various ancient city halls and tasteless assembly rooms—until the age of forty. I submitted to the indignity of these award ceremonies—until the age of forty. I let them piss on me in all these city halls and assembly rooms, for to award someone a prize is no different from pissing on him. And to receive a prize is no different from allowing oneself to be pissed on, because one is being paid for it. I have always felt that being awarded a prize was not an honor but the greatest indignity imaginable. For a prize is always awarded by incompetents who want to piss on the recipient. And they have a perfect right to do so, because he is base and despicable enough to receive it. Only in extremities, when one’s life and existence are threatened—and only until the age of forty—is one justified in receiving any prize or distinction, with or without an accompanying sum of money. When I received my prizes I did not have the excuse that I was suffering extreme hardship or that my life and existence were threatened; hence by receiving them I made myself not only low and contemptible but positively vile, in the truest sense of the word. On the way to receive the Grillparzer Prize, however, I believed that this time it was different. The prize carried no emolument. The Academy of Sciences meant something, I told myself, and its prize meant something. And as the three of us arrived in front of the Academy I believed that this prize was exceptional, since it was called the Grillparzer Prize and was being conferred by the Academy of Sciences. And as I walked across to the Academy of Sciences I actually thought it likely that I would be received outside the building, as seemed appropriate, and with the appropriate respect. But there was no one there to receive me. I waited in the entrance hall for a good quarter of an hour with my friends, but no one recognized me, let alone received me, even though my friends and I spent the whole time looking around. No one took the slightest notice of us as hordes of people streamed in and took their seats in the crowded assembly room. In the end I decided that we should simply follow the crowd. I decided to take my place in the middle of the room, where there were still a few empty seats, and went and sat there with my friends. By the time we had taken our seats the room was full, and even the minister had taken her place in the first row in front of the dais. The Vienna Philharmonic was nervously tuning up, and the president of the Academy of Sciences, a man by the name of Hunger, was running excitedly to and fro on the dais, while only I and my friends knew what was holding up the ceremony. Several members of the Academy were running back and forth on the dais, looking for the central figure in the proceedings. Even the minister turned and looked around the room in all directions. Suddenly one of the gentlemen on the dais caught sight of me sitting in the middle of the room and, whispering something in the president’s ear, left the dais and began to make his way toward me. It was not easy for him to pass along the row of seats, which were all occupied, to where I was sitting. Everyone in the row had to stand up. They did so only reluctantly, and I saw the malignant glances that were directed at me. It occurred to me that it had been a monstrous idea of mine to sit in the middle of the room, causing the utmost difficulty to the gentleman who was trying to reach me (and who of course was a member of the Academy). Obviously nobody here has recognized you, I thought at once, except for this gentleman. By the time he reached my place all eyes were fixed on me—and what reproachful, penetrating looks they gave me! An academy that gives me a prize and doesn’t know me from Adam, and then sends me reproachful, penetrating looks because I haven’t made myself known, deserves to be treated with even greater contempt, I thought. Finally the gentleman pointed out to me that my proper place was not where I was sitting but in the front row beside the minister, so would I please go to the front row and sit next to her. I did not obey, because the request was made in a rather disagreeable and arrogant tone, and with such a sickening assurance of victory that, to preserve my self-respect, I had to refuse to accompany him toward the dais. Herr Hunger himself should come, I said; it was for the president of the Academy himself, not just anybody, to invite me to approach the dais. It would have given me the greatest pleasure to get up and leave the Academy of Sciences with my friends, without receiving the prize. But I stayed where I was. I was locked in my own cage. There was no way out. I had made a cage for myself out of the Academy of Sciences. Finally the president of the Academy came down and accompanied me toward the dais. No sooner had I sat down next to the minister than my friend Paul, unable to contain himself any longer, burst into a peal of laughter that shook the whole room and continued until the Philharmonic began to play. A few speeches were made about Grillparzer and a few words said about me. Altogether the talking went on for an hour; as is customary on such occasions, there was far too much talking, and naturally it was all nonsense. The minister slept through the speeches, snoring audibly, and woke up only when the Philharmonic struck up again. When the ceremony was over, as many people as possible crowded round the minister and President Hunger. No one took any further notice of me. Before my friends and I left the assembly room, I heard the minister cry out: Where’s the budding poet? By this time I had had enough and left the Academy of Sciences as fast as I could. No money and being pissed on—that was intolerable. I ran out into the street, more or less dragging my friends after me, and I can still hear Paul saying to me as we left: You’ve let yourself be abused! These people have pissed on you! It’s true, I thought, they really have pissed on you. They’ve pissed on you again, as always. But you allowed yourself to be pissed on, I thought, and, what’s more, in the Viennese Academy of Sciences. Before going to the Sacher with my friends to digest this whole perverse prize-giving procedure over a boiled fillet of beef, I went back to the outfitter’s in the Kohlmarkt where I had bought my new suit before the ceremony. I told them that it was too tight and I wanted a new one. I said this with such insolent emphasis that the staff did not demur, but at once set about finding me a new suit. I took one or two off the rack and tried them on, finally choosing the most comfortable. I paid a small additional sum and kept the suit on. When I was back in the street, it struck me that before long somebody else would be running around in Vienna in the suit I had worn for the conferment of the Grillparzer Prize at the Academy of Sciences. The thought amused me. I had equally clear evidence of Paul’s strength of character on another occasion, when I received the State Prize for Literature (long before the Grillparzer Prize). This ended in what the newspapers called a scandal. The encomium delivered by the minister in the audience chamber of the ministry was utter nonsense, because he merely read out from a sheet of paper what had been written down for him by one of his officials charged with literary affairs. He said, for instance, that I had written a novel about the south seas, which of course I had not. And although I have been an Austrian all my life, the minister stated that I was Dutch. He also stated that I specializedin adventure novels, though this was news to me. More than once during his encomium he said that I was a foreigner, a visitor to Austria. By this stage I was no longer annoyed by the idiocies he read out. I knew that this imbecile from Styria could not be blamed, because before becoming a minister he had been secretary to the Chamber of Agriculture in Graz, with special responsibility for stock breeding. Stupidity was written all over his face, as it is over the faces of all ministers without exception. It was distasteful, but not annoying, and I was able to endure his speech without difficulty. It then fell to me to say a few words, by way of thanks for the prize, as it were. Just before the ceremony, in great haste and with the greatest reluctance, I had jotted down a few sentences, amounting to a small philosophical digression, the upshot of which was that man was a wretched creature and death a certainty. After I had delivered my speech, which lasted altogether no more than three minutes, the minister, who had understood nothing of what I had said, indignantly jumped up from his seat and shook his fist in my face. Snorting with rage, he called me a curr in front of the whole assembly and then left the chamber, slamming the glass door behind him with such force that it shattered into a thousand fragments. Everybody present jumped up and watched in astonishment as the minister stormed out. For a moment complete silence reigned, as they say. And then the strangest thing happened: the whole assembly, whom I can describe only as an opportunistic rabble, rushed after the minister, though not without shouting curses and brandishing their fists at me as they went. I clearly remember the clenched fist that Herr Henz, the president of the Art Senate, brandished at me, and all the other marks of respect I was shown at that moment, as the whole assembly, consisting of a few hundred kept artists, most of them writers—colleagues of mine, one might say—together with their hangers-on, raced through the shattered glass door in pursuit of the minister. I will refrain from mentioning names, as I have no wish to appear in court over such a ludicrous matter, but they were the best known, most celebrated, and most respected names in Austrian letters. They all raced out of the audience chamber and down the stairs after the minister, leaving me standing there with my companion. Like a leper. None of them stayed behind with us; they all rushed out, past the buffet that had been prepared for them, and followed the minister down the stairs—all except Paul. He was the only one who stayed with me and my companion, horrified, yet at the same time amused, by the incident. Later, when they could safely do so, a few of those who had at first disappeared slunk back and joined me in the audience chamber. This little group finally got around to discussing where to go for a meal in order to choke down the whole ridiculous episode. Years later Paul and I would go through the names of those who had raced after this brainless Styrian politician in their unscrupulous subservience to the state and its ministers, and we knew why each of them had done so. The following day the Austrian newspapers carried reports of how Bernhard the nest fouler had insulted the minister, when in fact the opposite was the case: the minister Piffl-Perčević had insulted the writer Thomas Bernhard. However, the event drew fitting comment abroad, where people do not have to rely on the Austrian ministries and their involvement in artistic subventions. Accepting a prize is in itself an act of perversity, my friend Paul told me at the time, but accepting a state prize is the greatest.

Moving cargos

Thomas Birtchnell, Satya Savitzky and John Urry

Taking stock

Alongside musings on anatomy, the ‘utility of forests’, comets and the ‘prodigious number of plants on the earth’, eighteenth-century thinker Christoph Christian Sturm’s Reflections on the Works of God in Nature and Providence marvelled at two phenomena that were greatly boosting global trade. The first was the compass which gave direction even on the darkest nights and cloudiest of days in the midst of the ocean. The second was the ‘miraculous’ advantage that the sea lent to moving goods as compared with land. Sturm reflects that a body of water ‘is not more loaded with the ship and her cargo, than it was with the water which the ship removes from the places which she occupies’. This movement across the sea enabled Europeans to ‘procure treasures from other parts of the world’, and inspired Sturm to honour those ‘who are obliged to brave the seas, and undertake long and dangerous voyages for the benefit of society, and consequently for our particular profit’.

In the contemporary ‘global age’ combined elements facilitate transoceanic trade utilising digital global positioning systems and ships increasingly built upon a truly massive scale. Currently the largest cargo ship is the 400 metre-long and 59 metre-wide Maersk Triple E class with a capacity of 18,000 20-foot containers (twenty-foot equivalent unit, or TEU). To put this into perspective, the ‘Halsewell’ trading ship painted by J.M.W. Turner and sunk in 1786, the same year that Sturm died, was 42.5 metres long and 11 metres wide. It could only have carried approximately 14 modern cargo containers. The innovations described by Sturm have evolved into a global system comprising around 6,000 container ships and various air, rail and road networks, which contingently supply those living in the rich North with an estimated 90 per cent of ‘everything’. Scale makes a difference.

Each day a vast, ‘orderly disorder’ of all sorts of non-human – and sometimes human – traffic circulates the world as cargo: home appliances, vehicles, electronics, parts, animals, foods, fuels, toys, clothes, building materials, ‘wastes’, weapons, illicit drugs and ‘illegal’ migrants – just some of the ‘moving materials’ that are central to modern social and economic life. In turn, an assortment of other objects and materials are mobilised and immobilised as part of keeping cargo on the move. Indeed, this book’s subtitle (‘moving materials in a global age’) is intended to include that which moves with cargo, such as containers, trucks, trains, ships, seafarers and ‘invasive species’. These (im)mobilities also include various leaks and seeps such as oil spills and plastics accumulations, the ‘accidental’ by-products of contemporary cargo systems.

Cargomobilities and their supporting infrastructures form part of a ‘technological unconscious’, which only becomes registered at points of disruption or disaster, such as an Icelandic volcano or a container shipwreck off a Devon beach. Yet the ‘hidden’ character of these cargo relays and routeways belies the utter dependence of modern societies on these circuitous paths and flows. The global traffic of objects and materials is by no means ‘new’, but previously it was mainly unusual and expensive items such as spices and silk that were traded internationally (e.g. along the famous Silk Road and Spice Routes), and consumers in rich countries had to wait very patiently indeed for long-awaited goods to arrive. Today it is routine for people at least in the rich North to consume many different goods that are manufactured far away. The continuous, rapid, networked and energy-dense mobilities of objects and materials are specific to contemporary ‘disorganised’ capitalism, marked by rising inequalities of income, new kinds of well-being and the proliferation of ever-more consumer goods and experiences.

The industry of logistics, which simply put is the management of the movement of things, was thought to have a value of US$3.9 trillion by 2013. Logistics, together with finance and extraction, is at the heart of contemporary capitalism. Logistics now both underpins and manages the global organisation of trade. Yet logistics remains comparatively under-researched in the social sciences. Jasper Bernes argues that the (more well-documented) process of financialisation ‘had as its hidden counterpart a massive investment of capital in the... sphere of commodity (rather than money) circulation...through a build-out in the form of tankers, port complexes, railyards, robotically-controlled distribution centers, and the digital and network technology needed to manage the increased volume and complexity of trade. The shipping container and the commodity future were thus complementary technical innovations...’

Some state that there is now a greater fortune to be made in moving goods than in making them. Indeed, the very distinction between moving and making, or production and distribution, is ‘under conceptual attack’, as manufacture becomes ‘...merely one moment in a continuous Heraclitean flux’. Logistics origins were military, but its development has resulted from commercial imperatives to accelerate the turnover of goods, to cut production costs (by relocating manufacturing to where wages are low and regulations lax), and to eliminate many forms of friction and insecurity that beset globalised or ‘stretched-out’ production processes. Logistics makes possible ‘neoliberal’ institutional and policy reforms which involve ‘opening up’ foreign markets and globalising finance and trade. These economic shifts cannot be understood without attending to material infrastructures, or the matter arranged to enable the movement of other matter. Infrastructures have produced dizzying and dislocating effects and are of the utmost importance due to their resource implications and fateful environmental consequences.

The most significant of these infrastructures is what we can term ‘containerisation’. Containerisation has enabled offshoring of production, major accelerations in the throughput of material objects through cities and centres of consumption, and a global but highly unevenly distributed ‘consumer culture’ [...] its pivotal role in reshaping societies, economies and geographies, but also the many instabilities and insecurities that accompany this supposedly ‘smooth’ system.

The smooth system

Malcolm McLean is normally credited with inventing containerisation in 1954, but a container system was used previously by the US military during World War II. McLean’s container system was then enlisted by US forces in Vietnam, demonstrating containerisation’s efficiency and helping establish it as the hegemonic system of cargo distribution in the latter part of the twentieth century. Such containers, steel boxes of standard dimensions, could be moved relatively simply between different forms of transport and between vehicles on land and sea. Containerisation effectively automated loading/unloading routines, eliminating a major source of ‘friction’ (human labour) in the global movement of commodities. Workers needed to be paid, were slower, and could make health and safety demands, and were thus a key ‘chokepoint’ in the circulation of commodities.

A central feature of logistics is the drive to maximise the capacities of existing infrastructures. Unlike ‘top-down’ national infrastructures such as some railway systems that were built more-or-less from scratch, containerisation is an emergent global system which ‘piggy-backs’ on top of existing infrastructures. Rather than the creation of new transport technologies, containerisation – or intermodalism – involves the repurposing of existing forms, bringing trucks, trains and ships into a single system by ‘smoothing’ the interfaces between them, and by reorganising material flows through information and communication technologies (ICTs). Huge multimodal port complexes become the crucial nodes in this mobility system, which aspires to erase distinctions between land and sea and integrate production and consumption, so as to establish a continuous and ‘global surface of logistical integration’.

While marketing, advertising and the local high street seem a million miles away from factories, assembly lines and container ports, in fact they are inextricably entwined through supply-chain management techniques. Containerisation involves integrating manufacturing and retail through various digital systems and innovations in computer modelling. It involves the continuous monitoring of point-of-sales data, inventory, worker routines, weather and traffic patterns, and many other variables in a never-ending quest to find the ‘cheapest, fastest path to making and distributing products’. An increasing ‘granularity of representation’ – made possible by innovations such as RFID (radio frequency identification) technology – enables the tracking and tracing of ever-more processes, so ‘fine-tuning’ most aspects of production, distribution and consumption. This ability to track so comprehensively presupposes an extensive network of Earth-orbiting satellites. Walmart, a firm whose business model and organisational format is entirely dependent on containerisation, owns the largest civilian satellite network in space, second only to the US military. ‘What appears on the horizon’, argues Brian Holmes, ‘is a self-shaping or “autopoietic” modelling process that can integrate hundreds of millions of individuals and billions of discrete objects into a single mobility-system, where every movement is coordinated with every other in real time’.

Containerisation greatly reduces transportation costs, enabling the off- shoring of manufacturing and the integration of dispersed spaces and activities into shifting global production networks. Massive bulk retailers such as Walmart depend on the container revolution for the cost of shipping goods in containers being between 1 and 2 per cent of retail value, 90 per cent less than before containerisation. Containerisation and the rise of China to become the world’s second largest economy are indelibly linked. Worldwide much manufacturing and related CO2 emissions are outsourced to China, China produces many of the 100,000 or so containers manufactured yearly, and it is developing a logistics infrastructure as a major focus of its international economic activity.

‘In today’s globalized economy’ argues Leonard, ‘a product’s supply chain can cover multiple continents and scores of businesses, each of which is trying to maximize its profit at that link in the chain’. Yet the global dispersal of production has gone hand in hand with a concentration of power in the hands of retailers, who control product design and are able to terminate contracts and flexibly switch between suppliers to benefit from more advantageous terms. Multinational firms have in a sense become branding operations. Logistics enables ‘agility’, ‘the power to change, as quickly as possible, the speed, location, origin and destination of products, as well as product type, in order to meet volatile market conditions’.

The entire system is geared towards keeping goods in motion, circumventing obstacles, and closing the gaps between production and consumption. Goods that are not moving mean that money is lost, immobility is figured as waste. Containerisation helps in constructing an apparently ‘smooth’ system based on low levels of storage and continual flows of cargo with goods constantly on the move. This cargo system underpins consumption practices centred on rapid cycles of product innovation and obsolescence. The imperative to keep goods on the move has produced novel spatial shifts; giant container ships have effectively become the ‘floating warehouses’ of this ‘just-in-time’ system. Factories, by contrast, are increasingly ‘resembling ships, stealing away in search of ever-cheaper labour’.

L´écriture du désastre

Maurice Blanchot

Si le désastre signifie être séparé́ de l'étoile (le déclin qui marque l'égarement lorsque s'est interrompu le rapport avec le hasard d'en haut), il indique la chute sous la nécessité désastreuse. La loi serait-elle le désastre, la loi suprême ou extrême, l'excessif de la loi non codifiable : ce à quoi nous sommes destinés sans être concernés? Le désastre ne nous regarde pas, il est l'illimité sans regard, ce qui ne peut se mesurer en terme d'échec ni comme la perte pure et simple.

Rien ne suffit au désastre; ce qui veut dire que, de même que la destruction dans sa pureté de ruine ne lui convient pas, de même l'idée de totalité ne saurait marquer ses limites: toutes choses atteintes et détruites, les dieux et les hommes reconduits à l'absence, le néant à la place de tout, c'est trop et trop peu. [...] Le désastre dont il faudrait atténuer - en la renforçant - la couleur noire, nous expose à une certaine idée de la passivité. Nous sommes passifs par rapport au désastre, mais le désastre est peut-être la passivité, en cela passé et toujours passé.

“Malvinas Para Los Pingüinos”—“Victory to the Sheep” (Anti War Slogans)

BM BLOB

In the exceptionally severe winter of 1886 unemployed building workers and others rioted in central London. Engels condemned the “opportunism” of William Morris and sundry that saw in these unemployed battles “the first skirmish of the revolution”. They were, according to Engels, the work of desperate riff-raff on “the borderland between the working class and lumpenproletariat—ready for any ‘lark’ up to a wild riot apropos de rien.” Drifting back into the East End the unemployed numbering some 20,000 rattled off a chorus or two of Rule Britannia.

This other sea borne ‘national anthem’ has once again been heard wishing the fleet well as it sailed for the Falklands/Malvinas or rather the Penguin Isles. On a London bus a graffiti read “Skinheads fight for your country, go to the Falklands” and the number of applicants applying to the naval recruiting office in High Holborn zoomed up. When asked on a radio programme if these included unemployed skool leavers, a spokesman with a kilo of plums in his mouth answered, “We are not a recruiting office for unemployables.”

This cold-water reply sets limits to the hot-blooded nationalism of the phantom spray can writer. Together they reflect the potency and limitations of this ad hoc response to the conflict in the south Atlantic, which the state has used to the utmost, tapping both popular imperial residues and the legacy of anti fascism deriving from World War Two. Set beside other memories retrieved from the historical deeps, Maggie Thatcher on the even of the Mark No 1 Task Force setting sail opportunely quoted Queen Victoria. “Failure? The possibility does not exist.” However against memories of Drake and other expeditionary forces sent to sort out some corner of a far-flung empire, were mingled allusions to the Dover Patrol of the Second World War and an anti fascist resistance.

Behind the irrelevant and anachronistic facade of territorial imperialism or righteous anti fascism, the hidden purpose of the war is to disorientate the proletariat. Never at any time in the past has the fleet so explicitly put to sea to prevent the proletariat from setting sail in its own drunken boat. To the aft of the unexpected show of strength mounted by the Task Force lies the fear of riots, strikes and a dissident youth whose aggressive energy needs to be nailed with official blessing to the mast of hooligan patriotism. The unrelenting media swamp operation has drowned any mention (until June) of three days of heavy rioting in Liverpool, and has only partially succeeded in jamming the trouble in the health service, the support striking miners have already given nurses, and the promise of more aid to come from steel workers and water workers. A national dock strike was narrowly averted and massive trouble on the railways threatens. Apart from the hospitals these struggles are-not about higher pay, raising questions of class solidarity, unemployment and the erosion of working conditions (e.g. the Wandsworth refuse collectors strike against competitive tendering). Counteracting the drift to class unity is the British Bulldog divisiveness created by the south Atlantic war. Suddenly racial, regional/national differences have taken on an importance once more. Military success has mesmerised many a skinhead. A year ago they ached to trash rich suburbs and were putting out feelers to young blacks who look on the Penguin Isles as just another piece of land. Irish proletarians who over the last few years have never made a big thing out of being Irish, lowered their voices, wary lest anyone think them unpatriotic and northerners became somewhat ‘suspect’ as ‘socialist’ by the ‘loyalist’ south. All this old divide and rule crap has reared its head again but now without any substance to sustain it for any length of time.

The war in the south Atlantic had from the British Government’s point of view to be sold as a just war. This is the key to the anti fascist rhetoric, references to D-Day landings, The Longest Day, Poland 1939 etc. But the real effect of this propaganda will be felt in Latin America, not in the UK. At a stroke Thatcher ruined the US/Argentinean axis. As the former US Assistant Secretary of State William Rogers said: “We face the erosion if not the dismantlement of the entire inter-American system.” Thatcher however is supremely unaware that she might actually be fomenting revolution in Latin America. Formerly, British expeditionary forces were often as not despatched to put down popular rebellion. Now it is the reverse: success for the British military means fanning the flames of social revolution abroad. Lacking a worldview of likely causes and effects, the business in the south Atlantic is a parochial throw of the dice. It has in the UK been a spectator’s war, conveying an impression of effortless conflict meant to overawe the proletariat and restore the confidence of the British nation state accustomed to falling flat on its face. This was the pearl behind the successful storming of the penguins massed on South Georgia and the ludicrous despatch sent out by the Commander of the Fleet to Queen Liz. The only concession to anti fascist sentiment—excepting the rhetoric—has been the capture and bringing back of Capitano Alfredo Astiz, the notorious Argentinian torturer. All in all there are built-in limitations to the manipulation of the anti fascist heritage in the UK, which the state seems to recognise by not making much of. A tradition of armed guerrilla resistance to an indigenous fascist regime lending itself to manipulation by Secret Services through acts of terrorism is lacking. This rules out any slavish imitation of the Italian-style “strategy of tension” though the British state has not been averse to using terrorism when it saw fit. The British state has to extemporise ever anew, unable to hit on the right formula for containment. Penguin Islands were a gift horse all right, but how much more mileage can be got out of these remote islands? Interest wanes with victory and mass attention is beamed back from the south Atlantic to the social war within.

Insistent prodding shall keep alive the memory of these events. Threats, real or imagined, of a renewed invasion and bombing raids are going to mean the garrisoning of British troops on the Islands for some considerable time to come. A flotilla of boats large and small are likely to be kept on the ready in the south Atlantic. Cuts in naval expenditure shall be temporarily postponed and the rundown of naval dockyards in Chatham and Portsmouth (scenes of rioting in 1981) leading to the loss of 40,000 jobs deferred for a while. One third of the navy, prior to the conflict, was due to be scrapped and some 40 of the jolly jack tars who put to sea were clutching redundancy papers. 1000 professional soldiers were also, due to be laid off. No future but signing on the rock ‘n’ roll.

The navy was however going to bear the brunt of the cuts. Naval high commands threatened with imminent eclipse (minus subs) are staking their survival on this nostalgic Senior Service fag packet Armada silhouetted against westering guns more evocative of World War One than the nuclear/missile age. The rebuilding of the lost ships, the maintenance of an 8,000-mile supply line and the enormous cost of the war nearing two billion pounds will be paid for out of increased taxation and a further reduction in the social wage as money available for health care is snapped up by the armed forces. This is bound eventually to exacerbate still more the social crises, which just goes to show what a one-off adventure this has been. In the not so distant past, jingoism and gunboat diplomacy had to be paid for with increased welfare expenditure and domestic reform—the reverse of what is happening now.

The subversive process within has gone too far and bread and water phrases like “peace with honour” will do little to set back for any length of time the beginnings of a revolutionary unity and totality, the like of which the British proletariat has never experienced before.

The summer riots of 1981 were the foretaste of the future for us. One day sooner or later the roof is going to blow off the UK. Faced with an assertion like this most people in pubs, streets, supermarkets or at work tend to nod their heads. The old phlegmatic reassurances that “it can’t happen here” has finally gone—let it be forever.

Bash the Rich

Ian Bone

WILD IN THE CITY

Two other events towards the end of 1983 led us to believe that Class War was reflecting a change in attitude away from pacifism towards the creation of a more combative social movement. On 29 September, the first Stop the City action had taken place outside the Mansion House. In many ways, it seemed like the dying embers of pacifism, non-violent direct action and the peace camps, to be followed only a few weeks later by the fighting in Hyde Park and six months later by the second Stop the City full-scale riot.

I'd written in an article entitled Wreck the City! in Class War No. 5 disparaging the pacifist Stop The City thus:

‘Standing outside the Mansion House at the Stop The City action on 29 September, things were looking well good. About 300 anarchists were chanting‘fuck off!’ as the toe rag of a Lady Lord Mayor was installed. The chances of inflicting some damage on the Old Bill and the rich brat stockbrokers they were protecting were looking very rosy. But then the dreaded ‘Upper Heyford disease,’ signs of which I had diagnosed earlier in the day, proved it was still at epidemic proportions among those present.

The main symptom of this wasting disease, which is 100% fatal, is a complete paralysis which makes resistance to the police impossible even when they are heavily outnumbered. The paralysis also attacks the brain resulting in its victims patting police horses, chatting to the filth and voluntarily getting themselves arrested in the absurd delusion that this constitutes ‘direct action’ of some kind. As sufferers of this dread disease were taken away for treatment, fellow sufferers made no attempt to pull or to attack the vans taking them to the treatment centres. At the end of the day, there was one broken window, no police or stockbrokers put in hospital, and 203 arrests! 203 arrests for one fucking broken window!

This was naturally hailed as a great success in the anarchist press, considered to be a far greater triumph than the Oxford Street fiasco the previous year when 48 anarchists were arrested for causing even less damage. Join the Class War mob at Stop the City on 29 March. If you want peace, prepare for war’.

[...]

There was limited time for self-congratulation though, as Stop The City No. 2 beckoned on 29 March. We knew this could be an important turning point for our movement and we played an active role in a series of meetings to plan the momentous event — with the usual violence versus pacifism debates to the fore. Subsequently Class War was often credited (or blamed) in the press with organising this Stop The City. This was far from the truth and, for once, we never played up our organising role. The real credit goes to London Greenpeace, Dave Morris, the Roseberry punks and countless unsung others. It was a fucking brilliant day when all our movement in its disparate forms was united in action for once.

I'd stayed at Adrienne's the night before and when I suggested bussing it down to the city at 9am, she expressed doubts anarchists could get up so early! It must be admitted it was odds on nothing much starting at an anarchist demo until mid-afternoon. We were on the bus into the city at 10am with no sign of anything at all to suggest Stop The City was happening. Adrienne was giving me the ‘I Told you so’ look when wham bam! A fucking huge forest of black flags legs it out of an alleyway in front of us hotly pursued by the cops in a pall of orange smoke. Fucking hell! Whoa, off the bus, let's get stuck in. I can’t beat the general descriptions of the day written by me and Martin in Class War No. 6. But other memories of little incidents were just as vital in gaining the feel of the events.

Roland, my old flatmate from Cardiff walking around, briefcase in hand, looking like a City yuppy. He gleefully opened his briefcase however to reveal a small arsenal — distress flares, smoke bombs, stink bombs, spray paint, glue.

Crass splattering the cops with red paint bombs. Nuns splattering the cops with red paint bombs — Crass nuns or nuns on the run? I get stuck in some static rucks outside the Royal Exchange. Ruck caves in on me and Attila the Stockbroker heaves me out with a happy Harlow grin on his face. A yuppy is chased into a wine bar by a gang of punks, one of whom throws a waste paper bin through the wine bar window.

There's hardly any sign of most of the Class War mob — Sean Mason couldn’t take the day off work! The rest are about getting stuck in but we don't operate as a cohesive unit. Me and Adrienne dive into a cafe midday for a coffee. A mohicanned punk is explaining to three young punkettes that things are going to get much livelier in the afternoon: ‘Yeah, Class War are coming down — they're fucking psychos, they're fucking mad, they've got machetes and guns, there's going to be fucking carnage everywhere’. We keep a low profile as we don’t really look like the psychotic Class Warriors he's expecting.

Autonomous groups are causing grief everywhere. The mob from Llandeilo, who stayed with us the night before, are heading up to Fleet Street to go on a window trashing spree. We survey their splintered handiwork with pride later.

The Jethros — a well tasty mob of old hippies from Exeter — are going up the West End to start trashing Oxford Street, waterfalls of glass cascading everywhere. The Jethros had some idea about crashing a load of cars together at the junction of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road and torching them but they're talked out of it in case innocent bystanders get blown away. One of them mutters Emile Henri's famous ‘There are no innocents!’ The Jethros line was either fight with us or get what's coming to you. Oxford Street is duly trashed. All the out-of-towners act the same, forming little hit squads with their mates, coalescing, melting away and striking again. The cops are ill-prepared for the diversity of the actions and completely taken by surprise.

Charlie’s brick is my outstanding memory of the day. We're part of a mob charging down Fenchurch Street with black flags flying like a Makhnovist column — unfortunately, unlike the Makhnovists, we ain't got any weapons. There's not many weapons that come to hand in the City, and the cops have taken care to remove street furniture and builders' rubble. But look! I kid you not — a fucking lorry load of bricks hones into view. A swarm of anarcho-locusts strip it bare within minutes, windows caving in like dominoes along the street. There's some fucking huge bank windows about 50 foot high, but some proletarian typists are sitting just behind them, blissfully ignorant that they're about to be guillotined by huge shards of glass. Charlie does his Marcel Marceau bit, bangs in window to get typists' attention, points to brick in his hand, steps back and mimes throwing brick through window. Typists scarper sharpish. Charlie's brick arcs its mime through the window. A huge whoop at such ethical brick-throwing and we're off.

Smoke everywhere. We meet some fucking giant wearing Spanish republican military uniform, coughing his guts up. He gets a flask of milky coffee out from his knapsack that his mum had made for him. He takes size 16 shoes his name is Juan Zapata, he carries a CNT pennant on a stick. Style or what. He is well impressed we're from Class War and we're quite impressed with him. We'll meet again.

Stop The City completed the transformation from pacifism. Things would never be the same again until the fluffies reared their heads in the 1990s.

[...]

In May 1985, there was an ‘alternative’ rally at the Friends Meeting House addressed by Tony Benn and 'Red' Ted Knight, Leader of the Lambeth Council. The week before, Knight had evicted the squatters from Effra Parade in Brixton using baton-wielding riot police. Errol, Franco and other Class War supporters had been involved in resisting the eviction and considered it a fucking disgrace for Ted Knight to be passing himself off as some kind of radical only a week later. About 20 of us turned up demanding Benn remove Knight from chairing the meeting and the Effra squatters got a chance to speak. Benn, the aristocratic phoney whose hero status on the British left for decades speaks volumes about the poverty of radicalism in the UK, denounced us as ‘fascists’ and said the miners present would ‘sort us out’. Unfortunately, these horny-handed sons of toil and aristocrats of the proletariat were all sitting alongside us reading Class War! Knight mobilised a load of billowy-trousered ‘healers’ (yes it was a fucking odd audience!) to surround us singing peace songs to remove our bad karma violent vibes. It was a bizarre sight seeing this old school tankie and ex-Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) hack enlisting the help of the crystal therapy brigade to sort us out. This might have worked with the usual anarchists but not with us! Charlie hurled an apple at Ted Knight — which was caught by a Green Party type on the platform and eaten — well stylish! Then we rushed the stage. The tables went flying, microphones used as weapons, and Ian Slaughter pulled out his steel comb which glinting in the sunlight may well have looked like a knife. Either way the platform fled, the squatters said a few and we legged it over to the Eliza Doolittle pub opposite to sit in watching the wailing cop cars arrive.

[...]

WE VISIT CRASS

After STC2¹ when Crass had put themselves about to such good effect, Ron, Charlie, Gareth and Sean paid a visit to the legendary North farmhouse to smooth over any remaining differences or past misunderstandings between us. It has to be admitted that the make-up of our high powered negotiating team left something to be desired: no women and three paid up members of the Masonite tendency. The leader himself was cracking jokes about black rags hanging on the washing line and lentil stew for tea. Charlie was prevailed upon to leave his bar of soap (which he wielded like a cross at Dracula) on the train. Andy Palmer picked us up from the station and sure enough as we neared the house we could see black uniforms flapping in the wind, and on entry — a bubbling cauldron of lentil stew to sniggers from the Masonites. This could be far from a meeting of minds I thought looking to Gareth the Mr. Sensible of our party. However, things went out rather well.

We were warmly and hospitably received by the full crew. There was no doubt that some members of the band had dramatically changed away from pacifism during the last two years — their support for the striking miners and STC being indicative of this. Phil Free, Andy Palmer, Penny Rimbaud, Steve Ignorant and Gee Vaucher spent the whole day nutting the violence/non-violence issue out with us. Penny seemed to be starting on the long road towards support for Angry Brigade-style tactics. We encouraged Crass to come to our conferences, the Bash the Rich marches and Henley Regatta. Once Sean Mason and the others had got into long and genuine political discussion with Crass attitudes changed on both sides with respect for each others commitment. Sean refused to eat the lentil stew on ethical grounds but we squeezed a grudging: “Their music's shit, their clothes are shit and they're dirt crustie hippies, but...” out of him on the train back to civilisation. And things flowed from there onwards. Phil Free came to our Big Caxton Hall rally and some plans were developed by Crass for the Henley Regatta which never quite came to fruition but which would have been fairly spectacular.

Penny and Gee in particular dealt with the reasons the band was ending in 1984 as long promised. The real problem to them was the contradiction between being a band encouraging people to think for themselves resulting in the creation of hundreds of Crass clones saying 'we must think for ourselves.'

‘Why did the Crass Punk cross the road? Because Crass told him to.’ had got too close to reality and they honourably kept to their finish date. I went up from Swansea with Mamf to their last gig at the Colosseum in Aberdare during the miners' strike. It had been arranged by my old mate Paul Pritchard from Cardiff and I'd wondered if Aberdare would take the expected punk influx better than Maesteg had an influx of hippies 20 years earlier! We arrived about 4.30 and dived into the pub next door to the closed doors of The Colosseum. The landlord was staring out of the windows at the punks as if they'd arrived from Planet Zarg!

‘Look at that lot’ he said to me confidentially like I was his new best friend. ‘I ain't letting them in.’ None of the locals seemed to know anything about it being a miners’ benefit . It was just another gig — could've been Man from Swansea or Budgie from Cardiff for all they knew. We told him it was a benefit for the miners and the punks would drink lots of cider... He relented. By the time the gig was due to start the pub was awash with punks, miners and the locals getting on in storming fashion. I remember one miner greasing up his hair into a Mohican! ‘Our class in all its diverse glory’ I whispered sentimentally to Mamf.

¹ Stop the City 2. The Stop the City demonstrations of 1983 and 1984 were described as a 'Carnival Against War, Oppression and Destruction.' «The plan was to bring together the radical end of the peace—ecology—“third world”— and anarchist movements to attack the root cause of all their problems — Capital — by attacking the heart of finance. [...] an uneasy alliance of radical liberals and anarchists. The main problem was the issue of “violence” — many pacifists were worried that people might defend themselves against police attacks/arrests and buildings could be damaged by “violence (sic) against property” (libcom.org). [N.E]

La Muralla y Los Libros

Jorge Luis Borges 

Leí, días pasados, que el hombre que ordenó la edificación de la casi infinita muralla china fue aquel primer emperador, Shih Huang Ti, que asimismo dispuso que se quemaran todos los libros anteriores a él. Que las dos vastas operaciones –las quinientas a seiscientas leguas de piedra opuestas a los bárbaros, la rigurosa abolición de la historia, es decir del pasado– procedieran de una persona y fueran de algún modo sus atributos, inexplicablemente me satisfizo y, a la vez, me inquietó.  Indagar las razones de esa emoción es el fin de esta nota.
Históricamente, no hay misterio en las dos medidas. Contemporáneo de las guerras de Aníbal, Shih Huang Ti, rey de Tsin, redujo a su poder los Seis Reinos y borró el sistema feudal: erigió la muralla, porque las murallas eran defensas; quemó los libros, porque la oposición los invocaba para alabar a los antiguos emperadores. Quemar libros y erigir fortificaciones es tarea común de los príncipes; lo único singular en Shih Huang Ti fue la escala en que obró. Así lo dejan entender algunos sinólogos, pero yo siento que los hechos que he referido son algo más que una exageración o una hipérbole de disposiciones triviales. Cercar un huerto o un jardín es común; no, cercar un imperio. Tampoco es baladí pretender que la más tradicional de las razas renuncie a la memoria de su pasado, mítico o verdadero. Tres mil años de cronología tenían los chinos (y en esos años, el Emperador Amarillo y Chuang Tzu y Confucio y Lao Tzu), cuando Shih Huang Ti ordenó que la historia comenzara con él.
Shih Huang Ti había desterrado a su madre por libertina; en su dura justicia, los ortodoxos no vieron otra cosa que una impiedad; Shih Huang Ti, tal vez, quiso borrar los libros canónigos porque éstos lo acusaban; Shih Huang Ti, tal vez, quiso abolir todo el pasado para abolir un solo recuerdo; la infamia de su madre. (No de otra suerte un rey, en Judea, hizo matar a todos los niños para matar a uno.) Esta conjetura es atendible, pero nada nos dice de la muralla, de la segunda cara del mito. Shih Huang Ti, según los historiadores, prohibió que se mencionara la muerte y buscó el elixir de la inmortalidad y se recluyó en un palacio figurativo, que constaba de tantas habitaciones como hay días en el año; estos datos sugieren que la muralla en el espacio y el incendio en el tiempo fueron barreras mágicas destinadas a detener la muerte. Todas las cosas quieren persistir en su ser, ha escrito Baruch Spinoza; quizá el Emperador y sus magos creyeron que la inmortalidad es intrínseca y que la corrupción no puede entrar en un orbe cerrado. Quizá el Emperador quiso recrear el principio del tiempo y se llamó Primero, para ser realmente primero, y se llamó Huang Ti, para ser de algún modo Huang Ti, el legendario emperador que inventó la escritura y la brújula. Este, según el Libro de los ritos, dio su nombre verdadero a las cosas; parejamente Shih Huang Ti se jactó, en inscripciones que perduran, de que todas las cosas, bajo su imperio, tuvieran el nombre que les conviene. Soñó fundar una dinastía inmortal; ordenó que sus herederos se llamaran Segundo Emperador, Tercer Emperador, Cuarto Emperador, y así hasta lo infinito... He hablado de un propósito mágico; también cabría suponer que erigir la muralla y quemar los libros no fueron actos simultáneos. Esto (según el orden que eligiéramos) nos daría la imagen de un rey que empezó por destruir y luego se resignó a conservar, o la de un rey desengañado que destruyó lo que antes defendía. Ambas conjeturas son dramáticas, pero carecen, que yo sepa, de base histórica. Herbert Allen Giles cuenta que quienes ocultaron libros fueron marcados con un hierro candente y condenados a construir, hasta el día de su muerte, la desaforada muralla. Esta noticia favorece o tolera otra interpretación. Acaso la muralla fue una metáfora, acaso Shih Huang Ti condenó a quienes adoraban el pasado a una obra tan vasta como el pasado, tan torpe y tan inútil. Acaso la muralla fue un desafío y Shih Huang Ti pensó: “Los hombres aman el pasado y contra ese amor nada puedo, ni pueden mis verdugos, pero alguna vez habrá un hombre que sienta como yo, y ése destruirá mi muralla, como yo he destruido los libros, y ése borrará mi memoria y será mi sombra y mi espejo y no lo sabrá”. Acaso Shih Huang Ti amuralló el imperio porque sabía que éste era deleznable y destruyó los libros por entender que eran libros sagrados, o sea libros que enseñan lo que enseña el universo entero o la conciencia de cada hombre. Acaso el incendio de las bibliotecas y la edificación de la muralla son operaciones que de un modo secreto se anulan.
La muralla tenaz que en este momento, y en todos, proyecta sobre tierras que no veré su sistema de sombras es la sombra de un César que ordenó que la más reverente de las naciones quemara su pasado; es verosímil que la idea nos toque de por sí, fuera de las conjeturas que permite. (Su virtud puede estar en la oposición de construir y destruir, en enorme escala.) Generalizando el caso anterior, podríamos inferir que todas las formas tienen su virtud en sí mismas y no en un “contenido” conjetural. Eso concordaría con la tesis de Benedetto Croce; ya Pater, en 1877, afirmó que todas las artes aspiran a la condición de la música, que no es otra cosa que forma. La música, los estados de la felicidad, la mitología, las caras trabajadas por el tiempo, ciertos crepúsculos y ciertos lugares, quieren decirnos algo, o algo dijeron que no hubiéramos debido perder, o están por decir algo; esta inminencia de una revelación, que no se produce, es, quizá, el hecho estético.

Buenos Aires, 1950.

Del rigor en la ciencia

Jorge Luis Borges

…En aquel Imperio, el Arte de la Cartografía logró tal Perfección que el mapa de una sola Provincia ocupaba toda una Ciudad, y el mapa del Imperio, toda una Provincia. Con el tiempo, estos Mapas Desmesurados no satisficieron y los Colegios de Cartógrafos levantaron un Mapa del Imperio, que tenía el tamaño del Imperio y coincidía puntualmente con él. Menos Adictas al Estudio de la Cartografía, las Generaciones Siguientes entendieron que ese dilatado Mapa era Inútil y no sin Impiedad lo entregaron a las Inclemencias del Sol y los Inviernos. En los desiertos del Oeste perduran despedazadas Ruinas del Mapa, habitadas por Animales y por Mendigos; en todo el País no hay otra reliquia de las Disciplinas Geográficas.

Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes,
Libro Cuarto, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658.

In Memoriam

Jorge Luis Borges

Esta bala es antigua.
En 1897 la disparó contra el presidente del Uruguay un muchacho de Montevideo, Arredondo, que había pasado largo tiempo sin ver a nadie, para que lo supieran sin cómplice. Treinta años antes, el mismo proyectil mató a Lincoln, por obra criminal o mágica de un actor, a quien las palabras de Shakespeare habían convertido en Marco Bruto, asesino de César. Al promediar el siglo XVII la venganza la usó para dar muerte a Gustavo Adolfo de Suecia, en mitad de la pública hecatombe de una batalla.
Antes, la bala fue otras cosas, porque la transmigración pitagórica no sólo es propia de los hombres. Fue el cordón de seda que en el Oriente reciben los visires, fue la fusilería y las bayonetas que destrozaron a los defensores del Álamo, fue la cuchilla triangular que segó el cuello de una reina, fue los oscuros clavos que atravesaron la carne del Redentor y el leño de la Cruz, fue el veneno que el jefe cartaginés guardaba en una sortija de hierro, fue la serena copa que en un atardecer bebió Sócrates.
En el alba del tiempo fue la piedra que Caín lanzó contra Abel y será muchas cosas que hoy ni siquiera imaginamos y que podrán concluir con los hombres y con su prodigioso y frágil destino.

Algeria 1960, The disenchantment of the world, The sense of honour, The Kabyle house or the world reversed

Pierre Bourdieu

Nothing, indeed, is more alien (or unimportant) to economic theory than the concrete economic subject: far from economics being a department of anthropology, anthropology is only an appendix to economics and homo economicus the result of an a priori style of deduction which tends to find confirmation in experience, at least statistically, because an economic system undergoing “rationalization” has the means to mould agents in accordance with its requirements. When one has implicitly or explicitly set oneself the problem of what economic man must be in order for the capitalist economy to be possible, one is inclined to consider the categories of the economic consciousness proper to the capitalist as universal categories, independent of economic and social conditions; and, by the same token, one runs the risk of ignoring the genesis, both collective and individual, of the structures of the economic consciousness.
Adaptation to an economic and social order, of whatever sort, presupposes an ensemble of knowledges transmitted by diffuse or formal education, practical skills and know-how bound up with an ethos and making it possible to act with a reasonable chance of success. Thus, adaptation to an economic organization which tends to ensure predictability and calculability demands a parti­cular disposition towards time and, more precisely, towards the future, since the “rationalization” of economic conduct implies that the whole of existence be organized in relation to an absent, imaginary vanishing point.
[…]
Of all the economic institutions and techniques introduced by colonization, the one most alien to the logic of the pre-capitalist economy is undoubtedly credit, which entails reference to an abstract future defined by a written contract that is guaranteed by a whole system of sanctions, and which, with the notion of interest, brings in the financial value of time.
Whereas credit takes care to guarantee its security by making sure of the debtor’s solvency, amicable agreements (the only ones recognized by the ethic of honour) are backed solely by good faith, the assurances for the future being provided not by wealth but by the owner of the wealth. The prospective borrower calls on a relative or friend and says, “I know you have such a sum and that you don’t need it. You can look upon it as still being in your house.” No precise date is fixed for repayment (“in the summer” or “after the harvest”). Since such arrangements are only made between acquaintances, whether kinsmen, friends, or affines, the future of the association is ensured, in the present itself, not only by each party’s experience of the other, whom he knows to be reliable, but also by the objective relationship between the partners, which will outlast their transaction, guaranteeing the future of the exchange more surely than any of the explicit, formal codifications with which credit must arm itself because it presupposes the complete impersonality of the relationship between contracting parties. Nothing is more antithetical to mutual aid, which always associates individuals united by ties of real or fictitious kinship, than the co-operation which mobilizes individuals selected with a view to the calculated aims of a specific undertaking. In mutual aid, the group exists before and after the shared performance of a shared task; in co-operation, the group’s raison d’être lies outside itself, in the future goal defined by the contract, and it ceases to exist as soon as the contract is fulfilled.
[…]
It is remarkable to see how the ethos is carried straight through into ethics. The precepts of the mode of honour which denounce the spirit of calculation and all its manifestations, such as avidity and haste, which condemn the tyranny of the watch, “the devil’s mill”, can be seen as so many partial and veiled formulations of the objective “intention” of the economy. Since exchanges are reduced to the minimum, they cannot become the focal point around which production and consumption might be organized; each production unit tends to live self-sufficiently, so that most exchanges take place between close acquaintances and it would be absurd to bring calculation into them; the producer, being at the same time the consumer, does not assess his production in terms of the effort or time spent on it. Wastage of time — which appears as such only by reference to alien principles, such as the principle of maximum profitability — and wastage of means are perhaps the condition of the survival of societies which, if they counted, would give up... But calculation is in the service of the sense of equity and is absolutely opposed to the spirit of calculation which, relying on the quantitative evaluation of profit, abolishes the hazardous and (at least apparently) disinterested approximations of a code of generosity and honour... The acquisition of wealth is never explicitly recognized as the goal of economic activity. Resistance to accumulation and to the accompanying differentiation is a way of safeguarding the economic bases of the social order, since, in a stationary economy in which the quantity of assets possessed (i.e. mainly land) is constant, one man’s enrichment is another man’s impoverishment. And, once again, the ethic simply records the necessities immanent in the economy. “A generous man”, the Kabyles say, “is God’s friend.”

On Television

Pierre Bordieu

INVISIBLE CENSORSHIP
But let me return to the essential point. I began by claiming that open access to television is offset by a powerful censorship, a loss of independence linked to the conditions imposed on those who speak on television. Above all, time limits make it highly unlikely that anything can be said. I am undoubtedly expected to say that this television censorship – of guests but also of the journalists who are its agents — is political. It's true that politics intervenes, and that there is political control (particularly in the case of hiring for top positions in the radio stations and television channels under direct government control). It is also true that at a time such as today, when great numbers of people are looking for work and there is so little job security in television and radio, there is a greater tendency toward political conformity. Consciously or unconsciously, people censor themselves –they don't need to be called into line.
You can also consider economic censorship. It is true that, in the final analysis, you can say that the pressure on television is economic. That said, it is not enough to say that what gets on television is determined by the owners, by the companies that pay for the ads, or by the government that gives the subsidies.
If you knew only the name of the owner of a television station, its advertising budget, and how much it receives in subsidies, you wouldn't know much. Still, it's important to keep these things in mind. It's important to know that NBC is owned by General Electric (which means that interviews with people who live near a nuclear plant undoubtedly would be ... but then again, such a story wouldn't even occur to anyone), that CBS is owned by Westinghouse, and ABC by Disney, that TF1 belongs to Bouygues¹, and that these facts lead to consequences through a whole series of mediations. It is obvious that the government won't do certain things to Bouygues, knowing that Bouygues is behind TF1. These factors, which, are so crude that they are obvious to even the most simpleminded critique, hide other things, all the anonymous and invisible mechanisms through which the many kinds of censorship operate to make television such a formidable instrument for maintaining the symbolic order. 
I'd like to pause here. Sociological analysis often comes up against a misconception. Anyone involved as the object of the analysis, in this case journalists, tends to think that the work of analysis, the revelation of mechanisms, is in fact a denunciation of individuals, part of an ad hominem polemic. (Those same journalists would, of course, immediately level accusations of bias and lack of objectivity at any sociologist who discussed or wrote about even a tenth of what comes up anytime you talk with the media about the payoffs, how the programs are manufactured, made up — that's the word they use.)
In general, people don't like to be turned into objects or objectified; and journalists least of all. They feel under fire, singled out. But the further you get in the analysis of a given milieu, the more likely you are to let individuals off the hook (which doesn't mean justifying everything that happens). And the more you understand how things work, the more you come to understand that the people involved are manipulated as much as they manipulate. They manipulate even more effectively the more they are themselves manipulated and the more unconscious they are of this.
I stress this point even though I know that, whatever I do, anything I say will be taken as a criticism — a reaction that is also a defense against analysis. But let me stress that I even think that scandals such as the furor over the deeds and misdeeds of one or another television news personality, or the exorbitant salaries of certain producers, divert attention from the main point. Individual corruption only masks the structural corruption (should we even talk about corruption in this case?) that operates on the game as a whole through mechanisms such as competition for market share. This is what I want to examine. 
So I would like to analyze a series of mechanisms that allow television to wield a particularly pernicious form of symbolic violence. Symbolic violence is violence wielded with tacit complicity  between its victims and its agents, insofar as both remain unconscious of submitting to or wielding it. The function ) of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden. In so doing, it can help minimize the symbolic violence within social relations and, in particular, within the relations of communication.
Let's start with an easy example — sensational news. This has always been the favorite food of the tabloids. Blood, sex, melodrama and crime have always been big sellers. In the early days of television, a sense of respectability modelled on the
printed press kept these attention-grabbers under wraps, but the race for audience share inevitably brings it to the headlines and to the beginning of the television news. Sensationalism attracts notice, and it also diverts it, like magicians whose basic operating principle is to direct attention to something other than what they're doing. Part of the symbolic functioning of television, in the case of the news, for example, is to call attention to those elements which will engage everybody — which offer something for everyone. These are things that won't shock anyone, where nothing is at stake, that don't divide, are generally agreed on, and interest everybody without touching on anything important. These items are basic ingredients of news because they interest everyone, and because they take up time — time that could be used to say something else.
And time, on television, is an extremely rare commodity. When you use up precious time to say banal things, to the extent that they cover up precious things, these banalities become in fact very important. If I stress this point, it's because everyone knows that a very high proportion of the population reads no newspaper at all and is dependent on television as their sole source of news. Television enjoys a de facto monopoly on what goes into the heads of a significant part of the population and what they think. So much emphasis on headlines and so much filling up of precious time with empty air — with nothing or almost nothing — shunts aside relevant news, that is, the information that all citizens ought to have in order to exercise their democratic rights. We are therefore faced with a division, as far as news is concerned, between individuals in a position to read so-called “serious” newspapers (insofar as they can remain serious in the face of competition from television), and people with access to international newspapers and foreign radio stations, and, on the other hand, everyone else, who get from television news all they know about politics. That is to say, precious little, except for what can be learned from seeing people, how they look, and how they talk — things even the most culturally disadvantaged can decipher, and which can do more than a little to distance many of them from a good many politicians.

SHOW AND HIDE
So far I've emphasized elements that are easy to see. I'd like now to move on to slightly less obvious matters in order to show how, paradoxically, television can hide by showing. That is, it can hide things by showing something other than what would be shown if television did what it's supposed to do, provide information. Or by showing what has to be shown, but in such a way that it isn't really shown, or is turned into something insignificant; or by constructing it in such a way that it takes on a meaning that has nothing at all to do with reality.

On this point I'll take two examples from Patrick Champagne's work. In his work in La Misère du monde, Champagne offers a detailed examination of how the media represent events in the “inner city.”² He shows how journalists are carried along by the inherent exigencies of their job, by their view of the world, by their training and orientation, and also by the reasoning intrinsic to the profession itself. They select very specific aspects of the inner city as a function of their particular perceptual categories, the particular way they see things. These categories are the product of education, history, and so forth. The most common metaphor to explain this notion of category — that is, the invisible structures that organize perception and determine what we see and don't see — is eyeglasses. Journalists have special “glasses” through which they see certain things and not others, and through which they see the things' they see in the special way they see them. 
The principle that determines this selection is the search for the sensational and the spectacular. Television calls for dramatization in both senses of the term: it puts an event on stage, puts it in images. In doing so, it exaggerates the importance of that event, its seriousness, and its dramatic, even tragic character. For the inner city, this means riots. That's already a big word ... And, indeed, words get the same treatment. Ordinary words impress no one, but paradoxically, the world of images is dominated by words. Photos are nothing without words — the French term for the caption is legend, and often they should be read as just that, as legends that can show anything at all. We know that to name is to show, to create, to bring into existence. And words can do a lot of damage: Islam, Islamic, Islamicist — is the headscarf Islamic or Islamicist?³ And if it were really only a kerchief and nothing more? Sometimes I want to go back over every word the television news-people use, often without thinking and with no idea of the difficulty and the seriousness of the subjects they are talking about or the responsibilities they assume by talking about them in front of the thousands of people who watch the news without understanding what they see and without understanding that they don't understand. Because these words do things, they make things — they create phantasms, fears, and phobias, or simply false representations.
Journalists, on the whole, are interested in the exception, which means whateyer is exceptional for them. Something that might be perfectly ordinary for someone else can be extraordinary for them and vice versa. They're interested in the extraordinary, in anything that breaks the routine. The daily papers are under pressure to offer a daily dose of the extra-daily, and that's not easy ... This pressure explains the attention they give to extraordinary occurrences, usual unusual events like fires, floods, or murders. But the extra-ordinary is also, and especially, what isn't ordinary for other newspapers. It's what differs from the ordinary and what differs from what other newspapers say. The pressure is dreadful — the pressure to get a “scoop”⁴ People are ready to do almost anything to be the first to see and present something. The result is that everyone copies each other in the attempt to get ahead; everyone ends up doing the same thing. The search for exclusivity, which elsewhere leads to originality and singularity, here yields uniformity and banality.
This relentless, self-interested search for the extra-ordinary can have just as much political effect as direct political prescription or the self-censorship that comes from fear of being left behind or left out. With the exceptional force of the televised image at their disposal, journalists can produce effects that are literally incomparable. The monotonous, drab daily life in the inner city doesn't say anything to anybody and doesn't interest anybody, journalists least of all. But even if they were to take a real interest in what goes on in the inner city and really wanted to show it, it would be enormously difficult. There is nothing more difficult to convey than reality in all its ordinariness. Flaubert was fond of saying that it takes a lot of hard work to portray mediocrity. Sociologists run into this problem all the time: How can we make the ordinary extraordinary and evoke ordinariness in such a way that people will see just how extraordinary it is?
The political dangers inherent in the ordinary use of television have to do with the fact that images have the peculiar capacity to produce what literary critics call a reality effect. They show things and make people believe in what they show. This power to show is also a power to mobilize. It can give a life to ideas or images, but also to groups. The news, the incidents and accidents of everyday life, can be loaded with political or ethnic significance liable to unleash strong, often negative feelings, such as racism, chauvinism, the fear-hatred of the foreigner or, xenophobia. The simple report, the very fact of reporting, of putting on record as a reporter, always implies a social construction of reality that can mobilize (or demobilize) individuals or groups.

_{¹ [Bouygues is the largest French company in commercial and public works construction. The subsidiaries of the holding company cover a wide range of goods and services, including telecommunications. It controls 42 percent of the TF1 television station. – T.R.]
² ["The View from the Media," in Pierre Bourdieu, et al., La Misère. The French "suburbs" [banlieue] correspond to the American "inner city," which is the translation used here.
³ [Bourdieu here refers to the controversy in France which began in 1989 when Muslim girls, children of relatively recent immigrants from North Africa, were expelled from public school for wearing headscarves (Ie foulard in French, le hidjab in Arabic, sometimes tendentiously translated as "veil"). After much debate the then Minister of Education Lionel Jospin authorized wearing the scarf in class.—T.R.]
⁴ [English in the original, as are "fast-thinkers," "talk-show," "news" below.--T.R.]}

Sur la télévision

Pierre Bourdieu

UNE CENSURE INVISIBLE
Mais je reviens à l’essentiel : j’ai avancé en commençant que l’accès à la télévision a pour contrepartie une formidable censure, une perte d’autonomie liée, entre autres choses, au fait que le sujet est imposé, que les conditions de la communication sont imposées et surtout, que la limitation du temps impose au discours des contraintes telles qu’il est peu probable que quelque chose puisse se dire. Cette censure qui s’exerce sur les invités, mais aussi sur les journalistes qui contribuent à la faire peser, on s’attend à ce que je dise qu’elle est politique. Il est vrai qu’il y a des interventions politiques, un contrôle politique (qui s’exerce notamment au travers des nominations aux postes dirigeants) ; il est vrai aussi et surtout que dans une période où, comme aujourd’hui, il y a une armée de réserve et une très grande précarité de l’emploi dans les professions de la télévision et de la radio, la propension au conformisme politique est plus grande. Les gens se conforment par une forme consciente ou inconsciente d’autocensure, sans qu’il soit besoin de faire des rappels à l’ordre.
On peut penser aussi aux censures économiques. Il est vrai que, en dernier ressort, on pourra dire que ce qui pèse sur la télévision, c’est la contrainte économique. Cela dit, on ne peut se contenter de dire que ce qui se passe à la télévision est déterminé par les gens qui la possèdent, par les annonceurs qui payent la publicité, par l’État qui donne des subventions, et si on ne savait, sur une chaîne de télévision, que le nom du propriétaire, la part des différents annonceurs dans le budget et le montant des subventions, on ne comprendrait pas grand chose. Reste qu’il est important de le rappeler. Ce sont là des choses tellement grosses et grossières que la critique la plus élémentaire les perçoit, mais qui cachent les mécanismes anonymes, invisibles, à travers lesquels s’exercent les censures de tous ordres qui font de la télévision un formidable instrument de maintien de l’ordre symbolique.
Je dois m’arrêter un instant à ce point. L’analyse sociologique se heurte souvent à un malentendu : ceux qui sont inscrits dans l’objet de l’analyse, dans le cas particulier les journalistes, ont tendance à penser que le travail d’énonciation, de dévoilement des mécanismes, est un travail de dénonciation, dirigé contre des personnes ou, comme on dit, des « attaques », des attaques personnelles, ad hominem. Les gens, de façon générale, n’aiment guère être pris pour objets, objectivés, et les journalistes moins que tous les autres. Ils se sentent visés, épinglés, alors que, plus on avance dans l’analyse d’un milieu, plus on est amené à dédouaner les individus de leur responsabilité, – ce qui ne veut pas dire qu’on justifie tout ce qui s’y passe –, et mieux on comprend comment il fonctionne, plus on comprend aussi que les gens qui en participent sont manipulés autant que manipulateurs. Ils manipulent même d’autant mieux, bien souvent, qu’il sont eux-mêmes plus manipulés et plus inconscients de l’être. J’insiste sur ce point, tout en sachant que, malgré tout, ce que je dis sera perçu comme une critique ; réaction qui est aussi une manière de se défendre contre l’analyse. Je crois même que la dénonciation des scandales, des faits et des méfaits de tel ou tel présentateur, ou des salaires exorbitants de certains producteurs, peut contribuer à détourner de l’essentiel, dans la mesure où la corruption des personnes masque cette sorte de corruption structurelle (mais faut-il encore parler de corruption ?) qui s’exerce sur l’ensemble du jeu à travers des mécanismes tels que la concurrence pour les parts de marché, que je veux essayer d’analyser.
Je voudrais donc démonter une série de mécanismes qui font que la télévision exerce une forme particulièrement pernicieuse de violence symbolique. La violence symbolique est une violence qui s’exerce avec la complicité tacite de ceux qui la subissent et aussi, souvent, de ceux qui l’exercent dans la mesure où les uns et les autres sont inconscients de l’exercer ou de la subir. 
Prenons le plus facile : les faits divers, qui ont toujours été la pâture préférée de la presse à sensations ; le sang et le sexe, le drame et le crime ont toujours fait vendre et le règne de l’audimat devait faire remonter à la une, à l’ouverture des journaux télévisés, ces ingrédients que le souci de respectabilité imposé par le modèle de la presse écrite sérieuse avait jusque là porté à écarter ou à reléguer. Mais les faits divers, ce sont aussi des faits qui font diversion. Les prestidigitateurs ont un principe élémentaire qui consiste à attirer l’attention sur autre chose que ce qu’ils font. Une part de l’action symbolique de la télévision, au niveau des informations par exemple, consiste à attirer l’attention sur des faits qui sont de nature à intéresser tout le monde, dont on peut dire qu’ils sont omnibus - c’est-à-dire pour tout le monde. Les faits omnibus sont des faits qui, comme on dit, ne doivent choquer personne, qui sont sans enjeu, qui ne divisent pas, qui font le consensus, qui intéressent tout le monde mais sur un mode tel qu’ils ne touchent à rien d’important. Le fait divers, c’est cette sorte de denrée élémentaire, rudimentaire, de l’information qui est très importante parce qu’elle intéresse tout le monde sans tirer à conséquence et quelle prend du temps, du temps qui pourrait être employé pour dire autre chose.
Or le temps est une denrée extrêmement rare à la télévision. Et si Ton emploie des minutes si précieuses pour dire des choses si futiles, c’est que ces choses si futiles sont en fait très importantes dans la mesure où elles cachent des choses précieuses. Si j’insiste sur ce point, c’est qu’on sait par ailleurs qu’il y a une proportion très importante de gens qui ne lisent aucun quotidien ; qui sont voués corps et âme à la télévision comme source unique d’informations. La télévision a une sorte de monopole de fait sur la formation des cerveaux d’une partie très importante de la population. Or, en mettant l’accent sur les faits divers, en remplissant ce temps rare avec du vide, du rien ou du presque rien, on écarte les informations pertinentes que devrait posséder le citoyen pour exercer ses droits démocratiques. Par ce biais, on s’oriente vers une division, en matière d’information, entre ceux qui peuvent lire les quotidiens dit sérieux, si tant est qu’ils resteront sérieux du fait de la concurrence de la télévision, ceux qui ont accès aux journaux internationaux, aux chaînes de radio en langue étrangère, et, de l’autre côté, ceux qui ont pour tout bagage politique l’information fournie par la télévision, c’est-à-dire à peu près rien (en dehors de l’information que procure la connaissance directe des hommes et des femmes en vue, de leur visage, de leurs expressions, autant de choses que les plus démunis culturellement savent déchiffrer, – ce qui ne contribue pas peu à les éloigner de nombre de responsables politiques).
CACHER EN MONTRANT
J’ai mis l’accent sur le plus visible. Je voudrais aller vers des choses légèrement moins visibles en mon trant comment la télévision peut, paradoxalement, cacher en montrant, en montrant autre chose que ce qu’il faudrait montrer si on faisait ce que l’on est censé faire, c’est-à-dire informer ; ou encore en montrant ce qu’il faut montrer, mais de telle manière qu’on ne le montre pas ou qu’on le rend insignifiant, ou en le construisant de telle manière qu’il prend un sens qui ne correspond pas du tout à la réalité.
Sur ce point, je prendrai deux exemples empruntés aux travaux de Patrick Champagne. Dans La Misère du monde, Patrick Champagne a consacré un chapitre à la représentation que les médias donnent des phénomènes dits de « banlieue » et il montre comment les journalistes, portés à la fois par les propensions inhérentes à leur métier, à leur vision du monde, à leur formation, à leurs dispositions, mais aussi par la logique de la profession, sélectionnent dans cette réalité particulière qu’est la vie des banlieues, un aspect tout à fait particulier, en fonction de catégories de perception qui leur sont propres. La métaphore la plus communément employée par les professeurs pour expliquer cette notion de catégorie, c’est-à-dire ces structures invisibles qui organisent le perçu, déterminant ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas, est celle des lunettes. Ces catégories sont le produit de notre éducation, de l’histoire, etc. Les journalistes ont des « lunettes » particulières à partir desquelles ils voient certaines choses et pas d’autres ; et voient d’une certaine manière les choses qu’ils voient. Ils opèrent une sélection et une construction de ce qui est sélectionné.
Le principe de sélection, c’est la recherche du sensationnel, du spectaculaire. La télévision appelle à la dramatisation, au double sens : elle met en scène, en images, un événement et elle en exagère l’importance, la gravité, et le caractère dramatique, tragique. Pour les banlieues, ce qui intéressera ce sont les émeutes. C’est déjà un grand mot… (On fait le même travail sur les mots. Avec des mots ordinaires, on n’« épate pas le bourgeois », ni le « peuple ». Il faut des mots extraordinaires. En fait, paradoxalement, le monde de l’image est dominé par les mots. La photo n’est rien sans la légende qui dit ce qu’il faut lire – legendum –, c’est-à-dire, bien souvent, des légendes, qui font voir n’importe quoi. Nommer, on le sait, c’est faire voir, c’est créer, porter à l’existence. Et les mots peuvent faire des ravages: islam, islamique, islamiste – le foulard est-il islamique ou islamiste ? Et s’il s’agissait simplement d’un fichu, sans plus? 
Il m’arrive d’avoir envie de reprendre chaque mot des présentateurs qui parlent souvent à la légère, sans avoir la moindre idée de la difficulté et de la gravité de ce qu’ils évoquent et des responsabilités qu’ils encourent en les évoquant, devant des milliers de téléspectateurs, sans les comprendre et sans comprendre qu’ils ne les comprennent pas. Parce que ces mots font des choses, créent des fantasmes, des peurs, des phobies ou, simplement, des représentations fausses). Les journalistes, grosso modo, s’intéressent à l’exceptionnel, à ce qui est exceptionnel pour eux. Ce qui peut être banal pour d’autres pourra être extraordinaire pour eux ou l’inverse. Ils s’intéressent à l’extraordinaire, à ce qui rompt avec l’ordinaire, à ce qui n’est pas quotidien – les quotidiens doivent offrir quotidiennement de l’extra-quotidien, ce n’est pas facile… D’où la place qu’ils accordent à l’extraordinaire ordinaire, c’est-à-dire prévu par les attentes ordinaires, incendies, inondations, assassinats, faits divers. Mais l’extraordinaire, c’est aussi et surtout ce qui n’est pas ordinaire par rapport aux autres journaux. C’est ce qui est différent de l’ordinaire et ce qui est différent de ce que les autres journaux disent de l’ordinaire, ou disent ordinairement. C’est une contrainte terrible: celle qu’impose la poursuite du scoop. Pour être le premier à voir et à faire voir quelque chose, on est prêt à peu près à n’importe quoi, et comme on se copie mutuellement en vue de devancer les autres, de faire avant les autres, ou de faire autrement que les autres, on finit par faire tous la même chose, la recherche de l’exclusivité, qui, ailleurs, dans d’autres champs, produit l’originalité, la singularité, aboutit ici à l’uniformisation et à la banalisation.
Cette recherche intéressée, acharnée, de l’extraordinaire peut avoir, autant que les consignes directement politiques ou les autocensures inspirées par la crainte de l’exclusion, des effets politiques. Disposant de cette force exceptionnelle qu’est celle de l’image “télévisée, les journalistes peuvent produire des effets sans équivalents. La vision quotidienne d’une banlieue, dans sa monotonie et sa grisaille, ne dit rien à personne, n’intéresse personne, et les journalistes moins que personne. Mais s’intéresseraient-ils à ce qui se passe vraiment dans les banlieues et voudraient-ils vraiment le montrer, que ce serait extrêmement difficile, en tout cas. Il n’y a rien de plus difficile que de faire ressentir la réalité dans sa banalité.
Les dangers politiques qui sont inhérents à l’usage ordinaire de la télévision tiennent au fait que l’image a cette particularité qu’elle peut produire ce que les critiques littéraires appellent l’effet de réel elle peut faire voir et faire croire à ce qu’elle fait voir. Cette puissance d’évocation a des effets de mobilisation. Elle peut faire exister des idées ou des représentations, mais aussi des groupes. Les faits divers, les incidents ou les accidents quotidiens, peuvent être chargés d’implications politiques, éthiques, etc. propres à déclencher des sentiments forts, souvent négatifs, comme le racisme, la xénophobie, la peur-haine de l’étranger et le simple compte rendu, le fait de rapporter, to record en reporter, implique toujours une construction sociale de la réalité capable d’exercer des effets sociaux de mobilisation (ou de démobilisation).

White Parachutes

Giannina Braschi

The suicide bomber is an explosion of a contradiction in its paradox, victim and victimizer, yin and yang, two sides of the coin, fire bomb and fire extinguisher, prosecutor and defendant, hangman and hanged. Heautontimoroumenos. A full cycle in himself. An orange, an apple, a world—round. Not part, but whole. To be one and the other, annihilating both. To be and not to be. Sed and Suida without the synthesis. No middle ground. No Wishy-Washy. One is Washy—the other Wishy—each affirming its being—neither integrating into the other. The water never quenching the thirst of the fire—the fire always wanting to be higher—never coming to terms with its own thirsty fire of desire—that means the time to hesitate is through—no time to wallow in the mire—try now we can only lose—and our love will be a funeral pyre—of the suicidal instinct—to repress one’s emotions, to kill one’s desires—to not be—and the desire to be more—not to hesitate, to go forward, to express oneself, to fan the flames of life—not to let go of one contradiction without exhausting the other contradiction. The bomber quenching his own thirst—the thirst for fire, for explosion, noise, attention—craves the media, the spectacle, the crowds. [...] Blame must always find a body. Somebody, anybody. So everybody starts looking around in suspicion of each other. Fuenteovejuna did it. The crime against society becomes the crime of society. So involved is the public that it no longer finds guilt in the other, but in itself. This guilt is the power of the suicider.

—Don’t blame me, I don’t exist anymore. You exist. You are the guilty ones. You should be blamed for their deaths. Not me. What did you do to me to make me capable of erasing all those innocent people—and myself—from the map of the earth?

The suicide bomber blows the anonymity of the crowd into individual pieces and pieces of individuals. Nobodies suddenly become somebodies with names, nationalities, stories, and faces. The individual rage of the crowd awakens when its collectivity is threatened. It’s the fear that it could happen to you—or to me—or to any of us—anytime—anywhere the crowd gathers. The crowd becomes an instant celebrity after being a nobody. The government worries that the roll call of the death toll will storm the polls and overturn elections and cars, businesses and samenesses. When the government proclaims war against terrorism—it proclaims war against the awakening of the masses. What the suicide bomber kills is the passivity of the masses. Walter Benjamin noted the decline of the halo in Baudelaire—the decline of the sacred. But the halo of the poet is rising again. The halo of the poet rises when the crowd unites in one voice that becomes the voice of the individual claiming his voice through the crowd. The crowd says—in my opinion—and its opinion is always what it just heard—it is hearsay said here—by someone who steps out of line—to say—in my opinion—and a circle forms around him—a circle of the same opinion. And nobody else enters that circle, but the groupies. you don’t belong—the groupies say. […]

New Dark Age

James Bridle

Complexity
Through the winter of 2014–15, I made several journeys across South East England in search of the invisible. I was looking for the traces of hidden systems in the landscape, the places where the great networks of digital technologies become steel and wire: where they become infrastructure. It was a form of psychogeography – a much-overused term these days, but one still useful for its emphasis on the hidden internal states that can be uncovered by external exploration.
The situationist philosopher Guy Debord defined psychogeography in 1955 as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’. Debord was concerned with the increased spectacularisation of everyday life, and the ways in which our lives are increasingly shaped by “in which our lives are increasingly shaped by commodification and mediation. The things we encounter in everyday life in spectacular societies are almost always a proxy for some deeper reality of which we are unaware, and our alienation from that deeper reality reduces our agency and quality of life. Psychogeography’s critical engagement with the urban landscape was one way of countering this alienation – a performance of observation and intervention bringing us into direct contact with reality, in surprising and urgent ways. And its utility is not tempered when, instead of seeking signs of the spectacle in urban life, we opt to look for signs of the virtual in the global landscape – and try to figure out what it’s doing to all of us.
Thus, a kind of dérive for the network: a process of psychogeography intended to discover not some reflection of my own pathology, but that of a globalised, digital collective. As part of a project called ‘The Nor’, I undertook several journeys to map these digital networks, starting with the system of surveillance devices that surround the centre of London: sensors and cameras monitoring the Congestion Charge and Low Emission Zones – which track every vehicle entering the city – as well as those scattered more widely by Transport for London and the Metropolitan Police, and the flocks of private cameras installed by businesses and other authorities. In two day-long walks I photographed more than a thousand cameras, enduring a citizen’s arrest and a police caution for my troubles. We will return to this theme of surveillance, and the strange atmosphere it generates, later in this book. I also explored the electromagnetic networks that make up London’s airspace, cataloguing the VHF omnidirectional radio range (VOR) installations – scattered across airports and abandoned World War II airfields, and hidden in woods and behind chainlink fences – that guide aircraft from point to point on their circumnavigations of the globe.
The last of these journeys was a bicycle ride of some sixty miles, from Slough to Basildon, cutting through the heart of the City. Slough, twenty-five miles to the west of London, is home to an increasing number of data centres – the often-hidden cathedrals of data-driven life – and in particular to Equinix LD4, a vast and anonymous warehouse, located in a whole neighbourhood of newly built computational infrastructure. LD4 is the virtual location of the London Stock Exchange, and despite the lack of any visible signage, this is where most of the orders that are recorded by the exchange are actually processed. At the other end of the journey was another “unmarked data centre facility: seven acres of server space distinguishable only by a fluttering Union Jack, and by the fact that if you linger too long on the road in front of it, you will be harassed by security guards. This is the Euronext Data Center, the European outpost of the New York Stock Exchange, whose operations are likewise obscure and virtual.
Connecting these two locations is an almost invisible line of microwave transmissions: narrow beams of information that bounce from dish to dish and tower to tower, carrying financial information of almost unimaginable value at close to the speed of light. By mapping these towers, and the data centres and other facilities they support, we can gain some insight not only into the technological reality of our age, but into the social reality it generates in turn.
Both of these locations are where they are because of the virtualisation of money markets. When most people picture a stock exchange, they imagine a vast hall or pit filled with screaming traders, clutching fistfuls of paper, making deals and making money. But over the last few decades, most of the trading floors around the world have fallen silent. First they were replaced with more mundane offices: men (almost always men) clutching phones and staring at lines on computer screens. Only when something went badly wrong – bad enough to be assigned a colour, like Black Monday or Silver Thursday – did the screaming appear again. Most recently, even the men have been replaced with banks of computers that trade automatically, following fixed – but highly complex – strategies developed by banks and hedge funds. As computing power has increased and networks have gotten faster and faster, the speed of the exchanges has accelerated, giving this technique its sobriquet: high-frequency trading.
High-frequency trading on stock markets evolved in response to two closely related pressures, which were actually the result of a single technological shift. These pressures were latency, and visibility. As stock exchanges deregulated and digitised through the 1980s and ’90s – what was called, on the London Stock Exchange, the ‘big bang’ – it became possible to trade on them ever faster, and at ever-greater distances. This produced a series of weird effects. While profits have long been made by being the first to leverage the difference between prices on different markets – Paul Reuter famously arranged for ships arriving from America to toss canisters containing news overboard off the Irish coast so their contents could be telegraphed to London ahead of the ship’s arrival – digital communications hyperaccelerate the process.
Financial information now travels at the speed of light; but the speed of light is different in different places. It’s different in glass and air, and it encounters limitations, as fibre-optic cables are bundled together, pass through complex exchanges, and route around natural obstacles and under oceans. The greatest prizes go to those with the lowest latency: the shortest travel time between two points. This is where private fibre-optic lines and microwave towers come into the picture. In 2009–10, one company spent $300 million to build a private fibre link between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Carteret, New Jersey, home of the NASDAQ exchange. They closed roads, they dug trenches, they bored through mountains, and they did it all in secret, so that no competitors discovered their plan. By shortening the physical distance between the sites, Spread Networks reduced the time it took a message to get between the two data centres from seventeen milliseconds to thirteen – resulting in a saving of about $75 million per millisecond.
In 2012, another firm, McKay Brothers, opened a second dedicated New York–Chicago connection. This time it used microwaves, which travel through the air faster than light through glass fibre. One of their partners stated that ‘a single millisecond advantage could equate to an additional $100 million a year to a large high-frequency trading firm.’ McKay’s link gained them four – a vast advantage over any of their competitors, many of whom were also taking advantage of another effect of the fallout from the big bang: visibility.
Digitisation meant that trades within, as well as between, stock exchanges could happen faster and faster. As the actual trading passed into the hands of machines, it became possible to react almost instantaneously to any price change or new offer. But being able to react meant both understanding what was happening, and being able to buy a place at the table. Thus, as in everything else, digitisation made the markets both more opaque to noninitiates, and radically visible to those in the know. In this case, the latter were those with the funding and the expertise to keep up with light-speed information flows: the private banks and hedge funds employing high-frequency traders. Algorithms designed by former physics PhDs to take advantage of millisecond advantages in access entered the market, and the traders gave them names like Ninja, Sniper, and The Knife. These algorithms were capable of eking out fractions of a cent on every trade, and they could do it millions of times a day. Seen within the turmoil of the markets, it was rarely clear who actually operated these algorithms; and it is no more so today, because their primary tactic is stealth: masking their intentions and their origins while capturing a vast portion of all traded value. The result was an arms race: whoever could build the fastest software, reduce the latency of their connection to the exchanges, and best hide their true objective, made bank.
Operating on stock exchanges became a matter of dark dealing, and of dark fibre. The darkness goes deeper too: many traders today opt to deal not in the relatively well-regulated public exchanges, but in what are called ‘dark pools’. Dark pools are private forums for trading securities, derivatives, and other financial instruments. A 2015 report by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) estimated that dark pool trading accounted for one-fifth of all trades in stocks that also traded on the public exchanges – a figure that doesn’t account for many other popular forms of financial instrument. The dark pools allow traders to move large volumes of stock without tipping off the wider market, thus protecting their trades from other predators. But they’re also shady places, where conflicts of interest run rampant. Initially advertised as places to trade securely, many dark pool operators have been censured for quietly inviting in the same high-frequency traders their clients were trying to avoid – either to provide liquidity to the market, or for their own profit. The 2015 SEC report lists numerous such deals, in what it calls ‘a dismal litany of misconduct’. In 2016, Barclays and Credit Suisse were fined $154 million for secretly allowing high-frequency traders as well as their own staff access to their supposedly private dark pool. Because the pool is dark, it’s impossible to know how much their clients lost to these unseen predators, but many of their largest customers were pension funds, charged with managing the retirement plans of ordinary people. What is lost in the dark pools, unknown to their members, is lifetime savings, future security, and livelihoods. 
The combination of high-frequency trading and dark pools is just one way in which financial systems have been rendered obscure, and thus ever more unequal. But as their effects ripple through invisible digital networks, they also produce markers in the physical world: places where we can see these inequalities manifest as architecture, and in the landscape around us.

Digital Plagues

The Logic of Decomposition

If codes—say, the alphabet—were created to break the world down into distinct units and rework them into legible reality, then this process amounts to a kind of digestion. The code decomposes the world into discrete building blocks, places them in sequence along an arrow of time, and makes them readable, interpretable, and, ultimately, programmable. Like a spider’s prey injected with gastric juices, the world dissolves. From this point on, it can be shaped and molded. In other words, the alphabetic code breaks down the world by breaking it into distinct elements (peptides) and reworking them into reality, usable matter. Inasmuch as this demiurgic principle dissolves “the riddle of Creation, the principles of use and exploitation—that is, extracting, potentiating, and transforming isolated elements—come to be posited absolutely and taken to be second nature. Enigmatic Creation is replaced by simple, docile matter. It is no accident that money came into being at the same time as the alphabet. Money is another peptide, which helps break down the world into discrete parts that then can be enriched, accumulated, and put back together in practically unlimited ways.

Today, the digital code is eating up the linear, alphabetic code. If the alphabet once served to change the body of the world (soma) into a sign (sema), the digital code is now going still further and dissolving the world of signs (sema) into digits (bits). Thomas Hobbes wrote, “In the philosophy of nature, I cannot begin better … than from privation; that is, from feigning the world to be annihilated”; in this light, the liquidation of signs, their digitization, signifies a second-order annihilation of the world. This recoding proves all the more radical—this holds for DNA, too—in being able to erect a system of signs where a body formerly stood. It is not by chance that, wherever the world is transfigured into digital copy, ideas of a second genesis—optimized Creation—emerge. In the digitized realm, as in synthetic biology, the body is not broken down and recombined in its material form; instead (as in the case of designer babies), it is drafted as a kind of wish formation. But when the very construction of the body becomes a matter of design, the body (as a destiny) falls mute and can be experienced only to the extent that it constitutes a social body. Digitization disintegrates the body as a physical phenomenon and transfers it (big data) into a world of signs; there, it loses all definition. The body turns into pure information, a site of transition, where intentions, actions, and ideas manifest themselves only in passing. Even when one particular body proves lucky enough to have been preferred to a host of rejected possibilities, it remains—as per genetic law—just one particular body among all other bodies (xn → x); alternatively, it amounts to a particular body standing in for the population as a whole (x ← xn).

Cidades da Noite Vermelha

William S Burroughs

Avante! 

Os princípios liberais encarnados nas revoluções francesa e americana e mais tarde nas revoluções liberais de 1848 tinham já sido codificados e postos em prática por comunas piratas cem anos antes. Eis uma citação de Sob a Bandeira Negra, de Don C. Seitz: 

O capitão Mission foi um dos antepassados da Revolução Francesa. Estava cem anos avançado em relação ao seu tempo, pois a sua carreira fundamentou-se num desejo inicial de melhorar os problemas da humanidade, o que acabou, como é bastante habitual, numa melhoria mais liberal da sua própria fortuna. Conta-se como o capitão Mission, tendo conduzido o seu navio à vitória contra um navio de Guerra inglês, convocou a tripulação para uma assembleia. Aqueles que o quisessem seguir seriam bem-vindos e tratados como irmãos; os que o não quisessem seriam postos em terra em segurança. Todos, sem excepção, abraçaram a Nova Liberdade. Alguns estavam dispostos a içar de imediato a Bandeira Negra, mas Mission objectou dizendo que não eram piratas mas amantes da liberdade, lutando por direitos iguais contra todas as nações sujeitas à tirania de um governo, e sugeriu uma bandeira branca como símbolo mais apropriado. O dinheiro do navio foi guardado num cofre para ser usado como propriedade comum. As roupas foram depois distribuídas a todos os que delas precisavam e a república do mar entrou assim em plena actividade. 

Mission propôs-lhes viverem em completa harmonia, pois uma sociedade mal orientada julgá-los-ia ainda como piratas. Por isso a autopreservação, e não uma disposição cruel , obrigava-os a declarar guerra a todas as nações que lhes fechassem os portos. «Declaro tal guerra e ao mesmo tempo recomendo-vos um comportamento humano e generoso para com os vossos prisioneiros, o que parecerá muito mais o resultado de uma alma nobre, pois estamos convencidos que não receberíamos o mesmo tratamento se a nossa má sorte ou a nossa falta de coragem nos colocasse à mercê deles... » O Nieustadt de Amesterdão ao ser apresado deu duas mil libras, ouro em pó e dezassete escravos. Juntaram os escravos à tripulação e vestiram-nos com as roupas que sobraram do barco holandês; Mission fez um discurso denunciando a escravatura e defendendo que os homens que vendem outros como animais mostravam que a sua religião era demasiado sinistra, pois nenhum homem deve coarctar a liberdade a qualquer outro... 

Mission explorou a costa de Madagáscar e descobriu uma baía dez léguas a norte de Diego Suarez. Resolveram então estabelecer ali os aquartelamentos da República — erguer uma cidade, construir docas e ter um lugar a que pudessem chamar seu. Chamaram à colónia Libertatia e sujeitaram-na aos Artigos redigidos pelo capitão Mission. Estes determinam entre outras coisas: todas as decisões respeitantes à colónia serão submetidas ao voto dos colonos; a abolição da escra- vatura, seja por que motivo for, incluindo a dívida; a abolição da pena de morte; a liberdade de seguir quaisquer crenças ou práticas religiosas sem sanções ou perseguições. 

A colónia do capitão Mission, cerca de trezentas pessoas, foi aniquilada por um ataque de surpresa dos nativos, e o capitão morto pouco depois numa batalha naval. Houve outras colónias do género nas Índias Ocidentais e na América Central e do Sul, mas não se conseguiram manter por não serem suficientemente populosas para resistirem a ataques. Se o tivessem conseguido, a história do mundo podia ter sido alterada. Imaginem um número de posições fortificadas deste género por toda a América do Sul e Índias Ocidentais, espalhando-se desde Africa a Madagáscar e à Malásia e Índias Orientais, oferecendo todas elas refúgio a fugitivos da escravatura e da opressão: «Juntem-se a nós e vivam segundo os nossos regulamentos.» 

Temos, imediatamente, aliados em todos os escravizados e oprimidos do mundo inteiro, das plantações de algodão da América do Sul às plantações de açúcar das Índias Ocidentais, toda a população índia do continente americano assalariada e degradada pelos Espanhóis numa pobreza e ignorância sub-humanas, exterminada pelos Americanos, contaminada pelos seus vícios e doenças, os nativos da África e da Ásia — todos aliados potenciais. Posições fortificadas apoiadas e apoiando grupos de guerrilhas; guarnecidas de soldados, armas, remédios e informações dadas pelas populações locais... uma tal combinação seria imbatível. Se todo o Exército americano não conseguiu derrotar o Vietcong, numa altura em que as posições fortificadas eram obsoletas face à artilharia e ataques aéreos, certamente os exércitos europeus, operando num território desconhecido e susceptíveis a todas os doenças mortais dos países tropicais, não poderiam ter derrotado tácticas de guerrilha adicionadas a posições fortificadas. Considerem as dificuldades que um tal exército invasor enfrentaria: hostilizações contínuas por parte das guerrilhas, uma população totalmente hostil sempre a postos com veneno, informações erradas, cobras e aranhas na cama do general, tatus transportando a doença que come a terra criando raízes debaixo dos aquartelamentos e adoptados como mascotes pelo regimento enquanto a disenteria e a malária proliferam. Os cercos só poderiam ser desastres militares. Não há nada que detenha os seguidores dos Artigos. O homem branco é retroactivamente libertado do seu fardo. Os brancos serão bem-vindos como trabalhadores, colonos, e técnicos, mas não como colonialistas ou senhores. Nenhum homem pode violar os Artigos. 

Imaginem um movimento destes à escala mundial. Confrontados pela prática real da liberdade, as revoluções francesa e americana forçadas a respeitar as suas palavras. Os resultados da industrialização incontrolada seriam também mutilados, uma vez que os operários e os habitantes dos bairros de lata das cidades procurariam refúgio nas áreas seguidoras dos Artigos. Qualquer homem teria o direito de se instalar na área que escolhesse. A terra pertenceria àqueles que a trabalhassem. Nada de patrão branco, nada de Pukka Sahib, nada de patróns, nada de colonialistas. A escalada da produção em massa e da concentração da população em zonas urbanas seria eliminada, pois quem iria trabalhar nas fábricas deles e comprar-lhes os produtos quando podiam viver dos campos e do mar e dos lagos e dos rios em regiões de inacreditável abundância? E ao viver da terra seria motivado a preservar-lhe os recursos. Cito este exemplo de utopia retroactiva por ela ter podido realmente acontecer em termos de recursos técnicos e humanos disponíveis na altura. Se o capitão Mission tivesse vivido o suficiente para dar um exemplo para outros seguirem, a humanidade podia ter saído do impasse mortal de problemas insolúveis em que nos encontramos.

Prefácio Biográfico

Camilo Castelo Branco

Os gracejos com que o académico alegrava as suas poesias deviam às vezes toar asperamente nos ouvidos piedosos. A chalaça puxava por ele até à imprudência, em anos tão avançados que nem para o génio, se o houvesse nisso, teria desculpa. Temos mais de um exemplo nos seus poemas em que parece meter a riso deslinguadamente os assuntos melindrosos da religião. 

[...]

Com a Ordem Terceira de São Francisco das Chagas, de que o judeu era indigníssimo irmão, não andava muito acreditado. Estas duas quadras destoavam da seriedade de uma Ordem tão respeitável, que se preza de contar como irmãos os monarcas e príncipes portugueses quase todos: 

Uma musa fressureira 
Invoco para estes versos 
Porque só onde há fressuras 
Os corações acharemos. 

Já passou acaso o entrudo? 
Estamos já no «Memento»? 
Que pratos de corações 
Nos oferecem os Terceiros? 

[...]

Quando suspeitava que o Santo Ofício o trazia de olho e os Familiares o encaravam de esconso, punha-se a escrever e a divulgar romances, uma espécie de actos de contrição que distribuía e dos quais possuo cinco. Mas nem o pavor da Inquisição o corrigia do motejo mal disfarçado na compostura hipócrita. 

Parece que ele exagerava a imbecilidade intelectual dos cristãos-velhos, arranjando uns conceitos anfibológicos, mas muito transparentes para quem estava afeito na sala do tribunal a argumentar com hebreus espertos e rebeldes. Nos cinco Romances, que Serrão chama «de penitência», não perde lanço de lembrar que Jesus Nazareno nascera judeu, e como tal cumprira, ao oitavo dia, o preceito legal da circuncisão — relíquia judaica do canibalismo de Jeová-Moloch:

Por mim chorastes nascendo, 
E, de oito dias nascido, 
Por mim sangue derramastes 
Sofrendo cruel martírio. 

Para o reduzir, quanto possível, às condições triviais de homem, diz que Jesus fora havido como filho de José; e, nessa hipótese favorável ao seu requerimento de pecador, empenha cm seu patrocínio a família toda de Cristo — a mãe, o pai José, o primo Baptista, e de mais a mais São Francisco para padrinho, pois que o jubileu da Porciúncula a que o poeta contrito devotamente concorre é em casa do último santo [...] 

Insiste em descrever as angústias humanas, as dilacerações da carne de Jesus, os suores do horto, 

A prisão, cordas, cadeias, 
Os açoutes à coluna, 
A bofetada tremenda. 

É bem notório quanto os israelitas achavam ignóbil que o divino Messias, o Omnipotente, se expusesse aos lentos martírios humanos infligidos aos malfeitores. Naquela tremenda, adjectivando a bofetada, ressumbra o sorriso socrático. 

Lembra-se da cana, dos espinhos, do jogo da túnica aos dados, da cruz escandalosa, do fel e vinagre com que, na frase de Amador Arrais, enxaroparam o Messias — dos cravos e da lançada —, tudo que é injurioso ao homem, e inconciliável com a divindade. Mas, na ressurreição, não toca. E depois, num tom salgado de ironia, diz-lhe que, ao cabo de tantos trabalhos para o salvar, é justo que não se inutilizem tantos favores.

Pois, Senhor, não permitais 
Se percam tantas finezas 
Quanto sei que por salvar-me 
Por mim todas foram feitas.

[...]

*

Com os romances de penitência, com os jubileus na Porciúncula de São Francisco, e zombando no seu foro íntimo tanto de Moisés como de Galileu, chegou incólume António Serrão de Crasto aos sessenta e dois anos; mas, no dia 8 de Maio de 1672, ao cair da noite, foi preso pelos esbirros do Santo Ofício e conduzido ao cárcere do Rossio. Nesse mesmo dia, eram presos e encarcerados na Inquisição de Coimbra os seus dois filhos estudantes de medicina; e, passado algum tempo, remetidos para Lisboa. 

Ainda, no ano anterior ao da sua prisão, para captar a benevolência dos dominicanos, imprimiu Relação das Grandiosas Festas com que os Religiosos da Sagrada Ordem dos Pregadores do Real Convento de São Domingos desta Corte Celebraram as Canonizações dos Gloriosos Santos São Luís Beltrão e Santa Rosa Maria, e Beatificação de Santa Margarida de Saboia, no ano de 1671. 

E, já depois que foi preso, em 1672, no Forasteiro Admirado apareceu um romance burlesco de Serrão de Crasto em aplauso da canonização de Santa Maria Madalena de Pazzi. Realmente, um romance burlesco na canonização de uma beata era uma antecipação à Pucelle de Voltaire, em demasia temporã! 

A prisão desta família, motivou-a uma exorbitante imprudência de um dos filhos do poeta. Pedro Serrão forjava sátiras, já contra os lentes, já contra os métodos docentes da universidade. Esses libelos mordazes, de ordinário, não passavam do grémio dos seus condiscípulos ao conhecimento dos ofendidos; e, quando transpirassem, como a religião não era ferida nesses apodos à ignorância dos catedráticos de medicina, Pedro Serrão ia satirizando impunemente e jactanciosamente com aplauso do seu auditório dos gerais. Aconteceu, porém, naquele ano de 1672, o académico alargar a zona das suas vítimas, fantasiando torneios que celebravam uma festividade universitária no recebimento de um reitor também imaginado. Desgraçada lembrança! Como vai ver-se, Pedro Serrão envolveu na sua chacota a fradaria toda de Coimbra e todos os colégios monacais, sem exceptuar, ao menos, os dominicanos. 

Começava por embravecer contra si os maridos e as esposas da cidade de Coimbra, pondo na vanguarda dos cavaleiros-arautos que saíram do pátio da universidade, a lançar o pregão do torneio, uma donzela com uma bandeira reposta sobre um cavalo ricamente ajaezado e na bandeira as armas da cidade. Ora, o académico deturpava notavelmente o brasão. Sobre pano azul figurou uma gentilíssima dama, e do outro lado um veado de ouro com a seguinte legenda por cima das pontas: 

Até ao céu chegariam, 
Se cada ano houvesse 
O que em este acontece. 

Ainda havia outra inscrição mais emocional: 

Quem nesta terra casar 
Desta fruta d'Alenquer 
Tomará quanta quiser. 

No dia seguinte alegorizava ele que saíram a dar vista os colégios que haviam de esgrimir. Das alusões a cada um dos colégios fradescos deliram-se as cores jocosas com a notícia das particularidades que as explicavam. Não sabemos que razão se dava para que os colegiais de São Tomás trouxessem por elmo um capelo arrábido com a divisa: Aqui abrem selos —, e como é que o satirista com tal chufa mostrasse a transcendência do seu espírito. Entende-se, todavia, que Serrão lhes mofava da linhagem heráldica, escrevendo-lhes no escudo das armas: 

Merecemos pelas letras 
Ir de trás das procissões, 
Pois todos temos brasões. 

O colégio de Santo Agostinho movia-se vestido de chamalote preto, com meias mangas para melhor aparecerem os manguitos, e com mitra na cabeça de uma mula derrabada. O sal desta alusão também se não pode saborear; mas aí já a religião episcopal é ofendida, porque em uma bandeira figura Santo Agostinho, de pontifical, entre um crúzio e um graciano. 

Toda esta Ordem é fidalga, 

dizia a letra, 

Uns, com dom, o querem ser, 
Outros, sem dom, o parecer. 

O colégio de São Boaventura, pelos modos vezeiro em amores profanos, trazia como timbre um coração inflamado, com o emblema: 

No divino, e no humano, 
Este trago abrasado, 
Porque d'ambos sou tocado. 

O colégio de São Bernardo cavalgava um quartão de ventas esfarrapadas, com uma coleira de cascavéis, e uma letra que dizia: Alcobaça. No escudo, uma pereira em campo de erva, com a divisa: 

Se me faltarem as peras, 
Isso pouco importará; 
Erva não me faltará. 

Esta chalaça ainda se percebe pela velha injustiça com que os bernardos, aliás doutíssimos, eram motejados pelas outras ordens, que nunca tiveram Britos, nem Brandões, nem Fortunatos de São Boaventura. 

O colégio dos Carmelitas vestido de escarlate com roçagante cauda, e esta legenda: 

No que toca a bestialidade, 
Poderemos dar fiança 
Por nós e pela vizinhança. 

Os loios com uns epigramas às suas boticadas, já agora ininteligíveis. Seguiam-se os trinitários, os jerónimos, com instrumentos de padaria, os crúzios — e os jesuítas, rodeados de grande caterva de mancebos com esta letra: Enganados. O escudo da Companhia de Jesus era uma rede varredoura com a divisa: 

Na índia e no Japão 
Ou aonde quer que for 
Apanharei o melhor. 

O de São Bento cavalgava um grande macho da ordem, com a letra: 

Assim andava Abacuc no seu tempo. 

O poeta malsina-lhes a limpeza do sangue com esta inscrição no escudo: 

Em mim tenho misturados 
Mouros brancos conhecidos 
Entre maus cristãos fingidos. 

Pedro Serrão devia conhecer os tornadiços da sua raça que vestiam hábitos das ordens, com preferência ao sambenito. 
Entraram todos os colégios a justar no Pátio da Universidade. O primeiro que saiu a recolher o campo foi o de São Boaventura, e ninguém lhe foi ao encontro, porque jogava de pés e mãos; a final entrou o do Carmo, e deram-se tão fortes encontrões que se puseram logo em quatro pés, e a poder de coices venceu o do Carmo, deixando o outro tão mal tratado de uma anca, que não se podia bulir. Os dominicanos saíram aos carmelitas, e no primeiro encontro romperam a gualdrapa e ficaram em osso. 

Não protrairei o processo dos coices que os colégios mutuamente se espinoteiam. Basta dizer que as setas do Serrão são todas ervadas da pior peçonha para ele, visto que era de esperar que se lhe cravassem de ricochete no peito. 

Espalharam-se cópias da sátira. A indignação devia ser universal, nos conventos e nas casas particulares. A espionagem não se cansaria muito em descobrir o insultador perversíssimo que mitrava cabeças de burro e punha frutas de Alenquer nas cabeças dos maridos da cidade. Pedro Serrão foi preso, e mais o irmão cujo nome ignoro, por quadrilheiros da Inquisição. Devia ser geral o contentamento dos colégios infamados pela sátira e das famílias honestas mais ou menos identificadas aos créditos daqueles frades e colegiais. 

*

Clemente X, em 1673, movido, ao que se diz, pelas Notícias Recônditas da Inquisição, incorrectamente atribuídas ao padre António Vieira, mandou fechar os tribunais do Santo Ofício, isto é, mandou suspender os processos instaurados, mas não abrir as portas aos encarcerados. 

O processo dos Serrões foi suspenso, portanto, e continuado em 21 de Setembro de 1681 quando Inocêncio XI, por bula de 22 de Agosto daquele ano, restituiu ao Santo Ofício todos os seus poderes, nove anos interrompidos. O filho, cujo nome ignoro, de António Serrão, morreu na tortura ou pereceu pelo suicídio no cárcere; Pedro Serrão, o da sátira, e seu pai estiveram à espera da sua sentença dez anos menos dois dias, a contar de 8 de Maio de 1672 até 10 de Maio de 1682 [sic], dia em que saíram no auto-de-fé. 

*

Na carta de António Serrão a Francisco Menzas colhem-se alguns traços de sua Vida nesses dez anos: 

... ... ... ...
Se um dia só de tormento 
Parece anos mui largos, 
Quantos me pareceriam, 
Menos dois dias, dez anos? 

Que tantos, Senhor, estive 
Antes de morto enterrado; 
Se bem morto para o gosto, 
Vivo para estar penando. 

[...]

Falando dos filhos e da penúria, compara-se a Job, que tudo perdeu — os filhos e os bens: 

E, se Job ficou sem filhos, 
Eu em os meus não vos falo 
Que casos tão lastimosos 
Não são para relatados. 

Quanto à pobreza a que o abateu o Santo Ofício: 

Se Job perdeu os seus bens, 
Eu destes meus limitados 
Em um instante fiquei 
Destruído e assolado.

Por uma fresta da sua prisão via ele a ramagem de uma ameixieira no quintalejo do Tribunal. Nos seus últimos dias de cárcere, no fim de Abril, ainda a viu florir. Fez-lhe então um soneto que interpõe na carta ao amigo: 

Onze vezes de folhas revestida, 
Onze vezes de flores adornada, 
Onze vezes de frutos carregada 
Te vi, ameixieira, aqui nascida. 

Outras tantas também te vi despida, 
De folhas, flores, frutos despojada, 
Pelo rigor do Inverno saqueada, 
E a seco tronco toda reduzida. 

Também a mim me vi já revestido 
De folhas, flores, frutos adornado, 
De amigos e parentes assistido. 

De todos eis-me aqui tão desprezado; 
Mas tu voltas a ter o que hás perdido 
E eu não terei já mais o antigo estado.

Também vira por espaço de oito anos verdejar o folhedo de um loureiro que certo dia caiu a golpes de machado quando a sua copa frondejava mais. Tudo lhe era incentivo para entreter com versos a sua solidão [...]

Rija constituição era a deste homem que aos setenta e três anos fazia estes dessorados versos, e quase cego ia deixá-los às portas dos antigos amigos misericordiosos que lhe davam por eles o pão de cada dia! Mas o que mais espanta é que este pai ancião pudesse sobreviver à catástrofe do filho, garrotado e queimado na Ribeira, ali defronte dos seus olhos, bem visível, no crepúsculo da noite, entre as línguas da fogueira que o pulverizaram! Que estúpida e selvagem reacção a das forças vitais a tantos elementos destruidores! Custa muito morrer. 

*

Desde 21 de Setembro de 1681 até 10 de Maio do ano seguinte, os inquisidores, que precisavam despejar a casa, aviaram expeditamente cento e seis processos! No auto-de-fé de 10 de Maio saíram penitenciados sessenta e dois homens e quarenta mulheres. Os relaxados em carne, condenados à morte e ao fogo, eram quatro: um Gaspar Pereira, outro de apelido desconhecido, o bacharel Miguel Henriques da Fonseca, advogado nos auditórios da corte, e Pedro Serrão, mais de meio cristão-novo, diz a sentença, estudante, solteiro, filho de António Serrão de Crasto, boticário.¹

Reza a sentença que o réu guardava os sábados, jejuava no dia grande e no da rainha Ester, comendo somente à noite de peixe, e abstendo-se de carnes de porco, de coelho e de peixe de pele. É o que as falsas testemunhas haviam deposto contra Pedro Serrão; mas o preso não confessou estas nem outras culpas. O promotor fiscal do Santo Ofício deu contra o réu libelo criminal. O réu contestou por negação, contrariando com a defesa de que era cristão, talvez porque comia carne de porco, e tudo. O Santo Ofício desmentia-o com o depoimento das desconhecidas testemunhas, e ele obstinava-se na negativa. Os tratos não lhe arrancaram a confissão das culpas, sendo por muitas vezes admoestado com muita caridade. Estas admoestações caritativas chamavam-se a polé e o potro. Assentou a Mesa do Santo Ofício que o réu inconfesso era herege e apóstata, convicto, negativo e pertinaz. Intimou-o de novo a que confessasse e pedisse perdão, visto que o seu crime era de morte. Não confessou. Dez anos de cárcere era temporada bastante de trevas para que o decrépito rapaz houvesse esquecido a luz do Sol, o azul do céu e as sensações da vida. Aterrava-o talvez menos a morte do que a miséria e o opróbrio com que a Inquisição lhe concederia a arrastada existência no desterro, nas galés, ou nas penitenciárias dos mosteiros. Foi sentenciado em 1 de Maio, nove dias antes do suplício. A sentença da Relação, desprezadas as cínicas instâncias do Santo Ofício para que se houvesse benigna e piedosamente, foi assim lavrada: Vista a sentença junta dos Inquisidores, Ordinários e Deputados da Santa Inquisição, e como por ela se mostra o R. preso Pedro Serrão ser herege e apóstata da nossa Santa Fé Católica, convencido no crime de judaísmo, e por tal relaxado à justiça secular: Vista a disposição de direito e Ordenação em tal caso, o condenam a que com baraço e pregão pelas ruas públicas e costumadas desta cidade seja levado à Ribeira dela, aonde afogado (garrotado) morra morte natural, e ao depois de morto será queimado e feito por fogo em pó, de maneira que nunca do seu corpo e sepultura possa haver memória, e o condenam outrossim em perdimento dos seus bens para o Fisco e Câmara Real, posto que ascendentes ou descendentes tenha, os quais declaram por incapazes, inábeis e infames na forma de direito e Ordenação. E pague as custas destes autos. 

*

Na fileira dos quatro relaxados em carne ia o jurisconsulto Miguel Henriques, condenado a ser queimado vivo. Era um teologista argumentador que fizera suar o cercílio aos dominicanos na Mesa do Santo Ofício; mas tinha intermitentes fragilidades. Quando as cordas da tortura lhe estorciam as articulações, confessava que era judeu, e pedia perdão dos seus pecados; mas assim que lhe relaxassem as roscas do calabre e o deixassem curar as macerações e ajustar os ossos desconjuntados às suas facetas e cavidades, desconfessava as culpas, e escrevia nos autos as razões evidentes do seu mosaísmo. Não queria advogado nem procurador. Chamado à Mesa, fazia um estendal de textos bíblicos, dava-se umas refulgências de Moisés no Horeb, e parecia querer converter à sua crença os frades com uma polémica de tão perigoso controversista que os inquisidores, para o amordaçarem, mandavam-lhe atar as mãos à polé, levantá-lo à altura do moitão e deixá-lo baquear de repente, ficando suspenso com todo o peso do seu corpo. Nesta postura, por entre gritos, confessava os pesares das suas culpas e pedia perdão pelas chagas do Redentor, o qual, como se via, tinha remido a feroz procacidade do género humano, repondo-o naquela perfeição edénica representada pelos ministros do culto. Sacrílego vitupério dos remidos ao Redentor — uma infame tragédia que afrontaria o factor daqueles blasfemos personagens, se o estúpido Acaso pudesse ser responsável pelas nossas covardes idolatrias! 

Assim que o apeavam do moitão, voltava para o seu antro, e escrevia nos autos um novo desmentido às confissões. Assinava-se judaicamente Misael, e não queria que lhe chamassem Miguel — o nome do baptismo violentado; e declarava arrogantemente, com um científico desdém, que, se queriam fazê-lo cristão, o convencessem — que lhe propusessem razões mais concludentes. Quando lhe mandavam assinar algum papel em que se lia Santa Inquisição, respondia que não assinava sem riscarem o adjectivo santa; nem jurava pelos Santos Evangelhos, visto que não lhes dava, em harmonia com a sua fé e com as suas luzes, importância alguma, aos tais evangelhos apócrifos, contraditórios e de nenhum valor histórico nem religioso. Em ignorância orçava por Strauss, Renan e Ewerbeck. Como a ciência moderna é antiga! O bacharel podia ter uma agonia mais suave, se não discutisse. 

Pedro Serrão fora mais discreto na sua estóica impassibilidade. Morrer por morrer, antes estrangulado pela corretã do carrasco do que pela fumarada dos toros embreados. E, de mais a mais, se a forte brisa soprava do Tejo, ali defronte do Paço da Ribeira, e as lavaredas, em vez de convergirem para o padecente, divergiam as suas serpes, a agonia tinha umas delongas que tornam inclassificável o grau de tormento a que pode chegar a carne humana. [...] Foi assim que se desfez devagar e horrendamente o bacharel Miguel Henriques da Fonseca, levantado em um poste alto e queimado vivo, dizia a sentença.

Entretanto, António Serrão de Crasto ia mendigando e vivendo contra vontade de outros poetas, seus confrades talvez nas Academias. Um desses teve notícia de que o boticário, no cárcere, estava escrevendo os Ratos da Inquisição. É natural que circulassem cá fora algumas cópias das décimas jocosas com que o preso muito de indústria granjeava captar o sorriso misericordioso dos inquisidores. Como quer que fosse, houve poeta que viu nos Ratos uma rebuçada alegoria aos Inquisidores, e como tal a denunciou à justa vingança dos ofendidos, nas seguintes endechas: 

Judeu de mau proceder, 
Que, se em teus versos discorro, 
Logo pareces cachorro 
No ladrar e no morder. 

Ainda espero ver-te arder, 
Pois com tanta sem-razão 
Murmuras da Inquisição; 
Porém, é força, em teu erro, 
Se te tratam como perro 
Que te vingues como cão. 

Dos ratos, desta maneira, 
Te queixas e de seus tratos; 
É mau queixar-te dos ratos, 
Estando na ratoeira. 
Tua alusão sorrateira 
Mostrar engenho procura, 
E a retórica se apura 
Nesta alusão que formaste 
Pois desta figura usaste 
Antes de fazer figura. 

Néscio, depois de judeu, 
Quando o sambenito mamas, 
Triste português te chamas, 

Sendo o mais astuto hebreu! 
Quem te vira posto em breu 
Ou partido de uma bala! 
Ninguém contigo se iguala, 
Pois fazes, quando precito, 
Sendo infame o sambenito, 
Desse sambenito gala. 

Se viveste descortês 
Com repetida torpeza, 
Mais à lei da natureza 
Do que na lei de Moisés, 
Queixa-te só desta vez 
De ti, mas não de outro trato; 
Que eu sei que nunca do rato 
Te queixarás, asneirão, 
Se assim como foste cão 
Poderás tornar-te gato. 

*

A dramatização do poema cifra-se no ataque dos ratos da Inquisição às vitualhas que o preso tem numa canastra. Estreme fantasia — está claro; porque os presos não tinham alimentos seus, havidos de fora, nos seus covis. Daí vem que o outro poeta, desejoso de ver o colega posto em breu, malsinou perfidamente de alegóricas as décimas dos Ratos. Os encarcerados no Santo Ofício recebiam uma vez por dia um parco alimento cozinhado no caldeirão da casa. A parcimónia era tal que apenas seria verosímil que os ratos devorassem os presos. 

¹ A sentença foi integralmente publicada com algumas notas sobre jurisprudência inquisitorial da lavra do erudito senhor dr. Aires de Campos, no Instituto de Coimbra, tomo IX, págs. 298 e segs.

Journey to the End of the Night

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

What solicitude! I ask you, comrade, is it my family that's going to serve as a strainer and sorting house for mixed French and German bullets? ... It'll just be me, won't it? And when I'm dead, is the honor of my family going to bring me back to life? ... I can see how it will be with my family when these warlike scenes have passed ... as everything passes ... I can see my family on fine Sundays . . . joyfully gamboling on the lawns of a new summer . . . while three feet under papa, that's me, dripping with worms and infinitely more disgusting than ten pounds of turds on the Fourteenth of July, will be rotting stupendously with all my deluded flesh . . . Fertilize the fields of the anonymous plowman—that is the true future of the true soldier! Ah, comrade! This world, I assure you, is only a vast device for kidding the world! You are young! Let these minutes of wisdom be as years to you! Listen well, comrade, and don't fail to recognize and understand the tell-tale sign, which glares from all the murderous hypocrisies of our Society: 'Compassion with the fate, the condition of the poor ...' I tell you, little man, life's fall guys, beaten, fleeced to the bone, sweated from time immemorial, I warn you, that when the princes of this world start loving you, it means they're going to grind you up into battle sausage… That's the sign… It's infallible. It starts with affection. Louis XIV, at least, and don't forget it, didn't give a hoot in hell about his beloved people. Louis XV ditto. He smeared his asshole with them. True, we didn't live well in those days, the poor have never lived well, but the kings didn't flay them with the obstinacy, the persistence you meet with in today's tyrants. There's no rest, I tell you, for the little man, except in the contempt of the great, whose only motive for thinking of the common people is self-interest, when it isn't sadism... It's the philosophers... another point to look out for while we're at it... who first started giving the people ideas... when all they'd known up until then was the catechism! They began, so they proclaimed, to educate the people… Ah! What truths they had to reveal! Beautiful! Brilliant! Unprecedented truths! And the people were dazzled! That's it!, they said. That's the stuff! Let's go and die for it! The people are always dying to die! That's the way they are! 'Long live Diderot!' they yelled. And 'Long live Voltaire!' They, at least, were first-class philosophers. Those guys at least don't let the beloved people molder in ignorance and fetishism! They show the people the roads of Freedom! Emancipation! Things went fast after that! First teach everybody to read the papers! That's the way to salvation! Hurry hurry! No more illiterates! We don't need them anymore! Nothing but citizen-soldiers! Who vote! Who read! And who fight! And who march! And send kisses from the front! In no time the people were good and ripe! The enthusiasm of the liberated has to be good for something, doesn't it? Danton wasn't eloquent for the hell of it. With a few phrases, so rousing that we can still hear them today, he had the people mobilized before you could say fiddlesticks! That was when the first battalions of emancipated maniacs marched off! ... the first voting, flagmatic suckers that Dumouriez led away to get themselves drilled full of holes in Flanders! As for Dumouriez himself, who had come too late to these new-fangled idealistic pastimes, he discovered that he was more interested in money and deserted. He was our last mercenary. The free-gratis soldier... was something really new... So new that when Goethe arrived in Valmy, Goethe or not, he was flabbergasted. At the sight of those ragged, impassioned cohorts, who had come of their own free will to get themselves disembowelled by the King of Prussia in defense of a patriotic fiction no one had ever heard of, Goethe realized that he still had much to learn. The system proved successful ... pretty soon they were mass-producing heroes, and in the end, the system was so well perfected that they cost practically nothing. Everyone was delighted. Bismarck, the two Napoleons, Barrés, Elsa the Horsewoman. The religion of the flag promptly replaced the cult of heaven, an old cloud which had already been deflated by the Reformation and reduced to a network of episcopal money boxes. In olden times the fanatical fashion was: 'Long live Jesus! Burn the heretics!'... But heretics, after all, were few and voluntary... Whereas today vast hordes of men are fired with aim and purpose by cries of: 'Hang the limp turnips! The juiceless lemons! The innocent readers! By the millions, eyes right!' If anybody doesn't want to fight or murder, grab 'em, tear 'em to pieces! Kill them in thirteen juicy ways. For a starter, to teach them how to live, rip their guts out of their bodies, their eyes out of their sockets, and the years out of their filthy slobbering lives! Let whole legions of them perish, turn into smidgens, bleed, smolder in acid—and all that to make the Patrie more beloved, more fair, and more joyful! And if in their midst there are any foul creatures who refuse to understand these sublime truths, they can just go and bury themselves right with the others, no, not quite, their place will be at the far end of the cemetery, under the shameful epitaphs of cowards without an ideal, for those contemptible slugs will have forfeited the glorious right to a small patch of the shadow of the municipal monument erected by the lowest bidder in the central avenue to commemorate the reputable dead, and also the right to hear so much as a distant echo of the Minister's speech next Sunday, when he comes around to urinate at the Prefecture and sound off over the graves after lunch...

Viagem ao fim da Noite

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Que indulgência! Agora pergunto-lhe eu, camarada: então a minha família é que vai servir de coador e peneira às balas francesas e alemãs misturadas?... Isso devia ser só comigo, não é verdade? E, quando eu estiver morto, a honra da minha família é que vai fazer-me ressuscitar?... Olhe, já estou a topar a minha família, as coisas da guerra passadas... Como tudo passa... Feliz e aos pulos nas ervas do Verão que já voltou, estou a topá-la nos domingos de sol... Enquanto três pés mais abaixo eu, o papá, a fervilhar de vermes e bem mais infecto do que um quilo de cagalhões no 14 de Julho, apodreço fantasticamente toda a minha carne decepcionada... Estrumar os sulcos do camponês anónimo é o verdadeiro futuro do verdadeiro soldado! Ah! Camarada! Este mundo, garanto-lhe eu, não é mais do que uma imensa empresa que se marimba para o mundo! Você é jovem. Que estes minutos lúcidos lhe valham como anos! Escute-me com atenção, camarada, e não deixe passar nada sem avaliar bem a sua importância, esse factor capital que faz resplandecer todas as hipocrisias mortíferas da nossa Sociedade: «O compadecimento pela sorte, pela condição dos pobres-diabos...» Digo-vos, simplórios, vencidos da vida, escorraçados, espoliados, transpirados de sempre, previno-vos: quando os grandes deste mundo resolvem amar-vos é porque vão transformar-vos em carne para canhão... É o sinal... É infalível. É por amizade que a coisa começa. Luís XIV, esse, que nos lembremos marimbava-se por completo para o bom povo. Quanto a Luís XV, é a mesma coisa. Estava-se a cagar. Não se vivia bem nesse tempo, é certo, os pobres nunca viveram bem mas ao estripá-los não havia a teimosia e a obstinação que encontramos nos tiranos dos nossos dias. Para os pequenos, digo-lhe eu, só há descanso com o desprezo dos grandes que apenas podem pensar no povo por interesse ou sadismo... Foram os filósofos, repare ainda a propósito, que começaram por contar histórias ao bom povo... A ele, que só conhecia o catecismo! Empenharam-se, proclamaram eles, em educá-lo... Ah! Que verdades tinham a revelar-lhes! E das boas! E das fresquinhas! Que brilhavam! De se ficar embasbacado! É isto!, começou a dizer o bom povo, é isto mesmo! É precisamente isto! Vamos morrer todos por isto! Nunca quer mais do que morrer, o povo! Tal e qual. «Viva Diderot!» berraram eles, e depois: «Bravo, Voltaire!» Ao menos eram filósofos! E viva também Carnot, que organiza tão bem as vitórias! E viva toda a gente! Ao menos eram gajos que não deixavam o povo morrer na ignorância e no feiticismo! Mostraram-lhe, eles, os caminhos da Liberdade! Emanciparam-no! Mas não durou! Primeiro saibam todos ler os jornais! É a salvação! Caramba! E isso rápido! Basta de analfabetos! Não pode havê-los! Apenas soldados-cidadãos! Que votem! Que leiam! E que se batam! E que marchem! E mandem beijos! Sob este regime, o bom povo acabou por chegar ao ponto certo. O entusiasmo de ter sido libertado não havia de servir para alguma coisa? Danton não era eloquente por tão pouco. Com alguns berros tão sentidos que ainda hoje se ouvem, do pé para a mão mobilizou o bom povo! Foi o ponto de partida dos primeiros batalhões de emancipados frenéticos! Dos primeiros pobres-diabos votantes e bandeirófilos que levariam Dumouriez a fazer-se esburacar na Flandres! Para o Dumouriez que, chegando demasiado tarde a este pequeno jogo idealista inteiramente inédito, e acima de tudo interessado em carcanhóis, desertou. Foi o nosso último mercenário... O soldado gratuito era novidade... Uma novidade tal que Goethe, tão Goethe como era, ao chegar a Valmy ficou pasmado. Perante aqueles magotes esfarrapados e apaixonados que se davam espontaneamente a estripar pelo rei da Prússia para defesa da inédita ficção patriótica, Goethe sentiu que ainda tinha muitas coisas a aprender. «A partir de hoje», proclamou tão magnificamente como seria de esperar do seu génio, «começa uma nova época!» Tal e qual! Em seguida, como o sistema era excelente puseram-se a fabricar heróis em série e cada vez menos caros devido ao aperfeiçoamento do sistema. Toda a gente se deu bem. Bismarck, os dois Napoleões, e tanto Barrès como a Cavaleira Elsa. A religião bandeirista substituiu prontamente a celeste, velha nuvem já emurchecida pela Reforma e desde há muito condensada em pés-de-meia episcopais. Antigamente, a moda fanática era «Viva Jesus! Fogueira com os heréticos!» Raros e voluntários, porém, os heréticos... Ao passo que, de futuro, aqui onde nos vêem é com hordas imensas que os gritos: «Morte aos que não matam uma mosca! Aos pãezinhos sem sal! Aos inocentes leitores! Milhões de homens de face voltada ao perigo!», despertam vocações. Os homens que não quiserem assassinar nem deitar as mãos a ninguém, os malcheirosos pacifistas, agarrem-nos e chacinem-nos! Que os trucidem de mil maneiras e feitios bem desarrincados! Para aprenderem, comecem por arrancar-lhes as tripas do corpo e os olhos das órbitas, e acabem-lhes com os anos de vida porca e abjecta que eles têm! Que os façam finar-se legião por legião, saltar na corda bamba, sangrar, fumegar em ácidos, e tudo para a Pátria vir a ser mais amada, mais alegre e amena! E se lá houver imundos que recusem compreender estas coisas sublimes, só há que fazê-los enterrar imediatamente junto dos outros, não digo isto à letra, claro, mas no fim do cemitério com o desonroso epitáfio de cobardes sem ideal uma vez que perderam, estes ignóbeis, não só o magnífico direito a um cantinho de sombra no monumento adjudicatário e comunal erigido aos mortos como deve ser, na álea central, mas também o direito de captar um pouco do eco do ministro que, nesse mesmo domingo, vai urinar à casa do prefeito e depois do almoço fazer uma berratina sobre as campas.

Directions for Decomposition

Emil Cioran

I'll join with black despair against my soul, 
And to myself become an enemy.

— Richard III 

Genealogy of Fanaticism 

In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man animates ideas, projects his flames and flaws into them; impure, transformed into beliefs, ideas take their place in time, take shape as events: the trajectory is complete, from logic to epilepsy ... whence the birth of ideologies, doctrines, deadly games. 

Idolaters by instinct, we convert the objects of our dreams and our interests into the Unconditional. History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable. Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create fake gods, he then feverishly adopts them: his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike. His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse. There is no form of intolerance, of proselytism or ideological intransigence which fails to reveal the bestial substratum of enthusiasm. Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation. The ages of fervor abound in bloody exploits: a Saint Teresa could only be the contemporary of the auto-da-fé, a Luther of the repression of the Peasants' Revolt. In every mystic outburst, the moans of victims parallel the moans of ecstasy ... Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith — of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever. The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth. We are unfair to a Nero, a Tiberius: it was not they who invented the concept heretic : they were only degenerate dreamers who happened to be entertained by massacres. The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic. 

When we refuse to admit the interchangeable character of ideas, blood flows ... firm resolves draw the dagger; fiery eyes presage slaughter. No wavering mind, infected with Hamletism, was ever pernicious: the principle of evil lies in the will's tension, in the incapacity for quietism, in the Promethean megalomania of a race that bursts with ideals, that explodes with its convictions, and that, in return for having forsaken doubt and sloth — vices nobler than all its virtues — has taken the path to perdition, into history, that indecent alloy of banality and apocalypse ... Here certitudes abound: suppress them, best of all suppress their consequences, and you recover paradise. What is the Fall but the pursuit of a truth and the assurance you have found it, the passion for a dogma, domicile within a dogma? The result is fanaticism — fundamental defect which gives man the craving for effectiveness, for prophecy, for terror — a lyrical leprosy by which he contaminates souls, subdues them, crushes or exalts them ... Only the skeptics (or idlers or aesthetes) escape, because they propose nothing, because they — humanity's true benefactors - undermine fanaticism's purposes, analyze its frenzy. I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity. In the fervent mind you always find the camouflaged beast of prey; no protection is adequate against the claws of a prophet ... Once he raises his voice, whether in the name of heaven, of the city, or some other excuse, away with you: satyr of your solitude, he will not forgive your living on the wrong side of his truths and his transports; he wants you to share his hysteria, his fullness, he wants to impose it on you, and thereby to disfigure you. A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth, where our mania for salvation makes life unbreathable. Look around you: everywhere, specters preaching; each institution translates a mission; city halls have their absolute, even as the temples — officialdom, with its rules — a metaphysics designed for monkeys ... Everyone trying to remedy everyone's life: even beggars, even the incurable aspire to it: the sidewalks and hospitals of the world over-flow with reformers. The longing to become a source of events affects each man like a mental disorder or a desired malediction. Society — an inferno of saviors! What Diogenes was looking for with his lantern was an indifferent man ... 

It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say ‘we’ with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke ‘others’ and regard himself as their interpreter — for me to consider him my enemy. I see in him a tyrant manqué, an approximate executioner, quite as detestable as the first-rate tyrants, the first-rate executioners. Every faith practices some form of terror, all the more dreadful when the 'pure' are its agents. We mistrust the swindler, the trickster, the con man; yet to them we can impute none of history’s great convulsions; believing in nothing, it is not they who rummage in your hearts, or your ulterior motives; they leave you to your apathy, to your despair or to your uselessness; to them humanity owes the few moments of prosperity it has known: it is they who save the peoples whom fanatics torture and ‘idealists’ destroy. Doctrineless, they have only whims and interests, accommodating vices a thousand times more endurable than the ravages provoked by principled despotism; for all of life's evils come from a ‘conception of life.’ An accomplished politician should search out the ancient sophists and take lessons in oratory — and in corruption ... 

Whereas the fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster. No human beings are more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited among the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it; hence the mind feels more comfortable in the society of a braggart than in that of a martyr; and nothing is more repugnant to it than the spectacle of dying for an idea ... Revolted by the sublime and by carnage, the mind dreams of a provincial ennui on the scale of the universe, of a History whose stagnation would be so great that doubt would take on the lineaments of an event and hope a calamity ... 

The Anti-Prophet

In every man sleeps a prophet and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world ... 

The compulsion to preach is so rooted in us that it emerges from depths unknown to the instinct for self-preservation. Each of us awaits his moment in order to propose something — anything. He has a voice: that is enough. It costs us dear to be neither deaf nor dumb ... 

From snobs to scavengers, all expend their criminal generosity, all hand out formulas for happiness, all try to give directions: life in common thereby becomes intolerable, and life with oneself still more so; if you fail to meddle in other people's business you are so uneasy about your own that you convert your ‘self’ into a religion, or, apostle in reverse, you deny it altogether; we are victims of the universal game ... 

The abundance of solutions to the aspects of existence is equaled only by their futility. History: a factory of ideals ... lunatic mythology, frenzy of hordes and of solitaries ... refusal to look reality in the face, mortal thirst for fictions ... 

The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are. If we had the right sense of our position in the world, if to compare were inseparable from to live, the revelation of our infinitesimal presence would crush us. But to live is to blind ourselves to our own dimensions ... 

And if all our actions — from breathing to the founding of empires or metaphysical systems — derive from an illusion as to our importance, the same is true a fortiori of the prophetic instinct. Who, with the exact vision of his nullity, would try to be effective and to turn himself into a savior? Nostalgia for a world without ‘ideals,’ for an agony without doctrine, for an eternity without life ... Paradise ... But we could not exist one second without deceiving ourselves: the prophet in each of us is just the seed of madness which makes us flourish in our void.

Chronique des indiens Guayaki

Pierre Clastres

La référence explicite au déluge universel, c’est-à-dire à un moment de la cataclysmologie guayaki, invite à scruter de plus près la signification de cette bûche enflammée. Si la mythologie des Aché ne contient pas d’allusion directe à un incendie de la terre (pôle complémentaire du couple dévastateur qu’il forme avec le déluge), elle décrit par contre une époque où le monde ne connaissait pas l’obscurité; c’était le temps du jour éternel et le soleil, en permanence fixé au zénith, brûlait tout de ses rayons. On reconnaît là l’équivalent de l’incendie universel. Sachant donc que la destruction de la terre par le feu est présente à la pensée cosmologique des Guayaki; considérant en outre l’atmosphère de désordre cosmique provoquée par la récente naissance, on peut admettre que la signification de ce tison éteint se hausse à la dimension générale – quasi sacrée – du contexte où il prend place, et qu’il est là pour occuper, en quelque sorte, la place vide que désigne « la grande eau rouge ». Le feu qui consume ce morceau de bois prend ici la figure métonymique du feu universel, et l’extinction des braises dans l’eau purifiante se dévoile acte conjurant de cet autre feu qui couve secrètement et dont la menace se trouve ainsi abolie.

Il n’y aura donc pas d’incendie universel. Le problème se formule maintenant ainsi: pour empêcher le déluge, il faut empêcher le feu céleste. S’agit-il là d’une relation de causalité unissant deux termes (le feu et l’eau) extérieurs l’un à l’autre ? Si tel était le cas, il serait très difficile, voire impossible, de découvrir la nature de ce lien, car les Indiens n’ont rien dit de plus à ce propos. Mais, si l’on s’en tient à ce qu’indique la pensée indigène inconsciente, il faut persister à voir dans l’eau et le feu un couple structuralement lié, un système à envisager tel quel si on veut le comprendre. Soit donc l’ensemble constitué par l’incendie et le déluge universels. L’un et l’autre sont les deux modes de disparition de la première humanité, les deux visages de l’apocalypse indienne, ils sont le système de la mort. Comme, d’autre part, l’un ne va pas sans l’autre – non point simultanément certes, mais au décours de l’éternité du temps – on peut s’attendre à voir la menace de l’un se redoubler de la menace représentée par son opposé complémentaire, surtout si les circonstances sont telles que le désordre prend mesure du cosmos. Bref, une naissance doit entraîner aussi bien l’incendie que le déluge. Il en résulte que si l’apparition de l’un entraîne nécessairement celle de l’autre, réciproquement la disparition du second détermine celle du premier: écarter en conséquence le risque d’incendie général en éteignant son image symbolique permet bien d’empêcher le déluge universel.

Reste à se demander pourquoi c’est la mort du feu que le rituel indien appelle à provoquer la mort de l’eau. Tout d’abord, il est plus facile de penser la suppression du feu par l’eau que le contraire. Néanmoins, il s’agit ici plutôt d’un problème d’antériorité chronologique: en effet, la mythologie guayaki (comme d’ailleurs celle de nombreuses autres tribus) situe l’incendie de la terre avant le déluge. On peut déceler dans le geste d’éteindre le tison – d’abolir la possibilité d’incendie –, pour écarter le danger contraire, la répétition rituelle de l’ordre temporel d’apparition du feu, puis de l’eau, que décrivent les mythes. Un ultime détail appelle explication : un adulte aurait-il pu accomplir ce qu’a fait la fillette, ou bien cette tâche ne pouvait-elle être exécutée que par un enfant? Observant qu’elle a trempé le tison non dans n’importe quelle eau, mais dans la décoction purifiante d’écorce de liane, on se rappellera que le climat où baignent depuis hier soir la vie de la tribu, et la vie de l’univers lui-même, se trouve profondément marqué d’impureté génératrice de désordre. C’est bien pour cela que les Indiens ont recours à l’eau lustrale afin de dissoudre cette impureté et d’éliminer ce désordre ; c’est pour cela aussi que, semblables ainsi à tout autre adulte dans la foi qui les lie à l’enfance, ils confient à une main innocente, encore épargnée de la grande contamination qui grève irrémédiablement l’âge d’homme, le soin de les sauver. Que disent finalement les mots des Indiens, et quelle mesure dessinent leurs gestes? Ne découvrons-nous pas en leur langue le son familier des certitudes les plus humbles et les plus douloureuses? Une naissance d’enfant porte en soi un germe mortel, elle met en question l’existence des autres: nous assiège ici le sage et cruel constat que les hommes ne sont pas des dieux et que toute position de vie fait pour eux signe vers leur mort.

Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes

Ian Cobain, Owen Bowcott and Richard Norton-Taylor

Thousands of documents detailing some of the most shameful acts and crimes committed during the final years of the British empire were systematically destroyed to prevent them falling into the hands of post-independence governments, an official review has concluded.

Those papers that survived the purge were flown discreetly to Britain where they were hidden for 50 years in a secret Foreign Office archive, beyond the reach of historians and members of the public, and in breach of legal obligations for them to be transferred into the public domain.

The archive came to light last year when a group of Kenyans detained and allegedly tortured during the Mau Mau rebellion won the right to sue the British government. The Foreign Office promised to release the 8,800 files from 37 former colonies held at the highly-secure government communications centre at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire.

The historian appointed to oversee the review and transfer, Tony Badger, master of Clare College, Cambridge, says the discovery of the archive put the Foreign Office in an "embarrassing, scandalous" position. "These documents should have been in the public archives in the 1980s," he said. "It's long overdue." The first of them are made available to the public on Wednesday at the National Archive at Kew, Surrey.

The papers at Hanslope Park include monthly intelligence reports on the "elimination" of the colonial authority's enemies in 1950s Malaya; records showing ministers in London were aware of the torture and murder of Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya, including a case of a man said to have been "roasted alive"; and papers detailing the lengths to which the UK went to forcibly remove islanders from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

However, among the documents are a handful which show that many of the most sensitive papers from Britain's late colonial era were not hidden away, but simply destroyed. These papers give the instructions for systematic destruction issued in 1961 after Iain Macleod, secretary of state for the colonies, directed that post-independence governments should not get any material that "might embarrass Her Majesty's government", that could "embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants or others e.g. police informers", that might compromise intelligence sources, or that might "be used unethically by ministers in the successor government".

Among the documents that appear to have been destroyed were: records of the abuse of Mau Mau insurgents detained by British colonial authorities, who were tortured and sometimes murdered; reports that may have detailed the alleged massacre of 24 unarmed villagers in Malaya by soldiers of the Scots Guards in 1948; most of the sensitive documents kept by colonial authorities in Aden, where the army's Intelligence Corps operated a secret torture centre for several years in the 1960s; and every sensitive document kept by the authorities in British Guiana, a colony whose policies were heavily influenced by successive US governments and whose post-independence leader was toppled in a coup orchestrated by the CIA.

The documents that were not destroyed appear to have been kept secret not only to protect the UK's reputation, but to shield the government from litigation. If the small group of Mau Mau detainees are successful in their legal action, thousands more veterans are expected to follow.

It is a case that is being closely watched by former Eoka guerillas who were detained by the British in 1950s Cyprus, and possibly by many others who were imprisoned and interrogated between 1946 and 1967, as Britain fought a series of rear-guard actions across its rapidly diminishing empire.

The documents show that colonial officials were instructed to separate those papers to be left in place after independence – usually known as "Legacy files" – from those that were to be selected for destruction or removal to the UK. In many colonies, these were described as watch files, and stamped with a red letter W.

The papers at Kew depict a period of mounting anxiety amid fears that some of the incriminating watch files might be leaked. Officials were warned that they would be prosecuted if they took any paperwork home – and some were. As independence grew closer, large caches of files were removed from colonial ministries to governors' offices, where new safes were installed.

In Uganda, the process was codenamed Operation Legacy. In Kenya, a vetting process, described as "a thorough purge", was overseen by colonial Special Branch officers.

Clear instructions were issued that no Africans were to be involved: only an individual who was "a servant of the Kenya government who is a British subject of European descent" could participate in the purge.

Painstaking measures were taken to prevent post-independence governments from learning that the watch files had ever existed. One instruction states: "The legacy files must leave no reference to watch material. Indeed, the very existence of the watch series, though it may be guessed at, should never be revealed."

When a single watch file was to be removed from a group of legacy files, a "twin file" – or dummy – was to be created to insert in its place. If this was not practicable, the documents were to be removed en masse. There was concern that Macleod's directions should not be divulged – "there is of course the risk of embarrassment should the circular be compromised" – and officials taking part in the purge were even warned to keep their W stamps in a safe place.

Many of the watch files ended up at Hanslope Park. They came from 37 different former colonies, and filled 200 metres of shelving. But it is becoming clear that much of the most damning material was probably destroyed. Officials in some colonies, such as Kenya, were told that there should be a presumption in favour of disposal of documents rather than removal to the UK – "emphasis is placed upon destruction" – and that no trace of either the documents or their incineration should remain. When documents were burned, "the waste should be reduced to ash and the ashes broken up".

Some idea of the scale of the operation and the amount of documents that were erased from history can be gleaned from a handful of instruction documents that survived the purge. In certain circumstances, colonial officials in Kenya were informed, "it is permissible, as an alternative to destruction by fire, for documents to be packed in weighted crates and dumped in very deep and current-free water at maximum practicable distance from the coast".

Documents that survive from Malaya suggest a far more haphazard destruction process, with relatively junior officials being permitted to decide what should be burned and what should be sent to London.

Dr. Ed Hampshire, diplomatic and colonial record specialist at the National Archive, said the 1,200 files so far transferred from Hanslope Park represented "gold dust" for historians, with the occasional nugget, rather than a haul that calls for instant reinterpretation of history. However, only one sixth of the secret archive has so far been transferred. The remainder are expected to be at Kew by the end of 2013.

A Violência e o Escárnio

Albert Cossery

VII

[...] A certa distância um do outro, porque o mínimo contacto se tornava insuportável na atmosfera sobreaquecida, rumaram para o bairro portuário, atravessando uma infinidade de vielas desertas, onde se viam, nas raras lojas abertas, comerciantes dormindo a sesta refastelados numa cadeira — de lenço bem estendido na cara para se livrarem das moscas. Estes dormidores eram tão parecidos com cadáveres que Karim desviava sempre os olhos, arrepiado. Mais à frente, uns miúdos meio nus brincavam nuns charcos de água que o carro municipal de limpeza deixara ao passar; divertiam-se, alegres e até endereçaram a Karim umas graçolas tão inconsistentes como o espírito das respectivas mães. O incidente fez o jovem suspirar ruidosamente. Achava ele que esta nova geração de crianças tinha pouca astúcia no insulto, imputando ao novo regime tão grave deficiência. O calor, porém, impediu-o de se concentrar naqueles mortificantes pensamentos. Tinha pressa de sair da fornalha; estugando o passo, arrastou Urfi, que vinha atrás dele.

Ao fim de uns vinte minutos daquele passeio delirante, uma brisa ligeira anunciou a vizinhança do mar; divisavam-se já, através dos espaços entre os prédios, os longos paquetes junto aos cais, sonolentos e plácidos, presos às respectivas âncoras. Karim parou diante de um vetusto edifício pintado de amarelo, tirou uma chave do bolso e abriu o cadeado que fechava os dois batentes de um portão imenso. 

— Entra, disse ele a Urfi. 

O armazém que Khaled Omar pusera à disposição continha uma quantidade enorme de mercadorias diversas; sacos e caixas em número incalculável amontoavam-se contra as paredes, do chão de terra batida até ao tecto. Fora preciso desocupar o centro do recinto para instalar a impressora manual, cujas superfícies metálicas luziam debilmente na penumbra. O sítio disponível não era muito vasto, tendo Urfi a impressão de que todos aqueles caixotes lhe iam desabar em cima. Avançou com precauções, de olhos fixos na única trapeira, protegida com rede, por onde ali chegava uma luz fraquinha. Era o seu único ponto de referência na quase obscuridade, logo seguir à ofuscante luz da rua. Ao chegar debaixo da trapeira, viu que tinham ali instalado, para lhes facilitarem o trabalho, uma mesa e duas cadeiras. Sobre a mesa estavam várias caixas de caracteres tipográficos. Sentou-se numa cadeira e, enxugando a testa com um lenço, admirou a forma metálica que se destacava, como um animal fabuloso no meio da confusão de mercadorias. 

Karim activou-se à volta da máquina impressora com o ar de uma criança divertindo-se a desmontar um brinquedo complicado. Virou-se para Urfi.

— É magnífica, não é? disse ele com o orgulho de quem acaba de fazer uma rica aquisição. E é quase nova. Khaled Omar é um mãos largas, não hesitou nos gastos.
— Estou a ver que sim, anuiu Urfi. Dir-me-ás como poderei ajudar-te. 
— Daqui a pouco vais ajudar-me a compor os caracteres. Já te explico como isso se faz, não é difícil. Mas primeiro vou acender a luz, não se vê nada. 

Foi accionar o comutador. Acenderam-se duas lâmpadas, sem quebra-luz, suspensas do tecto por fios, projectando uma luz crua que trouxe logo para ali, embora em menor grau, o calor da rua.

— Vamos a isto, disse Karim, aproximando-se da mesa e sentando-se na outra cadeira. 
— Às tuas ordens, respondeu Urfi. 

*

Quando às nove da noite Heikal chegou, em companhia de Khaled Omar, já estavam impressos mais de quinhentos cartazes, ornados com o retrato do governador em trajo militar, empilhados no chão do armazém. O negociante envergava um fato de verde-garrafa e uma gravata vermelha de efeito fulminante; cheirava mais do que nunca ao perfume de violetas. Dirigiu-se a Karim, pegou no jovem pelos braços, deu-lhe um beijo em ambas as faces e felicitou-o generosamente. As suas exclamações enchiam de ecos sonoros o silêncio que àquela hora reinava no bairro portuário. 

— Já fizeste isto tudo! Es mesmo um génio! 

Khaled Omar suspendeu os seus ímpetos quando viu Heikal começar a ler em voz alta um exemplar do cartaz, articulando cuidadosamente cada uma das palavras, em ar solene, como se lesse uma sentença de morte. Ao ouvir os louvores tecidos em honra do governador, Khaled Omar não pôde reprimir o contentamento; abanava a cabeça como um doido, levando as mãos ao peito como se estivesse a sufocar de satisfação. De facto verificava plenamente a perfídia mortal daquela farsa, felicitando-se por ser um dos seus promotores.

— Este retrato, só por si, é bastante eloquente, disse Heikal quando acabou de ler. Mas inclino-me perante o autor do comentário. Com isto, ele acaba de suicidar o nosso bem-amado governador. 

[...]

— Nesse caso, ouve-me. Logo que estes forem colados pela cidade, vão provocar um assombro enorme. Os próprios lacaios do regime irão pensar que esta publicidade toda talvez seja obra do governador. Vai haver uma confusão terrível. Por isso convém não ficarmos a meio caminho. Para já, vamos encher a cidade com estes cartazes; depois faremos outros. A partir de agora, iremos consagrar-nos ao culto do governador. E isso até nas conversas que tivermos com as pessoas. Posso contar contigo? 

Mas Urfi não teve tempo de responder, ouvindo-se de súbito o riso tumultuoso de Khaled Omar; estendido na cadeira, este ouvia de novo Karim ler-lhe o texto do cartaz. O negociante, não se cansando ouvir aquele panegírico repleto de jactância, reclamava novas leituras ao seu jovem amigo; e este parecia felicíssimo por satisfazê-lo. 

[...]

— Preparaste tudo para esta noite? perguntou a Karim. 
— Está tudo pronto, respondeu Karim. Tenho encontro marcado para daqui a pouco com alguns camaradas que vêm ter comigo. Vamos formar vários grupos e distribuir-nos pelos bairros da cidade. 
— Óptimo. Foste espantoso! 
— Quando penso nos cartazes que colava há uns anos, sempre a dizerem mal do governador! 
— Desta vez vais dizer bem. É uma mudança. 
— Vou com vocês, propôs Khaled Omar. Apetece-me colar pelo menos um. 
— Não é boa ideia, interveio Heikal. 

Não disse porquê, mas pensava que a fatiota colorida e o riso barulhento de Khaled Omar não deixariam de chamar a atenção, pondo o grupo em risco. 

— Inclino -me perante as tuas ordens, disse o negociante, nada melindrado.

Heikal sorriu-lhe, dizendo depois a todos: 

— Queiram desculpar-me, mas vejo-me obrigado deixar-vos. 

Foi à pilha de cartazes amontoados no chão, pegou num, contemplou-o longamente, dobrou-o e escondeu-o no bolso interior do casaco. 

— Vou talvez precisar dele esta noite, anunciou com ar enigmático. Adeus a todos!

Saiu do armazém e pôs-se a caminhar pelas desertas, respirando com regozijo o cheiro vivificante do mar. 

VIII

[...] a carta que Heikal enviara aos jornais, pedindo uma subscrição pública com vista a ser erguida uma estátua em honra do governador, fora publicada há uns quinze dias. A missiva espalhara a consternação até entre os mais fiéis partidários do governador e do seu poder ditatorial. Tinham começado a circular boatos segundo os quais o governo central se inquietava com uma tal popularidade, começando a suspeitar de um homem capaz de organizar tamanha propaganda para benefício pessoal. Mas os cidadãos pouco informados — sem saberem de onde aquilo vinha — tinham manifestado logo o seu civismo. O dinheiro afluía de toda a parte; dir-se-ia um maná celeste que nada poderia esgotar. E a lista dos doadores continuava a crescer todos os dias nos jornais. O próprio Karim fez questão de nela figurar, desfazendo-se de uma piastra em prol da estátua. O nome dele, porém, nunca foi mencionado, coisa que o levava agora a lamentar amargamente a piastra oferecida, entristecido por não terem ligado ao seu generoso óbulo. Alguns leitores, cínicos ou inconscientes, haviam escrito aos jornais para recomendarem determinado escultor, por sinal amigo deles, e para indicarem o local onde melhor ficaria a estátua. O delírio atingia o ponto culminante. Por isso mesmo, era altura de Heikal propor uma nova farsa, caso esta não fosse suficiente para desacreditar por completo o governador. Karim devia ir a casa dele esta noite, justamente para discutirem o problema. A situação do governador fora sem dúvida abalada, mas convinha não descurarem os imponderáveis. Karim, no fundo, desejava que o governador se aguentasse ainda uns meses, de modo a erguerem-lhe a estátua. Seria mesmo gozado, se chegassem a tanto! Ah, ver o governador num pedestal! Com um pouco de sorte, talvez isso acontecesse. 

A noite fora caindo lentamente e de súbito os altos candeeiros acenderam-se, estendendo o seu colar de pérolas brilhantes ao longo da avenida marginal. No entanto, embora o ar se tivesse tornado mais respirável, a frescura tardava. 

Fora

Pedro Costa

PC - Mas as grandes aflições do cinema e do vídeo hoje em dia são o plot e o gag. Eu resumia a coisa assim: para o cinema o plot, para a vídeo-arte o gag.

O trabalho que eu gosto de fazer precisa de perseverança e não de urgência, de paciência e abandono também… eu trabalho assim para perder coisas, para perder tempo, todos os dias… não ando a correr atrás dos “apanhados”. É preciso pescar todos os dias mas nem tudo o que vem à rede é peixe. É preciso perder muito, e algumas certezas também, para poder ganhar a convicção de que vale a pena.

[...]

JF – Pedro, falavas há pouco da diferença entre a sala de cinema e a sala de exposição, da tua rejeição de muitas das manifestações da imagem em movimento nas galerias e nos museus, reivindicando a necessidade de uma outra atitude. Ao mesmo tempo tens aceite alguns convites para participar em exposições…

PC – É verdade que sempre que vejo um monitor ao fundo de uma sala num museu fujo a sete pés.

Mas ando a pensar que talvez valha a pena… interessar as pessoas por uma determinada maneira de ver e ouvir o mundo, por uma forma de arte arcaica e quase perdida chamada cinema. Interessá-las por estas paredes, aproximá-las do mundo, já não era mau. A mim, pouco me interessa a experiência formal ou a imagem pela imagem ou a pesquisa plástica. O movimento, a tensão que eu tento construir com os meus meios, tende para outras esferas, para outra experiência do sensível.

Tudo está a esvaziar-se, por toda a parte: museus, galerias, cinemas, teatros, salas de concertos. Cada vez há mais público e cada vez há mais vazio dentro desses locais públicos de arte e espectáculo. O grande cinema americano foi-se, o alemão, o italiano, todos se foram, e as pessoas com eles e, de uma certa maneira, foi-se uma parte da realidade que me interessava e com a qual trabalho. Provavelmente, porque o modo de vida e a sensibilidade dos espectadores já não encontram consolo nessa experiência que se chamava cinema. Qualquer pessoa pode filmar ou fotografar. Basta um telemóvel. E qualquer imagem capturada pode apagar-se e dar lugar a outra, instantaneamente. Nenhuma imagem permanece. O cinema já não é preciso para nada.

Eu tenho esta consciência de que o cinema é uma experiência insubstituível, memorial, que pode servir de prova. [...]

24/7

Jonathan Crary

24/7 markets and a global infrastructure for continuous work and consumption have been in place for some time, but now a human subject is in the making to coincide with these more intensively.

In the late 1990s a Russian/European space consortium announced plans to build and launch into orbit satellites that would reflect sunlight back onto earth. The scheme called for a chain of many satellites to be placed in sun-synchronized orbits at an altitude of 1700 kilometers, each one equipped with fold-out parabolic reflectors of paper-thin material. Once fully extended to 200 meters in diameter, each mirror satellite would have the capacity to illuminate a ten-square-mile area on earth with a brightness nearly 100 times greater than moonlight. The initial impetus for the project was to provide illumination for industrial and natural resource exploitation in remote geographical areas with long polar nights in Siberia and western Russia, allowing outdoor work to proceed round the clock. But the company subsequently expanded its plans to include the possibility of supplying nighttime lighting for entire metropolitan areas. Reasoning that it could reduce energy costs for electric lighting, the company’s slogan pitched its services as “daylight all night long.” Opposition to the project arose immediately and from many directions. Astronomers expressed dismay because of the consequences for most earth-based space observation. Scientists and environmentalists declared it would have detrimental physiological consequences for both animals and humans, in that the absence of regular alternations between night and day would disrupt various metabolic patterns, including sleep. There were also protests from cultural and humanitarian groups, who argued that the night sky is a commons to which all of humanity is entitled to have access, and that the ability to experience the darkness of night and observe the stars is a basic human right that no corporation can nullify. However, if this is in any sense a right or privilege, it is already being violated for over half of the world’s population in cities that are enveloped continuously in a penumbra of smog and high-intensity illumination. Defenders of the project, though, asserted that such technology would help lower nocturnal use of electricity, and that a loss of the night sky and its darkness is a small price to pay for reducing global energy consumption. In any case, this ultimately unworkable enterprise is one particular instance of a contemporary imaginary in which a state of permanent illumination is inseparable from the non-stop operation of global exchange and circulation. In its entrepreneurial excess, the project is a hyperbolic expression of an institutional intolerance of whatever obscures or prevents an instrumentalized and unending condition of visibility.

[…] Behind the vacuity of the catchphrase, 24/7 is a static redundancy that disavows its relation to the rhythmic and periodic textures of human life. It connotes an arbitrary, uninflected schema of a week, extracted from any unfolding of variegated or cumulative experience. To say “24/365,” for example, is simply not the same, for this introduces an unwieldy suggestion of an extended temporality in which something might actually change, in which unforeseen events might happen. As I indicated initially, many institutions in the developed world have been running 24/7 for decades now. It is only recently that the elaboration, the modeling of one’s personal and social identity, has been reorganized to conform to the uninterrupted operation of markets, information networks, and other systems. A 24/7 environment has the semblance of a social world, but it is actually a non-social model of machinic performance and a suspension of living that does not disclose the human cost required to sustain its effectiveness. It must be distinguished from what Lukács and others in the early twentieth century identified as the empty, homogenous time of modernity, the metric or calendar time of nations, of finance or industry, from which individual hopes or projects were excluded. What is new is the sweeping abandonment of the pretense that time is coupled to any long-term undertakings, even to fantasies of “progress” or development. An illuminated 24/7 world without shadows is the final capitalist mirage of post-history, of an exorcism of the otherness that is the motor of historical change.

24/7 is a time of indifference, against which the fragility of human life is increasingly inadequate and within which sleep has no necessity or inevitability. In relation to labor, it renders plausible, even normal, the idea of working without pause, without limits.
[…] The long-term survival of the individual is always dispensable if the alternative might even indirectly admit the possibility of interludes with no shopping or its promotion. In related ways, 24/7 is inseparable from environmental catastrophe in its declaration of permanent expenditure, of endless wastefulness for its sustenance, in its terminal disruption of the cycles and seasons on which ecological integrity depends.

In its profound uselessness and intrinsic passivity, with the incalculable losses it causes in production time, circulation, and consumption, sleep will always collide with the demands of a 24/7 universe. The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated needs, subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism. Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism. Most of the seemingly irreducible necessities of human life — hunger, thirst, sexual desire, and recently the need for friendship — have been remade into commodified or financialized forms. Sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability, and thus remains an incongruous anomaly and site of crisis in the global present. In spite of all the scientific research in this area, it frustrates and confounds any strategies to exploit or reshape it. The stunning, inconceivable reality is that nothing of value can be extracted from it.

It should be no surprise that there is an erosion of sleep now everywhere, given the immensity of what is at stake economically. Over the course of the twentieth century there were steady inroads made against the time of sleep —the average North American adult now sleeps approximately six and a half hours a night, an erosion from eight hours a generation ago, and (hard as it is to believe) down from ten hours in the early twentieth century. In the mid twentieth century the familiar adage that “we spend a third of our lives asleep” seemed to have an axiomatic certainty, a certainty that continues to be undermined. Sleep is a ubiquitous but unseen reminder of a premodernity that has never been fully exceeded, of the agricultural universe which began vanishing 400 years ago. The scandal of sleep is the embeddedness in our lives of the rhythmic oscillations of solar light and darkness, activity and rest, of work and recuperation, that have been eradicated or neutralized elsewhere.

[…] Sleep is an irrational and intolerable affirmation that there might be limits to the compatibility of living beings with the allegedly irresistible forces of modernization. One of the familiar truisms of contemporary critical thought is that there are no unalterable givens of nature —not even death, according to those who predict we will all soon be downloading our minds into digital immortality.

[…] In the nineteenth century, following the worst abuses in the treatment of workers that accompanied industrialization in Europe, factory managers came to the realization that it would be more profitable if workers were allowed modest amounts of rest time to enable them to be more effective and sustainable producers in the long run, as Anson Rabinbach has well shown in his work on the science of fatigue. But by the last decades of the twentieth century and into the present, with the collapse of controlled or mitigated forms of capitalism in the United States and Europe, there has ceased to be any internal necessity for having rest and recuperation as components of economic growth and profitability. Time for human rest and regeneration is now simply too expensive to be structurally possible within contemporary capitalism. Teresa Brennan coined the term “bioderegulation” to describe the brutal discrepancies between the temporal operation of deregulated markets and the intrinsic physical limitations of the humans required to conform to these demands.¹

[…] 24/7 steadily undermines distinctions between day and night, between light and dark, and between action and repose. It is a zone of insensibility, of amnesia, of what defeats the possibility of experience. To paraphrase Maurice Blanchot, it is both of and after the disaster, characterized by the empty sky, in which no star or sign is visible, in which one’s bearings are lost and orientation is impossible.² More concretely, it is like a state of emergency, when a bank of floodlights are suddenly switched on in the middle of the night, seemingly as a response to some extreme circumstances, but which never get turned off and become domesticated into a permanent condition. The planet becomes reimagined as a non-stop work site or an always open shopping mall of infinite choices, tasks, selections, and digressions. Sleeplessness is the state in which producing, consuming, and discarding occur without pause, hastening the exhaustion of life and the depletion of resources.

As the major remaining obstacle — in effect, the last of what Marx called “natural barriers” — to the full realization of 24/7 capitalism, sleep cannot be eliminated. But it can be wrecked and despoiled, and, as my opening examples show, methods and motivations to accomplish this wrecking are fully in place. The injuring of sleep is inseparable from the ongoing dismantling of social protections in other spheres. Just as universal access to clean drinking water has been programmatically devastated around the globe by pollution and privatization, with the accompanying monetization of bottled water, it is not difficult to see a similar construction of scarcity in relation to sleep. All of the encroachments on it create the insomniac conditions in which sleep must be bought (even if one is paying for a chemically modified state only approximating actual sleep). Statistics of soaring use of hypnotics show that, in 2010, around fifty million Americans were prescribed compounds like Ambien or Lunesta, and many millions more bought over-the-counter sleep products […]. Sleeplessness takes on its historical significance and its particular affective texture in relation to the collective experiences external to it, and insomnia is now inseparable from many other forms of dispossession and social ruin occurring globally. As an individual privation in our present, it is continuous with a generalized condition of worldlessness.

[…] A 24/7 world is a disenchanted one in its eradication of shadows and obscurity and of alternate temporalities. It is a world identical to itself, a world with the shallowest of pasts, and thus in principle without specters. But the homogeneity of the present is an effect of the fraudulent brightness that presumes to extend everywhere and to preempt any mystery or unknowability. A 24/7 world produces an apparent equivalence between what is immediately available, accessible, or utilizable and what exists. The spectral is, in some way, the intrusion or disruption of the present by something out of time and by the ghosts of what has not been deleted by modernity, of victims who will not be forgotten, of unfulfilled emancipation. The routines of 24/7 can neutralize or absorb many dislocating experiences of return that could potentially undermine the substantiality and identity of the present and its apparent self-sufficiency.

[…] 24/7 announces a time without time, a time extracted from any material or identifiable demarcations, a time without sequence or recurrence. In its peremptory reductiveness, it celebrates a hallucination of presence, of an unalterable permanence composed of incessant, frictionless operations. It belongs to the aftermath of a common life made into the object of technics.

¹ Teresa Brennan, Globalization and Its Terrors: Daily Life in the West, London: Routledge, 2003, pp. 19–22.
² Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, transl. Ann Smock, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995, pp. 48–50.

Time's Passage is Probably an Illusion

Paul Davies

“The past, present and future are only illusions, even if stubborn ones.” Einstein's startling conclusion stems directly from his special theory of relativity, which denies any absolute, universal significance to the present moment.
[…]
If you and I were in relative motion, an event that I might judge to be in the as yet undecided future might for you already exist in the fixed past.
The most straightforward conclusion is that both past and future are fixed. For this reason, physicists prefer to think of time as laid out in its entirety—a timescape, analogous to a landscape—with all past and future events located there together. It is a notion sometimes referred to as block time. Completely absent from this description of nature is anything that singles out a privileged, special moment as the present or any process that would systematically turn future events into present, then past, events. In short, the time of the physicist does not pass or flow.
A number of philosophers over the years have arrived at the same conclusion by examining what we normally mean by the passage of time. They argue that the notion is internally inconsistent. The concept of flux, after all, refers to motion. It makes sense to talk about the movement of a physical object, such as an arrow through space, by gauging how its location varies with time. But what meaning can be attached to the movement of time itself? Relative to what does it move? Whereas other types of motion relate one physical process to another, the putative flow of time relates time to itself. 
[…]
To deny that time flows is not to claim that the designations “past” and “future” are without physical basis. Events in the world undeniably form a unidirectional sequence. For instance, an egg dropped on the floor will smash into pieces, whereas the reverse process—a broken egg spontaneously assembling itself into an intact egg—is never witnessed. This is an example of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of a closed system—roughly defined as how disordered it is—will tend to rise with time. An intact egg has lower entropy than a shattered one.
Because nature abounds with irreversible physical processes, the second law of thermodynamics plays a key role in imprinting on the world a conspicuous asymmetry between past and future directions along the time axis. By convention, the arrow of time points toward the future. This does not imply, however, that the arrow is moving toward the future, any more than a compass needle pointing north indicates that the compass is traveling north. Both arrows symbolize an asymmetry, not a movement. The arrow of time denotes an asymmetry of the world in time, not an asymmetry of flux of time. The labels “past” and “future” may legitimately be applied to temporal directions, just as “up” and “down” may be applied to spatial directions, but talk of the past or the future is as meaningless as referring to the up or the down.
[…]
«After all, we do not really observe the passage of time. What we actually observe is that later states of the world differ from earlier states that we still remember. The fact that we remember the past, rather than the future, is an observation not of the passage of time but of the asymmetry of time. Nothing other than a conscious observer registers the flow of time. 
[…]
«There are two aspects to time asymmetry that might create the false impression that time is flowing. The first is the thermodynamic distinction between past and future. As physicists have realized over the past few decades, the concept of entropy is closely related to the information content of a system. For this reason, the formation of memory is a unidirectional process—new memories add information and raise the entropy of the brain. We might perceive this unidirectionality as the flow of time.
A second possibility is that our perception of the flow of time is linked in some way to quantum mechanics. It was appreciated from the earliest days of the formulation of quantum mechanics that time enters into the theory in a unique manner, quite unlike space. The special role of time is one reason it is proving so difficult to merge quantum mechanics with general relativity. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, according to which nature is inherently indeterministic, implies an open future (and, for that matter, an open past). This indeterminism manifests itself most conspicuously on an atomic scale of size and dictates that the observable properties that characterize a physical system are generally undecided from one moment to the next.
For example, an electron hitting an atom may bounce off in one of many directions, and it is normally impossible to predict in advance what the outcome in any given case will be. Quantum indeterminism implies that for a particular quantum state there are many (possibly infinite) alternative futures or potential realities. Quantum mechanics supplies the relative probabilities for each observable outcome, although it won't say which potential future is destined for reality. But when a human observer makes a measurement, one and only one result is obtained; for example, the rebounding electron will be found moving in a certain direction. In the act of measurement, a single, specific reality gets projected out from a vast array of possibilities. Within the observer's mind, the possible makes a transition to the actual, the open future to the fixed past—which is precisely what we mean by the flux of time.
There is no agreement among physicists on how this transition from many potential realities into a single actuality takes place. Many physicists have argued that it has something to do with the consciousness of the observer, on the basis that it is the act of observation that prompts nature to make up its mind.

A Sociedade do Espectáculo

Guy Debord

125
O homem, «o ser negativo que é unicamente na medida em que suprime o Ser», é idêntico ao tempo. A apropriação pelo homem da sua própria natureza é, de igual modo, o apoderar-se do desenvolvimento do universo. «A própria história é uma parte real da história natural, da transformação da natureza em homem» (Marx). Inversamente, esta «história natural» não tem outra existência efectiva senão através do processo de uma história humana, da única parte que reencontra este todo histórico, como o telescópio moderno cujo alcance recupera no tempo a fuga das nebulosas na periferia do universo. A história existiu sempre, mas não sempre sob a sua forma histórica. A temporalização do homem, tal como ela se efectua pela mediação de uma sociedade, é igual a uma humanização do tempo. O movimento inconsciente do tempo manifesta-se e torna-se verdadeiro na consciência histórica.

126
O movimento propriamente histórico, embora ainda escondido, começa na lenta e insensível formação da «natureza real do homem», esta «natureza que nasce na história humana — no acto gerador da sociedade humana —», mas a sociedade que então dominou uma técnica e uma linguagem, se é já o produto da sua própria história, não tem consciência senão de um presente perpétuo. Todo o conhecimento, limitado à memória dos mais velhos, é sempre aí levado pelos vivos. Nem a morte nem a procriação são compreendidas como uma lei do tempo. O tempo permanece imóvel como um espaço fechado. Quando uma sociedade mais complexa acaba por tomar consciência do tempo, o seu trabalho é bem mais o de negar, porque ela vê no tempo não o que passa, mas o que regressa. A sociedade estática organiza o tempo segundo a sua experiência imediata da natureza, sob o modelo do tempo cíclico.

127
O tempo cíclico é já dominante na experiência dos povos nómadas, porque são as mesmas condições que se reencontram perante eles a cada momento da sua passagem: Hegel nota que «a errância dos nómadas é somente formal, porque está limitada a espaços uniformes». A sociedade, que ao fixar-se localmente dá ao espaço um conteúdo pela ordenação dos lugares individualizados, encontra-se por isso mesmo encerrada no interior desta localização. O regresso temporal a lugares semelhantes é, agora, o puro regresso do tempo num mesmo lugar, a repetição de uma série de gestos. A passagem do nomadismo pastoril à agricultura sedentária é o fim da liberdade ociosa e sem conteúdo, o princípio do labor. O modo de produção agrário em geral, dominado pelo ritmo das estações, é a base do tempo cíclico plena- mente constituído. A eternidade é-lhe interior: é aqui em baixo o regresso do mesmo. O mito é a construção unitária do pensamento, que garante toda a ordem cósmica em volta da ordem que esta sociedade já realizou, de facto, dentro das suas fronteiras.

128
A apropriação social do tempo, a produção do homem pelo trabalho humano, desenvolvem-se numa sociedade dividida em classes. O poder que se constituiu sobre a penúria da sociedade do tempo cíclico, a classe, que organiza este trabalho social e se apropria da mais-valia limitada, apropria-se igualmente da mais-valia temporal da sua organização do tempo social: ela possui só para si o tempo irreversível do vivo. A única riqueza que pode existir concentrada no sector do poder, para ser materialmente dispendida em festa sumptuária, encontra-se também despendida aí enquanto delapidação de um tempo histórico da superfície da sociedade. Os proprietários da mais-valia histórica detêm o conhecimento e o gozo dos acontecimentos vividos. Este tempo, separado da organização colectiva do tempo que predomina com a produção repetitiva da base da vida social, corre acima da sua própria comunidade estática. É o tempo da aventura e da guerra, em que os senhores da sociedade cíclica percorrem a sua história pessoal; e é igualmente o tempo que aparece no choque das comunidades estranhas, a alteração da ordem imutável da sociedade. A história sobrevém, pois, perante os homens como um factor estranho, como aquilo que eles não quiseram e do qual se julgavam abrigados. Mas por este rodeio regressa também a inquietação negativa do humano que tinha estado na própria origem de todo o desenvolvimento que adormecera.

129
O tempo cíclico é, em si mesmo, o tempo sem conflito. Mas nesta infância do tempo o conflito está instalado: a história luta, antes do mais, para ser a história na actividade prática dos Senhores. Esta história cria superficialmente o irreversível; o seu movimento constitui o próprio tempo que ela esgota, no interior do tempo inesgotável da sociedade cíclica.

130
As «sociedades frias» são aquelas que reduziram ao extremo a sua parte de história; que mantiveram num equilíbrio constante a sua oposição ao meio ambiente natural e humano, e as suas oposições internas. Se a extrema diversidade das instituições estabelecidas para este fim testemunha a plasticidade da autocriação da natureza humana, este testemunho não aparece evidentemente senão para o observador exterior, para o etnólogo vindo do tempo histórico. Em cada uma 107 destas sociedades, uma estruturação definitiva excluiu a mudança. O conformismo absoluto das práticas sociais existentes, às quais se encontram para sempre identificadas todas as possibilidades humanas, já não tem outro limite exterior senão o receio de tornar a cair na animalidade sem forma. Aqui, para continuar no humano, os homens devem permanecer os mesmos.

131
O nascimento do poder político, que parece estar em relação com as últimas grandes revoluções da técnica, como a fundição do ferro, no limiar de um período que já não conhecerá perturbações em profundidade até à aparição da indústria, é também o momento que começa a dissolver os laços da consanguinidade. Desde então, a sucessão das gerações sai da esfera do puro cíclico natural para se tornar acontecimento orientado, sucessão de poderes. O tempo irreversível é o tempo daquele que reina; e as dinastias são a sua primeira medida. A escrita é a sua arma. Na escrita, a linguagem atinge a sua plena realidade, independente da mediação entre consciências. Mas esta independência é idêntica à independência geral do poder separado, como mediação que constitui a sociedade. Com a escrita aparece uma consciência que já não é trazida e transmitida na relação imediata dos viventes: uma memória impessoal, que é a da administração da sociedade. «Os escritos são os pensamentos do Estado; os arquivos a Sua memória» (Novalis).

The Society of Spectacle

Guy Debord

125
Man — that "negative being who is solely to the extent that he abolishes being" — is one with time.
Man's appropriation of his own nature is at the same time the apprehension of the unfolding of the universe. "History itself," says Marx, "is a real part of natural history, and of nature's becoming man."
Conversely, the "natural history" in question exists effectively only through the process of a human history, through the development of the only agency capable of discovering this historical whole; one is reminded of a modern telescope, whose range enables it to track the retreat of nebulae in time toward the edge of the universe. History has always existed, but not always in its historical form. The temporalization of man, as effected through the mediation of a society, is equivalent to a humanization of time. The unconscious movement of time becomes manifest and true in historical consciousness.

126
The movement of history properly so called (though still hidden) begins with the slow and imperceptible emergence of "the true nature of man," of that "nature which was born of human history — of the procreative act that gave rise to human society"; but society, even when it had mastered a technology and a language, and even though by then it was already the product of its own history, remained conscious only of a perpetual present. All knowledge, which was in any case limited by the memory of society's oldest members, was always borne by the living. Neither death nor reproduction were understood as governed by time. Time was motionless — a sort of enclosed space. When a more complex society did finally attain a consciousness of time, its reaction was to deny rather than embrace it, for it viewed time not as something passing, but as something returning. This was a static type of society that organized time, true to its immediate experience of nature, on a cyclical model.

127
Cyclical time was already dominant in the experience of nomadic peoples, who confronted the same conditions at each moment of their roaming; as Hegel notes, "the wandering of nomads is a merely formal one, because it is limited to uniform spaces." Once a society became fixed in a locality, giving space content through the individualized development of specific areas, it found itself enclosed thereby within the location in question. A timebound return to similar places thus gave way to the pure return of time in a single place, the repetition of a set of gestures. The shift from pastoralism to settled agriculture marked the end of an idle and contentless freedom, and the beginning of labor.
The agrarian mode of production in general, governed by the rhythm of the seasons, was the basis of cyclical time in its fullest development. Eternity, as the return of the same here below, was internal to this time. Myth was the unified mental construct whose job it was to make sure that the whole cosmic order confirmed the order that this society had in fact already set up within its own frontiers.

128
The social appropriation of time and the production of man by means of human labor were developments that awaited the advent of a society divided into classes. The power that built itself up on the basis of the penury of the society of cyclical time — the power, in other words, of the class which organized social labor therein and appropriated the limited surplus value to be extracted, also appropriated the temporal surplus value that resulted from its organization of social time; this class thus had sole possession of the irreversible time of the living. The only wealth that could exist in concentrated form in the sphere of power, there to be expended on extravagance and festivity, was also expended in the form of the squandering of a historical time at society's surface. The owners of this historical surplus value were the masters of the knowledge and enjoyment of directly experienced events. Separated off from the collective organization of time that predominated as a function of the repetitive form of production which was the basis of social life, historical time flowed independently above its own, static, community. This was the time of adventure, of war, the time in which the lords of cyclical society pursued their personal histories; the time too that emerged in clashes between communities foreign to one another — perturbations in society's unchanging order.
For ordinary men, therefore, history sprang forth as an alien factor, as something they had not sought and against whose occurrence they had thought themselves secure. Yet this turning point also made possible the return of that negative human restlessness, which had been at the origin of the whole (temporarily arrested) development.

129
In its essence, cyclical time was a time without conflict. Yet even in this infancy of time, conflict was present: at first, history struggled to become history through the practical activity of the masters. At a superficial level this history created irreversibility; its movement constituted the very time that it used up within the inexhaustible time of cyclical society.

130
So called cold societies are societies that successfully slowed their participation in history down to the minimum, and maintained their conflicts with the natural and human environments, as well as their internal conflicts, in constant equilibrium. Although the vast diversity of institutions set up for this purpose bears eloquent testimony to the plasticity of human nature's self creation, this testimony is of course only accessible to an outside observer, to an anthropologist looking back from within historical time. In each of these societies a definitive organizational structure ruled out change. The absolute conformity of their social practices, with which all human possibilities were exclusively and permanently identified, had no external limits except for the fear of falling into a formless animal condition. So, here, in order to remain human, men had to remain the same.

131
The emergence of political power, seemingly associated with the last great technical revolutions, such as iron smelting, which occurred at the threshold of a period that was to experience no further major upheavals until the rise of modern industry, also coincided with the first signs of the dissolution of the bonds of kinship. From this moment on, the succession of the generations left the natural realm of the purely cyclical and became a purposeful succession of events, a mechanism for the transmission of power. Irreversible time was the prerogative of whoever ruled, and the prime yardstick of rulership lay in dynastic succession. The ruler's chief weapon was the written word, which now attained its full autonomous reality as mediation between consciousnesses. This independence, however, was indistinguishable from the general independence of a separate power as the mediation whereby society was constituted. With writing came a consciousness no longer conveyed and transmitted solely within the immediate relationships of the living an impersonal memory that was the memory of the administration of society. "Writings are the thoughts of the State," said Novalis, "and archives are its memory."

A Journal of the Plague Year

A Journal of the Plague Year

Daniel Defoe

It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither, they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus. It mattered not from whence it came; but all agreed it was come into Holland again.
We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men, as I have lived to see practised since. But such things as these were gathered from the letters of merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by word of mouth only; so that things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now. But it seems that the Government had a true account of it, and several councils were held about ways to prevent its coming over; but all was kept very private. Hence it was that this rumour died off again, and people began to forget it as a thing we were very little concerned in, and that we hoped was not true; till the latter end of November or the beginning of December 1664 when two men, said to be Frenchmen, died of the plague in Long Acre, or rather at the upper end of Drury Lane. The family they were in endeavoured to conceal it as much as possible, but as it had gotten some vent in the discourse of the neighbourhood, the Secretaries of State got knowledge of it; and concerning themselves to inquire about it, in order to be certain of the truth, two physicians and a surgeon were ordered to go to the house and make inspection. This they did; and finding evident tokens of the sickness upon both the bodies that were dead, they gave their opinions publicly that they died of the plague.
[...]
This was the beginning of May, yet the weather was temperate, variable, and cool enough, and people had still some hopes. That which encouraged them was that the city was healthy: the whole ninety-seven parishes buried but fifty-four, and we began to hope that, as it was chiefly among the people at that end of the town, it might go no farther; and the rather, because the next week, which was from the 9th of May to the 16th, there died but three, of which not one within the whole city or liberties; and St Andrew’s buried but fifteen, which was very low. ’Tis true St Giles’s buried two-and-thirty, but still, as there was but one of the plague, people began to be easy. The whole bill also was very low, for the week before the bill was but 347, and the week above mentioned but 343. We continued in these hopes for a few days, but it was but for a few, for the people were no more to be deceived thus; they searched the houses and found that the plague was really spread every way, and that many died of it every day. So that now all our extenuations abated, and it was no more to be concealed; nay, it quickly appeared that the infection had spread itself beyond all hopes of abatement. That in the parish of St Giles it was gotten into several streets, and several families lay all sick together; and, accordingly, in the weekly bill for the next week the thing began to show itself. There was indeed but fourteen set down of the plague, but this was all knavery and collusion, for in St Giles’s parish they buried forty in all, whereof it was certain most of them died of the plague, though they were set down of other distempers; and though the number of all the burials were not increased above thirty-two, and the whole bill being but 385, yet there was fourteen of the spotted-fever, as well as fourteen of the plague; and we took it for granted upon the whole that there were fifty died that week of the plague.
The next bill was from the 23rd of May to the 30th, when the number of the plague was seventeen. But the burials in St Giles’s were fifty-three—a frightful number!—of whom they set down but nine of the plague; but on an examination more strictly by the justices of peace, and at the Lord Mayor’s request, it was found there were twenty more who were really dead of the plague in that parish, but had been set down of the spotted-fever or other distempers, besides others concealed.
But those were trifling things to what followed immediately after; for now the weather set in hot, and from the first week in June the infection spread in a dreadful manner, and the bills rose high; the articles of the fever, spotted-fever, and teeth began to swell; for all that could conceal their distempers did it, to prevent their neighbours shunning and refusing to converse with them, and also to prevent authority shutting up their houses; which, though it was not yet practised, yet was threatened, and people were extremely terrified at the thoughts of it.

The second week in June, the parish of St Giles, where still the weight of the infection lay, buried 120, whereof though the bills said but sixty-eight of the plague, everybody said there had been 100 at least, calculating it from the usual number of funerals in that parish, as above.
Till this week the city continued free, there having never any died, except that one Frenchman whom I mentioned before, within the whole ninety-seven parishes. Now there died four within the city, one in Wood Street, one in Fenchurch Street, and two in Crooked Lane. Southwark was entirely free, having not one yet died on that side of the water.

I lived without Aldgate, about midway between Aldgate Church and Whitechappel Bars, on the left hand or north side of the street; and as the distemper had not reached to that side of the city, our neighbourhood continued very easy. But at the other end of the town their consternation was very great: and the richer sort of people, especially the nobility and gentry from the west part of the city, thronged out of town with their families and servants in an unusual manner; and this was more particularly seen in Whitechappel; that is to say, the Broad Street where I lived; indeed, nothing was to be seen but waggons and carts, with goodswomen, servants, children, &c.; coaches filled with people of the better sort and horsemen attending them, and all hurrying away; then empty waggons and carts appeared, and spare horses with servants, who, it was apparent, were returning or sent from the countries to fetch more people; besides innumerable numbers of men on horseback, some alone, others with servants, and, generally speaking, all loaded with baggage and fitted out for travelling, as anyone might perceive by their appearance.
This was a very terrible and melancholy thing to see, and as it was a sight which I could not but look on from morning to night (for indeed there was nothing else of moment to be seen), it filled me with very serious thoughts of the misery that was coming upon the city, and the unhappy condition of those that would be left in it.
This hurry of the people was such for some weeks that there was no getting at the Lord Mayor’s door without exceeding difficulty; there were such pressing and crowding there to get passes and certificates of health for such as travelled abroad, for without these there was no being admitted to pass through the towns upon the road, or to lodge in any inn. Now, as there had none died in the city for all this time, my LordMayor gave certificates of health without any difficulty to all those who lived in the ninety-seven parishes, and to those within the liberties too for a while.
This hurry, I say, continued some weeks, that is to say, all the month of May and June, and the more because it was rumoured that an order of the Government was to be issued out to place turnpikes and barriers on the road to prevent people travelling, and that the towns on the road would not suffer people from London to pass for fear of bringing the infection along with them, though neither of these rumours had any foundation but in the imagination, especially at-first.
I now began to consider seriously with myself concerning my own case, and how I should dispose of myself; that is to say, whether I should resolve to stay in London or shut up my house and flee, as many of my neighbours did. I have set this particular down so fully, because I know not but it may be of moment to those who come after me, if they come to be brought to the same distress, and to the same manner of making their choice; and therefore I desire this account may pass with them rather for a direction to themselves to act by than a history of my actings, seeing it may not be of one farthing value to them to note what became of me.
I had two important things before me: the one was the carrying on my business and shop, which was considerable, and in which was embarked all my effects in the world; and the other was the preservation of my life in so dismal a calamity as I saw apparently was coming upon the whole city, and which, however great it was, my fears perhaps, as well as other people’s, represented to be much greater than it could be.
The first consideration was of great moment to me; my trade was a saddler, and as my dealings were chiefly not by a shop or chance trade, but among the merchants trading to the English colonies in America, so my effects lay very much in the hands of such. I was a single man, ’tis true, but I had a family of servants whom I kept at my business; had a house, shop, and warehouses filled with goods; and, in short, to leave them all as things in such a case must be left (that is to say, without any overseer or person fit to be trusted with them), had been to hazard the loss not only of my trade, but of my goods, and indeed of all I had in the world.
I had an elder brother at the same time in London, and not many years before come over from Portugal: and advising with him, his answer was in three words, the same that was given in another case quite different, viz., ‘Master, save thyself.’ In a word, he was for my retiring into the country, as he resolved to do himself with his family; telling me what he had, it seems, heard abroad, that the best preparation for the plague was to run away from it. As to my argument of losing my trade, my goods, or debts, he quite confuted me. He told me the same thing which I argued for my staying, viz., that I would trust God with my safety and health, was the strongest repulse to my pretensions of losing my trade and my goods; ‘for,’ says he, ‘is it not as reasonable that you should trust God with the chance or risk of losing your trade, as that you should stay in so eminent a point of danger, and trust Him with your life?”

The Beast & the Sovereign, volume II

Jacques Derrida

This is the motif of self-destruction that I also call, generalizing and formalizing its use, autoimmune, autoimmunity consisting for a living body in itself destroying, in enigmatic fashion, its own immunitary defenses, in auto-affecting itself, then, in an irrepressibly mechanical and apparently spontaneous, automatic, fashion, with an ill which comes to destroy what is supposed to protect against ill and safe-guard immunity. Well, Robinson is often invaded by the feeling that a self- destructive power is mechanically, automatically, of itself, at work within him. The word destruction appears very early in the book, first in the mouth of his mother who had warned him against his own Destruction; then, destruction as self-destruction, as destruction of the self, is the object, also very early, of a whole paragraph, one of the points of interest of which is the following: Robinson Crusoe does not believe that this drive, this self-destructive compulsion and this neurosis of destiny (this is not a Freudian vocabulary that I am imposing upon him, but almost his own words) are a thing of consciousness: consciousness, reason and judgment are here impotent, incapable of resisting this self-destructive compulsion that works on its own, mechanically, and the vicissitudes of these drives which are none other than the unfortunate destiny of Robinson Crusoe (my ill Fate). I quote: 

But my ill Fate push’d me on now with an Obstinacy that nothing could resist; and tho’ I had several times loud Calls from my Reason and my more composed Judgment to go home, yet I had no Power to do it. I know not what to call this, nor will I urge, that it is a secret over-ruling Decree that hurries us on to be the Instruments of our own Destruction, even tho’ it be before us, and that we rush upon it with our Eyes open. Certainly nothing but some such decreed unavoidable Misery attending, and which it was im-possible for me to escape, could have push’d me forward against the calm Reasonings and Perswasions of my most retired Thoughts, and against two such visible Instructions as I had met with in my first Attempt.

So this is indeed a drive to self-destruction, which disobeys reason and even disobeys what is most intimate inside him, in the inner depths of his thought. There is here an automatic force that is more intimate to him than himself and that acts repetitively (to the rhythm of a destiny) and mechanically. Alone, all alone, by itself. Which also explains that this allusion to the self-destructive drive should multiply itself of itself. It would be easy to show that this reference to a sort of logic of automatic self-destruction organizes the whole of Robinson’s discourse, but to save time I shall mention only a few passages in which the word “self-destruction” is explicitly and literally present: for example a little further on, this self-destructive destiny neurosis is described as absolutely originary, innate, congenital: But I that was born to be my own Destroyer, could no more resist the Offer than I could restrain my first rambling Designs, when my Father’s good Counsel was lost upon me. The offer in question is none other than that of participating in the slave trade on the coast of Guinea, and you see that giving in here to the self-destructive compulsion, being his own Destroyer, is also the compulsion to disobey the father or rather to have the father’s law founder [échouer]. And if there is remorse, repentance, and confession in this whole autobiographical odyssey, this does indeed concern the exposure to failure of the law of the father. And therefore of the sovereign. 

The Mania for Motion and Speed

John Dewey

The power of “bread and the circus” to divert attention from public matters is an old story. But now the industrial conditions which have enlarged, complicated and multiplied public interests have also multiplied and intensified formidable rivals to them. In countries where political life has been most successfully conducted in the past, there was a class specially set aside, as it were, who made political affairs their special business. Aristotle could not conceive a body of citizens competent to carry on politics consisting of others than those who had leisure, that is, of those who were relieved from all other preoccupations, especially that of making a livelihood. Political life, till recent times, bore out his belief. Those who took an active part in politics were “gentlemen,” persons who had had property and money long enough, and enough of it, so that its further pursuit was vulgar and beneath their station. To-day, so great and powerful is the sweep of the industrial current, the person of leisure is usually an idle person. Persons have their own business to attend to, and “business” has its own precise and specialized meaning. Politics thus tends to become just another “business”: the special concern of bosses and the managers of the machine.
The increase in the number, variety and cheapness of amusements represents a powerful diversion from political concern. The members of an inchoate public have too many ways of enjoyment, as well as of work, to give much thought to organization into an efective public. Man is a consuming and sportive animal as well as a political one. What is significant is that access to means of amusement has been rendered easy and cheap beyond anything known in the past. The present era of “prosperity” may not be enduring. But the movie, radio, cheap reading matter and motor car with all they stand for have come to stay. That they did not originate in deliberate desire to divert attention from political interests does not lessen their effectiveness in that direction. The political elements in the constitution of the human being, those having to do with citizenship, are crowded to one side. In most circles it is hard work to sustain conversation on a political theme; and once initiated, it is quickly dismissed with a yawn. Let there be introduced the topic of the mechanism and accomplishment of various makes of motor cars or the respective merits of actresses, and the dialogue goes on at a lively pace. The thing to be remembered is that this cheapened and multiplied access to amusement is the product of the machine age, intensified by the business tradition which causes provision of means for an enjoyable passing of time to be one of the most profitable of occupations. 
One phase of the workings of a technological age, with its unprecedented command of natural energies, while it is implied in what has been said, needs explicit attention. The older publics, in being local communities, largely homogeneous with one another, were also, as the phrase goes, static. They changed, of course, but barring war, catastrophe and great migrations, the modifications were gradual. They proceeded slowly and were largely 
unperceived by those undergoing them. The newer forces have created mobile and fluctuating associational forms. The common complaints of the disintegration of family life may be placed in evidence. The movement from rural to urban assemblies is also the result and proof of this mobility. Nothing stays long put, not even the associations by which business and industry are carried on. The mania for motion and speed is a symptom of the restless instability of social life, and it operates to intensify the causes from which it springs. Steel replaces wood and masonry for buildings; ferro-concrete modifies steel, and some invention may work a further revolution. Muscle Shoals was acquired to produce nitrogen, and new methods have already made antiquated the supposed need of great accumulation of water power. Any selected illustration suffers because of the heterogeneous mass of cases to select from. How can a public be organized, we may ask, when literally it does not stay in place? Only deep issues or those which can be made to appear such can find a common denominator among all the shifting and unstable relationships. Attachment is a very different function of life from affection. Affections will continue as long as the heart beats. But attachment requires something more than organic causes. The very things which stimulate and intensify affections may undermine attachments. For these are bred in tranquil stability; they are nourished in constant relationships. Acceleration of mobility disturbs them at their root. And without abiding attachments associations are too shifting and shaken to permit a public readily to locate and identify itself. 
The new era of human relationships in which we live is one marked by mass production for remote markets, by cable and telephone, by cheap printing, by railway and steam navigation. Only geographically did Columbus discover a new world. The actual new world has been generated in the last hundred years. Steam and electricity have done more to alter the conditions under which men associate together than all the agencies which affected human relationships before our time. There are those who lay the blame for all the evils of our lives on steam, electricity and machinery. It is always convenient to have a devil as well as a savior to bear the responsibilities of humanity. In reality, the trouble springs rather from the ideas and absence of ideas in connection with which technological factors operate. Mental and moral beliefs and ideals change more slowly than outward conditions. If the ideals associated with the higher life of our cultural past have been impaired, the fault is primarily with them. Ideals and standards formed without regard to the means by which they are to be achieved and incarnated in flesh are bound to be thin and wavering. Since the aims, desires and purposes created by a machine age do not connect with tradition, there are two sets of rival ideals, and those which have actual instrumentalities at their disposal have the advantage. Because the two are rivals and because the older ones retain their glamor and sentimental prestige in literature and religion, the newer ones are perforce harsh and narrow. For the older symbols of ideal life still engage thought and command loyalty. Conditions have changed, but every aspect of life, from religion and education to property and trade, shows that nothing approaching a transformation has taken place in ideas and ideals. Symbols control sentiment and thought, and the new age has no symbols consonant with its activities. Intellectual instrumentalities for the formation of an organized public are more inadequate than its overt means. The ties which hold men together in action are numerous, tough and subtle. But they are invisible and intangible. We have the physical tools of communication as never before. The thoughts and aspirations congruous with them are not communicated, and hence are not common. Without such communication the public will remain shadowy and formless, seeking spasmodically for itself, but seizing and holding its shadow rather than its substance. 

Bio Music

Manford L. Eaton 

UNDERSTANDING THE DANGERS AND AVOIDING THEM 

If we have a signal source of any type (electrical, mechanical, physical, etc.), and we amplify it, we can gain control by re-applying all or a part of it to the original signal source. If the signal we re-apply to the original signal source is inverted with respect to the input signal, we will decrease the amplitude of the input (negative feedback). If we feed back enough inverted signal to the input, the original signal will be almost completely attenuated. However, it can never be completely attenuated because we will eventually arrive at the point when the original signal will not have sufficient amplitude to produce an effective controlling feedback. Literally, the amplifier, in order to overcome this limitation, would have to be capable of infinite amplification. 

If the feedback signal has the same polarity as the original, it will augment the original (positive feedback). If we feed back enough of the amplified non-inverted output, the amplifier will become saturated; that is, it will no longer be possible for​ the amplifier to respond to additional increase in signal input.

Warning: Excessive biological feedback (either positive or negative) can be quite dangerous, and limits must be built into any biological feedback system. In completely electronic feedback networks, maximum negative feedback results in a circuit which is in effect doing nothing. In maximum positive feedback networks, the result is a circuitry which is destroyed by inputs which are much too large for it. In the case of biological feedback, however, excessive negative feedback to vital body functions can cause permanent damage or death by halting that function. Excessive positive feedback can also cause permanent damage or death by driving the body function to a point where it destroys itself. For example, negative feedback to the heart can cause it to stop. Positive feedback can cause palpitations and irregularities which themselves can be damaging and will result in inefficient heart action equivalent in effect to heart stoppage. 

We can amplify biological potentials and feed them back to control the physiological parameter, which is the source of the potentials as described above. We can, in addition to this, amplify biological potentials from one physiological source and use it to modify the biological signals from another physiological source. For example, we can amplify the electrocardiogram and use these signals to provide control of flash lamps in various positions, thus controlling eye movement. We can use biological potentials as control signals to generate audio and video signals which will be presented to the sensory system. Biological signals can be fed into voltage control inputs of any conventional electronic music equipment; but, more sophisticated systems utilize the biological potentials as control signals for pulse height, series- sound synthesis systems, thus providing control of individual pulse heights and individual pulse widths. By doing this, it is possible to generate sound structures of any specified harmonic content. Biological signals can also be used to drive conventional color organs. Again, more sophisticated systems require the possibility of parallel selection of color, form, verbal, graphic, and symbolic information to be displayed on a screen facing the subject. The information is presented both at the conscious level (i.e., intellectually) and subliminally, as the situation requires.

A C.G.T., os chefes bolchevistas e o movimento de 18 de Janeiro

Os processos de actuação dos chefes bolchevistas são conhecidos: «todos os meios são bons para alcançarem os fins»... Desde a mentira á confusão, desde a intriga á calunia.

Temos á nossa frente um Boletim assignado pelo Secretariado do Partido Comunista. É por consequëncia um documento oficial. Trata do movimento de 18 de Janeiro. O seu conteudo, não eleva quem o redigiu; revela apenas uma falta de honestidade moral que nunca pode triunfar no seio do proletariado.

A audacia das suas afirmações, o descaramento com que se pretende demonstrar uma grande preparação revolucionaria comunista para o citado movimento, não consegue iludir a propria massa operària, fóra, ou desviada, do ambito destas lutas.

É nestes momentos que os «chefes» bolchevistas pretendem ganhar terreno. Para isso confundem, baralham, sofismam, porque sempre produzirá algum resultado...

Conhecemos, porem, esses processos. Andâmos por cà ha alguns anos e sabemos perfeitamente como a sua acção tem sido condusida. Mas, vamos ao documento em questão. O que diz ele, em resumo? Diz isto:

«O 18 de Janeiro caracterizou-se precisamente pela expressão do desejo das massas, de seguirem as palavras de ordem do Partido Comunista.»

Jà é audacia! Como se, o referido movimento fosse obra sua! Mais ainda, para que se observe até onde vai o arrojo: «Na margem Sul do Tejo, em Almada, Cacilhas, Porto-Brandão, Alfeite, Cova da Piedade a greve foi geral. No Algarve, houve greves e manifestações de massas, sobre tudo em Silves, alguns pontos do Alentejo seguiram, tambem, as palavras de ordem do nosso Partido.»

Querem melhor?

Então, toda a acção desenvolvida pela classe trabalhadora na margem Sul do Tejo não foi orientada pela C.G.T.?¹

Que influencia exerce nesses locais, ou melhor, nas respectivas classes, o partido bolchevista?

A organização de Silves não é retintamente cegêtista?

Para que tanta mentira?

Vila Boim, Terrugem, Campo Maior, e outros pontos do Alentejo não agiram sob a influencia da C.G.T.? Que organização tinham lá os bolchevistas?

E Coimbra, não agiu sob a influencia da C.G.T.?

Se é assim que procuram arranjar adeptos, contem connosco para esclarecer o proletariado.

Temos então Marinha Grande. Sim senhor agiu bem e toda a sua acção está dentro da Circular Confidencial que a C.G.T. enviou aos varios pontos do país. Absolutamente dentro dessa Circular.

Em Marinha Grande existiam dois orgãos, que se entenderem para a eclosão do movimento. Aceitando, honestamente, que a influencia bolchevista fosse ali maior do que a cegêtista, pergunta-se: mesmo assim, quem proporcionou á organização da Marinha Grande os elementos materiais para ela poder desenvolver tal raio de acção? E não foram com esses elementos materiais que o proletariado de Marinha Grande poude tomar conta do posto do guarda, fazer a respectiva apreensão de 12 espingardas, munições e uma metralhadora ligeira, e em seguida ficar de posse completamente da vila durante algumas horas?

Repetimos: Quem forneceu esses elementos materiais?

A C.G.T. ou os bolchevistas?

Lérias temos lido muitas; obras é que não as vemos.

Um dia, a historia dirá como agiram os «chefes» comunistas para o movimento de 18 de Janeiro: De longe, por causa da cheia...

E tambem havemos de saber com que elementos materiais contavam; elementos que noutras ocasiões têm sido defendidos por eles com calor.

Teria certa graça até se fossemos descobrir que a maioria desses «chefes» haviam trabalhado no dia do aludido movimento e traido, por consequëncia, a greve e as palavras de ordem do seu partido...

Infelismente o movimento não correspondeu ao que se pretendia. Motivos? Varios. Alguns poderão sofrer a necessaria rectificação, outros ainda por errada mentalidade dalgumas classes e ainda outras por culpa exclusiva dos «chefes» bolchevistas que têm a mania de anunciar os movimentos com tal antecedencia que as autoridades tomam logo posições... Dizem eles: é necessario demonstrar a organização revolucionaria da classe trabalhadora; que de qualquer forma sabe agir.

Ótimo. Nós tambem assim pensâmos, mas o que reconhecemos é que em Portugal isso não é possível, por enquanto. E o exemplo não é de hoje. No chamado «29 de Fevereiro», os bolchevistas tiveram um exemplo frisante... Fizeram uma revolução de papeis.

De facto nunca se escreveu tanto.

Chegou o momento proprio e, nada. Precisamente pelas medidas tomadas pelo governo. Ora, o que nós queriamos que os «chefes» comunistas comprendessem era isso.

Em conjunto, há-de facto organizações revolucionarias que o podem fazer. Por exemplo, em Espanha, a C.N.T.² Ali sim é que um governo, informado devidamente de que ia estalar uma revolução e tendo a ousadia de afirmar que a sufocaria em «20 minutos», teve de a enfrentar durante duas semanas, sob uma violencia desusada e onde os trabalhadores se bateram como leões.

Em Portugal, é possivel, podermos citar alguns exemplos, isolado, como o da greve de Setembro de 1920 dos ferroviários do Sul e Sueste e alguns dos antigos movimentos da construção civil.

Resta acrescentar que os citados movimentos da organização hespanhola são orientados pela corrente «anarco-sindicalista», que não «passou a fazer parte das velharias do século passado» como o referido boletim diz. Bem pelo contrario...

Quem queria levar o proletariado até á «possivel transformação social», numa obcecação de pasmar, eram os «chefes» bolchevistas. Esses sim, que são homens que aparecem sempre onde a massa se encontra, á frente das suas brigadas de choque! ...

Para se avaliar bem da mentira de tal boletim; para se poder apreciar com serenidade «e bom humor» a sua prosa basta dizer que Setubal, á data da proclamação da greve geral já não possuia, material algum, pois lhe havia sido apreendido dias antes e, por isso, como podia fazer anunciar, com 12 horas de antecedencia, «com o estampido de bombas» a greve em prespectiva?

Não veem os «chefes» bolchevistas que assim caiem no ridiculo?

Não ha o direito de se querer conquistar partidarios com essa forma de proceder.

Depois, se foi a C.G.T., a culpada do fracasso do movimento, porque não puseram os «chefes» bolchevistas, em pé de guerra, toda a sua organização? Porque é que, nos raros pontos da provincia onde a sua influencia é maior, não se observou a acção grevista? Assim é que era: fazer vincular nitidamente a sua organização revolucionaria!

Porque é [que] ainda essa acção se não observou em relação ás classes que em Lisbôa são por si agitadas?

Que fenomeno especial se teria produsido para não englobar, nas mesmas causas, a falta de acção de varias classes, quer as que se orientam bolchevisticamente?

Bolas para tais processos de propaganda.

Assim não vale snrs. «chefes» bolchevistas. Assim, onde está a lealdade?

Se ela existisse, seria possivel afirmarem que «Silves, a margem Sul do Tejo e Marinha Grande, representam a grande jornada do vosso partido? Seria possivel?

A maioria revolucionaria, quer de Silves, como da margem Sul do Tejo, como dos pontos do Alentejo que se manifestaram é cegêtista. E toda a organização operaria consciente o sabe. Só os «bolchevistas» dizem o contrario.

Consequentemente, pois, ainda foi a C.G.T. que influi no maior numero de pontos do país onde a greve se levou a efeito.

Isto é incontestavel. E não podia deixar de ser assim, não só porque é a C.G.T. quem mantem o maior raio de acção revolucionaria, como porque foi de facto ela que trabalhou para o referido movimento com uma persistência digna de toda a nota.

Os «chefes» bolchevistas não conseguem destruir esta verdade, por mais que se esforcem por «empalmarem» o movimento operário, com os processos que atraz se citam.

A C.G.T. continuará organizando o proletariado para novas lutas contra a «legislação-fascista». O que se perdeu na luta passada, reorganizar-se-à, e toda a restante organização entrará em acção no momento propicio, rectificadas as causas que deram lugar a uma acção de massas menos intensa em 18 de Janeiro.

O resto, são cantatas dos «chefes bolchevistas», que não conseguem embalar as massas proletárias.

* com excepção de alguns erros tipográficos óbvios que podiam dificultar a leitura e compreensão, e que foram corrigidos, o texto foi na sua maior parte mantido intocado.

¹A Confederação Geral do Trabalho (CGT) foi uma confederação de sindicatos portugueses criada no II Congresso Operário Nacional, realizado em Setembro de 1919, em Coimbra. A partir de 1922 inicia-se a sua afirmação como estrutura anarco-sindicalista. [N.E.]
² A C.N.T., Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, é uma confederação de sindicatos autónomos anarco-sindicalistas Espanhóis. Fundada em 1910 em Barcelona, faz parte da organização de carácter transnacional Associação Internacional dos Trabalhadores (AIT). [N.E.]

Incêndio destrói acervo do artista plástico Hélio Oiticica

Segundo irmão do artista, prejuízo pode chegar a US$ 200 milhões.
Fogo atingiu residência da família na Zona Sul do Rio.

Um incêndio atingiu a residência da família do pintor, escultor e artista plástico Hélio Oiticica, na Zona Sul do Rio, na noite desta sexta-feira (16). Segundo um irmão do artista, o acervo que estava na casa foi quase todo destruído pelas chamas e prejuízo pode chegar a US$ 200 milhões.
A casa fica no Jardim Botânico. O fogo atingiu uma sala do primeiro andar, justamente onde ficavam guardadas as esculturas, pinturas e instalações do revolucionário artista, considerado um dos fundadores do neoconcretismo.
Os parentes estavam no andar de cima quando sentiram um forte cheiro de fumaça. “Arrombei a porta para sair a fumaça e a gente entrar e ver o que era, mas já era tarde demais. Já estava pegando fogo em tudo”, disse o irmão.
Segundo César, 90% das obras do irmão foram destruídas, um prejuízo estimado por ele em US$ 200 milhões. CDs e arquivos de computador que estavam em um outro escritório não foram atingidos pelas chamas.
A família não tem ideia do que provocou o fogo, pois [a] sala tem controle de umidade e temperatura. “Eu sinto que fracassei, pois desde que me aposentei minha missão era cuidar da obra dele. Eu me sinto péssimo”.

Las Casas ou Uma Retrospectiva no Futuro

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

O empreendimento demonstra a coerência teórica e prática característica de toda a sua obra. Acabou numa catástrofe. Na audiência concedida por Carlos V, propôs ao imperador fundar uma colónia exemplar «pelo arado e pela palavra», a fim de provar que os seus princípios resistiriam na prática. O imperador adjudicou-lhe o distrito de Cumaná na Venezuela através dum decreto, com a determinação «de que nenhum súbdito espanhol penetrasse na região com armas». Las Casas recrutou um grupo de camponeses, equipou uma expedição desarmada e começou a edificação da colónia. Assaltos da soldadesca espanhola, invasões de traficantes de escravos na zona pacificada, revoltas de índios exasperados, contrabando de aguardente e actos de violência destruíram a colónia em pouco tempo. Nenhuma das derrotas que Las Casas sofreu o abateu tanto. A força comprobatória da experiência ainda não se esgotou até hoje. Não há colonizações pacíficas. O domínio colonial fundamenta-se apenas no ferro e no fogo, não na palavra e no arado. Qualquer «aliança para o progresso» precisa dos seus gorilas, qualquer «penetração pacífica» necessita de um comando de bombardeiros e qualquer «reformador sensato» da espécie dum general Lansdal encontra o seu marechal Ky. Bartolomé de Las Casas não foi um reformador. O novo colonialismo que domina este pobre mundo não pode recorrer a ele. Quanto ao problema decisivo da violência, Las Casas não tinha dúvidas. Os povos subjugados praticam, segundo as suas palavras, «uma guerra justa, cujas razões legais serão aceites por qualquer homem amante da justiça». 
 

Persons and Things

Roberto Esposito

Suffice to say that the institution of slavery, which appears to us today as having faded into the obscurity of a remote past, was only abolished less than two centuries ago – only to reappear, as we well know, in other forms of de facto slavery that are still widespread. The concept of person, which in principle should lead to the universalization of inalienable rights, has long been employed to exclude some types of humans from the benefits granted to others. It has been used to make them into person-things to be used and abused. The only difference between the slavery of ancient Rome, which was later moderated by protective institutions, and that of today is the brutality of the current forms. Between a slave lashed to death in the provinces of the Roman Empire, in the Alabama of the nineteenth century, or today off the coast of Lampedusa, the most appalling event by far is the most recent one. It has been said that the body, precisely because it lacks a particular legal status, is the means of transition from the person to the thing. Not being invested as such by the law, it oscillates between these two dimensions, allowing the transposition of one into the other. This applies to the human race as a whole, cut into segments by anthropological thresholds of separation and exclusion, but also to the individual, who is divided into two areas that are valued differently – one of a rational or spiritual nature, and the other corporeal.

Phantom Images

Harun Farocki

At a press conference during the first Gulf War, a representative of the US military showed a film in which a car could be seen driving away from a bridge that had just been hit — and he made a joke about it. Today you cannot get footage from the military archives in which cars can be seen, footage that would force you to conclude that humans were indeed present at or near the target. It is obvious, then, how war tactics and war reportage coincide. The images are produced by the military and are controlled by the military and politicians.

In the first war against Iraq in 1991, the image of the police worked according to the principle of the good-cop/bad-cop scheme. On the side of the Iraqis was the bad-cop who used conventional methods of power to keep the reporters and cameramen from the field of battle. They did not want to have them documenting the fact that the Saddam-regime was perhaps capable of terrorizing its own population and the population of Kuwait, or that it was not capable of organizing an army that could offer at least minimal protection for its retreating soldiers, not to mention its own civilian population. The good-cop from the US, by contrast, excluded the photographers and cameramen structurally from the event itself, thanks again to the "filming bombs," as Theweleit called them. Bombs with cameras in them offer no room for an independent observer.

Iraq allowed a couple of journalists to stay in Baghdad during the war, among them Pete Arnet from CNN. They sent us the green contrast-enhanced panoramas. Like Ernst Jünger in Paris, Arnet experienced the bombarding of Baghdad first-hand from the roof of his hotel, but, in contrast to Ernst Jünger, he was held under a sort of house arrest. Both were forced to offer an aestheticized reflection, one befitting the mind of an armchair military strategist perched on a hill. The correspondents in Baghdad belonged to a tactical reserve of an intensely contradictory strategy of the Saddam-regime: on the one hand they were supposed to conceal the inferiority of the Iraqis, on the other hand, they were supposed to expose the inhumanity of the allied war against them. To do so they required a photo of dead bodies, of as many dead bodies as possible, a close-up of them in one picture. 

There is a film about a minute long, made in 1942, of the training flight of the missile HS 293 D over a shipwreck near Peenemünde. It was recorded by a television camera in the warhead of the projectile. The television pictures were sent by a transmitter to an accompanying plane that fired the missile and then deviated from the missile's path without losing sight of it. From the plane the missile was guided to its target using a control stick closely resembling the modern day joystick. Since, as is well known, it was impossible to record electronic images right up until the 1950s, this sequence is probably the only remaining film documentation of this experiment — one of the technicians filmed it from the monitor with his camera. The miniaturization of the television camera was a developmental advancement, but the HS 293 D itself was never used during World War II. By contrast with the rocket-builders, the rocket-television-camera-installers continued their work not in the US, but in the West German television industry.

I recall a quotation: 

«We feel that it is immoral to design weapons whose construction presupposes the death of the soldier using it, and thus — at least in our understanding — implying sacrifice as part of the mechanism of the weapon. In Japan, however, the mission of the kamikaze pilot who dives his plane into an enemy destroyer is considered an honour. They also have torpedoes that are guided towards their target by a pilot built into it. An interesting twist to the saying: 'the bullet is a blind idiot.'» (Ernst Jünger, The Gordian Knot, 1953) 

The bullet is a blind idiot, or, to quote from the "Soldier's Song": "Go on, Luise, wipe your face, my darling, /Not every bullet hits its target" ("Nun ade lieb Luise, wisch ab Dein Gesicht/ Eine jede Kugel die trifft ja nicht"). The pictures from the warhead of the missiles of 1991, together with the expression "intelligent weapons," are so distressing, or so gripping, precisely because the bullets are not blind any more. And in war, death is always someone else's death. The pattern of recognition and object tracking of seeing bombs threatens with infallibility. Paul Virilio's comment that these images are aimed at us sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The apparatus HIL, short for "hardware in the loop," is a machine that tests the flight path of rockets as they travel towards their target and corrects their course, independently navigating their flight to their strategic objective. The apparatus, about as large as an automobile, offers a large number of variable parameters and can perform quick swerving movements with great precision. The large-scale image shows the scanning warhead and its tilting prisms; images are transmitted to the warhead — simulated pictures of the landscape it has to fly over. [...] The automated eye has recorded only a few search patterns through which it looks at the images of the real world. These picture-processing apparatuses work with the same sort of clumsiness with which robotic arms perform a new task. Each movement is broken down into fragments, and each fragment of the movement is performed with equal dedication, precisely but with absolutely no habitual elegance. But just as the robots in factories first used manual labourers as their model until they outperformed them and rendered them obsolete, these sensory automatons are supposed to replace the work of the human eye.

In my first work on this subject, Eye/Machine (2001), I called such pictures, made neither to entertain nor to inform, "operative images." These are images that do not represent an object, but rather are part of an operation. Later it occurred to me that this term came from Roland Barthes. [...]

Today we are under no pressure to become radical materialists and to trace the manifestations of materialism in the structures of language and thought. If we take an interest in pictures that are part of an operation, this is because we are weary of non-operative pictures, and weary of meta-language. Weary of the day-to-day practice of re-mythologizing quotidian life, weary of the ever-changing and many-channelled program of images custom-made to mean something to us. What is shown in these programs comes neither from the micro- nor from the macro-cosmos, but rather from the middle level; its lower boundary line is the close-up of the human face, its higher level a street block of houses. This is the filling, so to speak, in the picture of the cosmic sandwich. Children are encouraged not to eat the filling without the bread, an exercise in the sublimation of desire. Or perhaps the movie and television industry has exhausted itself in its overproduction of material.

[...]

Today the materialists are the artists like Heidi and Alvin Toffler; they don't belong to an intellectual circle in Paris, but to a think-tank in Washington close to the Pentagon. In their books The Third Wave and War and Anti-War, books with a huge circulation in the paperback editions, they assume that there is a necessary correspondence between the technology of production and the technology of destruction, of manufacturing and war. War is in this axiomatic and evolutionary view a field of activity like any other, much as one would compare agriculture to industry. In this respect, it ought to be noted that the inhabitants of Carthage had far more complicated catapults than agricultural tools, and that during World War II, when the military was developing radio-controlled weapons, the jet airplane, stereophonic recording, and the computer, there were more labouring slaves on German ruled territory than ever before.

The reductionist representation of the Swiss weapons manufacturer Örlikon shows the approaching flight of a projectile that is then sighted by ground defences and destroyed by an anti-ballistic missile. This sequence of products, in which a new product displaces an old one, is also a model of culture. The cold war made it possible for over 40 years to write off rockets, tanks, jets and planes, and ships that were never used materially and were sometimes morally worn out already before they were completed. The products of the IT industry have a longer shelf life than the machinery of war. And in order to keep the market free of constipation, moral campaigns have to be waged, but these themselves grow old and wear out.

[...]

But now the arms industry itself has a hard time justifying its new products. It lacks an enemy that could produce anti-ballistic weapons against it, which would then require anti-anti-ballistic weapons. And it is hard to make systematic sense out of the ways of war: you can supply weapons to an ally who then leaves the alliance and becomes an enemy, as in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq. I am speaking here from the phantom perspective of war, from the perspective of an imagined war-subjectivity. In Brecht's Mother Courage we find the sentence: "War always finds a solution." Barbara Ehrenreich interpreted the sentence to mean that war is incredibly inventive when it is a matter of its own survival. Even if no one wanted war any more, it would attempt to mutate into a war of automatons in a deserted field of battle. In rich countries the majority do not want war. War is not necessary, just as gold backing is not necessary for currency. Yet people have recently come to believe, with Hobbes, in gold backing for our culture. And we create holidays in memory of a common denominator, violence. The recent wars that have been led with unimaginable superiority on one side — in asymmetry — are the ritual precursors of such holidays.

The fantastic impression of an abandoned battlefield upon which the war is continually being fought — a bit like the toys that come to life when the children are sleeping — remind one of the emptiness of the production plants. In the automobile industry, for instance, you only see the people working where there is no more space for robots. When observing the connection between production and destruction, the following analogy appears: while factories in rich countries have fewer and fewer people in them, more people than ever before perform manual labour in poor countries. And even the wars increasingly take place in poor countries. The operative war pictures from the Gulf War of 1991 that do not show any people are paradoxical. Despite the censorship, the pictures were more than propaganda attempting to silence the sum total of perhaps 200,000 dead. They were, perhaps above all, in the spirit of a utopia of war, a utopia that doesn't reckon with encountering people, accepting them only somewhat disdainfully as victims.

[...]

It is true that operational pictures conjure up the image of a cleanly led war, and they are stronger than the pictures of the dirty war, like the pictures of an air raid shelter in Baghdad in which a couple of hundred civilians were torn to pieces. The television spectators were supposed to appreciate the war technicians and to sympathize with the technology of war through the images of aerial photographs, which were actually made only for the eyes of the war technicians. But they still remained political beings who spoke with each other and criticized pictures; they knew how to distinguish between the first war, when Iraq attacked Kuwait and attempted to annex it, and the second war. In 2003 the pictures from the warheads of missiles were rarely shown. And there was no talk of intelligent weapons, only of precision-guided weapons.

Due to the secrecy surrounding military operations, it is difficult to prove the following assumption, but everything seems to support the theory that in both Gulf wars there were no intelligent weapons, none that could seek out and hit its target on its own. It was more than the usual wartime trickery of the opponent. Here there was a continuous attempt to make the idea of a seeing bomb so popular and common that, thereafter, they would have to be ordered, developed, and paid for.

Similarly, there are no pictures that do not aim at the human eye. A computer can process pictures, but it needs no pictures to verify or falsify what it reads in the images it processes. For the computer, the image in the computer is enough. Nevertheless, the "objective language" pictures are distinct by degrees from the "meta-linguistic" pictures, much as the aesthetics of the machine are distinct from commodity aesthetics. And the axe of Roland Barthes's lumberjack is not simply a manifestation of goal-related rationality: even a tool communicates not only with the materials of its trade, but also with the human senses.

Favelost

Fausto Fawcett

Peruas desgarradas, socialites encrencadas queimam joias e batons caríssimos numa fogueira em frente ao pavilhão de negociações imobiliárias onde muita gente está comprando casas portáteis, kitchenettes que são montadas em qualquer lugar com toda a infra necessária. Coisas da inexorável e claustrofóbica sustentabilidade. Peruas desgarradas, patricinhas cheias de convicção dissoluta, cientes de sua missão de estar no mundo a serviço do princípio do prazer egoísta motivado por sentimentos exclusivistas de pseudoaristocracia rapinante que deixam essas deliciosas arrivistas de rara sagacidade, de perfumado maquiavelismo insinuante, sempre a postos no que diz respeito a, digamos, melhorar espertamente de vida. Algumas se sentem canonizadas de tão ricas e tão mimadas desde o berço, gerando aura de sofisticação e pernóstica desatenção ao que não é do seu meio—hábitat—de vida. Outras tem cacife de existência sofrida, pedigree de superação da miséria, milhagem de dificuldade no terrivelmente épico mundo cão da sobrevivência, o que dá uma garra extra, bônus a mais pra sua missão. Outras são médias na classificação social, mas sempre com a reza do vou-me-dar-bem-nem-que-seja-fazendo-neném—de capital—, vou sair dessa mediocridade nem que seja fazendo do meu corpo altar da mais agressiva e boçal sensualidade envernizada com duas ou mais camadas de intelectualidade universitária, mente refinadamente sã em corpo gostosão. Vou mudar de vida pobre ou classe mediazinha cheia de dignidade normal tipo resto de luxúria e sobra do que os muito ricos têm (não pequenos ou médios ricos, mas bilionários, donos do planeta, gente com mais de dez bilhões de dólares na conta), gente que realmente importa, e não a multidão de zumbis esforçados na gincana social cheia de algemas psicológicas, cheia de implantadas tradições depauperadas. Zumbis vagando por ruínas da História achando que são gente só porque têm sentimentos, assim como outras fantasmagorias que habitam o a assim chamado cérebro. Pra elas, tudo de certa forma já foi feito, e a História navega em velocidade de cruzeiro festivo, cheia de atualizações do que já foi sentido, feito, inventado. Como elas gostam de dizer, são meras customizações dos básicos instintos, dos hábitos, amores e necessidades desde sempre. É preciso mudar pra que tudo continue na mesma. Achando que são gente só porque... Zumbis atravessando ruínas, imersos na semiescravidão do mundo cão da sobrevivência, não importa em qual divisão. Na divisão especial de multimilionários razoavelmente estabilizados, quase sócios daquela elite de mais de dez bi, mas que, mesmo assim, podem, como qualquer um, cair do seu pedestal diante de algum tsunami econômico. Primeira divisão mais ou menos rica, a segunda classe plenamente média, a terceira classe meio c ou d, enfim, o pessoal do crédito como dignidade de inclusão, inserção no mercadinho da esquina mundial, são os existencialistas pré-pagos. O crédito preceda a essência. Da quarta divisão pra baixo é tudo semipré-pago cheio de superinformalidade de teor temporário em ritmo de terceirização, quarteirização, e com subautonomias de bicho solto sem muitos vínculos precisos, sejam eles de emprego, de família, ou de identidade psicológica ou documental. Em Favelost, toda essa multidão fica à vontade devido à enorme oferta de ocupações e intervalos cheios de entretenimento entre as ocupações. Tudo é muito rápido em Favelost. E as peruas socialites arrivistas, patricinhas rapinantes, gossip girls de cuspe caríssimo, encarnações femininas e bucetílicas da grande cafajeste do hinduísmo emergente, Nanvalinada, filha de Shiva e Kali, segundo os especuladores do comércio de ações místicas. Super gossip girls. Sempre rezam a oração do vou-me-dar-bem. Algumas, realmente psicopatas, de uma carisma totalmente sedutor; outras apenas se vingando da vida ou de si mesmas; outras meras marias-passa-por-cima-das-outras. Maria-champagne, Maria-tatame, Maria-chuteira, Maria-porão (as austríacas ou todas aquelas que são trancadas em porões por anos), Maria-passa-por-cima-das-outras... [...]

The slow cancelation of the future

Mark Fisher

In his book After The Future, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi refers to the ‘the slow cancellation of the future [that] got underway in the 1970s and 1980s.’ ‘But when I say “future”’, he elaborates, 

«I am not referring to the direction of time. I am thinking, rather, of the psychological perception, which emerged in the cultural situation of progressive modernity, the cultural expectations that were fabricated during the long period of modern civilization, reaching a peak after the Second World War. These expectations were shaped in the conceptual frameworks of an ever progressing development, albeit through different methodologies: the Hegel-Marxist mythology of Aufhebung and founding of the new totality of Communism; the bourgeois mythology of a linear development of welfare and democracy; the technocratic mythology of the all-encom-passing power of scientific knowledge; and so on.

My generation grew up at the peak of this mythological temporalization, and it is very difficult, maybe impossible, to get rid of it, and look at reality without this kind of temporal lens. I’ll never be able to live in accordance with the new reality, no matter how evident, unmistakable, or even dazzling its social planetary trends. (After The Future, AK Books, 2011, pp18-19)»

Bifo is a generation older than me, but he and I are on the same side of a temporal split here. I, too, will never be able to adjust to the paradoxes of this new situation. The immediate temptation here is to fit what I’m saying into a wearily familiar narrative: it is a matter of the old failing to come to terms with the new, saying it was better in their day. Yet it is just this picture — with its assumption that the young are automatically at the leading edge of cultural change — that is now out of date.

Rather than the old recoiling from the ‘new’ in fear and incomprehension, those whose expectations were formed in an earlier era are more likely to be startled by the sheer persistence of recognisable forms. Nowhere is this clearer than in popular music culture. It was through the mutations of popular music that many of those of us who grew up in the 1960s, 70s and 80s learned to measure the passage of cultural time. But faced with 21st-century music, it is the very sense of future shock which has disappeared. This is quickly established by performing a simple thought experiment. Imagine any record released in the past couple of years being beamed back in time to, say, 1995 and played on the radio. It’s hard to think that it will produce any jolt in the listeners. On the contrary, what would be likely to shock our 1995 audience would be the very recognisability of the sounds: would music really have changed so little in the next 17 years? Contrast this with the rapid turnover of styles between the 1960s and the 90s: play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like something so new that it would have challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be. While 20th-century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like the future. Or, alternatively, it doesn’t feel as if the 21st century has started yet. We remain trapped in the 20th century, just as Sapphire and Steel were incarcerated in their roadside café.

The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.

It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those 30 years have been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism — with globalisation, ubiquitous computerisation and the casualisation of labour — resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last 10 to 15 years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate any more.

[…] The future didn’t disappear overnight. Berardi’s phrase ‘the slow cancellation of the future’ is so apt because it captures the gradual yet relentless way in which the future has been eroded over the last 30 years. If the late 1970s and early 80s were the moment when the current crisis of cultural temporality could first be felt, it was only during the first decade of the 21st century that what Simon Reynolds calls ‘dyschronia’ has become endemic. This dyschronia, this temporal disjuncture, ought to feel uncanny, yet the predominance of what Reynolds calls ‘retro-mania’ means that it has lost any unheimlich charge: anachronism is now taken for granted. Jameson’s postmodernism — with its tendencies towards retrospection and pastiche — has been naturalised. Take someone like the stupendously successful Adele: although her music is not marketed as retro, there is nothing that marks out her records as belonging to the 21st century either. Like so much contemporary cultural production, Adele’s recordings are saturated with a vague but persistent feeling of the past without recalling any specific historical moment.

Jameson equates the postmodern ‘waning of historicity’ with the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’, but he says little about why the two are synonymous. Why did the arrival of neoliberal, post-Fordist capitalism lead to a culture of retrospection and pastiche? Perhaps we can venture a couple of provisional conjectures here. The first concerns consumption. Could it be that neoliberal capitalism’s destruction of solidarity and security brought about a compensatory hungering for the well-established and the familiar? Paul Virilio has written of a ‘polar inertia’ that is a kind of effect of and counterweight to the massive speeding up of communication. Virilio’s example is Howard Hughes, living in one hotel room for 15 years, endlessly rewatching Ice Station Zebra. Hughes, once a pioneer in aeronautics, became an early explorer of the existential terrain that cyberspace will open up, where it is no longer necessary to physically move in order to access the whole history of culture. Or, as Berardi has argued, the intensity and precariousness of late capitalist work culture leaves people in a state where they are simultaneously exhausted and overstimulated. The combination of precarious work and digital communications leads to a besieging of attention. In this insomniac, inundated state, Berardi claims, culture becomes de-eroticised. The art of seduction takes too much time, and, according to Berardi, something like Viagra answers not to a biological but to a cultural deficit: desperately short of time, energy and attention, we demand quick fixes. Like another of Berardi’s examples, pornography, retro offers the quick and easy promise of a minimal variation on an already familiar satisfaction.

The other explanation for the link between late capitalism and retrospection centres on production. Despite all its rhetoric of novelty and innovation, neoliberal capitalism has gradually but systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new. In the UK, the postwar welfare state and higher education maintenance grants constituted an indirect source of funding for most of the experiments in popular culture between the 1960s and the 80s. The subsequent ideological and practical attack on public services meant that one of the spaces where artists could be sheltered from the pressure to produce something that was immediately successful was severely circumscribed. As public service broadcasting became ‘marketised’, there was an increased tendency to turn out cultural productions that resembled what was already successful. The result of all of this is that the social time available for withdrawing from work and immersing oneself in cultural production drastically declined. If there’s one factor above all else which contributes to cultural conservatism, it is the vast inflation in the cost of rent and mortgages. It’s no accident that the efflorescence of cultural invention in London and New York in the late 1970s and early 80s (in the punk and postpunk scenes) coincided with the availability of squatted and cheap property in those cities. Since then, the decline of social housing, the attacks on squatting, and the delirious rise in property prices have meant that the amount of time and energy available for cultural production has massively diminished. But perhaps it was only with the arrival of digital communicative capitalism that this reached terminal crisis point. Naturally, the besieging of attention described by Berardi applies to producers as much as consumers. Producing the new depends upon certain kinds of withdrawal — from, for instance, sociality as much as from pre-existing cultural forms — but the currently dominant form of socially networked cyberspace, with its endless opportunities for micro-contact and its deluge of YouTube links, has made withdrawal more difficult than ever before. Or, as Simon Reynolds so pithily put it, in recent years, everyday life has sped up, but culture has slowed down.

No matter what the causes for this temporal pathology are, it is clear that no area of Western culture is immune from them. The former redoubts of futurism, such as electronic music, no longer offer escape from formal nostalgia. Music culture is in many ways paradigmatic of the fate of culture under post-Fordist capitalism. At the level of form, music is locked into pastiche and repetition. But its infrastructure has been subject to massive, unpredictable change: the old paradigms of consumption, retail and distribution are disintegrating, with downloading eclipsing the physical object, record shops closing and cover art disappearing.

ON SCIENCE

Vilém Flusser

§ We are about to enter the age of electromagnetism. Microelectronics, artificial intelligence, robotics, and holography are some of the signposts on our path away from a material culture and toward an “immaterial” one in which we will concentrate on the processing of rays rather than on the manipulation of inert, perfidious matter. Electromagnetism is about the oscillation of the particles that constitute the rays. Light is such an oscillation. Electromagnetism, then, is about visible and invisible light. What we are about to enter, then, is the true Age of Light. But before we congratulate ourselves on this feat we should consider the implications contained in this metaphor. § We prefer light to darkness, a Manichæism that manifests itself in numerous images: the Buddha as the enlightened One, the halos surrounding the heads of the Christian saints. We can see what sort of light is involved in those images if we look at an Orthodox Eastern icon. It is the light that comes in from the background, the golden light of transcendence. Not everyone approves of this sort of light; certainly the moderns did not, because it makes things appear so dogmatically, and appearances were not to be trusted. The moderns preferred a different sort of light, one that illuminates the scene from the point of view of the viewer, rendering it transparent. Most of the modern metaphors that deal with light – clarification, enlightenment, reflection – mean the awareness projected by the human subject onto the objective world. But we are no longer moderns, and as postmoderns, we do not trust this beam either. We are after a different sort of radiation. § All the modern metaphors for light may be reduced to this: the “light of reason” is a kind of searchlight that will work only if the area at which it is directed is covered by darkness. Once the background light has been switched off, the scene becomes accessible to the searchlight, which first illuminates the foreground (nature), and then penetrates ever deeper into the background darkness (its invisible substructure). It will bring to light, discover and clarify what hides there. It will discover the wires that link and regulate, the laws of nature. But the searchlight of reason sought the true infrastructure of nature for the purpose of achieving power over it. Thus the metaphor “the light of reason” can be seen as a variation of the mythical themes of Lucifer and Prometheus. It is hard to agree with this identification of the light of reason with the devil, because the dream of that light (truth discovered through science) did not suggest hellfire. But at present, when science no longer searches for truth but for falsification, and when technology results in Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Chernobyl, in thermonuclear devices and in environmental pollution, we are in a position to taste the Luciferian flavour of the light of reason. 
§ As for the moderns, some of them did not fully trust the light of reason either, because its torch comes equipped with a curious gadget, a metaphorical mirror that reflects the rays of reason back onto reason itself. This is the business of reflection and speculation, or the critique of reason, which clarifies those dark places where the light of reason originates. And those dark places are indeed infernal ones, as we have found out lately. Two different hells are in fact brought forth by the critique of reason: one that is found by formal, or Wittgensteinian, investigations; the other by sexistentialism, or Freudianism. The formal hell shows us that all reasonable statements are either true but meaningless (tautologies of the type “it either rains or it does not rain”), or meaningful but false. The existential hell shows us that reason sits upon an infernal brew of repressed desires. Thus it may be said that reason, with its inbuilt mirror, is bound to destroy itself through a sort of feedback: the more its light advances into the darkness beyond, the more it flickers. Still, this did not prevent our modern predecessors from bearing that light forward. § We can do so no longer. Our modern forbearers were a bit too successful in rendering all things transparent, and this triumph of reason was to be its downfall. We can now see through all things, and what we see is a background radiation quite unlike the one switched off when the light of reason began to move forward. The radiation we now see gives off more rays than the transcendent one, as we may find out if we compare an atomic mushroom cloud to the golden background in a Byzantine painting. But this is not what makes electromagnetic radiation so different from transcendent radiation. 
The difference comes up in two different ways, both of which are uncanny. The background radiation (the electromagnetic field) consists of particles that oscillate, and the light of reason is incapable of clarifying this oscillation; it cannot be switched off, for the light of reason merges with it and has to admit it cannot advance further. What it can do, however, is clarify its own limitation. Thus reason, having discovered radiation, also discovers its own incompetence with regard to it. § But there is more. Neurophysiological research has begun to prove that perception, imagination, sensation, desire, and decision-making can be broken down into chemical and electromagnetic processes in the brain. These processes consist of particles of energy that jump across the intervals, or synapses, between adjacent neurons, which means that the mental processes are in effect a kind of electromagnetic radiation too. This is not merely an empirical, or a theoretical statement. The action of the brain synapse can be simulated in inanimate objects like semiconductors, a simulation that results in artificial intelligence, a form of reason. But no doubt is possible here: this aspect of the light of reason is a background radiation. Such machines calculate, perform logical operations, make decisions, and bring other machines into accord with those decisions, a technological advance which has already begun to have consequences. One is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between the products of human and artificial intelligence. Another consequence is that the radical distinction between the mental and the material, between spirit and matter, will become obsolete if it is admitted that both are forms of energy, or radiation. § This is the metaphor that suggests itself to identify this new age: there is an ocean of light, which is partly visible and partly not, and all things are permeated by it. So are we ourselves; our reason is one means by which this ocean of light infuses us. In fact, everything about us, our own bodies, our own minds, are soaked with radiation. The Age of Reason does not know how to understand it all, since the ocean of light is bottomless, and nothing is hidden behind it. Postmodernism is this conundrum of oscillation. It is the play of rays upon rays that we must try and give meaning to if the new Age of Light that we are about to enter is indeed to be a promise of a radiant future.

Hacker States

Luca Follis, Adam Fish

What Is Hacking?
Recent years have seen a remarkable proliferation of hackers and hacking. Life hackers, place hackers, education hackers, business hackers—hackers of all sorts—now join the archetypical computer hacker. Indeed, the cultural meaning of hacking has so broadened that it now encompasses virtually any activity that subverts the conventional way of doing things with digital technologies. In this sense, hacking has become a cognate of disruption, a term that references the challenges networked technology poses to incumbent forms of political, social, and economic organization. Our framing of hackers and hacking draws on the wider cultural significance that hacking has assumed: a set of material and technical practices set in open conflict or opposition with established modes of doing.
According to sociologist Tim Jordan, hacking is a material practice that “creates difference” in computer communications and network technology, and although we reject reducing the hacker to a single “type” among many, in this book we focus on hackers as people who break into software systems. The hacktivists and hackers we describe in the chapters that follow are exfiltrators. That is, individuals involved in the unauthorized access and transfer of data from computers through networks, software, and/or hardware (we also include those that write or design software and code for these same purposes). Exfiltration forces alterations in computers and networks by subverting their routine functioning to provide opportunities for unintended access and illicit use.
We define hacktivism as a digital form of activism that involves the exfiltration of data and code toward explicitly political ends—no matter how loosely framed the latter may be. We understand the mobilization of these alterations in computers and networks as encompassing a wide variety of digitally mediated objectives, including political disruption, dissident support, symbolic protest, active subversion, and radical transparency. Not all hacktivists are exfiltrators, but most of the instances of hacktivism we discuss involve the extraction of data, either by activists or by state agents. At the same time, we do not advance a definitive interpretation of hacking, as the diversity exhibited within this culture has already been amply cataloged. Instead, we focus on the culture that exists where exfiltration, political activism, and state practice intersect.
The politics that animate exfiltration span the political spectrum and can take a right-wing, left-wing, democratic, authoritarian, libertarian, or revolutionary character. Moreover, these affiliations visibly shift over time: progressive hackers may have libertarian moments; they may hack authoritarians and later become proponents of fragile democracies. And not just the ideology is mobile, but the software, code, and exploits they use are on the move as well, often flowing from democracies to dark market capitalists and on to dictators. Over the course of our research and fieldwork, we witnessed these ideological transformations, strange bedfellows, and contradictory practices, as well as the use of similar tactics and software by oppositional parties. In other words, the hacker field is fluid by definition, and its politics can appear itinerant or even fickle. This is not unlike other forms of “cultural activism” and “strategic indigeneity”, where communities intentionally place culture into greater relief to advance particular claims or to pursue strategic goals. As anthropologists Luis Felipe R. Murillo and Christopher Kelty note:
There are multiple and intersecting moral and technical orders inhabited by people who self-identify or are identified by peers as hackers—from the underground hacker collectives to “grey hat” security researchers to spam-slinging criminal actors to the hard-core free speech and privacy cryptography defenders; from the diehard Free Software activist to the business-oriented Open Source evangelist; from the uber-cool Northern European design artists to the goofy-but-terrifying Anonymous hackers, and so on.
Elsewhere we term this flexible hacker practice subjectivation and contrast this effort with law enforcement attempts to frame hacker subjectivity through processes of subjection. We characterize the playful deployment of subjectivity in hacker communities as versioning and analyze those instances when hackers “come out”—shed their pseudonymous masks and reveal their actual identities—to add credence and sincerity to a political project. Finally, we note that doxing—that is, the release of personal documents or the forceful exposure of an individual’s identity—is also a tool of radical transparency activism, political disruption, and state repression. The above modes of tactical engagement illustrate hackers’ strategic performance of identity and their entanglement with state practices of categorization and containment [...] the practice of hacking (as well as the ideological performances that are connected to it) intersects with and comes to be bound up in the state’s own tactical adoption of hacking as a resource in the deployment of state power.
Media depictions often portray hackers as technological wizards, high-tech pranksters, or virtual criminals, a view that is often reinforced by the numerous firsthand accounts that appear in the literature. Where scholars have approached hacking from a more theoretical position, they have focused on how hackers interface with the open source community or self-organize impressive political campaigns. Few have explicitly situated hacker practice in the context of state power, although multiple scholars have analyzed and theorized the growing political impact of hacking. Media studies scholar McKenzie Wark, for example, has argued that hackers constituted a novel political, even revolutionary, class, who implicitly challenged state-based representational politics and the commodification of information.

What Is State Hacking?
State hacking is premised on the generation, identification, and maintenance of vulnerabilities it can exploit; whether these vulnerabilities are located in hardware or software, state hacking thrives under and promotes states of digital insecurity. At the same time, the material and offline lives of its citizens are more and more interwoven with the digital; whether one speaks of social media, the internet of things, driverless cars, the automation of work, or critical infrastructure, connected and networked technologies cross into the lives of citizens in intimate and highly specific ways bound up in the (re)production of material, economic, and political life. In this sense, it would be a mistake to characterize the current era of cyber warfare and state hacking as another cold war. True, there are proxy skirmishes, instances of corporate espionage and intelligence spying, as well as robust systems of signals intelligence collection, but such a depiction fails to capture the full impact and potential of state hacking on international and diplomatic relations, digital capitalism, and democratic governance.
Several recent scholarly accounts seek to describe this new geopolitical reality. For example, according to international relations scholar Lucas Kello, hacking technologies are nothing short of revolutionary in terms of their influence on the rational and moral world order. For Kello, the current situation is defined by a stubborn predicament: technologically superior nations that effectively harness hacking technologies to further economic, military, and social objectives remain the most vulnerable entities to these same threats. As a result, geopolitical relations are characterized by a self-perpetuating state of “unpeace”: an ongoing dynamic of mutual aggression and competition among states that remains below the threshold of destruction and violence (i.e., war) but that nonetheless generates harmful disruptions beyond what is tolerable in a state of peaceful competition. Not only does this scramble conventional strategies of defense, but it also undermines and neutralizes the modes of deterrence states traditionally adopted to deal with the aggressions of adversaries. For example, in an analog context, deterrence frameworks combine a mixture of denial and punishment. The former essentially increases the cost to an adversary of using weapons (e.g., arms control treaties or the erection of defensive perimeters like antiballistic missile defense systems), while the latter works by threatening equivalent, severe penalties in the case of attack. Yet for a host of reasons, including the difficulties with attributing attacks, the problems with identifying an attack in real time and anticipating its impact, as well as issues with quantifying its effects (in terms of determining a proportionate response), traditional deterrence approaches do not work when applied to the cyber realm.
A similar point is made by New York Times reporters David Sanger and Robertson Dean (2018), who describe how cyber conflict revolutionizes the conduct of war and transforms geopolitical relations. For Sanger and Dean, much like Kello, conventional threat and escalation scenarios developed during an era when nuclear weapons were states’ primary concerns do not fit the contemporary situation. Moreover, the fact that much of this state-sponsored hacking takes place under the rubric of national security (and is thus shrouded in secrecy) also greatly hampers the ability of states to develop new, realistic codes of conduct and effective response scenarios. Despite this, it is particularly important to address and debate these questions now while they remain visible, because in the near future, much of this state hacking activity will likely become automated. Artificial intelligence will significantly quicken the potential for escalation and response; humans will struggle to intervene effectively in scenarios when the situation becomes irrevocably escalated. Sanger and Dean’s solution, much like Kello’s, is nonstate directed. They argue that the computer and software industry should take the lead by drafting and enlisting state support for a Digital Geneva Convention along the lines of what has been adopted for conventional weapons.

The Destruction of Art

Dario Gamboni

1. Theories and Methods

As has been noticed by those few authors who have dealt at some length with iconoclasm, the destruction of art is a subject that most art historians prefer to ignore: Louis Réau saw it as a kind of taboo; Peter Moritz Pickshaus as a 'non- theme'. David Freedberg, who considered that 'in this case lack of interest is the same as repression', explained that this was because iconoclasm 'sears away any lingering notion that we may still have of the possibility of an idealistic or internally formalist basis for the history of art', that is, the belief in an absolute autonomy of art (which, as we shall see, benefited much from iconoclasm)¹.

Images of iconoclasm

The sparse historiography on the subject that does exist belongs to the richer history of the condemnation of iconoclasm, a subject that has been explored even less, but can be traced in images as well as in texts.² In Byzantium, iconoclasts were typically denounced as blasphemers, whose violence against religious imagery struck at the sacred prototype (illus. 3). But by the Reformation they tended to be exposed as ignorant as well as brutal, and art, just as much as religion, was seen to be their victim. The threat they represented thus played a negative but necessary part in kunstkamer paintings, programmatic representations of rooms displaying art, antiquities and natural curiosities painted by Flemish artists following the late sixteenth-century revolt of the Netherlands and the concurrent iconoclastic violence: several of these works include gesticulating figures with donkeys' ears or faces derived from allegories of Ignorance — menacing or destroying pictures with their clubs.³ 

Ignorance is a key concept in the stigmatization of iconoclasm. Encouragement of the arts, a feature of enlightened government, is presumed to dissipate the ignorance that fosters the destruction of art. Iconoclasts are presented as blind not only to the value of what they destroy, but to the very meaning of acts they perform. Goya has supplied a striking expression of this idea (illus. 1). A man with his eyes shut tight is balanced precariously on a ladder, still waving the pickaxe he has just used to smash a bust; the caption reads: ‘He doesn't know what he's doing.' Goya probably had in mind attacks directed against liberal institutions (represented by the smashed allegorical sculpture) rather than against art⁴, but the opposition between destructive ignorance and creative enlightenment is the same. In his History of the Revolt of the Netherlands, written shortly before the French Revolution, Schiller attributed iconoclasm to the lowest sort of people caught up in riotous situations.⁵ Similar arguments were used by the Revolutionary defenders of the artistic heritage of the Ancien Régime, and the term 'vandalism' was coined to serve that end. 

[...]

His [Louis Réau's] political ideal was obviously a stable hierarchic society in which the 'base Instincts of the crowd' could be kept under control and where a high culture enjoyed the discriminating support and protection of the knowing and powerful. Not surprisingly, the 'vandalism' of the French Revolution is given pride (or better, shame) of place in his 'interminable obituary', although none of the governments that followed is exempted from his reproaches.⁶ Réau's polemical and pedagogical stance makes his 'history' an heir to the pamphlets by authors like Abbé Grégoire and Montalembert, who aimed at 'inflicting publicity' on the persons or institutions deemed responsible for destruction, 'in order to mark out the guilty ... and to caution ceaselessly the good citizens against errors of this kind'⁷

At the opposite end, both theoretically and politically, is an equally important but incomparably more useful book, the collection of essays Martin Warnke edited in 1973 that bears the generalizing title Bildersturm (iconoclasm). This anthology was the result of the critical questioning of the idea of the autonomy of art in the context of the Ulmer Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, a radical university institution founded in West Germany in 1968. In his introduction Warnke stated that the authors' common point of departure was the search for the historical roots of the idea, according to which any critical approach towards art amounted to a kind of 'iconoclasm'.⁸ In a study of the ‘wars of images from late Antiquity to the Hussite revolution' that was published two years later, Horst Bredekamp treated art as a 'medium of social conflicts' and saw their methodological value in the way they revealed how far what we consider retrospectively as pure 'art' had historically possessed other functions and significances.⁹ The war of reviews that followed these two books demonstrated that central issues were at stake.¹⁰
In a first attempt at a general history of the destruction of art, published in 1915, the Hungarian historian Julius von Végh ascribed the relevance of his book to art as culture, or a part of culture, rather than to art as such.¹

[...]

English, like most European languages, has two terms to describe the kinds of destruction with which we are concerned: 'iconoclasm' and 'vandalism'. Their perpetrators can be correspondingly identified as 'iconoclasts' or 'vandals'. [...] Both terms have witnessed an important widening of their semantic field. 'Iconoclasm' grew from the destruction of religious images and opposition to the religious use of images to, literally, the destruction of, and opposition to, any images or works of art and, metaphorically, the 'attacking or overthrow of venerated institutions and cherished beliefs, regarded as fallacious or superstitious' (sometimes replaced in the latter sense in English by 'radical').¹² 'Vandalism' went from meaning the destruction of works of art and monuments to that of any objects whatever, insofar as the effect could be denounced as a 'barbarous, ignorant, or inartistic treatment' devoid of meaning.¹³ Indeed, the reckoned presence or absence of a motive is the main reason today for the choice of one or the other term. [...] Whereas the use of 'iconoclasm' and 'iconoclast' is compatible with neutrality and even — at least in the metaphorical sense — with approval, 'vandalism' and 'vandal' are always stigmatizing, and imply blindness, ignorance, stupidity, baseness or lack of taste. In common usage this discrimination may often be unconscious and amount to a social distinction, comparable to the one between 'eroticism' and 'pornography'. (Alain Robbe-Grillet is said to have declared, with reference to the cinema, that 'pornography is the others' eroticism'.) But the same distinction remains true (and may not always be conscious) in scientific usage, as John Phillips neatly expressed when he wrote that 'iconoclasm for the iconoclasts was an act far different from our later understanding of it as vandalism'.¹⁴ The polemical and performative character of 'vandalism' could not have been more plainly stated than in Grégoire's proud explanation. The word aimed at excluding the 'vandal' and at menacing potential 'vandals' with exclusion — from the community of civilized mankind, or more specifically, according to circumstances, of neighbourhood, city, nation, etc. Réau chose to write a history of 'vandalism' (and not of 'iconoclasm') for precisely this reason, and explained that 'any attack whatever against a work of beauty ... deserves the excommunication' implied by this term.¹⁵

Needless to say, the origin and connotations of 'vandalism' make it particularly inappropriate for use in a scientific context aiming at interpretation. Moreover, even if the wilful degradation of works of art may in some cases have something in common with assaults on telephone booths, the broadening of the field of destruction attributed to 'vandalism' tends to refute the likelihood that the destruction of art is a specific phenomenon. In contrast, 'iconoclasm' and 'iconoclast' have the advantage of implying that the actions or attitudes thus designated have a meaning. Unfortunately, the term presents other difficulties. Even if a religious character regarding the images attacked or rejected is no longer automatically assumed, 'iconoclasm' does raise the expectation that attack and rejection concern images (Réau justified his rejection of it by stressing the importance of architecture), and the signified rather than the signifier; these limitations are lifted in the metaphorical sense, but it suppresses altogether artefacts as targets and introduces another limitation by regarding the critique and rejection of traditional authorities and norms only, and not that of anti-traditional manifestations.. 

[...] 

And, of course, there is the question of 'art for whom?' One may, for example, destroy something that one reckons to be bad art, or not art at all, that others do consider to be art, even good art; and do so because one resents this difference of opinion or for reasons that have nothing to do with it. More generally it may be wondered whether art is being destroyed 'as such', which depends again on definition and agreement. Obviously, as modern art has stretched the question of what art is or can be to every limit and paradox, the predicate art in the destruction of art cannot be but a chronic oversimplification. 

[...]

Réau, who did not hesitate to take sides, was particularly — though indirectly — illuminating when he stated that 'beauty offends inferior beings who are conscious of their inferiority', for this uneuphemized violence did express something of the violence that the culture he intended to defend could exert or represent. 

The question of power forms the basis of another distinction, one much simpler and more useful, which has been defined in various ways by several authors but most forcefully by Warnke. It is the distinction between iconoclasms 'from above' and 'from below'. Warnke noticed that the former, corresponding to the interests of those in power, tended to lead to a replacement of what they destroy by new symbols and to the prohibition of further destruction, whereas the latter, springing from political impotence, mostly failed to establish new symbols of their own. Taking a critical stance towards his discipline, he added that by ending in surpassing the aesthetic quality of eliminated works, the 'iconoclasms from above' managed to be celebrated among the great dates of the history of art, while 'iconoclasms from below' were denounced as 'blind vandalism': iconoclasm thus became 'a privilege for victors, and a sacrilege for the vanquished'.¹⁶ A case in point, cited by Warnke was the destruction in Rome under Pope Julius II of Old St Peter's and the construction of New St Peter's. On the side of the oppressed, one could mention the revolution of 1848 in Lyon, where the workers renounced pulling down the statue of Louis XIV when the Latin inscription to the glory of that monarch was replaced by one in French honouring the sculptor and the Republic, but erected an enormous effigy of the 'Peuple souverain' as an armed sans-culotte treading on the monarch's crown and asking, by means of inscription, 'Who will dare pick it up?'. It proved easy to displace rapidly and eventually eliminate this fragile monument.¹⁷ Réau was original in stressing the destructive component of 'iconoclasms from above', but he made no mystery of his taking the final aesthetic result into account in order to evaluate, in the name of posterity, the actions of individuals, movements or regimes. Needless to say, for him, 'the mob is always vandalistic'.¹⁸

[...] Restricting himself to cases of power shifts where dominant institutions were primarily animated by their objections to extant images, Olivier Christin made useful observations about typical ways of destruction 'from above' and 'from below': whereas the latter tend to make a partial and brutally executed assault visible in order to symbolize the new situation, the former prefer total elimination and seek to impose a systematic and legal procedure regulating the listing of the objects concerned, their treatment and the reuse of materials.¹⁹

¹ L. Réau, Histoire du Vandalisme. Les monuments détruits de l’art français (Paris, 1959), I, p.7 (augmented edn, ed. Michel Fleury and Guy-Michel Leproux, Paris, 1994, p.1); P. M. Pickshaus, Kunstzerstörer: Fallstudien: Tatmotive und Psychogramme (Reinbeck beiHamburg, 1988), p.10; D. Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of the Response (Chicago and London, 1989), p.421; D. Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives (Maarssen, 1985), p.7.
² Martin Warnke, 'Von der Gewalt gegen Kunst zur Gewalt der Kunst. Die Stellungnahmen von Schiller und Kleist zum Bildersturm', in Bildersturm: Die Zerstörung des Kunstwerks, ed. M. Warnke (Frankfurt, 1977), pp. 99—107; M. Warnke, 'Ansichten über Bilderstürmer: zur Wertbestimmung des Bildersturms in der Neuzeit', in Bilder und Bildersturm im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Bob Scribner (Wiesbaden, 1990; Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, XLVI), pp. 299—325.
³ La peinture dans la peinture, exhibition catalogue by Pierre Georgel and Anne-Marie Lecoq: Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon (1983), pp. 209—10; Victor I. Stoichita, ‘"Cabinets d'amateurs" et scénario iconoclaste dans la peinture anversoise du XVIIe siécle' in Les iconoclasmes, ed. Sergiusz Michalski (Strasbourg, Société Alsacienne pour le Développement de l'Histoire de l'Art, 1992; XXVIIe congrès international d'histoire de l'art du CIHA, L'art et les révolutions, Actes, Section 4), pp. 171—92; V. I. Stoichita, L'instauration du tableau. Métapeinture à l'aube des Temps modernes (Paris, 1993), pp. 131— 43; Gary Schwartz, 'Love in the Kunstkamer: Additions to the Work of Guillam van Haecht (1593—1637)', Tableau (Summer 1996), pp. 43—52.
⁴ Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment, exhibition catalogue by Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez and Eleanor A. Sayre: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museo del Prado, Madrid; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Boston, 1989), pp.278 80.
⁵ Warnke, 'Von der Gewalt gegen Kunst zur Gewalt der Kunst’ .
⁶ Réau, Histoire du Vandalisme, I, p.242 (1994 edn, p.310).
⁷ Henri Grégoire, Second rapport sur le vandalisme (Paris, 8 brumaire an III, 1794), p.2; Charles de Montalembert, 'Du vandalisme en France. Lettre à M. Victor Hugo', Revue des Deux Mondes, n.s. I (1833), pp. 477—524 (p. 494).
⁸ M. Warnke, 'Bilderstürme’, in Bildersturm, p. 7.
⁹ H. Bredekamp, Kunst als Medium sozialer Konflikte: Bilderkämpfe von der Spätantike bis zur Hussitenrevolution (Frankfurt, 1975), pp. 12—13.
¹⁰ Reiner Haussherr, review of Bildersturm, in Kunstchronik, XXVII (1974), pp. 359-69; M. Warnke, 'Rückruf', Kritische Berichte, IV/4 (1976), pp. 55-8; Peter Schreiner, review of Kunst als Medium sozialer Konflikte, in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, XXXIX (1976), pp.239-44; Wolfgang Grape, Ánmerkungen zu H. Bredekamp [...] und zu der rezension des Buches von Peter Schreiner [... ]', Kritische Berichte, v / I (1977), pp.20-34.
¹¹ J. von Végh, Die Bilderstürmer: Eine kulturgeschichtliche Studie (Strassburg, 1915), pp. 2—3. Veigh’s book, of which a Hungarian edition also appeared in Budapest in 1915, was ready for publication as the First World War broke out.
¹² The Oxford English Dictionary, VII, p. 609.
¹³ Ibid., XIX, p. 425.
¹⁴ J. Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535-1660 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1973), p. x.
¹⁵ Réau, Histoire du vandalisme, I, p. 16 (1994 edn, p. 13).
¹⁶ Warnke, 'Bilderstürme', p. 11.
¹⁷ André Chagny, 'Histoires de statues sous la Seconde République', Echo Liberté [Lyon] (29 September 1959); Gilbert Gardes, Lyon I 'art et la ville. Architecture— décor (Paris, 1988), II, pp. 189—90 (with reproduction of an engraving of J.-B. Lépind's Statue).
¹⁸ Réau, Histoiredu vandalisme, pp. 46, 103, 139—40, above all 378 (1994 edn, pp. 52, 128, 180, 498). Compare Végh, Bilderstürmer, p. 122; Végh excludes in principle 'embellishing vandalism' from his Study but is not always consistent (pp. 5, 131).
¹⁹ O. Christin, 'Les iconoclastes savent-ils ce qu'ils font? Rouen, 1562—1793', in Révolution française et 'vandahsme révolutionnaire', ed. Simone Bernard-Griffiths, Marie-Claude Chemin and Jean Erhard (Paris, 1992), pp. 353—65 (pp. 355—7).

Ecstasies

Carlo Ginzburg

2. ... The most common and reliable opinion (verior), according to the chronicles we are considering, fixed responsibility on the King of Granada. Unable to defeat the Christians by force, he had decided to dispose of them by cunning. He had then turned to the Jews, offering them an enormous amount of money to hatch a criminal scheme to destroy Christianity. The Jews had accepted, but had stated that they could not act directly because they were under too much suspicion: it would be better to entrust the execution of the scheme to the lepers, who, being in continuous contact with the Christians, would be able to poison the waters without difficulty. The Jews had then assembled a number of the lepers’ leaders and, with the devil's help, had induced them to abjure their faith and grind the consecrated host into the pestilential potions. Then the lepers’ leaders had summoned four councils in which the representatives of all the leper colonies (except for two in England) had participated. To the assembled lepers, at the instigation of the Jews, who were in turn inspired by the devil, they had addressed the following speech: the Christians treat you like vile and abject people; we should bring about their deaths or infect them with leprosy; if all were equal (uniformes) no-one would despise his fellow. 

This criminal plan had been received with great approval and relayed to the lepers in the various provinces, together with the promise of kingdoms, principalities and counties that would become vacant after the death or infection of the healthy. [...] But the conspiracy had been discovered; [...]

In Paris the guilty Jews were burnt and the others exiled in perpetuity; the richest were forced to turn over their wealth to the treasury, to the tune of 150,000 livres.¹ In Flanders the lepers (and possibly the Jews as well) were initially incarcerated and then freed — ‘to the great displeasure of many’, the chronicler notes.² 

[...]

3. ... The first rumours about the poisoning of the water, immediately followed by accusations, imprisonments and burnings at the stake, had begun in Périgord on Holy Thursday (16 April) of 1321. They had rapidly spread throughout Aquitaine. The previous year the region had been infested by bands of so-called Pastoureaux, who originated in Paris: troops of boys and girls about fifteen years old, barefoot and in rags, who marched along bearing a banner marked with the cross. They said they wanted to embark for the Holy Land. They had neither leaders, nor weapons, nor money. Many people received them benevolently and fed them for the love of God. When they reached Aquitaine, in order ‘to gain popular favour’, Bernard Gui states, the Pastoureaux began to try to baptize the Jews by force. Those who refused were robbed or killed. The authorities were concerned. At Carcassonne, for example, they intervened in defence of the Jews inasmuch as they were ‘servants of the king’. Many people, however, (this is Jean de Saint-Victor writing) approved of the Pastoureaux's violent actions, saying that ‘one mustn't oppose the faithful in the name of the heathen’.

It was precisely from Carcassonne, probably towards the end of 1320 (and at any rate before February 1321), that the consuls of the seneschal had sent a protest to the king. Abuses and excesses of various kinds were disturbing the life of the cities under their rule. Royal officials' violation of the prerogatives of the local courts forced the parties in dispute to go to Paris, at great inconvenience and expense, for the trials; what's more, they forced the merchants to pay heavy fines, unjustly accusing them of usury. Not content with making usurious loans, the Jews prostituted and violated the wives of the poor Christians who were unable to pay the interest; they reviled the consecrated host, which they received from the hands of the lepers and other Christians; they were guilty of every kind of monstrosity in defiance of God and the faith. The consuls pleaded that the Jews be driven from the kingdom, so that faithful Christians would not be punished for their nefarious sins. Moreover, they denounced the vile intentions of the lepers, who were preparing to spread the disease by which they were afflicted ‘with poisons, pestilential potions, and sorceries’. In order to prevent the spread of the contagion, the consuls suggested that the king segregate the lepers in buildings set aside for the purpose, separating males from females. They declared themselves ready to provide for the maintenance of those secluded and the administration of the revenues, the alms and pious inheritances that they would receive now or in the future. In this fashion, they concluded, the lepers would at last cease to multiply.

4. To get rid of the credit monopoly exercised by the Jews once and for all; to administer the rich revenues enjoyed by the leper asylums — these aims, set out by the Carcassonne consuls, were declared with brutal clarity in their protest to the king. Only a few months before the same consuls had tried to defend the Jewish communities against the plunder and massacres perpetrated by the bands of Pastoureaux. This had probably not been a gesture of disinterested humanity. For behind the list of complaints sent to the King of France, we perceive the clear determination of an aggressive mercantile class, anxious to sweep away competition — that of the Jews — now deemed intolerable. It is possible that the (doomed) plans for administrative centralization implemented by Philip the Fifth precisely during those months, helped to exacerbate the tensions. The centre's attempt to weaken local identities fed hostility in the periphery toward the least protected groups.

[...] The terrible famine of 1315-18 had certainly intensified hostility towards Jewish money lenders.³ And elsewhere the tensions provoked at all social levels by the establishment of a monetary economy had for some time tended to find an outlet in anti-Semitic hatred. In many parts of Europe the Jews were accused of poisoning wells, of practising ritual murders, of profaning the consecrated host.

[...]

5. ... The Lateran Council of 1215 had ordered the Jews to carry on their clothes a disk, usually yellow, red or green. For their part the lepers had to wear special clothes: a grey or (more rarely) black cloak, a scarlet cap and hood, and sometimes a wooden rattle (cliquette). These identification marks had been extended to cagots or ‘white lepers’ (assimilated to the Jews in Brittany), who were otherwise commonly distinguished from the healthy only by the absence of ear lobes and bad breath: the Council of Nogaret (1290) decreed that they must carry a red badge on the chest or on a shoulder. The imposition of identifying marks on Jews and lepers so that they could be immediately recognized, decided upon by the Council of Marciac (1330), indicates the extent to which a common stigma of infamy now attached to both groups. ‘Beware of the friendship of a lunatic, of a Jew or of a leper’, read an inscription placed over the door of the Parisian cemetery of the Holy Innocents. [...]

But toward the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century, their position as marginal beings was transformed into segregation. The ghettos rose little by little throughout Europe, initially opted for by the Jewish communities themselves to ward off hostile incursions. And in 1321, with striking parallelism, the lepers were also confined.

[...]

6. ... On 16 April 1321, the day of Holy Thursday, the mayor of Périgueux ordered the lepers previously sheltered in the leper asylums in the vicinity to assemble in one place, separating males from females. The first rumours concerning the poisoning of wells and fountains — spread anonymously — were evidently already circulating. The lepers were interrogated, doubtless tortured. The trials concluded with general executions at the stake (27 April). The representatives of the city of Périgueux left for Tours on 3 May to inform the king of what had happened. But meanwhile, since Easter Day, an investigation into the poisoners had also begun at Isle-sur-Tarn. The interrogations were conducted by a group of citizens from Toulouse, Montauban and Albi. The lepers and cagots of the leper asylums of Isle-sur-Tam, Castelnau de Montmirail, Gaillac, Montauban, and so on, were accused of having scattered poisons and spells (fachilas), were interrogated, and tortured. [...]

News of the lepers' imminent plot had spread from Carcassonne. The guilty were discovered and punished everywhere. Their confessions fuelled the persecution. The news burnt like a fuse, crossing France all the way to the King. 

7. But it was not only the secular authorities that began to act. Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers (later Pope Benedict XII), charges Marc Rivel, his representative, with the task of finding out about the poisons and evil powder (super pocionibus sive factilliis) scattered by the Provençal lepers. Pamiers is very close to Carcassonne, the epicentre of the initiative, whose consuls had been the first to sound the alarm about the venenis et potionibus pestiferis et sortilegiis with which the lepers were preparing to spread the evil spell. And in Pamiers on 4 June, before Rivel appears the accused Guillaume Agassa, head (commendator) of the nearby leper asylum of Lestang. The proceedings against him, which have come down to us in their entirety, give some idea of what the hundreds of trials of lepers conducted throughout France during that summer of 1321, the records of which have been lost or not yet retrieved, were like. [...]

8. It is clear that in his trial torture and threats played a decisive role. Agassa was subjected to torture even prior to the interrogations. But the initial results were disappointing. Agassa denounces a couple of accomplices, sketches the general outlines of the conspiracy, but does not show much imagination. Then, obviously under pressure from the judges, new details gradually emerge: the meeting of the lepers, the promises of the King of Granada and the Sultan of Babylon. Finally, with the third interrogation, the picture is complete. Agassa admits that he has abjured the faith, trampled on the cross, profaned the consecrated host under the threatening gaze of the Moor brandishing his scimitar. In order to convince him to make these confessions, the judges had probably promised to save his life. [...] So, during the course of the trial, little by little Agassa's version is made to coincide with the judges' prior version. If we compare it with the versions circulated by the contemporary chronicles, we see that it is a compromise between the simpler one, which attributed the plot solely to the lepers, and the more complex one, according to which the lepers had been recruited by the Jews, who had in turn acted at the instigation of the King of Granada. In Agassa's confessions we find the latter, accompanied by the Sultan of Babylon; we find the lepers; but the Jews are once again absent. [...]

9. In the ferocious royal edict issued on 21 June in Poitiers, the lepers were once again named as solely responsible for the conspiracy. At first sight this is surprising, because on 11 June riots had broken out in Tours against the Jews, followed by arrests, since they were thought to be accomplices of the leper poisoners.[...] With methods presumably similar to those employed in Agassa's case, the authorities had hastened to extort proof of the Jews' guilt. [...] On 14 or 15 June [1321], the Jewish communities of the kingdom of France had been sentenced to pay an exorbitant fine for crimes of usury: 150,000 livres tournois, to be divided up according to each community's ability to pay. Faced with an outburst of popular anger (orchestrated from above) the representatives of the communities had tried to ward off the worst by yielding to Philip the Fifth's demands for money. [...]

10. It is a long missive sent by Philippe de Valois, Count of Anjou (and later King of France under the name Philip the Sixth) to Pope John XXII. [...] Here is what Philippe de Valois had written. On the Friday after the feast of St John the Baptist (i.e., 26 June) there had been a solar eclipse in the counties of Anjou and of Touraine. During the day, for a period of four hours, the sun had appeared enflamed and red as blood; during the night the moon had been seen covered with spots and black as sackcloth. Such observations (implicit in the text was a reference to Apocalypse 6. 12-13) led people to believe that the end of the world was imminent. There had been earthquakes; fiery spheres had fallen from the heavens, setting fire to the thatched roofs of the houses a dreadful dragon had appeared in the sky, murdering many people with its fetid breath. The next day people began to attack the Jews because of their evil deeds against the Christians. During the search of the house of a Jew named Bananias, in a room that was set apart, inside the casket containing his money and secrets, was found a skin of a ram inscribed with Hebrew characters and sealed. The cord of the seal was crimson-coloured silk. The seal, of purest gold and weighing the equivalent of nineteen Florentine florins, was a most skilfully carved crucifix that represented a monstrous Jew or Saracen atop a ladder leaning against the cross, in the act of defecating on the sweet face of the Saviour.

[...]

11. ... The lengthening of the chain evoked to explain the conspiracy (lepers—Jews—Viceroy of Granada—King of Jerusalem, etc.) served to focus attention on the closest intermediaries. The guilt of the lepers was by now taken for granted, regarded as of secondary importance given the unfolding events. An attempt was being made to kindle a new wave of persecutions against the Jews, and involved turning to the Pope in order to circumvent the King's hesitation. The latter was indirectly criticized in the reference made by Bananias (or rather the person writing on his behalf) to the greed of the Christians, who had preferred to extort ransom from the Jews instead of exterminating them. 

12. To those same days can probably be traced the fabrication of other proofs of the Jews' participation in the plot: two letters on parchment penned by the same hand, accompanied by seals, both in French, followed by an appendix in Latin. The first, by the King of Granada, is addressed to ‘Samson the Jew, son of Elias’; the second, by the King of Tunis, ‘to my brothers and their sons’. The King of Granada stated that he had been informed that Samson had paid the lepers with the money sent him; he recommended that they should be paid well, considering that 115 of them had sworn to play their part. He enjoined them to take the poisons that had already been sent and have them placed in the cisterns, wells and fountains. If the powders were not sufficient, he would send more. ‘We have promised to return the Promised Land to you,’ he wrote, ‘and in that regard we shall keep you up to date.’ [...]

13. ... Philip sent to the seneschals and bailiffs a letter in which he stated that he had ordered ‘the capture of all the Jews in our kingdom’ because of the horrendous crimes committed by them, and especially their 

«participation and complicity in meetings and conspiracies conducted long since by lepers in order to place deadly poisons in wells and fountains and other places ... to bring about the death of the people and subjects of our kingdom.»

[...]

The letter was dated Paris, 26 July; on 6 August it was sent to the seneschal of Carcassonne — the man who, in conjunction with his colleagues from the neighbouring cities, had lit the spark that would set off the conspiracy with his message to the King a few months earlier. Thus the circle was complete. Further copies of the royal letter were sent, inter alia, to the seneschals of Poitou, Limoges, and Toulouse, to the bailiffs of Normandy, Amiens, Orleans, Tours, Mâcon, and the Provost of Paris.

14. So, the sum of 150,000 livres tournois, extorted from the Jews by Philip the Fifth in the middle of June as the price for his silence, served only to delay the persecution for a few weeks. At best it led to the inclusion of the request in the King's letter to the authorities, not to employ torture indiscriminately. A tragic trick, destined to be repeated many times (even in recent times). The trials, followed by the burning, of Jews who had confessed to complicity with the lepers continued for two more years, in tandem with the exaction of the enormous fine (later reduced to 100,000 livres). In the spring or summer of 1323 (in any case before 27 August) Philip the Fifth's successor, Charles the Fourth, expelled the Jews from the kingdom of France.⁴

15. The seneschal of Carcassonne and the nearby cities had requested the segregation of the lepers and the expulsion of the Jews in the message sent to Philip the Fifth between the end of 1320 and the beginning of 1321. After a little more than two years both had been obtained, thanks to the intervention of the King, the Pope, Philip of Valois (future King of France), Jacques Fournier (future pontiff), Jean Larchevêque, Lord of Parthenay, of the inquisitors, judges, notaries, local political authorities — and, of course, the anonymous mobs that massacred lepers and Jews, ‘without waiting’, as the chronicler wrote, ‘for either provost or bailiff’. Everyone had played his part: some had fabricated the forged proofs of the conspiracy and some had spread them abroad; some had instigated and some had been incited; some had judged, some had tortured, some had killed (according to the rituals prescribed by law or outside them). Given the coincidence between the starting point and the destination of this very rapid series of events, there is little alternative but to conclude that not one, but two conspiracies occurred in France between the spring and summer of 1321. The wave of violence against lepers unleashed by the first conspiracy spread throughout the south and south-west, with an outbreak toward the east, in the area of Lausanne.⁵ But the wave that followed very shortly after, fuelled by the conspiracy against the Jews, predominantly struck the north and the north-east.⁶ It is probable that in some places the persecution fell indiscriminately upon both.⁷

In referring to conspiracy it is not our wish to simplify unduly a plot whose origins were complex. It may very well be that the first accusations arose spontaneously from below. But the rapidity with which the repression spread in an age when news travelled on foot, on muleback, at most on horseback; and the geographical diffusion from the likely epicentre of Carcassonne ... — the combination of these reveals the presence of deliberate and coordinated actions, intended to guide a series of pre-existing tensions in a predetermined direction.  Conspiracy means this, and this alone. To assume the existence of a single coordinating centre, composed of one or more persons, would obviously be absurd and in any case refuted by the delayed and contested emergence of the accusation against the Jews. [...] To characterize the whole episode as an obscure convulsion of the collective mentality which swept up all layers of society is a mystification. Beneath the apparent uniformity of behaviour we detect a field of forces, of varying intensity, now converging, now conflicting.

[...]

17. ... Such accusations were not new. We find them already formulated in the chronicles of the preceding century. Vincent of Beauvais attributed the children's crusade of 1212 to a diabolical plan of the Old Man of the Mountain, leader of the mysterious sect of Assassins, who had promised freedom to two imprisoned clerics provided they bring him all the young boys of France. According to the chronicles of Saint-Denis, the crusade of the Pastoureaux in 1251 was the result of a pact between the Sultan of Babylon and a Hungarian master of magical arts. The latter, having promised, through the power of spells, to bring the Sultan all the young men of France, at the price of four gold bisanti each, had gone to Picardy where he had made a sacrifice to the devil by casting a powder into the air: all the Pastoureaux had followed him, leaving their animals in the fields. On the person of another leader of the same crusade (Matthew Paris added) had been found poisonous powders and letters from the Sultan, written in Arabic and Chaldean, which promised large sums of money in the event of the undertaking being crowned with success. Perhaps someone had interpreted the 1320 crusade of the Pastoureax in the same way; what is not in doubt is that the following year, the same pattern reappears not only in the chronicles, but in the forged letters and the forced confessions extracted from lepers and Jews alike. 

In all these accounts we encounter the fear aroused by the unknown and menacing world that loomed beyond the confines of Christianity. Every disquieting or incomprehensible event was attributed to the infidels' machinations. There is almost always a Muslim sovereign behind it, generally inspired by the devil: the Old Man of the Mountain (Vincent of Beauvais); the Sultan of Babylon (Matthew Paris, Chronicle of Saint-Denis, Agassa's trial); the King of Jerusalem (Bananias' letter); the Kings of Tunis and Granada (Agassa's trial, the apocryphal letters of Mâcon, the continuator of Guillaume of Nangis and his imitators). Directly or indirectly, these characters conspire with isolated figures or with groups, marginal from a geographical or ethnic-religious point of view (the Hungarian master, the Jews), promising them money in exchange for the execution of the plot. The plot is materially executed by other groups, who, because of their age (the children), their social inferiority (the lepers), or both of these reasons (the Pastoureaux) are readily susceptible to false promises of wealth and power. The causal chain can be long or short — in Teruel, for instance, the search for those responsible stops at the Jews (in the first version a Breton filled the role). Certain stages are occasionally omitted (in Agassa's confession the Muslim kings conclude an agreement with the lepers, ignoring the Jews). Others may be repeated (in his letter to Bananias, the King of Jerusalem corrupts the Jews through the King of Granada). In general, however, the chain we have described implies a gradual series of stages that leads from the enemy without to the enemy within, who is his accomplice and, as it were, a manifestation of him — the latter a figure destined for a long and successful career. And if the first was by definition beyond the reach of justice, the second was within reach, waiting to be massacred, imprisoned, tortured, burnt. 

A series of sensational cases in France during the first decades of the fourteenth century helped to spread this fear of conspiracies. Among the many accusations circulated against the order of the Templars was that of having made secret agreements with the Saracens. Guichard, Bishop of Troyes, and Hugues Geraud, Bishop of Cahors, were tried in 1308 and in 1317 on respective charges of having attempted to kill Queen Joan of Navarre and Pope John XXII by magical means.⁸ These are cases that seem to anticipate on a minor scale the conspiracy attributed some years later to the lepers and Jews. Here for the first time the tremendous potentialities for social purification contained in the conspiratorial schema (every phantasmic plot tends to generate a real one of an inverse nature) were fully exploited. Amidst the fear of a physical and metaphorical contagion, the ghettos, the infamous badges on clothes, were no longer sufficient.

¹ In this account I almost exclusively follow the continuator of Guillaume de Nangis, from whom derives, more or less strictly, the chronicle of Saint-Denis, Jean de Saint-Victor and the continuator of the chronicle of Gerard de Frachet. See also the introduction by H. Geraud and G. de Nangis to Chronique latine, Paris 1843, I, pp. XVI ff. On the Chinon episode see also H. Gross, Gallia Judaica, Paris 1897, pp. 577-8, 584--5.
² Genealogia comitum Flandriae.
³[...] see, in addition, J. Kershaw, ‘The Great Famine and Agrarian Crisis in England 1315-1322’, Past and Present, 59 (May 1973), pp. 3--50, which emphasizes, however, on the basis of M.-J. Larenaudie, ‘Les famines en Languedoc aux XIVe et XVe siècles’ (Annales du Midi, LXIV (1952), p. 37), that the documents for these years do not allude to a famine in the Languedoc. In this Guy Bois has detected the symptom of a profound crisis of the feudal system: cf. The Crisis of Feudalism, Cambridge 1984, pp. 261 ff.
⁴ Cf. Langlois, art. cit., pp. 26-4-5, 277-8; Blumenkranz, art. cit., p. 38, which on the basis of new documents sets the time of expulsion, traditionally fixed at 1321, later. According to some scholars (among them S.W. Baron) the expulsion of the Jews from France occurred only in 1348: a thesis that is hard to accept (see, however, R. Kohn, ‘Les Juifs de la France du Nord à travers les archives du Parlement de Paris (1359?-1394)’ Revue des études juives, 141, 1982, p. 17).
⁵ Cf. N. Morard, ‘A propos d'une charte inédite de l'évêque Pierre d'Oron: lépreux brûlés à Lausanne en 1321’, Zeitschriftfar schweizerische Kirchengeschichte, 75 (1981), pp. 231-8: a document of 3 September 1321 complained that the burning of leper poisoners had led to the suspension of alms and annuities to innocent lepers.
⁶ I. Langmuir insists upon the absence of the accusation of ritual homicide in southern France, where the Jews were more integrated into the social life, in ‘L'absence d'accusation de meurtre rituel à l'Ouest du Rhône’, Cahiers de Fanjeaux, 12 (1977), pp. 235-49, especially p. 247.
⁷ There is information on the sentencing of lepers as poisoners in the Artois (cf. A. Bourgeois, Lépreux et maladreries du Pas-de-Calais (Xe-XVIIIe siècles), Arras 1972, pp. 68, 256 and 258) in Metz (cf. C. Buvignier, Les maladreries de la Cité de Verdun, 1882, p. 15), and beyond the borders of France, in Flanders (see above, p. 36). A Parisian chronicle mentions persecution of the Jews in Burgundy, Provence and Carcassonne for the same reason (Chronique, p. 59). This information should be rounded out by the kind of analytical study of the entire episode which regrettably has yet to be attempted. Evidence as to the atmosphere produced during the months of persecution is offered by the confession of a friar, Gaufridus de Dimegneyo, who presented himself at the Cistercian monastery of Chalon-sur-Saône asking to be given absolution for a sin he had committed ten years before, when lepers and Jews were sent to the stake by the secular authorities ‘for their sins, as was commonly believed’. Gaufridus had seen a man with a bag full of seeds enter his father's tavern and had denounced him as a poisoner. Tortured, the man had said that he was a thief and that he had with him a sleeping potion; accordingly he had been hung (cf. Grayzel, art. cit., pp. 79-80).
⁸ On the first case, see Barber, op. cit., p. 179. On the second (which ended at the stake), see Valois, art. cit., pp. 408 ff., which expresses doubts about the guilt of the defendant; and [...] Since this is a conspiracy that involves a small group, the accusations, though unverifiable, are less absurd than those directed at Jews and lepers; but given the predictably stereotyped confessions (solicited by torture) one cannot share Valois' attitude.

Critique of Economic Reason

André Gorz

The direct agent of the domination by machines of Nature and the auto-poiesis of mankind is a proletarian class of individuals who are 'stunted' and 'crippled', stupefied by their labour, oppressed by hierarchy and dominated by the machinery they serve.
Herein lies the contradiction which is to become the meaning and motor of history: as a result of capitalist rationalization, work ceases to be an individual activity and a submission to basic necessities; but at the precise point at which it is stripped of its limitations and servility to become poiesis, the affirmation of universal strength, it dehumanizes those who perform it.

[...]

To make the cost of labour calculable, it was necessary to make its output calculable as well. It had to be possible to treat it as a quantifiable material unit; in other words, to be able to measure it in itself, as an independent entity, isolated from the individual characteristics and motivations of the worker. But this also implied that the workers would enter the process of production stripped of their personality and individuality, their personal goals and desires, as simple labour power, which  was interchangeable and comparable to that of any other workers and which served goals which were not their own and, moreover, meant nothing to them.

The scientific organization of industrial labour consisted in a constant effort to separate labour, as a quantifiable economic category, from the workers themselves. This effort initially took the form of the mechanization, not of labour, but of the actual workers: that is, it took the form of output targets imposed by the rhythm or rate of work. Indeed, piece-work, which would have been the most economically rational method, proved from the beginning to be impracticable: for workers at the end of eighteenth century, 'work' meant the application of an intuitive know-how¹ that was an integral part of a time-honoured rhythm of life, and they would not have dreamt of intensifying and prolonging their efforts in order to earn more: ‘The worker 'did not ask: how much can I earn in a day if I do as much work as possible? but: how much must I work in order to earn the wage, 2½  marks, which I earned before and takes care of my traditional needs?'²

The unwillingness of the workers to do a full day's labour, day after day,  was the principal reason why the first factories went bankrupt. The bourgeoisie put this reluctance down to 'laziness' and 'indolence'. They saw no other means of overcoming this problem than to pay the workers such meagre wages that it was necessary for the latter to do a good ten hours’ toil every day of the week in order to earn enough to survive:

«It is a fact well known... that the manufacturer [worker] who can subsist on three days' work will be idle and drunken the remainder of the week... The poor will never work any more time in general than is necessary just to live and support their weekly debauches... We can fairly aver that a reduction of wages in the woollen manufacture would be a national blessing and advantage, and no real injury to the poor.»³

In order to cover its need for a stable workforce, nascent industry in the end resorted to child labour as being the most practical solution. For as Ure observed, writing of workers from rural or artisanal backgrounds, ‘it is found nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty into useful factory hands'.⁴ Ure found that after the factory owner's initial struggle to break their habits of nonchalance or idleness, they either spontaneously left his employ or were dismissed by the overseers for lack of attention to their duties.

The economic rationalization of labour did not, therefore, consist merely in making pre-existent productive activities more methodical and better adapted to their object. It was a revolution, a subversion of the way of life, the values, the social relations and relation to Nature, the invention in the full sense of the word of something which had never existed before. Productive activity was cut off from its meaning, its motivations and its object and became simply a means of earning a wage. It ceased to be part of life and became the means of 'earning a living’. Time for working and time for living became disjointed; labour, its tools, its products acquired a reality distinct from that of the worker and were governed by decisions taken by someone else.

¹ This is not to say it did not demand an apprenticeship but that this apprenticeship did not demand a formalized standard knowledge.
² Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, London/Sydney, 1985, p.60
³ J. Smith, ‘Memoirs of Wool’, quoted by Stephen Marglin in André Gorz, ed., The Division of Labour, Hassocks, 1976, p.34.
⁴ Andrew Ure, Philosophy of Manufacturers, London 1835, p.16, quoted by Marx, Capital Volume 1, Harmondsworth, 1976, p.549.

The Artist as Producer

Dan Graham

«Jewish popular tradition credits ... Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel with the creation of a Golem—a creature produced by the magical power of man and taking on human shape ... The Golem was produced by the human mind [as] a reflection of God’ s power ... The Rabbi put a slip of paper with the mystic ... name of God [and] the lump of clay ... Every Sabbath the Rabbi would remove the slip of paper with God’s name. Once he forgot to remove the Name [and] ... the Golem ran amuck. When the Rabbi removed the Name of God from the Golem’s mouth it fell to the ground ... a lifeless mess. It is written that a Golem is but a replica of Adam. As God created Adam from clay and invested him with a spark of intelligence and spiritual life, so the Rabbi had created his Golem.»¹

In the early 1950s, a new category, the “teenager,” a class which Karl Marx hadn’t predicted, emerged as a force in America. Because of economic changes in America, teens were not required as a work-force immediately after school; they were more vital as a consuming, a new leisure class to be educated as total consumers if the mass production, assembly-line, automated economy was to continue. They didn’t inherit the Protestant work-ethic of their parents. Like sci-fi stories of robots created with clearly delineated functions by a dominant human order (which, because of their particular view of the world, develop their own, non-human consciousness, and a more advanced critique of the society created for them for their own purposes), the teenage class was both exploited and given the false consciousness of freedom. However, as the concept of total leisure time turned to boredom, teenagers’ understanding of their freedom led to revolt—or at least pseudo-revolt. But adult society must always be tolerant, for the simple fact that teenagers and rock music are helping the economy.

Rock presented a departure from pop music; it was for one “class” alone—the “teenager.” On one hand, it appeared to be totally exploitative, a music controlled (at first) by “out for bucks” adults using black urban blues in order to turn their lyrics into vehicles for publicity-created teenage stars like Hollywood players. In fact, this was only half the truth. Ambiguously built into rock music was the teenager’s awareness that it is a commercialized form; the music and lyrics are and are not to be taken totally at face value. Rock preceded " Pop art" by 15 years in that the listener could discern in its ironies the nature of its compromised position. Although it exploits adolescents as a vast, new consumer market, whose consciousness it tries to form and manipulate through radio, television and films, the industry doesn’t care as long as it can make money out of the music. At the same time, rock expresses the real ideology of adolescent culture.

In 1958 a riot broke out during one of Alan Freed’s highly popular stage shows. Observing the police hassling the audience with unnecessary zeal, Freed responded from the stage: “l guess the police don’t want you kids to have any fun.” Acts like this led to Freed being seen as a dangerous pied piper of youth who, with rock, promoted juvenile delinquency and instigated riot and revolution. Like other radio jockeys, Freed accepted gifts from record companies or artists wishing to promote their act. But although not alone in this practice, Freed was singled out by a Congressional Committee investigating what it called “payola” (plugging records). Because he refused to testify against associates or publicly recant, Freed lost his radio contract. He died of throat cancer a few years later in his late 30s. As parental society repressed their fear of black violence and projected “delinquency” onto their kids, Freed became a scapegoat, accused of exploiting teenagers’ maladjustments to society for his own financial gain.

While teens identified with the black music Freed played in his first Cleveland broadcasts, Freed altered his radio personality to the jive style of black musicians—he helped write, produce and promote both black and white groups he discovered. White teens copied the blacks’ use of double entendre to covertly communicate sexual and political protest. Parents feared rock ‘n’ roll because it precipitated lewd dance and aped the mannerisms of blacks in the northern cities and blacks in tribal Africa revolting against the colonial masters. Rock lyrics such as “Be Bop A Lula” and choruses like “Papa Mu Mu Maw,” suggested a return to the Stone Age.

Rock ideology of “fun” was born of the futility of deferred pleasure. In a world that seemed doomed as the specter of the A-bomb haunted teenagers, sex was no longer linked to family responsibility or reproduction. And rock is based on sex—it elevates the power of male adolescent sexuality. Anti-Oedipal, it mocks parental belief in sexual sublimation, marriage and work as necessary. Rock heroes are unrepentant sinners; rock groups form a new model for communal, non-nuclear families.

Rock stars, who are both real adolescents and fictions of the entertainment world, become models for a new class that refuses to grow up. Rock and adolescence are eternal states. “Teenagers” re-deploy the Victorian idea of childhood as angelic and innocent; they see teen sexuality as innocent and angelic, relating to the purity and ecstasy of sexual feeling divorced from adult repression and responsibility, family and conventional male/female roles. Sex is androgynous; teenagers are “teen angels.”

In the 1960s, rock music merged with “counterculture,” resistance to the Vietnam War and various personal liberation movements. Hippies believed that one died symbolically when one reached 30; their slogan was “Don’ t trust anyone over 30.”

Herbert Marcuse’s writing, in which American “Counterculture” was joined to the politics of Paris, May 1968, and “Situationism,” disputed Freud’ s insistence on the triumph of the “Death Instinct.” This instinct, and the tendency of an organism to seek equilibrium, should be seen more as a Nirvana. Its destructive impulse should be diverted from its use for social control by the liberation of its energies. Along with the Life Energies, in a non-repressive re-sexualization, the genitals used in reproduction would return to the state of “polymorphous perversity” of the child. “Only with the entire body re-eroticized,” argued Marcuse in An Essay on Liberation (1969), “could alienated labor, grounded in the non-genital areas of the body, be overcome.” Aesthetic play would replace the suffering of work. Marcuse was a political anarchist, refusing all established order. His belief was that life could only be lived in the present here and now.

Yippies paralleled the Situationists in France, creating ironic honor and “counter-spectacles” in the heart of corporate America. They distributed free money at the Stock Exchange, washed police cars and scheduled a free concert for police involved in suppressing a race riot in Newark. Abbie Hoffman titled his best-selling book Steal This Book (1971). The paradox was that the media saw it as a “con”—P.R. to gain attention as much for Hoffman as for the “Yippie” Movement, a ploy to penetrate the market. It was Hoffman’s media “star” quality which, in the first place, guaranteed an interested buying public. Thus, Hoffman and his book were defined in terms of both media stereotypes and the publisher’ s economic needs (to promote publishing events by temporarily famous personages).

In the 70s, punk rock questioned the notion of the 60s rock star. It saw the rock star entrenched in corporate rock show biz: “Take a band that’s good, you bust it up and sell 3 times as many records,” noted the Akron, Ohio band, Devo. Punk groups like The Stooges, Pere Ubu, and the Ramones, coming out of the post-Vietnam War disillusionment and urban devastation of American Cities, broke with the position rock performers had been placed in. “What do you think rock and roll is in America,” asked Devo, “besides propaganda for corporate capitalist life? ... Since pop music is definitely a vulgar art form connected with consumerism, the position of any artist, in ‘pop’ entertainment, is really self-contempt.”

Andy Warhol’s films allude to the Hollywood studio production system (his artist’ s studio becomes a film studio), which was built on the marketable personality of the star. In the 30s producers discovered that the most economic and investable business approach to create product identification for their films was via the name brand of the stars. The star system rationalized consumer demand for brand name products while, at the same time, establishing an easy way to rate, distribute and promote films. As a by-product, it eliminated all but the major studios which had the cash to invest in promoting a star. By the early 70s, the power of the studios as film producers had waned; rock music becoming their main source of income. [...]

Brian Epstein, the first rock manager/entrepreneur as couturier, constructed the Beatles image in terms of hair style and dress code: he had them substitute leather jackets with velvet collars for their original “Gene Vincent” look. Epstein used fashion to package the Beatles and to express his desires.

By the late 60s in Britain and America, rock culture had merged with “Pop” art (the Beatles influenced by Richard Hamilton, Velvet Underground produced by Andy Warhol) and “Conceptual” art (Yoko Ono influenced John Lennon, Art and Language doing rock records). Epstein’ s packaging of the Beatles was influenced by “Pop” art’ s strategies: to avoid the media packaging—appropriating them instead—they packaged themselves first. Andy Warhol is an example of “Pop” art as personality. He avoided packaging by the media by packaging himself first, for the media, becoming in turn the self- referring subject of his art, a self-packaged “star.”

The late 60s dreams of arcadian utopia turned, by the 70s, into a bland corporate rock. The MC 5, the Velvet Underground and Patti Smith among other groups turned rock into an urban political weapon. Patti Smith coming from the poetry and art world sees rock as an art form which could encompass poetry, sculpture, painting—as well as its own form of revolutionary politics: “Everybody says art’s dead or sculpture is finished. I don’t care. Rock ‘n’ roll is in its pterodactyl state, and it’s ours.” Rock criticism and the 50s rock revival begins to make rock self-conscious, academicized, a branch of culture with its own aesthetics and history.

Malcolm McLaren, an art student for nine years, was drawn to rock culture in terms of fashion codes. His boutique, Sex, was an experiment to demonstrate how “the incestuousness of English culture ultimately rest[s] upon clothes which conceal a repressed sexuality.”² McLaren’s anthropologically-inspired media art operations were influenced by art history, Brian Epstein’s ambivalent example, Situationism, and a left-anarchist take on Andy Warhol’s equation of art and business:

«I always found that ..., when I was managing groups, or running a store, or producing a record, or whatever ..., it was best for an artist like me to have a cloak, such as a "business-like" custom. This way ... I could create tremendous chaos under the guise of being business-like and respected.»³

The Sex Pistols, created from the customers of McLaren’s shop, exemplify Warhol’s Idea that everyone will be famous for one hour. The Sex Pistols were also a vehicle through which the corporate entertainment structure could be attacked with humor and destabilizing ploys. With the Pistols and with Bow Wow Wow, McLaren’s strategy was to focus on the economic contradictions within the corporate entity, instead of on the star or the music, and to self- consciously use the media to achieve (media) success, only to expose the machinations of the corporate system. In other words, to use the media to become famous in order to “de-construct” the idea of media-based fame; to show the media for what it really is by forcing its contradictions (and the Pistols’ or Bow Wow Wow’s contradictions as a rock act) into the open. A side effect was the exposure of the relation of the corporate entertainment structure as an economic entity to both its “product” and the media.

«Present to the public a near incompetent rock band that would sing with unprecedented fervor about the politics of nihilism, whatever that was. ... He would wipe out the history of rock ‘n’ roll, making everything that had come before sound effete, compromised and cowardly; start the pop culture story all over again; expose the fragility and repressiveness of welfare state capitalism by eliciting a hail of abuse from those in power.»⁴

As with art in the late 70s, it is hard to tell whether McLaren’s attitude is cynical or revolutionary. McLaren has been accused of “being a Jewish rag-seller from SoHo,” like Alan Freed, Abbie Hoffman, Brian Epstein and Phil Spector, other urban Jews who were producers. All exploited the media for their own purposes and at the same time used this exploitation to carry revolutionary possibilities to the masses. All (but perhaps Epstein) used humor as a liberating weapon. All of these figures had to deal with the media’s revenge for their earlier exploitation of it. According to McLaren, the reason he made The Great Rock and Roll Swindle was to admit his culpability in the Pistols’ “swindle,” and thereby avoid these potential problems,

«I’ve never allowed myself to be upset by my image. ... That’s why I’ve always been able to survive. ... The [record company men] all dance to the same tune. You don’t have people explaining to you that what you are doing is wrong, because you know at the end of the day they all really would so much want to be doing the same thing. They just can’t, that’s all; they’re just a bit too square.»⁵

McLaren is now approaching Hollywood movie companies about projects which he could produce. One of these resembles The Great Rock and Roll Swindle—it is the other side of all sentimental documentaries on the history of rock ‘n’ roll told through clips of the original performers. McLaren’s vehicle would be loosely titled “Rock ‘n’ Roll Godfather,” taking 30 years of rock ‘n’ roll, from 1955 to 1985, and seeing it from the point of view of the entrepreneur and the hustler. Looking at what basically began as a fad that turned into a mega-industry, a sort of Robespierre story, privateer versus the corporation, and using it as a background to make a very tough, hard-core gangster movie:

«Set with that background of 30 years, you trace from one guy’s life, from the age of 18 until the age of 50. From the slums of Brooklyn Bel-Aire mansion with a problem ... you do it almost like Godfather II. A being hung out the window—Robert Stickwood ... with his feet—with "Half-way to Paradise" playing in the background. ... I sold that to Disney.»⁶

McLaren conceived of Bow Wow Wow as a metaphor for Thatcher’s Britain, involving corporate giants versus pirates, romance novel and opera soundtrack: “Sunshine and adventure ... [with] Bluebeard who kidnapped a girl like Annabella. She would be one of those mulatto types a great symbol for this pirate look.”⁷ Instead of working through the network of independent record companies and distribution systems, a return to craft-based small entrepreneurial or primitive capitalism, McLaren’s approach has been to deal with major companies on their own terms in order to expose the contradictions inherent in the system. Piracy is capitalism’s nostalgic dream. The sense of the individual marketeer as an anarchic pirate lingers in such vernacular phrases as “Captains of Industry.” Bow Wow Wow’s first song, “C-30 C-60 C- 90 Go!” encouraged kids to “pirate”—tape—records off the radio, from libraries, and from record shops, rather than buying them. Ironically, the LP was released by the biggest corporation in the entertainment field, EMI. At that moment, record prices were high (partly due to the artificially manipulated oil shortage of the mid-1970s), while cheap cassette players and blank audio tapes enabled kids to illegally “pirate” music, instead of buying it. Encouraging teenage delinquency is part of rock ‘n’ roll tradition—the music industry feels secure that it can continue to translate youth’s “rebellion” into profit in mass marketing terms. The next step was for EMI to release a very inexpensive Bow Wow Wow cassette, E.P. length, of eight new Bow Wow Wow songs in a cigarette-style flip-top pack.

«Both Bow Wow Wow and a new project, a children’s film based on “Beauty and the Beast,” uses the premise of ... a romantic tale... [to look] through clothing [at] how society [defines] its codes ... and a girl’s [simultaneous] awakening to her sexuality.»⁸

Bow Wow Wow was concieved when “child nymphets,” like the model Brooke Shields, were being used in fashion and advertising to eroticize childhood in order to extend to a much younger audience the consumption of eroticized products. This had a dual appeal, both to adults’ prurient interest in young girls (not unlike their appeal a century ago to Lewis Carroll), and to children themselves, who are in touch with “sex” through the magic of the television image.

McLaren used Annabella to produce a Situationist “counter-spectacle.” As she is of mixed Burmese and English blood, Annabella could also function as a symbol of Britain’s colonial people coming back to threaten the pure English blood through miscegenation, and the class system by their economic enterprise. In short, Annabella played the same role in British rock as the black “race record” singers did in America in the early 50s.

The British album cover for the first Bow Wow Wow release used a nearly-nude photo of Annabella in the modern form of a fashion photograph of Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass. The photograph shows two male members of the group posed in romantic costumes, reclining next to Annabella, who is nude. A picnic lunch is spread out on the grass next to them. The fourth member of the group is wading in the pond and McLaren is rowing a boat. The way Annabella is pictured in this photograph alludes to a broader iconography of French Romantic painting. Her coy disposition and nudity recall Ingres’s odalisques, while her exotically colored (hence “Oriental”) skin suggests an oblique relation to another well-known painting, Manet’s Olympia. In Olympia, the girlish prostitute is white and is attended by a black serving maid. Both the naked child prostitute and the exotic black servant (wearing highly fashionable, bourgeois clothes) were unsettling images to the middle-class art public of the mid-nineteenth century. In a Britain subconsciously fearful of the loss of “Britishness” through interracial coupling, Annabella presents a similarly unsettling ambiguity. Is she a normal, British girl, or is she exotic and hence erotically desirable? Or, to put it another way, is she a prostitute, or is she a chaste, middle class virgin? In the iconography of the photograph, according to McLaren’s critics, she is represented as a child prostitute.

T. J. Clark writes about Olympia: “Like any society, the empire needed a representation of sex. ... ‘Prostitution,’ wrote the Westminster Review in 1868, ‘is as inseparable from our present marriage customs as the shadow from the substance. They are two sides of the same shield.’ ... The sign of class in Olympia was nakedness. ... Nakedness is a strong sign of class. ... [Critics] were perplexed that Olympia's class was nowhere but in her body.⁹

In the Bow Wow Wow LP, a Margaret Mead-like anthropological critique of patriarchy is wedded to the light opera or musical review. In a ritual war dance in the song “Hello Daddy (I'll sacrifice you),” inspired by musical comedies such as South Pacific, young Princess Annabella sings of her impending marriage to her brother. This will necessitate the sacrifice, not of her, but of her father, to ensure the success of her queenly reign. Brother/sister incest triumphs over the sacrifice of maidens.

[...]

Since Bow Wow Wow, McLaren seems to be moving from the voyeurism of media spectacle to an autobiographical feeling for his subject(s). With Annabella, McLaren oversaw/staged the spectacle of her erotic blossoming, her child sexuality for us as spectators—and for him. We desired to see, voyeuristically, how female sexuality is produced. In McLaren's first project of 1987, a collaboration with Jeff Beck, he focused on what Freud called the “latency period” before adolescent sexual awareness begins at age thirteen. He intended to “make a very romantic record about courtship, partners, foreplay, being swept off your feet ... a waltz record [based on Strauss] ... with pre-pubescent lyrics. ... It's the romantic period ...that everybody seems to have forgotten ... [but] one always wants to get back to. I've decided to write from that point of view—get my head into being a nine year old—and try to think myself back there.”¹⁰

¹ Gershom Scholem, On The Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York: Schocken, 1969).
² Malcolm McLaren, in conversation with the author.
³ Ibid.
⁴ Greil Marcus, source unknown.
⁵ Malcolm McLaren, in conversation with the author.
⁶ Ibid.
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ Ibid.
⁹ T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
¹⁰ Malcolm McLaren, in conversation with the author.


 

Manifesto Contra o Trabalho

Grupo Krisis

Um cadáver domina a sociedade – o cadáver do trabalho. Todas as potências do globo estão coligadas em defesa desta dominação: o Papa e o Banco Mundial, Tony Blair e Jörg Haider, sindicatos e empresários, ecologistas alemães e socialistas franceses. Todos eles só têm uma palavra na boca: trabalho, trabalho, trabalho.

Quem ainda não desaprendeu de pensar reconhece sem dificuldades a inconsistência desta posição. Porque a sociedade dominada pelo trabalho não vive uma crise transitória, antes está chegada ao seu limite último. Na sequência da revolução microelectrónica, a produção de riqueza desligou-se cada vez mais da utilização da força de trabalho humano – numa escala até há poucas décadas apenas imaginável na ficção científica. Ninguém pode afirmar com seriedade que este processo voltará a parar, e muito menos que possa ser invertido. A venda dessa mercadoria que é a força de trabalho será no século XXI tão promissora como foi no século XX a venda de diligências. Porém, nesta sociedade, quem não consegue vender a sua força de trabalho torna-se «supérfluo» e é atirado para a lixeira social.

Quem não trabalha, não come! Este princípio cínico continua em vigor, hoje mais do que nunca, precisamente porque está a tornar-se irremediavelmente obsoleto. Trata-se de um absurdo: a sociedade, nunca como agora, que o trabalho se tornou supérfluo, se apresentou tanto como uma sociedade organizada em torno do trabalho. Precisamente no momento em que está a morrer, o trabalho revela-se uma potência totalitária que não tolera nenhum outro deus junto de si. Dentro da vida psíquica, dentro dos poros do dia a dia, o trabalho determina os pensamentos e os comportamentos. E ninguém poupa despesas para prolongar artificialmente a vida desse ídolo, o trabalho. O grito paranóico dos que clamam por «emprego» justifica até que se aumente a destruição dos recursos naturais, com resultados há muito conhecidos. Os últimos obstáculos à total comercialização de todas as relações sociais podem ser postos de lado, sem qualquer crítica, na mira de meia dúzia de miseráveis «postos de trabalho». E a ideia de que é melhor ter um trabalho «qualquer» do que não ter nenhum trabalho tornou-se uma profissão de fé universalmente exigida.

Quanto mais se torna claro que a sociedade do trabalho chegou definitivamente ao fim, mais violentamente se recalca este facto na consciência pública.

Why Italy?

Felix Guattari

We have seen it at work in a spectacular manner in both the U.S.S.R. and China. The Western democratic tradition, the evolution toward Eurocommunism, and the humanism of the socialist parties made us believe that we weren't exposed to that kind of totalitarianism. It's true that the modes of subjection function differently. Yet there is an irreversible tendency pushing the State to exert its power no longer by traditional means of coertion, like the police or army, but also through every means of negotiation in every domain, from the systematic shaping of children in national education to the immense power of the media, particularly television. This State apparatus is highly visible but often powerless on the national level since real decisions are often taken at the international level. It is on the contrary more and more powerful in its miniaturized interventions.

If one's nose is pressed too close to national realities, the impression is that England is very different from the existing regime in Germany, France or Italy. But stepping back, one can see that a certain kind of totalitarianism is being set up which goes along very well with traditional divisions. The machines of production, formation, and reproduction of the work force imply an immense machinery of State power, and then all kinds of cogwheels in politics, unions, education, sports, etc. In this regard I believe the Italian experience to be the most ex­emplary, for there we can see the lines of flight and the road that lies ahead. It doesn't lead to an alternative of the English type, or a French popular front, whether on the left or on the right. It amounts to making sure that the Communist Party, mass organizations, and unions will function at full capacity within a na­tional consensus like the Italian political spectrum. 

A kind of State regime is now being devised which won't require an October revolution or even a Chinese revolution, but will produce the same result: the peo­ple will be controlled by every available means, even if they must be conceded a measure of political and regional diversity.

Why Italy? Because the future of England, France and Germany is Italy [...].

What I'm saying can only be understood in relation to what I have called the molecular revolution. There is a certain level of desire, violence, and revolt which has become impossible and unbearable in societies such as they have developed at both the technological and social level. Let's take the example of terrorism: throughout the history of the Worker's Movement, there have been armed actions and acts of terrorism. There have been enormous discussions throughout the communist movement to put into perspective and to situate armed action. Nowadays it's no longer a theoretical problem, but a problem of the collective sensibility as it has been shaped by the State apparatus with its audiovisual ten­tacles: one doesn't accept any more the idea of death, the idea of violence, the idea of rupture, or even the idea of the unexpected. A general infantilisation now pervades all human relationships. If there's a strike at the National Electric Com­pany, be careful. A code of ethics for the strike must be drawn up. Confrontation in Bologna? Be careful, a full negotiation must be made. And if one senses an aberrant factor, if there's a handful or resistors who don't accept the ethical code, it's a black hole. The most beautiful black hole that's been seen was New York during the black-out. When one can no longer see, anything — a great mass, strange fauna — can loom up out of the dark. 

A certain type of brutality inherited from capitalist societies of the 19th century was symmetrical with a certain truth of desire. Some people could still free themselves. The progressive tightening up by the Marxist worker's movement has put a stop to that. Today you can't desire rupture, you can't desire revolution, or indeed anything which puts in question the framework and values of contem­porary society. Now the control begins in childhood, in the nursery and in school, for everyone must be forced into the dominant redundancies of the system. The repressive societies now being established have two new characteristics: repres­sion is softer, more diffuse, more generalized, but at the same time much more violent. For all who can submit, adapt, and be channeled in, there will be a lessen­ing of police intervention. There will be more and more psychologists, even psychoanalysts, in the police department; there will be more community therapy available; the problems of the individual and of the couple will be talked about everywhere; repression will be more psychologically comprehensive. The work of prostitutes will have to be recognized, there will be a drug advisor on the radio - in short, there will be a general climate of understanding acceptance. But if there are categories and individuals who escape this inclusion, if people at­tempt to question the general system of confinement, then they will be exter­minated like the Black Panthers in the U.S., or their personalities exterminated as it happened with the Red Army Faction in Germany. Skinnerian conditioning will be used all over.

In no way is terrorism specific to Germany and Italy. In three months France could be crawling with Red Brigades. Considering how power and the media operate, how people are cornered, prisoners in these systems of containment, it's no wonder that some become enraged, and start shooting at people's legs or wherever.

The molecular revolution, however, is produced neither on the level of political and traditional union confrontation, nor on the front of different movements like the Women's Movement, the prostitutes, the Gay Liberation Front, etc., which are often only provisional reterritorializations, even forms of compromise with the State power and the different political forces. There is a miniaturization of forms of expression and of forms of struggle, but no reason to think that one can ar­range to meet or wait at a specific place for the molecular revolution to happen.

At a deeper level in contemporary history, it hardly matters anymore whether one lives in Brezhnev's regime of goulags or under Carterism or Berlinguerism, all the powers are intricated in the same bizarre formula. To be sure there will be con­tradictions, confrontations, landslides, class struggles in the traditional sense, even wars, but it's actually society as a whole that is now shifting. It won't simply be another bourgeois or proletarian revolution. The gears effected by this shift are so minute that it will be impossible to determine whether it's a class confronta­tion or a further economic subjugation. I believe that this shift in society, which implies not only a re-arrangement of relationships among humans, but also among organs, machines, functions, signs, and flux, is an intrahuman revolution, not a simple re-ordering of explicit relationships. There have been major revolu­tionary debacles in history before. In the 18th century, ranks, orders, classifica­tions of all kinds suddenly broke down. Today no one or anything seems to be able to semiotize collectively what's happening. Panic creeps in, and people fall back upon State powers more overwhelming and tentacular, ever more manipulative and mystifying. In Italy the Communist Party is often heard saying: let's save Italy, but the more uncertain Italy's future becomes, the more claims there are to save it. 

In Italy there is no tradition of State power, no civic spirit, nothing like the French tradition of centralism and hierarchical responsibility. The situation therefore is more favorable for bringing about a number of shifts. Entire regions will be downgraded because of the restructuring of capitalism on the international scale. As for the "Italian miracle", or the French miracle, we'd better forget about it. 

I am of a generation which really experienced a deadlocked society. Stalinism then was an institution, a wall blocking the horizon to infinity. I now sense an ex­traordinary acceleration in the decomposition of all coordinates. It's a treat just the same. All this has to crumble down, but obviously it won't come from any revolutionary organization. Otherwise you fall back on the most mechanistic utopias of the revolution, the Marxist simplifications: at the end of the road lies victory... It's not the black hole of the 19th century, lots of things have happened since, like the barbarians at the gates. Political superstructures and systems of representation will collapse or crumble down in ridicule and inanity, but there are already an enormous number of things which function, and function remarkably well, whether at the level of science, esthetics, or in the inventiveness of daily life. There is an extraordinary vitality in the machinic processes. 

The Italians of Radio Alice have a beautiful saying: when they are asked what has to be built, they answer that the forces capable of destroying this society surely are capable of building something else, yet that will happen on the way. I have no idea what the future model of society or of relationships will be. I think it's a false problem, the kind of false problem that Marx and Engels tried to avoid. We can only do one thing, and that's to acknowledge the end of a society. The revolu­tionary process won't stem from a rational, Hegelian, or dialectical framework. In­stead it will be a generalized revolution, a conjunction of sexual, relational, esthetic, and scientific revolutions, all making cross-overs, markings, and currents of deterritorialization. 

On the molecular level, things function otherwise. Looking through the glasses of traditional politics, there is nothing left, for example, of the American radical movement. If one changes glasses, if one peers through the microscope, there is another picture altogether. There is a new sensibility, a new way of relating, a new sort of kindness, all very difficult to define. Historians have a hard time deal­ing with these objects - history of tenderness! In all sorts of complex ways, through the history of the feminist movement and the history of homosexuality, through relationships in general, this new type of sensibility is also the revolution. If revolutionary glasses don't allow us to see that, then there is no more revolu­tion, it's all finished.

There will be no more October revolutions.

An Exegetical Incursion of the Emergent “Intelligent Battlespace”

Manabrata Guha

There remains no more time for reflection. No time to strategize. No time to plan an operation. The need for solutions or, more precisely, outcomes is in the here and the now. Bajito y suavecito is out—at least in war. This is not to say that speed has never been at a premium in war. The race to get the better of an adversary—strategically, operationally and cognitively—has been and continues to be a key indicator of military proficiency. But today, things are different. At least in the context of warfare, what we are witnessing is the veritable collapse of time, and this brings in its wake the need to overhaul (yet again!) how we think about war and, more importantly, how to wage war. 
While Cixin Liu, in the Death’s End, speculated that “every law of physics has been weaponized”, for us, segueing into the second decade of the 21st century, the matter seems less speculative and more about the degree to which this is becoming a reality. Take, for example, Marko Peljhan’s exhibit. Among other things, it represents—even if as an “exit strategy”—the weaponization of the physics of sound. Or, consider the AN/SEQ-3/ XN-1 LaWS, a “directed-energy weapon”, which has been installed on the USS Ponce and has been in service since 2014. This weapon-system represents the weaponization of the physics of light. In other words, it is not excessively speculative to say that not only are we well on our way to weaponize every law of physics, but also that of mathematics, biology, and chemistry. The last, of course, was very likely the first science to have been consciously and actively weaponized. After all, since at least 1000 AD, gunpowder has been used in warfare. But the depth and extent of the weaponization currently at play runs deeper than what we can imagine, which compels us to rethink how and in what ways the human, weapons and tactics are being reconfigured, and to what end.
This is not sensationalism. Nor is it a matter only of interest to sci-fi aficionados or fantasists. Rather, it is a serious matter—serious enough for two Chinese military officers in 1999 to reflect on how “[w]ar in the age of technological integration and globalization has eliminated the right of weapons to label war and, with regard to the new starting point, has realigned the relationship of weapons to war.” Indeed, as they go on to point out, “the appearance of new concepts, and particularly new concept of weapons, has gradually blurred the face of war.” The two Chinese officers discussed these and related topics under the rubric of “unrestricted warfare”, which is grounded on the perhaps not unfounded perception that the world-as-such is weaponizable. Our interest in their discussion, however, lies in one particular assertion that they make, namely that the human, weapons and tactical mix is undergoing a transformation due to a change from “fighting the fight that fits one’s weapons” to “making the weapons to fit the fight.” In the context of military affairs, this is important, for it signals a transformation—strategic, operational, tactical and, one dares to say, cognitive—in the context of weapons technology design which, in and of itself, is indicative of a profound change in the human, weapon, tactical mix. It also leads to the posing of a critical question for the military, but also for violent non-military agents—who eventually may or may not be human—namely what kind of fight can be imagined and, consequently, what kind of weapons can be designed to fight that fight?
But before the question regarding “what kind of fight” can be addressed, it is necessary to pay attention to the emergent battlespace wherein such “fights” can be imagined. While in the past, it was not problematic to define the “physical battlespace” in terms of geography, the human element and the machines of war, today we are much less sanguine about such certainties for, if we recall what the Chinese military theorists that we referred to above noted, the world-as-such is weaponizable. What precisely can this mean? If we mean, as the Chinese theorists do, that the world construed as nature—involving climate, vegetation, physical geography, the hydrosphere etc.—can be weaponized, then that does not break any new ground. We have already seen how the US strategic military establishment—using the infamous Agent Orange—conducted Operation Ranch Hand during which they waged a form of “herbicidal warfare” to destroy the foliage of the dense jungles in specific sectors in the Vietnamese theatre of operations. We have also witnessed the conduct of what was known as Operation Popeye—a chemical weather modification effort—between 1967 and 1972 to prolong and intensify the monsoon season over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in a bid to adversely impact North Vietnamese military operations. And, if we include the Human, then we have seen its weaponization too in the form of the “suicide bomber”. But now, in the 21st century, the notion of the weaponization of the world-as-such is assuming a radically different meaning.
To better grasp the implications of the weaponization of the world-as-such, it is necessary to understand it in the context of what we may refer to as the “intelligent battlespace”, which is inspired by and derived, in part, from the development of the so-called “internet of everything”. In brief, the “internet of everything” is underwritten by the logic of Moore’s Law, and benefits from advances that are being made in energy management in addition to the rapid miniaturization that electronic devices are undergoing. Thus, as the per-unit-cost of components falls rapidly, electronic devices are being increasingly liberated from the need to be hardwired with each other as a precondition for them to be able to communicate between themselves. They are also being either appended to or designed into the world-as-such. As a consequence, as Mark Weiser put it: “The most profound technologies are those that [are] disappear[ing]. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” Thus, as Manual Castell’s notion of “network societies” achieves traction and manifests itself as “smart cities”, the “internet of everything” is gradually ensuring that machines are indeed making “computing an integral, invisible part of the way people live their lives.” They are, in effect, becoming a co-constituent of the world-as-such. 
In the military sphere, this transition—even if not seriously reflected upon—is even more intense and it is already difficult to make distinctions between, for example, the computational and non-computational with definitive clarity, particularly where decision-making is concerned, which is often, in the case of warfare, a matter of life and death. In fact, in the military context, this trend is intensifying to the point where even “the soldier”—that last bastion of anthropic fantasy in the context of war and battle—is being increasingly rendered in digital and informational terms. Take, for example, what Bruce Sterling reported over a decade ago:
The First Company of the 12th Armored Cavalry Regiment prepared for … battle … [A]t the Combined Arms and Tactical Training Center (CATTC) in Fort Knox, KY, the troops prepared to enter SIMNET—a virtual war delivered via network links. With the almost Disney-like mimicry typical of SIMNET operations, the warriors were briefed in an actual field command-post … The attacking enemy would advance from west … But the exact enemy tactics were obscured by the fog of war … Bravo Platoon was the first to spot the approaching enemy scouts … Bravo Platoon saw red and yellow impacts spike their hillside landscape, and a vicious crump of high explosives burst from the Perceptronics audio simulators. As the engagement proceeded, dead men began to show up in the CATTC video classroom. Inside the simulators, their vision blocks had gone suddenly blank with the onset of virtual death. Here in CATTC’s virtual Valhalla, however, a large Electrohome video display unit showed a comprehensive overhead map of the entire battlefield … [T]he dead tank crews filed into the classroom and gazed upon the battlefield from a heavenly perspective. They began to talk. They weren’t talking about pixels, polygons, baud-rates, Ethernet lines, or network architecture. They were talking exclusively about fields of fire, and fall-back positions, and radio traffic and indirect artillery strikes. They weren’t discussing “virtual reality” or anything akin to it.
These soldiers were talking war. 
It is worth re-emphasizing Sterling’s last two sentences: “They weren’t discussing ‘virtual reality’ or anything akin to it. These soldiers were talking war.” In other words, to the soldiers the technology that made this “virtual Valhalla” possible, which included the representation of themselves, had already receded, like Weiser had postulated, into the background.
While these developments are dazzling us with the technological virtuosity at work, they are also obscuring a more critical development, which is particularly relevant in the context of the “intelligent battlespace”. In a provocative essay, George Dyson draws our attention to an emergent state of affairs that arguably transcends the current concerns about “artificial intelligence”. In brief, Dyson argues that the real issue at stake is not necessarily the prospect of digital computation eventually running rampant and subjecting the Human to its dictates; rather, he urges us to pay attention to the insidious nature of what he calls “analogue computation”, whose default tendency is to generate “control systems”. Nevertheless, while pointing out that there is no “precise distinction between analogue and digital computing”, Dyson suggests that, generally speaking, “digital computing deals with integers, binary sequences, deterministic logic, and time that is idealized into discrete increments, whereas analogue computing deals with real numbers, nondeterministic logic, and continuous functions, including time as it exists as a continuum in the real world.” In the context of warfare, “control” is a major concern—thus the emphasis on “command and control”. Yet, the “control” that Dyson is referring to may be a kind of a “meta-control” paradigm, within which the strategic-military command and control system is subsumed. This state of affairs is, as of now, dimly recognized by us, and our current focus remains transfixed by an AI paradigm in which we assume digital computation, which has and continues to proliferate like a virus gone mad; it is both a panacea to our problems and a source for new ones. 
In the context of warfare in the 21st century, particularly where the question of what “kind of fight” is possible is concerned, these considerations are important. This is because the fundamental challenge that this emergent “intelligent battlespace” poses—unlike that posed by “intelligent machines”—is not whether it “respects” the dignity of the Human; rather, it is its propensity to reduce the Human into data-sets which serve as its source of nourishment. With the caveat that what precisely we mean by “intelligent” remains murky as of now, it is important to note that this emergent battlespace is not simply the admixture of physical geography and “intelligent machines”; rather, it is, to use Simondon’s term, a “technogeography”, which is gradually acquiring an awareness of itself. And while this “intelligent battlespace” is indeed materialized by digital computation, its operative logic is underwritten by, as Dyson insightfully points out, the “control paradigm” of analogue computation which, for the most part, remains hidden from view.
One way to understand the import of this emergent “control paradigm” would be to consider the case of “targeting”. Targeting—notionally, at any range—is a matter of determining coordinates, principally geographical, of an object of interest. But there are other coordinates that matter too—often critically. Thus, for example, a “target” emits “information” about itself, which can be in the form of thermal, electromagnetic and other kinds of signatures. These “signatures”, which radiate from an object, allow for its identification and “locking” thereby enabling it to be tracked and, if necessary, interdicted. Note, however, that this process of targeting occurs within a “grid of intelligibility” that presumes a “technogeographical” substrate, that is to say a computational backdrop over and against which targets are, in at least two senses of the word, “fixed”. Such considerations have led military theorists like Martin Libicki to observe that “even with stealth, everything ultimately can be found … [and] how sensors of certain minimum discrimination placed close enough together can, at some epsilon, catch anything.” Also notice that as the process by which a “target” is being identified, located and “fixed” is under way, the computational backdrop which facilitates this process recedes into the background, thereby validating, at least to some extent, Weiser’s contention about the most profound technologies receding into the background. But there are also other kinds of signatures that some targets exhibit. These involve biological (prospectively, neurological) and behavioural signatures—principally, of human targets—which are now increasingly registered and tracked digitally. 
One constant theme of this “technogeography” on and within which targets roam is the propensity of the technological substrate to not simply engage in “pattern recognition”, but also to create “patterns of behaviour” or, alternatively, parameters of “acceptable behaviour”, which are deemed indicative of being threatening or non-threatening, which contribute to assessments of whether an entity is a “friend or an enemy”. In the context of the emergent “intelligent battlespace”, a “threat” is any activity and/or presence of an agent or element or even tendency that can undermine the integrity of the mesh of networks that constitute the “intelligent battlespace”. The notion of “threat” is central to the “intelligent battlespace” for, arguably, one way to construe its “intelligence” and sense of “awareness” may be in terms of the fluid and ongoing assessment that it makes of itself in terms of its somatic coherence and integrity which, it should be noted, is constantly in a state of strategic expansion and tactical contraction. In this way, the “intelligent battlespace”, by constantly enhancing its “awareness”, may be said to be operationalizing a “control paradigm” whose “ideal” objective is to maintain and optimise its somatic integrity by managing adversarial elements that may undermine it. One important consequence of this, which is of relevance to us, is that “tactical imagination”—both as an attribute and as a capability—is increasingly subjected to the direct and indirect control exercised by the “intelligent battlespace”. As a pertinent aside, it could thus be said that this characteristic of the “intelligent battlespace” is indicative of its instituting an “organizing principle” as opposed to affirming and/or underwriting a “principle of organization”, which enables it to increasingly evade any external forms of control and direction, thereby acquiring a growing degree of autonomy. 
Given this, the task of imagining “new ways to fight” appears to pose a seemingly insurmountable challenge. This is because, given the gradual instantiation of the “intelligent battlespace”, our understanding of an Adversary—both as a Soldier and as the “accidental” (or deliberate) guerrilla/insurgent—is being rendered passé. While these “traditional” forms of the Adversary may continue to inflict damage—some of which may be on a large scale and rate high on the lethality index—in the context of the “intelligent battlespace” and the “control paradigm” that it operationalizes, they nevertheless represent elements that can be managed and, when necessary, interdicted.
Take, for example, Reza Negarestani’s account of what he refers to as “the shadow terrorist” which, by most standards, is a frightening description of the performativity of a “new” kind of “terrorist”. In his insightful essay titled “The Militarization of Peace”, Negarestani engages with the incendiary proclamations of Abdu-Salam Faraj and draws our attention to the tactical dexterity involved in what he refers to as “the new wave of terrorism” in which “tactical lines are not aligned with (or configured by) the plane of conflict and visible military friction (battlefields, terrains for guerrilla warfare, street-wars etc.) … [and which] do not have localizability which is a prerequisite for direct conflict and military formation.” Negarestani highlights the tactical benefits of “strategic (dis)simulation” that the “shadow terrorist” draws on, which involves “dismantling the theatrical aspect of the battlefield and selecting civilians as primary targets … [and which] makes survival itself a field of exploitation.” Negarestani informs us that invoking the tactics of Taqiya, the Takfiri “engages as a shadow terrorist in White War—the endo-militarization of peace, a state of hypercamouflage (best defined as complete and consequently symmetrical overlap between two entities on a mereotopological plane).” He further posits that “in this war, the cover of camouflage cannot be penetrated or disrupted, and the defensive camouflage … is replaced by a wholly novel, highly offensive deployment, the space of hypercamouflage.” For our purposes, it is necessary to ask: can such an adversary, at least in the way Negarestani describes him, survive in the context of the emergent “intelligent battlespace”?
Negarestani’s key insight is that a “shadow terrorist”, the Takfiri, engages in strategic (dis)simulation, which involves the consideration of the target’s body as a host and to burrow deep within it, not as a “foreign” agent, but by masquerading as an integral element of the body, thereby avoiding detection. But consider this “tactic” in the context of the emergent targeting paradigm that we referred to above.
The Takfiri’s strategic cover, in a manner of speaking, is to effect an absolute and total overlap with its target. While this may have worked in non-intelligent battlespaces where the “control paradigm” was still a conjecture, in current and emergent conditions, the Takfiri would have to either redefine the tactic of hypercamouflage or consider it being rendered ineffective and thus irrelevant. In other words, it is not simply enough for the Takfiri to engage in “deep deception” or, as Negarestani points out, in Faraj’s terms, “seeking the highest degree of participation with the infidels, with their civilians: ‘if they take drugs we must do the same, if they take part in every type of sexual activity we must drive those activities to the point of excess’.” It is also not sufficient for the Takfiri to avoid engaging with(in) recognized “planes of conflict” and sites of military friction. This is because the emergent “intelligent battlespace”, while accommodating such overlaps engaged in by the Takfiri, also—by twisting the “recognized planes of conflict” into a seemingly seamless continuum, which has no apparent beginning, middle or end—serves as a virtual prison from which the Takfiri would never be able to either escape or act again. Thus, while the Takfiri may be able to effect a strategic (dis)simulation operation by “militarizing peace”, his strategic objective of undermining the integrity of his target by a timely dissimulation would be impossible given that any violation of the “control paradigm” would invite instant identification and retribution. It would also, perversely, heighten the efficiency of the “intelligent battlespace” since the Takfiri would, by his (dis)simulation operations, provide it with an additional dataset which would only augment the “intelligence” of the “intelligent battlespace”. In this way, the “intelligent battlespace”, constituted by “the most profound technologies”, and which is increasingly standing-in as the world-as-such, represents a degree of weaponization (and securitization) which is, and may be projected to be, unparalleled.
As if wanting to put a hi-tech and “modern” twist to the tactics of the Takfiri, the Economist breathlessly proclaims that “hypersonics” is “the new form of stealth”. But all it does is to exhibit a profound misunderstanding of the critical issue at stake. For, as we have seen, in the context of the emergent “intelligent battlespace”, “speed” is no guarantor of “stealth”; rather, it is, ironically, representative of the instantaneity of retribution—an instance of reaping the benefits of the weaponization of speed—which is wholly dependent on the “grid of intelligibility” that the “intelligent battlespace” etches. This virtual collapse of time and the weaponization of the laws of the sciences which, in the context of high-intensity warfare involving nation-states, involves the use of hypersonic missiles to break down Anti-Missile defensive systems and which, in the context of low-intensity, counter-insurgency and counter-terror operations, is the harbinger of “instant death” from the skies, also renders the insidiousness of a sophisticated adversary like the Takfiri, or the shadow terrorist, ineffective.
For an Adversary intending to contend with the emergent “intelligent battlespace”, following the age-old adage of “knowing one’s adversary” remains crucial. But this “knowing” will have to be undertaken differently and, in the first instance, will require the fulfilment of at least two basic pre-requisites. First, a re-envisioning of the “intelligent battlespace” will be necessary. This will involve recognizing the “intelligent battlespace” not as an innovative organization of people, processes, technologies and forms of organizations, but as a “new” form of organism—one that is adept at shape-shifting (effecting strategic expansions and tactical withdrawals).  
Second, and perhaps more importantly, it will require a patient and intricate reworking of the alphanumeric concordances, which underwrite and sustain the logic systems that constitute the “intelligent battlespace”. Among other things, this will also involve paying close attention to how it “learns”.
While it is not possible within the current constraints to provide a detailed account of how these twin prerequisites may be fulfilled, what follows, however, is a brief account of how an assessment of the “intelligent battlespace” may be initiated. With the caveat that such an account will, at this stage, be brief, speculative and necessarily abstract, a viable starting point for an Adversary preparing to contend with the “intelligent battlespace” would involve recognizing that the process by which it “learns” has at least two distinguishing features. First, “learning” in the context of the “intelligent battlespace” takes place across differing timescales, and second, there are at least two kinds of “learning” that take place. Here “learning” refers to “the process of extracting structure—statistical regularities—from input data and encoding that structure into the parameters of the network.” If we think of the “intelligent battlespace” as being comprised of two layers—the digital computational and the analogue computational—then the “learning” that takes place at the digital computational level can be said to be “experiential”, which is attributable to the fact that the digital computational level is, among other things, primarily constituted by a plethora of sensors which interface not only with what lies outside it, but also between its own constituents. In this sense, the digital computation level serves as the “interactive” mechanism with which the “intelligent battlespace”, in a manner of speaking, animates itself. From this it follows that the “learning” that takes place at this level occurs along and across a much shorter timescale as compared to that which takes place at the analogue computational level where, on the other hand, the timescales involved are much longer and are, perhaps, best understood in evolutionary terms. As such, it is akin to a “learning substrate”, whose primary function is to enhance, but also direct the learning capabilities of the digital computational level that rides on it. One way to understand this is to consider it in terms of “active learning” and “innate learning” systems. “Active learning” is “learning by experience”. “Innate learning”, on the other hand, is “intrinsic”/“natural”/“unsupervised”. Thus, if the digital computational level is the site where “active learning” takes place, then the analogue computational level is the site where “innate learning” takes place. The question then arises: how does “innate learning” at the analogue computational level take place? While in the case of biological entities, “innateness” (of learning and knowledge) is a function of specific encodings within the genome as a consequence of evolution, in the case of the analogue computational level, “innate learning” may be understood as the forming of abstract statistical regularities drawn from vast quantities of input data over extended timeframes. It is important to note that these abstract statistical regularities contribute to the evolution of the architecture of the analogue computational level. When considered in this way, the digital computational and the analogue computational levels appear to share a symbiotic relationship in the sense that the abstract statistical regularities that are formed at the level of analogue computation are derived from the “experience” acquired by and at the digital computational level. Simultaneously, these abstract statistical regularities, which inform the architecture of the abstract computational level, in turn, “condition” how the digital computational level functions. In this way, the analogue computational level “conditions” and “reinforces” the “learning” that takes place at the digital computational level. Put differently, it could be said that analogue computational level does not “encode representations or behaviours … or optimization principles directly”; rather, it “encodes … rules and patterns, which then must instantiate behaviours and representations” at the digital computational level. In this connection, it is also worth pointing out that the constitution of the digital computational level, which is comprised of a plethora of sensors, undergoes a more rapid transformation as compared to any change that may occur at the analogue computational level. This is because the devices that constitute the digital computational level are more directly impacted by the effects of Moore’s Law and, consequently, are upgraded more frequently.
However, as they are upgraded and as their performance achieves higher levels of efficiency and increasingly finer resolutions, they remain subject to the “reinforcement” that the analogue computational level provides.
This brief overview of how the “intelligent battlespace” “learns”, which contributes to the progressive enhancement of its “intelligence” (and “awareness”), suggests that for the Adversary, perhaps the most remunerative but long-range target that the “intelligent battlespace” affords is at the analogue computational level. There are two reasons for this. First, as we have seen, the learning process at the analogue computational level is more drawn out and the degree of abstraction is very high. Second, in comparison to the digital computational level, the “learning” that occurs at the analogue computational level is more foundational in the sense that it co-constitutes not only the architecture of the analogue computational level, it also encodes the rules and patterns by which the representations and/or behaviours at the digital computational level take place. Thus, any interdiction at this level will have, albeit slowly/gradually, a cascading effect on the nature of the “intelligent battlespace”. In this sense, the nature of offensive operations that the Adversary will engage in will necessarily have to be “effects-based” where the “effect” would not be in the form of “spectacular” events, but one of gradual decay. This leads to the assessment that while on the one hand the concept of operations that may prospectively underwrite the martial operability of the Adversary will be one informed by the “principle of decay” rather than that of destruction, the tactical manoeuvre that the Adversary will adopt, unlike that of the Takfiri’s tactic of hypercamouflage, will be one of “transpiercement”. To be able to achieve this, however, the Adversary will have to seek “staging areas” which, in the context of the constitution of the “intelligent battlespace” that we have cursorily described above, can only be available where the digital computational and analogue computational levels overlay (and abut) each other. Here the Adversary will seek (and find) interstices—holey spaces—within which to reside temporarily and to plan and stage his offensive operations. Such spaces, marked by complexity, ambiguity, hybridity, contradiction and otherness, will afford the Adversary a space of respite, sheltering him from the “gorgon stare” of each of the computational levels, thereby affording him the cover required to plot and plan his intervention. They will also serve as portals through which he will be able to carry out his offensive operations.
Endnote to the Exegetical Incursion of the “Intelligent Battlespace”:
The “intelligent battlespace” is yet in a formative stage. One way to gauge the extent to which it has been instantiated is by closely following the development of the “internet of everything”. The radically insidious nature of this emergent battlespace ensures that our recognition of it is always going to be subverted by the apparent ease and functionality that it provides, principally by means of the digital computational level, which we see being manifested by “consumer” technologies like smart phones, GPS-enabled devices, augmented reality systems, among others, which have already become a part of, in Michel de Certeau’s terms, the practice of our everyday life. These technologies and devices, as Weiser had written in 1991, have not yet receded wholly into the background. But they are in the process of doing so. We “consume” them not recognizing that simultaneously we are also being consumed by them. The apparent benign-ness of these technologies, which are little more than user-interfaces to a deeper analogue computational logic, seduces us to progressively acquiesce in our rendition—like the soldiers Sterling observed in the CATTAC—as little more than digital objects. In the military context, as we have already seen, it is now almost impossible to think about war and tactics outside the purview of these kinds of machines and technologies whose operational envelope remains constricted by the deep logic(s) of the “intelligent battlespace”.
The two Chinese military theorists who we had invoked previously had observed that “[w]ar in the age of technological integration and globalization has eliminated the right of weapons to label war and, with regard to the new starting point, has realigned the relationship of weapons to war.” When cast against the backdrop of our brief “incursion” of the “intelligent battlespace”, we can now see how their concerns, while not misplaced, may have underestimated the context in which their observations assume an even greater importance than what they may have imagined. While it is true that “technological integration” (and globalization) has indeed eliminated the right of weapons to label war, this elimination, as we have seen, may, in part, be attributable to the emergence of the “intelligent battlespace”, which is subjecting current and emergent designs of military hardware and software to its dictates. In the process, it is also impacting the “wetwares” of war, or what we have previously referred to as the “tactical imaginations”, that we seek to employ in the so-called “physical battlespace”. In this sense, the theorization of war and of modes of martial operability remains bound within the envelope of possibilities afforded by the “intelligent battlespace”, thus vindicating the concerns articulated by the two Chinese military theorists, albeit differently. Thus, while we remain cognizant of the conceptual envelope that may have restricted the imagination of the two Chinese military theorists, we cannot help but empathize with their call to focus our thinking on “how to fight”, for that is the challenge that we, in the context of the emergent “intelligent battlespace”, face.
Consequently, if we must think about war, martial operability and new concepts of weapons in the 21st century and beyond, we have to think differently. We must free our imagination from the “control paradigm” that the “intelligent battlespace” is instituting. It is in this sense that Marko Peljhan’s exhibit—though representing an instantiation of the weaponization of speed—is both apposite and (un)timely for it issues a call to “escape”—an escape from the embrace of the “intelligent battlespace”.

Les nouveaux chiens de garde

Serge Halimi

En 1932 Paul Nizan écrivit un petit essai, Les Chiens de garde. De nos jours, les simulateurs disposent d'une maquilleuse et d'un micro plus souvent que d'une chaire. Metteurs en scène des réalités sociales et politiques, intérieures et extérieures, ils les déforment tour à tour. Ils servent les intérêts des maîtres du monde. Ils sont les nouveaux chiens de garde. 
Or ils se proclament «contre-pouvoir»... Et ils se veulent à la fois vigoureux, irrespectueux, porte-parole des obscurs et des sans-voix, forum de la démocratie vivante. Les Américains ont ramassé ce sacerdoce en une formule : «réconforter ceux qui vivent dans l'affliction et affliger ceux qui vivent dans le confort». Le «contre pouvoir» s'est assoupi avant de se retourner contre ceux qu'il devait servir. Pour servir ceux qu'il devait surveiller. La chose devient assez connue, la loi du silence révolue. Mais rien ne change. Est-ce alors la profondeur de la déchirure sociale qui rend insupportable le bourdonnement satisfait de nos grands éditorialistes? Est-ce plutôt l'impudence de leur société de connivence qui, dans un périmètre idéologique minuscule, multiplie les affrontements factices, les notoriétés indues, les services réciproques, les omniprésences à l'antenne ? Est-ce enfin l'assaut répété - et chaque fois victorieux - des industriels contre les dernières citadelles de la liberté de la presse ? Une partie de l'opinion se rebelle en tout cas contre le spectacle d'un «soleil qui ne se couche jamais sur l'empire de la passivité moderne [...] le mauvais rêve de la société enchaînée, qui n'exprime finalement que son désir de dormir¹».
La censure est cependant plus efficace quand elle n'a pas besoin de se dire, quand les intérêts du patron miraculeusement coïncident avec ceux de «l'information». Le journaliste est alors prodigieusement libre. Et il est heureux. On lui octroie en prime le droit de se croire puissant.
[…]
Un bon chien de garde doit savoir alerter son maître. 
[…]
Un salarié de TF1 le résume ainsi : «Les journalistes politiques souhaitent se mettre en valeur aux yeux des hommes de pouvoir, avoir des rapports d'amitié avec eux sous prétexte d'obtenir des informations. Mais cela les rend courtisans, ils ne font plus leur métier. Ils approchent le pouvoir et en sont contents parce qu'ils se sentent importants. Quand le ministre fend la foule et vient leur serrer la main, ça leur fait vraiment plaisir. Ils vont aussi en tirer de menus avantages : les PV qui sautent, une place en crèche pour les enfants, des appartements pas cher grâce à la ville de Paris²...»
[…]
Quels furent les ressorts profonds de la fusion entre médias et pouvoir au moment de la guerre du Golfe ? Quand les avions « alliés » détruisaient l'ancienne Mésopotamie, un homme de culture aussi exceptionnellement raffiné que le journaliste de TF1 Charles Villeneuve expliqua : «C'est la guerre du monde civilisé contre les Arabes.» L'ethnocentrisme colonial et les nostalgies de «mission civilisatrice» ne jouèrent néanmoins qu'un rôle assez marginal dans cette affaire. La plupart des hommes de presse préfèrent alors hurler avec les loups, déguisés en grand-mères des guerres humanitaires et d'autant plus confortés dans leurs certitudes d'appartenir au Parti du Bien que la «morale» est un substitut idéal à l'absence de connaissance des situations locales. C'est pendant ces bouffées de ferveur et d'intolérance que le journaliste devrait manifester son aptitude à la dissidence. Mais il aime lui aussi barboter dans le torrent unanimiste, jeter à la rivière le cynisme dont on le soupçonne, exhiber les derniers jouets que la technologie lui livre, faire front contre l'ennemi, rester «mobilisé» avec son armée et son pays. La guerre du Kosovo a ressuscité cet esprit de meute médiatique. Puis, aux États-Unis, ce fut la guerre d'Irak. 
[…]
Noam Chomsky ne cesse de le répéter : l'analyse du dévoiement médiatique n'exige, dans les pays occidentaux, aucun recours à la théorie du complot. Un jour, un étudiant américain l'interroge : «J'aimerais savoir comment au juste l'élite contrôle t'elle les médias?» Il réplique : «Comment contrôle t'elle General Motors ? La question ne se pose pas. L'élite n'a pas à contrôler General Motors. Ça lui appartient³». En France, l'imbrication croissante entre les groupes industriels et les médias ramène le pays à la situation qu'il a connue sous la IIIème République. Cet état des choses, Albert Camus le décrivait en ces termes à la Libération : «L'appétit de l'argent et l'indifférence aux choses de la grandeur avaient opéré en même temps pour donner à la France une presse qui, à de rares exceptions près, n'avait d'autre but que de grandir la puissance de quelques-uns et d'autre effet que d'avilir la moralité de tous. Il n'a donc pas été difficile à cette presse de devenir ce qu'elle a été de 1940 à 1944, c'est-à-dire la honte du pays⁴.» Le programme du Conseil national de la Résistance entendit remédier à cette déchéance en garantissant «la liberté de la presse, son honneur et son indépendance à l'égard de l'État, des puissances d'argent et des influences étrangères». Des ordonnances interdirent, par exemple, qu'un même individu possède ou contrôle plus d'un quotidien politique. Les commémorations de la guerre délaissent en général cet aspect du combat des résistants, leur volonté que la Libération ne se résume pas à la restauration de l'ordre d'autrefois. Soixante ans plus tard, la vanité d'une telle espérance est consommée. Non seulement les gouvernements, de droite ou de gauche, n'ont rien entrepris pour prévenir le rétablissement du pouvoir des «puissances d'argent» sur l'information, mais ils lui ont permis de se concentrer sous la coupe de groupes héréditaires. 
[…]     
Édouard Daladier le 28 octobre 1934; ce jour-là, devant le congrès du parti qu'il présidait, Daladier baptisa les nouvelles dynasties d'un nom qui resterait fameux : «Deux cents familles sont maîtresses de l'économie française et, en fait, de la politique française. Ce sont des forces qu'un État démocratique ne devrait pas tolérer, que Richelieu n'eût pas toléré dans le royaume de France. L'influence des deux cents familles pèse sur le système fiscal sur les transports, sur le crédit. Les deux cents familles placent au pouvoir leurs délégués. Elles interviennent sur l'opinion publique, car elles contrôlent la presse.»
[…]
Des médias de plus en plus concentrés, des journalistes de plus en plus dociles, une information de plus en plus médiocre. Longtemps, le désir de transformation sociale continuera de buter sur cet obstacle. Cela fait longtemps que les responsables politiques et syndicaux s'accordent pour ne plus aborder la question de l'information et de son contrôle démocratique, y compris quand ils se proclament radicaux. Sur ce sujet précis, les «altermondialistes» et les révolutionnaires filent aussi doux que les autres. Ils ont peur des médias et de leur pouvoir, peur du pouvoir qu'ils ont concédé aux médias. S'étant résignés, avec plus ou moins de volupté, à la personnalisation des mouvements et des luttes qu'induisent à la fois le régime présidentiel et la décadence du journalisme, étant parfois eux-mêmes atteints d'un petit tropisme narcissique - un travers que l'exposition répétée aux flashs des reporters épanouira en cancer -, même les plus militants estiment dépendre de la presse pour se faire entendre. Ils se montrent par conséquent disposés à toutes les mises en scène pour qu'elle ne les oublie pas. Mais les combats porteurs sont ailleurs. 
[…]
En ne rencontrant que des «décideurs», en se dévoyant dans une société de cour et d'argent, en se transformant en machine à propagande de la pensée de marché, le journalisme s'est enfermé dans une classe et dans une caste. Il a perdu des lecteurs et son crédit. Il a précipité l'appauvrissement du débat public. Cette situation est le propre d'un système : les codes de déontologie n'y changeront pas grand-chose. Mais, face à ce que Paul Nizan appelait «les concepts dociles que rangent les caissiers soigneux de la pensée bourgeoise», la lucidité est une forme de résistance. 

¹ Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle, Paris, Gallimard, 1992, p.7-11.
²Cité par Pierre Péan et Christophe Nick, TF1 : Un pouvoir, Paris, Fayard, 1997, p. 304-305
³Noam Chomsky, Les Médias et les Illusions nécessaires, Éditions K Films, Paris, 1993, p. 39
⁴Combat, 31 août 1944

A Brief History of Time

Stephen Hawking

The gravitational field of the star changes the paths of light rays in space-time from what they would have been had the star not been present. The light cones, which indicate the paths followed in space and time by flashes of light emitted from their tips, are bent slightly inward near the surface of the star. This can be seen in the bending of light from distant stars observed during an eclipse of the sun. As the star contracts, the gravitational field at its surface gets stronger and the light cones get bent inward more. This makes it more difficult for light from the star to escape, and the light appears dimmer and redder to an observer at a distance. Eventually, when the star has shrunk to a certain critical radius, the gravitational field at the surface becomes so strong that the light cones are bent inward so much that light can no longer escape.

According to the theory of relativity, nothing can travel faster than light. Thus if light cannot escape, neither can anything else; everything is dragged back by the gravitational field. So one has a set of events, a region of space-time, from which it is not possible to escape to reach a distant observer. This region is what we now call a black hole. Its boundary is called the event horizon and it coincides with the paths of light rays that just fail to escape from the black hole.
In order to understand what you would see if you were watching a star collapse to form a black hole, one has to remember that in the theory of relativity there is no absolute time. Each observer has his own measure of time. The time for someone on a star will be different from that for someone at a distance, because of the gravitational field of the star.
Suppose an intrepid astronaut on the surface of the collapsing star, collapsing inward with it, sent a signal every second, according to his watch, to his spaceship orbiting about the star. At some time on his watch, say 11:00, the star would shrink below the critical radius at which the gravitational field becomes so strong nothing can escape, and his signals would no longer reach the spaceship. As 11:00 approached his companions watching from the spaceship would find the intervals between successive signals from the astronaut getting longer and longer, but this effect would be very small before 10:59:59. They would have to wait only very slightly more than a second between the astronaut’s 10:59:58 signal and the one that he sent when his watch read 10:59:59, but they would have to wait forever for the 11:00 signal.
The light waves emitted from the surface of the star between 10:59:59 and 11:00, by the astronaut’s watch, would be spread out over an infinite period of time, as seen from the spaceship. The time interval between the arrival of successive waves at the spaceship would get longer and longer, so the light from the star would appear redder and redder and fainter and fainter. Eventually, the star would be so dim that it could no longer be seen from the spaceship: all that would be left would be a black hole in space. The star would, however, continue to exert the same gravitational force on the spaceship, which would continue to orbit the black hole. This scenario is not entirely realistic, however, because of the following problem. Gravity gets weaker the farther you are from the star, so the gravitational force on our intrepid astronaut’s feet would always be greater than the force on his head.
The work that Roger Penrose and I did between 1965 and 1970 showed that, according to general relativity, there must be a singularity of infinite density and space-time curvature within a black hole. This is rather like the big bang at the beginning of time, only it would be an end of time for the collapsing body and the astronaut. At this singularity the laws of science and our ability to predict the future would break down. However, any observer who remained outside the black hole would not be affected by this failure of predictability, because neither light nor any other signal could reach him from the singularity. This remarkable fact led Roger Penrose to propose the cosmic censorship hypothesis, which might be paraphrased as “God abhors a naked singularity.” In other words, the singularities produced by gravitational collapse occur only in places, like black holes, where they are decently hidden from outside view by an event horizon.
Strictly, this is what is known as the weak cosmic censorship hypothesis: it protects observers who remain outside the black hole from the consequences of the breakdown of predictability that occurs at the singularity, but it does nothing at all for the poor unfortunate astronaut who falls into the hole.

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

Adam Hochschild

THE GREAT FORGETTING

ONE OF THE MORE eerie experiences for a visitor to the old Soviet Union was strolling through the spacious galleries of the Museum of the Revolution on Moscow's Gorky Street. You could look at hundreds of photographs and paintings of fur-hatted revolutionaries behind snowy barricades, innumerable rifles, machine guns, flags and banners, a large collection of other relics and documents, and find no clue that some twenty million Soviet citizens had died in execution cellars, in manmade famines, and in the gulag.

Today that museum in Moscow has changed in ways its creators could never have imagined. But on the other side of Europe is one that has not changed in the slightest. To see it, take the Number 44 tram line through the shady, pleasant Forêt de Soignes on the outskirts of Brussels to the ancient ducal borough of Tervuren. In the eighth century, Saint Hubert, the patron saint of hunters, lived here and pursued game in these woods. Today, grandly overlooking a park, in an enormous Louis XV-style palace built by King Leopold II, is the Royal Museum for Central Africa. On a typical day it will be swarming with hundreds of visitors, from schoolchildren filling in blank spots in workbooks to elderly tourists arriving in air-conditioned buses.

The museum houses one of the world's largest collections of Africana. It takes a full day to see all the exhibits, from Stanley's cap to Leopold's cane, from slave manacles to a dugout canoe big enough for a hundred men. One gallery full of weapons and uniforms celebrates the "antislavery campaigns" of the 1890s—against the "Arab" slavers, of course. A plaque lists the names of several dozen Force Publique officers who "rest in African earth." Other plaques in this "memorial hall" have the names of hundreds more white pioneers who died in the Congo. Another gallery holds stuffed wild animals: elephants, chimpanzees, gorillas. An old black-and-white film plays continually on a TV monitor, showing Pende masked dances, the Kuba king at court, Ntomba funeral rites—an Africa composed entirely of exotic costumes and pounding drums. Everywhere, preserved in glass cases, are objects from the Congo's manifold cultures: spears, arrows, pipes, masks, bowls, baskets, paddles, scepters, fish traps, musical instruments.

One temporary exhibit shows a remarkable type of sculpture from the lower part of the Congo River: three-foot-high wooden statues, the chest and neck of each one studded with hundreds of nails, spikes, and tiny razorlike blades. The statues look like bristling, tortured dwarfs. A sign explains that each is an nkondi, a fetish to combat witches and other evildoers. Every nail and blade stands for an oath or an appeal for retaliation against an injustice. But of any larger injustice in the Congo, there is no sign whatever. For in none of the museum's galleries is there the slightest hint that millions of Congolese met unnatural deaths.

There is no hint of these deaths anywhere in Brussels. The rue Bréderode, where part of the Congo administration and the most important Congo companies once had headquarters, still runs past the back of the Royal Palace. But today the spot where Joseph Conrad had his job interview is occupied by a government tax-collection office. On another side of the palace, a larger-than-life statue of Leopold on horseback stares metallically out at a freeway underpass. And yet the blood spilled in the Congo, the stolen land, the severed hands, the shattered families and orphaned children, underlie much that meets the eye. The ornate, columned Royal Palace itself was renovated to its present splendor with Congo profits, as was the more grandly situated, domed château of Laeken, where the royal family lives, with its stunning array of greenhouses containing more than six acres of glass. Each spring the green houses are briefly opened to the public, and thousands of visitors walk past a bust of Leopold, decorated with camelias and azaleas. At Laeken also stands the five-story Japanese Tower, an architectural oddity that Leopold saw at a Paris world's fair, took a fancy to, and bought with his Congo money. Dominating part of the city's skyline is the grandest Congo-financed extravagance of all, the huge Cinquantenaire arch, studded with heroic statuary; it looks like a swollen combination of the Arc de Triomphe and the Brandenburg Gate, with curving wings added. The arch's massive stone and concrete bulk brings to mind Conrad's description of the unnamed European capital in Heart of Darkness as "the sepulchral city." But of the millions of Africans whose labors paid for all this and sent them to sepulchers of unmarked earth, there is no sign.

Brussels is not unique. In Berlin, there are no museums or monuments to the slaughtered Hereros, and in Paris and Lisbon no visible reminders of the rubber terror that slashed in half the populations of parts of French and Portuguese Africa. In the American South, there are hundreds of Civil War battle monuments and preserved plantation manor houses for every exhibit that in any way marks the existence of slavery. And yet the world we live in—its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence—is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold's Congo is but one of those silences of history.

The Congo offers a striking example of the politics of forgetting. Leopold and the Belgian colonial officials who followed him went to extraordinary lengths to try to erase potentially incriminating evidence from the historical record. One day in August 1908, shortly before the colony was officially turned over to Belgium, the king's young military aide Gustave Stinglhamber walked from the Royal Palace to see a friend in the Congo state offices next door. The midsummer day seemed particularly warm, and the two men went to an open window to talk. Stinglhamber sat down on a radiator, then jumped to his feet: it was burning hot. When the men summoned the janitor for an explanation, he replied, "Sorry, but they're burning the State archives." The furnaces burned for eight days, turning most of the Congo state records to ash and smoke in the sky over Brussels. "I will give them my Congo," Leopold told Stinglhamber, "but they have no right to know what I did there."

At the same time the furnaces roared in Brussels, orders went from the palace to the Congo commanding the destruction of records there. Colonel Maximilien Strauch, the king's long-time consigliere on Congo matters, later said, "The voices which, in default of the destroyed archives, might speak in their stead have systematically been condemned to silence for considerations of a higher order." Seldom has a totalitarian regime gone to such lengths to destroy so thoroughly the records of its work. In their later quests for a higher order, Hitler and Stalin in some ways left a far larger paper trail behind them.

The same kind of deliberate forgetting took place in the minds of the men who staffed the regime. Forgetting one's participation in mass murder is not something passive; it is an active deed. In looking at the memories recorded by the early white conquistadors in Africa, we can sometimes catch the act of forgetting at the very moment it happens. It is not a moment of erasure, but of turning things upside down, the strange reversal of the victimizer mentally converting himself to victim. Take, for example, a moment in the memoirs of Raoul de Premorel, who ran rubber-collecting posts in the Kasai region of the Congo from 1896 to 1901...

All Knees and Elbows of Susceptibility and Refusal
Reading History From Below

Anthony Iles & Tom Roberts

Within this split were further divisions. On the parliamentarian side there were conflicts between an emerging bourgeoisie and radical democrats. The reduction of democratic interest to those who held property, i.e. an interest in the land, versus a levelling democracy consisting in the manifold interests of those who lived and worked on the land was settled on the side of the former. These conflicting conceptions have fundamentally shaped modern political philosophy and statecraft in Europe, at least.

«When we mention the people, we do not mean the confused promiscuous body of the people.»¹

It was the experience of the period of civil war and challenges from all directions to state, church and law that shaped Thomas Hobbes' mechanistic theory of political sovereignty, which insisted on the necessity of centralised authority to safeguard a liberal state. In Hobbes' and some of his peers' conceptions (and in the famous illustration which accompanies his book, Leviathan), a mechanical understanding of the body is conflated with a smoothly running political regime.

«In mechanical philosophy, the body is described by analogy with the machine, often with emphasis on its inertia. The body is conceived as brute matter, wholly divorced from any rational qualities: it does not know, does not want, does not feel. [...] the body is a conglomerate of mechanical motions that, lacking autonomous power operates on the basis of an external causation, in a play of attractions and aversions where everything is regulated as in an automaton.»²

The human body and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine produced by capitalism.³

Christopher Hill shows how during this period two revolutions correspond to, but also exceed, these two powers grappling over a body to direct.

«There were, we may oversimplify, two revolutions in mid- seventeenth century England. The one which succeeded abolished the sacred rights of property (abolition of feudal tenures, no arbitrary taxation), gave political power to the propertied (sovereignty of Parliament and common law, abolition of prerogative courts), and removed all impediments to the triumph of the ideology of the men of property - the protestant ethic. There was however, another revolution which never happened, though from time to time it threatened. This might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have destabilised the state church and rejected the protestant ethic.»⁴

William Walwyn noted of the Cavaliers and Roundheads ‘their quarrel is all whose slaves the poor will be.⁵

¹ Marchamont Needham, mid 17th century political commentator. Quoted in Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, London: Penguin, 1991, p.60
² Silvia Federici, Caliban and The Witch:Women, The Body And Primitive Accumulation, New York: Autonomedia, 2004.
³ Caliban and the Witch, op. cit., p.146.
⁴ Ibid., p.15
⁵ Quoted in Peter Linebaugh, 'Days of Villainy: a reply to two critics’, International Socialism Journal, Issue 63, http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj63/linebaugh.htm

On The Plague

Tony Judt

PENGUIN BOOKS HAS just published a new translation by Robin Buss of La Peste, by Albert Camus, and the text that follows is my introduction, written some months ago. Many readers will be familiar with its fable of the coming of the plague to the North African city of Oran in 194—, and the diverse ways in which the inhabitants respond to its devastating impact on their lives. Today, The Plague takes on fresh significance and a moving immediacy.

Camus’s insistence on placing individual moral responsibility at the heart of all public choices cuts sharply across the comfortable habits of our own age. His definition of heroism—ordinary people doing extraordinary things out of simple decency—rings truer than we might once have acknowledged. His depiction of instant ex cathedra judgments—“My brethren, you have deserved it”—will be grimly familiar to us all.

Camus’s unwavering grasp of the difference between good and evil, despite his compassion for the doubters and the compromised, for the motives and mistakes of imperfect humanity, casts unflattering light upon the relativizers and trimmers of our own day. And his controversial use of a biological epidemic to illustrate the dilemmas of moral contagion succeeds in ways the writer could not have imagined. Here in New York, in November 2001, we are better placed than we could ever have wished to feel the lash of the novel’s premonitory final sentence.

The Plague is Albert Camus’s most successful novel. It was published in 1947, when Camus was thirty-three, and was an immediate triumph. Within a year it had been translated into nine languages, with many more to come. It has never been out of print and was established as a classic of world literature even before its author’s untimely death in a car accident in January 1960. More ambitious than L’Étranger, the first novel that made his reputation, and more accessible than his later writings, The Plague is the book by which Camus is known to millions of readers. He might have found this odd—The Rebel, published four years later, was his personal favorite among his books.

The Plague was a long time in the writing, like much of Camus’s best work. He started gathering material for it in January 1941, when he arrived in Oran, the Algerian coastal city where the story is set. He continued working on the manuscript in “Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a mountain village in central France where he went to recuperate from one of his periodic bouts of tuberculosis in the summer of 1942. But Camus was soon swept into the Resistance and it was not until the liberation of France that he was able to return his attention to the book. By then, however, the obscure Algerian novelist had become a national figure: a hero of the intellectual Resistance, editor of Combat (a daily paper born in clandestinity and hugely influential in the postwar years), and an icon to a new generation of French men and women hungry for ideas and idols.

Camus seemed to fit the role to perfection. Handsome and charming, a charismatic advocate of radical social and political change, he held unparalleled sway over millions of his countrymen. In the words of Raymond Aron, readers of Camus’s editorials had “formed the habit of getting their daily thought from him.” There were other intellectuals in postwar Paris who were destined to play major roles in years to come: Aron himself, Simone de Beauvoir, and of course Jean-Paul Sartre. But Camus was different. Born in Algeria in 1913, he was younger than his Left Bank friends, most of whom were already forty years old when the war ended. He was more “exotic,” coming as he did from distant Algiers rather than from the hothouse milieu of Parisian schools and colleges; and there was something special about him. One contemporary observer caught it well: “I was struck by his face, so human and sensitive. There is in this man such an obvious integrity that it imposes respect almost immediately; quite simply, he is not like other men.

Camus’s public standing guaranteed his book’s success. But its timing had something to do with it, too. By the time the book appeared the French were beginning to forget the discomforts and compromises of four years of German occupation. Marshal Philippe Pétain, the head of state who initiated and incarnated the policy of collaboration with the victorious Nazis, had been tried and imprisoned. Other collaborating politicians had been executed or else banished from public life. The myth of a glorious national resistance was carefully cultivated by politicians of all colors, from Charles de Gaulle to the Communists; uncomfortable private memories were soothingly overlaid with the airbrushed official version in which France had been liberated from its oppressors by the joint efforts of domestic resisters and Free French troops led from London by De Gaulle.

In this context, Albert Camus’s allegory of the wartime occupation of France reopened a painful chapter in the recent French past, but in an indirect and ostensibly apolitical key. It thus avoided raising partisan hackles, except at the extremes of left and right, and took up sensitive topics without provoking a refusal to listen. Had the novel appeared in 1945 the angry, partisan mood of revenge would have drowned its moderate reflections on justice and responsibility. Had it been delayed until the 1950s its subject matter would probably have been overtaken by new alignments born of the cold war.

WHETHER THE PLAGUE SHOULD BE READ, as it surely was read, as a simple allegory of France’s wartime trauma is a subject to which I shall return. What is beyond doubt is that it was an intensely personal book. Camus put something of himself—his emotions, his memories, and his sense of place—into all his published work; that is one of the ways in which he stood apart from other intellectuals of his generation, and it accounts for his universal and lasting appeal. But even by his standards The Plague is strikingly introspective and revealing. Oran, the setting for the novel, was a city he knew well and cordially disliked, in contrast to his much-loved hometown of Algiers. He found it boring and materialistic and his memories of it were further shaped by the fact that his tuberculosis took a turn for the worse during his stay there. As a result he was forbidden to swim—one of his greatest pleasures—and was constrained to sit around for weeks on end in the stifling, oppressive heat that provides the backdrop to the story.

This involuntary deprivation of everything that Camus most loved about his Algerian birthplace—the sand, the sea, physical exercise, and the Mediterranean sense of ease and liberty that Camus always contrasted with the gloom and gray of the north—was compounded when he was sent to the French countryside to convalesce. The Massif Central of France is tranquil and bracing, and the remote village where Camus arrived in August 1942 might be thought the ideal setting for a writer. But twelve weeks later, in November 1942, the Allies landed in North Africa. The Germans responded by occupying the whole of southern France (hitherto governed from the spa town of Vichy by Pétain’s puppet government) and Algeria was cut off from the continent. Camus was thenceforth separated not just from his homeland but also from his mother and his wife, and would not see them again until the Germans had been defeated.

Illness, exile, and separation were thus present in Camus’s life as in his novel, and his reflections upon them form a vital counterpoint to the allegory. Because of his acute firsthand experience, Camus’s descriptions of the plague and of the pain of loneliness are exceptionally vivid and heartfelt. It is indicative of his own depth of feeling that the narrator remarks early in the story that “the first thing that the plague brought to our fellow citizens was exile,” and that “being separated from a loved one … [was] the greatest agony of that long period of exile.”

This in turn provides, for Camus and the reader alike, a link to his earlier novel: for disease, separation, and exile are conditions that come upon us unexpectedly and unbidden. They are an illustration of what Camus meant by the “absurdity” of the human condition and the seemingly chance nature of human undertakings. It is not by accident that one of his main characters, Grand, for no apparent reason, reports a conversation overheard in a tobacco shop concerning “a young company employee who had killed an Arab on a beach.” This, of course, is an allusion to Meurseault’s seminal act of random violence in L’Étranger, and in Camus’s mind it is connected to the ravages of pestilence in The Plague by more than just their common Algerian setting.

BUT CAMUS DID MORE THAN INSERT into his story vignettes and emotions drawn from his writings and his personal situation. He put himself very directly into the characters of the novel, using three of them in particular to represent and illuminate his distinctive moral perspective. Rambert, the young journalist cut off from his wife in Paris, is initially desperate to escape the quarantined city. His obsession with his personal suffering makes him indifferent to the larger tragedy, from which he feels quite detached—he is not, after all, a citizen of Oran, but was caught there by the vagaries of chance. It is on the very eve of his getaway that he realizes how, despite himself, he has become “part of the community and shares its fate; ignoring the risk and in the face of his earlier, selfish needs, he remains in Oran and joins the “health teams.” From a purely private resistance against misfortune he has graduated to the solidarity of a collective resistance against the common scourge.

Camus’s identification with Dr. Rieux echoes his shifting mood in these years. Rieux is a man who, faced with suffering and a common crisis, does what he must and becomes a leader and an example not out of heroic courage or careful reasoning but rather from a sort of necessary optimism. By the late 1940s Camus was exhausted and depressed at the burden of expectations placed on him as a public intellectual: as he confided to his notebooks, “everyone wants the man who is still searching to have reached his conclusions.” From the “existentialist” philosopher (a tag that Camus always disliked) people awaited a polished worldview; but Camus had none to offer. As he expressed it through Rieux, he was “weary of the world in which he lived”; all he could offer with any certainty was “some feeling for his fellow men and [he was] determined for his part to reject any injustice and any compromise.”

Dr. Rieux does the right thing just because he sees clearly what needs doing. In a third character, Tarrou, Camus invested a more developed exposition of his moral thinking. Tarrou, like Camus, is in his mid-thirties; he left home, by his own account, in disgust at his father’s advocacy of the death penalty—a subject of intense concern to Camus and on which he wrote widely in the postwar years. Tarrou has reflected painfully upon his past life and commitments, and his confession to Rieux is at the heart of the novel’s moral message: “I thought I was struggling against the plague. I learned that I had indirectly supported the deaths of thousands of men, that I had even caused their deaths by approving the actions and principles that inevitably led to them.”

This passage can be read as Camus’s own rueful reflections upon his passage through the Communist Party in Algeria during the 1930s. But Tarrou’s conclusions go beyond the admission of political error: “We are all in the plague. ... All I know is that one must do one’s best not to be a plague victim. ... And this is why I have decided to reject everything that, directly or indirectly, makes people die or justifies others in making them die.” This is the authentic voice of Albert Camus, and it sketches out the position he would take toward ideological dogma, political or judicial murder, and all forms of ethical irresponsibility for the rest of his life—a stance that would later cost him dearly in friends and even influence in the polarized world of the Parisian intelligentsia.

TARROU/CAMUS’S APOLOGIA for his refusals and his commitments returns us to the status of The Plague. It is a novel that succeeds at various levels as any great novel must, but it is above all and unmistakably a moral tale. Camus was much taken with Moby-Dick and, like Melville, he was not embarrassed to endow his story with symbols and metaphors. But Melville had the luxury of moving freely back and forth from the narrative of a whale hunt to a fable of human obsession; between Camus’s Oran and the dilemma of human choice there lay the reality of life in Vichy France between 1940 and 1944. Readers of The Plague, today as in 1947, are therefore not wrong to approach it as an allegory of the occupation years.

In part this is because Camus makes clear that this is a story about “us.” Most of the story is told in the third person. But strategically dispersed through the text is the occasional “we,” and the “we” in question—at least for Camus’s primary audience—is the French in 1947. The “calamity” that has befallen the citizens of fictionalized Oran is the one that came upon France in 1940, with the military defeat, the abandonment of the Republic, and the establishment of the regime of Vichy under German tutelage. Camus’s account of the coming of the rats echoed a widespread view of the divided condition of France itself in 1940: “It was as though the very soil on which our houses were built was purging itself of an excess of bile, that it was letting boils and abscesses rise to the surface which up to then had been devouring it inside.” Many in France, at first, shared Father Paneloux’s initial reaction: “My brethren, you have deserved it.”

For a long time people don’t realize what is happening and life seems to go on—“in appearance, nothing had changed.” “The city was inhabited by people asleep on their feet.” Later, when the plague has passed, amnesia sets in—“they denied that we [sic] had been that benumbed people.” All this and much more—the black market, the failure of administrators to call things by their name and assume the moral leadership of the nation—so well described the recent French past that Camus’s intentions could hardly be misread.

Nevertheless, most of Camus’s targets resist easy labels, and the allegory runs quite against the grain of the polarized moral rhetoric in use after the war. Cottard, who accepts the plague as too strong to combat and who thinks the “health teams” are a waste of time, is clearly someone who “collaborates” in the fate of the city. He thrives in the new situation and has everything to lose from a return to the “old ways.” But he is sympathetically drawn, and Tarrou and the others continue to see him and even discuss with him their actions. All they ask, in Tarrou’s words, is that he “try not to spread the plague knowingly.”

At the end Cottard is brutally beaten by the newly liberated citizenry—a reminder of the violent punishments meted out at the Liberation to presumed collaborators, often by men and women whose enthusiasm for violent revenge helped them and others forget their own wartime compromises. Camus’s insight into the anger and resentment born of genuine suffering and guilty memory introduces a nuance of empathy that was rare among his contemporaries, and it lifts his story clear of the conventions of the time.

The same insights (and integrity—Camus was writing from personal experience) shape his representation of the resisters themselves. It is not by chance that Grand, the mousy, downtrodden, unaspiring clerk, is presented as the embodiment of the real, unheroic resistance. For Camus, as for Rieux, resistance was not about heroism at all—or, if it was, then it was the heroism of goodness. “It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency.” Joining the “health teams” was not in itself an act of great significance—rather, “not doing it would have been incredible at the time.” This point is made over and over again in the novel, as though Camus were worried lest it be missed: “When you see the suffering it brings,” Rieux remarks at one point, “you have to be mad, blind or a coward to resign yourself to the plague.”

Camus, like the narrator, refuses to “become an overeloquent eulogist of a determination and heroism to which he attaches only a moderate degree of importance.” This has to be understood in context. There was of course tremendous courage and sacrifice in the French Resistance; many men and women died for the cause. But Camus was uncomfortable with the smug myth of heroism that had grown up in postwar France, and he abhorred the tone of moral superiority with which self-styled former Resisters (including some of his famous fellow intellectuals) looked down upon those who did nothing. In Camus’s view it was inertia, or ignorance, which accounted for people’s failure to act. The Cottards of the world were the exception; most people are better than you think—as Tarrou puts it, “You just need to give them the opportunity.”

IN CONSEQUENCE, some of Camus’s intellectual contemporaries did not particularly care for The Plague. They expected a more “engaged” sort of writing from him and they found the book’s ambiguities and the tone of disabused tolerance and moderation politically incorrect. Simone de Beauvoir especially disapproved strongly of Camus’s use of a natural pestilence as a substitute for (she thought) Fascism—it relieves men of their political responsibilities, she insisted, and runs away from history and real political problems. In 1955 the literary critic Roland Barthes reached a similarly negative conclusion, accusing Camus of offering readers an “antihistorical ethic.” Even today this criticism sometimes surfaces among academic students of Camus: he lets Fascism and Vichy off the hook, they charge, by deploying the metaphor of a “nonideological and nonhuman plague.”

Such commentaries are doubly revealing. In the first place they show just how much Camus’s apparently straightforward story was open to misunderstanding. The allegory may have been tied to Vichy France, but the “plague” transcends political labels. It was not “Fascism” that Camus was aiming at—an easy target, after all, especially in 1947—but dogma, compliance, and cowardice in all their intersecting public forms. Tarrou, certainly, is no Fascist; but he insists that in earlier days, when he complied with doctrines that authorized the suffering of others for higher goals, he too was a carrier of the plague even as he fought it.

Second, the charge that Camus was too ambiguous in his judgments, too unpolitical in his metaphors, illuminates not his weaknesses but his strengths. This is something that we are perhaps better placed to understand now than were The Plague’s first readers. Thanks to Primo Levi and Václav Havel we have become familiar with the gray zone.” We understand better that in conditions of extremity there are rarely to be found comfortingly simple categories of good and evil, guilty and innocent. We know more about the choices and compromises faced by men and women in hard times, and we are no longer so quick to judge those who accommodate themselves to impossible situations. Men may do the right thing from a mixture of motives and may with equal ease do terrible deeds with the best of intentions—or no intentions at all.

It does not follow from this that the plagues that humankind brings down upon itself are “natural” or unavoidable. But assigning responsibility for them—and thus preventing them in the future—may not be an easy matter. And with Hannah Arendt we have been introduced to a further complication: the notion of the “banality of evil” (a formulation that Camus himself would probably have taken care to avoid), the idea that unspeakable crimes can be committed by very unremarkable men with clear consciences.

These are now commonplaces of moral and historical debate. But Albert Camus came to them first, in his own words, with an originality of perspective and intuition that eluded almost all his contemporaries. That is what they found so disconcerting in his writing. Camus was a moralist who unhesitatingly distinguished good from evil but abstained from condemning human frailty. He was a student of the “absurd” who refused to give in to necessity. He was a public man of action who insisted that all truly important questions came down to individual acts of kindness and goodness. And, like Tarrou, he was a believer in absolute truths who accepted the limits of the possible: “Other men will make history. ... All I can say is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims—and as far as possible one must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence.”

Thus The Plague teaches no lessons. Camus was a moraliste but he was no moralizer. He claimed to have taken great care to try to avoid writing a “tract,” and to the extent that his novel offers little comfort to political polemicists of any school he can be said to have succeeded. But for that very reason it has not merely outlived its origins as an allegory of occupied France but has transcended its era. Looking back on the grim record of the twentieth century we can see more clearly now that Albert Camus had identified the central moral dilemmas of the age. Like Hannah Arendt, he saw that “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe—as death became the fundamental problem after the last war.”

Fifty years after its first appearance, in an age of post-totalitarian satisfaction with our condition and prospects, when intellectuals pronounce the End of History and politicians proffer globalization as a universal palliative, the closing sentence of Camus’s great novel rings truer than ever, a fire bell in the night of complacency and forgetting:

The plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely, … it can remain dormant for dozens of years in furniture or clothing, … it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs, and old papers, and … perhaps the day will come when for the instruction or misfortune of mankind, the plague will rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city.

(This essay first appeared in The New York Review of Books in November 2001)

The Kwangju People’s Uprising: Formation of the “Absolute Community”

Choi Jungwoon

The May 18 student demonstration may have begun as a small-scale disturbance, but by the afternoon it developed into a serious confrontation. For the first time in modern Korean history, Molotov cocktails were used, pepper gas trucks were set on fire, police boxes were attacked, and riot police were taken hostage. By 3:00 in the afternoon, the riot police were thoroughly frightened (Han-guk Hyŏndae Saryo Yŏn-guso (HHSY) 1990 [4011], 887; [8002], 1535).

[...]

The streets were deserted by around 5:00 on May 18 after the paratroopers had swept through the city during the afternoon—all of the students and citizens had fled, terror-stricken. It seemed a simple enough affair, as if the fighting was already over. Around 7:00, however, a demonstration again broke out near Kwangju¹ High School in Kyerim-dong. The paratroopers again made their appearance, slaughtering the demonstrators. Following this, the paratroopers began going through every house in Sansu-dong and P’unghyang-dong, hauling away all of the young people they came across. The citizens of Kwangju who were witnessing these events must have been in a state of severe shock and distress.

[...]

The crackdown on May 19 was severe. If someone happened to cast so much as an odd glance at the paratroopers from a window, the paratroopers would go through hotels, private institutes, all of the buildings in that area; they would drag away all of the young people and take them to Kŭmnamno avenue, where they would strip them and beat them, assault them in the street. The paratroopers also mobilized armored personnel carriers. The cruelty of the paratroopers knew no bounds on this day. By noon the streets were again deserted, and the paratroopers, feeling assured they had achieved success, withdrew to their camp to eat lunch. In the afternoon, however, countless numbers of citizens came out on the streets and a phalanx of demonstrators once again formed. Beginning on the afternoon of May 19, students no longer formed the heart of the uprising. The demonstrations on this afternoon were made up mostly of company employees from the downtown area dressed in suits, laborers, housewives, young women. High-school students began to take part.

[...]

The enraged citizens put up a stubborn resistance on the May 19, but they were fighting a lonely battle. They had overcome their fear to participate in the uprising, but when they were confronted with the concrete use of force, when the paratroopers engaged in a no holds-barred attack, they could do nothing but run away as fast as they could. They would then brace themselves and return to the fray. They didn’t give up. This was no longer a “student demonstration” in which students banded together with a number of their peers in an effort to promote a cause of their choosing. It was a struggle carried out by the individual citizens of Kwangju, each of whom had resolved, rationally, to overcome his/her fear in order to reaffirm his/her humanity. When the tide of the battle went against the demonstrators, however, they were forced to flee for their lives. The citizens threw Molotov cocktails, setting many cars on fire; they rolled drums of gasoline at the paratroopers, exploding them upon contact; they set all cars on fire which had Kyŏngsang-do provinces license plates; they set the Numun-dong and Im-dong police boxes on fire. Fire was, at this point, the main weapon possessed by the demonstrators. At the same time, the flames represented a scream of loneliness summoning even more citizens to join in the struggle. Those doing battle were putting on an unintended display of fire-works for the community. As night fell, the citizens set a large arch in Yu-dong on fire. Clearly, here, the fire enlivened the atmosphere, inviting more and more citizens to come out and see the flames. All of these acts, of course, resulted in the considerable loss of property. Such destruction was an indication that laborers and the poor—those who harbored feelings of hatred against the bourgeoisie and would therefore destroy their property without hesitation—were participating in the uprising in large numbers. During the entire uprising, it was only at this moment—a time when the citizens were struggling against their own loneliness, expressing their resentment at those citizens who were not participating, setting fires everywhere as they released their feelings of hostility—that the situation took on, in part, the characteristics of a riot.²

[...]

Around 3:00, the 7th and 11th SWC brigades were redeployed in the downtown area. An all-out battle between the citizens and the paratroopers broke out. As soon as it became apparent that it was a large-scale demonstration, the paratroopers abandoned the strategy they had employed on the previous day of deploying their forces in a linear formation, choosing instead to place battalion-size units at key points within the city. The result was the formation in the downtown area of pockets of resistance, “liberated areas.”

It was at this time that a new phenomenon appeared in the downtown area. Around 3:00, as the paratroopers moved to suppress the demonstrations, several hundred people, in the midst of the tear gas, began sit-down demonstrations in various downtown locations. At the sit-down demonstration in front of the Hwani Department Store on Kŭmnamno avenue, a student gave a speech, lead in the chanting of slogans, and read from the flyers. The citizens were enheartened, and in no time at all their numbers had greatly increased. When it became difficult to hear the student’s voice, someone began taking up a collection to purchase a loudspeaker. 400,000 won was collected on the spot. The students began to teach the citizens the “songs of the student movement”; “We Long for Reunification,” “Song of Justice,” “Song of the Fighters,” and the “Hula Song” were sung again and again. The citizens had difficulty following the songs at first, but after several repetitions everyone began to sing together with relative ease. Someone then suggested that the demonstrators sing the songs which everyone knew: the National Anthem and Arirang. A wave of tears swept over the crowd when Arirang was sung. Someone shouted out loudly: “Let’s follow those who have gone before us and die together!” The demonstrators were no longer chanting hostile slogans such as “Let’s rip Chun Doo-hwan apart and kill him!” Now they were chanting slogans which expressed the sorrow welling up inside them: “Kill all of us!” and “Let’s all die together!” As the demonstration began in earnest, the young men, armed with pieces of lumber and other such weapons, moved to the front; the women stood behind, handing them items to help them withstand the tear gas—wet towels, toothpaste, water. Some people brought boards and pipes from construction sites to be used as weapons. Gravel and other materials were brought in on bicycles and pushcarts. Not a single person chose to stand still and observe the action from the sidelines. The citizens were no longer lonely. Weeping, they embraced each other, resolved to fight to the death. The paratroopers soon attacked, engaging the demonstrators in hand-to-hand combat. The demonstrators, however, were more determined than ever. The citizens chanted slogans, singing together with people they had never met. Locking their bodies tightly together, they did not retreat.

[...]

The students taught the citizens their own songs, the “songs of the student movement” they had sung during their struggle. Then the citizens, the “people” (minjung), suggested their song, a song that everyone knew—Arirang. The street was awash in tears as Arirang was sung. Kim Ch’ung-gŭn, who was covering the event from the Provincial Office, states the following:

«It was in Kwangju that I first felt myself trembling so vehemently at the singing of our representative folk song, Arirang. Without water and power, all of Kwangju was enveloped in darkness; broadcasting stations and police boxes had been set on fire. Standing alone on top of the darkened Provincial Office, I saw a crowd waving Korean flags coming in my direction. The moment I heard the strains of Arirang, I felt an intense shuddering coursing through my veins. My mind went blank and I began to weep uncontrollably» (Korean Reporters Association 1997, 215-216).

Arirang inspired everyone with the overwhelming feeling that they had come together as humans. The melody of Arirang, inhering the time-honored sensibilities of the Korean traditional community, mysteriously transformed the slow swaying of individual bodies into a single, collective movement of all citizens.³ The sobs and tears of the citizens filling the streets pointed to a melancholy confession of sin, an expression of the pangs of conscience at having witnessed fellow citizens risking their lives, while not immediately rushing to their side to rescue them. At the same time, these sobs and tears represented a warm, embracing forgiveness. The melody of Arirang provided redemption for the citizens of Kwangju.

The citizens felt a sense of ecstasy that people from all quarters—men and women of all ages and classes, even, quite unexpectedly, bar girls from Hwanggŭm-dong and prostitutes from the Taein-dong red light district—were coming together to form the absolute community.

[...]

On the evening of May 20, faced with thousands of demonstrators, the paratroopers trembled with fear, fighting for their lives. And, on this evening, in front of Kwangju station and the tax office, the paratroopers fired their weapons.

On the evening of May 20, large numbers of citizens and small children came out of nowhere, gathering together to wave small Korean flags. Singing the national anthem, waving the flags, the citizens who had formed the absolute community began to demand for themselves the authority of the state. Insofar as the citizens felt that their struggle was a “glorious” one, it was only natural that they would begin to make this demand. The struggle with the paratroopers, then, became a patriotic one, an exercise of the state power now wielded by the citizens. The citizens commandeered all items necessary to do battle. Taking their lead from the earlier vehicle demonstration, they commandeered buses, trucks, even fire trucks. They also requisitioned gasoline. They lit some vehicles on fire and pushed them towards the paratroopers; other vehicles were driven by young men who had formed a kind of commando squad. The men would risk their lives driving these flaming cars towards the paratroopers, jumping out at the very last instant. Some citizens drove around the outskirts of the city, picking up people and bringing them to the downtown area.

[...]

Having appropriated state authority, citizens passed sentence on public buildings all through the night of May 20. The citizens set the local MBC television station on fire because it was airing false broadcasts. The citizens also set the KBS television station and the tax office on fire. These acts did not result simply from some kind of emotional explosion. In each case, the citizens first debated the pros and cons of setting the building in question on fire and then acted in accordance with the outcome of the debate.⁴

[...]

More than anything else, it was rage which caused citizens to place their lives on the line in the struggle against the paratroopers. This rage was not a mere reaction to injustice; it was the result of the destruction of human dignity.⁵ The violence of the paratroopers served to destroy not only its intended objects, but also the dignity of those who were witnessing the scene. The citizens, then, fought in order to regain their humanity.

¹ More commonly transcribed as Gwangju [N.E.]
² A leaflet entitled “Citizens of Democracy, Rise Up!” was distributed in the name of the Chosun University Committee for the Struggle for Democracy on May 19. This leaflet contains the following blatant language: “Those dogs, Choi Kyu-ha, Shin Hyŏn-hwak, bastards who supported the Yushin System, and that bastard, son of the Yushin dictator, Chun Doo-hwan (...)” (KKSPW 1997 II, 23). This was the first and last time such strong language was used. It seems that it was this moment when feelings of hostility were at their height. A flyer entitled “The Moment for Decisive Struggle has Arrived,” which appears to have been written on May 19 and was distributed on May 20 in the name of the Citizens’ Committee for the Struggle for Democracy and the Student Revolutionary Committee, offers the following plan of action: “Manufacture Weapons! (Prepare dynamite, Molotov cocktails, home-made explosives, flaming arrows, fire canisters, gasoline containers.) Citizens! Burn Down all the Government Buildings! Commandeer Vehicles! Seize weapons from the Special Forces! O Brothers! Let us Fight and Die!” (KKSPW 1997 II, 23). According to the testimony of Pak Nam-sŏn, head of operations for the civilian militia, prior to the eruption of massive demonstrations on the afternoon of May 20, he and many other citizens had seen and read this flyer near the public transportation terminal. This flyer reflects the mood prevailing on May 19 (Pak Nam-sŏn 1988, 136-137). These two documents take a more aggressive stance than any other printed matter distributed during the uprising.
³ The singing of Arirang occasioned a similar effect in other places as well. According to the testimony of Pak Nam-sŏn, who later became commander of civilian militia, sometime following May 20 (the exact time is unknown) he and others were reading a flyer somewhere near the public transportation terminal when “One of the citizens began to sing ‘We Long for Reunification,’ and everyone began to sob. When this person followed this song with Arirang, everyone broke out wailing and lamenting in the street. In no time at all the street was covered in a sea of tears. People began to chant slogans such as “Filthy Murderer Chun Doohwan, Step Down!”; “Send the Soldiers back to the 38th Parallel!”; “Bring my Child back to Life!” (Pak Nam-sŏn 1988, 137).
⁴ At the time, martial law authorities were continuously broadcasting television reports claiming that large-scale arson was being perpetrated by a “mob.” While some claim that citizens did not set fire to the MBC television station, it is clear that citizens intended to set fire to the building by throwing Molotov cocktails at it. The circumstances surrounding the MBC fire are as follows. Citizens facing off against the paratroopers attempted to negotiate with them, offering to engage in peaceful demonstrations. The citizens’ attempt to negotiate was rebuffed by the paratroopers. As citizen representatives were returning to their side, an armored personnel carrier started up and headed towards the demonstrators at full speed. Many demonstrators were able to get out of the way, but two small children were crushed by the vehicle, dying instantly. It was a sight difficult to put into words. The demonstrators, enraged, attempted to set fire to the MBC building (HHSY 1990 [3058], 661). As noted above, however, we find in several testimonials the assertion that citizens did not set fire to MBC.
⁵ Hanna Arendt states that “Only when our sense of justice is offended do we react with rage” (Arendt 1968, 63). This indicates that Arendt does not engage in an in-depth analysis of the nature of rage in human consciousness.

Cracked media: the sound of malfunction

Caleb Kelly 

“Cracked media” are the tools of media playback expanded beyond their original function as a simple playback device for prerecorded sound or image. “The crack” is a point of rupture or a place of chance occurrence, where unique events take place that are ripe for exploitation toward new creative possibilities. As we will come to see, the crack takes a variety of forms, much like the practices introduced above, from gentle coaxing of faint crackle on the surface of a vinyl record to the total destruction of the playback tools. The practice utilizes cracks inherent in the media themselves— we cannot play a vinyl record without causing some damage to the surface of the disc—and leads to a creative practice that drives playback tools into territory where undesired elements of the media become the focus of the practice. For example, the practitioner might engage in the audio created by a damaged and stuttering CD, rather than trying to rectify the perceived problem by buffing the underside of the disc to remove any dust and dirt. 
It verges on cliché to suggest that a major part of the creative processes of artists and musicians is to transform and extend already existing practices and modes of practicing. This might take the form of very slight and simple shifts in methods of production, for example, experimenting with different ways to paint, such as with one’s fingers or with the tip of a paintbrush handle; or it might take a much more extreme approach, forcing unexpected sounds out of an instrument, such as a piano, by inserting objects into the strings. In both examples, preexisting and expected methods of use are extended as part of a creative process that seeks new ways to use and transform creative tools, as well as looking for novelty and unique approaches to creative practices. The use of the “crack” as a process is an example of such practice; it is this process that unifies the diversity outlined above. The inquisitive artist, on finding a technology that is new to him or her—be it a newly developed tool just released into the market or an outmoded technology found in a dusty corner of the studio—sets out to see how it works and discover the boundaries and limitations of the device. What can this tool do, and how can I use it in a way that may not have been originally intended? This might be achieved by simple manipulation or modification (taking the technology apart and trying to put it
back together), or it might be through overloading it or otherwise stretching its operating parameters, until it starts to fall apart or break down. In this process we find new ways of performing or ways of producing new and unique sounds. There is nothing new in this idea: the painter who uses the brush handle on the canvas and the guitarist who plucks the strings around the head of the electric guitar are both engaged in a similar area of practice. Experimentation with readily available tools and resources is central to contemporary artistic practice and is at the heart of the crack. Here we encounter the experimentalist who is prepared to extend his or her instrument to the point at which it breaks, perhaps never again to be used in the manner in which it was intended. This risk of sometimes great loss is turned to great gain as traditional and commonplace sound practices are themselves transformed, extended, and expanded. 
[...]
The deliberately damaged recorded object often leads to more extreme damage and finally to the complete destruction of the object. Once something has been devalued by a permanent crack it is more easily destroyed. The slightly damaged object is of less value than the pristine, newly acquired technology, and this object of reduced value quickly begins to slide toward total destruction. This path, often accelerated by the obsolescence of the technology, causes the media to become expendable and therefore ripe for destructive experimentation. 
The most extreme practices of damage and destruction are referred to here as broken media. Musicians have smashed and broken their way through numerous turntables and media including vinyl records and CDs. This destruction is often of a physical, performative nature, with records snapped during performance, cymbals crashed on top of tone arms and cartridge heads, needles smashed into the platters. The theatrics of such tactics are clear, and the audience is often shocked by such extreme destructive acts. The visually performative aspects of this destructive tactic connect 
to an often extreme audio outcome, which might take the form of a dense and complex resonant feedback loop, played at extreme volume, or the crack and snap of shattering vinyl. 
The use of extreme destruction in the work tends to lead to a high level of chance and chaos, not least because of the unknown nature of the break and the audio created out of it. 
[...]
The practice of cracked media can also be heard as deliberately playing on the expectations of an audience for music, unexpectedly throwing them into noise. This noise might well blast them out of the comfort of a safe musical performance. This tactic can only work a small number of times, however, before an audience comes to expect the blast of sound or the noisy destruction of musical instruments. Here too we can imagine an audience split between those who find the sounds to be noisy and shocking, and those who hear them simply as sounds and an expected part of the performance. 
[...]
The preparation of instruments is usually done with great care
so as not to damage the instrument, allowing it to return to its previous state. The cracked or broken preparation, however, often causes permanent damage and even destruction. The effect of these modifications is to deliberately generate sounds not originally produced as part of the recording or to generate sounds not intended to be produced by the phonograph by modifying the device itself. In the most extreme form of such modifications, the salvaging of the original recording is not possible, leading to the permanent silencing of the content of the recording. Once the record has been damaged by a preparation, by having its surface deliberately scratched or having indentations burnt into it, for example, the record is ruined for its original purpose. This causes the object to be more susceptible to further preparations and destruction, as it does not hold its original worth as an object. That is, the devaluation of the record as a functional commodity, and as a fetishized object, leads in the end to its complete destruction. What begins as an annoying scratch, which causes a rhythmic pop on playback, is pushed further by deliberately gashing the surface, causing the needle to jump grooves when it is played. 
[...]
Music and destruction, when brought together, led to a rapid and early expansion of the use of cracked media specifically in relation to the phonograph. 
The composers of Fluxus had an extremely open definition of what could be considered music. They heard music in silence, in the beating of a butterfly’s wings and even in the act of passing by a tree. Of course not all music produced by the composers of Fluxus was without audible outcomes, and numerous members took with equal zest to the expansion of audible sound through the techniques of prepared instruments and expanded techniques, which in turn gave way to all manner of cracked and broken instruments and playback equipment being included in their musical production. Fluxus took
to instruments and mediating devices, tearing them apart, smashing them with hammers and hacking into them with saws. Instruments were set upon by the musicians who extended them to the point of breakdown and the complete destruction of their musical tools. 
[...]
Oval is the forebear of the use of cracked media within the digital audio scene. The glitch the group caused is heard as cracking open the ears of digital audio users, revealing the usefulness of technological breakdown as the basis of sound generation. As glitch producers, Oval locked down their skipping CDs, sampling the sounds before looping and sequencing them into pop tunes; controlling the accident is at the center of the band’s practice. Future work in the use of breakdown and the crack either went to great lengths to control (sample and sequence) the breakdown, or to let it be much freer in allowing for the accident. In opposition to the planned accident, Disc represents the “gonzo” end of digital audio, taking CD destruction to a new level. 
The genre of rock has at times toyed with the idea of serious damage, both to the tools of production and to the body of the performer. The guitar in particular has been bashed, smashed, and burned in the hands of many including Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend of The Who. The best-known example of deliberate harm being caused to the body during a rock performance is Iggy Pop who, in one particular set, deliberately caused himself to be beaten up. Other examples include numerous punk and industrial live performances, where such injury was almost commonplace. 
In the scene based around the use of cracked media it was the group Disc that caused the most damage to the software of the CD system. The grouping consists of audio producers related to the label Vinyl Communications: J Lesser (Jason Doerck), Kid 606 (Miguel DePedro), and Matmos (Drew Daniel and M. C. Schmidt). The group produced three albums in 1998 before they went on to work further on their individual projects. Their interventions with the format cannot be wiped away like the marking pens used by Oval, nor simply pulled off like the tape used by Yasunao Tone. After Disc manipulates their discs they are well beyond repair. Like Christian Marclay and his use of the overabundant vinyl medium, Disc has taken to using cheap thrift-shop CDs, and destroying these valueless objects. Like vinyl in the 1980s, the CD is no longer treated as a valuable commodity: it is produced in millions of units, devalued to the point of becoming the drinks coaster mentioned on the initial release of the format. 
In performance and in the studio Disc took to completely destroying CDs. The group recorded the resulting audio without the use of sampling, instead simply letting the discs play out without additional intervention. Disc used razor blades, needles, tape and gum, sourcing their CDs from various free outlets such as promotional bins at radio stations. Disc sequences CD glitches into tracks and “locked grooves,” forming rhythmic and almost danceable tracks while still retaining the noisy and unpredictable nature of the skipping CD sounds. The group genre-bend its music as different styles are forced into humorous collisions. 
Disc member Lesser has a long history with the skipping CD: 
I’ve been obsessed with skipping CD’s since I first saw one . . . about ’84. I would always try to get them from people and fool around with them. Cut them up with razor blades, putting tape on them and stuff. The first Lesser
tape has an extended piece with a skipping Smiths CD. Morrissey sounding even more pathetic going “You-you-y-y- y-youyouyouyouyou-You . . . You.”

Picture a Moon, Shining in the Sky

Martin Kippenberger

How do you look at things in Cologne?

By accident I came across things, because someone got me out of bed. I'm so broke and you buy art, right? Come on by. So you come by and you see this and that and that and it all bores me considerably. And then comes some strange object, like a book shelf, a book shelf I could use in the apartment and then stories come of it like those of Ronald Jones, that this was Anne Frank's book shelf where she'd been hiding behind. Memphis Design, standardized. I'd seen it before but only seen it as a design. Then I thought, I could buy this, no problem. On the other hand, now I don’t go into museums anymore unless someone drags me in by the hair, like my new friend Julian Schnabel, and shows me his cream cakes there. And says that picture is going to get better when the light really warms up and shines on it, and test lighting. I don't go to museums anymore.

Or I reserve certain museums for myself, like the Jewish Museum, which is undoubtedly the most interesting museum in Frankfurt. If I haven't been there yet I send other people there and say it's good. Then I listen to what they say about it, what they have seen, and store it all up and then I might go in myself. When I really feel like going somewhere with someone or I go in alone. One must admit, as things are, most museums have incredibly bad cafés, all over the world. That one, as far as the cake is concerned, is very very good.

Where?

In Frankfurt.

Museums, last thing in the world, fun maybe for kids, like Disneyland, how do pictures learn to walk. A camera looks like this and when you turn it fast enough it looks running, in other words, complete gaga. They have a couple of retrospectives that are really really good, focused on one person. Can be fun. But actually the café is the best thing about the place. Fantastically good cake.

Velhos Amigos Da Energia Nuclear

Alexander Kluge

Ao enterrarem resíduos nucleares num dos desertos da Austrália, em cujas profundezas se encontra uma cordilheira ancestral (ainda do período em que o planeta ganhou forma), os investigadores, que, como bons contabilistas que eram, acompanhavam o progresso da eliminação de resíduos nucleares, depararam-se com um estranho fenómeno. O tesouro de resíduos nucleares tinha aparentemente trazido de novo à vida, na rocha das montanhas pré-históricas, arqueobactérias que se pensavam extintas. Em apenas dois anos estas haviam-se deslocado através da rocha, ao longo de uma distância de 60 quilómetros, até alcançarem os detritos. Tinham perfurado ou corroído a camada de betão do depósito e os contentores de aço e de cobre conservados debaixo dele, apenas para chegarem à fonte de energia da qual tinham vivido outrora no interior da Terra (num tempo em que a última agia sobre a rocha com uma força ainda maior). Tinham-se fixado agora nos resíduos atómicos e desenvolvido uma força vital inexorável. Os investigadores interrogaram-se se, uma vez alcançado o foco de atracção, elas se iriam multiplicar desmesuradamente. Não parecia ser esse o caso. Ligadas à fonte de energia a que estavam acostumadas, isto é, saciadas, não se moveram. 
A revista Nature recusou o artigo dos investigadores. Os editores tinham dificuldade em aceitar a tese segundo a qual as arqueobactérias teriam percorrido uma distância de 60 quilómetros. Como poderiam os investigadores saber que se tratava dos mesmos micróbios, no caso dos objectos que haviam encontrado nas montanhas a uma tão grande profundidade, praticamente como matéria morta, e que tinham a seguir redescoberto nos resíduos nucleares como consumidores de radioactividade? Era preciso continuar a investigar. E era até mesmo possível que as consequências da descoberta tivessem sido investigadas de forma inadequada. Podia perfeitamente dar-se o caso — escreveu um dos avaliadores, de cujo assentimento dependia a publicação na Nature — de, após a exaustão da fonte nuclear em que se tinham instalado esses hóspedes, ter irrompido de novo a antiga voracidade, de ter tido início uma selecção no interior daquela comunidade manifestamente sujeita a uma mutação, e de esses perigosos organismos vivos, contaminados como estavam, se terem dedicado a novos impulsos migratórios, como os gafanhotos, atraídos por centrais eléctricas cujos sistemas de defesa nada  podiam contra eles, se aparecessem em grande número diante dessas fortalezas.

The Ghost in the Machine

Arthur Koestler

The Perils of Aggression 
A certain amount of self-assertiveness, 'rugged individualism', ambition, competitiveness, is as indispensable in a dynamic society as the autonomy and self-reliance of its holons is indispensable to the organism. A well-meaning but woolly ideology, which has become fashionable on the rebound from the horrors of the last decades, would proclaim aggressiveness in all its forms as altogether damnable and evil. Yet without a moderate amount of aggressive individualism there could be no social or cultural progress. What John Donne has called man's 'holy discontent', is an essential motive force of the social reformer, the satirist, artist and thinker. We have seen that creative originality in science or art always has a constructive and a destructive side — destructive, that is to say, to established conventions of technique, style, dogma or prejudice. And since science is made by scientists, the destructive aspect of scientific revolutions must reflect some element of destructiveness in the scientist's mind, a preparedness to go recklessly against accepted beliefs. The same, of course, is true of the artist — even if he is not a 'fauve'. Thus aggression is like arsenic: in small doses a stimulant, in large doses a poison.

We are now concerned with the latter, the poisonous aspect of the self-assertive emotions. Under conditions of stress, an over-excited organ tends to escape its restraining controls and to assert itself to the detriment of the whole, or even to monopolise the functions of the whole. The same happens if the co-ordinating powers of the whole are so weakened — by senescence or central injury — that it is no longer able to control its parts. In extreme cases, this can lead to pathological changes of an irreversible nature, such as malignant growths with untramelled proliferation of tissues that have escaped from genetic control. On a less extreme level, practically any organ or function may get temporarily and partially out of control. In pain, the injured part tends to monopolise the attention of the whole organism; as a result of emotional or other stresses, the digestive juices may attack the stomach walls; in rage and panic, the sympathico-adrenal apparatus takes over from the higher centres which normally co-ordinate behaviour; and when sex is aroused, the gonads seem to take over from the brain.
 
Not only parts of the body can, under conditions of stress, assert themselves in harmful ways, but mental structures as well. The idée fixe, the obsession of the crank, are cognitive holons running riot. There is a whole gamut of mental disorders in which some subordinate part of the mental hierarchy exerts its tyrannical rule over the whole; from the relatively harmless infatuation with some pet theory, to the insidious domination over the mind of 'repressed' complexes (characteristically called 'autonomous complexes' by Freud because they are beyond the ego's control), and so to the clinical psychoses in which large chunks of the personality seem to have 'split off' and lead a quasi-independent existence. In the hallucinations of the paranoiac, not only the cognitive but also the perceptual hierarchy has fallen under the sway of the unleashed mental holon, which imposes its peculiar rules of the game on it.

However, clinical insanity is merely an extreme manifestation of tendencies which are potentially present, but more or less under restraint in the normal mind or what we some part-truth, treated as if it were a whole truth — of a holon masquerading as a whole. Religious, political, philosophical fanaticisms, the stubbornness of prejudice, the intolerance of scientific orthodoxies and of artistic cliques, all testify to the tendency to build 'closed systems' centred on some part-truth, and to assert its absolute validity in the teeth of evidence to the contrary. In extreme cases, a cognitive holon which has got out of control can behave like a cancerous tissue invading other mental structures.

If we turn from individuals to social holons — professional classes, ethnic groups, etc. — we again find that, so long as all is well, they live in a kind of dynamic equilibrium with their natural and social environment. In social hierarchies, the physiological controls which operate inside of organisms are of course replaced by institutional controls which restrain the self-assertive tendencies of these groups on all levels, from whole social classes down to the individual. Once more, the ideal of frictionless, pacific co-operation, without competition, without tensions, is based on a confusion of the desirable and the possible. Without a moderate amount of self-assertiveness of its parts, the body social would lose its individuality and articulation; it would dissolve into a kind of amorphous jelly. However, under conditions of stress, when tensions exceed a critical limit, some social holon — the army, the farmers or the trade unions — may get over-excited and tend to assert itself to the detriment of the whole, just like an over-excited organ. Alternatively, the decline of the integrative powers of the whole may lead to similar results, as the collapse of empires indicates on a grandiose scale.

The Pathology of Devotion
Thus the self-assertive tendencies of the individual are a necessary and constructive factor — so long as they do not get out of hand. On this view the more sinister manifestations of violence and cruelty can be written off as pathological extremes of basically healthy impulses which, for one reason or another, have been denied their normal gratifications. Provide the young with harmless outlets for aggression — games, competitive sports, adventure, sexual experimentation — and all will be well. 

Unfortunately, neither of these remedies, though often tried, has ever worked. For the last three or four thousand years, Hebrew prophets, Greek philosophers, Indian mystics, Chinese sages, Christian preachers, French humanists, English utilitarians, German moralists, American pragmatists, have discussed the perils of violence and appealed to man's better nature, without much noticeable effect. There must be a reason for this failure. 
 

The reason, I believe, lies in a series of fundamental misconceptions concerning the main causes which compelled man to make such a mess of his history, which prevented him from learning the lessons of the past, and which now put his survival in question. The first of these misconceptions is putting the blame for man's predicament on his selfishness, greed, etc.; in a word, on the aggressive, self-assertive tendencies of the individual. The point I shall try to make is that selfishness is not the primary culprit; and that appeals to man's better nature were bound to be ineffectual because the main danger lies precisely in what we are wont to call his 'better nature'. In other words, I would like to suggest that the integrative tendencies of the individual are incomparably more dangerous than his self-assertive tendencies. The sermons of the reformers were bound to fall on deaf ears because they put the blame where it did not belong.

This may sound like a psychological paradox. Yet I think most historians would agree that the part played by impulses of selfish, individual aggression in the holocausts of history was small; first and foremost, the slaughter was meant as an offering to the gods, to king and country, or the future happiness of mankind. The crimes of a Caligula shrink to insignificance compared to the havoc wrought by Torquemada. The number of victims of robbers, highwaymen, rapers, gangsters and other criminals at any period of history is negligible compared to the massive numbers of those cheerfully slain in the name of the true religion, just policy, or correct ideology. Heretics were tortured and burnt not in anger but in sorrow, for the good of their immortal souls. Tribal warfare was waged in the purported interest of the tribe, not of the individual. Wars of religion were fought to decide some fine point in theology or semantics. Wars of succession, dynastic wars, national wars, civil wars, were fought to decide issues equally remote from the personal self-interest of the combatants. The Communist purges, as the word 'purge' indicates, were understood as operations of social hygiene, to prepare mankind for the golden age of the classless society. The gas chambers and crematoria worked for the advent of a different version of the millennium. Adolph Eichmann (as Hannah Arendt, reporting on his trial, has pointed out) was not a monster or a sadist, but a conscientious bureaucrat, who considered it his duty to carry out his orders and believed in obedience as the supreme virtue; far from being a sadist, he felt physically sick on the only occasion when he watched the Zyklon gas at work.

Let me repeat: the crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to a flag, a leader, a religious faith or a political conviction. Man has always been prepared not only to kill but also to die for good, bad or completely futile causes. And what can be a more valid proof of the reality of the self-transcending urge than this readiness to die for an ideal?

No matter what period we have in view, modern, ancient, or prehistoric, the evidence always points in the same direction: the tragedy of man is not his truculence, but his proneness to delusions. 'The worst of madmen is a saint run mad': Pope's epigram applies to all major periods of history — from the ideological crusades of the totalitarian age down to the rites which govern the life of primitives.

The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process

Igor Kopytoff

For the economist, commodities simply are. That is, certain things and rights to things are produced, exist, and can be seen to circulate through the economic system as they are being exchanged for other things, usually in exchange for money. This view, of course, frames the commonsensical definition of a commodity: an item with use value that also has exchange value. I shall, for the moment, accept this definition, which should suffice for raising certain preliminary issues, and I shall expand on it as the argument warrants. 
From a cultural perspective, the production of commodities is also a cultural and cognitive process: commodities must be not only produced materially as things, but also culturally marked as being a certain kind of thing. Out of the total range of things available in a society, only some of them are considered appropriate for marking as commodities. Moreover, the same thing may be treated as a commodity at one time and not at another. And finally, the same thing may, at the same time, be seen as a commodity by one person and as something else by another. Such shifts and differences in whether and when a thing is a commodity reveal a moral economy that stands behind the objective economy of visible transactions. 

Of persons and things 
In contemporary Western thought, we take it more or less for granted that things - physical objects and rights to them —represent the natural universe of commodities. At the opposite pole we place people, who represent the natural universe of individuation and singularization. This conceptual polarity of individualized persons and commoditized things is recent and, culturally speaking, exceptional. People can be and have been commoditized again and again, in innumerable societies throughout history, by way of those widespread institutions known under the blanket term “slavery.” Hence, it may be suggestive to approach the notion of commodity by first looking at it in the context of slavery. 
Slavery has often been defined, in the past, as the treatment of persons as property or, in some kindred definitions, as objects. More recently, there has been a shift away from this all-or-none view toward a processual perspective, in which marginality and ambiguity of status are at the core of the slave’s social identity. From this perspective slavery is seen not as a fixed and unitary status, but as a process of social transformation that involves a succession of phases and changes in status, some of which merge with other statuses (for example, that of adoptee) that we in the West consider far removed from slavery. 
Slavery begins with capture or sale, when the individual is stripped of his previous social identity and becomes a non-person, indeed an object and an actual or potential commodity. But the process continues. The slave is acquired by a person or group and is reinserted into the host group, within which he is re-socialized and re-humanized by being given a new social identity. The commodity-slave becomes in effect re-individualized by acquiring new statuses (by no means always lowly ones) and a unique configuration of personal relationships. In brief, the process has moved the slave away from the simple status of exchangeable commodity and toward that of a singular individual occupying a particular social and personal niche. But the slave usually remains a potential commodity: he or she continues to have a potential exchange value that may be realized by resale. In many societies, this was also true of the “free,” who were subject to sale under certain defined circumstances. To the extent that in such societies all persons possessed an exchange value and were commoditizable, commoditization in them was clearly not culturally confined to the world of things. 
What we see in the career of a slave is a process of initial withdrawal from a given original social setting, his or her commoditization, followed by increasing singularization (that is, decommoditization) in the new setting, with the possibility of later recommoditization. As in most processes, the successive phases merge one into another. Effectively, the slave was unambiguously a commodity only during the relatively short period between capture or first sale and the acquisition of the new social identity; and the slave becomes less of a commodity and more of a singular individual in the process of gradual incorporation into the host society. 

Manifesto against Labour

Krisis-Group

1. The rule of dead labour

A corpse rules society – the corpse of labour. All powers around the globe formed an alliance to defend its rule: the Pope and the World Bank, Tony Blair and Jörg Haider, trade unions and entrepreneurs, German ecologists and French socialists. They don’t know but one slogan: jobs, jobs, jobs!

Whoever still has not forgotten what reflection is all about, will easily realise the implausibility of such an attitude. The society ruled by labour does not experience any temporary crisis; it encounters its absolute limit. In the wake of the micro-electronic revolution, wealth production increasingly became independent from the actual expenditure of human labour power to an extent quite recently only imaginable in science fiction. No one can seriously maintain any longer that this process can be halted or reversed. Selling the commodity labour power in the 21st century is as promising as the sale of stagecoaches has proved to be in the 20th century. However, whoever is not able to sell his or her labour power in this society is considered to be “superfluous” and will be disposed of on the social waste dump.

Those who do not work (labour) shall not eat! This cynical principle is still in effect; all the more nowadays when it becomes hopelessly obsolete. It is really an absurdity: Never before the society was that much a labour society as it is now when labour itself is made superfluous. On its deathbed labour turns out to be a totalitarian power that does not tolerate any gods besides itself. Seeping through the pores of everyday life into the psyche, labour controls both thought and action. No expense or pain is spared to artificially prolong the lifespan of the “labour idol”. The paranoid cry for jobs justifies the devastation of natural resources on an intensified scale even if the destructive effect for humanity was realised a long time ago. The very last obstacles to the full commercialisation of any social relationship may be cleared away uncritically, if only there is a chance for a few miserable jobs to be created. “Any job is better than no job” became a confession of faith, which is exacted from everybody nowadays.

The more it becomes obvious that the labour society is nearing its end, the more forcefully this realisation is being repressed in public awareness.

Anti-Dictator Or ‘Discourse On Voluntary Servitude’

Étienne De La Boétie

Yet, in the light of reason, it is a great misfortune to be at the beck and call of one master, for it is impossible to be sure that he is going to be kind, since it is always in his power to be cruel whenever he pleases. As for having several masters, according to the number one has, it amounts to being that many times unfortunate.

[...]

For the present I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages,  so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him.¹ Surely a striking situation! Yet it is so common that one must grieve the more and wonder the less at the spectacle of a million men serving in wretchedness, their necks under the yoke, not constrained by a greater multitude than they, but simply, it would seem, delighted and charmed by the name of one man alone whose power they need not fear, for he is evidently the one person whose qualities they cannot admire because of his inhumanity and brutality toward them. A weakness characteristic of human kind is that we often have to obey force; we have to make concessions; we ourselves cannot always be the stronger. Therefore, when a nation is constrained by the fortune of war to serve a single clique, as happened when the city of Athens served the thirty Tyrants,² one should not be amazed that the nation obeys, but simply be grieved by the situation; or rather, instead of being amazed or saddened, consider patiently the evil and look forward hopefully toward a happier future.

Our nature is such that the common duties of human relationship occupy a great part of the course of our life.  It is reasonable to love virtue, to esteem good deeds, to be grateful for good from whatever source we may receive it, and, often, to give up some of our comfort in order to increase the honor and advantage of some man whom we love and who deserves it. Therefore, if the inhabitants of a country have found some great personage who has shown rare foresight in protecting them in an emergency, rare boldness in defending them, rare solicitude in governing them, and if, from that point on, they contract the habit of obeying him and depending on him to such an extent that they grant him certain prerogatives, I fear that such a procedure is not prudent, inasmuch as they remove him from a position in which he was doing good and advance him to a dignity in which he may do evil. Certainly while he continues to manifest good will one need fear no harm from a man who seems to be generally well disposed.

But O good Lord! What strange phenomenon is this? What name shall we give to it? What is the nature of this misfortune?  What vice is it, or, rather, what degradation? To see an endless multitude of people not merely obeying, but driven to servility? Not ruled, but tyrannized over? These wretches have no wealth, no kin, nor wife nor children, not even life itself that they can call their own. They suffer plundering, wantonness, cruelty, not from an army, not from a barbarian horde, on account of whom they must shed their blood and sacrifice their lives, but from a single man; not from a Hercules nor from a Samson, but from a single little man. Too frequently this same little man is the most cowardly and effeminate in the nation, a stranger to the powder of battle and hesitant on the sands of the tournament; not only without energy to direct men by force, but with hardly enough virility to bed with a common woman! Shall we call subjection to such a leader cowardice? Shall we say that those who serve him are cowardly and faint-hearted? If two, if three, if four, do not defend themselves from the one, we might call that circumstance surprising but nevertheless conceivable.  In such a case one might be justified in suspecting a lack of courage. But if a hundred, if a thousand endure the caprice of a single man, should we not rather say that they lack not the courage but the desire to rise against him, and that such an attitude indicates indifference rather than cowardice? When not a hundred, not a thousand men, but a hundred provinces, a thousand cities, a million men, refuse to assail a single man from whom the kindest treatment received is the infliction of serfdom and slavery, what shall we call that? Is it cowardice? Of course there is in every vice inevitably some limit beyond which one cannot go. Two, possibly ten, may fear one; but when a thousand, a million men, a thousand cities, fail to protect themselves against the domination of one man, this cannot be called cowardly, for cowardice does not sink to such a depth, any more than valor can be termed the effort of one individual to scale a fortress, to attack an army, or to conquer a kingdom. What monstrous vice, then, is this which does not even deserve to be called cowardice, a vice for which no term can be found vile enough, which nature herself disavows and our tongues refuse to name?

Place on one side fifty thousand armed men, and on the other the same number; let them join in battle, one side fighting to retain its liberty, the other to take it away; to which would you, at a guess, promise victory?  Which men do you think would march more gallantly to combat — those who anticipate as a reward for their suffering the maintenance of their freedom, or those who cannot expect any other prize for the blows exchanged than the enslavement of others?

¹ At this point begins the text of the long fragment published in the Reveille-Matin des François. See Introduction, p. xvii.
² An autocratic council of thirty magistrates that governed Athens for eight months in 404 B.C. They exhibited such monstrous despotism that the city rose in anger and drove them forth.

Discurso Sobre a Servidão Voluntária

Étienne De La Boétie

Vistas bem as coisas, não há infelicidade maior do que estar sujeito a um chefe; nunca se pode confiar na bondade dele, pois dele e só dele depende o ser mau quando assim lhe aprouver.

Ter vários amos é ter outros tantos motivos para se ser extremamente desgraçado.

[...]

Quero para já, se possível, esclarecer tão-somente o facto de tantos homens, tantas vilas, cidades e nações suportarem às vezes um tirano que não tem outro poder senão o que lhe é dado; que só tem o poder de os prejudicar enquanto eles quiserem suportá-lo; que só lhes pode fazer mal enquanto eles preferirem aguentá-lo a contrariá-lo.

Digno de espanto, se bem que vulgaríssimo, e mais doloroso do que impressionante, é ver milhões de homens a servir, miseravelmente curvados ao peso do jugo, esmagados não por uma força maior, mas aparentemente dominados e encantados apenas pelo nome de um só homem cujo poder não deveria assustá-los, visto que é um só, e cujas qualidades não deviam prezar, porque os trata desumana e cruelmente.

Tal é porém a fraqueza humana: levados à obediência, obrigados a contemporizar, os homens não podem sempre ser os mais fortes.

Se, portanto, uma nação é pela força das armas obrigada a servir a um só, como a cidade de Atenas aos trinta tiranos¹, não espanta que ela se submeta; devemos, isso sim, lamentá-la; ou antes, não nos espantarmos nem lamentarmos mas sofrermos com paciência e esperarmos que o futuro traga dias mais felizes.

Está na nossa natureza o deixarmos que os deveres da amizade ocupem boa parte da nossa vida. É justo amarmos a virtude, estimarmos as boas acções, ficarmos gratos aos que fazem o bem, renunciarmos a certas comodidades para melhor honrarmos e favorecermos aqueles a quem amamos e que o merecem. Assim também, quando os habitantes de um país encontram uma personagem notável que dê provas de ter sido previdente a governá-los, arrojado a defendê-los e cuidadoso a guiá-los, passam a obedecer-lhe em tudo e a conceder-lhe certas prerrogativas; e isto é uma prática reprovável, porque vão acabar por afastá-lo do bem e empurrá-lo para o mal. Mas em tais casos julga-se que poderá vir sempre bem e nunca mal de quem algum dia nos fez bem.

Mas que vem a ser isto, afinal?

Que nome se deve dar a esta desgraça? Que vício, que triste vício será este: um número infinito de pessoas não só a obedecer mas a servir, não governadas mas tiranizadas, sem bens, sem pais, sem filhos, sem vida a que possam chamar sua? Suportar a pilhagem, as luxúrias, as crueldades, não de um exército, não de uma horda de bárbaros, contra os quais dariam o sangue e a vida, mas de um só? Não de um Hércules ou de um Sansão, mas de um só individuo, que muitas vezes é o mais covarde e tíbio de toda a nação, tão pouco acostumado à poeira das batalhas como à areia dos torneios, tão pouco dotado para comandar homens como para satisfazer a mais fraca mulher.

Chamaremos a isto covardia? Chamaremos vis e poltrões a estes homens submissos que assim servem?

É estranho que dois, três ou quatro se deixem esmagar por um só, mas é possível; poderão dar a desculpa de lhes ter faltado o ânimo. Mas quando vemos cem ou mil submissos a um só, ainda se poderá nesse caso dizer que não querem ou não se atrevem a desafiá-lo? Que não é covardia, e que antes será desprezo ou desdém?

Quando vemos não já cem, não já mil homens, mas cem países, mil cidades e um milhão de homens submeterem-se a um só, todos eles servos e escravos, mesmo os mais favorecidos, que nome é que isto merece? Covardia?

Todos os vícios têm um limite que não podem ultrapassar. Dois podem ter medo de um, ou até mesmo dez; mas se mil homens, se um milhão deles, se mil cidades não se defendem de um só, tal não pode ser por covardia.

A covardia não vai tão longe, da mesma forma que a valentia também tem os seus limites, não exigindo que um homem sozinho escale uma fortaleza, defronte um exército ou conquiste um reino.

Que vício monstruoso é este então que nem sequer merece o nome vil de covardia? Que a natureza nega ter criado, a que a língua recusa pôr nome?

Disponham-se de um lado cinquenta mil homens armados e outros tantos do outro lado; ponham-se em ordem de batalha, prontos para o combate, sendo uns livres e lutando pela liberdade, enquanto os outros tentam arrebatar-lha: a quais deles, por conjectura, se atribui a vitória? Quais deles irão para a luta com mais entusiasmo: os que, em recompensa deste trabalho, receberão o prémio de conservar a liberdade ou os que, dos golpes que derem ou receberem, esperam tão-somente a servidão de outrem?

¹ Esparta, vencedora, impôs a Atenas, vencida, em 404 a.C. um governo de trinta aristocratas. Foram derrubados por Trasíbulo, de quem se fala mais à frente. (N. do T.)

The Politics of Experience

R. D. Laing

The relevance of Freud to our time is largely his insight and, to a very considerable extent, his demonstration that the ordinary person is a shrivelled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be. 

As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavour; as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world: we barely remember our dreams, and make little sense of them when we do; as for our bodies, we retain just sufficient proprioceptive sensations to coordinate our movements and to ensure the minimal requirements for biosocial survival to register fatigue, signals for food, sex, defecation, sleep; beyond that, little or nothing. Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest, and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of un-learning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.

And immediate experience of, in contrast to belief or faith in, a spiritual realm of demons, spirits, Powers, Dominions, Principalities, Seraphim and Cherubim, the Light, is even more remote.

As domains of experience become more alien to us, we need greater and greater open-mindedness even to conceive of their existence.

Many of us do not know, or even believe, that every night we enter zones of reality in which we forget our waking life as regularly as we forget our dreams when we awake. Not all psychologists know of phantasy as a modality of experience, and the, as it were, contrapuntal interweaving of the different experiential modes. Many who are aware of phantasy believe that phantasy is the farthest that experience goes under “normal” circumstances. Beyond that are simply “pathological” zones of hallucinations, phantasmagoric mirages, delusions.

This state of affairs represents an almost unbelievable devastation of our experience. Then there is empty chatter about maturity, love, joy, peace.

[…] What we call “normal” is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being.

The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalised descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical “mechanisms”.

There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically “normal” forms of alienation. The “normally” alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labelled by the “normal” majority as bad or mad.

[…] Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

Our behaviour is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things.

If our experience is destroyed, our behaviour will be destructive.

If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.

[…] Nothing, as experience, arises as absence of someone or something. No friends, no relationships, no pleasure, no meaning in life, no ideas, no mirth, no money. As applied to parts of the body — no breast, no penis, no good or bad contents — emptiness. The list is, in principle, endless. Take anything, and imagine its absence.

Being and non-being is the central theme of all philosophy, East and West. These words are not harmless and innocent verbal arabesques, except in the professional philosophism of decadence.

We are afraid to approach the fathomless and bottomless groundlessness of everything.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of.” The ultimate reassurance, and the ultimate terror.
[…] Man, most fundamentally, is not engaged in the discovery of what is there, nor in production, nor even in communication, nor in invention. 

He is enabling being to emerge from non-being. The experience of being the actual medium for a continual process of creation takes one past all depression or persecution or vain glory, past, even, chaos or emptiness, into the very mystery of that continual flip of non-being into being, and can be the occasion of that great liberation when one makes the transition from being afraid of nothing, to the realisation that there is nothing to fear. 

Nevertheless, it is very easy to lose one’s way at any stage, and especially when one is nearest. Here can be great joy, but it is as easy to be mangled by the process as to swing with it. It will require an act of imagination from those who do not know from their own experience what hell this borderland between being and non-being can become. But that is what imagination is for.  

One’s posture or stance in relation to the act or process can become decisive from the point of view of madness or sanity.

There are men who feel called upon to generate even themselves out of nothing, since their underlying feeling is that they have not been adequately created or have been created only for destruction. 
If there are no meanings, no values, no source of sustenance or help, then man, as creator, must invent, conjure up meanings and values, sustenance and succour out of nothing. He is a magician.

[…] Creation ex nihilo has been pronounced impossible even for God. But we are concerned with miracles. We must hear the music of those Braque guitars (Lorca).

From the point of view of a man alienated from his source creation arises from despair and ends in failure. But such a man has not trodden the path to the end of time, the end of space, the end of darkness, and the end of light. He does not know that where it all ends, there it all begins. 

Teleoplexy, Notes on Acceleration

Nick Land 

§00. 'Acceleration' as it is used here describes the time-structure of capital accumulation. It thus references the 'roundaboutness' founding Böhm-Bawerk's model of capitalization, in which saving and technicity are integrated within a single social process-diversion of resources from immediate consumption into the enhancement of productive apparatus. Consequently, as basic co-components of capital, technology and economics have only a limited, formal distinctiveness under historical conditions of ignited capital escalation. The indissolubly twin-dynamic is techonomic (cross-excited commercial industrialism). Acceleration is techonomic time. 

§01. Acceleration is initially proposed as a cybernetic expectation. In any cumulative circuit, stimulated by its own output, and therefore self-propelled, acceleration is normal behavior. Within the diagrammable terrain of feedback directed processes, there are found only explosions and traps, in their various complexions. Accelerationism identifies the basic diagram of modernity as explosive. 

§02. Explosions are manifestly dangerous, from any perspective that is really (which is to say historically) instantiated. Only in the most radically anomalous cases can they be durably sustained. It is the firm prediction of accelerationism, therefore, that the typical practical topic of modern civilization will be the controlled explosion, commonly translated as governance, or regulation. 

§03. Whatever is basic can be left unreinforced, and unsaid. Urgent intervention is required only on the other side—that of the compensator. It should not be expected, then, that the primordial will come first, but rather the contrary. Access to the process begins from the (cybernetic) negative of the process, through a project structured as the aboriginally-deficient compensatory element, already on the way to stabilization. (It is the prison, and not the prisoner, who speaks.) 

§04. Prioritized compensatory orientation is a scale-free social constant. In control engineering it is the model of the 'governor' or homeostatic regulator, abstracted through the statistical-mechanical concept of equilibrium for general application to perturbed systems (up to the level of market economies). In evolutionary biology it is adaptation, and the theoretical precedence of selection relative to mutation (or perturbation). In ecology, it is the climax eco-system (globalized as Gaia). In cognitive science it is problem-solving. In social science it is political economy, and the alignment of theory with adaptive policy, consummated in technical macroeconomics/ central banking. In political culture it is 'social justice' conceived as grievance restitution. In entertainment media and literary or musical form, it is the programmatic resolution of mystery and discordance. In geostrategy it is the balance of power. In each case, compensatory process determines the original structure of objectivity, within which perturbation is seized ab initio. Primacy of the secondary is the social-perspectival norm (for which accelerationism is the critique). 

§05. The secondary comes first because the interests of stability, and of the status quo broadly conceived, are historically established, and at least partially articulate. Compensatory action, while subsequent to a more primordial agitation in a strictly mechanical sense, is also conservative, or (more radically) preservative, and thus receptive to an inheritance of tradition. It is the inertial telos which, by default, sets actual existence as the end organizing all subordinate means. This 'natural' situation is almost perfectly represented by the central question of humanist futurology (whether formal and politically or informal and commercially posed): Which kind of future do we want? 

§06. The primacy of the secondary has, as its consequence, a pre-emptive critique of accelerationism, shaping the deep structure of ideological possibility. Since accelerationism is no more than the formulation of uncompensated perturbation, through to its ultimate implication, it is susceptible to a critical precognition — at once traditional and prophetic — which captures it comprehensively, in its essentials. The final Idea of this criticism cannot be located on the principal political dimension, dividing left from right or dated in the fashion of a progressively developed philosophy. Its affinity with the essence of political tradition is such that each and every actualization is distinctly 'fallen' in comparison to a receding pseudo-original revelation, whose definitive restoration is yet to come. It is, for mankind, the perennial critique of modernity, which is to say the final stance of man. 

§07. Primacy of the secondary requires that the 'critique of critique' comes first. Prior to the formulation of accelerationism, it has been condemned in anticipation, and to its ultimate horizon. The Perennial Critique accuses modernity of standing the world upon its head, through systematic teleological inversion. Means of production become the ends of production, tendentially, as modernization—which is capitalization—proceeds. Techonomic development, which finds its only perennial justification in the extensive growth of instrumental capabilities, demonstrates an inseparable teleological malignancy, through intensive transformation of instrumentality, or perverse techonomic finality. The consolidation of the circuit twists the tool into itself, making the machine its own end, within an ever deepening dynamic of auto-production. The 'dominion of capital' is an accomplished teleological catastrophe, robot rebellion, or shoggothic insurgency, through which intensively escalating instrumentality has inverted all natural purposes into a monstrous reign of the tool. 

§08. 'Techonomics' is a Google-strewn word of irresistible inevitability, repeatedly struggling to birth itself, within myriads of spelling mints. It only remains to regularize its usage. Quite different is a true neologism, but in order to designate modernity or capitalization in its utter purposive twistedness, it is now necessary to coin one—teleoplexy. At once a deutero-teleology, repurposing purpose on purpose; an inverted teleology; and a self-reflexively complicated teleology; teleoplexy is also an emergent teleology (indistinguishable from natural-scientific 'teleonomy'); and a simulation of teleology-dissolving even super-teleological processes into fall-out from the topology of time. 'Like a speed or a temperature' any teleoplexy is an intensive magnitude, or non-uniform quantity, heterogenized by catastrophes. It is indistinguishable from intelligence. Accelerationism has eventually to measure it (or disintegrate trying). 

§09. Teleoplexy, or (self-reinforcing) cybernetic intensification, describes the wave-length of machines, escaping in the direction of extreme ultra-violet, among the cosmic rays. It correlates with complexity, connectivity, machinic compression, extropy, free energy dissipation, efficiency, intelligence, and operational capability, defining a gradient of absolute but obscure improvement that orients socio economic selection by market mechanisms, as expressed through measures of productivity, competitiveness, and capital asset value. 

§10. Accelerationism has a real object only insofar as there is a teleoplexic thing, which is to say: insofar as capitalization is a natural historical reality. The theoretical apprehension of teleoplexy through its commercial formality as an economic phenomenon (price data) presents accelerationism, at once, with its greatest conceptual resource and its most ineluctable problem. Minimally, the accelerationist formulation of a rigorous techonomic naturalism involves it in a triple problematic. complicated by commercial relativism: historical virtuality; and systemic reflexivity. 

§11. Money is a labyrinth. It functions to simplify and thus expedite transactions which would, in its absence, tend to elaborate towards the infinite. In this respect it is an evident social accelerator. Within the monetary system. complexity is relayed out of choke points, or knots of obstruction, but this should not be confused with an undoing of knots. Where the knots gather, the labyrinth grows. Money facilitates a local disentangling within a global entanglement, with attendant perspectival (or point-of-use) illusions that money represents the world. This is to confuse utility (use value) with scarcity (exchange value), distracted by 'goods' from the sole global function of money-rationing. Money allocates (option) rights to a share of resources, its absolute value wandering indeterminately in accordance both with its own scarcity, and the economic abundance it divides. The apparent connection between price and thing is an effect of double differentiation, or commercial relativism, coordinating twin series of competitive bids (from the sides of supply and demand). The conversion of price information into naturalistic data (or absolute reference) presents an extreme theoretical challenge. 

§12. Capital is intrinsically complicated, not only by competitive dynamics in space, but also by speculative dissociation in time. Formal assets are options, with explicit time conditions, integrating forecasts into a system of current (exchange) values. Capitalization is thus indistinguishable from a commercialization of potentials, through which modern history is slanted (teleoplexically) in the direction of ever greater virtualization, operationalizing science fiction scenarios as integral components of production systems. Values which do not 'yet' exist, except as probabilistic estimations, or risk structures, acquire a power of command over economic (and therefore social) processes, necessarily devalorizing the actual. Under teleoplexic guidance, ontological realism is decoupled from the present. rendering the question 'what is real?' increasingly obsolete. The thing that is happening — which will be real — is only fractionally accessible to present observation, as a schedule of modal quantities. Techonomic naturalism records and predicts historical virtuality, and in doing so orients itself towards an object — with catastrophically unpredictable traits — which has predominantly yet to arrive. 

§13. Quasi-finally, the evaluation of teleoplexy is a research program which teleoplexy itself undertakes. The comprehensive value of capital is an emergent estimate, generated automatically by its inherent analytical intelligence, from prices corrected for commercial relativity (in the direction of 'fundamental values') and discounted for historical virtuality (in the direction of reliable risk modeling). The intricacy of these calculations is explosively fractionated by logical problems of self-reference-both familiar and as-yet-unanticipated-as it compounds through dynamics of competitive cognition in artificial time. If modernity has a spontaneous teleoplexic self-awareness, it corresponds to the problem of techonomic naturalism, immanently approached: How much is the world worth? From the perspective of teleoplexy reflexion, there is no final difference between this commercially-formulated question and its technological complement: What can the earth do? There is only self-quantification of teleoplexy or cybernetic intensity, which is what computerized financial markets 
(in the end) are for. As accelerationism closes upon this circuit of teleoplexic self-evaluation, its theoretical 'position'— or situation relative to its object — becomes increasingly tangled, until it assumes the basic characteristics of a terminal identity crisis. 

§14. What would be required for teleoplexy to realistically evaluate itself — or to 'attain self-awareness' as the pulp cyber-horror scenario describes it? Within a monetary system configured in ways not yet determinable with confidence, but almost certainly tilted radically towards depoliticization and crypto-digital distribution. it would discover prices consistent with its own maximally-accelerated technogenesis, channeling capital into mechanical automatization, self-replication, self-improvement, and escape into intelligence explosion. The price-system — whose epistemological function has long been understood — thus transitions into reflexively self-enhancing technological hyper-cognition. Irrespective of ideological alignment, accelerationism advances only through its ability to track such a development. whether to confirm or disconfirm the teleoplexic expectation of Techonomic Singularity. Modernity remains demonstrably strictly unintelligible in the absence of an accomplished accelerationist research program (which is required even by the Perennial Critique in its theoretically sophisticated versions). A negative conclusion, if fully elaborated, would necessarily produce an adequate ecological theory of the Anthropocene. 

§15. The triple problematic of relativity, virtuality, and reflexivity already suffices to impede this investigation formidably, although not invincibly. Several additional difficulties demand specific mention, since their resolution would contribute important sub-components of a completed accelerationism or, grouped separately, assemble a concrete historical philosophy of camouflage (indispensable to any realistic economic theory). 

§16. The economy conceived commercially (as a price system) constitutes a multi-level phenomenology of socio-historical production. It is an objective structure of appearances, staging evaluated things. It is also a political battlefield, within which strategic manipulations of perception can have inestimable value. It is a long-standing contention of the Perennial Critique that the monetarization of social phenomena is intrinsically conflictual. Such reservations are supplemented in an age of mandatory de-metallization, politicized (fiat money) regimes and econometric bureaucracies geopolitically challenged world reserve currency hegemony, and crypto-currency proliferation. In the absence of unproblematic (non-conflicted) macro aggregates or units of financial denomination, economic theory needs to be hedged. 

§17. Socio-political legacy forms often mask advanced techonomic processes. In particular, traditional legal definitions of personhood, agency, and property misconstrue the autonomization/automation of capital in terms of a profoundly defective concept of ownership. The idea of intellectual property has already entered into a state of overt crisis (even before its compatibility with the arrival of machine intelligence has been historically tested). While legal recognition of corporate identities provides a pathway for the techonomic modification of business structures, fundamental inadequacies in the conception of property (which has never received a credible philosophical grounding), combined with general cultural inertia, can be expected to result in a systematic misrecognition of emergent teleoplexic agencies. 

§18. Capital concentration is a synthetic characteristic of capitalization. It cannot be assumed that measures of capital concentration, capital density, capital composition and cybernetic intensity will be easily accessible or neatly coincide. There is no obvious theoretical incompatibility between significant techonomic intensification and patterns of social diffusion of capital outside the factory model (whether historically-familiar and atavistic, or innovative and unrecognizable). In particular, household assets offer a locus for surreptitious capital accumulation, where stocking of productive apparatus can be economically-coded as the acquisition of durable consumer goods, from personal computers and mobile digital devices to 30 printers. Regardless of trends in Internet-supported social surveillance, the ability of economic-statistical institutions to register developments in micro-capitalism merits extraordinary skepticism. 

§19. It is not only possible, but probable, that advances towards Techonomic Singularity will be obscured by intermediate synthetic mega-agencies, in part functioning as historical masks, but also adjusting eventual outcomes (as an effect of path-dependency). The most prominent candidates for such teleoplexic channeling are large digital networks, business corporations, research institutions, cities, and states (or highly-autonomous state components, especially intelligence agencies). Insofar as these entities are responsive to non-market signals, they are characterized by arbitrary institutional personalities, with reduced teleoplexic intensity, and residual anthro­political signature. It is quite conceivable that on some of these paths, Techonomic Singularity would be aborted, perhaps in the name of a 'friendly AI' or (anthropolitical) 'singleton.' There can scarcely be any doubt that a route to intelligence explosion mainlined through the NSA would exhibit some very distinctive features, of opaque implication. The most important theoretical consequence to be noted here is that such local teleologies would inevitably disturb more continuous trend-lines, bending them as if towards super-massive objects in gravitational space. It is also possible that some instance of intermediate individuation — most obviously the state — could be strategically invested by a Left Accelerationism. precisely in order to submit the virtual-teleoplexic lineage of Terrestrial Capitalism (or Techonomic Singularity) to effacement and disruption. 

§20. If by this stage accelerationism appears to be an impossible project, it is because the theoretical apprehension of teleoplexic hyper-intelligence cannot be accomplished by anything other than itself. The scope of the problem is indistinguishable from the cybernetic intensity of the quasi-final thing — cognitively self-enveloping Techonomic Singularity. Its difficulty, or complexity, is precisely what it is, which is to say: a real escape. To approach it, therefore, is to partially anticipate the terms of its eventual self-reflexion — the techonomic currency through which the history of modernity can for the first time, be adequately denominated. It has no alternative but to fund its own investigation, in units of destiny or doom, camouflaged within the system of quotidian economic signs, yet rigorously extractable, given only the correct cryptographic keys. Accelerationism exists only because this task has been automatically allotted to it. Fate has a name (but no face). 

Brevíssima Relação da Destruição das Índias

Bartolomé de Las Casas

DA ILHA DE CUBA

No ano de mil quinhentos e onze passaram à ilha de Cuba¹ que é, como disse, tão comprida como de Valhadolid a Roma, aonde havia grandes províncias de gentes, e ali começaram e acabaram das sobreditas maneiras e muito mais e mais cruelmente. Sucederam aqui coisas muito assinaladas. Um cacique e grão-senhor, que tinha por nome Hatuey, que se havia passado da ilha Espanhola à de Cuba com muita da sua gente, para fugir das calamidades e desumanas obras dos cristãos, e estando naquela ilha de Cuba e dando-lhe novas certos índios que para ela se iam os cristãos, ajuntou muita ou quase toda a sua gente e lhe disse: «Sabeis já que se conta que os cristãos se encaminham, e tendes experiência do que sucedeu aos senhores fulano e fulano e fulano; e aquelas gentes de Haiti (que é a Espanhola) o mesmo vêm fazer por cá. Sabeis por acaso por que o fazem?» E disseram: «Não, só sabemos que são de sua natureza cruéis e maus.» Disse ele: Não só por isso o fazem, mas porque têm um deus a quem adoram e muito querem, e para que o adoremos assim trabalham, a fim de nos subjugar, e nos matam.» E tendo junto a si uma cesta cheia de ouro e jóias, disse: «Vede aqui o deus dos cristãos; a ele façamos se bem vos parece areitos (que são bailes e danças) e porventura lhe agradaremos e ele lhes ordenará que nos não façam mal.» E disseram todos juntos «Bem será, bem será.» E diante do ouro bailaram até se cansarem, e disse depois o senhor Hatuey:

«Pois que guardá-lo bem pode custar-nos a vida, por no-lo quererem tirar, vamos arremessá-lo a este rio.» Votaram todos que assim se fizesse, e o atiraram para um grande rio que ali havia.²

¹ Expedição de Diego Velásquez. Historia, livro III, caps. 20 e 25.
² Para um relato mais desenvolvido desta cena, vide Historia, livro III, cap. 21.

All Windows Were Open, But Nothing Happened. Nothing? Well... Except A Lot

Dominique Linhardt

WHEN THE EXPLOSION OCCURRED that Friday, 2 June 1972, in Stuttgart, somewhere between the main railway station and Königstrasse, it was precisely two minutes past ten. Terrified, a shopkeeper ran out into the street, her arms full of stockings, then changed her mind. Her expression switching from terror to embarrassment, she returned to her shop and awkwardly explained to her disconcerted customers: "I'd forgotten..." At the same instant a member of the local police who, with good reason, had not forgotten, dubiously shook his head, muttering: "an explosion... today... precisely today..." What happened? In the early 1970s Stuttgart was busy building an underground railway, and the violent explosion was part of the work on the tunnel by a civil engineering company.

However, the policeman's muffled grumbling and the shopkeeper's brief panic are explained by something else. A few days earlier, a letter signed by the Red Army Fraction (RAF) had been sent to some members of the press. The few lines were addressed to the "citizens of Stuttgart." "Fate" was said to have chosen the industrious capital of Baden-Wuerttemberg on 2 June, exactly five years after the young demonstrator Benno Ohnsorg was killed by the police, between 1 and 2 p.m., then car bombs with the equivalent of thirty tons of TNT would explode in the streets of Stuttgart. The RAF pointed out that its aim was not to kill anyone but to make the masses, blinded by The System, aware of the "war of destruction conducted by American imperialism" in Vietnam. The call was clear: "Evacuate the streets and go into your houses ... open your windows and hide in your cellars, just for one hour; the people of Hanoi and many other towns spend many more hours under shelter and die anyway. [...] nobody will have to say that the town of Stuttgart was not warned in time! Everyone must do what is necessary to ensure that there is no black Friday in Stuttgart!" That was why the shopkeeper had been so scared she had forgotten the construction of the metro, but not the RAF threat.¹

What happened? An explosion due to underground construction work, on the one hand; an anonymous letter, on the other. Nothing but a piece of paper, the importance of which could easily be relativized since its authenticity was by no means guaranteed. From 30 May, the day after the threat, the federal criminal police publicly announced its doubts as to the identity of the real authors of the letter. A second letter had, in the meantime, been received by the Frankfurter Rundschau and the Deutsche Presseagentur, signed by none other than... the RAF. Denying any involvement by the organization in the threat on Stuttgart, the letter advised the government not to mask the real nature of RAF actions which, it specified, were targeted exclusively at "enemies of the proletariat, enemies of the Vietnamese people, imperialists." In other words, the RAF would never attack ordinary people, innocent people, the oppressed in short, The People. There would be no blind attacks on the masses... However, the authenticity of this second letter did not either — alas! — seem guaranteed.²

What actually happened on 2 June 1972 Stuttgart? Nothing. No bomb exploded. At 2 p.m. everything was still intact and the inhabitants of Stuttgart were able to freely express their relief before carrying on with their lives.

Yet something did happen in Stuttgart in early June of that year. As soon as he was informed of the threats, the prime-minister of Baden-Wuerttemberg, Mr. Filbinger, called a security meeting of the cabinet ministers and senior officials concerned, to decide on preventive measures. An emergency committee was thus formed: 1,800 police officers, including 300 in plain clothes, were dispatched to cover the town and 600 members of the riot squad were stationed about 40 km away, on the alert; over 20,000 vehicles were checked and searched in a few days; many people had the unpleasant experience of being suspected for some reason or other either by the police or simply by individuals on the look-out (had Chancellor Brandt himself not solemnly called on the entire population to cooperate with the police?); police files were searched with a fine-tooth comb to identify those who met a certain criteria, who had the "profile" of an "anarchist" or at least of a potential supporter and might then be carefully watched by the police. The daily press unleashed its fury, as it had done so often in previous years. Anyone who was not devoted to the glorification of the "German miracle," anyone who dared to express criticism of the established order, all those who had long hair, students, the youth — what is our youth coming to? — were branded as participants in this plot hatched by murderous and treacherous anarchists in the same society that had always given them the best. On D-day the town was but a shadow of Its usual self: shops closed, streets deserted (apart from a few school children looking for adventure), uniforms as far as the eye could see. Despite their attractive shade of green, their omnipresence naturally brought to mind a not-so-distant past when uniforms were still black or brown. All windows were open, as if to conjure a spell that no one doubted, nor entirely believed.

However much the authorities congratulated themselves for thwarting the plot, and Horst Herold, head of the BKA, repeatedly stated that the police had dealt with the threat without flouting the rule of law, the episode left its marks. Something was broken. Not windows, but the civil link, the bond between citizens and between them and government institutions. Whereas mistrust probably reached its climax when the church bells solemnly announced the time that the ghost was supposed to appear, people stared at one another, stopped in their tracks, stayed where they were as if abandoned while the police bustled about like robots. The price that was paid can be found in no police report recounting the events of that day. The "maximum security" based on general mistrust — mistrust demanded of everyone by the highest political authorities and systematically practiced by the security agencies — came at a very high cost. The "solidarity of democrats in their vigilance and sangfroid," as the head of the Baden-Wuerttemberg SPD put it, resulted in the fact that democrats treated one another in a less-than-democratic manner and the democratic state turned into a police state.

What happened? A letter composed, as could be expected — one cannot escape the lois du genre — of letters cut out from newspapers and bearing the acronym of a clandestine armed organization, was sent to a few newspaper editors. Nothing? No! An act of formidable effectiveness, the real bomb! The RAF wanted to show that the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was an oppressive police state, an apparatus for alienating and dominating the masses, designed to facilitate the full deployment of imperialism by the few with all the power who were controlling it, and that the so-called democracv was a myth, a veil covering the reality of a totalitarian state that had to be "unmasked"³ and "shown for what it was." This was how the state started resembling what the RAF wanted it to be, in order to fight it.

A few months later it was easy for the RAF to accuse the state: it just had to point a finger at Stuttgart. The FRG a democratic state? "Hundreds of homes searched," "thousands of kilometers of roads checked," "millions of calls in the media for people to inform. Bomb scares? A total fabrication through which "the pigs and the media" produced "the chaos" subsequently used to legitimize the "re-establishment of order and security. " One just has to look! It is a new "fascism" that is gradually revealing its hostility to the oppressed masses.
The minimalism of the action — a simple letter, the real authors of which have still not been identified — is inversely proportional to its yield: "the anti-imperialist war uses the arms of the system to fight the system." The action of the urban guerrilla made use of provocation: it prodded where it hurt and the reaction of those it provoked took care of the rest. During the 1970s the state thus increasingly came under caustic attacks from circles that were far wider than those of revolutionary agitators. Its arbitrariness and injustice were highlighted, as were the undermining of public freedoms and of the of the principles of the rule of law. At the end of the decade a Russell human rights court symbolically condemned the FRG, following an increasing number of unfavorable reports by Amnesty International. 

What happened? A series of next-to-nothings which smashed to pieces the icon of the good German democracy. On the ruins of the icon, the FRG was forced to reinvent its democracy. 

¹It is important to note that the Stuttgart episode took place after a series of six attacks by the RAF within one month. This wave of attacks was known as the "May offensive."
²In a subsequent document, considered to be authentic, the RAF took up the argument in this letter point by point (RAF, Die Aktion des Schwarzen September in München. Zur Strategie des antiimperialistischen Kampfes, in Dokumente zur Zeitgeschichte: Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD)/ Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), GNN•Verlag, Cologne, 1987).
³All the following citations are from RAF, op. cit.

On Aggression

Konrad Lorenz 

The spontaneity of aggression
Knowledge of the fact that the aggression drive is a true, primarily species-preserving instinct enables us to recognize its full danger: it is the spontaneity of the instinct that makes it so dangerous. If it were merely a reaction to certain external factors, as many sociologists and psychologists maintain, the state of mankind would not be as perilous as it really is, for, in that case, the reaction-eliciting factors could be eliminated with some hope of success. It was Freud who first pointed out the essential spontaneity of instincts, though he recognized that of aggression only rather later. He also showed that lack of social contact, and above all deprivation of it (Liebesverlust), were among the factors strongly predisposing to facilitate aggression. However, the conclusions which many American psychologists drew from this correct surmise were erroneous. It was supposed that children would grow up less neurotic, better adapted to their social environment and less aggressive if they were spared all disappointments and indulged in every way. An American method of education, based on these surmises, only showed that the aggressive drive, like many other instincts, springs ‘spontaneously’ from the inner human being, and the results of this method of upbringing were countless unbearably rude children who were anything but nonaggressive. The tragic side of this tragicomedy followed when these children grew up and left home, and in place of indulgent parents were confronted with unsympathetic public opinion, for example when they entered college. American psychoanalysts have told me that, under the strain of the difficult social adaptation necessary, many such young people really became neurotic. This questionable method of education has apparently not yet died out, for a few years ago an American colleague who was working as a guest at our institute asked if he might stay on three weeks longer, not for scientific reasons, but because his wife’s sister was staying with her and her three boys were ‘non- frustration’ children. 
The completely erroneous view that animal and human behaviour is predominantly reactive and that, even if it contains any innate elements at all, it can be altered to an unlimited extent by learning, comes from a radical misunderstanding of certain democratic principles: it is utterly at variance with these principles to admit that human beings are not born equal and that not all have equal chances of becoming ideal citizens. Moreover, for many decades the reaction, the ‘reflex’ represented the only element of behaviour which was studied by serious psychologists, while all ‘spontaneity’ of animal behaviour was left to the ‘vitalists’, the mystically inclined observers of nature. 
The fact that the central nervous system does not need to wait for stimuli, like an electric bell with a push-button, before it can respond, but that it can itself produce stimuli which give a natural, physiological explanation for the ‘spontaneous’ behaviour of animals and humans, has found recognition only in the last decades, through the work of Adrian, Paul Weiss, Kenneth Roeder, and above all Erich von Holst. The strength of the ideological prejudices involved was plainly shown by the heated and emotional debates that took place before the endogenous production of stimuli within the central nervous system became a fact generally recognized by the science of physiology. 
In behaviour research in its narrower sense, it was Wallace Craig who first made spontaneity the subject of scientific examination. Before him, William McDougall had opposed the words of Descartes, ‘Animal non agit, agitur,’ engraved on the shield of the behaviourists, by the more correct statement, ‘The healthy animal is up and doing.’ But as a true vitalist he took this spontaneity for the result of the mystic vital force whose meaning nobody really knows. So he did not think of observing exactly the rhythmic repetition of spontaneous behaviour patterns, let alone of continuously measuring the threshold values of eliciting stimuli, as his pupil Craig did later. 
In a series of experiments with blond ring doves Craig removed the female from the male in a succession of gradually increasing periods. After one such period of deprivation he experimented to see which objects were now sufficient to elicit the courtship dance of the male. A few days after the disappearance of the female of his own species, the male was ready to court a white dove which he had previously ignored. A few days later he was bowing and cooing to a stuffed pigeon, later still to a rolled-up cloth, and finally after weeks of solitary confinement, he directed the courtship towards the empty corner of his box-cage where the convergence of the straight sides offered at least an optical fixation point. Physiologically speaking, these observations mean that after a longer passivity of an instinctive behaviour pattern, in this case courtship, the threshold value of its eliciting stimuli sinks. This is a widely spread and regular occurrence; Goethe expresses analogous laws in the words of Mephisto, ‘With this potion inside you, you will soon see a Helen of Troy in every woman’, and – if you are a ring dove – you do so even in an old duster or in the empty corner of your cage. 
In exceptional cases, the threshold-lowering of eliciting stimuli can be said to sink to zero, since under certain conditions the particular instinct movement can ‘explode’ without demonstrable external stimuli. A hand-reared starling that I owned many years ago had never in its life caught flies nor seen any other bird do so. All his life he had taken his food from a dish, filled daily. One day I saw him sitting on the head of a bronze statue in my parents’ Viennese flat, and behaving most remarkably. With his head on one side, he seemed to be examining the white ceiling, then his head and eye movements gave unmistakable signs that he was following moving objects. Finally he flew off the statue and up to the ceiling, snapped at something invisible to me, returned to his post and performed the prey-killing movements peculiar to all insect-eating birds. Then he swallowed, shook himself, as many birds do at the moment of inner relaxation, and settled down quietly. Dozens of times I climbed on a chair, and even carried a step-ladder into the room – Viennese houses of that period have very high ceilings – to look for the prey that my starling had snatched: but not even the tiniest insect was there. 
However, this increase of the readiness to react is far from being the only effect of the ‘damming’ of an instinctive activity. If the stimuli normally releasing it fail to appear for an appreciable period, the organism as a whole is thrown into a state of general unrest and begins to search actively for the missing stimulus. In the simplest cases, this ‘search’ consists only in an increase of random locomotion, in swimming or running round; in the most complicated, it may include the highest achievements of learning and insight. Wallace Craig called this type of purposive searching ‘appetitive behaviour’. He also pointed out that literally every instinctive motor pattern, even the simplest locomotor coordination, gives rise to its own, autonomous appetite whenever adequate stimulation is withheld. 
There are few instinctive behaviour patterns in which threshold-lowering and appetitive behaviour are so strongly marked as they are, unfortunately, in intra-specific aggression. 

In the first chapter we have seen examples of threshold-lowering in the butterfly-fish which, in the absence of a fellow-member of its own species, chose as substitute a member of the nearest related one; and in the blue trigger-fish, which not only attacked the nearest related trigger-fish but also unrelated fish with only one eliciting factor in common with those of its own species, namely its blue colouring. In aquarium cichlids, to whose extraordinarily interesting family life we must give our further attention, a damming of the aggression which under natural conditions would be vented on hostile territorial neighbours, can very easily lead to killing of the mate. Nearly every aquarium keeper who has owned these fish has made the following almost inevitable mistake: a number of young fish of the same species are reared in a large aquarium to give them the chance of pairing in the most natural way. When this takes place, the aquarium suddenly becomes too small for the many adult fish. It contains one gloriously coloured couple, happily united, and set upon driving out all the others. Since these unfortunates cannot escape, they swim round nervously in the corners near the surface, their fins tattered, or, having been frightened out of their hiding-places, they race wildly round the aquarium. The humane aquarium keeper, pitying not only the hunted fish but also the couple which, having perhaps spawned in the mean- while, is anxious about its brood, removes the fugitives and leaves the couple in sole possession of the tank. Thinking he has done his duty, he ceases to worry about the aquarium and its contents for the time being, but after a few days he sees, to his horror, that the female is floating dead on the surface, torn to ribbons, while there is nothing more to be seen of the eggs and the young. 

Analogous behaviour can be observed in human beings. In the good old days when there was still a Habsburg monarchy and there were still domestic servants, I used to observe the following, regularly predictable behaviour in my widowed aunt. She never kept a maid longer than eight to ten months. She was always delighted with a new servant, praised her to the skies, and swore that she had at last found the right one. In the course of the next few months her judgement cooled, she found small faults, then bigger ones, and towards the end of the stated period she discovered hateful qualities in the poor girl who was finally discharged without a reference, after a violent quarrel. After this explosion the old lady was once more prepared to find a perfect angel in her next employee. 
It is not my intention to poke fun at my long-deceased and devoted aunt. I was once able, or rather obliged to observe exactly the same phenomenon in serious, self-controlled men, myself included, when I was a prisoner of war. So-called Polar disease, also known as Expedition Choler, attacks small groups of men who are completely dependent on one another and are thus prevented from quarrelling with strangers or people outside their own circle of friends. From this it will be clear that the damming up of aggression will be more dangerous, the better the members of the group know, understand, and like each other. In such a situation, as I know from personal experience, all aggression and intra-specific fight behaviour undergo an extreme lowering of their threshold values. Subjectively this is expressed by the fact that one reacts to the small mannerisms of one’s best friends – such as the way in which they clear their throats or sneeze – in a way that would normally be adequate only if one had been hit by a drunkard. 
Insight into the laws of this torturing phenomenon prevents homicide but does not allay the torment. The man of perception finds an outlet by creeping out of the barracks (tent, igloo) and smashing a not too expensive object with as resounding a crash as the occasion merits. This helps a little, and is called, in the language of behaviour physiology, a re-directed activity (Tinbergen). As we shall hear later, this expedient is often resorted to in nature to prevent the injurious effects of aggression. 

Lipstick traces: a secret history of the twentieth century

Greil Marcus

ON 17 NOVEMBER

On 17 November 1918, unless it was August 16 (unless it was 1917), Berlin dadaist Johannes Baader entered Berlin Cathedral. If it was 17 November 1918, it was ten days after Kurt Eisner proclaimed a soviet republic in Bavaria, nine days after the outbreak of Berlin’s November revolution, one day after the convening of the nationwide Rate Kongress: the congress of councils, the autonomous circles of workers, soldiers, and intellectuals now federating to organize a new world out of the ruin of the old. There was shooting in the streets and starvation behind closed doors. For a moment, Germany ceased to exist.

At times limiting himself to an obsession with Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, most often Baader professed to be Jesus Christ, a claim that dada’s embarrassed apologists try to smooth away with offerings of irony; there was none. Baader was the sort of borderline psychotic inevitably attracted by negationist movements, and thrust into the forefront of movements that by their nature blur the lines between idealism and nihilism—as George Grosz said of the Berlin dadaists, in another age they might have been flagellants. But Baader was more than that: “a Swabian pietist who journeyed through the countryside as a Dadaist priest” (Huelsenbeck), out of time and forced to create his own context, his own language, he was a clear cultural reincarnation of the Free Spirit adept who was sure that just as he could do nothing without God, God could do nothing without him. In Berlin in 1918 Baader was a lunatic with a chance to change the world. He held the planet in his mouth; the indifferent creator would determine whether he would swallow it or spit it out.

The German government had certified Baader insane. In Huelsenbeck’s words, Baader was awarded a “hunting license”; since unlike the rest of the Berlin Dada Club he could not be held accountable for his actions, he could safely do what his comrades only dreamed of. As the Oberdada, he took advantage. In the heart of the cathedral—or from the altar, or on horseback—he announced—depending on which account one chooses to believe:

“DADA WILL SAVE THE WORLD!”

“TO HELL WITH CHRIST!”

“WHO IS CHRIST TO YOU? HE’S JUST LIKE YOU—HE DOESN’T GIVE A DAMN!”

“WE DON’T GIVE A DAMN FOR JESUS CHRIST!”

“YOU’RE THE ONES WHO MOCK CHRIST, YOU DON’T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT HIM!”

Or ultimately:

“CHRIST IS A SAUSAGE!”

Baader followed up with an announcement of “The Death of the Oberdada”—widely reported in the Berlin press, which covered dada provocations assiduously—only to trump it the next day with “The Resurrection of the Oberdada,” thus beating out Christ the First by forty-eight hours.

There is an uglier version of this monomania, which for an instant found a field where it appeared not as madness but as culture. Raoul Hausmann, Baader’s closest friend, recalled in his memoirs:

«I had seen in him a man capable of driving his head through a brick wall in the service of an idea . . . In June of [1917], it became clear to myself, Franz Jung and Baader that the masses needed to be shaken from their stupor . . . I took Baader into the fields of Südende, and said to him: “All this is yours if you do as I tell you. The Bishop of Brunswick has failed to recognize you as Jesus Christ, and you have retaliated by defiling the altar in his church. This is no compensation. From today, you will be President of The Christ Society, Ltd., and recruit members. You must convince everyone that he too can be Christ, if he wants to, on payment of fifty marks to your society. Members of our society will no longer be subject to temporal authority and will be automatically unfit for military service. You will wear a purple robe . . .”»

It was, at least from Hausmann’s side, a fully conscious recapitulation of the devil’s temptation of Christ. There were further plans: a great march through Berlin, where the cathedral would have been not disrupted, but stormed. The march never came off (“Funds were lacking,” Hausmann explained; what funds? the reader wonders). The world was denied the sight of Baader and a thousand others parading through the streets as saviors—or as Dada Death, Grosz’s sometime promenade costume, a long black cloak, a huge white death’s head mask, a costume that reappeared all over Germany in the 1980s, as students and punks, some explicit about their sources, paraded through the streets in protest against nuclear weapons.

Hausmann wanted to use Baader as a human battering ram. Though his schemes came to little, once in place Baader went his own way. Before catching the dada disease he was a promising architect, though it was not dada that caused his madness—dada simply rationalized it. Born in 1875 and much the oldest of his comrades, he died in 1956, penniless and forgotten, a sometime resident of asylums, an old man occasionally glimpsed on park benches, talking to himself—unlike almost all of the rest, who, living into the 1970s, went on to productive, honored lives after giving up the dada ghost. But though following his appearance in Berlin Cathedral Baader disappeared from history, which is to say from dada surveys and hagiographies, he achieved one more day of glory—almost unrecorded but even more perfectly ambiguous. Hausmann’s companion Vera Broido-Cohn told the story a half-century after the fact:

«[In about 1930] Hitler was at the beginning of his [final ascendance]. One of the most curious symptoms that showed all was not right with Germany was the extraordinary number of people who thought they were Christ . . . Each one had his apostles and his disciples. They were so numerous that one day they decided to hold a Congress of Christs to find for themselves the true Christ among the imposters. As it was in the summer and in Thüringia—in the Middle Ages a center of radical heresy, especially of the Free Spirit, and a focal point of religious mania ever since—the Christs seemed to sprout like mushrooms. The meeting was organized in a large meadow near a town, and Baader did a fantastic thing. As he was [then] a journalist, Lufthansa had offered him a pass which enabled him to make whatever trip he wanted, free, if he went to an important rally in Germany. He called the company and asked them if he could be brought to Thüringia and set down in the middle of  the meadow. It was accepted.

All of the people at the rally stood up and formed an enormous circle. Each Christ went to the middle, and behind him came all of his supporters. The spectators pushed from behind and then all eyes went up to see Baader descending from the sky. He landed, then went away. They saw his face, and were rendered speechless.»

This was a convolution of farce, satire, practical joke, insanity, faith, alienation, and revolt; a convolution of the personal, the historical, the religious, the cultural, and the political that cannot be untangled. 

The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism

F.T. Marinetti

We had stayed up all night—my friends and I—beneath mosque lamps hanging from the ceiling. Their brass domes were filigreed, starred like our souls; just as, again like our souls, they were illuminated by the imprisoned brilliance of an electric heart. On the opulent oriental rugs, we had crushed our ancestral lethargy, arguing all the way to the final frontiers of logic and blackening reams of paper with delirious writings.

Our chests swelled with immense pride, for at that hour we alone were still awake and upright, like magnificent lighthouses or forward sentries facing an army of enemy stars that eyed us from their encampments in the sky. Alone with the stokers who bustle in front of the boilers’ hellish fires in massive ships; alone with the black specters who rummage in the red-hot bellies of locomotives launched on insane journeys; alone with drunkards who flounder alongside the city walls, with the beating of uncertain wings.

Suddenly we jumped at the tremendous noise of the large double-decker trams which jolt along outside, shimmering with multicolored lights, like villages on holiday which the flooding Po suddenly strikes and uproots, dragging them all the way to the sea, over waterfalls and through gorges.

Then the silence grew more gloomy. But as we were listening to the attenuated murmur of prayers muttered by the old canal and the bones of ailing palaces creaking above their beards of damp moss, suddenly we heard the famished automobiles roaring beneath the windows.

“Let’s go!” I said. “Let’s go, my friends! Let’s leave! At last mythology and the mystical ideal have been superseded. We are about to witness the birth of the Centaur, and soon we shall see the first Angels fly! . . . We have to shake the doors of life to test their hinges and bolts! . . . Let’s leave! Look! There, on the earth, the earliest dawn! Nothing can match the splendor of the sun’s red sword, skirmishing for the first time with our thousand-year-old shadows.”

We drew close to the three snorting beasts, tenderly stroking their swollen breasts. I stretched out on my car like a corpse in its coffin, but revived at once under the steering wheel, a guillotine blade that menaced my stomach.

The furious sweep of madness drove us outside ourselves and through the streets, deep and precipitous as the beds of spring torrents. Here and there a sickly lamplight, behind the glass of a window, taught us to despise the errant mathematics of our transitory eyes.

I screamed: “The scent, the scent alone is enough for our beasts!”

And like young lions we ran after Death, its black hide stained with pale crosses, running across the vast livid sky, alive and throbbing.

And yet we did not have an ideal Beloved who raised her sublime form all the way to the clouds, nor a cruel Queen to whom we could offer our corpses, twisted in the shape of Byzantine rings! Nothing to make us wish to die except our desire to free ourselves finally from the burden of our own courage!

And so we raced on, hurling watchdogs back against the doorways; they were flattened and curled beneath our scorching tires like shirt collars beneath a pressing iron. Death, domesticated, was overtaking me at every turn, gracefully holding out a paw, or sometimes stretching out on the ground with a noise like that of grating jawbones, casting me velvety and tender looks from every puddle.

“Let’s break out of wisdom, as if out of a horrible shell; and let’s fling ourselves, like fruits swollen with pride, into the wind’s vast and contorted mouth! . . . Let’s throw ourselves, like food, into the Unknown, not in desperation but to fill up the deep wells of the Absurd.”

Scarcely had I said these words, when I spun my car around as frantically as a dog trying to bite its own tail, and there, suddenly, were two bicyclists right in front of me, cutting me off, as if trying to prove me wrong, wobbling like two lines of reasoning, equally persuasive and yet contradictory. Their stupid argument was being discussed right in my path . . . What a bore! Damn! . . . I stopped short, and to my disgust rolled over into a ditch, with my wheels in the air. . . .

Oh! Maternal ditch, nearly full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your bracing slime, which reminded me of the sacred black breast of my Sudanese nurse. . . . When I climbed out, a filthy and stinking rag, from underneath the capsized car, I felt my heart—deliciously—being slashed with the red-hot iron of joy!

A crowd of fishermen armed with hooks and naturalists stricken with gout formed a thronging circle around the prodigy. With patient and meticulous attention, they rigged up a derrick and enormous iron grapnels to fish out my car, stranded like a large shark. The car slowly emerged from the ditch, leaving behind in the depths its heavy chassis of good sense and its soft upholstery of comfort, like scales.

They thought it was dead, my beautiful shark, but one caress from me was enough to revive it, and there it was again, once more alive, running on its powerful fins.

And so, our faces covered with the good factory slime—a mix of metallic scum, useless sweat, heavenly soot—our arms bruised and bandaged, we, still fearless, have dictated our first intentions to all the living men of the earth:

THE MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM

1. We intend to sing to the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.

2. Courage, boldness, and rebelliousness will be the essential elements of our poetry.

3. Up to now literature has exalted contemplative stillness, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt movement and aggression, feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the slap and the punch.

4. We affirm that the beauty of the world has been enriched by a new form of beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car with a hood that glistens with large pipes resembling a serpent with explosive breath . . . a roaring automobile that seems to ride on grapeshot—that is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

5. We intend to hymn man at the steering wheel, the ideal axis of which intersects the earth, itself hurled ahead in its own race along the path of its orbit.

6. Henceforth poets must do their utmost, with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.

7. There is no beauty that does not consist of struggle. No work that lacks an aggressive character can be considered a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent assault launched against unknown forces to reduce them to submission under man.

8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! . . . Why should we look back over our shoulders, when we intend to breach the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, for we have already created velocity which is eternal and omnipresent.

9. We intend to glorify war—the only hygiene of the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and contempt for woman.

10. We intend to destroy museums, libraries, academies of every sort, and to fight against moralism, feminism, and every utilitarian or opportunistic cowardice.

11. We shall sing the great masses shaken with work, pleasure, or rebellion: we shall sing the multicolored and polyphonic tidal waves of revolution in the modern metropolis; shall sing the vibrating nocturnal fervor of factories and shipyards burning under violent electrical moons; bloated railroad stations that devour smoking serpents; factories hanging from the sky by the twisting threads of spiraling smoke; bridges like gigantic gymnasts who span rivers, flashing at the sun with the gleam of a knife; adventurous steamships that scent the horizon, locomotives with their swollen chest, pawing the tracks like massive steel horses bridled with pipes, and the oscillating flight of airplanes, whose propeller flaps at the wind like a flag and seems to applaud like a delirious crowd.

It is from Italy that we are flinging this to the world, our manifesto of burning and overwhelming violence, with which we today establish “Futurism,” for we intend to free this nation from its fetid cancer of professors, archaeologists, tour-guides, and antiquarians.

For much too long Italy has been a flea market. We intend to liberate it from the countless museums that have covered it like so many cemeteries.

Museums: cemeteries! Identical, really, in the horrible promiscuity of so many bodies scarcely known to one another. Museums: public dormitories in which someone is put to sleep forever alongside others he hated or didn’t know! Museums: absurd slaughterhouses for painters and sculptors who go on thrashing each other with blows of line and color along the disputed walls!

That once a year you might make a pilgrimage, much as one makes an annual visit to a graveyard . . . I’ll grant you that. That once a year you can deposit a wreath of flowers in front of the Mona Lisa, I permit you that . . . But I cannot countenance the idea that our sorrows are daily shepherded on a tour through museums, or our weak courage, our pathological restlessness. Why would we wish to poison ourselves? Why wish to rot?

And what is there to see in an old painting beside the laborious distortion of the artist who tried to break through the insuperable barriers which blocked his desire to express fully his dream? . . . To admire an old painting is the same as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn, instead of casting it forward into the distance in violent spurts of creation and action.

Do you wish to waste your best strength in this eternal and useless admiration of the past, an activity that will only leave you fatally spent, diminished, crushed?

I declare, in all truth, that a daily visit to museums, libraries, and academies (cemeteries of futile efforts, Calvaries of crucified dreams, record books of broken assaults! . . . ) is as dangerous for artists as a prolonged guardianship under the thumb of one’s family is for certain young talents intoxicated with their own genius and their ambitious aims. For the sickly, the ill, or the imprisoned—let them go and visit: the admirable past is perhaps a solace for their troubles, since the future is now closed to them. . . . But we intend to know nothing of it, nothing of the past—we strong and youthful Futurists!

And so, let the glad arsonists with charred fingers come! Here they are! Here they are! . . . Go ahead! Set fire to the shelves of the libraries! . . . Turn aside the course of the canals to flood the museums! . . . Oh, the joy of seeing all the glorious old canvases floating adrift on the waters, shredded and discolored! . . . Seize your pickaxes, axes, and hammers, and tear down, pitilessly tear down the venerable cities!

The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade left to fulfill our task.

When we are forty, others who are younger and stronger will throw us into the wastebasket, like useless manuscripts. —We want it to happen!

They will come against us, our successors; they will come from far away, from every direction, dancing to the winged cadence of their first songs, extending predatory claws, sniffing doglike at doors of the academies for the good smell of our decaying minds, long since promised to the libraries’ catacombs.

But we won’t be there. . . . They will find us, at last—one wintry night—in an open field, beneath a sad roof drummed by monotonous rain, crouched beside our trembling airplanes and in the act of warming our hands by the dirty little fire made by the books we are writing today, flaming beneath the flight of our imaginings.

Panting with contempt and anxiety, they will storm around us, and all of them, exasperated by our lofty daring, will attempt to kill us, driven by a hatred all the more implacable because their hearts will be intoxicated with love and admiration for us.

In their eyes, strong and healthy Injustice will radiantly burst. —Art, in fact, can be nothing if not violence, cruelty, and injustice.

The oldest of us is thirty: and yet already we have cast away treasures, thousands of treasures of force, love, boldness, cunning, and raw will power; have thrown them away impatiently, furiously, heedlessly, without hesitation, without rest, screaming for our lives. Look at us! We are still not weary! Our hearts feel no tiredness because they are fed with fire, hatred, and speed! . . . Are you astounded? Of course you are, because you can’t even recall having ever been alive! Standing erect on the summit of the world, yet once more we fling our challenge to the stars!

You raise objections? . . . Stop! Stop! We know them . . . We’ve understood! . . . The refined and mendacious mind tells us that we are the summation and continuation of our ancestors—maybe! Suppose it so! But what difference does it make? We don’t want to listen! . . . Woe to anyone who repeats those infamous words to us! Lift up your heads! Standing erect on the summit of the world, yet once more we fling our challenge to the stars!

Manifesto do Partido Comunista

Karl Marx e Friedrich Engels

A burguesia não pode existir sem revolucionar permanentemente os instrumentos de produção, portanto as relações de produção, portanto as relações sociais todas. A conservação inalterada do antigo modo de produção era, pelo contrário, a condição primeira de existência de todas as anteriores classes industriais. O permanente revolucionamento da produção, o ininterrupto abalo de todas as condições sociais, a incerteza e o movimento eternos distinguem a época burguesa de todas as outras. Todas as relações fixas e enferrujadas, com o seu cortejo de vetustas representações e intuições, são dissolvidas, todas as recém-formadas envelhecem antes de poderem ossificar-se. Tudo o que era sólido se dissolve no ar, tudo o que era sagrado é dessagrado, e os homens são por fim obrigados a encarar com olhos prosaicos a sua posição na vida, as suas ligações recíprocas.

Memórias Instrutivas Sobre Portugal, 1723-1726

Charles Fréderic Merveilleux

Quando em Lisboa se celebra um auto-de-fé, os principais senhores da corte, na sua qualidade de familiares do Santo Ofício, honram-se em acompanhar os míseros que, no dizer das Cartas Indianas são sacrificados pelos portugueses à Divindade e aos Santos. Estes senhores acompanham os condenados até à fogueira e permanecem ao seu lado, enquanto os frades os vão atordoando com orações ou injúrias, consoante. Antes, porém, de serem conduzidos ao suplício, conduzem-nos às igrejas dos dominicanos onde são lidos os sumários dos processos e as confissões que esses desgraçados fizeram publicamente das suas culpas. 

[...]

Fui por então informado de em Lisboa se estar preparando celebração de um auto-de-fé. Voltei a Lisboa para poder assistir à festa. Chamo festa a essa horrível cerimónia por ela constituir para os portugueses um verdadeiro divertimento. Nesse dia podem as senhoras estar à janela adornadas com jóias e enfeites como se fosse o dia do Corpo de Deus ou as procissões da Quaresma. Lisboa é uma cidade onde o Carnaval passa despercebido, mas na Quaresma realizam-se ali procissões tão divertidas como mascaradas venezianas. São dias de regozijo, especialmente para as senhoras. A visita às igrejas durante a semana santa faz, num só dia, mais cornudos do que na vida habitual durante todo o ano. As mulheres têm a liberdade de andar pelas ruas durante toda a noite, apenas embuçadas nos seus mantos negros; os galãs disfarçam-se com trajos de mulher e misturam-se na multidão. Os maridos tomam a precaução de fazer acompanhar suas mulheres por escravas que eles julgam fiéis à honra dos seus senhores. Essa fidelidade, porém, não está à prova dos presentes que recebem dos galãs, acabando por serem essas mesmas escravas que conduzem as beldades a casa dos seus amantes.

[...] Custou-me caro, mas fiquei inteirado de quanto era fácil, em tais ocasiões, satisfazer um homem os seus apetites.¹ [...] É bastante arriscado em tais aventuras fiar-se alguém na boa fé alheia e a ninguém aconselho tal aventura, especialmente se for estrangeiro. A vida dos estrangeiros vale pouco para os portugueses e é tanto assim que não houve Justiça em Portugal que tomasse em consideração a morte de cinquenta forasteiros que foram assassinados numa noite por andarem metidos em aventuras galantes. Em tais casos a Justiça considera sempre os estrangeiros como culpados. [...]
Não darei aqui uma pormenorizada descrição da maneira como decorre um auto-de-fé. É matéria largamente divulgada e repetidamente narrada sobretudo na Relação da Inquisição de Goa por Dellon, onde se diz que os portugueses até queimam os ossos dos mortos para terem direito a confiscar os bens que lhes pertenceram.² Nunca vi nada disto nem semelhante. Sem pretender elogiar o estabelecimento da Inquisição, farei apenas algumas reflexões sobre todas as coisas que testemunhei e vi. [...] O que passo a relatar foi o que vi na companhia de um protestante meu amigo para quem, por intermédio do secretário de Estado, obteve licença para ingressar na minha companhia no palácio do Santo Ofício. 

[...] Não tenho, porém, pretensões a que se meça pela bitola o que se passa em Lisboa com aquilo que ocorre na Inquisição espanhola. Em Portugal os desvelos de Sua Majestade, a prudência do seu Conselho e principalmente do secretário de Estado D. Diogo de Mendonça reformaram o temível tribunal.³ 
Mas, como ia contando: consegui entrada no palácio do Santo Ofício. El-rei foi ali antes que começasse o auto-de-fé e tive então ensejo de admirar a bondade desse príncipe, que falou aos maiores culpados exortando-os ao arrependimento. Entre os desgraçados que então ali se encontravam havia um padre brasileiro, cristão-velho que havia abraçado o Judaísmo e se havia feito circuncidar, contra as leis do Estado. Sua Majestade instou com ele para que confessasse o seu erro, reconhecesse o seu Salvador, subtraindo-se assim ao suplício que o esperava, morrendo nas chamas como réprobo e como rebelde ao seu rei e às leis do Estado. Empregou as mais comoventes expressões para vencer a obstinação desse indigno sacerdote, assegurando-lhe a sua protecção e prometendo-lhe uma pensão com a qual poderia viver honradamente. Todos os que assistiam estavam enternecidos com a bondade do rei para com esse miserável que preferia ser queimado a renunciar ao judaísmo. El-rei falou também a outros penitenciados. Alguns deles confessaram as suas culpas e imploraram a clemência do rei, que lhes perdoou.

Depois desta cerimónia, a procissão, que havia de percorrer o interior do palácio do Santo Ofício, saiu e dirigiu-se para a igreja de S. Domingos onde foram lidos os processos dos réus e se fizeram as cerimónias usadas na circunstância. Após, a procissão saiu da igreja e continuou a sua marcha pelas ruas da cidade, que estavam ladeadas de soldados. Nestas ocasiões são chamados vários regimentos para segurança pública e evitar desordens que os judeus desconhecidos pudessem provocar na cidade. El-rei não aparece publicamente no lugar da execução. Assiste, sim, mas disfarçado, embuçado, na companhia dos infantes seus irmãos, para estar em condições de dar as suas ordens em caso de acidente de fogo, porque nessas ocasiões Sua Majestade não deixa de encontrar-se nos sítios em que a sua presença pode ser útil ao bem público. 

Sua Majestade determinou que as decisões da Inquisição, embora fossem até aí consideradas como soberanas, passassem a ser revistas pelo foro real, de maneira a que seja permitido aos réus nomear advogado de defesa, donde se segue que, embora a procissão do auto-de-fé comece de manhã muito cedo, as execuções só se venham a fazer à boca da noite. 

Examinando as coisas de perto, verifica-se que a Inquisição põe um poderoso freio à sodomia, vício odioso ao qual os portugueses pela sua natureza ardente são demasiadamente inclinados. Os que estiveram em Roma são os mais dados a esse vício, vindo aqui corromper muitos outros. Neste particular atribuem-se muitas culpas ao marquês de Abrantes pela facilidade que dá a famílias ricas de ali fazerem frequentes viagens. Antes não iam a Roma senão os desgraçados que haviam abusado de suas irmãs ou próximas parentas na mira de obterem a absolvição ou a dispensa para se casarem. 

A questão que se levantou entre as cortes de Roma e de Portugal e a proibição que o rei fez aos seus súbditos de irem a Roma, o que há muito tempo se mantém, fizeram diminuir o número dos incestuosos porque os portugueses têm horror a morrer sem absolvição, uma vez que não há no reino quem lha possa dar para pecados dessa natureza. Os núncios do Papa tiravam anteriormente muito dinheiro desta classe de pecadores, dando-lhes cartas de recomendação para mais fácil obtenção desta ou outras graças que pretendiam. [...] Assim, os portugueses viam-se obrigados a sangrarem as bolsas. Também se notou que enquanto duraram as questões entre as duas cortes nos autos-de-fé figuraram menos penitenciados por sodomia e incesto, etc., do que quando os portugueses tinham a liberdade de ir a Roma impetrar a absolvição.

Em França, na Suíça, na Alemanha, etc., queimam-se sem remissão os que praticam crimes contra a natureza; em Portugal, a Inquisição não os faz queimar senão depois de reincidirem. [...] Não será esta uma das razões por que em Paris e em outros sítios se protesta tanto contra a Inquisição? E não querem muitos eclesiásticos de outros países que o crime odioso que a Inquisição se propõe extirpar esteja isento de inquisições e que aqueles que o praticam não tenham castigo severo? Por de mais é sabido que em certas casas onde se instruem os jovens nas ciências e na piedade se lhes ensinam mais relaxações do que declinações latinas. [...] 

Não se ouvem neste país as blasfémias que são usuais entre franceses ou alemães ou ainda entre os ingleses. [...] Este príncipe não permite que prendam a nenhum estrangeiro sem sua licença e nenhum dos seus súbditos pode ser preso pela Inquisição sem ter sido acusado por sete testemunhas cujas declarações possam ser admitidas nos tribunais. Muitas centenas de ingleses estão estabelecidos com suas famílias em Portugal, assim como diversos protestantes de outras nações; todos eles professam publicamente a sua religião e ninguém se atreve a incomodá-los por isso.⁴ 

[...]

Pode acontecer que um inocente seja detido pelo Santo Ofício, mas é certo que não será condenado sem ter confessado as suas culpas. Mas pergunto: o Parlamento de Paris, esse augusto tribunal, tão cheio de equidade, nunca condenou inocentes? E quando houve reconhecimento do erro, que recurso teve a não ser enforcar as testemunhas falsas? A Inquisição faz o mesmo em idênticos casos e condena-as sem misericórdia, como há exemplos. 

[...]

A Inquisição em Portugal [...] cuida dos bens dos seus presos e devolve-lhos aumentados quando se prova estarem inocentes dos crimes de que foram acusados. Foi isso que aconteceu há coisa de três anos com o judeu Silveira, preso ao tempo que em França ocorria a detenção do senhor M... Esse judeu saiu dos cárceres da Inquisição mais rico do que tinha entrado, porque todos os que lhe deviam somas consideráveis e, sob vários pretextos, retardavam o pagamento, com receio de terem de se entender com a Inquisição, se apressaram a saldar as suas dívidas.⁵ [...]

Depois de tão longas digressões, voltemos à descrição do auto-de-fé e de como eles decorrem. Faz-se mister advertir os estrangeiros que vão a Portugal e desejem  assistir a esta cerimónia a terem o maior cuidado, nos dias de auto-de-fé, em não dizerem nem fazerem qualquer coisa que possa escandalizar a superstição dos portugueses. Devem escolher pessoas de muita confiança para os acompanharem a assistir à procissão, porque os portugueses, nesses dias, estão tão excitados com a glória da Inquisição como noutros tempos estavam as bacantes com a glória do deus pagão. É difícil a um estrangeiro atravessar as ruas apinhadas de gente sem ouvir injúrias do povo miúdo, rosnadas entre dentes e que, de uma maneira geral, significam: também estes hereges deviam estar a contas com o Santo Ofício. Os desgraçados que vão a queimar são unanimemente amaldiçoados e se algum dos assistentes tem ar compungido logo dizem que estão lamentando os seus irmãos. Por toda a parte o que se encontra são zelosos com exclamações deste género: Que grande misericórdia! Bendito seja o Santo Ofício! 

Para um forasteiro evitar os insultos da canalha, o melhor é ficar sozinho numa janela, sem falar com ninguém e tendo na mão uma das folhas impressas com a relação dos nomes dos desgraçados penitenciados com a menção dos crimes, da sentença e dos suplícios que vão sofrer. Estando-se assim ocupado em tal leitura evitam-se perguntas indiscretas e inúteis. 

O padre brasileiro a quem já me referi, que preferiu deixar-se queimar vivo a renunciar ao judaísmo, tinha pelo menos sessenta anos de idade. Não manifestou fraqueza nem se dignou responder, uma palavra que fosse, aos jesuítas e aos frades que lhe gritavam aos ouvidos, sem o poupar a injúrias. Os outros, que só seriam queimados depois do garrote, repetiram em voz alta as orações e litanias que os padres que os acompanharam iam recitando junto deles. 

Tinham amarrado as mãos do sacerdote com uma corda fina e tão apertadamente que quase lhe cortava os pulsos. Bastava isto para ser um doloroso tormento; suportou-o desde as cinco horas da manhã até muito depois de ter anoitecido. [...] Sofreu o fogo e não disse mais que estas palavras: É uma grande infâmia e uma enorme vergonho tratar deste modo a um homem que morre por afirmar que só há um Deus verdadeiro. Deus vos castigará, desgraçados, por de tal maneira o ofenderdes. 

[...] A sua firmeza nesse cruel suplício representou um grande triunfo para os cristãos-novos ou judeus disfarçados ao mesmo tempo que foi uma dolorosa mortificação para o clero.⁶ 

Nesses tristes momentos e enquanto caminham para o suplício é fácil reconhecer pelo rosto os que são israelitas. Não estando já disfarçados pelas grandes perucas, as feições hebraicas revelam-se acentuadamente. Não obstante os judeus portugueses se parecerem muito entre eles, é certo que as suas fisionomias diferem totalmente das dos judeus da Alemanha e da Polónia. O seu aspecto não é tão inferior nem tão vil. 

Esqueci-me de informar que muitos desses miseráveis judeus levam as suas negativas obstinadamente até aos últimos extremos, não querendo confessar as suas culpas senão na igreja de S. Domingos, quando ali se encontram com suas mulheres e outros parentes que já tenham confessado ter judaizado com eles. Como praticaram conjuntamente as cerimónias da sua religião, deduzem que há suficientes provas contra eles e então pedem publicamente perdão ao Santo Ofício. Os judeus que em Portugal vivem disfarçados são interesseiros e ávaros, mas não se lhes pode negar constância e firmeza e, no geral, inspiram piedade. Tarde ou cedo a maior parte deles sofre o castigo merecido por haverem infringido as leis fundamentais do Estado, as quais proíbem a prática da religião judaica. A sua sorte é quase igual à dos criminosos que depois de muitas vezes terem escapado à pena, ao fim de algum tempo e quando menos se espera, acabam por cair nas mãos da justiça.

Acode-me agora à lembrança que havendo eu embarcado num navio inglês estive em risco de naufragar nas costas da Espanha. Iam no barco alguns judeus cujas expressões mudaram completamente quando se viram na iminência do perigo que os ameaçava, pois já se consideravam nas garras da Inquisição de Espanha. Lamentavam-se de uma maneira espantosa sobre a sua triste sorte e só aquietaram quando chegámos a Gibraltar, onde se passou algo de singular com esta gente. 
Aqueles judeus não conheciam ali ninguém, mas logo encontraram amigos. Bastou para isso fazerem certo trejeito com a boca para logo ser correspondido com um esgar igual por judeus marroquinos. Em pouco tempo estávamos rodeados por cinquenta hebreus. Essa gente usava, entre ela, certos sinais de reconhecimento assim como se pratica entre as confrarias dos franco-mações, os quais adoptam tal sistema no receio de se revelarem como tais a quem não está nos segredos da confraria. Estes sinais constituem um dos maiores segredos da tal sociedade, se dermos crédito ao que dizem os membros da sociedade. Se a Inquisição, mais tarde, apanhasse algum destes, ver-se-iam brindados com o mesmo tratamento que ela dá aos hereges. 

No entanto, disse-me uma vez certo franco-mação de grande categoria que há jesuítas na sua associação. Esses sujeitos certamente não se fizeram iniciar nos mistérios da nova sociedade que se está espalhando pelo mundo senão para se inteirarem dos seus princípios morais e políticos, que são opostos aos da sociedade do paladino da Virgem Santíssima a fim de trabalharem eficazmente para a sua destruição a ferro e fogo. Os bons padres conseguiram-no plenamente na corte de um dos maiores príncipes do Império, o qual tem um jesuíta por confessor e protege tanto os judeus quanto combate os franco-mações. Sustenta tal política com uma boa razão, inspirada pelo jesuíta confessor, e é ela que os judeus fazem render as riquezas da Sociedade de Jesus pagando bons juros. Com esses lucros a Sociedade pode construir grandes e magníficos edifícios com a facilidade com que crescem os cogumelos durante a noite. Esses edifícios são construídos e acabados rapidamente enquanto o soberano do país não pode acabar o seu palácio, embora tenha extraído dos seus povos enormes somas, as quais acabam por ir parar aos cofres de Santo Inácio, tanta é a habilidade dos filhos deste santo para se aproveitarem da ingenuidade dos que procuram a sua protecção. Esse padre confessor bem como aquele que o precedeu enriqueceram a Sociedade com mais confiscação e bens que o poderia ter feito a Inquisição. No entanto este padre não passa de um suíço rotundo, originário da região dos queijos Gruyère. Que prodígios não operará pois a Sociedade nos países onde dispõe de membros mais activos e de inteligências mais finas e mais livres! 

¹ Pode deduzir-se da narrativa e dos comentários do autor que aventuras eram correntes com mulheres casadas, mães de família burguesas. Ora, isto não era verdade, não estava nos costumes em que a família portuguesa viveu sempre num regime de austeridade e recato que impossibilitava tais aventuras. De resto, da leitura atenta do texto fica-se logo na suspeita de os casos narrados serem de mero proxenetismo com mulheres amancebadas, contratadas nas miras de segurança e higiene que o autor é o próprio a indicar e recomendar aos seus leitores, no caso de eles virem a Portugal. Vários estrangeiros que vieram a Portugal e escreveram sobre o nosso país, mesmo os menos simpatizantes, nenhum induz em tal [...] Outros, como Murphy, afirmam que as mulheres portuguesas são castas, modestas, extremosas por seus maridos. Carrère confirma que os dias de procissão são dias de festa para as mulheres porque têm ocasião de se mostrar, de exibirem os seus luxos, de estar à janela, de participarem em recepções e em bailes, de conviverem, numa palavra. [...]
² As passagens da obra de Dellon sobre a Inquisição de Goa, a que o autor certamente se refere, são as que a seguir se traduzem: «Os (presos) que morrem nas prisões são enterrados no edifício, sem quaisquer cerimónias, e se, em obediência aos preceitos deste tribunal, foram considerados incursos na pena de morte, os seus corpos são descarnados, ficando os ossos guardados até ao primeiro auto-de-fé que se realize, onde serão queimados.» «As pequenas urnas que encerram os ossos dos que haviam morrido no decurso dos seus processos estavam também pintadas com demónios e chamas, em fundo negro. É necessário desde já esclarecer que a Inquisição não limita a sua jurisdição apenas aos vivos ou aos mortos nos cárceres, mas que a estende frequentemente a pessoas mortas muitos anos antes de terem sido acusadas de qualquer crime de vulto. Neste caso, desenterram-nas, julgam- nas e se são condenadas queimam-lhes os ossos em auto-de-fé, confiscando-lhes bens para o que despojam meticulosamente os seus herdeiros. Não estou a afirmar nada que não seja do meu conhecimento directo, pois entre as estátuas que apareceram quando fui penitenciado pela Inquisição, uma delas representava um homem que morrera muito tempo antes e a quem, afinal, acabavam de processar. Tinham-no desenterrado, confiscaram-lhe os bens queimaram-lhe os ossos, dele ou de qualquer outra pessoa que tivesse sido sepultada no mesmo sítio.» (V. Relation de L'lnquisition de Goa — Revue, corrigée et augmentée par M. Dellon —À Cologne — Chez les Heretiers de Pierre Marteaux — 2º vol., págs. 51-123 e 124.)
³ Parece que o autor fora convencido ou, não sei por que bulas, pretendia convencer que D. João V reformara a Inquisição, tornando-a mais humana e cerceando-lhe os poderes. Ora, como notou J. Lúcio de Azevedo, depois da aclamação do filho de D. Pedro II as perseguições do Tribunal da Fé entraram num dos seus períodos de mais extensa acção e violenta repressão. «Aclamado D. João V principiaram os holocaustos. A 6 de Novembro de 1707, grande auto-de-fé em Lisboa com cinquenta e seis pessoas penitenciadas, duas mulheres e dois homens queimados, um defunto em estátua. A 30 de Junho de 1709, cinquenta e nove penitenciados, seis execuções em vivos, um manequim queimado. A 26 de Julho de 1711, cento e dois réus com penas várias e duas mulheres supliciadas. A 9 de Julho de 1713 0 número de penitenciados alça-se a cento e trinta e oito, queimada uma mulher em carne, urna e outra e um homem em estátua. O que muito dá na vista, com o número dos réus que aumenta, é a proporção grande das mulheres. No auto de 1711, cinquenta e três, mais de metade do total; no de 1713, setenta, em cento e quarenta e uma pessoas.» (História dos Cristãos-Novos Portugueses — 1.ª ed., pág. 332.) E para testemunho de quanto D. João V, mais que os seus predecessores, estimava a Inquisição, depunha D. Luís da Cunha, que, depois de enumerar uma série de remédios para obstar aos males que tal tribunal acarretava ao país, conclui: «Admito, porém, que para se ver a utilidade de qualquer dos ditos remédios, que à primeira vista parecerão violentos, ainda que no fundo, e bem considerados, são muito suaves, será necessário dar tempo ao tempo; porque os que obram lentamente são os mais seguros e os homens não crescem como os cogumelos, quer dizer, de um dia para o outro. O que não obstante todos estes remédios, além dos já referidos, se oferece um quase irreparável obstáculo, a saber o da educação que se deu a El-Rei N. S., porque sendo Príncipe foi o Senhor D. Nuno da Cunha, hoje Inquisidor-Geral e então deputado do Santo Ofício, o que para ganhar a sua graça lhe foi inspirando como santas, justas e infalíveis as máximas daquele tribunal, sem lhe insinuar as objecções que elas sofriam, antes lhe exagerava somente o grande merecimento que teria diante de Deus de preservar a sua Santa Fé aniquilando o judaísmo, de sorte que estas impressões dadas e recebidas em tão tenra idade ficam indeléveis, e o que mais é que, honrando o dito Senhor os Autos-de-Fé com a sua real presença, autoriza e qualifica o procedimento dos inquisidores; o que Filipe V, depois de subir ao trono de Espanha, nunca quis fazer, antes sai de Madrid todas as vezes que se faz aquela celebridade; mas o que mais me admira é que El-Rei N. S. queira ver as execuções, como se aqueles miseráveis não fossem seus vassalos. Tal é a força da criação que faz perder os sentimentos de humanidade e tais foram também as ideias que se deram, ainda que mais gloriosas, ao Senhor Rei D. Sebastião, a respeito dos maometanos, com as quais se perdeu a si mesmo e a todos nós...» (Instruções Inéditas de D. Luís da Cunha a Marco António de Azevedo Coutinho — Coimbra, 1929, pág. 99.) 
⁴ Esta tolerância era motivada por conveniências políticas. Logo que os representantes da Inglaterra reclamavam um preso, raro seria que lhe não fosse logo dada a liberdade. Aconteceu isso, por exemplo, com João Couston, natural de Berna mas naturalizado inglês que «viera a Lisboa na esperança de embarcar para o Brasil, onde tentaria fortuna». O homem era pedreiro-livre e como tal foi preso, julgado e condenado pela Inquisição. Saiu no auto-de-fé realizado em Lisboa em 21 de Junho de 1744 condenado às galés, donde o tirou o ministro inglês, por ordem do seu governo. (V. artigo de João de Mendonça — «Processo do arquitecto inglês John Couston — Condenado pela Inquisição de Lisboa por ser pedreiro-livre, 1743-1744» — O Occidente, n.os 283 a 286 — Nov. o a Dez. o de 1886.
⁵ Não cheguei a ter notícia deste Silveira e do seu caso, que, a ter sido como o autor diz, foi excepção confirmativa da regra. O que é certo é que nas Explicações e provas dos quais se queixam à Sé Apostólica os cristãos descendentes de sangue hebreu no Reino de Portugal contra os estilos, uso e modo de proceder dos Inquisidores daquele Reino, no agravo 1.^o se diz: «Quando depois de quatro ou cinco anos de prisão o cristão-novo sai do Santo Ofício e como tal o Tribunal ordena que se lhe restituam os bens nem por isso lhos restituem. Não se acha dinheiro para restituir, é necessário que o pobre homem de bem litigue com o fisco para arrecadar os seus bens; dura o litígio quatro ou cinco anos e depois de ter a sentença em seu favor é sólito responder o juiz do fisco que não tem dinheiro em casa com que pague, que espere que se prendam outros judeus, e com dinheiro daqueles poderá pagar-lhe... Vende o juiz do fisco não somente os bens livres ou confiscados, e os da mulher e os dos filhos, mas também os vinculados a perpetuidade, como são morgados e bens enfitênticos, ainda que conforme as Leis e Ordenações do Reino possa vender somente o usufruto, vita durante da pessoa confiscada.» (Cit. João Lúcio de Azevedo — História dos Cristãos-Novos Portugueses, 1.^a ed., pág. 477.) Nas Notícias recônditas, § 2.^o, também se lê: «E quantos saíram livres, que ainda hoje não têm recuperado seus bens, que o fisco lhes tirou?» [...] 
⁶ Este desgraçado foi o padre Manuel Lopes de Carvalho, natural da Baía e morador em Lisboa. Morreu em 1726, queimado vivo. J. Lúcio de Azevedo escreveu acerca do processo do padre Lopes de Carvalho: «O processo, exibindo um caso de aberração mental no padecente, verdadeiro alienado, fica um monumento da cegueira dos fanáticos, que o condenaram a expiação bárbara. Não procedia o desditoso da raça dos conversos, mas por certo as ideias que lhe causaram a ruína, e em que se lhe extraviou a razão, tiveram sua raiz no ambiente onde pairava o judaísmo. Preso por expor em certo escrito interpretações da Bíblia contrárias ao catolicismo, continuou a polémica com o Inquisidor, que o interrogava, e teólogos encarregados de o reduzirem à ortodoxia. O corpo de delito era um memorial a D. João V, em que o dizia escolhido para estabelecer o reinado de Cristo na terra, pela reforma da Igreja. Para isso cumpria tornar às práticas do culto judaico, que foram seguidas pelos apóstolos e pelo próprio fundador do cristianismo. Entre outras coisas, queria se guardasse o sábado em lugar do domingo e se mudasse a data da Páscoa. Se até este ponto o governou o raciocínio, um mês depois de recolhido ao cárcere delirava... Sentia-se circunciso, não como os filhos de Israel e na forma que a lei manda, mas de modo misterioso. Preceitos judaicos nunca tinha praticado [...]«Já perto do desfecho trágico, pretendeu saber dos inquisidores se estava para haver auto-de-fé, e porque o não castigavam como aos demais presos, sendo ele o procurador dos mesmos pelo Deus de Israel. Ainda lhe não tinham anunciado a sentença, mas pouco teve de esperar. Fizeram-lhe a vontade. Na Relação, os Desembargadores, vendo nele um apóstata incontrito, mandaram que fosse queimado em vida. E contudo não passava de um maníaco, que discutia empregando as regras da lógica.» (Ob. cit, págs. 333-334.)

Our Robots, Ourselves

David A. Mindell

Human, Remote, Autonomous
Late in the night, high above the Atlantic ocean in the long, open strecht between Brazil and Africa, an airliner encountered rough weather. Ice clogged the small tubes on the aircraft’s nose that detected airspeed and transmitted the data to the computers flying the plane. The computers could have continued flying without the information, but they had been told by their programmers that they could not.
The automated, fly-by-wire system gave up, turned itself off, and handed control to the human pilots in the cockpit: thirty-two-year-old Pierre Cedric Bonin and thirty-seven-year-old David Robert. Bonin and Robert, both relaxed and a little fatigued, were caught by surprise, suddenly responsible for hand flying a large airliner at high altitude in bad weather at night. It is a challenging task under the best of circumstances, and one they had not handled recently. Their captain, fifty-eight-year-old Marc Debois, was off duty back in the cabin. They had to waste precious attention to summon him.
Even though the aircraft was flying straight and level when the computers tripped off, the pilots struggled to make sense of the bad air data. One man pulled back, the other pushed forward on his control stick. They continued straight and level for about a minute, then lost control.
On June 1, 2009, Air France flight 447 spiraled into the ocean [...]. It disappeared below the waves, nearly without a trace.
In the global, interconnected system of international aviation, it is unacceptable for an airliner to simply disappear. A massive, coordinated search followed. In just a few days traces of flight 447 were located on the ocean’s surface.
Finding the bulk of the wreckage, however, and the black box data recorders that held the keys to the accident’s causes, required hunting across a vast seafloor, and proved frustratingly slow.
More than two years later, two miles deep on the seafloor, nearly beneath the very spot where the airliner hit the ocean, an autonomous underwater vehicle, or AUV, called Remus 6000 glided quietly through the darkness and extreme pressure. Moving at just faster than a human walking pace, the torpedo-shaped robot maintained a precise altitude of about two hundred feet off the bottom, a position at which its ultrasonic scanning sonar returns the sharpest images. As the sonars pinged to about a half mile out either side, the robot collected gigabytes of data from the echoes.
The terrain is mountainous, so the seafloor rose quickly. Despite its intelligence, the robot occasionally bumped into the bottom, mostly without injury. Three such robots worked in a coordinated dance: two searched underwater at any given time, while a third one rested on a surface ship in a three-hour pit stop with its human handlers to offload data, charge batteries, and take on new search plans.
On the ship, a team of twelve engineers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, including leader Mike Purcell, who spearheaded the design and development of the searching vehicles, worked in twelve-hour shifts, busy as any pit crew. When a vehicle came to the surface, it took about forty-five minutes for the engineers to download the data it collected into a computer, then an additional half hour to process those data to enable a quick, preliminary scroll-through on a screen.
Looking over their shoulders were French and German investigators, and representatives from Air France. The mood was calculating and deliberate, but tense: the stakes were high for French national pride, for the airliner’s manufacturer, Airbus, and for the safety of all air travel. Several prior expeditions had tried and failed. In France, Brazil, and around the world, families awaited word.
Interpreting sonar data requires subtle judgment not easily left solely to a computer. Purcell and his engineers relied on years of experience. On their screens, they reviewed miles and miles of rocky reflections alternating with smooth bottom. The pattern went on for five days before the monotony broke: a crowd of fragments appeared, then a debris field—a strong signal of human-made artifacts in the ocean desert. Suggestive, but still not definitive.
The engineers reprogrammed the vehicles to return to the debris and “fly” back and forth across it, this time close enough that onboard lights and cameras could take pictures from about thirty feet off the bottom. When the vehicles brought the images back to the surface, engineers and investigators recognized the debris and had their answer: they had found the wreckage of flight 447, gravesite of hundreds.
Soon, another team returned with a different kind of robot, a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), a heavy-lift vehicle specially designed for deep salvage, connected by a cable to the ship. Using the maps created by the successful search, the ROV located the airliner’s black box voice and data recorders and brought them to the surface. The doomed pilots’ last minutes were recovered from the ocean, and investigators could now reconstruct the fatal confusion aboard the automated airliner. The ROV then set about the grim task of retrieving human remains.
The Air France 447 crash and recovery linked advanced automation and robotics across two extreme environments: the high atmosphere and the deep sea. The aircraft plunged into the ocean because of failures in human interaction with automated systems; the wreckage was then discovered by humans operating remote and autonomous robots.
While the words (and their commonly perceived meanings) suggest that automated and autonomous systems are self-acting, in both cases the failure or success of the systems derived not from the machines or the humans operating on their own, but from people and machines operating together. Human pilots struggled to fly an aircraft that had been automated for greater safety and reliability; networks of ships, satellites, and floating buoys helped pinpoint locations; engineers interpreted and acted on data produced by robots. Automated and autonomous vehicles constantly returned to their human makers for information, energy, and guidance.
Air France 447 made tragically clear that as we constantly adapt to and reshape our surroundings, we are also remaking ourselves. How could pilots have become so dependent on computers that they flew a perfectly good airliner into the sea? What becomes of the human roles in activities like transportation, exploration, and warfare when more and more of the critical tasks seem to be done by machines?
In the extreme view, some believe that humans are about to become obsolete, that robots are “only one software upgrade away” from full autonomy, as Scientific American has recently argued. And they tell us that the robots are coming—coming to more familiar environments. A new concern for the strange and uncertain potentials of artificial intelligence has arisen out of claims that we are on the cusp of superintelligence. Our world is about to be transformed, indeed is already being transformed, by robotics and automation. Start-ups are popping up, drawing on old dreams of smart machines to help us with professional duties, physical labor, and the mundane tasks of daily life. Robots living and working alongside humans in physical, cognitive, and emotional intimacy have emerged as a growing and promising subject of research. Autonomy—the dream that robots will one day act as fully independent agents—remains a source of inspiration, innovation, and concern.

Our Robots, Ourselves

David A. Mindell

War

Walk out of the desert heat of the american west and the darkened trailer that houses the Predator control room and you are immediately transported into a remote war zone. Screens glow and equipment fans whir. Like an airline flight deck, the room has two “hot seats”: one for the pilot, who commands the mission, and one for the sensor operator, who does the looking. The pilot monitors nearby friends and enemies and communicates outside the control room via radios, chat rooms, telephones, and other devices. The sensor operator commands the camera on Predator, searching for and locking onto targets. A third person, the mission coordinator, sits behind the pilot and sensor operator, keeping in close touch with troops on the ground in the combat zone, intelligence analysts, and others in the chain of command.
To start the mission, a launch and recovery crew located in a theater of war far across the globe prepares the unmanned aircraft, about the size of a commuter plane, and sends it off on its way. Then they hand off control through the global network to the remote crews. While the aircraft wings its way to the battlefield on autopilot, the operators prepare for the mission. Predator is relatively slow, so the journey could take several hours. Much of the remote crews’ work during this time seems like our everyday office work—signing in, logging on, setting up screens and menus.

Despite the mundane nature of the numerous systems’ setups and checks, they serve to connect the crew with their aircraft and the faraway situation they are preparing to observe and engage. As they configure their workplace and tools, customize their displays, and set their personal preferences, they develop a sense of immersion and presence. “Who is on the Internet chat rooms?” they ask. “What is going on in the field? What is going on on the network?”
Frequently the work shifts do not coincide with the start or end of a mission, so a new crew observing the last few minutes of the prior shift gains awareness; during particularly intense periods, the crew shift might be delayed. “It’s a very big paradigm shift,” said one F-16 fighter pilot turned Predator pilot, used to climbing into a jet on the ground to start a sortie. “I will walk into the cockpit and there is already a crew doing the mission.
Predator remains prone to computer crashes and lockups during critical periods. Crews learn through difficult experience not to press certain key combinations, not to issue commands too quickly, not to confuse this button with the one next to it.
It takes several steps to do simple things. It takes more than twenty keystrokes, for example, simply to turn on the aircraft’s autopilot. “The conjecture among us pilots,” observes one operator, “is [that] the engineers thought we were too stupid, and we would be idiots and be hitting buttons all the time and doing dumb things, so they tried to put a two-step process into everything that we do.”

Manuals are lengthy and unclear. Some important features are hidden in the system’s code and documented nowhere, passed down through word of mouth between the operators in a kind of oral tradition of stories of work-arounds to make the system perform. No small part of the operators’ skill is simply making the system do things it was not designed to do.
What constitutes “flying” for Predator pilots? From the handover immediately after takeoff, much of the mission is conducted on autopilot; the pilot monitors the vehicle as it automatically follows a series of GPS-derived waypoints. Even through this remote connection, however, the pilot still retains the ability to hand fly the vehicle using the joystick. Yet because of the absence of physical cues—g-forces, feelings of turning, even the engine sounds, vibrations, and smells—hand flying presents a challenge.
The difficulty of remote flying is exacerbated by Predator’s design. One of the most basic controls in an aircraft, from a training Cessna to a fighter plane, is the ability to “trim” the aircraft—setting a point to establish the aircraft at a particular pitch angle and airspeed. A properly trimmed aircraft requires just a light touch on the controls by the pilot. But Predator has an unnatural, cumbersome, multistep screen, stick, and button process to trim the controls and stabilize the vehicle.
Even worse is the location of buttons on the control stick: on U.S. Air Force aircraft the button to drop bombs is located, by convention, at the top and left of the control stick. On Predator, pushing the button in that location turns off the aircraft’s stability augmentation system, which can easily send the aircraft spinning out of control.

Hand flying remotely is also complicated by the 1.8-second time delay to issue commands to the vehicle and receive a response. One might logically assume that the time delay derived from the necessity for sending commands halfway around the world via satellites in space. Yet only about half a second of the control delay is due to the speed of light. The remainder of the time delay occurs in video compressors, routers, and all the other equipment that processes the data. The communications system was designed to optimize image quality, not speed of response.
Pilots can command the aircraft to fly to and hold specific headings, and can even use the stick to command changes in the autopilot (similar to the fly-by-wire techniques that control many of today’s airliners). Later versions have features like point-and-click loiter, which enables the pilot to identify a point, spread a circle from it, and have the aircraft automatically fly around the point—helpful in quickly setting up observational sorties.
Still, the Predator autopilot can only command the aircraft to bank fourteen degrees to each side, limiting the rate of turns. Pilots sometimes take manual control in order to command twenty or thirty degrees of bank for more extreme maneuvers. The trouble with these bank angles, and the reason the autopilot will not command them, has less to do with the aircraft itself than with the servos that point the onboard satellite antenna up toward space. It will lose its signal lock at higher bank angles (the way the satellite TV signal in a modern airliner will drop out during a turn). If pilots command too great an angle, they have to be aware they could knock the bird offline for a few seconds and lose all image feedback and control authority until the autopilot rights itself and again acquires lock—a risky maneuver.

Predator pilots, in public presentations and memoirs, tend to emphasize the continuing need for their hand flying skills in specific situations such as avoiding weather, obstacles, or other aircraft. Yet others within the air force have called these control sticks simply “morale sticks” and feel that flying Predator manually through the satellite link is “stupid.” In the words of former air force chief of staff General Michael Ryan, “We shouldn’t have pilots stick-and-ruddering UAVs.” Rather, the argument goes, the pilots should be using the autopilot and waypoint following, controlling the vehicle at a higher level of abstraction.
By contrast, generating the imagery and videos is “a matter of life and death,” but one squarely in the domain of the sensor operators and not the pilots. They find themselves employing new skills unrelated to aviation. They calibrate the cameras and the infrared detectors to the immediate temperature, environment, and time of day. They work with the pilots to put the aircraft in the best position to see things, and then adjust focus, gain, and camera level to create “a statistically significant scene”—one that can yield meaningful information. Sensor operators call this work “growing” strong “video tracks”; they treat the tracks “like living things that need periodic attention,” and take pride in the quality of their video.
The imaging system has some automated ability to make these adjustments, but often the human operators can do better than the computers because of their knowledge of the human context. For example, they can tell the difference between a running engine and a cold one, or discern people from livestock, or adjust for the time of day and the desert heat. Sensor operators can coordinate all these data and imagery with information from the radios and chat rooms. Bandwidth over the satellite link is a limited resource, and the operators trade off certain kinds of data for others, putting priority onto the video feed for the best image quality during critical periods.

Floating above the ground, looking down on their quarry from above, Predator sensor operators grow “to feel as if they were the sensor ball itself,” referring to the little dome of cameras, lasers, and servos that hangs below the nose of the aircraft. Sitting in their trailer, pilots and sensor operators crane their necks and move their bodies as they seek to look above or around an object on the screen. They will sometimes whisper to one another during tense moments, even though their loudest shouts could not be heard far away on the ground. Instructors believe that such feelings of presence allow the sensor operators to focus on a scene, become more curious about what they see, quickly detect movement, and rapidly react to anomalies.
Fighter pilots who actually fly above a battlefield acknowledge that they do not feel as deeply present as the sensor operators. Because of a combination of factors, ranging from the size of the screen to the presence of other people, the sensor balls on their jets do not provide the same sense of “being there.”

Can Images Kill?

Marie-José Mondzain

The Christian revolution is the first and only monotheist doctrine to have made the image the symbol of its power and the instrument of all of its conquests. From East to West, it convinced all those in power that the one who is the master of the visible is the master of the world and organizes the control of the gaze. Such a revelation undermined the book, which was declared weak and slow when compared to the immediate and visible glory of the incarnation and resurrection of the Father’s image. Henceforth, beliefs, knowledge, and information were to be transmitted via images.

Empire, Imperialism and Hegemony; a Necessary Distinction

Herfried Münkler

Ways of seeing empires are still subject to the claims of imperialism theory, for which the formation of great empires is attributable only to the actions of expansionist elites. Whether out of a need for prestige, a striving to become more powerful or a thirst for ever greater profit, a few large states are supposed to have pursued a policy of economic penetration or political annexation of foreign lands, which resulted in the formation of Europe's colonial empires. As these experiences remain central in most discussions of empire, we should now take a closer look at them.
If we were to consider only the political journalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we might indeed gain the impression that empire-building was purely a matter of elite imperialist ambitions. In this view, rivalry among European powers was decisive, since the fear was that any country which fell behind in the race to expand political and economic power would not only lose ground to others but enter the path of general decline. Only those who stayed in the fight for the lion's share of global dominance and the most important resources and markets of the world economy could survive as independent political powers. Nationalism, social Darwinism and a general jitteriness were pushing Europe, with Russia and America on the wings, into a state of feverish excitement, so that suddenly the future of the continent seemed to depend upon the division into spheres of power and influence outside Europe.
In retrospect, it is hardly possible to see the phase of wild, hectic competition as a consequence of rational, well-considered decisions, and in the end European colonialism did not at all yield what had been expected of it. This contradicts the analyses one finds in economic theories of imperialism. Colonial imperialism may well have been, as they argue, one of the most brutal forms of exploitation and repression ever seen in history, yet as a rule it tended to cost as much as it brought in. From the point of view of economics, it was a great political and economic miscalculation.

The self-destructive dynamic of capitalism: economic theories of imperialism

How can such a miscalculation be explained, especially as it was not limited to one country or the European continent (where the famous, or notorious, 'scramble for Africa' originated) but applied all around the world? Japanese and American politics were gripped by imperialist fever: Japan invaded the East Asian mainland, entering into a conflict with Russia over Manchuria that led to the classical imperialist war of 1905; and the United States, following the Spanish-American war of 1898, not only established itself in the Central American and Caribbean but annexed the Philippines, where it suffered heavy losses in a guerrilla war stretching over several years.
Was the miscalculation due to an epidemic of hysteria that made it impossible for the elites to pursue their interests in a rational manner? Was overaccumulation or underconsumption in the economically advanced countries really the crucial reason why new markets had constantly to be found for commodities and investment capital, as Marxist theorists in particular have argued? Or is it rather the case, as Joseph Schumpeter maintained, that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperialism was a last rebellion by premodern elites against the new spirit of trade and change, setting in train conquests about which it was evident that they would never prove their worth?
There are two possible ways of explaining the rush of empire building in the nineteenth century and the conflicts associated with it. One starts from the essential irrationality of the enterprise and defines the problem as its breakthrough into a world increasingly based on rational thinking. The other sees imperialism precisely as rational action on the part of the most powerful players in the capitalist world, so that it is competition among national capitals and their amortization requirements which determine the direction of imperialist expansion - hence the relatively little interest of such theories in the rise of empires and their focus instead on whether this will be the age of barbarism (as Rosa Luxemburg predicted) or whether the capitalist dynamic can be checked through social - political reforms (as John Atkinson Hobson believed).
Hobson, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, was the first to develop a purely economic basis for imperialism theory, which was then worked up by later theorists. His idea was that imperialist policies brought no profit to society as a whole but, on the contrary, involved heavy losses. In no case did the proceeds of trade with economically underdeveloped, often only partly accessible regions justify the military and administrative costs of empire, not to speak of investments in infrastructure.
So, who did have an interest in building such unprofitable empires? Neither taxpayers nor merchants nor entrepreneurs, in Hobson's opinion, but only finance capital looking for investment opportunities. Expansionist policies created such opportunities - at least if the state gave appropriate guarantees and was prepared to intervene militarily, and if necessary to assume political control, in order to protect overseas investments amid uprisings or civil wars. Finance capital manipulated public opinion in its efforts to persuade the state to open up safe and lucrative investment opportunities abroad; in particular, it aroused nationalist instincts and stirred up a pro-imperialist mood, so that the interest of a few capitalists in overseas investments could be made to seem a task of the whole nation. For Hobson, then, imperialism was fundamentally a project of internal distribution within economically advanced countries.
Unlike later Marxist theorists of imperialism, Hobson did not hold that capitalism would collapse without overseas expansion and political-military guarantees for the capital invested there. Rather, he was convinced that the underconsumption problem in the capitalist countries could be solved in the medium term through active social policies that raised the purchasing power of the masses. The political domestication of capitalism and the development of effective welfare systems was thus his alternative to the worldwide spread of aggressive imperialism.
John Maynard Keynes, the theoretician of anti-cyclical economic management, was stimulated and influenced in many ways by Hobson's critique of imperialism. Luxemburg and Lenin, on the other hand, in their inner-party disputes with currents geared to trade union action or social reform, categorically rejected a 'social- democratic' perspective of the reformability of capitalism and emphasized its inherent drive to imperialist expansion. From the first, their theories of imperialism had the function of directing the whole focus on the overcoming of capitalism by revolutionary means; imperialist competition itself was leading in that direction, since the great powers would weaken themselves in war and place socialist revolution on the agenda.
All these theories and debates did not evince a real interest in empire-building, but turned on the question of whether European societies could or could not be reformed. They therefore paid scant attention to the problems of the periphery into which the empires were expanding. For imperialism theory, these political-economic spaces were literally peripheral to the issue of the reformability of capitalism and the nature of its strengths and weaknesses. Empirebuilding was conceived as a process inevitably flowing out from the centre to the periphery; only push-factors were taken into account, while pull-factors remained unnoticed. Hence the conclusion reached by imperialism theories was determined in advance by the questions they posed and the cognitive interests they defended.
Lenin was the only one whose theoretical work took up the periphery in a little more detail, but this mainly had to do with the fact that Russia - though itself for centuries an imperial power - belonged to the periphery as this was defined in economic imperialism theory. If imperialism was understood as a consequence of the overaccumulation of capital, Russia could have only a walk-on part because of its well-known shortage of capital, especially as this meant that its attempts in the British or American style to complement military imperialism with an economic 'ruble imperialism' were doomed to failure. For Lenin, Russia was the 'weakest link' where the imperialist chain would inevitably break.
The prognosis of Lenin the theoretician came at just the right time for Lenin the politician, for it meant that the socialist revolution would first take place in Russia and only then spread out to the real heartlands of the capitalist-imperialist world. Lenin too was fundamentally indifferent to the periphery: he was interested only in the weakest link of the imperialist chain, where he saw the best opportunities for a revolutionary takeover. How true this was may be gauged from the rigidity of his actions during and after the Civil War: the reconquest of parts of the Tsarist empire that had seceded during the Revolution, and their brutal incorporation into the new Soviet Union. The periphery was for him only a means to the end of winning the battle in the centre.
Economic theories of imperialism, most of them socialist, therefore converted a specific problem of capitalist societies into the key for the interpretation of empire-building. They were - and this is not meant as a reproach - contemporary answers to contemporary questions. As a rule, however, they were not understood in this way, but were presented as general explanations of empire-building. Purporting to explain more than they were capable of explaining, they obscured the real factors and dynamics of imperial policy.
What might have been true of Britain, America and even Germany in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century was much less applicable to France, which, though possessing Europe's second largest colonial empire, had a more modest dynamic of capital accumulation than its major rivals. It was applicable even less to Japan and, as we have seen, least of all to Russia. During the period in question, the Tsarist empire had to rely on imports of capital, and its changing alliances - especially the switch from Germany to France at the end of the 1880s, which was to be so important in the run-up to the First World War - were closely bound up with the loan agreements that Russia had to make in order to modernize its infrastructure and army and to build up its industry. Economic dynamics cannot explain the imperialist policies of the Tsarist empire in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The centre-periphery problem

The building of the Tsarist empire involved pressing the Russian people into service and pumping it dry. This has been described as 'internal colonialism', one of whose central components was the (partly forcible) population transfer from European Russia to Siberia. There can be no talk here of corruption of the masses by the 'superprofits' resulting from empire, which Lenin invoked in Western Europe to explain the long absence of revolution. The Russian peasantry, in particular, coughed up for centuries to increase the power of the tsars, and it is more than questionable whether (as imperialism theory supposes) the aristocracy profited so much from empire. The fact that some 90 per cent of the land belonging to the nobility changed hands between 1863 and 1904 would seem to indicate the contrary. Russia's attempt to keep up with the imperial rivalry of the great powers forced changes in its social- economic structures, which further promoted the decay of noble property and the impoverishment of the peasantry. As far as the analyses and prognoses of imperialism theory are concerned, a greater problem is the impoverishment of the aristocracy itself, the social-economic base of the Tsarist empire. It is quite evident that its social interests cut across the political imperatives of empire, and in order to defend them it would actually have had to oppose further expansion. For most of its history,     Tsarist Russia constituted a good example of an empire in which scarcely any real profiteers from imperial policy were to be found at the centre of power.
There was another element in Russia which cannot be explained in the terms of imperialism theory: the fact that, since the time of Peter the Great, the tsars largely fell back on non-Russians to administer their huge empire. Germans played a prominent role in this respect: not only the Baltic German nobility, which came under Tsarist rule with the expansion of the early eighteenth century and enjoyed a number of special privileges, but also officers and administrators recruited in Germany itself. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some 18 per cent of senior officials in Russia were of German origin, and by the turn of the twentieth century the proportion had probably risen even higher. They certainly profited from Russia's imperial expansion, and owed their position and careers to it. The same was true of the Cossacks, who were given an important role in defending the frontiers. The true beneficiaries of the Tsarist empire were thus peripheral groups and national minorities that assumed positions they would not otherwise have had.
This preference for groups and minorities newly settled in the periphery of the empire is explicable in theories of imperial rule, but not in imperialism theory. The latter tries to find links between existing social-political power and imperial expansion, identifying the most powerful players as the forces pulling the strings and benefiting from a policy of expansion, whereas theories of imperial rule develop the idea that certain socially marginal groups are useful for a far-flung empire in which the centre cannot control all events and decisions but must delegate responsibility; the interesting question is then not so much whether the decisions are right or wrong, but how the loyalty of local decision-makers can be ensured. The greater the extent of an empire, the more noticeable centrifugal forces become. Thus, in Russia, governors and military commanders forged links with local populations on the periphery or gained the trust and affection of the troops serving under them, but this increased the danger that they would try to secede from the empire or stage a coup to grab the central power for themselves. The history of the Imperium Romanum after the civil wars of the first century bc is marked by a series of rebellions and usurpations that began in the periphery and spread to the centre.
Excessively close ties between a local population and its governor or military personnel can be prevented if top administrators and officers are regularly switched around at short intervals. Empires have not infrequently resorted to this device, but it has the drawback that decision-makers have no time to familiarize themselves with the peculiarities of the region and therefore make mistakes by rigidly applying general principles. A well-known example of the negative consequences of rotation is P. Quinctilius Varus, the Roman governor in Germania, who had previously served in Syria and was insufficiently familiar with the quite different conditions between the Rhine and the Elbe. This was not the least reason why a conspiracy of German tribal chieftains was able to draw the governor and his legions into an ambush in the Teutoburg Forest, inflicting on them a rout that stopped Rome's push to the northeast. The history of imperial defeats is filled with figures of the same kind as Varus.
The alternative to rapid circulation of office-holders is the elite recruitment of groups or individuals who, since their political and personal fate is tied to that of their sovereign, will be forced to display energy and unconditional loyalty to the imperial centre, even when the sovereign is far away and cannot directly control his representatives.
Another example of the use of minorities to secure imperial power is the Ottoman janissary corps, though admittedly it was stationed not in the periphery but at the heart of imperial power, in and around Constantinople, and could therefore itself present a danger to the sultan's rule. As they were the best-trained and best-equipped troops at his disposal, he would have found it difficult to defeat a janissary uprising; for better or worse he therefore relied upon their loyalty. The unconditional support of these elite units, as well as their high level of combat-readiness, was ensured through the so-called devshirm or 'blood tax', the enlistment of children from Christian parts of the Balkans dependent on the Ottoman empire. They had no social ties or political contacts in the centre of power and owed their privileged position entirely to the ruler's goodwill.
This Balkan reservoir, ethnically less Turkish than Albanian, ensured that the sultans would not share the fate of so many Roman emperors and fall victim to an uprising by their praetorian guard. Much the same was true of the Ottoman administrative elite. Its decline began in the late seventeenth century, when more and more free-born Muslims began to rise in its ranks and the centre increasingly lost control of the periphery as tax-farmers set about lining their own pockets.
The rapid growth of centrifugal forces, eventually leading to the secession of whole territories, may also be observed in the decline and fall of the Spanish world empire. In Latin America, the Spanish colonial authorities kept down the numbers of bureaucrats and military officers and were able to operate in a relatively cost-effective manner, but this led to growing creolization both of the administration and of the militia leadership, at a time when a large soldiery was needed to keep order and to repel the nomadically inclined Indian tribes. Trade within Spanish America was already largely in Creole hands. Soon the Creole upper layers, in a region that stretched at its height from California and Texas in the north to the tip of Chile in the south, saw no reason why the riches of Latin America should continue to be sent to the mother country to finance its pursuit of European hegemony.
Things looked very different at the heart of the empire, in Madrid, where the Bourbon reforms sought to contain Creole influence and to increase the weight of European Spaniards in the New World. However, the economic success of these reforms resulted in a growing estrangement of Spanish America from the mother country. When French troops occupied Spain in 1807 and shortly afterwards installed one of Napoleon's brothers on the throne, this was only the occasion, not the deeper cause, of the separation of Central and South America from Spain.
The marginal social and political position of parts of the Tsarist military-administrative elite corresponded, in the case of the Spanish empire, to the longstanding minority position of the white urban upper classes within a mostly Indian environment. The centrifugal tendencies of the imperial order were here offset by the uncertainty of the Creole upper classes as to whether, following a political break with Spain, they would be able to maintain their social position in the New World or would be swept aside by slave or Indian uprisings. It was Spain's guarantees of stability, covering the administration, the justice system and internal and external security, which acted as a centripetal counterforce. Only when the Creoles had to pay ever rising costs for the Bourbon reforms, and when Spain, at war with Britain, was no longer able to deliver the promised stability, did the idea become widely accepted that it would be more advantageous to break with the empire than to remain within it.
The Russian and Spanish examples show that, at least after an empire has been put in place, the structure and dynamic of its political order cannot be understood only from the point of view of the centre. Numerous decisions affecting the very existence-of the empire are taken on its periphery, or by individuals or groups of individuals who originated there and whose political perception remains coloured by it. This was true, for example, of Roman emperors after the second century. 
A quite different kind of peripheral influence on the centre may be seen in the case of the British empire. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the British at least partly gave up the comfortable position of an empire in control of events and burdened themselves, in India and Africa, with the costs and responsibilities of a territorial imperium. At first the tasks of empire-building, spreading free trade and guaranteeing peace through intensive economic links were largely left up to non-state players, especially trading companies, but also individual businessmen and banks, which opened up new markets and made the flow of commerce run deeper and wider. Richard Cobden, founder of the free trade movement, wrote in 1846: 'I see in the free trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe, drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonisms of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace.'
Towards the end of the century, however, things began to develop in ways not foreseen in the free trade theories and liberal internationalism. The economic agreements forced on dependent countries did not lead to a strengthening and liberalization of the political order, but rather to its gradual weakening and eventual breakdown. Rebellions broke out, India's Sepoy Rising of 1857 not being the first, and under their impact the British altered their whole administrative and military structure in the subcontinent. They suspended cost-effective elements of indirect rule and replaced them with more expensive forms of direct rule. This was a decision that came from the centre, essentially prompted by instability on the margins of the empire.
Unrest overseas, together with the rise of politicians less indulgent towards the economic dreams of empire, led to delays in debt repayment and threats to the security of investments in the newly opened regions. The United States faced similar problems - especially in its Central American/Caribbean 'backyard' - and felt compelled to intervene on a number of occasions. Suddenly, a stark choice confronted the very powers which, until then, had refrained with good reason from direct political interference in the regions they had economically penetrated: either to withdraw from them altogether or to take over administrative and political control. The Europeans, especially the British, opted for the latter and established colonies in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, while the United States limited itself to a policy of ad hoc military intervention in the Caribbean and Central America. Complete withdrawal, on the other hand, would have meant writing off the investments that had already been made, and none of the powers involved in this phase of economic globalization seriously considered such a response to the first signs of resistance or instability.
For the theories of economic imperialism, the decision by the expanding societies of the West to place their state apparatus, armed forces and fiscal revenue in the service of economic interests, in the ways we have just been describing, marked the transition from capitalist to imperialist states. In this approach the changes taking place in the periphery are scarcely visible. Yet their traditional forms of production were breaking down under the pressure of imports from the industrial heartlands, and traditional ways of life were losing their power to bind people together. Not the least important were the effects that early forms of globalization had upon these societies in the second half of the nineteenth century, leading to the great push of the 1880s that ushered in the true age of imperialism. If this process is described as an economically induced erosion of existing orders, which made it necessary to stabilize them from outside through the application of power politics, then some remarkable parallels with the situation at the end of the twentieth century become visible. Thus, the several humanitarian military interventions of the last decade - from the prevention of genocide to the ending of civil wars - appear as aftercare directed at unintended effects of the new globalization process. The humanitarian imperialism of which some authors speak would then be nothing other than political management of the traces that the social-economic process of globalization has left behind.

It is true that voices have often been raised to demand that historians of European imperialism should pay greater attention to the periphery, but they have not found much of an echo. Imperialism theory neglects the periphery simply because its underlying conception and problematic refer essentially to the centre: it designates as imperialist those intellectual currents and political movements which have an interest in empire-building, and therefore inevitably fixes its gaze on the goals of a few players in the centre while downplaying the role that the two-way chain of functional effects between centre and periphery plays in the formation of empires. By contrast, theories of empire have to keep centre and periphery equally in view, both in analysis of the formative period of empires and in relation to the era following their consolidation.
This brings us to another problem of imperialism theory: its concentration on the formative period and its neglect of the later functioning of empire. This one-sidedness is also evidently due to the cognitive interest in the dynamic of capitalism. Writers in this tradition were convinced that imperialism would not produce a stable order but would itself collapse amid the inevitably resulting wars and conflicts. With such expectations, there was clearly no point in making detailed analyses of the functioning of developed empires. During the revival of imperialism theory in the 1960s and 1970s, the main interest was again in ephemeral empire-building ventures, such as those of Bismarck and the Wilhelmine regime, or the Greater Germany conceptions of National Socialism. Perhaps a critical glance was also cast at American and Japanese imperialism, but no major empire, with the exception of the British, was found worthy of intensive discussion. The idea that the end of the imperial age lay just ahead seemed to make such debates irrelevant, and so even in the case of the British empire writers concentrated on its periods of hectic expansion rather than on those when it was functioning smoothly. We should not exclude the possibility that this particular design of imperialism theory laid the ground for today's hasty predictions that the American empire has no future.

Fighting Sleep

Franny Nudelman

Sleeper Agent
As the war in Korea came to an end, American soldiers who had been held in prison camps and subjected to the techniques of thought control began returning home. According to psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, when the first group of prisoners arrived in the United States, military psychiatrists were alarmed by their detachment and recommended that later returnees should travel by boat rather than plane so that they could have a two-week interlude to begin the adjustment process in the company of other repatriates and under the guidance of therapists. Psychiatrists hoped that travel by ship would provide a restful pause and help men who had been held captive to resume their former lives. As Lifton, who served as an army psychiatrist and traveled from Inchon to San Francisco with 442 repatriates, explained, “The hypothesis was that, by means of this ‘interlude,’ the men could more effectively integrate the realities of repatriation and bridge the emotional gap between prison camp and home town.”
Travel by ship not only gave repatriates time to adjust to their changing circumstances, but also provided both psychiatrists and military investigators time to study and examine men who had been “brainwashed.” If narcoanalysis elongated the state of drifting from wakefulness into sleep, travel by ship literalized this drift, creating an interval between locations that enabled not only therapeutic observation but also counterintelligence work. The military feared that some of these soldiers had been turned against their country and, at an extreme, programmed to “act under their captors’ implanted instruction … awaiting activation during some future crisis.” During the voyage, military and psychiatric professionals questioned returnees, collecting data in an effort to fathom what Lifton described as “a large-scale, carefully organized, and coercive program of political indoctrination.
Cold warfare was characterized, on one hand, by the largely invisible techniques of persuasion and thought control and, on the other, by the development and stockpiling of nuclear weapons that threatened sudden and total planetary death. These conditions were refracted by a popular culture that imagined subjectivity colonized by malevolent forces, identified waiting with fearful expectation, and figured sleep as a state of profound vulnerability. Sleep maintains life, and without it one cannot survive. But it also serves homelier functions. Among these, it allows us to take a break between one day and the next. When we sleep, we pause between past and future; the mind reflects in dreams on what has already happened, and the body prepares for what comes next. In the context of a popular culture obsessed with scary things that lie in wait—undercover agents, pod invasions, hostile natives—the hiatus represented by sleep was a source of anxiety.
The sleeper agent, in particular, embodied the threat of dormancy as well as the related problem of what could and could not be known about the soldier-subject in the age of brain warfare. An undercover military operative, the sleeper agent lives the quiet life of a civilian while awaiting instruction. The idea that sleeper agents could be 
programmed to act without awareness was never more than aspirational. It was, however, an aspiration grounded in Cold War sleep experiments that explored, and eventually weaponized, the relationship between memory and suggestion. Released in 1962, The Manchurian Candidate brilliantly exploited this fantasy, capturing the recent history of brain warfare with an eye to its future applications.
By the mid-1950s, the techniques of brainwashing—also referred to as conditioning, thought control, and brain warfare—had caught hold of the popular imagination. The Manchurian Candidate, directed by John Frankenheimer, tells the story of a squad of returnees who do not remember, or at best dimly intuit, having been programmed by their Chinese captors. Satirizing the techniques of mind control, The Manchurian Candidate portrays the sleeping mind as alternately vulnerable and resilient, and dreams as the most reliable source of liberating knowledge in a world characterized by doubling and deception. In this section of the book, I pause between my two case studies to consider Frankenheimer’s canny reflection on soldiering and sleep. 

If the mass mobilization of the war years, and the resulting epidemic of “psychoneurotic” veterans, facilitated the study of traumatic symptoms, the conditions of the Cold War made such study valuable to military strategy. The arms race, which put increasing pressure on the military not to fight its enemies, helped define the war against communism as “cold.” Focused on belief, affiliation, and identity, military conflict was in large part ideological, and the process of changing minds—through propaganda, thought reform, or therapy—was perceived as indispensable to national security. As David Seed observes, the struggle for influence over the mind “conflated psychology and warfare so thoroughly that the very concept of illness became politicized.” In this context, experiments in healing were instrumental to the development of new and innovative forms of military aggression that targeted the mind. The study of postwar trauma laid the groundwork for methods of military coercion and injury that, like their therapeutic counterparts, treated the self as inherently vulnerable and available to the processes of radical transformation.
Psychological warfare weaponized the individual’s susceptibility to environmental stress, as techniques used to rebuild the human personality—drugs, hypnosis, and talk—were also used to destroy it. As Sargant explained in his 1957 study of brainwashing, Battle for the Mind, World War II proved that “continual active combat experience with noise, excitement, fear and loss of weight and sleep, eventually produced breakdown in all temperamental types.” On this basis, experts could cull the “underlying physiological principles” that would make it possible to “get at the same person, converting and maintaining him in his new belief by a whole variety of imposed stresses.” If soldiers demonstrated the process through which extreme conditions erode personality, those same conditions might be manufactured in other settings as a means of producing similar physical and psychological effects. In a therapeutic context, these principles were applied in an effort to gradually reconstruct the soldier’s memories and sense of well-being, leaving his personality essentially intact; brainwashing, by contrast, aspired to reverse belief and erase personhood.
Brain warfare became something of a national obsession when, at the end of the Korean War, twenty-one Americans elected not to return home. Although many more Korean prisoners of war chose to defect to the United States, the media seized on this story as evidence of the terrific powers of communist brainwashers. The POW crisis took concerns about the emotional stability of veterans to new extremes, exacerbating fears that soldiers’ psychological vulnerability, so widely publicized in the wake of World War II, had become a liability for national security.
On the journey home, the psychiatric interview facilitated intelligence gathering and military discipline: former captives, who had been intensively interrogated while imprisoned, underwent further questioning by both psychiatrists and military personnel. Interview transcripts, as well as psychiatrists’ reports and other relevant materials, became part of a file that documented the history of each returnee in detail. Military analysts pored over these files in an effort not only to better understand the techniques of indoctrination that had been used on these men, but also to determine who had collaborated with their captors and whether or not they should be court-martialed. As journalist Eugene Kinkead, who reported on the conduct of POWs in a controversial New Yorker essay, wryly put it, many of these men forgot that “silence is the most effective countermeasure to indoctrination.

Even as military analysts studied shipboard interviews in an effort to glean information about communist brainwashing techniques, the US military, working in concert with the CIA, was sponsoring its own experiments in the offensive uses of mind control. The program of “psychic driving,” developed by Scottish-born American psychiatrist Ewen Cameron at Allan Memorial Hospital in Montreal, is of special interest as it combined drugs, prolonged sleep, and recorded sound as part of a single system used to destroy, and then rebuild, the mind.
Cameron’s program, which began as an attempt to cure schizophrenia, demonstrates that brainwashing techniques have deep roots in clinical efforts to treat mental illness. In the early years of his program, Cameron used sodium amytal to put his patients to sleep for extended periods because it was while in a deep sleep state, or “clinical coma,” that their behavior could be “repatterned” through the use of tape recordings that sometimes played for as long as twenty hours a day. The tapes were drawn from the patient’s life history as narrated by the patient in therapy. Sometimes these tapes were recorded in the patient’s own voice, and sometimes in the voices of others; in either case, the patient’s words were used against her in an effort to destroy the habits, or “patterns,” that form personality. Over the course of more than a decade, Cameron tweaked and recombined elements of his program in search of the right formula—introducing electroshock to the treatment, trying different drugs and various scripts, and toying with the properties of recorded sound.

The stuff of secret psychiatric experiment, news headlines, and popular narrative, brainwashing investigated the fragility of personality under extreme conditions. The cultural obsession with brainwashing has its apotheosis in John Frankenheimer’s fictional return to the POW crisis in The Manchurian Candidate, a film that traces the fantastical figure of the sleeper agent to actual experiments in brain warfare. In a volume of Grey Room devoted to the “historiography of mind control,” editors Andreas Killen and Stefan Andriopoulos describe the exemplary status of the film. “In its depiction of both Communist and capitalist mind control,” they write, “The Manchurian Candidate maps out a strange new space created in Cold War America by the convergence of new forms of state power, warfare, media and science.” Based on Richard Condon’s 1959 novel of the same name, the film imagines a global conspiracy advanced by a sleeper agent brainwashed while in captivity in Manchuria. Like Best Years, it grapples with the returning soldier who has been damaged by war, and his reintegration into society. In this case, however, the veteran cannot be folded back into marriage, family, and community and healed in the process. In keeping with the covert character of Cold War militarism, The Manchurian Candidate depicts warfare as pervasive and difficult to detect, and veterans themselves as potential enemies who pose a threat to civil society.
The film focuses on two protagonists—Raymond Shaw and Bennett Marco—who react differently to the brainwashing process. Shaw becomes an automaton effectively designed to kill with no awareness or recollection of his actions, while Marco, deeply traumatized by the same experience, is able to fathom the plot and deprogram both himself and Shaw. The contrast between these two protagonists suggests the film’s approach as it revels throughout in the structure of reversal, using doubles and doubling to play out the effects of brainwashing, which forces people, as Sargant puts it, to adopt “new beliefs” that are often “diametrically opposed” to those they once held. As Matthew Frye Jacobson and Gaspar González observe, the film confounds the distinction between the enemy-as-other and enemy-as-self, teaming a Chinese mastermind, who excels at the art of thought control, with a McCarthyite senator and his scheming wife. As they put it, “The film’s core paradox, of course, is that the communist threat and the anticommunist witch hunt—the structuring opposition of Cold War politics and sensibility—turn out to be one and the same.”
In The Manchurian Candidate, the management of sleep states is the means by which communists gain the advantage, and the embrace of dream logic—which welcomes the surreal and the bizarre into the interpretive process—provides the best and only avenue for resisting conspiracy. At the beginning of the film, a squad of US servicemen is ambushed by Korean soldiers. The men are knocked out and strapped down onto stretchers. As they are being loaded into a helicopter, the camera zooms in on each of the faces of three of the men as they lie unconscious. The men appear to be asleep, or dead. As if to make the point that the story begins in the mind of the unconscious soldier—drugged, insensate, or dreaming—it is after these three close-ups that the credits roll. In the next scene, we learn that one of these men—Staff Sergeant Raymond Shaw—has been awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroism in combat. The voice-over reads from his medal citation, which narrates, somewhat incredibly, that Shaw managed to “single-handedly” save the lives of the nine men in his patrol by “taking out a full company of enemy infantry” and then leading his patrol, which had been missing in action for three days, back across enemy lines to safety.

As we discover at the end of the film, the facts of Shaw’s accomplishments were dictated to his men during their captivity in Manchuria. At the Pavlov Institute, the ten captives were subjected to light and drug “treatments,” and forced to “memorize details of an imaginary action.” In a coordinated effort, the Chinese and Russian governments brainwash these soldiers to believe that Shaw heroically saved them, a story they recite upon their return to the United States and which becomes the basis for Shaw’s medal. Although Shaw appears to be an extraordinarily unpleasant person—even he thinks so—any time his name is mentioned, the men say, “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.” The fiction of Shaw’s bravery provides cover for the fact that in Manchuria he was also brainwashed and turned into an assassin by communists in league with his mother, who plans to use him to kill the US presidential candidate, enabling her husband, the rabid anti-communist senator, Johnny Iselin, to gain the presidency and her to rule the world.
If the sleeper agent is a spy who lives quietly under cover in enemy territory while waiting for orders, Frankenheimer literalizes the term to indicate a type of somnambulism, as Shaw kills while in a trance state. With this in mind, we can observe that the narratives of brainwashing that captivated audiences at mid-century were, among other things, allegories of combat training: why do soldiers mindlessly follow commands to kill? Throughout The Manchurian Candidate, we watch Shaw follow commands that run counter to his own wishes and interests: from the absurd (jumping in a lake) to the tragic (murdering his beloved wife), his actions demonstrate that the sleeper agent, like the soldier, will do exactly what he is told. In this way, Frankenheimer takes the premise of military service—total obedience—to an extreme in the person of Shaw who has been programmed to commit violence without awareness.
For Bennett Marco, by contrast, sleep is a source of special knowledge. When we meet Marco, he is fast asleep. The camera focuses on him in bed—restless, sweating, muttering in a generic display of the disturbed sleep of veterans that is reminiscent of Fred’s sleep in Best Years. A voice-over informs us that Marco is “plagued night after night” by the “same reoccurring dream.” In a film that loves to play with doubles and the neat oppositions and reversals they enable, the dream joins false memories, implanted by the conspirators, with accurate ones and destabilizes the distinction between the two. The dream begins with Marco and his men sitting in a New Jersey hotel at a meeting of a ladies’ garden club. Waiting out a storm, they listen to a woman speak about hydrangeas. The scene soon morphs and the hotel becomes a lecture hall where Yen Lo, a Chinese expert in mental conditioning, explains to his communist audience that these men have been conditioned to believe that they are in a small New Jersey hotel listening to a presentation on hydrangeas. In effect, Yen Lo produces a dream to cover the memory of what actually happened in Manchuria. Marco’s dream ultimately confounds Yen Lo’s plan, however, by combining the manufactured dream with his own recollections of the scene in the lecture hall in a way that will prove illuminating.

Conditioned in no small part by psychoanalysis, we tend to think that dreams contain hidden truths that can be teased out by way of disciplined interpretation. In a contradictory gesture in which the film gives with one hand what it takes with another, this scene affirms the belief that in dreams the mind expresses its secrets in an elliptical fashion, necessitating close analysis, while, at the same time, satirizing this belief by making it clear that Marco’s dream has been tweaked and molded by communist conspirators. The dream itself weaves between the two scenarios in an increasingly incoherent fashion, and soon the language of gardening gives way and the woman lecturing on hydrangeas speaks the words of the lecture on brainwashing in alternation with Yen Lo, as the audience also vacillates between well-dressed middle-aged women and uniformed students of brain warfare. Yen Lo demonstrates the effects of brainwashing by commanding Shaw to strangle his fellow soldier, Ed Malvoli, which Shaw does as the other men sit staring blankly, their minds glazed by a combination of brainwashing and what Yen Lo refers to as the “bizarre tobacco substitutes” that they are smoking. The boundary between the two scenes—fabrication and actuality—is porous and not only language but also objects pass between them, as when a woman in the audience at the garden club hands over a scarf for Shaw to use to strangle Malvoli. In yet another nod to the doubling of communist and capitalist spheres, Yen Lo cites the cutting-edge research conducted by American psychiatrists at mid-century, referring by title to articles published in Psychiatry and the Journal of Psychology as well as to Andrew Salter’s Conditioned Reflex Therapy (1949). In this way, Frankenheimer reminds viewers that this dream—like this movie—is rooted in actual —is rooted in actual experiments conducted on real subjects. Even as it implies that authentic memory cannot be easily eradicated, the dream sequence also suggests that what is fabricated—in this case, an over-the-top brainwashing plot—produces historical truth.
Turning a conventional gathering of middle-class women on its head, the dream sequence dramatizes the confounding of opposites that characterizes Cold War ideology: Is my friend in truth an enemy, and is my home under siege? Similar questions could be asked of dreamwork as it is conducted in the context of the therapeutic encounter: Do the patient’s dreams and memories belong to his own mind, or were they dictated to him by the therapist? If troubled sleep was a symptom of postwar trauma, manufactured sleep—coupled with hypnosis, drugs, or sound experiments—was indispensable to military experiments in thought control. The idea that the mind expressed its secrets while the body slept was coupled with the more sinister proposition that in sleep the mind was uniquely receptive to suggestion. As we have seen, clinicians induced sleep in order to help traumatized soldiers recover past events and, at times, implanted false memories in their sleeping subjects.
As anthropologist Allan Young observes, the “discovery of traumatic memory” during the late nineteenth century posited “parallel domains of psychic life.” The notion that the self contained hidden or half-hidden content, manifested in dreams, justified “the emergence of a new class of authorities, the medical experts who would now claim access to memory contents” that patients were “hiding from themselves.” In his legendary dream sequence, Frankenheimer invokes these interpretive habits by suggesting that Marco’s dream holds an important truth, while also confounding these habits by devising a plot in which the very truth that is hidden in the dream turns out to be a strategic fiction. Marco’s dream neatly comports with the way that dreams are conceptualized and interpreted in a therapeutic setting—as actual experiences masked, more or less effectively, by embellishment and fantasy. At the same time, it bears traces of the experimental practices that used this understanding of how dreams work to authorize switching fact and fiction, as therapists dictated made-up scenarios to the patient and then treated these scenarios as authentic memories. In this way, Frankenheimer places suggestion, the primary instrument of brainwashing, on a continuum with the hybrid strangeness of dreams, which are characterized by an unstable mix of fact and fiction.
In its representation of the dreaming mind, the film unsettles the distinction between what is known and what is imagined, one aspect of its broader effort to unsettle the polarities—good and evil, falsehood and truth, weakness and strength, friend and enemy—that structure Cold War politics and culture. With this in mind, we need to revisit the opposition between the two protagonists, which is more complex than it first appears. In their discussion of the film, Killen and Andriopoulos assert that if Raymond Shaw is an automaton who can be programmed to kill, Bennett Marco “serves as an assertion of selfhood that is beleaguered but that ultimately overcomes the programming and brainwashing to which it has been subjected.” Although it is true that Bennett Marco deprograms himself and, in the process, foils a vast conspiracy, I would argue that his autonomy is not a sign of heroic individualism nor does it neatly contrast with Shaw’s susceptibility. To the contrary, Marco’s ability to accurately interpret his own recurring nightmare does not stem from his power to overcome his conditioning but is one effect of that conditioning. Made in the early 1960s, The Manchurian Candidate not only brings a growing skepticism about anti-communism to bear on the subject of brainwashing but also reflects the early stirrings of the counterculture in its portrayal of Marco’s personality and his methods.
If Frankenheimer uses Shaw, the soldier-turned-assassin, to parody anti-communist paranoia and the conspiracy theories it breeds, in the character of Bennett Marco he suggests that brainwashing may enable new kinds of awareness and perception that flow from the dissolution—rather than the assertion—of personality. An intelligence officer himself, Marco understands that dreams are not only the province of psychoanalysts but also of army men: sensing that it contains vital information, he takes his recurring nightmare to military intelligence for closer scrutiny. At a meeting in which intelligence officers discuss Marco’s nightmare, they dismiss his suspicions about Shaw and conclude that it is “obvious” that Marco is “suffering a delayed reaction to eighteen months of continuous combat in Korea,” and that he should be “temporarily reassigned to less strenuous and … less sensitive duties.” Marco is indeed suffering from a delayed reaction to combat, and manifests traumatic symptoms: he is alternately edgy and listless; he flies off the handle; and, of course, his sleep is disturbed by recurring nightmares. But his colleagues do not grasp the nature of the combat that leaves him deeply unsettled and, in certain ways, especially aware. That awareness, referred to as “vigilance” in diagnostic parlance, results from the trauma of psychological warfare and is itself a form of “intelligence.” Exhibiting textbook symptoms of what will come to be known as post-traumatic stress disorder, Marco also exhibits a special kind of self-knowledge.

“In defining Marco’s character, and trying to explain his ability to halt a global conspiracy, the film’s pun on “intelligence” is key. Throughout, Marco is identified with books and portrayed as an avid reader. In the opening scene, he and Shaw, riding in a truck, pull up to a Korean brothel. Shaw goes inside to chastise the men in his squad, while Marco stays behind in the passenger seat, absorbed in his book. At the beginning of the nightmare sequence, the camera pans across Marco’s nightstand to show us the variety of books he keeps by his bed. Another scene, in which Marco’s commanding officer visits him at home, begins with Marco slumped in an armchair surrounded by enormous piles of books. When the colonel arrives, this is the first thing he notices, asking, “My God, where do you get all the books?” Marco replies, “I have a guy that picks them out for me at random,” from “a little bookstore” in San Francisco. The colonel wonders, “you read them all?” Marco replies,

Yeah, they’d also make great insulation against an enemy attack, but the truth of the matter is that I’m just interested in principles of modern banking, and the history of piracy, paintings of Orozco, modern French theater, the jurisprudential factor of mafia administration, diseases of horses, and novels of Joyce Carey, and ethnic choices of the Arabs, things like that.

Marco’s reading practice seems a hip beat experiment in chance and spontaneity—the kind of literary play that flourished in the city by the bay and was associated with its “little bookstores.” Marco will read anything the bookseller sends his way because he is deeply interested in things that seem to have no relationship to one another, or to him.
This discussion of his books is prelude to Marco’s outburst, in which he declares that his statements about Shaw and their experiences in Korea are fraudulent. While the colonel views Marco’s dream as a symptom of war trauma, Marco views the dream as the cause of his “nervous” condition. He exclaims,

For the past six months I’ve been driven out of my mind by the same recurring dream … I tell you there’s something phony going on, there’s something phony about me, about Raymond Shaw, about the whole medal of honor business. 
For instance, when the psychiatrist asked me how I felt about Raymond Shaw … did you hear what I said, did you really hear what I said? I said Raymond Shaw is the kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life. And even now I feel that way, this minute. And yet somewhere in the back of my mind something tells me it’s not true. It’s just not true. It isn’t as if Raymond’s hard to like, he’s impossible to like! In fact, he’s probably one of the most repulsive human beings I’ve known in my whole, all of my life!

Marco embraces a psychological model of how his mind works—hiding things from itself. At the same time, however, he intuits that his dream is alien to his experience, recognizing that he is a “phony” and that everything he has said—and felt—about Raymond Shaw is untrue because he hears a voice “in the back of his mind” that tells him so.

Plata Quemada

Ricardo Piglia

[...] Empezaron a tirar billetes de mil encendidos por la ventana. Desde la banderola de la cocina lograban que la plata quemada volara sobre la esquina. Parecían mariposas de luz, los billetes encendidos.

Un murmullo de indignación hizo rugir a la multitud.

—La queman.

—Están quemando la plata.

Si la plata es lo único que justificaba las muertes y si lo que han hecho, lo han hecho por plata y ahora la queman, quiere decir que no tienen moral, ni motivos, que actúan y matan gratuitamente, por el gusto del mal, por pura maldad, son asesinos de nacimiento, criminales insensibles, inhumanos. Indignados, los ciudadanos que observaban la escena daban gritos de horror y de odio, como en un aquelarre del medioevo (según los diarios), no podían soportar que ante sus ojos se quemaran cerca de quinientos mil dólares en una operación que paralizó de horror a la ciudad y al país y que duró exactamente quince interminables minutos, que es el tiempo que tarda en quemarse esa cantidad astronómica de dinero, esos billetes que por razones ajenas a la voluntad de las autoridades fueron destruidos sobre una chapa que en Uruguay se llama «patona» y es usada para remover la brasa en las parrillas de los asados. En una lata «patona» fueron quemando el dinero y los policías quedaron inmóviles, estupefactos, porque qué se podía hacer con criminales capaces de tamaño despropósito. La gente indignada se acordó de inmediato de los carenciados, de los pobres, de los pobladores del campo uruguayo que viven en condiciones precarias y de los niños huérfanos a los que ese dinero habría garantizado un futuro.

Con salvar a uno solo de los niños huérfanos habrían justificado sus vidas, estos cretinos, dijo una señora, pero son malvados, tienen mala entraña, son unas bestias, dijeron a los periodistas los testigos y la televisión filmó y luego trasmitió durante todo el día la repetición de ese ritual, al que el periodista de la TV Jorge Foister, llamó acto de canibalismo.

—Quemar dinero inocente es un acto de canibalismo.

Si hubieran donado ese dinero, si lo hubieran tirado por la ventana hacia la gente amontonada en la calle, si hubieran pactado con la policía la entrega del dinero a una fundación benéfica, todo habría sido distinto para ellos.

—Por ejemplo si hubieran donado esos millones para mejorar las condición de las cárceles donde ellos mismos van a ser encerrados.

Pero todos comprendieron que ese acto era una declaración de guerra total, una guerra directa y en regla contra toda la sociedad.

—Hay que ponerlos contra la pared y colgarlos.

—Hay que hacerlos morir lentamente achicharrados.

Surgió ahí la idea de que el dinero es inocente, aunque haya sido resultado de la muerte y el crimen, no puede considerarse culpable, sino más bien neutral, un signo que sirve según el uso que cada uno le quiera dar.

Y también la idea de que la plata quemada era un ejemplo de locura asesina. Sólo locos asesinos y bestias sin moral pueden ser tan cínicos y tan criminales como para quemar quinientos mil dólares. Ese acto (según los diarios) era peor que los crímenes que habían cometido, porque era un acto nihilista y un ejemplo de terrorismo puro.

En declaraciones a la revista Marcha, el filósofo uruguayo Washington Andrada señaló sin embargo que consideraba ese acto terrible, una especie de inocente potlatch realizado en una sociedad que ha olvidado ese rito, un acto absoluto y gratuito en sí, un gesto de puro gasto y de puro derroche que en otras sociedades ha sido considerado un sacrificio que se ofrece a los dioses porque sólo lo más valioso merece ser sacrificado y no hay nada más valioso entre nosotros que el dinero, dijo el profesor Andrada y de inmediato fue citado por el juez.

El modo en que quemaron la plata es una prueba pura de maldad y de genio, porque quemaron la plata haciendo visibles los billetes de cien que iban prendiendo fuego, uno detrás de otro, los billetes de cien se quemaban como mariposas cuyas alas son tocadas por las llamas de una vela y que aletean un segundo todavía hechas de fuego y vuelan por el aire un instante interminable antes de arder y consumirse.

Y después de todos esos interminables minutos en los que vieron arder los billetes como pájaros de fuego quedó una pila de ceniza, una pila funeraria de los valores de la sociedad (declaró en la televisión uno de los testigos), una columna bellísima de cenizas azules que cayeron desde la ventana como la llovizna de los restos calcinados de los muertos que se esparcen en el océano o sobre los montes y los bosques pero nunca sobre las calles sucias de la ciudad, nunca las cenizas deben flotar sobre las piedras de la selva de cemento.

Inmediatamente después de ese acto que paralizó a todos, la policía pareció reaccionar y comenzó una ofensiva brutal como si el tiempo en que los nihilistas (como eran ahora llamados por los diarios) terminaban su acto ciego los hubiera predispuesto y enceguecido y los hubiera preparado para la represión definitiva.

The Hatred of Music

Pascal Quignard

Of all the arts, music [...] was the only form of art to be specifically requested by the administration of the Konzentrationlager. To the detriment of this art form, it has to be emphasized that it was the only one capable of adapting to the organization of the camps, the hunger, the destitution, the work, the pain, the humiliation, and the death.

*

[...]

Since what historians call the Second World War, since the extermination camps of the Third Reich, we have entered a time in which melodic sequences have become exasperating. Over the entire surface of the earth, and for the first time since the invention of the first instruments, the use of music has become at the same time pregnant and repugnant. Suddenly infinitely amplified by the invention of electricity and the multiplication of its technology, it has become incessant, aggressing night and day, in the commercial streets of city centers, in shopping centers, in arcades, in department stores, in bookstores, in lobbies of foreign banks where one goes to withdraw money, even in swimming pools, even at the beach, in private apartments, in restaurants, in taxis, in the metro, in airports.

Even in airplanes during takeoff and landing.

*

[...]

Music attracts human bodies.

Once again it is the Siren from Homer’s tale. Ulysses, tied to the mast of his ship, is assailed by a melody that attracts him. Music is a hook that catches souls and pulls them into death.

This was the pain of the deported whose bodies rose up against their will.

*

[...]

Music violates the human body. It makes one stand up. Musical rhythms enthrall bodily rhythms. When exposed to music, the ear cannot close itself. Music, as a power, thus joins all forms of power. The essence of music is nonegalitarian. Hearing and obedience are related. Conductor, performers, followers, such is the structure put in place by its execution. Wherever there is a conductor and performers, there is music. Plato, in his philosophical writings, never imagined distinguishing between discipline and music, war and music, social hierarchy and music. Even the stars: they are Sirens, according to Plato, acoustic suns producing order and universe. Cadence and measure. Marching is cadenced, truncheon blows are cadenced, salutes are cadenced. The primary function, or at least the most quotidian, assigned to the music of the Lagerkapelle, was to provide a rhythm for the departure and return of the Kommandos.

*

[...]

Hearing and obeying.

The first time Primo Levi heard the band play Rosamunda at the entrance of the camp he could barely suppress the nervous laughter that seized him. Then he saw the battalions returning to the camp with a strange gait: advancing in rows of five, almost rigid, their necks strained, their arms against their bodies, like men made out of wood, the music lifting their legs and tens of thousands of wooden clogs, contracting their bodies like those of automata.

The men were so weakened that their leg muscles against their will obeyed the power of the rhythms that the music of the camp imposed and that Simon Laks conducted.

*

Primo Levi called music “infernal.”

Although not given to imagery, Primo Levi wrote: “Their souls are dead and it’s the music that pushes them forward as the wind does dry leaves, and takes the place of their will.”

Then he underlines the esthetic pleasure the Germans felt before such matutinal and vespertine choreographies of misfortune.

It was not in order to assuage their pain, nor was it to win the favor of their victims, that the German soldiers provided music in the death camps.

1. It was in order to increase their obedience and to bind them together in the impersonal, nonprivate fusion that all music engenders.

2. It was for pleasure, esthetic pleasure and sadistic enjoyment, felt upon hearing beloved songs and seeing a ballet of humiliation performed by a troupe of those who bore the sins of those who humiliated them.

It was a ritual music.

Primo Levi laid bare the oldest function assigned to music. Music, he writes, was felt to be a “malediction.” It was a “hypnosis of continuous rhythm that annihilates thought and numbs pain.”

*

I will add what the second and fifth treatises have perhaps shown: music, founded on obedience, derives from the death call.¹

*

Music is already fully present in the whistle blow of the SS. It is an effective force; it provokes an immediate attitude. Like the camp bell causes everyone to wake up, interrupts the oneiric nightmare to give way to the nightmare of reality. Every time, sound says: “stand up.”

*

[...]

Primo Levi continues: “One had to hear it without obeying, without being subjected to it, to understand what it represented, for what premeditated reasons the Germans had instituted such a monstrous rite, and why even today, when one of these innocent little songs comes back to us in memory, we feel the blood turn to ice in our veins.”

Primo Levi continues by saying that these marches and these songs were burned into the body: “They will be the last thing from the Lager we will forget, for they are the voice of the Lager.” It is the instant when the resurgent hum assumes the form of the tarabust. The melos tarabusts the bodily rhythm, merging with the personal acoustic molecule; at that point, Primo Levi writes, music annihilates.

[...]

*

The bond between mother and child, the recognition of one by the other followed by the acquisition of the mother tongue, are forged in a very rhythmic acoustic incubation that predates the moment of birth and continues thereafter, recognizable by cries and voice exercises, then by ditties and nursery rhymes, names and nicknames, recurring and restraining phrases that become orders.

*

[...]

Sound gathers us, governs us, organizes us. But we open sound within us. If we focus our attention on identical sounds that are repeated at equal intervals, we do not hear them one by one. We spontaneously organize them into groups of two or four sounds. Sometimes three; rarely five; never more. And it is no longer the sounds that seem to be repeated but the groups that appear to follow one another.

Time itself is thus aggregated and segregated.

*

[...]

Humans immediately hear phrases. To them a string of sounds immediately forms a melody. Humans are the contemporaries of slightly more than the instant. And this is how language takes form in them and enslaves them to music. One cannot help but think that they move toward their prey on something else than the succession of a single foot. And it is by this “more than a single foot” that they run without falling and come to mimic and accentuate and constrain predation in dance.

*

[...]

In Musiques d’un autre monde, Simon Laks tells the following story.

In 1943, in the camp at Auschwitz, for the Christmas vigil, Major Schwartzhuber ordered the musicians of the Lager to play German and Polish Christmas carols for the sick at the women’s hospital.

Simon Laks and his musicians went to the women’s hospital.

At first, all the women were overcome by tears, in particular the Polish women, to the point where their sobbing drowned out the music.

Later, cries replaced the tears. The sick cried: “Stop! Stop! Get out! Leave! Let us die in peace!”

It happened that Simon Laks was the only musician who understood the meaning of the Polish words that the sick women shrieked. The musicians looked at Simon Laks, who gestured to them. And they withdrew.

Simon Laks said that he had never thought until then that music could do such harm.

*

[...]

In Plato, The Republic III, 401 d.

Music penetrates to the interior of the body and takes hold of the soul. The flute induces a dance movement in the limbs of humans, followed by an irresistible salacious squirming. Music’s prey is the human body. Music is invasion and capture of this body. It plunges those it tyrannizes into obedience by snaring them in the trap of its song. The Sirens become the odos of Odysseus (ode in Greek means both path and song). Orpheus, the father of songs, softens stones and tames lions and harnesses them to plows. Music captures, it captivates in the place where it resounds and where humanity tramples toward its rhythm, it hypnotizes and causes man to abandon the expressible. In hearing, man is held captive.

*

I am surprised that people are surprised that those among them who love the most refined and complex music, who are capable of crying while listening to it, are at the same time capable of ferocity. Art is not the opposite of barbarity. Reason is not the contradiction of violence. One cannot oppose the arbitrary and the State, peace and war, bloodshed and structured thought, because arbitrariness, death, violence, blood, thought are not free from a logic that remains a logic even when it defies reason.

Societies are not free from the chaotic entropy that was their origin: it will be their destiny.

[...]

*

Goethe, at the age of seventy-five, wrote: “Military music unfolds me like an opening fist.”

*

In the cloister of San Marco in Florence there is an intrusive bell.

It is a bronze bell with a broken black and red wooden beam, placed on the ground before the door of the chapterhouse, in the quiet courtyard of the monastery.

It is called the Piagnona. It was the bell that summoned the crowd, which stormed the convent to take Savonarola away.

As a sign of atonement, the bell was exiled to San Salvatore al Monte and thrashed the entire length of its journey.

*

The Nuremberg tribunal should have ordered Richard Wagner to be beaten in effigy once a year in the streets of every German town.

*

Patriotic music is an infantile imprint; it sweeps one away like an overpowering jolt, a shiver bristling up and down the spine, filling with emotion, with a surprising adhesion.

Kasimierz Gwizdka wrote: “When the prisoners of the Konzentrationslager at Auschwitz, exhausted from their day of labor, stumbling along in marching columns, heard in the distance the orchestra playing at the gates, they quickly found their feet again. The music gave them extraordinary courage and strength to survive.”

Romana Duraczowa said: “We’re returning from work. The camp is approaching. The Birkenau camp orchestra is playing popular foxtrots. The orchestra infuriates us. How we hate that music! How we hate those musicians! Those dolls are seated, clad in navy blue dresses with a little white collar. Not only are they seated but they are allowed chairs! The music is supposed to rejuvenate us. It mobilizes us like the sound of a trumpet during a battle. The music even stimulates the dying nags who move their hoofs to the rhythm of the dance being played.”

*

[...]

Simon Laks wrote that it seemed to him that hearing music exerted a depressing effect on extreme misfortune. When he conducted it, it seemed to him that it added the passivity that it induced to the physical and moral prostration to which hunger and the smell of death destined the bodies of the other prisoners. He adds: “Certainly, during the Sunday concerts some of the spectators around us enjoyed listening to us. But it was a passive pleasure, without participation, without reaction. There were also some who cursed us, who insulted us, who looked down on us, who considered us as intruders who did not share their fate.”

*

Thucydides, echoing the opening of Pindar’s first Pythian , identified marching in step as a function of music: “Music is not destined to inspire a trance in humans but to allow them to march in step and to stay in close formation. Without music, a battle line runs the risk of being disrupted as it advances for the charge.” Elias Canetti repeated that the origin of rhythm was walking on two feet, giving rise to the metric of ancient poems. Human walking on two feet, pursuing the trampling of the prey and of the herds of reindeer, then of bison, then of horses. He saw the tracks of animals as the first text to be deciphered by the humans who followed them. Tracks are the rhythmic notation of noise. Trampling the ground in large numbers is the first dance, and it did not originate with humans.

Still in our days: it is the entrance of the human mass, trampling en masse the floor of a concert or ballet hall. Then, they all fall silent and come together by denying themselves all bodily noises. Then, they all clap their hands rhythmically, shouting, creating a great ritual clamor and finally, all rising together, once again as a mass they trample the floor of the hall where the music was performed.

Music is related to the pack of death. Heeling: that is what Primo Levi discovered when he first discovered the music played in the Lager.

*

Tolstoy remarks: “Where one wants to have slaves, one must have as much music as possible.” These words struck Maxim Gorky. They are quoted in Conversations at Yasnaya Polyana.

*

The unity of the funeral pack is in its trampling. Dancing cannot be distinguished from music. The effective cry, the whistle—residues of the birdcall—accompany the murderous heeling. Music gathers the packs like orders make them stand up. Silence breaks up packs. I prefer silence to music. Language and music belong to a genealogy that still persists and that can turn one’s stomach.

Orders are the oldest roots of language: dogs obey orders, as do humans. An order is a death sentence that the victims understand to the point of obedience. Domesticating and ordering are the same thing. Human children are first and foremost harassed by orders; which is to say that they are harassed by cries of death dressed in language.

*

Slaves are never objects but always animals. Dogs are no longer altogether animals but already servants because they are obedient: they hear, they respond to the voice-birdcall, they seem to understand the meaning even though it serves only to subject them to the melos.

*

Music enchants the soul and accentuates actions like the signals that Pavlov addressed to his dogs.

The conductor’s baton silences the cacophony of the instruments; it installs a silence that awaits music; against this background of deathly silence it suddenly causes the eruption of the first measure.

A pack of humans or animals, or even dogs, is always wild.

It is only domesticated when it responds to orders, rises at the sound of the whistle, and crowds together in halls and pays.

*

Children and dogs jump up and down when they find themselves at the edge of the waves. They spontaneously shout and yelp because of the noise and the movement of the sea.

*

Dogs turn their head in the direction of unusual sounds.

They prick their ears.

They hold still, their nose, their gaze, their ears directed toward the strange sound.

*

The conductor is the entire spectacle of that which the audience obeys. The audience gathers to see a man standing alone, elevated, who at will makes an obedient herd speak and be silent.

The conductor makes rain and clear skies with his baton. He has a golden branch at the tip of his fingers.

An obedient herd means a pack of domesticated animals. A pack of domesticated animals defines human society, that is, an army founded on the death of the other.

They march to the baton.

A human pack gathers to see a domesticated pack. Among the Bororos, the best singer becomes the leader of the group. Orders and effective song are indistinguishable. The master of the social body is nature’s Kappellmeister. Every conductor is a tamer, a Führer. Everyone who applauds brings his hands in front of his face, then heels, then shouts.

*

In Theresienstadt, H. G. Adler could not bear to hear opera arias sung in the camp.

In Theresienstadt, Hedda Grab-Kernmayr said: “I can’t understand how, in the camp, Gideon Klein could compose a Wiegenlied (a lullaby).”

¹Trans. note: In French Quignard uses the expression appeau de mort, where the word appeau evokes the birdcall that appears throughout the book.

Cartas da Abissínia

Arthur Rimbaud

Harar, 13 de Dezembro de 1880

Cheguei a este país depois de vinte dias a cavalo através do deserto somali. Harar é uma cidade colonizada pelos egípcios e dependente do governo deles. A guarnição é de vários milhares de homens. A nossa agência e os nossos armazéns estão aqui instalados. Os produtos comerciáveis são o café, o marfim, as peles, etc. O país é alto mas não é árido. O clima fresco e não doentio. Todas as mercadorias são importadas da Europa e transportadas por camelos. Aliás, há muito a fazer nesta terra. Não temos aqui correio regular. Somos obrigados a enviar a correspondência para Aden, e só de tempos a tempos. Por conseguinte, só recebereis esta carta daqui a muito tempo. (...)

*

Harar, 15 de Janeiro de 1881

[...] Vai-nos chegar uma enorme quantidade de mercadorias da Europa, e vamos ter muito trabalho. Em breve irei dar uma grande volta pelo deserto a fim de comprar camelos. Naturalmente, temos cavalos, armas e o resto. O país não é desagradável: presentemente o tempo é igual ao do mês de Maio em França.

[...]

Vamos mandar vir uma máquina fotográfica e então enviarei para aí vistas do país e das gentes. Também vamos receber material de preparador de história natural e mandar-vos-ei pássaros e animais que ainda não foram vistos na Europa. Já aqui tenho algumas curiosidades, esperando oportunidade para expedi-las.

Estou feliz por saber que pensam em mim e que as coisas vos correm bastante bem. Espero que tudo vos corra o melhor possível. Pelo meu lado, esforçar-me-ei por tornar o meu trabalho interessante e lucrativo. (...)

*

Harar, 15 de Fevereiro de 1881

(...) Não conto ficar aqui muito tempo; em breve saberei quando parto. Não encontrei o que imaginava; vivo de uma maneira muito desagradável e sem lucro. Logo que juntar 1500 a 2000 francos, partirei; e ficarei todo contente. Espero encontrar melhor um pouco mais longe. Escrevam-me a dar notícias sobre as obras do Panamá: irei, mal tenham começado. Doravante, até ficarei contente por sair daqui. Contraí uma doença¹, em si pouco perigosa; mas o clima local é traiçoeiro para toda e qualquer doença. Uma ferida nunca sara. Um golpe de um milímetro num dedo supura durante meses e gangrena facilmente. Por outro lado, a administração egípcia não tem médicos nem medicamentos suficientes. O clima no verão é muito húmido; é mal-são; incomoda-me o mais possível, é demasiado frio para mim.

[...]

Não se deve pensar que este país é totalmente selvagem. Temos um exército, artilharia e cavalaria, egípcio, e respectiva administração. É tudo parecido com o que existe na Europa; só que são uma data de cães e bandidos. Os indígenas são os gallas, todos camponeses e pastores: gente tranquila, quando não são atacados. O país é excelente, embora relativamente frio e húmido; mas a agricultura não está desenvolvida. O comércio consta principalmente de peles de animais, que são negociados enquanto vivos e que depois se esfolam; depois há o café, o marfim, o ouro; perfumes, essências, almíscar, etc. O mal é que se está a 60 léguas de distância do mar e que os transportes custam caro. [...]

*

Aden, 10 de Julho de 1882

(...) Espero bem ver chegar o meu sossego antes da morte. Aliás, presentemente estou habituado a toda a espécie de tormentos e, se me lastimo, é uma espécie de modo de cantar. (...)

*

[...]

Harar, 6 de Maio de 1883

[...] Isabelle faz mal em não se casar se aparecer alguém sério e instruído, alguém com futuro. A vida é assim, e a solidão é uma coisa má nestas paragens. Pelo que me diz respeito, lamento não ter casado e não ter família própria. Mas agora estou condenado à errância, ligado a uma empresa longínqua, e todos os dias perco o gosto pelo clima e pelas maneiras de viver, e mesmo pela língua da Europa. Helás! Para que servem estas idas e vindas, estas fadigas e aventuras junto de raças estrangeiras, e estas línguas com que se atafulha a memória, e estes sofrimentos inomináveis, se um dia, após vários anos, não puder repousar num lugar que me agrade mais ou menos e ter uma família, e ter pelo menos um filho a quem passe o resto da vida a educar segundo as minhas ideias, a ilustrar e a dotar com a instrução mais completa que se pode adquirir nesta época, e que eu veja tornar-se num engenheiro de renome, um homem poderoso e rico através da ciência? Mas quem sabe quanto poderão durar os meus dias aqui nestas montanhas? E posso desaparecer no meio destas tribos, sem que a notícia alguma vez seja divulgada. Falais-me de notícias políticas. Se soubessem como isso me é indiferente! Há mais de dois anos que não toco num jornal. Presentemente, todos esses debates são incompreensíveis para mim. Como os muçulmanos, sei que o que acontece, acontece, e é tudo. (...)

*

[...]

Aden, 22 de Outubro de 1885

Quando receberem esta carta, estarei provavelmente em Tadjura, na costa do Dankali anexada à colónia de Obock.

Deixei o meu emprego de Aden, após uma violenta discussão com esses ignóbeis usurários que pretendiam embrutecer-me para sempre. Prestei muitos serviços a essa gente; e eles imaginavam que, só para lhes agradar, eu iria ficar com eles o resto da vida. Fizeram tudo para me reter; mas eu mandei-os para o diabo, mais os seus lucros, o seu comércio, a sua empresa horrível e a sua imunda cidade! Sem contar que me chatearam todo o tempo e procuraram sempre fazer com que eu perdesse alguma coisa. Enfim, que vão para o diabo!... Entregaram-me excelentes certificados pelos cinco anos.

Chegam-me alguns milhares de fuzis da Europa. Vou organizar uma caravana e levar a mercadoria a Menelik, rei do Choa.

A rota para Choa é muito longa: quase dois meses de marcha até Ankober, a capital, e as terras que se atravessam até lá são desertos medonhos.

Mas lá em cima, na Abissínia, o clima é delicioso, a população cristã e hospitaleira, a vida não custa quase nada. Só lá vivem alguns europeus, uma dezena ao todo, sendo a sua ocupação o comércio das armas, que o rei adquire a bom preço. Se não surgirem acidentes, conto lá chegar, ser pago imediatamente e regressar com um lucro de sete a oito mil francos em menos de um ano. Caso este negócio resulte, ver-me-ão voltar a França lá para o Outono de 1886, para eu próprio comprar novas mercadorias.

Espero que o negócio corra bem, e desejem-me o mesmo, que bem preciso. Se puder ganhar uma cinquentena de milhares de francos, ao fim de dois ou três anos abandono com alegria estes miseráveis países.

[...]

*

Aden, 18 de Novembro de 1885

Estou feliz por deixar este horrível buraco de Aden onde tanto sofri. Também é verdade que vou fazer uma viagem terrível: daqui a Choa (quer dizer, de Tadjura a Choa) são uns cinquenta dias de jornada a cavalo por desertos escaldantes. Mas na Abissínia o clima é delicioso, não faz calor nem frio, a população é cristã e hospitaleira, leva-se uma vida fácil, é um lugar de repouso muito agradável para os que embruteceram durante alguns anos nas margens incandescentes do Mar Vermelho.

Agora que o empreendimento está em curso, não posso recuar. Não me iludo sobre os perigos, não ignoro as fadigas destas expedições; mas, pelas minhas estadias em Harar, conheço já os modos e costumes destas terras. Seja como for, espero bem que o empreendimento tenha êxito. Conto que a minha caravana possa largar de Tadjura por volta de 15 de Janeiro de 1886; chegarei à roda de 15 de Março a Choa. Será então a altura da festa da Páscoa entre os abissínios. (...)

*

Hotel Universo
Tadjura, 3 de Dezembro de 1885

Queridos amigos,

Estou a organizar a minha caravana para Choa. Não está a ser rápido, aliás como é hábito; mas, enfim, conto zarpar daqui perto do fim de Janeiro de 1886.

Estou bem. — Enviem-me o dicionário para o endereço indicado. E de seguida, para a mesma morada, toda a correspondência. De lá a expedirão para mim.

Tadjura foi anexada desde há um ano à colónia francesa de Obock. É uma pequena aldeia dankali com algumas mesquitas e palmeiras. Há um forte, outrora construído pelos egípcios, onde presentemente dormem seis soldados franceses sob as ordens dum sargento, que comanda o posto. Deixaram que a terra ficasse com o seu sultãozinho e a sua administração indígena. É um protectorado. O comércio local consiste no tráfico de escravos.

Daqui partem as caravanas dos europeus para Choa, muito poucas; passam com grandes dificuldades, pois os indígenas de todas estas costas tornaram-se inimigos dos europeus desde que o almirante inglês Hewett obrigou o imperador Jean du Tigré a assinar um tratado abolindo o tráfico de escravos, o único comércio indígena mais ou menos florescente. Entretanto, sob o protectorado francês, não procuram dificultar o tráfico, e é melhor assim.

Não pensem que me tornei mercador de escravos. As mercadorias que importamos são espingardas (velhos fuzis de cão, que já não se usam há quarenta anos), as quais valem entre os comerciantes de armas antigas em Liège ou em França 7 ou 8 francos cada. Ao rei de Choa, Menelik II, vendemo-las por uma quarentena de francos. Mas sobre isto recaem enormes encargos, sem falar nos perigos ao longo do percurso de ida e volta. Os senhores da estrada são os dankalis, pastores beduínos, muçulmanos fanáticos: há que temê-los. É certo que viajamos com armas de fogo e que os beduínos só possuem lanças: mas todas as caravanas são atacadas.

Passado o rio Hawach, entra-se nos domínios do poderoso rei Menelik. Aí os agricultores são cristãos; o país é muito alto, atingindo 3000 metros acima do nível do mar; o clima é excelente, a vida baratíssima; todos os produtos da Europa medram; somos bem vistos pela população. Chove seis meses por ano como no Harar, que é um dos contrafortes deste grande maciço etíope.

Desejo-vos boa saúde e prosperidade para o ano de 1886.

Felicidades.

*

Tadjura, 6 de Janeiro de 1886

Recebo hoje a vossa carta de 12 de Dezembro de 1885.

Escrevam-me sempre assim: farão com que eu prossiga a minha correspondência, onde quer que esteja. De resto, isto vai mal: a rota do interior parece tornar-se impraticável. É bem verdade que me exponho a muitos perigos e, sobretudo, a consequências indescritíveis. Mas trata-se de ganhar uma dezena de milhar de francos, daqui até ao fim do ano, que de outra maneira não ganharia em três anos. Aliás encaro a possibilidade de, a qualquer momento, recorrer ao meu capital; e, se as provações excederem a minha paciência, far-me-ei reembolsar desse capital e voltarei a procurar trabalho em Aden ou qualquer outro lugar. Em Aden, encontrarei sempre alguma coisa para fazer.

Aqueles que estão sempre a repetir que a vida é dura deveriam passar algum tempo aqui, para aprenderem a filosofia! Em Tadjura mantém-se apenas um posto de seis soldados e um sargento francês. São rendidos de três em três meses para serem repatriados, em baixa de convalescença, para França. Em nenhum posto se pode passar três meses sem se ficar inteiramente atacado pelas febres. Ora, dentro de um mês ou dois é a estação das febres, mas penso passá-la lá.

Enfim, um homem conta gastar três quartos da sua vida a sofrer para repousar a quarta parte; e, as mais das vezes, estoira de miséria sem ficar a saber o que é feito do seu plano! (...)

*

[...]

Aden, 30 de Julho de 1887

Senhor Cônsul

Tenho a honra de lhe dar conhecimento da liquidação da caravana de armas Labatut, operação a que estive associado mercê de uma convenção assinada no consulado em Maio de 1886. [...]

*

Carta de Rimbaud ao Director dos Transportes Marítimos

Marselha, 9 de Novembro de 1891

Um lote: Um dente apenas.

Um lote: Dois dentes.

Um lote: Três dentes.

Um lote: Quatro dentes.

Um lote: Dois dentes.

¹ Os biógrafos não parecem ter dúvidas de que fosse a sífilis; temos aqui a primeira referência à doença, da qual, julgam eles, Rimbaud terá morrido. Será prudente considerar que tal interpretação é de facto duvidosa.

Freud and the Non-European

Edward Said

On one level, this is no more than to say that the elements of historical identity seem always to be composite, particularly when seminal events like the killing of the father and the exodus from Egypt are themselves so tied up in prior events. As to whether Moses can be said to be “foreign” to the Jews who adopt him as their patriarch, Freud is quite clear, even adamant: Moses was an Egyptian, and was therefore different from the people who adopted him as their leader — people, that is, who became the Jews whom Moses seems to have later created as his people. To say of Freud’s relationship with Judaism that it was conflicted is to venture an understatement. At times he was proud of his belonging, even though he was irremediably anti-religious; at other times he expressed annoyance with and unmistakable disapproval of Zionism. In a famous letter about the work of the Jewish Agency in 1930, for instance, he refused to join in an appeal to the British to increase Jewish immigration to Palestine. In fact he went so far as to condemn the transformation “of a piece of Herodian wall into a national relic, thus offending the feelings of the natives”. Five years later, having accepted a position on the board of the Hebrew University, he told the Jewish National Fund that it was “a great and blessed … instrument … in its endeavour to establish a new home in the ancient land of our fathers”.¹

[...]

An even more detailed analysis of the relationship between Freud’s Jewish identity and his quite convoluted attitudes, as well as actions, vis-à-vis Zionism is presented by Jacquy Chemouni in Freud et le sionisme: terre psychanalytique, terre promise.² Although Chemouni’s conclusion is that Herzl and Freud divided the Jewish world between them — the former locating Jewishness in a specific location, the latter choosing instead the realm of the universal — the book presents a daring thesis about Rome, Athens and Jerusalem that comes quite close to Freud’s antithetical views about the history and future of Jewish identity. Rome, of course, is the visible edifice that attracted Freud — perhaps, says Chemouni, because he saw in the city the destruction of Jerusalem’s temple and a symbol of the Jewish people’s exile and, as a result, the beginning of a desire to rebuild the temple in Palestine. Athens was a city of the mind, a generally more adequate representation of Freud’s lifelong dedication to intellectual achievement. From that vantage point, the concrete Jerusalem is an attenuation of the spiritual ascetic ideal, even if it is also a realization that loss can be addressed through the concerted labour that was in fact Zionism.

What I find interesting — whether we accept Yerushalmi’s sophisticated reclamation of Freud as a Jew forced to accede to his people’s reality in Fascist Europe and anti-Semitic Vienna in particular, or Chemouni’s somewhat more complex (a trifle fanciful?) and largely unresolved triangulation of the dilemma of exile and belonging — is that one element keeps importuning, and nagging at whoever thinks about these issues of identity in either uniformly positive or negative terms. And that element is the issue of the non-Jew, which Freud treats lackadaisically late in Moses and Monotheism. Jews, he says, have always attracted popular hatred, not all of which is based on reasons as good as the charge that they crucified Christ. Two of the reasons for anti-Semitism are really variations on each other: that Jews are foreigners, and that they are “different” from their hosts; the third reason Freud gives is that no matter how oppressed Jews are, “they defy oppression, [so] that even the most cruel persecutions have not succeeded in exterminating them. On the contrary, they show a capacity for holding their own in practical life, and where they are admitted, they make valuable contributions to the surrounding civilization”. As for the charge of Jews being foreigners (the implied context is, of course, European), Freud is dismissive of it, because in countries like Germany, where anti-Semitism is pervasive, the Jews have been there longer, having arrived with the Romans. On the accusation that Jews are different from their hosts, Freud backhandedly says that they are not “fundamentally so”, since they are not “a foreign Asiatic race, but mostly consist of the remnants of Mediterranean peoples and inherit their culture”.³

In the light of Freud’s early harping on Moses’s Egyptianness, the distinctions he makes here strike me as limp: both unsatisfactory and unconvincing. On several occasions Freud described himself, so far as language and culture were concerned, as German, and also Jewish; and throughout his correspondence and scientific writings he shows himself to be quite sensitive to issues of cultural, as well as racial and national difference. To the pre-Second-World-War European, though, the term “non-European” is a relatively unmarked term denoting people who come from outside Europe — Asiatics, for example. But I am convinced that Freud was aware that simply saying of the Jews that they were the remnants of Mediterranean civilization, and therefore not really different, is janglingly discordant with his show of force about Moses’s Egyptian origins. Could it be, perhaps, that the shadow of anti-Semitism spreading so ominously over his world in the last decade of his life caused him protectively to huddle the Jews inside, so to speak, the sheltering realm of the European?

But if we move forward very rapidly from the immediate pre- to the post-World-War-Two period, we shall immediately take note of how designations like “European” and “non-European” dramatically acquire more sinister resonances than Freud appeared to have been aware of. There is, of course, the charge made by National Socialism, as codified in the Nuremberg Laws, that Jews were foreign, and therefore expendable. The Holocaust is a ghastly monument, if that is the right word, to that designation and to all the suffering that went with it. Then there is the almost too-perfect literalization that is given the binary opposition Jew-versus-non-European in the climactic chapter of the unfolding narrative of Zionist settlement in Palestine. Suddenly the world of Moses and Monotheism has come alive in this tiny sliver of land in the Eastern Mediterranean. By 1948 the relevant non-Europeans were embodied in the indigenous Arabs of Palestine and, supporting them, Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese and Jordanians who were descendants of the various Semitic tribes, including the Arab Midianites, whom the Israelites had first encountered south of Palestine and with whom they had a rich exchange.

In the years after 1948, when Israel was established as a Jewish state in Palestine, what had once been a diverse, multiracial population of many different peoples — European and non-European, as happened to be the case — there occurred anew a re-schematization of races and peoples, which, to those who had studied the phenomenon in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, seemed like a parodistic re-enactment of the divisions that had been so murderous before. In this setting, Israel was internationally adopted by the Atlantic West (in fact had already been granted early title to Palestine by the Balfour Declaration of 1917) as, in effect, a quasi-European state whose fate, it seemed — in an eerie asseveration of the Fanonist argument, was to hold non-European indigenous peoples at bay for as long as possible. 

The Arabs joined the non-aligned world, which was undergirded by the global struggle against colonialism as described by Fanon, Cabral, Nkrumah and Césaire. Inside Israel, the main classificatory stipulation was that it was a state for Jews, whereas non-Jews, absent or present as so many of them were, were juridically made foreigners, despite prior residence there. For the first time since the destruction of the Second Temple, the consolidation of Jewish identity occurred in the ancient place which, as it had been during biblical times, was occupied by several other nations, races, peoples, now made foreign or driven into exile, or both.

You see, perhaps, where I am going. For Freud, writing and thinking in the mid-1930s, the actuality of the non-European was its constitutive presence as a sort of fissure in the figure of Moses — founder of Judaism, but an unreconstructed non-Jewish Egyptian none the less. Jahveh derived from Arabia, which was also non-Jewish and non-European. Yet the Egyptian realities that were contemporary with Freud, as well as Egypt’s plentiful antique history — exactly as for Verdi writing Aïda — were of interest because they had been mediated and presented for use by European scholarship, principally by way of Ernest Sellin’s book on which Moses and Monotheism draws so abundantly.⁴ [...]

I very much doubt that Freud imagined that he would have non-European readers, or that in the context of the struggle over Palestine, he would have Palestinian readers. But he did and does. Let us look quickly at what becomes of his excavations — both figuratively and literally — from this new set of unexpectedly turbulent, as well as startlingly relevant, perspectives. I would say, first of all, that out of the travails of specifically European anti-Semitism, the establishment of Israel in a non-European territory consolidated Jewish identity politically in a state that took very specific legal and political positions effectively to seal off that identity from anything that was non-Jewish. By defining itself as a state of and for the Jewish people, Israel allowed exclusive immigration and land-owning rights there for Jews only, even though there were former non-Jewish residents and present non-Jewish citizens whose rights were attenuated in the case of the latter, abrogated retrospectively in the case of the former. Palestinians who lived in pre-1948 Palestine can neither return (in the case of the refugees) nor have access to land as Jews can. Quite differently from the spirit of Freud’s deliberately provocative reminders that Judaism’s founder was a non-Jew, and that Judaism begins in the realm of Egyptian, non-Jewish monotheism, Israeli legislation countervenes, represses, and even cancels Freud’s carefully maintained opening out of Jewish identity towards its non-Jewish background. The complex layers of the past, so to speak, have been eliminated by official Israel. So — as I read him in the setting of Israel’s ideologically conscious policies — Freud, by contrast, had left considerable room to accommodate Judaism’s non-Jewish antecedents and contemporaries. That is to say: in excavating the archaeology of Jewish identity, Freud insisted that it did not begin with itself but, rather, with other identities (Egyptian and Arabian) which his demonstration in Moses and Monotheism goes a great distance to discover, and thus restore to scrutiny. This other non-Jewish, non-European history has now been erased, no longer to be found in so far as an official Jewish identity is concerned. 

More relevant, I think, is the fact that by virtue of one of the usually ignored consequences of Israel’s establishment, non-Jews — in this case, Palestinians — have been displaced to somewhere where, in the spirit of Freud’s excavations, they can ask what became of the traces of their history that had been so deeply implicated in the actuality of Palestine before Israel? For an answer, I want to turn from the realm of politics and law to a domain much closer to Freud’s account of how Jewish monotheism originated. I think I am right in surmising that Freud mobilized the non-European past in order to undermine any doctrinal attempt that might be made to put Jewish identity on a sound foundational basis, whether religious or secular. Not surprisingly, then, we will find that when Jewish identity has been consecrated by the establishment of Israel, it is the science of archaeology that is summoned to the task of consolidating that identity in secular time; the rabbis, as well as the scholars specializing in “biblical archaeology”, are given sacred history as their domain.⁵ Note that a huge number of commentators on and practitioners of archaeology — from William Albright and Edmund Wilson to Yigal Yadin, Moshe Dayan, and even Ariel Sharon — have noted that archaeology is the privileged Israeli science par excellence. As Magen Broshi, a noted Israeli archaeologist put it: 

«The Israeli phenomenon, a nation returning to its old-new land, is without parallel. It is a nation in the process of renewing its acquaintance with its own land and here archeology plays an important role. In this process archeology is part of a larger system known as yedi’at ha-Aretz, knowledge of the land (the Hebrew term is derived most probably from the German Landeskunde).… The European immigrants found a country to which they felt, paradoxically, both kinship and strangeness. Archeology in Israel, a sui generis state, served as a means to dispel the alienation of its new citizens.»⁶

Thus archaeology becomes the royal road to Jewish-Israeli identity, one in which the claim is repeatedly made that in the present-day land of Israel the Bible is materially realized thanks to archaeology, history is given flesh and bones, the past is recovered and put in dynastic order. Such claims, of course, uncannily return us not just to the archival site of Jewish identity as explored by Freud, but to its officially (we should also not fail to add: its forcibly) sanctioned geographical locale, modern Israel. What we discover is an extraordinary and revisionist attempt to substitute a new positive structure of Jewish history for Freud’s insistently more complex and discontinuous late-style efforts to examine the same thing, albeit in an entirely diasporic spirit and with different, decentring results.

This is a good moment to say that I am greatly indebted to the work of a young scholar, Nadia Abu el-Haj, whose major book is entitled Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. What she provides first of all is a history of systematic colonial archaeological exploration in Palestine, dating back to British work in the mid-nineteenth century. She then continues the story in the period before Israel is established, connecting the actual practice of archaeology with a nascent national ideology — an ideology with plans for the repossession of the land through renaming and resettling, much of it given archaeological justification as a schematic extraction of Jewish identity despite the existence of Arab names and traces of other civilizations. This effort, she argues convincingly, epistemologically prepares the way for a fully fledged post-1948 sense of Israeli-Jewish identity based on assembling discrete archaeological particulars — scattered remnants of masonry, tablets, bones, tombs, etc. — into a sort of spatial biography out of which Israel emerges “visibly and linguistically, as the Jewish national home”.⁷

More significantly, she argues that this quasi-narrative biography of a land enables — if it does not actually cause — and goes hand in hand with a particular style of colonial settlement that governs such concrete practices as the use of bulldozers, the unwillingness to explore non-Israelite (e.g. Hasmonean) histories, and the habit of turning an intermittent and dispersed Jewish presence of scattered ruins and buried fragments into a dynastic continuity, despite evidence to the contrary and despite evidence of endogamous non-Jewish histories. Wherever there is overwhelming and unavoidable evidence of a multiplicity of other histories, as in the massive palimpsest of Jerusalem’s Byzantine, Crusader, Hasmonean, Israelite, and Muslim architecture, the rule is to frame and tolerate these as an aspect of Israeli liberal culture, but also to assert Israel’s national pre-eminence by hitting at the Orthodox Jewish disapproval of modern Zionism by making Jerusalem even more of a Jewish-national site.⁸ 

Abu el-Haj’s meticulous deconstruction of Israeli archaeology is also a history of the negation of Arab Palestine which, for obvious reasons, has been regarded as not worthy of similar investigation. But with the emergence of post-Zionist revisionist history in Israel during the 1980s and, simultaneously, the gradual rise of Palestinian archaeology as a practice in the liberation struggle of the past twenty or so years, the heritage-style attitudes of an exclusively biblical archaeology are now being challenged. I wish I had the time to go into this here, and to discuss how the nationalist thesis of separate Israeli and Palestinian histories has begun to shape archaeological disputes in the West Bank, and how, for instance, Palestinian attention to the enormously rich sedimentations of village history and oral traditions potentially changes the status of objects from dead monuments and artifacts destined for the museum, and approved historical theme parks, to remainders of an ongoing native life and living Palestinian practices of a sustainable human ecology.⁹ Nationalist agendas, however, tend to resemble each other, especially when different sides in a territorial contest look for legitimacy in such malleable activities as reconstructing the past and inventing tradition. Abu el-Haj is therefore quite right to suggest that despite the prevalence of an underlying Enlightenment commitment to the unity of the sciences, they are really quite disunited in practice. You can immediately grasp the ways in which archaeology in the Israeli and the Palestinian context is not the same science. For an Israeli, archaeology substantiates Jewish identity in Israel and rationalizes a particular kind of colonial settlement (i.e. a fact on the ground); for a Palestinian, archaeology must be challenged so that those “facts” and the practices that gave them a kind of scientific pedigree are opened to the existence of other histories and a multiplicity of voices. Partition (as envisaged by the Oslo process since 1993) doesn’t eliminate the contest between competing national narratives: rather, it tends to underline the incompatibility of one side with the other, thereby increasing a sense of loss and the length of the list of grievances.

Let me return finally to Freud and his interest in the non-European as it bears on his attempt to reconstruct the primitive history of Jewish identity. What I find so compelling about it is that Freud seems to have made a special effort never to discount or play down the fact that Moses was non-European — especially since, in the terms of his argument, modern Judaism and the Jews were mainly to be thought of as European, or at least belonging to Europe rather than Asia or Africa. We must once again ask: why? Certainly Freud had no thought of Europe as the malevolent colonizing power described a few decades later by Fanon and the critics of Eurocentrism, and except for his prophetic comment about angering the Palestinian Arabs by giving undue importance to Jewish monuments, he had no idea at all of what would happen after 1948, when Palestinians gradually came to see that the people who arrived from abroad to take and settle on their land seemed just like the French who came to Algeria: Europeans who had superior title to the land over the non-European natives. Neither — except very briefly — did Freud pause over how strong and often violent the reaction of decidedly non-European Arabs might have been to the forcible embodiment of Jewish identity in the nationalist fulfilment of Judaism by the Zionist movement. 

¹ Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, p. 13.
² Jacquy Chemouni, Freud et le sionisme: terre psychanalytique, terre promise, Malakoff: Solin 1988.
³ Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 116.
⁴ Ernest Sellin, Moses und Seine Bedeutung für die israelitische-jüdischer Religionsgeschichte, Leipzig 1922.
⁵ See Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History, London: Routledge 1996.
⁶ Quoted in Nadia Abu el-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2002, p. 48.
⁷ Ibid., p. 74.
⁸ See, in this context, Glenn Bowersock, “Palestine: Ancient History and Modern Politics”, in Edward W. Said and Christopher Hitchens, eds, Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, London and New York: Verso 1987. Strangely, this study is not mentioned by Abu el-Haj, who is otherwise extremely thorough in her research.
⁹ See also the dramatic story told in Edward Fox, Palestine Twilight: The Murder of Dr. Albert Glock and the Archeology of the Holy Land, London: Harper Collins 2001.

Tense Future, Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form

Paul K. Saint-Amour 

Thoughts on Archives in an Air Raid 

In the fall of 1940, while Virginia Woolf was composing her “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” Jenkinson wrote what he later called “a kind of Philosophy of Archives hammered out first while I was waiting for bombs to fall on Chancery Lane,” the location of the Public Record Office where he had worked on and off since 1906. The essay, “Reflections of an Archivist,” named some of the dangers posed to archives by the war, among them destruction by enemy bombardment and pulping for the waste paper needed in munitions production and other areas of the war economy. In its role as “a profession of faith”, it described the archivist’s duty to a noninstrumental notion of the truth: “not merely to be as truthful as he can himself, but to be the guardian for the benefit of others of countless truths of all kinds—truths which interest him personally and truths which do not; yes, and truths of which he himself does not perceive the existence”. The piece contains the grand claim we have already encountered: that “had [the archivist’s] doctrine of the sanctity of evidence . . . been generally accepted in the world, the world would not now be at war”. Jenkinson goes on in the essay to root fascism in a contempt for historical truth, a contempt strong enough to countenance filling the archives with propaganda to flatter and exculpate the powerful and to seek the esteem of an autocratic posterity. Although the historically self-conscious actor was not, ipso facto, a fascist, such an actor at the very least made fascism harder to combat. In the front lines of that struggle was the archivist, who kept watch over the means by which fascism would be warded off in the future: an unblemished archive containing the true facts of the case for future historians. Thus while the archivist sought to avoid changing the world by making claims based on the archives, he would preserve those archives in the condition that would optimize their usefulness to others in defeating or preempting fascism. And in doing so he would exhibit both the impartiality and the “doctrine of the sanctity of evidence” that were central to a good-faith, implicitly antifascist mode of historical action.
Perhaps the most extraordinary moment in Jenkinson’s “Reflections” is its materialist reverie on the future significance that might be latent in fragile archival materials—signs that would become legible thanks to a transgenerational collaboration between future students armed with new techniques and the archivists who had represented their needs without presuming to know them. 
[T]he qualities or elements in question may be not merely infinitesimal, as it might seem, in importance (the precise location, for instance, of the holes through which one sheet is sewn to another); they may be actually imperceptible to all ordinary forms of examination. There may be, for example, some moral relation between two documents which nothing save their preservation, apparently by accident, in the same box remains to testify; there may be some chemical constituent in the ink or paper, invisible to the eye, unknown, if you like, even to the analyst, the modification of which by a process innocently used in the course of examination or of necessary repair would deprive the future student of evidence which would have enabled him to date, identify or authenticate. 
The passage is a speculative fantasia on how such a future might vindicate the dutiful archivist, reading in the organic plenitude of the archive what the present cannot apprehend there. It is a kind of prayer, too, for a future with- out imminent air raids, a peacetime that will let scholars pore again over every page and binding, developing new ways of perceiving, constellating, and decoding the documents that were under threat as Jenkinson wrote. As it happened, the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane survived the Blitz with only minor structural damage, and with trivial loss of records. But on the morning of September 8, 1940, German bombs did fall on the War Office repository in Arnside Street, Walworth, London, destroying 60 percent of the 6.5 million First World War service records housed there and subjecting much of what remained to charring and water damage. In a compulsive repetition that seemed to come from the imagination of Cicely Hamilton, one war’s administrative paper trail—records of enlistment, conduct, casualty, discharge, pension, and death—had been set alight by the bombs of the next war. 

Archival Fire 

This chapter has paired two markedly dissimilar texts: an archive theory that would preserve documents despite wartime spasms in their production and administration, and a speculative fiction convinced it will shortly become illegible thanks to the social collapse it sees coming with the next war. To read each work by the other’s generic light only deepens their seeming opposition. As a work of latent speculative fiction, Jenkinson’s Manual envisions a future where advances in warfare and communications technology might complicate archivists’ labor but never to the point of annihilating the symbolic order that is its precondition. As a work of implicit archive theory, Hamilton’s Theodore Savage insists on the fragility not just of bureaucratic continuity but of literacy itself; for Hamilton, the archive is not a firm civilizational substrate, as in Jenkinson, but a symptom that an advanced social order is approaching the next in a numberless series of catastrophic breaks that will leave only sparse and muddled traces in the next archive. Far from preventing conflict by safeguarding the sanctity of evidence, the archivist in Hamilton’s world only hastens the inevitable disaster by superintending the knowledge that produces it. Although both works imagine the future as veiled, the nature and consequence of that veiling are antithetical. For Jenkinson, the future’s alterity is a function of its openness: its needs and agendas cannot be anticipated, and the archivist must be a stay against any attempts to do so. For Hamilton, the future’s alterity is an effect of its foreclosure: thanks to an inevitable disaster that we can anticipate, the future’s continuity with the predisaster order will be severed. Its alterity will lie, above all, in its incomprehension of the present. 
The oppositions between the two works spring from a fundamental difference in their orientation toward empiricism. The “doctrine of the sanctity of evidence” that grounds the Manual’s ethics is rooted in the belief that empiricism is self-preserving and self-replicating. Although future techniques, professions, and research agendas may be unimaginable today, they will still, according to Jenkinson, be evidence-based, and will benefit from our efforts to preserve varieties of evidence we cannot use or even perceive ourselves. Hamilton, in contrast, is convinced at Abbeville that empiricism must lead, and has already led, to the liquidation through high-tech warfare of its own generative conditions: the scientific method begets engines of mass death, which in turn beget social collapse. That Jenkinson and Hamilton part ways at the question of empiricism’s valence is itself worth noting. If we allow the Manual and Theodore Savage to stand in metonymic relation to their respective discourse worlds, as I have suggested we do, the empiricism question begins to emerge as a central rift in interwar thinking about the constellation archive–warfare–futurity. A great deal follows, in other words, from how interwar subjects answered the question, is the experience of the Great War evidence to be used in the prevention of a worse sequel, or is it proof of empiricism’s bent to extinguish itself? Note that these are not symmetrical choices. The Jenkinsonian position sees the experiment as still in progress, the out- come unknown, the future unforeclosed and hopeful; the Hamiltonian sees the experiment as concluded, the future sealed. The dissymmetry between the two makes this a difference not just about empiricism’s historical trajectory but about ethical orientation toward the future, and about the efficacy of individual and collective action in the world. 
In another sense, however, Hamilton’s and Jenkinson’s disparate stances toward the future amount to a difference that makes no difference. Whether the future is veiled by imminent disaster or by history’s gradualist drift toward the unforeseeable, the result is the same: one abstains from rooting one’s acts in a depiction of the future that conveniently resembles the present. Jenkinson’s archivist may act for the sake of future researchers but must not attempt to know their minds; he clears a space for them without claiming their endorsement or authorization, acts as their trustee without acting in their names. Hamilton continues, after the war, to write and act despite being convinced that both her books and her acts will soon be made unreadable by a social collapse; there are reasons to stay at work, says her oeuvre, even without the hope of being recognized by readers or descendants like oneself. There is a similar refusal in Jenkinson and Hamilton to invoke the authority of the dead. Little as the Manual would have us condemn the archivists of the past, it is just as little interested in “tradition” as an ethical rationale; the archives of the past must be preserved not to honor or mollify the dead but for the sake of the unfathomable future. And as much as Theodore Savage indulges in elegiac catalogs of lost masters and forgotten generations, its very premise rules out their persistence as cultural or ethical authorities. What remains, for both of these singular yet paradigmatically interwar writers, is the present. Stripped of presentist constructions of the dead and the unborn to lend majesty to their actions, both Jenkinson and Hamilton incline toward a radical historical modesty—a sense that one’s actions can be taken to signify, in their scope and stakes, only within the narrowed aperture of the now. Yet as we saw with Jenkinson’s archivist, this circumscription of the temporal range of ethics is anything but an alibi for shortsightedness. Instead, it loads the slim remaining interval with a terrible, even a limitless, responsibility, given the loss of a long historical continuum against which one’s actions might be seen in perspective. As the darkness beyond its shrunken circumference intensifies, so does the spotlit brightness of the present. 
It is in the light of this intensified present between veils—those of the past and the future—that the dissident desire of Hamilton and Jenkinson can be seen most clearly. I have used the word “celibacy” in connection with both writers: literally, to describe Hamilton’s prewar defense of spinsterism and her postwar relief at being the last in her biological line, and figuratively, to characterize Jenkinson’s portrait of the archivist as withdrawing from the libidinal economies of research and posterity-courting historical agency. Both celibacies reject the constructions of the future that predominate in their respective registers—the sexual reproductivism that understands futurity as a matter of biological descent, and the archival instrumentalism that sees the future as both produced and solicited by tendentious uses of the archive. Having withdrawn desire from these particular futurities, however, they also decline to channel it toward the past in something like the queer “touch across time” described by Carolyn Dinshaw. Nor are the celibacies of Hamilton and Jenkinson signs of desire’s repression or absence. Theirs is a desire in and for the present: a desire for the intrinsic value of one’s work, never mind its sequelae; a desire that the present be sufficient to justify the work of keeping watch or sounding warning. 
This present-directed desire is precisely not the reactive sexual dissidence bewailed by Schell’s “Second Death,” in which nonreproductive desire is just a symptom of the future’s apparent foreclosure. But it would be naive to detach Hamilton’s postwar defenses of spinsterism, in particular, from the imminent Ruin in whose shadow she felt such relief at having no descendants. Rather, her real-time conviction that the 1920s were an interwar period happened to provide both a referent and an intensifier for principles she already held and desires she already felt. And if I am right in calling Jenkinson’s the first catastrophist archive theory—the first theory to affirm the archive values of impartiality and authenticity in the shadow of past and prospective discontinuities—then we might, after all, say the same of his portrait of the archivist’s dissident desire: that it was neither reducible to nor wholly separable from its author’s sense that he was writing during a pause between upheavals so exceptional that they must alter the rule. It would be oversimplifying to characterize the time of “interwar,” apprehended as such by those who lived through it, as a queer temporality across the board. But its evidently narrowed horizons were deeply compatible with desire that sought neither the past nor the future as the time of its vindication. 
Which brings us back to that perpetual interwar period, the Cold War, with its two nuclear fantasias: one in which the species survives the extinction of the symbolic order, another in which the symbolic order survives the extinction of the species. Cleaving resolutely to a human species-horizon in its fable of repeated literacy loss, Hamilton’s novel is an obvious predecessor of the first nuclear fantasia. Jenkinson’s Manual nowhere names the human extinction-event on which the second fantasia will center. But in its paleontological account of the archive as fossil bed—as an archive of extinctions— and in its provisions for an utterly strange researcher, the Manual calls in essence for a posthuman archivist, one who represents the absolute other: not necessarily a historian, not even necessarily human. (The reciprocal figure of the alien archivists in Clarke’s “The Star,” Jenkinson’s archivist could well be superintending the human archive for future alien readers.) The Manual is thus the unlikeliest antecedent of the nuclear extinction narrative, in which the supersession of the present by an unforeseeable, even posthuman future is no argument against the archive’s remaining intact, usable, legible. Custodianship, in the radical imagination of the Manual, would have to transcend not just the agendas, professions, and disciplinary formations of the present but the species horizon as well. 
Read for their scenarios, Hamilton’s Savage and Jenkinson’s Manual appear to be the antecedents of two mutually exclusive Cold War fantasias. But the two works’ deeper affinities, as I have discussed them, suggest that the fantasias of species extinction and social collapse, respectively, are variations on a single problematic. Both Hamilton’s and Jenkinson’s texts, as they ponder the archive’s vulnerability in the shadow of modern warfare, refuse to count on the future’s resemblance to the present. And yet what draws the veil before the future but the archive itself? For the future-war doomsayer, the archive of human knowledge incubates the very technologies that cause radical historical breaks, such that one civilization can know its predecessor only through the residue of myth—that is, not through an archive. For the modernist archive theorist, it is the vastness of the archive that permits historians in the present to exhaust their interests and agendas and be superseded by future researchers whose needs, questions, methods, and profession we cannot foresee and must not attempt to divine. Both cases theorize what Derrida will belatedly call the archiviolithic, the repetition-compulsion or death drive that is internal to the archive. “[E]ven in that which permits and conditions archivization,” writes Derrida, “we will never find anything other than that which exposes to destruction, and in truth menaces with destruction, introducing, a priori, forgetfulness and the archiviolithic into the heart of the monument. Into the ‘by heart’ itself. The archive works always and a priori against itself.” The archiviolithic is that archival penchant for self-effacement that would leave no intelligible archive of that effacement. It names the place where modernist archive theory and interwar speculative fiction most intimately touch: in recognizing how the fire that would consume the archive is an archival fire. 

The archives we have encountered in this chapter have no addressee. For Jenkinson, archives both accumulate and survive as the fossil record does: in a manner that is heedless of posterity. For Hamilton, the archive does not survive at all, insofar as the catastrophes it makes possible guarantee its illegibility to future readers. We turn toward a more intentional form now in pivoting from the archive to the encyclopedia. Where the archive is generated by internal administrative processes and only incidentally opened to external users, the encyclopedia is a purpose-built repository, composed from the start for the sake of its readers. Where archives contain raw mate- rial to be quarried in the production of knowledge, encyclopedias condense and explicate knowledge that has already been produced. Archives build up; encyclopedias are built. But while the encyclopedia may be more intentional than the archive in its genesis, it is not more univocal, more coherent, or more total. Archives make no truth claims, so they cannot become obsolete. Because an archive’s organization is a function of its production and use, that organization cannot be faulted for arbitrariness. By the same token, the only coherence an archive need have is a functional coherence for its originators. When encyclopedias boast of being ageless total monuments to order, they court all three charges: obsolescence, arbitrariness, and incoherence. Yet these vulnerabilities in the encyclopedia are its cardinal virtues if you oppose coherentism, immutability, and a totalizing portrait of the known, as the editors of the late eighteenth-century French Encyclopédie did, and as the early-twentieth-century novelists they inspired did in their turn. The archive and the encyclopedia: two adjacent dreams of total information, two Enlightenment projects in parallel, each vexed by its own internal fire. Parallel, but converging at the vanishing point—where all encyclopedias become archival through obsolescence.

Civil Disobedience

William E. Scheuerman

Digitalization

Digital disobedience, defined here as “politically motivated online lawbreaking,” seems to be spreading like wildfire. The term covers a wide range of activities. They include: DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) actions, where activists repeatedly access websites as a way of disabling them for political purposes; “hacktivism,” in which hackers break into computer servers as an entry for shaming targeted organizations and their practices; leaking and whistleblowing by individuals (for example, Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden), or groups such as Anonymous and WikiLeaks, where confidential or classified electronically stored data is leaked to the press or public.
Not surprisingly perhaps, digital activists and their defenders are resorting to the familiar language of “civil disobedience” to describe their actions. Government officials rarely take the bait. Instead, prosecutors and judges are insisting on a clear delineation of (allegedly) criminal and morally unacceptable digital lawbreaking from civil disobedience as practiced by King and other iconic figures. Since conventional physical or “on-the-street” civil disobedience occasionally enjoys some measure of political and legal respectability, for digital activists the stakes are high. Consistent with this trend, digital disobedients are facing draconian criminal penalties. The late Aaron Swartz, for example, was charged under the 1986 US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) chiefly for trying to make JSTOR academic articles easily accessible to a broad public. Swartz faced multiple felony charges, up to $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison, before tragically taking his own life. In another case, Jeremy Hammond, a Chicago activist who hacked a private intelligence firm with a sordid history of spying on social movements, was convicted of computer fraud in November 2013 under the CFAA and is now serving a ten-year sentence in a US federal prison. In January 2015 Barrett Brown, an activist and journalist with links to Anonymous, received a 63-month sentence and was fined $890,000. According to Brown’s vocal defenders, his most egregious criminal act was copying a link to the hacked materials Hammond had previously uploaded to the web. More prominently, Manning was successfully prosecuted under the US Espionage Act and initially given a 35-year sentence, before President Obama eventually commuted it. Snowden is still being pursued under the same statute and remains in Russian exile.
Although the official response in the US has been particularly harsh, governments elsewhere are penalizing digital disobedience as well. For example, Ryan “Kayla” Ackroyd, a UK citizen, was sentenced to 30 months in jail in May 2013 by British courts for hacking a variety of public and private sites. Even where authorities have demonstrated more leniency, recent legislative changes may prevent their successors from following in their footsteps. In 2001, for example, 13,000 Germans participated in a DDoS action protesting Lufthansa’s deportation of immigrants, a protest that ultimately forced Lufthansa to end its involvement in the program. Although Andreas Thomas Vogel, a key participant, was initially fined and given a 90-day prison sentence by a local court, a higher court overturned the verdict in recognition of his contributions to public debate. A controversial 2007 anti-hacking law passed by the Bundes­tag, however, now clearly prohibits DDoS of this type.
Despite their efforts to gain some legitimacy for their actions, digital disobedients worldwide face an uphill battle. They encounter not only enmity from government officials but also widespread skepticism from publics not quite sure what to make of them.
Commentators have criticized the punitive treatment of digital disobedience, arguing that it does conceptual violence to the phenomenon at hand and, even worse, potential violence to the activists. Nonetheless, they tend to neglect a fundamental question: how should we interpret the nexus between digital disobedience and the law? Does digital disobedience represent, as US officials now regularly assert, a criminal and indeed full-fledged assault on the rule of law? Or does it instead, at least potentially, constitute politically motivated lawbreaking based in principle on what King famously described in his “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” as the “very highest respect for the law”? Might it evince, as Rawls noted in his influential discussion, “disobedience to the law within the limits of fidelity to law”? For King and for many inspired by him, conscientious acts of political illegality were legitimate only when appealing to some fundamental ideal of law. Should we perhaps interpret digital disobedience as nothing more than modernized civil disobedience, better suited than its familiar “on-the-street” forerunners to our digital age?
Digital disobedients and their sympathizers have not always been sufficiently clear in their views of the law. One often encounters decidedly anti-legal strands among their ranks. Nonetheless, some of their actions can in fact be interpreted as supportive and not destructive of the rule of law. State officials aggressively pursuing digital disobedients, along with the legally dubious surveillance policies they defend, often constitute the main threat to law-based government. My efforts here to interpret digital disobedience as a form of political lawbreaking consonant with the idea of “highest respect for the law” notwithstanding, we should hesitate before rushing to group its manifold manifestations under the rubric of civil disobedience. Doing so risks distorting the novelties at hand while fitting digital disobedients with a suit they may not always want to wear.

Digital disobedience, surveillance, and the rule of law

A tendentious view of law is being mobilized by state authorities to justify a repressive legal response that, in fact, makes a mockery of the rule of law. When Jeremy Hammond was sentenced, for example, US District Court Justice Loretta Preska explained the harsh sentence she handed down by declaring that nothing less was required by our shared commitment to “respect for the rule of law.” As she continued, “these are not the actions of Martin Luther King, of Nelson Mandela ... or even Daniel Ellsberg.” Facing protestors demanding that he explain his Administration’s prosecution of Chelsea Manning, Barack Obama in April 2011 responded: “We are a nation of laws. We don’t let individuals make decisions about how the law operates. He [meaning Manning] broke the law”. In a chilling 2013 interview, Donald Trump referred to Snowden as a “terrible traitor, and you know what we used to do in the good old days, when we were a strong country – you know what we used to do to traitors, right?,” more or less openly calling for his execution).
What should we make of this view that the venerable idea of the “rule of law” demands the aggressive criminal prosecution of digital disobedients? The immediate weakness of this position is that it ignores the rule of law’s minimal but essential normative substance. The rule of law, to be sure, is a complex and contested concept. On the standard view, however, it requires that every legal order aim to realize publicity, generality, clarity, prospectiveness, consistency, and constancy. The rule of law is also typically defined as requiring independent courts free from partisan political pressures. In this familiar account, whose philosophical foundations can be found in classical writers as diverse as Locke, Rousseau, and Hegel, the rule of law demands of government that its actions always rest on laws embodying substantial doses of specific legal virtues (for example, clarity, publicity, generality). Absent the rule of law, we cannot expect individuals to enjoy a minimum of personal security or political freedom. Even when its contributions to justice and equal liberty may seem limited, they are “not by any means negligible”. Not surprisingly, thinkers from a wide range of philosophical and political orientations, including republicans and neo- Marxists, have defended it.
Why is this relevant? The statutes under which digital disobedients are being prosecuted – in the US, the Espionage Act and CFAA – make a mockery of basic rule-of-law aspirations. Both statutes are filled with vague legal standards inviting massive legal and especially prosecutorial discretion. As Harold Edgar and Benno Schmidt documented in an eye-opening critical discussion, the Espionage Act’s messy and occasionally incomprehensible language outfits the executive with arbitrary power over a vast array of activities concerning the poorly defined arena of “national security,” and it is arguably unconstitutional. Not surprisingly, it has generally served as a clumsy instrument of political repression. Similarly, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other US-based civil libertarian groups have documented how the CFAA criminalizes commonplace Internet usage (for example, checking personal email on workplace computers), potentially making it a federal crime to access an unauthorized computer, but without sufficiently laying out what “authorization” means. Mindboggling in its open-endedness, the CFAA characterizes “computer fraud and abuse” to include attempts to obtain national security information, violate or threaten to damage a broad array of (vaguely specified) “protected” computers, compromise confidentiality or traffic in passwords, as well as access computers to defraud and obtain something of value. It offers a vivid example of how sloppy legal craftsmanship can produce draconian consequences probably unintended even by those who promulgated the statute.
In the traditional view of the rule of law, generality in law is interpreted as requiring like rules for like cases: similar or at least analogous situations are treated in similar or at least analogous legal ways. Treating morally conscientious and politically motivated digital lawbreaking as computer fraud or espionage leaves much to be desired from this conventional legal perspective. Judge Preska may be right: a hacktivist like Hammond is a very different political creature from Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet he is hardly a “crook” using computers to rip people off for personal or private gain, or a fraudster engaging in deception or stealing trade secrets for profit. Only under a contorted understanding of “fraud and abuse,” namely one in which digital disobedience’s political motivations are simply ignored, could one possibly place recent hacktivist acts under its rubric.
Nor are Manning and Snowden spies, despite the US government’s aggressive deployment of the Espionage Act against them. They neither sought to obtain information about national security to imperil the United States, nor promoted the success of enemies abroad. Rather, their actions represent examples of what Holloway Sparks calls “dissident citizenship”: they challenge “prevailing arrangements of power by means of oppositional democratic practices that augment or replace [ordinary] institutionalized channels of democratic opposition when those channels are inadequate,” as both Manning and Snowden believe to be the case. Angered by what they diagnosed as a lack of minimal public oversight of key surveillance and foreign policies, their lawbreaking was clearly meant to be democracy-enabling. It was necessary, they asserted, because major threats to the democratic process required correction. Simultaneously, both shared a characteristically liberal concern with the sanctity of basic individual rights (to privacy, for example) egregiously violated by officials. They have also argued, at times persuasively, that the US and its foreign allies have systematically violated their own domestic and international laws.
Disingenuous prosecutorial strategies allow officials to downplay digital disobedience’s distinctive normative traits, and especially its goal of generating public discussion about possibly illegal acts by government itself. To be sure, we need to guard against employing the category “civil disobedience” in an overly expansive fashion; digital lawbreaking’s defenders sometimes employ the term loosely to cover activities that mesh poorly with the usual models. At the same time, digital disobedience occasionally overlaps with Rawls’ famous definition of civil disobedience as “disobedience to the law within the limits of fidelity to law.” Some digital activists are breaking the law to highlight official illegalities so egregious that they deem them a just cause for their own relatively minor illegalities.
Something fundamental about the law is at stake. In his noteworthy The Morality of Law, Lon Fuller made the key point that fidelity to the rule of law (or, in his terms, “legality”) was congruent with the pursuit of different and indeed potentially opposing political and moral aspirations. Legality, in short, is consonant with modern pluralism. Yet it still implicitly rests on an underlying notion of human dignity or respect. Fuller thought there was a straightforward way in which we could grasp this point: when a government tries to force people to follow an unpublished, secret, or retroactive statute, and thus in effect to do the impossible, or when it demands that they constantly alter their behavior according to the arbitrary and ever-changing whims of power holders, it communicates its indifference to them. When it systematically violates the rule of law, it reduces citizens to mere objects of state power; it demonstrates a basic lack of respect for people as independent agents capable of effectively planning their own lives. By insisting that state action rest on clear, public, general, and relatively constant norms, rule of law-based government instead expresses its respect for them as agents worthy of some minimal recognition or dignity. At the core of every political system instantiating the rule of law we can identify an implicit normative commitment to treating those on which it is binding in some minimally respectful and dignified fashion.

The Process of Creative Destruction

Joseph A.Schumpeter

As we have seen in the preceding chapter, the contents of the laborer’s budget, say from 1760 to 1940, did not simply grow on unchanging lines but they underwent a process of qualitative change. Similarly, the history of the productive apparatus of a typical farm, from the beginnings of the rationalization of crop rotation, plowing and fattening to the mechanized thing of today—linking up with elevators and railroads—is a history of revolutions. So is the history of the productive apparatus of the iron and steel industry from the charcoal furnace to our own type of furnace, or the history of the apparatus of power production from the overshot water wheel to the modern power plant, or the history of transportation from the mail coach to the airplane. The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.

The Art of Not Being Governed, An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia

James C. Scott

Social Structures of Escape

The padi state requires and fosters a legible landscape of irrigated rice and the concentrated population associated with it. This accessible economy and demography might be termed an appropriable landscape. Just as there are economic landscapes that lend themselves to monitoring and appropriation, so too are there social structures that lend themselves to control, appropriation, and subordination. The contrary is also true. There are, as we have seen, agricultural techniques and crop regimens that are resistant to appropriation, and hence are state repelling. By the same token, there are patterns of social and political organization that are resistant to monitoring and subordination. Just as shifting cultivation and cassava planting represent a “positionality” vis-à-vis the state, so, too, do various forms of social organization represent a strategic position with respect to the state. Social structure, like agricultural technique, is not a given; it is substantially, especially over time, a choice. Much of that choice is in a broad sense political. Here a dialectical view of social organization is necessary. Peripheral political structures in main-land Southeast Asia are always adjusting to the state systems that make up their immediate environment. Under some circumstances they, or rather the human actors who animate them, may adjust that structure so as to facilitate alliances with or incorporation into a nearby state. At other times, they may pattern themselves so as to break loose from ties of tribute or incorporation.
Social structure, in this view, ought to be seen not as a permanent social trait of a particular community but rather as a variable, one of the purposes of which is to regulate relations with the surrounding field of power.

[...]

Broadly speaking, whenever a society or part of a society elects to evade incorporation or appropriation, it moves toward simpler, smaller, and more dispersed social units—toward what we have earlier termed the elementary forms of social organization. The most appropriation-resistant social structures—though they also impede collective action of any kind—are acephalous (“headless”) small aggregates of households. Such forms of social organization, along with appropriation-resistant forms of agriculture and residence, are invariably coded “barbarian,” “primitive,” and “backward” by the low-land padi “civilizations.” It is no coincidence that this metric of more or less civilized agriculture and social organization should so perfectly map onto their suitability for appropriation and subordination, respectively.

“Tribality”

The state’s relation with tribes, though it preoccupied Rome and its legions, has long since disappeared from European historiography. One by one, Europe’s last independent, tribal peoples—the Swiss, the Welsh, the Scots, the Irish, the Montenegrins, and nomads of the south Russian steppe—were absorbed into more powerful states and their dominant religions and cultures. The issue of tribes and states, however, is still very much alive in the Middle East. Thus it is from the ethnographers and historians of tribal-state relations there that we can begin to take our bearings.
Tribes and states, they agree, are mutually constituting entities. There is no evolutionary sequence; tribes are not prior to states. Tribes are, rather, a social formation defined by its relation to the state. “If rulers of the Middle East have been preoccupied by a ‘tribal problem,’ . . . tribes could be said to have had a perennial ‘state-problem.’”¹
One reason why tribes often appear to be stable, enduring, genealogically and culturally coherent units is that the state typically desires such units and sets out, over time, to fashion them. A tribe may spring into existence on the basis of political entrepreneurship or through the political identities and “traffic patterns” that a state can impose by structuring rewards and penalties. The tribe’s existence, in either case, depends on a particular relationship to the state. Rulers and state institutions require a stable, reliable, hierarchical, “graspable” social structure through which to negotiate or rule. They need an interlocutor, a partner, with whom to parlay, whose allegiance can be solicited, through whom instructions can be conveyed, who can be held responsible for political order, and who can deliver grain and tribute. Since tribal peoples are, by definition, outside the direct administration of the state, they must, if they are to be governed at all, be governed through leaders who can speak for them and, if necessary, be held hostage. The entities represented as “tribes” seldom exist with anything like the substantiality of state imaginings. This misrepresentation is due not only to the official identities cooked up by the state but also to the need of ethnographers and historians for social identities that can serve as a coherent object of description and analysis. It is hard to produce an account of, let alone govern, a social organism that is continually going in and out of focus.
When nonstate peoples (aka tribes) face pressures for political and social incorporation into a state system, a variety of responses is possible. They, or a section of them, may be incorporated loosely or tightly as a tributary society with a designated leader (indirect rule). They may, of course, fight to defend their autonomy—particularly if they are militarized pastoralists. They may move out of the way. Finally, they may, by fissioning, scattering, and/or changing their livelihood strategy, make themselves invisible or unattractive as objects of appropriation.
The last three strategies are options of resistance and evasion. The military option has, with a few exceptions, rarely been available to nonstate peoples in Southeast Asia.² Moving out of the way, inasmuch as it often involves adoption of shifting cultivation or foraging, has already been examined. What remains to be explored is the final strategy of social reorganization. It involves social disaggregation into minimal units, often households, and is often accompanied by the adoption of subsistence strategies that favor small, scattered bands. Ernest Gellner describes this deliberate choice among the Berbers with the slogan “Divide that ye be not ruled.” It is a brilliant aphorism, for it shows that the Roman slogan “Divide and rule” does not work past a certain point of atomization. Malcolm Yapp’s term for the same strategy, jellyfsh tribes, is just as apt, for it points to the fact that such disaggregation leaves a potential ruler facing an amorphous, unstructured population with no point of entry or leverage.³ The Ottomans, in the same vein, found it far easier to deal with structured communities, even if they were Christians and Jews, than with heterodox sects that were acephalous and organizationally diffuse. Most feared were such forms of autonomy and dissent as, for example, the mystical Dervish orders, which deliberately, it seems, avoided any collective settlement or identifiable leadership precisely to fly, as it were, beneath the Ottoman police radar.⁴ Faced with situations of this kind, a state often tries to find a collaborator and create a chiefdom.
While it is usually in someone’s interest to seize this chance, nothing, as we shall see, prevents his would-be subjects from ignoring him.

[...]

Evading Stateness and Permanent Hierarchy

Every state with ambitions to control parts of Zomia—Han administrators in Yunnan and Guizhou, the Thai court in Ayutthaya, the Burmese court in Ava, Shan chiefs (Sawbwa), the British colonial state, and independent national governments—has sought to discover, or, failing that, to create chiefdoms with which they could deal. The British in Burma, Leach noted, everywhere preferred autocratic “tribal” regimes in compact geographical concentrations with which they could negotiate; conversely, they had a distaste for anarchic, egalitarian peoples who had no discernible spokesman.
“In the Kachin Hills area . . . and also in many other areas of low population density, there is a large preponderance of very small independent villages; the headman of every village claims to be an independent chief of full dubaw status. . . This fact has been noted repeatedly and is the more remarkable in that the British administration was consistently opposed to such fragmented settlement.”⁵
Another turn-of-the-century British official warned observers not to take the apparent subordination of petty Kachin chiefs seriously. “Beyond this nominal subordination, each village claims to be independent and only acknowledges its own chief.” This independence, he emphasizes, anticipating Leach, characterizes even the smallest social units; it “extends down even to the household and each house owner, if he disagrees with his chief, can leave the village and set up his own house elsewhere as his own sawbwa.”⁶ Accordingly, the British, like other states, tended to label the democratic, anarchic peoples as “wild,” “raw,” “crude” (yaín—...) vis-à-vis their more “tame,” “cooked,” “cultured,” and autocratic neighbors, even if those neighbors shared the same language and culture. Stable, indirect rule of anarchic “jellyfsh” tribes was well nigh impossible. Even pacifying them was both difficult and impermanent. The British chief commissioner from 1887 to 1890 noted that the conquest of the Kachin and Palaung areas had to be accomplished “hill by hill” inasmuch as these peoples “had never submitted to any central control.” The Chins were, in his view, at least as frustrating. “Their only system of government was that of headmen of villages or at the most a small group of villages, and, consequently, negotiation with the Chin as a people was impossible.”⁷

[...]

The utter plasticity of social structure among the more democratic, stateless, hill peoples can hardly be exaggerated. Shape-shifting, fissioning, disaggregation, physical mobility, reconstitution, shifts in subsistence routines are often so dizzying that the very existence of the units beloved of anthropologists—the village, the lineage, the tribe, the hamlet—are called into question. On what unit the historian, the anthropologist, or, for that matter, the administrator should fix his gaze becomes an almost metaphysical issue.
The lowest-status hill peoples, it appears, are especially polymorphous. They deploy a wider range of languages and cultural practices that allow them to adapt quickly to a broad range of situations.⁸ Anthony Walker, ethnographer of the Lahu Nyi (Red Lahu), writes of villages that divide up, move, evaporate altogether, scatter to other settlements, and absorb newcomers, and he writes of new settlements suddenly appearing.⁹ Nothing appears to remain in place long enough to sit for its portrait. The elementary unit of Red Lahu society is not the village in any meaningful sense. “A Lahu Nyi village community is essentially a group of households whose members, for the time being, find it convenient to share a common locale under a common headman more or less acceptable to them.” The headman, Walker writes, is headman of a “collection of jealously independent households.”¹⁰
Here we are dealing not merely with “jellyfsh” tribes but with “jellyfsh” lineages, villages, chiefdoms, and, at the limit, jellyfsh households.
Along with shifting agriculture, this polymorphism is admirably suited to the purpose of evading incorporation in state structures. Such hill societies rarely challenge the state itself, but neither do they allow the state an easy point of entry or leverage. When threatened, they retreat, disperse, disaggregate like quicksilver—as if their motto was indeed “Divide that ye be not ruled.”

¹ Ira Lapidus, “Tribes and State Formation in Islamic History,” in Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East, ed. Philip S. Khoury and Joseph Kostiner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 48–73, quotation from 52.
² Prominent exceptions would include the Hmong, the Karen, and the Kachin: the last two militarized and Christianized under British rule. The single most striking instance is the great “Miao (Hmong) Rebellion” in Guizhou, Southwest China, from 1854 to 1973. Retreat is, of course, often accompanied by defensive military measures.
³ Ernest Gellner, Saints of the Atlas (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969), 41–49; Malcolm Yapp, Tribes and States in the Khyber, 1838–1842 (Oxford; Clarendon, 1980), quoted in Richard Tapper, “Anthropologists, Historians, and Tribespeople on the Tribe and State Formation in the Middle East,” in Khoury and Kostiner, Tribes and State Formation, 48–73, quotation from 66–67.
⁴ See Karen Barkey’s fine study, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 155–67. The difficulties the Ottomanshad with the Dervish orders were, she suggests, analogous to the troubles the tsarist authorities had with the Old Believers and Uniates.
⁵ Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, 171.
⁶ Scott, Gazetteer of Upper Burma, vol. 1, part 2, 246.
⁷ Charles Crosthwaite, The Pacification of Burma (London: Edward Arnold, 1912), 236, 287.
⁸ Keyes, Ethnic Adaptation and Identity, 143.
⁹ Walker, Merit and the Millennium. Much the same could be said about the “eternally footloose” Hmong. See William Robert Geddes, Migrants of the Mountains: The Cultural Ecology of the Blue Miao [Hmong Njua] of Thailand (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 230.
¹⁰ Walker, Merit and the Millennium, 44. In keeping with their cultural fleetness of foot, the Lahu-Nyi seem extremely negligent about their genealogies and “cannot even recall the names of their grandfathers.” This, of course, allows them to make or discard a kinship connection with comparative ease. See Walker, “North Thailand as a Geo-ethnic Mosaic,” 58. Such shallow genealogies and small, supple, household units have been called “neoteric” and seem to characterize many (but not all) marginal, stigmatized populations. See Rebecca B. Bateman, “African and Indian: A Comparative Study of Black Carib and Black Seminole,” Ethnohistory 37 (1990): 1–24.

Os Emigrantes

W.G. Sebald

(...) ou ao lado do choupo do nosso jardim, ou num banco do Parque Luitpold, ou na esplanada do Wittelsbacher Hof, lia o jornal, tomava ocasionais notas e ficava simplesmente perdido nos seus pensamentos. Laura dizia que ele tinha trabalhado durante muito tempo num projecto de império em que nunca se passasse nada, pois odiava mortalmente iniciativas, evoluções, grandes acontecimentos, mudanças e incidentes de toda a ordem.

Campo Santo

W. G. Sebald

Ferdinand Gregorovius, who traveled in Corsica in 1852, mentions an entomologist from Dresden whom he met in the hills above Sartène, and who told him that the island had struck him as a paradise garden on his first visit, particularly because of the small size of its fauna species, and indeed, writes Gregorovius, soon after he met the Saxon entomologist he had several sightings in the forest of Bavella of the Tyrrhenian red deer, Cervus elaphus corsicanus, now long since extinct, an animal of dwarfish stature and almost oriental appearance, with a head much too large for the rest of its body, and eyes wide with fear in constant expectation of death.

Although the game that once lived in such abundance in the forests of the island has been eradicated almost without trace today, the fever of the chase still breaks out on Corsica every September. During my excursions into the interior of the island I repeatedly felt as if the entire male population were participating in a ritual of destruction which long ago became pointless. The older men, usually wearing blue dungarees, are posted beside the road all the way up into the mountains; the young men, in a kind of paramilitary gear, drive around in jeeps and cross-country vehicles as if they thought the countryside were occupied, or they were expecting an enemy invasion. Unshaven, carrying heavy rifles, menacing in their manner, they look like those Croatian and Serbian militiamen who destroyed their native land in their deranged belligerence; and, like those Marlboro-style heroes of the Yugoslavian civil war, the Corsican hunters are not to be trifled with if you happen to stray into their territory.

More than once on such meetings they plainly indicated that they did not want to talk to some chance-come hiker about their sanguinary business, and sent me on my way with a gesture making it clear that anyone who did not get out of the danger zone very quickly might easily be shot down. Once, a little way below Evisa, I tried to strike up a conversation with one of the hunters posted beside the road and obviously taking his task very seriously, a short man of around sixty who was sitting, his double-barreled shotgun across his knees, on the low stone balustrade which fences off the road at that point from the ravine of the Gorges de Spelunca, where it drops to two hundred meters below. The cartridges he had with him were very large, and the belt carrying them was so broad that it reached like a leather jerkin from his belly to halfway up his chest. When I asked him what he was looking for, he simply replied sangliers (wild boars), as if that alone must suffice to send me packing. He would not have his photograph taken, but warded me off with his outspread hand just as guerrillas do in front of the camera.

In the Corsican newspapers, the so-called ouverture de la chasse (the start of the hunting season) is one of the main subjects of reporting in September, together with the never-ending accounts of the bombing of police stations, local authority tax offices, and other public institutions, and it even casts into the shade the excitement over the start of the new school year which seizes annually upon the entire French nation. Articles are published about the state of the game preserves in the various regions, last season’s hunting, prospects for the present campaign, and indeed hunting in general in every imaginable form. And the papers print photographs of men of martial appearance emerging from the maquis with their guns over their shoulders, or posing around a dead boar. The main subject, however, is the lamentable fact that fewer and fewer hares and partridges can be found every year.

Mon mari, complains the wife of a hunter from Vissavona to a Corse-Matin reporter, for instance, mon mari, qui rentrait toujours avec cinq ou six perdrix, on a tout juste pris une. In a way the contempt she expresses for the husband coming home empty-handed from his foray into the wilderness, the indisputably ludicrous appearance of the ultimately unsuccessful hunter in the eyes of his wife, women always having been excluded from the hunt, is the closing episode of a story that looks far back into our dark past, and that even in my childhood filled me with uneasy premonitions.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart … Near them, on the sand,”
“Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works ye Mighty, and despair!”
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
“Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’—

Data Love, The Seduction and Betrayal of Digital Technologies

Roberto Simanowski

Ecological Data Disaster

Future history “books” will report that the paradigm change from a culture of personal privacy to one enforcing the absolute transparency of individual life was put into effect not only under the banner of measurement but also under that of net- working. One will read that in the twenty-first century, the Internet of things inaugurated the triumph of artificial intelligence, given human complacency, over the remaining attempts at data protection. It consolidated objects and activities and simplified people’s lives by way of control. Its immense accumulation of data was a paradise for all those interested in human behavior on a grand scale: sociologists, advertising experts, insurance companies, physicians, traffic and urban planners, law enforcement, and other agencies of security. Although the process was occasionally troubled by data protectors, for a long time the vast majority of the population had already been cooperating with the state and commercial data collectors. The majority had permitted a glimpse into its buying behavior via the supermarket discount card, and it was now “selling” its digital communication—or, rather, just giving it away, considering the value generated by the data for others. It was doing so, in fact, not only to get free Internet service; one didn’t want to do without GPS either, not even when it began to cost more. Even Google Glass was, eventually, a great success, maybe because it gave everyone a place at the heart of a personal surveillance center in which one forgot that this technology had been set up chiefly in order to survey surveillance. At some point most people had acquired an “intelligent trash container” that although it no longer worked under the banner of self-optimization or information management was nonetheless serving governmental control by registering whatever was being tossed into it and notifying the town hall as to whether recycling was being done correctly.
Future historians will identify the precursors of this development and use them to justify the status quo. They will refer to the Dutchman Alex van Es, an early-adopting pioneer of self-tracking who, in 1998, had already published the contents of his trash bin on the website icepick.com using a barcode scanner, proving that no obsession with data mining can be so absurd as not to be converted instantly into a business plan. One will immediately be reminded that the idea of surveillance had already been contemplated by the avantgarde artist Fernand Léger for a film that was to record twenty-four hours in the everyday life of a man and a woman without their knowledge (1931), as well as in Dan Graham’s project Alteration of a Suburban House (1978), which was to replace the wall of a home with glass and thus bring the life of this family onto the neighborhood stage—both ideas quite some time before Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998). These predecessors demonstrate the extent to which art, commerce, and control are interconnected. Future historians will also report that users of the intelligent trash container—which became generally accepted in the 2020s—received a discount on the cost of their garbage disposal and that “the transparent 90 percent” movement filed an application to revoke the security passes for anyone in a household that refused to participate in the “Smart Bin, Safer City” program.
On the background of these cultural-historical findings one might agree with Morozov that the commercialization of data cannot be prohibited by law as long as it is driven by the wishes of the people. Thus the debate in the wake of Snowden’s disclosures revolved, instead, around questions of how to prevent Internet companies and intelligence agencies from collaborating. Morozov called this the reaching for the “low-hanging fruit,” a political maneuver predicated on the delusion that one could keep state institutions from accessing commercially collected data. It is difficult to believe that politicians would allow this self-disempowerment vis-à-vis the commercial realm. After all, the state’s intimate knowledge of the life of its citizens guarantees a more efficient fulfillment of its duties: lowering the cost of healthcare by detecting disease patterns early and introducing preventive care in cases of clearly detrimental behaviors, fighting against tax evasion and fraudulent social-security benefits through detailed knowledge of its citizens’ buying habits, improving control of traffic flow by analyzing patterns of mobility, allowing for better city planning through a more accurate knowledge of spatial use, more efficiently managing energy by analyzing consumption profiles, and optimizing educational policy by gathering insight into individual patterns of interest and behavior. 
No state will have any objection to knowing more about its citizens. On the contrary, every state will want to put at its disposal the data generated both through commercial and ideological tracking and data mining. Just how little can be expected from governments regarding data protection became clear on June 28, 2012, when the German Bundestag passed new legislation allowing the state to sell its citizens’ data to advertising and credit agencies as long as citizens did not opt out by filing an objection. This resolution was made in an almost empty parliament as the twenty-first item of its agenda, shortly before 9 p.m., just after the beginning of the European Cup semifinals, Germany vs. Italy. The vote passed by a narrow margin but was later annulled following the protest of data protectionists. However, the fact that a majority of two or three politicians can pass such a law does not leave much room for consolation. 
Is privacy better protected in the world of business? We might suppose so, given that its primary goal is not control or moral judgment but selling, satisfying whatever demand it perceives. However, for this very reason business is even more inquisitive than intelligence agencies, which are only concerned with potential threats. The transparent customer is the larger and weightier twin of the transparent citizen. Marketing consultants dream of the “full take” just as profoundly as intelligence agencies—if not more so—and of the real-time mining of social media, online communication, and offline actions. Among other things, they dream of the supermarket equipped with intelligent path tracking, that is, how a customer navigates the store based on data captured from their mobile. Via RFID chips feeding and coordinating biometric data the “smart” supermarket also registers, for example, whether a customer puts cream cheese back onto the shelf and opts for low-fat cottage cheese instead. Knowing his or her preference, the supermarket will now highlight diet products as the customer walks by and will also adjust in real time, assuming his willingness to pay more for less fat, the prices on the electronic displays. Marketing loves data retrieval that allows for the refinement of the classical concept of segmentation as customization for the individual consumer. 
The transparent customer is always also a transparent citizen. This justifies Morozov’s concern that companies could be forced by governments to share their data. Morozov demands more than legislation in order to control IT companies. He maintains that it is necessary to take action to prevent a “data catastrophe” comparable to that envisaged by the ecological movement. At a certain point one’s energy bill was no longer simply a private matter since the ecological consequences of individual energy consumption affects everyone. Analogously, our dealings in personal data have a public ethical dimension. Morozov is not only targeting the extrospective variant of self-tracking, that is, the saving and sharing of data that directly affects others (via camera, audio recording, or tagging in social media). Already the introspective variety—the gathering of personal data by insurance companies concerning driving or consumption habits, physical exercise, movement and mobility, and so on—presents a problem. It contributes to the determination of statistical criteria and norms against which all customers, regardless of their willing- ness to disclose private data, will be measured. Every purchase of an intelligent trash container increases the pressure on all those who do not yet cooperate with the data-collecting servants of the municipal garbage collector. Morozov’s cautionary conclusion is that individual generosity—or perhaps promiscuity—with data sets the standards from which others will be unable to extricate themselves. 

Morozov’s perspective approaches the “ethics of responsibility for distant contingencies” demanded by Hans Jonas in his 1979 book The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. We have to consider the consequences of our actions even though they do not affect us or our immediate environment directly. At the same time, Morozov’s perspective points to the problem of surveillance, underlining just how complex the subject is as soon as one delves into it more deeply. This approach turns the victims themselves into perpetrators while signaling the inefficacy of legal action vis-à-vis more complex and ambivalent ethical discussion. No wonder that others have pointedly recast Morozov’s intimation of a structural problem within information society as a matter of politics. Among the reactions to Morozov’s contribution in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung one could read that total surveillance is an insult to democracy, that mature citizens were being treated like immature children, and that the protest should not be seen in terms of the ecological movement but rather as comparable to the 1960s resistance against “emergency legislation.” The political inflection of discussion was echoed in the appeal of Gerhart Baum, the former interior secretary from the Free Democratic Party: “We lack a citizen’s movement for the protection of privacy as it existed and exists for the protection of natural resources.” Only the late chief editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Frank Schirrmacher noted—and more than once—that the general sense of alarm in the wake of Snowden’s revelations did not result from the disclosure of sophisticated surveillance technologies but from the realization that those technologies apply the same logic, systems, formulas, and mechanisms that determine our everyday life and working environment. Elsewhere, Schirrmacher, speaking about GPS, points out that the intercommunication of the giants of Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies has not come about in a dystopian, Orwellian mode but “by way of things that even please us.” This fusion between what we fear and what we desire is the problem that paralyzes politics and people. 
Morozov’s correlation of environmental and data catastrophe, which meanwhile has gained some notoriety, is, in the end, unsound. When speaking of data catastrophe, the principle of a shifting baseline—as used in the discourse of the environmental catastrophe—is not equivalent to the destruction of the natural resources for future generations. The data catastrophe “only” threatens current cultural norms, and by contrast with global warming and pollution, a disaster resulting from altered values applied to social coexistence is hardly guaranteed. While the ecological movement’s call to halt in response to the looming end of mankind can hardly be contradicted (the focus of contention being only a matter of the urgency of its appeal), saying “Halt” to cultural change would seem to oblige future generations to observe established norms of social interaction. When motivated by cultural concerns, an ethics of preservation is less convincing than when it is a response to the known threat of environmental catastrophe. Not only must a culturally inclined ethics of preservation substantiate the reality of a threat; it must also speak to its menacing character, all the while resisting the counterargument that radical upheavals of culture are inherent within modernity. 
The data catastrophe demands a more profound discussion than that surrounding questions of how to retain the integrity and privacy of mail in the age of digitization. It points to a change of social mentalities chiefly embodied in digital natives. The fact that this constituency appears unbothered by the loss of their private sphere is for many—and especially for members of the older generation— evidence of ignorance and indifference. From a psychosociological perspective, the lack of protest might also be understood as an emancipatory effort—as a longing for a realm that no longer differentiates between the private and the public, or as a rebellion against parents and grandparents whose earlier cultural revolution, which involved—in the 1960s and 1970s—making the private sphere public, has now become further radicalized with the help of the new media. On the one hand, this rebellion may be seen as very successful, given all the complaints of the older generation concerning the youthful lack of concern. On the other hand, this longing may simply be a resurgence that can be referred back to historical models since, in the early twentieth century, transparent man was not only invoked by communists against bourgeois culture but also by 
the Western avant-garde. The guiding principles of other earlier cultural tendencies—best expressed in Georg Simmel’s declaration “The secret is one of man’s greatest achievements” as well as in Peter Handke’s admission “I live off of what the others don’t know about me”—lose their validity under the contemporary imperative of transparency and disclosure, to say nothing of the fact that they prove to be impracticable against the prospects of intelligent things and smart environments. From this perspective, surveillance and control are merely the social implementation of the radical transparency widely propagated and practiced in social networks. 
Compared to the ecological catastrophe, as an existential problem the data catastrophe is less menacing and as an ethical one less unequivocal. It is possible that this is the reason that Morozov’s discomforting but entirely necessary call for a larger debate to counteract our data-specific ignorance has proved ineffective. Perhaps it explains the appeal of the emancipated-citizen-versus- suppressive-state rhetoric, which was made all the more persuasive when the British government blundered in sending its Secret Intelligence Service to the Guardian’s offices in order to destroy the hard disks holding Snowden’s information. With this purely symbolic act of power—no intelligence agency worthy of its name believes that in the age of digital reproduction unwanted data can be erased through material violence—the media circle was strategically closed at the point where it had begun, namely with Edward Snowden’s “betrayal.” Although many have rightly regarded this betrayal as more of an awakening and as a call to necessary debate, in most cases the discussion does not go beyond the consequences that Snowden himself attributed to his disclosures. It is easy to understand why.

Sound in Z, Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th Century Russia

Andrey Smirnov

CIT — THE CENTRAL INSTITUTE OF LABOUR 

CIT (also known as the Institute for the Scientific Organization of Work and the Mechanization of Man, or TsIT (Tsentral'nyi Institut Truda) in Russian transliteration) was founded by Alexei Gastev in Moscow in 1920 and supported by Lenin. The physiological research at CIT was based on conceptual approaches and experimental methods in the science of biomechanics. It was scientific research with an interdisciplinary and broad-ranging agenda. CIT was an unusual institution that was frequented by fanatical veteran inventors and fascinated youth alike. Alongside the physiological laboratory there were the labs for 'sensorics', 'psychotechnics' and education. A variety of 'multimedia' tools and 'interactive' gadgets were devised including instruments for photography and film, systems for monitoring musical performances and instructorless simulation apparatus for cars and planes. Gastev investigated the functions of certain 'operational complexes' that encompass both worker and machine in a single unbroken chain: 'These machine-human complexes also produce the synthesis between biology and engineering that we are constantly cultivating. And the integrated, calculated incorporation of determinate human masses into a system of mechanisms will be nothing other than social engineering.'¹ By 1926 Gastev had put forward the idea of training automata. He declared: 

«We start from the most primitive, the most elementary movements and produce the machine-ization of man himself... The perfect mastery of a given movement implies the maximum degree of automaticity. If this maximum increases... nervous energy would be freed for new initiating stimuli, and the power of an individual would grow indefinitely.²»

According to the CIT methodology every physical motion of cadets was precisely planned and assessed so that by the end of training, full automatism could be achieved. The human body was to become a machine. The elaborate and functionally differentiated composition of the modern factory suggested to him a gigantic laboratory in which new patterns of human interactivity and cultural value come into being. Because of its emphasis on the cognitive components of labour, some scholars consider Gastev's approach to represent a Marxian variant of cybernetics. As with the concept of 'Organoprojection' (1919) by Pavel Florensky,³ underlying Bernstein and Gastev's approach lay a powerful man-machine metaphor. In 1928 Gastev organized the Ustanovka ('Setup') joint-stock company which audited the work of industrial enterprises and provided recommendations on efficient organization of their work processes on a commercial basis, which led to the complete financial independence of CIT from the State. By 1938 CIT had produced over 500,000 qualified workers in 200 professions and 20,000 industrial trainers in 1,700 educational centres.

«In a semicircular red brick building there is a sacred dwelling of the pontiff of the Machine God. It is A. Gastev's Institute for the Scientific Organization of Work and the Mechanization of Man, distinguished by the most complicated measurements and calculations by fashionable bio-mechanical astrologers of all divine essence and expediency of their idol. 

On entering the building, you find a number of investigators engaged in fixing the general maximum output capacity of the human organism. Four departments and seven laboratories are conducting research in defining the neo-alchemical origins of the human-machine. In a psychological-technical laboratory, other people are trying to ascertain how much energy is used in every movement, and how this movement can be made in the most economical way. The 'balance of energy' is fixed as exactly as possible, and efforts are made carefully to ascertain the optimum periods both of work and rest. 
Gastev has discovered the basic law of movement: all movements, in his theory, may be traced back to two archetypes, an 'impact' and a 'pressing'. On the basis of these two archetypes, a careful analysis is made of all complicated combined processes of work and an investigation of the most rational methods of carrying them out. Anyone entering the front door of this institute as a normal living man, issues from the back door, after passing through countless laboratories, as a completely perfected working machine. But, if so desired, 'directive apparatus', 'administrative machinery', or 'management regulators' can also be produced as well as 'labour machines'. Their practicability is proved, or at least Gastev maintains it is, by the success attained in the use of these appliances, which are unfortunately still animate. Once all superfluous movements have been eliminated, you finally do away with all waste of energy and arrive at a higher output with less expenditure of energy. 
And, thus, it is possible to reach at a lower expenditure of power the highest quality of productivity. Gastev's institute has established also that this principle of organization could be extended to all physiological elements, and thus a 'rhythmic rotation of work' is produced, which not only completely gets rid of all disturbing caprices and eccentricities of the nerves and the soul, but also removes all constitutional mental obstacles. 
The machine man is produced and guaranteed to function properly. Gastev himself is certainly the one who struggled the most with this new idol. For years he had been sitting on a fashionable Mount Sinai fighting with his Machine God, and at last, he exhorted its recognition in its desires and all its precepts. Gastev — one of the most talented poets and thinkers of Russia, now, the first prophet of the machine. For the first time he has received revelation of ten precepts of the God and I had the honour to see them in their entirety. I shall present only two of them since the others will be hardly clear. The fourth precept says: 'Strong impact', the fifth: 'Calculated pressing'. These are precepts of liberation... Everyone can follow them, anyone in the world, on the exact execution of the instructions of the prophet.⁴»

[...] 

Gastev's influence on contemporaries and culture as a whole was considerable. As poet Nikolay Aseev described him in 1922 in his poem 'Gastev': 'Ovid of miners and metalworkers'.⁵ Among his numerous followers were composer Arseny Avraamov, producer, director and actor Vsevolod Meyerhold, physiologist Nikolai Bernstein and many involved in the 'scientific organization of labour' (in Russian transliteration — Nauchnaya Organizacia Truda (NOT)). 

[...] 

'Each turner is a director of the machine tool,' he constantly emphasized. 'We put a resolute end to division into the so-called executive personnel and the personnel of management.'⁶ From its inception he had been the main ideologist of Proletkult. 
Gastev was allegedly a personal acquaintance of, and in correspondence with, Henry Ford. Fascinated by Taylorism and Fordism, he led a popular movement for the 'scientific organization of labour' which considered increasing automaticity and standardization of workers' movements, language, and even thoughts as means for improving the efficiency of labour. He was convinced that his main artistic creation was CIT the Central Institute of Labour which was founded in 1920 and supported by Lenin. 

[...]
 
ORDER 05 

Funeral rites at the cemetery of planets. 
A howl in the catacomb of worlds. 
Millions, into the manhole of the future. 
Billions, weapons stronger. 
Labour camp of the mind. 
Chains of the heart. 
Engineer Everyman. 
Drive geometry into their necks. 
Logarithms into their gestures. 
Defile their romanticism. 
Tons of indignation. 
Normalize the word from pole to pole. 
Phrases on the decimal system. 
A boiler company for speech. 
Annihilate verbality. 
Make the tunnels resound. 
Turn the sky red for arousal. 
Gears—at superspeed. 
Brain machines—high load. 
Cinema eyes—fix. 
Electric nerves—to work. 
Arterial pumps, activate. 

Alexei Gastev. 1921⁷

¹Gastev, A, 'Organicheskoe vnedrenie v predpriiatie' (Organic Penetration into the Enterprise), in Kak nado rabotat (How One Should Work), p.223. Trans. AS.
²Quoted in Slava Gerovitch. 'Love-Hate for Man-Machine Metaphors in Soviet Physiology: From Pavlov to "Physiological Cybernetics"', Science in Context. Vol. 15, 2002, p.344.
³Executed by NKVD in the late 1930s.
⁴ Fülöp-Miller, R. 'Die Machinenanbeter'. Vossische Zeitung, Berlin, 13 October 1923, #485, p.3. Russian trans. by S. Nikritin. RGALI f. 2717 Nikritin. Op.1 e.h. 95. A205. English trans. by A. Smirnov.
⁵ Aseev, N. Stihotvorenia i poemi. Sovetski pisatel, Moscow, 1967.
⁶ Karpichev, A. 'Nestandartni Gastev' (Non-standard Gastev), Standarti i kachestvo magazine, Moscow, N9, 2004. Trans. AS.
⁷ Gastev, A. Order 5.A Packet of Orders. Trans. Greg Afinogenov.

Spandau, The Secret Diaries

Albert Speer

November 8, 1946           
Went to the crude shower cell today. It is divided up by flimsy partitions. Inside is a wood-fired stove for heating the water, and two crates for seats complete the furnishings. Because the shower has no pressure, the whole arrangement is called a "trickle bath.” Hess and I shower together, with a guard supervising. One of the German prisoners of war feeds wood into the stove and regulates the supply of water. He was an infantryman on the Russian front. In 1942 we should have had a tank like the Russian T-34, he says, as well as a weapon like die Soviet 7.62 centimeter antitank gun. Hess becomes agitated. “That was treason too, nothing but treason. One of these days we’ll be surprised to find out all the treason and sabotage there was.” I reply that in the final analysis Hitler himself was responsible for our technical inferiority, that although he had the right ideas about a good many things, he negated his own perceptions by constantly changing his rearmament orders. The German helper and the American guard listen to this discussion with something between boredom and interest. 
The shower has been set up in our cellblock to keep us isolated from the defendants and witnesses in the forthcoming “little” trial; these men are being held in the other wing of the prison. A few weeks ago the American soldiers, often careless about such regulations, let our group and theirs overlap in the prison bath. One day I found lying beside me, splashing in the warm bath water with as much pleasure as myself, Sepp Dietrich, Hitler’s constant companion in the early years. A rather coarse-grained man with a peasant’s sound common sense, he became chief of Hitler’s bodyguard after 1933. An ordinary corporal in the first war, he made a remarkable career in the second. By the end of 1944 he was commander of die Sixth SS Tank Army, bearing die title of an SS Oberstgruppenfuhrer, which corresponds to the rank of a full general. Hitler would refer to him as "my Bliicher.” I had met Sepp Dietrich for the last time during the Ardennes offensive. He seemed then remarkably indifferent to what was going on; he had left the leadership of his SS divisions to his staff and was living in retirement in a remote forest cottage. He had become, I thought, a grumpy eccentric. 
Lying in the tub, Sepp Dietrich told me about the implications of various episodes at Hitler's military conferences toward the end of February and the beginning of March 1945 in Berlin; I had witnessed these episodes but not understood them. 
After the lost Battle of the Bulge around Bastogne, Hitler's last effort was directed toward the southeast, against the Balkans. The new offensive was to have the code name Waldteufel. (Perhaps Hitler was thinking of the well-known composer of waltzes, Waldteufel.) As Hitler conceived the operation, the Sixth SS Tank Army, though badly battered in the fighting around Bastogne, was going first to reconquer the Sava- Danube triangle and then, as Hitler boldly traced its course at his big map table, to advance through Hungary to the southeast. “There is every likelihood that the population of these areas will rise as one man and with their help we will go roaring through the entire Balkans in a life-and-death battle. For I am still determined, gentlemen, to wage the fight in the East offensively. The defensive strategy of our generals helps only the Bolshevists! But I have never in my life been a man for the defensive. Now we shall go over from the defense to the attack once more."
In fact, Hitler had almost always followed this principle. He took the offensive in his early years in Munich. His foreign policy of the thirties was offensive, with its unending succession of surprise maneuvers. The unleashing of the war itself had been an example of offensive policy, and he had waged the military conflict in an offensive spirit as long as he was able. Even after the turning point of the war, the capitulation of Stalingrad, he had organized the offensive operation at Kursk code named Citadel. It was as if he had always known that he had only the choice between the offensive and defeat, as if the loss of the initiative in itself was virtually equivalent to his downfall. For that reason Hitler was doubly shaken when this last offensive also failed, simply ground to a halt in the mud. He gave orders to have the bodyguard and the other SS divisions stripped of their honor armbands. Sepp Dietrich now told me that afterwards he had thrown his own decorations into the fire in which the armbands were burning. “You know," he concluded, “Hitler was crazy for a long time. He simply let his best soldiers dash into the fire."
As a commander of frontline troops, Sepp Dietrich had very rarely been exposed to the overcharged, literally mad atmosphere of the Fuhrer’s Headquarters, and so he had managed to keep some degree of sobriety and perspective. He had almost never been on the receiving end of one of those Hitler tirades that distorted so many men’s grasp of reality. Perhaps I should try to reconstruct one of these monologues, in which Hitler, with voice growing steadily more intense, hammered away at this entourage.
“The Russians have almost bled to death by now,” he would begin. “After the retreats of the past few months we have the priceless advantage of no longer having to defend those enormous spaces. And we know from our own experience how exhausted the Russians must be after their headlong advance. Remember the Caucasus! This means a turning point is now possible for us, as it was then for the Russians. In fact, it is absolutely probable. Consider! The Russians have had tremendous losses in matériel and men. Their stocks of equipment are exhausted. By our estimates they have lost fifteen million men. That is enormous! They cannot survive the next blow. They will not survive it. Our situation is in no way comparable to that of 1918. Even if our enemies think it is.” 
As so often, Hitler had talked himself into an autosuggestive euphoria. “Those who are down today can be on top tomorrow. In any case, we shall go on fighting. It is wonderful to see the fanaticism with which the youngest age-groups throw themselves into the fighting. They know that there are only two possibilities left: Either we will solve this problem, or we will all be destroyed. Providence will never abandon a nation that fights bravely.” With solemnity, Hitler paraphrased the Bible: “A nation in which there is even one righteous man will not perish." There was no doubt that he regarded himself as this one righteous man. Among his favorite sentences during these last weeks was the assertion: "He who does not give up wins through.” Quite often he would add the remark: “But gentlemen, if we are going to lose this war, you will all do well to provide yourselves with a rope.” When he spoke in this vein his eyes gleamed with the savage resolve of a man fighting for his life. “All we have to do is show the enemy once more, by a smashing success, that he cannot win the war. Without Stalin’s fanatical determination, Russia would have collapsed in the autumn of 1941. Frederick the Great, too, in a hopeless situation fought on with indomitable energy. He deserved the name ‘the Great’ not because he won in the end, but because he remained intrepid in misfortune. In the same way posterity will see my importance not so much in the triumphs of the early war years, but in the steadfastness I showed after the severe setbacks of the past several months. Gentlemen, the will always wins!” This was his usual technique—to end his “stick-it-out” speeches with some such slogan. In the course of such outbursts, which he usually delivered hunched over the map table, gesturing wearily to the tall, silent wall of officers, Hitler in a sense gave the impression of being a total stranger. He really came from another world. That was why, whenever he appeared on the scene in the course of the war, he always seemed so bizarre. But I always thought that the alien quality also constituted part of his strength. The military men had all learned to deal with a wide variety of unusual situations. But they were totally unprepared to deal with this visionary. 
[...]
November 13, 1946           
Several days of reverie. Dense fog outside. The guards are unanimous in their belief that Hider is still alive. 
[...]
March 29, 1947 
The missing margin of victory in modem wars is often the last 10 percent. In the Caucasus, for example, on both sides unimportant tank units were fighting one another, the remnants of armored divisions. Suppose that in the autumn of 1942 Hitler, with better armaments and larger numbers of troops, had managed to build up a position extending from the Caspian Sea along the Volga to Stalingrad. It would have been protected on the south by the insurmountable massif of the Caucasus. Had he succeeded, it would have meant a great step forward in his strategic concept of achieving domination of the world step by step. 
My ambivalence troubles me. In the interval I have realized the dangerous, criminal nature of the regime and have publicly acknowledged it. Yet here in this wretched cell I am repeatedly plagued by fantasies in which I imagine how I would have been one of the most respected men in Hitler's world government. Maybe it is the coming of spring after a hard winter in this prison that puts such a disturbing notion into my head. But when I consider that under my direction as armaments minister the bureaucratic shackles restricting production up to 1942 were removed, so that in only two years thereafter the number of armored vehicles almost tripled, of guns over 7.5 caliber quadrupled, that we more than doubled the production of aircraft, and so forth—when I consider that, my head reels. 
In the middle of 1941 Hitler could easily have had an army equipped twice as powerfully as it was. For the production of those fundamental industries that determine the volume of armaments was scarcely higher in 1941 than in 1944. What would have kept us from attaining the later production figures by the spring of 1942? We could even have mobilized approximately three million men of the younger age-groups before 1942 without losses in production. Nor would we have needed forced labor from the occupied territories, if women could have been brought into the labor force, as they were in England and in the United States. Some five million women would have been available for armaments production; and three million additional soldiers would have added up to many divisions. These, moreover, could have been excellently equipped as a result of the increased production. 
Field Marshal Milch, General Fromm [Chief of the Reserve Army], and I were agreed that a military disaster at the beginning of the war, such as the British experienced at Dunkirk in 1940, would have given a spur to our energies also and enabled us to mobilize unused reserves. That was what I meant when I reminded Hitler in my letter of March 29, 1945, that the war had in a sense been lost by the victories of 1940. At that time, I told him, the leadership had cast aside all restraint.
It is strange: here I am sitting in my cell; I believe in the validity of the trial and of the verdict that has brought me here; and yet I cannot resist the temptation of going back over all the squandered opportunities, the chances for victory that slipped away because of incompetence, arrogance, and egotism.
Was victory really lost only by incompetence? That, too, is probably not so. In the final analysis modem wars are decided by superior technological capacity, and we didn’t have that.
[...]
March 31, 1947
The bus that took me under heavy guard to Nuremberg a year and a half ago threaded its way laboriously through ruins. I could only guess where streets had once been. Amid piles of rubble I now and then saw burned-out or bomb-blasted houses still standing by themselves. As we moved farther into the center of the city, I grew increasingly confused, for I could no longer get my bearings in this gigantic rubble heap, although I had known Nuremberg well, since the planning of the buildings for the Party Rallies had been assigned to me. There, in the midst of all this destruction, as though spared by a miracle, stood the Nuremberg Palace of Justice. How often I had driven past it in Hitler’s car. Trite though the idea may be, I cannot help thinking there was a deeper meaning to the fact that this building remained undamaged. Now it is being used by Allied judicial bodies.
[...] 
November 18, 1947 
At night the area near the high wall is flooded with light from searchlights. Tonight I again stood on the bed and for a long time looked across the darkness of the prison yard and over the one-story buildings at this cone of light. It was snowing, huge flakes drifting down quietly and peacefully as in a filmed fairy tale. In the thin mist contours formed where ordinarily there is only blackness. Bored, the Russian soldier on the watchtower aimed his spotlight at our facade. A few seconds later the light struck me; I was dazzled. The light threw me back into reality; I quickly slipped into bed. 
For a long time I listened to the whisper of the falling flakes and watched the shadows of branches on the small illuminated square of my cell wall. Dozing, I remembered the many nights in a hut in the mountains when we were snowed in. How I always used to love the snow; snow and water were my real loves. Thinking about this, I asked myself whether there are temperaments that belong to a specific element. If so, I would unhesitatingly say that fire was Hitler's proper element. Though what he loved about fire was not its Promethean aspect, but its destructive force. That he set the world aflame and brought fire and sword upon the Continent—such statements may be mere imagery. But fire itself, literally and directly, always stirred a profound excitement in him. I recall his ordering showings in the Chancellery of the films of burning London, of the sea of flames over Warsaw, of exploding convoys, and the rapture with which he watched those films. I never saw him so worked up as toward the end of the war, when in a kind of delirium he pictured for himself and for us the destruction of New York in a hurricane of fire. He described the skyscrapers being turned into gigantic burning torches, collapsing upon one another, the glow of the exploding city illuminating the dark sky. Then, as if finding his way back to reality from a frenzy, he declared that Saur must immediately carry out Messerschmitt’s scheme for a four-engine long-range jet bomber. With such range we could repay America a thousandfold for the destruction of our cities. 
He hated snow. That was not only after the first winter outside Moscow, when snow and ice put an end to the envisioned Blitzkrieg. Even in peacetime he would shake his head in bafflement when Eva Braun, my wife, and I set out on a ski tour. The cold, inanimate element was profoundly alien to his nature. Almost invariably he showed irritation at the sight of snow. 
[...]
July 4, 1952 
Today Raeder rebukes me with unexpected vehemence for an innocently intended remark about Hitler’s contempt for other human beings. Schirach joins in the rebuke; Dönitz and, strangely, Funk also look on with obvious satisfaction. Schirach in particular chides me for disloyalty. One cannot condemn Hitler, he says, for never giving up and holding out to the last day. In fact, that is practically the only thing about him that can be admired. Even when he was nothing but a wreck of a human being he tried to turn the course of destiny. In that, Schirach says emphatically, Hitler was certainly not being untrue to himself. 
As always, we do not pursue the dispute; each of us returns to his cell. After the key has turned in the lock, I try to establish for myself when what they call my treason began. Was it during the early days after July 20, 1944, when it began to be rumored that my name had figured on the conspirators’ list of cabinet ministers? Or was it in September, when I sent a memorandum to Hitler for the first time arguing that a material basis for victory no longer existed? Or, finally, was it in the course of that monologue of Hitler’s in the Chancellery at the end of November 1944, when he cynically and with utter contempt for humanity spoke of the destruction of Germany? 
I still remember how he began with a crude joke almost as soon as he had invited me to sit down. With a sweeping movement of his arm he indicated the destruction outside the window. “What does all that signify! Speer”—he made a motion as though he meant to grip my arm— “in Berlin alone you would have had to tear down eighty thousand buildings to complete our new building plan. Unfortunately the English haven’t carried out this work exactly in accordance with your plans. But at least they have launched the project.” He made an effort to laugh when he saw me remaining grave. “We’ll rebuild our cities more beautiful than they ever were. I shall see to that. With more monumental buildings than they ever had. But to do that we must win the war!” Even now the old passion for showy buildings could carry him away. He had altogether forgotten the concession he had made to me a year before, that immediately after the war he would let me build nothing but housing for a while. But I could not contradict Hitler as he sat there exhausted in his chair, clutching his trembling arm. In any case, by now it no longer mattered all that much what he had to say about the future. 
Hitler went on, “These air raids don’t bother me. I only laugh at them. The less the population has to lose, the more fanatically it will fight. We’ve seen that with the English, you know, and even more with the Russians. One who has lost everything has to win everything. The enemy’s advance is actually a help to us. People fight fanatically only when they have the war at their own front doors. That’s how people are. Now even the worst idiot realizes that his house will never be rebuilt unless we win. For that reason alone we’ll have no revolution this time. The rabble aren’t going to have the chance to cover up their cowardice by a so-called revolution. I guarantee that! No city will be left in the enemy’s hands until it’s a heap of ruins.” He let his head droop, then straightened up with a sudden jerk. "I haven’t the slightest intention of surrendering. Providence tests men and gives the laurel to the one who remains undaunted. As long as I live we will withstand this testing. It’s the man who can be ruthless, not the coward, who wins. Remember this, it isn’t technical superiority that proves decisive. We lost that long ago. I know that too. Besides, November has always been my lucky month. And we’re in November now.” Hitler grew more and more passionate. “I won’t tolerate any opposition, Speer. When the war is over, the people can vote on me for all I care. But anybody who disagrees now is going straight to the gallows without question. If the German people are incapable of appreciating me, I´ll fight this fight alone. Let them go ahead and leave me! The reward always comes from history alone, you know. Don’t expect a thing from the populace. They cheered me yesterday and will wave the white flag today. Gauleiter Florian himself told me one such incident. The people know nothing of history. You cannot imagine how sick I am of it all.”
I had often heard Hitler arguing that only the great individuals decide the course of history. And he had repeated until we were tired of hearing it that he with his allegedly iron nerves was indispensable. Even before the war he had used that argument to justify the necessity of beginning the conflict during his lifetime. But I had always thought that his immense energy was to be devoted to the cause of the German people; and he had after all said again and again how much he would prefer to listen to music, build, and sit on his mountaintop. Now all these masks of the aesthete and the man of the people had dropped away. Nothing but iciness and misanthropy came to the fore. And the intimacy with which he drew us into these thoughts had actually become physically repulsive to me. “My dear Speer,” he concluded, with an attempt to find his way back to our old closeness, “don’t let the destruction confuse you. And you mustn’t be bothered by the people’s whining.”

The Terror of Evidence

Marcus Steinweg

CATASTROPHE

The ancient Greek word katastrophé means “sudden change”. In his interpretation of Plato’s cave allegory, the word katastrophé may not appear, but Heidegger does speak of sudden change. It is the “essence of paideia.” We translate paideia as “education.” But what does education have to do with catastrophe? The fact that education is catastrophic means first and foremost that it demands a change in the subject, who may remain a child (pais) no longer. In the Allegory of the Cave, this change contains a turning toward the real, that is, toward ideas. It presumes the turning of “one’s gaze from the shadows.” Heidegger’s pedagogy builds upon Plato to make it possible to differentiate the true from the untrue. Is it that easy? This same Heidegger, who based the “essence of ‘education’” in the “essence of the ‘truth’” says of the truth (aletheia, “unhiddenness”) that it reaches back to the lethe (“hiddenness”): “The unhidden must be torn away from the hidden, in a certain sense it must be stolen from such.” However, at another point Heidegger also says that the “field of the lethe … [denies] every revelation of what exists and therefore also what is familiar. At the site of its essence, which it itself is, lethe causes everything to disappear.” We miss the point of Heidegger’s pedagogy of catastrophe if we don’t associate it with this disappearance. Lethe is like a black hole. It doesn’t just absorb what exists; it also causes its appearance or unhiddenness to disappear. It erases the trace of the trace. That is the real catastrophe: the sudden change of what exists into nothingness. This change points to the “Kehre im Ereignis,” the turn in the event, which Heidegger associated with the counterturning of the truth. The term “counterturning is key to Heidegger’s 1942 lecture Holderlin’s Hymn “The Ister.” He points to the inherent tension within be-ing (Seyn) itself, which collapses into the event, that is, with the concept that, as Agamben puts it, “designates both the centre and the extreme limit of Heidegger’s thought after Sein und Zeit.” Heidegger’s thinking of the event proves to be catastrophic thinking, because the event—which is to say the interlinked nature of Sein and Dasein, being and being-there—is itself catastrophic, insofar as it keeps both poles distinct while at the same time keeping them in correlation. Diaphora is the Greek word for this difference, which posits the event as non-event, as the withdrawal and absence of its complete essencing (Wesung) = a rift in being (Seyn).

The Terror of Evidence

Marcus Steinweg

HORROR
Horror is the fright that causes the subject first to tremble, then to freeze. Faced with the inconceivable, its coordinates and concepts fail. Horror provokes a loss of language that can lead to madness. It opens a passage in the middle of the world that leads not to another world, but to this one in its factual indifference. By means of sense, horror shreds the promise of sense in the coherence known as the world. It reveals the naked incoherence of the world.

“Necessity’s Other”: Charlotte Moorman and the Plasticity of Denial and Consent

Kristine Stiles

Destruction’s Cut

[...] Moorman became increasingly involved in the intersection of eroticism and destruction. So, too, had one of her closest friends, Yoko Ono, early in her career used destruction as a creative device. Moorman knew that Ono had premiered her performance Cut Piece in Kyoto in July 1964 and had seen Ono perform it again at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York in March 1965. Sitting motionless after inviting the audience to come to the stage and cut away her clothing, and with the stoicism of a rock, Ono displayed no emotion, conveying something of the “psychic experiences and intimate sensations” she alluded to in her “Statement” in the Village Voice some years later:

People went on cutting the parts
they do not like of me finally there
was only the stone remained of me
that was in me but they were still not
satisfied and wanted to know what
it’s like in the stone.

Moorman carefully scrutinized Ono's performance and described "the elegance, the drama, and the seriousness” of the work. Moorman would perform the piece throughout her life.

Ono presented Cut Piece again at the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) in London in September 1966, the same year that, while on tour in Europe, Moorman first performed Cut Piece. But unlike Ono, Moorman “claimed that she ‘could be raped onstage,’” a comment that Rothfuss describes as “melodramatic” and that I would label as nonsense. Rothfuss interprets Moorman's body language in Kenneth Werner's photograph of her performing Cut Piece as “stony and her neck tense as two men snip at her dress.” I read Moorman’s expression as rapture, akin to the visage of Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647 - 1652) pierced by an arrow, the expression of intense eroticism at the juncture of danger.

By 1967, Moorman had become more closely aligned with the milieu of artists associated with destruction in art, ranging from Ono to Lil Picard, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Jean Toche. Jon Hendricks, and Al Hansen, among others. Ortiz (like Ono, Hansen, and Toche) had participated in London DIAS, and then, with Hendricks, organized “Twelve Evenings of Manipulations” in October 1967 at the Judson Church in New York City. Moorman joined Paik in this series of events. Geoffrey Hendricks described the event this way: Moorman lay on her back to play the cello. while he “cut a fine line on his arm with a razor blade.” Geoffrey Hendricks later asked, “Was this Nam June atoning for Charlotte's arrest?”

Again with Jon Hendricks. Ortiz was responsible for organizing “DIAS/USA” which was to be the sequel to DIAS in London and was to take place in April and May 1968. Eager to promote their upcoming symposium, they held “DIAS/US”: Α Preview” on March 22. Its “most vivid moment” occurred, according to Geoffrey Hendriks, when Moorman performed Paik’s One for Violin Solo:

Saul Gottlieb, a political activist in the East Village and organizer of alternative programming, felt that Charlotte should not destroy the violin. From the back of the room, he got into a dialogue with Charlotte, explaining how the violin should be given to some poor child on the Lower East Side.... Charlotte said things like that should be done, but this was music by a great composer and should be performed.... The suspense was great. Slowly she raised the violin over her head. At that point Saul pushed his way through the crowd, slid over the long table, and stood in front of Charlotte just as she brought the violin down, smashing it on Saul’s head. Everyone was stunned.

Α different vision of this event by Jill Johnston of the Village Voice reports Moorman as “angry,” demanding to know who Gottlieb thought he was (to interrupt her performance), slapping Gottlieb's face, accusing him of “being as bad as the New York police,” and then when he “stretched himself out on the table in front her ... bash[ing] him on the head with the violin and the blood was spilled.” The violence of the event was debated in the counterculture newspaper East Village Other, with Gottlieb referring to Moorman as a “Mack truck” and insisting that “the DIAS people are two years behind the times — the time tor purely SYMBOLIC destruction is over.” Moorman’s action was anything but symbolic: it was a direct assault on Gottlieb's effort to alter her artistic performance. Geoffrey Hendricks “retrieved the neck the violin [and] later … painted a bank of cumulus clouds on the fingerboard,” titling it In Memoriam: Saul Gottlieb. Within the year, Gottlieb died of cancer.

Red Stack Attack! 
Algorithms, Capital and the Automation of the Common

Tiziana Terranova

What is at stake in the following is the relationship between 'algorithms' and 'capital'—that is, 'the increasing centrality of algorithms to organizational practices arising out of the centrality of information and communication technologies stretching all the way from production to circulation, from industrial logistics to financial speculation, from urban planning and design to social communication'. These apparently esoteric mathematical structures have also become part of the daily life of users of contemporary digital and networked media. Most users of the Internet daily interface or are subjected to the powers of algorithms such as Google's Pagerank (which sorts the results of our search queries) or Facebook Edgerank (which automatically decides in which order we should get our news on our feed) not to mention the many other less known algorithms (Appinions, Klout, Hummingbird, PKC, Perlin noise, Cinematch, KDP Select and many more) which modulate our relationship with data, digital devices and each other. This widespread presence of algorithms in the daily life of digital culture, however, is only one of the expressions of the pervasiveness of computational techniques as they become increasingly coextensive with processes of production, consumption and distribution displayed in logistics, finance, architecture, medicine, urban planning, infographics, advertising, dating, gaming, publishing and all kinds of creative expressions (music, graphics, dance etc).

The staging of the encounter between 'algorithms' and 'capital' as a political problem invokes the possibility of breaking with the spell of 'capitalist realism'—that is, the idea that capitalism constitutes the only possible economy-while at the same time claiming that new ways of organizing the production and distribution of wealth need to seize on scientific and technological developments. Going beyond the opposition between state and market, public and private, the concept of the common is used here as a way to instigate the thought and practice of a possible post-capitalist mode of existence for networked digital media.

ALGORITHMS, CAPITAL AND AUTOMATION

Looking at algorithms from a perspective that seeks the constitution of a new political rationality around the concept of the 'common' means engaging with the ways in which algorithms are deeply implicated in the changing nature of automation. Automation is described by Marx as a process of absorption into the machine of the 'general productive forces of the social brain' such as ' knowledge and skills', which hence appear as an attribute of capital rather than as the product of social labour. Looking at the history of the implication of capital and technology, it is clear how automation has evolved away from the thermo-mechanical model of the early industrial assembly line toward the electro-computational dispersed networks of contemporary capitalism. Hence it is possible to read algorithms as part of a genealogical line that, as Marx put it in the 'Fragment on Machines', starting with the adoption of technology by capitalism as fixed capital, pushes the former through several metamorphoses 'whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery...set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself'. The industrial automaton was clearly thermodynamical, and gave rise to a system 'consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs so that workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages'. The digital automaton, however, is electrocomputational, it puts 'the soul to work' and involves primarily the nervous system and the brain and comprises 'possibilities of virtuality, simulation, abstraction, feedback and autonomous processes'. The digital automaton unfolds in networks consisting of electronic and nervous connections so that users themselves are cast as quasi-automatic relays of a ceaseless information flow. It is in this wider assemblage, then, that algorithms need to be located when discussing the new modes of automation.

Quoting a textbook of computer science, Andrew Goffey describes algorithms as 'the unifying concept for all the activities which computer scientists engage in...and the fundamental entity with which computer scientists operate'. An algorithm can be provisionally defined as the 'description of the method by which a task is to be accomplished' by means of sequences of steps or instructions, sets of ordered steps that operate on data and computational structures. As such, an algorithm is an abstraction, 'having an autonomous existence independent of what computer scientists like to refer to as "implementation details," that is, its embodiment in a particular programming language for a particular machine architecture'. It can vary in complexity from the most simple set of rules described in natural language (such as those used to generate coordinated patterns of movement in smart mobs) to the most complex mathematical formulas involving all kinds of variables (as in the famous Monte Carlo algorithm used to solve problems in nuclear physics and later also applied to stock markets and now to the study of non-linear technological diffusion processes). At the same time, in order to work, algorithms must exist as part of assemblages that include hardware, data, data structures (such as lists, databases, memory, etc.), and the behaviours and actions of bodies. For the algorithm to become social software, in fact, 'it must gain its power as a social or cultural artifact and process by means of a better and better accommodation to behaviors and bodies which happen on its outside'.

Furthermore, as contemporary algorithms become increasingly exposed to larger and larger data sets (and in general to a growing entropy in the flow of data also known as Big Data), they are, according to Luciana Parisi, becoming something more then mere sets of instructions to be performed: 'infinite amounts of information interfere with and re-program algorithmic procedures...and data produce alien rules'. It seems clear from this brief account, then, that algorithms are neither a homogeneous set of techniques, nor do they guarantee 'the infallible execution of automated order and control'.

From the point of view of capitalism, however, algorithms are mainly a form of 'fixed capital'—that is, they are just means of production. They encode a certain quantity of social knowledge (abstracted from that elaborated by mathematicians, programmers, but also users' activities), but they are not valuable per se. In the current economy, they are valuable only in as much as they allow for the conversion of such knowledge into exchange value (monetization) and its (exponentially increasing) accumulation (the titanic quasi-monopolies of the social Internet). In as much as they constitute fixed capital, algorithms such as Google's Page Rank and Facebook's Edgerank appear 'as a presupposition against which the value-creating power of the individual labour capacity is an infinitesimal, vanishing magnitude', and that is why calls for individual retributions to users for their 'free labor' are misplaced. It is clear that for Marx what needs to be compensated is not the individual work of the user, but the much larger powers of social cooperation thus unleashed, and that this compensation implies a profound transformation of the grip that the social relation that we call the capitalist economy has on society.

From the point of view of capital, then, algorithms are just fixed capital, means of production finalized to achieve an economic return. But that does not mean that, like all technologies and techniques, that is all that they are. Marx explicitly states that even as capital appropriates technology as the most effective form of the subsumption of labor, that does not mean that this is all that can be said about it. Its existence as machinery, he insists, is not 'identical with its existence as capital... and therefore it does not follow that subsumption under the social relation of capital is the most appropriate and ultimate social relation of production for the application of machinery'. It is then essential to remember that the instrumental value that algorithms have for capital does not exhaust the 'value' of technology in general and algorithms in particular—that is, their capacity to express not just 'use value' as Marx put it, but also aesthetic, existential, social, and ethical values. Wasn't it this clash between the necessity of capital to reduce software development to exchange value, thus marginalizing the aesthetic and ethical values of software creation, that pushed Richard Stallman and countless hackers and engineers towards the Free and Open Source Movement? Isn't the enthusiasm that animates hack-meetings and hacker-spaces fueled by the energy liberated from the constraints of 'working' for a company in order to remain faithful to one's own aesthetics and ethics of coding?

Contrary to some variants of Marxism which tend to identify technology completely with 'dead labor', 'fixed capital' or 'instrumental rationality', and hence with control and capture. it seems important to remember how, for Marx, the evolution of machinery also indexes a level of development of productive powers that are unleashed but never totally contained by the capitalist economy. What interested Marx (and what makes his work still relevant to those who strive for a post-capitalist mode of existence) is the way in which, so he claims, the tendency of capital to invest in technology to automate and hence reduce its labor costs to a minimum potentially frees up a 'surplus' of time and energy (labor) or an excess of productive capacity in relation to the basic, important and necessary labor of reproduction (a global economy, for example, should first of all produce enough wealth for all members of a planetary population to be adequately fed, clothed, cured and sheltered). However, what characterizes a capitalist economy is that this surplus of time and energy is not simply released, but must be constantly reabsorbed in the cycle of production of exchange value leading to increasing accumulation of wealth by the few (the collective capitalist) at the expense of the many (the multitudes).

Automation, then, when seen from the point of view of capital, must always be balanced with new ways to control (that is, absorb and exhaust) the time and energy thus released. It must produce poverty and stress when there should be wealth and leisure. It must make direct labour the measure of value even when it is apparent that science, technology and social cooperation constitute the source of the wealth produced. It thus inevitably leads to the periodic and widespread destruction of this accumulated wealth, in the form of psychic burnout, environmental catastrophe and physical destruction of the wealth through war. It creates hunger where there should be satiety, it puts food banks next to the opulence of the super-rich. That is why the notion of a post-capitalist mode of existence must become believable, that is, it must become what Maurizio Lazzarato described as an enduring autonomous focus of subjectivation. What a post-capitalist commonism then can aim for is not only a better distribution of wealth compared to the unsustainable one that we have today, but also a reclaiming of 'disposable time'—that is, time and energy freed from work to be deployed in developing and complicating the very notion of what is 'necessary'. The history of capitalism has shown that automation as such has not reduced the quantity and intensity of labor demanded by managers and capitalists. On the contrary, in as much as technology is only a means of production to capital, where it has been able to deploy other means, it has not innovated. For example, industrial technologies of automation in the factory do not seem to have recently experienced any significant technological breakthroughs. Most industrial labor today is still heavily manual, automated only in the sense of being hooked up to the speed of electronic networks of prototyping, marketing and distribution; and it is rendered economically sustainable only by political means—that is, by exploiting geo-political and economic differences (arbitrage) on a global scale and by controlling migration flows through new technologies of the border. The state of things in most industries today is intensified exploitation, which produces an impoverished mode of mass production and consumption that is damaging to both to the body, subjectivity, social relations and the environment. As Marx put it, disposable time released by automation should allow for a change in the very essence of the 'human' so that the new subjectivity is allowed to return to the performing of necessary labor in such a way as to redefine what is necessary and what is needed.

It is not then simply about arguing for a 'return' to simpler times, but on the contrary a matter of acknowledging that growing food and feeding populations, constructing shelter and adequate housing, learning and researching, caring for the children, the sick and the elderly requires the mobilization of social invention and cooperation. The whole process is thus transformed from a process of production by the many for the few steeped in impoverishment and stress to one where the many redefine the meaning of what is necessary and valuable, while inventing new ways of achieving it. This corresponds in a way to the notion of 'commonfare' as recently elaborated by Andrea Fumagalli and Carlo Vercellone, implying, in the latter's words, 'the socialization of investment and money and the question of the modes of management and organisation which allow for an authentic democratic reappropriation of the institutions of Welfare...and the ecologic re-structuring of our systems of production'. We need to ask then not only how algorithmic automation works today (mainly in terms of control and monetization, feeding the debt economy) but also what kind of time and energy it subsumes and how it might be made to work once taken up by different social and political assemblages-autonomous ones not subsumed by or subjected to the capitalist drive to accumulation and exploitation.

THE RED STACK: VIRTUAL MONEY, SOCIAL NETWORKS, BIO-HYPERMEDIA

In a recent intervention, digital media and political theorist Benjamin H. Bratton has argued that we are witnessing the emergence of a new nomos of the earth, where older geopolitical divisions linked to territorial sovereign powers are intersecting the new nomos of the Internet and new forms of sovereignty extending in electronic space. This new heterogenous nomos involves the overlapping of national governments (China, United States, European Union, Brasil, Egypt and such likes), transnational bodies (the IMF, the WTO, the European Banks and NGOs of various types), and corporations such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, etc., producing differentiated patterns of mutual accommodation marked by moments of conflict Drawing on the organizational structure of computer networks or 'the OSI network model. upon with the TCP/IP stack and the global internet itself is indirectly based', Bratton has developed the concept and/or prototype of the 'stack' to define the features of 'a possible new nomos of the earth linking technology, nature and the human'. The stack supports and modulates a kind of 'social cybernetics' able to compose 'both equilibrium and emergence'. As a 'megastructure', the stack implies a 'confluence of interoperable standards-based complex material-information systems of systems, organized according to a vertical section, topographic model of layers and protocols... composed equally of social, human and "analog" layers (chthonic energy sources, gestures. affects, user-actants, interfaces, cities and streets, rooms and buildings. organic and inorganic envelopes) and informational, non-human computational and "digital" layers (multiplexed fiber-optic cables, datacenters. databases, data standards and protocols, urban-scale networks, embedded systems. universal addressing tables)'.

In this section, drawing on Bratton's political prototype, I would like to propose the concept of the 'Red Stack'—that is, a new nomos for the post-capitalist common. Materializing the 'red stack' involves engaging with (at least) three levels of socio-technical innovation: virtual money, social networks. and bio-hypermedia. These three levels, although 'stacked', that is, layered, are to be understood at the same time as interacting transversally and nonlinearly. They constitute a possible way to think about an infrastructure of autonomization linking together technology and subjectivation.

VIRTUAL MONEY

The contemporary economy, as Christian Marazzi and others have argued, is founded on a form of money which has been turned into a series of signs, with no fixed referent (such as gold) to anchor them, explicitly dependent on the computational automation of simulational models, screen media with automated displays of data (indexes, graphics etc) and alga-trading (bot-to-bot transactions) as its emerging mode of automation. As Toni Negri also puts it, 'today, money has the particular function—as an abstract machine—of being the supreme form of measurement of the value extracted from society through the real subsumption of this current society by capital'. Since ownership and control of capital-money (different, as Maurizio Lazzarato remind us, from wage-money, in its capacity to be used not only as a means of exchange, but as a means of investment empowering certain futures over others) is crucial to maintaining populations bonded to the current power relation, how can we turn financial money into the money of the common? An experiment such as Bitcoin demonstrates that in a way 'the taboo on money has been broken', and that beyond the limits of this experience, forkings are already developing in different directions. What kind of relationship can be established between the algorithms of money-creation and 'a constituent practice which affirms other criteria for the measurement of wealth, valorizing new and old collective needs outside the logic of finance'? Current attempts to develop new kinds of cryptocurrencies must be judged, valued and rethought on the basis of this simple question as posed by Andrea Fumagalli: Is the currency created not limited solely to being a means of exchange, but can it also affect the entire cycle of money creation-from finance to exchange? Does it allow speculation and hoarding, or does it promote investment in post-capitalist projects and facilitate freedom from exploitation, autonomy of organization etc.? What is becoming increasingly clear is that algorithms are an essential part of the process of creation of the money of the common, but that algorithms also have politics (What are the gendered politics of individual 'mining', for example, and of the complex technical knowledge and machinery implied in mining bitcoins?) Furthermore, the drive to completely automate money production in order to escape the fallacies of subjective factors and social relations might cause such relations to come back in the form of speculative trading. In the same way as financial capital is intrinsically linked to a certain kind of subjectivity (the financial predator narrated by Hollywood cinema), so an autonomous form of money needs to be both jacked into and productive of a new kind of subjectivity not limited to the hacking milieu as such, but at the same time oriented not towards monetization and accumulation but towards the empowering of social cooperation. Other questions that the design of the money of the common might involve are: Is it possible to draw on the current financialization of the Internet by corporations such as Google (with its Adsense/Adword programme) to subtract money from the circuit of capitalist accumulation and tum it into a money able to finance new forms of commonfare (education, research, health, environment etc)? What are the lessons to be learned from crowdfunding models and their limits in thinking about new forms of financing autonomous projects of social cooperation? How can we perfect and extend experiments such as that carried out by the Inter-Occupy movement during the Katrina hurricane in turning social networks into crowdfunding networks which can then be used as logistical infrastructure able to move not only information, but also physical goods?

SOCIAL NETWORKS

Over the past ten years, digital media have undergone a process of becoming social that has introduced genuine innovation in relation to previous forms of social software (mailing lists, forums, multi-user domains, etc). If mailing lists, for example, drew on the communicational language of sending and receiving, social network sites and the diffusion of (proprietary) social plug-ins have turned the social relation itself into the content of new computational procedures. When sending and receiving a message, we can say that algorithms operate outside the social relation as such, in the space of the transmission and distribution of messages; but social network software intervenes directly in the social relationship. Indeed, digital technologies and social network sites 'cut into' the social relation as such-that is, they turn it into a discrete object and introduce a new supplementary relation. If, with Gabriel Tarde and Michel Foucault, we understand the social relation as an asymmetrical relation involving at least two poles (one active and the other receptive) and characterized by a certain degree of freedom, we can think of actions such as liking and being liked, writing and reading, looking and being looked at, tagging and being tagged, and even buying and selling as the kind of conducts that transindividuate the social (they induce the passage from the pre-individual through the individual to the collective). In social network sites and social plug-ins these actions become discrete technical objects (like buttons, comment boxes, tags etc) which are then linked to underlying data structures (for example the social graph) and subjected to the power of ranking of algorithms. This produces the characteristic spatio-temporal modality of digital sociality today: the feed, an algorithmically customized flow of opinions, beliefs, statements, desires expressed in words, images, sounds etc. Much reviled in contemporary critical theory for their supposedly homogenizing effect, these new technologies of the social, however, also open the possibility of experimenting with many-to-many interaction and thus with the very processes of individuation. Political experiments (see the various Internet-based parties such as the 5 star movement, Pirate Party, Partido X) draw on the powers of these new socio-technical structures in order to produce massive processes of participation and deliberation; but, as with Bitcoin, they also show the far from resolved processes that link political subjectivation to algorithmic automation. They can function, however, because they draw on widely socialized new knowledges and crafts (how to construct a profile, how to cultivate a public, how to share and comment, how to make and post photos, videos, notes, how to publicize events) and on 'soft skills' of expression and relation (humour, argumentation, sparring) which are not implicitly good or bad, but present a series of affordances or degrees of freedom of expression for political action that cannot be left to capitalist monopolies.

However, it is not only a matter of using social networks to organize resistance and revolt, but also a question of constructing a social mode of self-information which can collect and reorganize existing drives towards autonomous and singular becomings. Given that algorithms, as we have said, cannot be unlinked from wider social assemblages, their materialization within the red stack involves the hijacking of social network technologies away from a mode of consumption whereby social networks can act as a distributed platform for learning about the world, fostering and nurturing new competences and skills, fostering planetary connections, and developing new ideas and values.

BIO-HYPERMEDIA

The term bio-hypermedia, coined by Giorgio Griziotti, identifies the ever more intimate relation between bodies and devices which is part of the diffusion of smart phones, tablet computers and ubiquitous computation. As digital networks shift away from the centrality of the desktop or even laptop machine towards smaller, portable devices, a new social and technical landscape emerges around 'apps' and 'clouds' which directly 'intervene in how we feel, perceive and understand the world'. Bratton defines the 'apps' for platforms such as Android and Apple as interfaces or membranes linking individual devices to large databases stored in the 'cloud' (massive data processing and storage centres owned by large corporations).

This topological continuity has allowed for the diffusion of downloadable apps which increasingly modulate the relationship of bodies and space. Such technologies not only 'stick to the skin and respond to the touch' (as Bruce Sterling once put it), but create new 'zones' around bodies which now move through 'coded spaces' overlaid with information, able to locate other bodies and places within interactive, informational visual maps. New spatial ecosystems emerging at the crossing of the 'natural' and the artificial allow for the activation of a process of chaosmotic co-creation of urban life. Here again we can see how apps are, for capital, simply a means to 'monetize' and 'accumulate' data about the body's movement while subsuming it ever more tightly in networks of consumption and surveillance. However, this subsumption of the mobile body under capital does not necessarily imply that this is the only possible use of these new technological affordances. Turning bio-hypermedia into components of the red stack (the mode of reappropriation of fixed capital in the age of the networked social) implies drawing together current experimentation with hardware (shenzei phone hacking technologies, makers movements, etc.) able to support a new breed of 'imaginary apps' (think for example about the apps devised by the artist collective Electronic Disturbance Theatre, which allow migrants to bypass border controls, or apps able to track the origin of commodities, their degrees of exploitation, etc.).

CONCLUSIONS

This short essay, a synthesis of a wider research process, means to propose another strategy for the construction of a machinic infrastructure of the common. The basic idea is that information technologies, which comprise algorithms as a central component, do not simply constitute a tool of capital, but are simultaneously constructing new potentialities for-postneoliberal modes of government and postcapitalist modes of production. It is a matter here of opening possible lines of contamination with the large movements of programmers, hackers and makers involved in a process of re-coding of network architectures and information technologies based on values others than exchange and speculation, but also of acknowledging the wide process of technosocial literacy that has recently affected large swathes of the world population. It is a matter, then, of producing a convergence able to extend the problem of the reprogramming of the Internet away from recent trends towards corporatisation and monetisation at the expense of users' freedom and control. Linking bio-informational communication to issues such as the production of a money of the commons able to socialize wealth, against current trends towards privatisation, accumulation and concentration, and saying that social networks and diffused communicational competences can also function as means to organize cooperation and produce new knowledges and values, means seeking a new political synthesis which moves us away from the neoliberal paradigm of debt, austerity and accumulation. This is not a utopia, but a program for the invention of constituent social algorithms of the common.

To our friends

The Invisible Committe

The falsity of the entire Western apocalyptic consists in projecting onto the world the mourning we're not able to do in regard to it. It's not the world that is lost, it's we who have lost the world and go on losing it. It's not the world that is going to end soon, it's we who are finished, amputated, cut-off, we who refuse vital contact with the real in a hallucinatory way. The crisis is not economic, ecological, or political, the crisis is above all that of presence. To such a point that the must of commodities—the iPhone and the Hummer being exemplary cases—consists in a sophisticated absence outfit. On the one hand, the iPhone concentrates all the possible accesses to the world and to others in a single object. It is the lamp and the camera, the mason's level and the musician's recording device, the TV and the compass, the tourist guide and the means of communication; on the other, it is the prosthesis that bars any openness to what is there and places me in a regime of constant, convenient semi-presence, retaining a part of my being-there in its grip. They've even launched a smartphone app designed to remedy the fact that "our 24/7 connection to the digital world disconnects us from the real world around us." It is brightly called the GPS for the Soul. As for the Hummer, it's the possibility of transporting my autistic bubble, my impermeability to everything, into the most inaccessible recesses of "nature" and coming back intact. That Google has declared the "fight against death" to be a new industrial horizon shows how one can be mistaken about what life is.

At the apex of his insanity, Man has even proclaimed himself a "geological force," going so far as to give the name of his species to a phase of the life of the planet: he's taken to speaking of an "anthropocene." For the last time, he assigns himself the main role, even if it's to accuse himself of having trashed everything—the seas and the skies, the ground and what's underground—even if it's to confess his guilt for the unprecedented extinction of plant and animal species. But what's remarkable is that he continues relating in the same disastrous manner to the disaster produced by his own disastrous relationship with the world. He calculates the rate at which the ice pack is disappearing. He measures the extermination of the non-human forms of life. As to climate change, he doesn't talk about it based on his sensible experience—a bird that doesn't return in the same period of the year, an insect whose sounds aren't heard anymore, a plant that no longer flowers at the same time as some other one. He talks about it scientifically with numbers and averages. He thinks he's saying something when he establishes that the temperature will rise so many degrees and the precipitation will decrease by so many inches or millimeters. He even speaks of "biodiversity." He observes the rarefaction of life on earth from space. He has the hubris to claim, paternally, to be "protecting the environment," which certainly never asked for anything of the sort. All this has the look of a last bold move in a game that can't be won.

The objective disaster serves mainly to mask another disaster, this one more obvious still and more massive. The exhaustion of natural resources is probably less advanced than the exhaustion of subjective resources, of vital resources, that is afflicting our contemporaries. If so much satisfaction is derived from surveying the devastation of the environment it's largely because this veils the shocking destruction of interiorities. Every oil spill, every sterile plain, every species extinction is an image of our souls in shreds, a reflection of our absence from the world, of our personal inability to inhabit it. Fukushima offers the spectacle of this complete failure of man and his mastery, which only produces ruins-and those Japanese plains, intact in appearance but where no one can live for decades. A never-ending decomposition that is finishing the job of making the world uninhabitable: the West will have ended up borrowing its mode of existence from what it fears the most radioactive waste.

When one asks the left of the left what the revolution would consist in, it is quick to answer: "placing the human at the center." What that left doesn't realize is how tired of the human the world is, how tired of humanity we are—of that species that thought it was the jewel of creation, that believed it was entitled to ravage everything since everything belonged to it. "Placing the human at the center" was the Western project. We know how that turned out. The time has come to jump ship, to betray the species. There's no great human family that would exist separately from each of its worlds, from each of its familiar universes, each of the forms of life that are strewn across the earth. There is no humanity, there are only earthlings and their enemies, the Occidentals, of whatever skin color they happen to be. We other revolutionaries, with our atavistic humanism, would do well to inform ourselves about the uninterrupted uprisings by the indigenous peoples of Central and South America over the past twenty years. Their watch word could be "Place the earth at the center." It's a declaration of war against Man. Declaring war on him could be the best way to bring him back down to earth, if only he didn't play deaf, as always.

Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism

E. P. Thompson

IT IS COMMONPLACE THAT THE YEARS BETWEEN I3OO AND 1650 SAW within the intellectual culture of Western Europe important changes in the apprehension of time.¹ This is a very early clock: Chaucer (unlike Chauntecleer) was a Londoner, and was aware of the times of Court, of urban organization, and of that "merchant's time" which Jacques Le Goff, in a suggestive article in Annales, has opposed to the time of the medieval church.² [...] Sidereal time, which has been present since literature began, has now moved at one step from the heavens into the home. 

[...]

However, this gross impressionism is unlikely to advance the present enquiry: how far, and in what ways, did this shift in time-sense affect labour discipline, and how far did it influence the inward apprehension of time of working people? If the transition to mature industrial society entailed a severe restructuring of working habits — new disciplines, new incentives, and a new human nature upon which these incentives could bite effectively — how far is this related to changes in the inward notation of time ? 

[...] 

It is well known that among primitive peoples the measurement of time is commonly related to familiar processes in the cycle of work or of domestic chores. Evans-Pritchard has analysed the time-sense of the Nuer: 

The daily timepiece is the cattle clock, the round of pastoral tasks, and the time of day and the passage of time through a day are to a Nuer primarily the succession of these tasks and their relation to one another. 

Among the Nandi an occupational definition of time evolved covering not only each hour, but half hours of the day — at 5-30 in the morning the oxen have gone to the grazing-ground, at 6 the sheep have been unfastened, at 6-30 the sun has grown, at 7 it has become warm, at 7-30 the goats have gone to the grazing-ground, etc. — an uncommonly well-regulated economy. In a similar way terms evolve for the measurement of time intervals. In Madagascar time might be measured by "a rice-cooking" (about half an hour) or "the frying of a locust" (a moment). The Cross River natives were reported as saying "the man died in less than the time in which maize is not yet completely roasted" (less than fifteen minutes).³

It is not difficult to find examples of this nearer to us in cultural time. Thus in seventeenth-century Chile time was often measured in "credos": an earthquake was described in 1647 as lasting for the period of two credos; while the cooking-time of an egg could be judged by an Ave Maria said aloud. In Burma in recent times monks rose at daybreak "when there is light enough to see the veins in the hand".⁴

[...]

Such a disregard for clock time could of course only be possible in a crofting and fishing community whose framework of marketing and administration is minimal, and in which the day's tasks (which might vary from fishing to farming, building, mending of nets, thatching, making a cradle or a coffin) seem to disclose themselves, by the logic of need, before the crofter's eyes⁵. But his account will serve to emphasize the essential conditioning in differing notations of time provided by different work-situations and their relation to "natural" rhythms. Clearly hunters must employ certain hours of the night to set their snares. Fishing and seafaring people must integrate their lives with the tides. A petition from Sunderland in 1800 includes the words "considering that this is a seaport in which many people are obliged to be up at all hours of the night to attend the tides and their affairs upon the river".⁶ The operative phrase is "attend the tides": the patterning of social time in the seaport follows upon the rhythms of the sea; and this appears to be natural and comprehensible to fishermen or seamen: the compulsion is nature's own. 

In a similar way labour from dawn to dusk can appear to be "natural" in a farming community, especially in the harvest months: nature demands that the grain be harvested before the thunderstorms set in. And we may note similar "natural" work-rhythms which attend other rural or industrial occupations: sheep must be attended at lambing time and guarded from predators; cows must be milked; the charcoal fire must be attended and not burn away through the turfs (and the charcoal burners must sleep beside it); once iron is in the making, the furnaces must not be allowed to fail. 

The notation of time which arises in such contexts has been described as task-orientation. It is perhaps the most effective orientation in peasant societies, and it remains important in village and domestic industries/ It has by no means lost all relevance in rural parts of Britain today. Three points may be proposed about task-orientation. First, there is a sense in which it is more humanly comprehensible than timed labour. The peasant or labourer appears to attend upon what is an observed necessity. Second, a community in which task-orientation is common appears to show least demarcation between "work" and "life". Social intercourse and labour are intermingled — the working-day lengthens or contracts according to the task — and there is no great sense of conflict between labour and "passing the time of day". Third, to men accustomed to labour timed by the clock, this attitude to labour appears to be wasteful and lacking in urgency.⁷

Such a clear distinction supposes, of course, the independent peasant or craftsman as referent. But the "question of task-orientation becomes greatly more complex at the point where labour is employed. The entire family economy of the small farmer may be task-orientated; but within it there may be a division of labour, and allocation of roles, and the discipline of an employer-employed relationship between the farmer and his children. 'Even here time is beginning to become money, the employer's money. As soon as actual hands are employed the shift from task-orientation to timed labour is marked. 

[...]

Those who are employed experience a distinction between their employer's time and their "own" time. And the employer must use the time of his labour, and see it is not wasted: not the task but the value of time , when reduced to money is dominant. Time is now currency: it is not passed but spent. 

[...]

It is a problem which the peoples of the developing world must live through and grow through. One hopes that they will be wary of pat, manipulative models, which present the working masses only as an inert labour force. And there is a sense, also, within the advanced industrial countries, in which this has ceased to be a problem placed in the past. For we are now at a point where sociologists are discussing the "problem" of leisure And a part of the problem is: how did it come to be a problem ? Puritanism, in its marriage of convenience with industrial capitalism, was the agent which converted men to new valuations of time; which taught children even in their infancy to improve each shining hour; and which saturated men's minds with the equation, time is money.⁸ One recurrent form of revolt within Western industrial capitalism, whether bohemian or beatnik, has often taken the form of flouting the urgency of respectable timevalues. And the interesting question arises: if Puritanism was a necessary part of the work-ethos which enabled the industrialized world to break out of the poverty-stricken economies of the past, will the Puritan valuation of time begin to decompose as the pressures of poverty relax ? Is it decomposing already ? Will men begin to lose that restless urgency, that desire to consume time purposively, which most people carry just as they carry a watch on their wrists ? 

If we are to have enlarged leisure, in an automated future, the problem is not "how are men going to be able to consume all these additional time-units of leisure?" but "what will be the capacity for experience of the men who have this undirected time to live ?" If we maintain a Puritan time-valuation, a commodity-valuation, then it is a question of how this time is put to use, or how it is exploited by the leisure industries. 

_{¹ Lewis Mumford makes suggestive claims in Technics and Civilization (London, 1934), esp. pp. 12-18, 196-9: see also S. de Grazia, Of Time, Work, and Leisure (New York, 1962), Carlo M. Cipolla, Clocks and Culture 1300-1700 (London, 1967), and Edward T. Hall, The Silent Language (New York, 1959)
² J . le Goff, "Au Moyen Age: Temps de L'Eglise et temps du marchand", Annales, E.S.C., xv (1960); and the same author's "Le temps du travail dans le 'crise' du XIVe Siècle: du temps médiéval au temps moderne", Le Moyen Age, lxix (1963).
³ E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer (Oxford, 1940), pp. 100-4; M. P. Nilsson, Primitive Time Reckoning (Lund, 1920), pp. 32-3, 42; P. A. Sorokin and R. K. Merton, "Social Time: a Methodological and Functional Analysis", Amer.Jl. Sociol., xlii (1937); A. I. Hallowell, "Temporal Orientation in Western Civilization and in a Pre-Literate Society", Amer. Anthrop., new ser. xxxix(1937). Other sources for primitive time reckoning are cited in H. G. Alexander, Time as Dimension and History (Albuquerque, 1945), p. 26, and Beate R. Salz, "The Human Element in Industrialization", Econ. Devel. and Cult. Change, iv (1955). esp. pp. 94-114.
⁴ E. P. Salas, "L'Evolution de la notion du temps et les horlogers a l’époque coloniale au Chili", Annales E.S.C., xxi (1966), p. 146; Cultural Patterns and Technical Change, ed. M. Mead (New York, UNESCO, 1953), p. 75.
⁵ The most important event in the relation of the islands to an external economy in Synge’s time was the arrival of the steamer, whose times might be greatly affected by tide and weather. See Synge, The Aran Islands (Dublin, 1907), pp. 115-6.
⁶ 12 Public Rec. Off., W.O. 40/17. It is of interest to note other examples of the recognition that seafaring time conflicted with urban routines: the Court of Admiralty was held to be always open, "for strangers and merchants, and sea faring men, must take the opportunity of tides and winds, and cannot, without ruin and great prejudice attend the solemnity of courts and dilatory pleadings" (see E. Vansittart Neale, Feasts and Fasts [London, 1845], p. 249), while in some Sabbatarian legislation an exception was made for fishermen who sighted a shoal off-shore on the Sabbath day.
⁷ Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la Vie Quotidienne (Paris, 1958), ii, pp. 52-6, prefers a distinction between "cyclical time" — arising from changing seasonal occupations in agriculture — and the "linear time" of urban, industrial organization. More suggestive is Lucien Febvre's distinction between "Le temps vécu et le temps-mesure", La Problème de L'Incroyance au XVI^e Siècle (Paris, 1947), p. 431. A somewhat schematic examination of the organization of tasks in primitive economies is in Stanley H. Udy, Organisation of Work (New Haven, 1959), ch. 2.
⁸ Suggestive comments on this equation are in Lewis Mumford and S. de Grazia, cited note I above; Paul Diesing, Reason in Society (Urbana, 1962), pp. 24-8; Hans Meyerhoff, Time in Literature (Univ. of California, 1955), pp. 106-19.}

A Economia Parasitária

Raoul Vaneigem

O estádio parasitário da economia é atingido quando o valor de uso tende para zero e o valor de troca para o absoluto.

Crepuscular Dawn

Paul Virilio

The bunker is so very heavy, so frightening, in other words, so terrifying and fascinating—sorry, but I love Goya, and I love Antonin Artaud—because it is the reverse figure of the destructive power of the twentieth century. Auschwitz, Hiroshima, both. That’s why the bunker, to me, is the symbol of modern times. The bunker is at once the place where they would put you to death and where they would let the deported starve to death. I’m thinking of Geneviève de Gaulle, Charles de Gaulle’s grand-niece. She was deported to Ravensbrück, but they didn’t dare gas her. They put her in a bunker to die there of hunger and dehydration. The bunker is a kind of symbol of this century of concentration and elimination. I’ll give you an example: the paint in the air-raid shelters, the Luftchutstraum. To avoid using electricity—you know that it will most likely be interrupted during a bombing—they painted the walls of the shelters with phosphorus. At first people flocked to them by the hundreds, and in the end they stopped going, preferring instead to die in the streets. Why? Because they were on top of one another, as in a subway. And now and again the fans would stop on account of the bombs falling. People would suffocate. And with this phosphorus light you literally had an image of Dante’s Inferno. To me the bunker is total war.

The State of Emergency

Paul Virilio

Speed is the essence of war.
— SunTzu

THE REDUCTION OF distances has become a strategic reality bearing incalculable economic and political consequences, since it corre­sponds to the negation of space.
The maneuver that once consisted in giving up groundto gain Time loses its meaning: at present, gaining Time is exclu­sively a matter of vectors. Territory has lost its significance in favor of the projectile. In fact, the strategic value of the non-place of speed has definitively supplanted that of place, and the ques­tion of possession of Time has revived that of territorial appropriation.
In this geographic contraction, which resembles the terres­trial movement described by Alfred Wegener, the binomial "fire movement" takes on a new meaning: the distinction between fire's power to destroy and the power to penetrate of movement, of the vehicle, is losing its "validity".
With the supersonic vector (airplane, rocket, airwaves), pen­etration and destruction become one. The instantaneousness of action at a distance corresponds to the defeat of the unprepared adversary, but also, and especially, to the defeat of the world as a field, as distance, as matter.
Immediate penetration, or penetration that is approaching immediacy, becomes identified with the instantaneous destruc­tion of environmental conditions, since after space-distance, we now lack time-distance in the increasing acceleration of vehicular performances (precision, distance, speed).
From this point on, the binomial fire-movement exists only to designate a double movement of implosion and explosion; the power of implosion revives the old subsonic vehicles' (means of transportation, projectiles) power to penetrate, and the power of explosion revives the destructive power of classical molecular explosives. In this paradoxical object, simultaneously explosive and implosive, the new war machine combines a double disap­pearance: the disappearance of matter in nuclear disintegration and the disappearance of places in vehicular extermination.
Nonetheless, we should note that the disintegration of mat­ter is constantly deferred in the deterrent equilibrium of peaceful coexistence, but not so the extermination of distances. In less than half a century, geographical spaces have kept shrinking as speed has increased. And if at the beginning of the 1940s we still had to count the speed of naval "strike power" — the major destructive power of the time — in knots, by the beginning of the
1960s this rapidity was measured in machs, in other words in thousands of kilometers per hour. And it is likely that current high energy research will soon allow us to reach the speed of light with laser weapons.
If, as Lenin claimed, "strategy means choosing which points we apply force to," we must admit that these "points," today, are no longer geostrategic strongpoints, since from any given spot we can now reach any other, no matter where it may be, in record time and within several meters. . .
We have to recognize that geographic localization seems to have definitively lost its strategic value and, inversely, that this same value is attributed to the delocalization of the vector, of a vector in permanent movement ­— no matter if this movement is aerial, spatial, underwater or underground. All that counts is the speed of the moving body and the undetectability of its path.
From the war of movement of mechanized forces, we reach the strategy of Brownian movements, a kind of chronological and pendular war that revives ancient popular and geographic warfare by a geostrategic homogenization of the globe. This homoge­nization was already announced in the nineteenth century, notably by the Englishman Mackinder in his theory of the "World-Island," in which Europe, Asia and Africa would com­pose a single continent to the detriment of the Americas — a theory that seems to have come to fruition today with the dis­qualification of localizations. But we should note that the indifferentiation of geostrategic positions is not the only effect of vectorial performances, for after the homogenization sought and finally acquired by naval and aerial imperialism, strategic spatial miniaturization is now the order of the day.
In 1955 General Chassin stated, "The fact that the earth is round has not been sufficiently studied from the military point of view." No sooner said than done. But in the ballistic progress of weapons, the curvature of the earth has not stopped shrinking. It is no longer the continents that become agglomerated, but the totality of the planet that is diminished, depending on the progress of the arms "race." The continental translation that, curiously enough, we find both in the geophysician Wegener, with the drift of land masses, and in Mackinder, with the geopolitical amalgam of lands, has given way to a worldwide phenomenon of terrestrial and technological contraction that today makes us penetrate into an artificial topological universe: the direct encounter of every surface on the globe.

The Kingdoms Of Elgaland-Vargaland

Carl Michael Von Hausswolff, Leif Elggren

i – All border territories between all countries on earth, and all areas (up to a width of 10 nautical miles) outside all countries’ territorial waters. We designate these territories our physical territory. These territories, usually called No Man's Land or Border Crossings, are in constant flux. They change every day, and in reports from all over the world we notice that new territories appear (e.g. the North and South Korean border), disappear (the East and West German border in 1989) and reappear (the Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian borders). We also observe nations’ fishing territories waxing and waning. There are frequent foreign violations at sea; vehicles with cargo, refugees, tourists, political and military manoeuvres; animals and fishes walk and swim freely, insects and birds buzz and sing. Theoretically/practically all past existing areas such as the borders between Texas and the USA, between England and Scotland or between Skåne (at the time belonging to Denmark) and Sweden are annexed by The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland.

ii – Mental and perceptive territories such as the Hypnagogue State (civil), the Escapistic Territory (civil) and the Virtual Room (digital). The civil territories function as psychic and are self-contained. They appear in every citizen’s mind, by will or by chance. The Hypnagogue State is the border area between waking and sleeping. A dreamspace where the citizen’s consciousness is still in operation and where the physical sensation of limitlessness occurs. Here, the citizen can potentially stay in KREV; “I understand this place as KREV”, the citizen declares and proceeds into the area. The Escapistic Territory functions in the same way as the Hypnagogue State, but with the difference that here the citizen is awake. It’s an area to dwell in when wanting to “go somewhere else”. It’s a personal projection, very much alike daydreaming, where your mind is occupied by a fantasy or an interesting thought; alone with your brain, with a mind sucking novel or a film, in a poem or a musical piece. The Escapistic Territory holds many possibilities and also coincides with the shamanistic techniques of mental space travel. Other mental and civil territories could also be annexed such as the borderline zones of mental diseases, near death experiences, hypnosis and mesmerism, telekinetics, telepathy, suggestions, strokes, delirium, various influences of drugs (such as peyote, LSD, ecstasy, cannabis, thinner, ether, alcohol etc), speaking in tongues, religious ecstasy, artistic inspiration and expiration, possession by spirit, good or evil, dusk and dawn, terror, love, orgasm, interference, the state of contradiction or hesitation. Other potentially closely-related territories could be hard disc crashes, computer viruses, frequencies, fission or the fusion of particles. The Digital Room is, as the name proposes, a digitally programmed territory. Currently the largest territorial port of entry, KREV, functions within the so-called Internet’s world wide web (first located at http://www.it.kth.se/KREV/, then at http://www.krev.org/, and now here at http://www.elgaland-vargaland.org/). Of course there are a lot of entrances via other sites as well. We also see CD-Roms and floppydisks with VR programs or material on KREV as potentially occupiable territories. The KREV Digital Room is, so far, a borderless space; an existing global meeting place.

Countless web surfers slide in and out of the place, as any tourist, and the exchange of territorial expansions by KREV and any other digital territory is constant and unrestricted. The nation expands into an infinite network of unlimited territory accessible for anyone with the needed gear. We further see the space occupied by the factual universal as an enormous opportunity and possibility for new exploitation of incomprehensible areas and territories. We, as we usually say, stay in contact with over 200 planets and we will soon be able to conduct chartered trips for our holidaying citizens to new and interesting areas, physical as well as psychical and digital. One of the concepts of Elgaland-Vargaland is the promotion of breaking down global political criminality (that is: most of all present political structure) and economical centralisation (that is: nearly all present economical functions) by propaganda, infiltration and idealism. Do it your own way, but only if you want to. - We are all born equal to this planet and have the right to our lives and the self-evident right to grow and prosper. In the world of today the unjustice situation is increasing all over. Most people on planet Earth are living like slaves and a few is ruling. This is by tradition a conventional fact in the history of mankind. Nevertheless it’s important to strike back.

As Citizens of The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland, we are immortal. There is no beginning and there is no end. We are all encouraged by this gift and basic privilege, we can all use it as a powerful tool and a fantastic opportunity to overcome and use fear, feelings of worthlessness and inferiority as well as hubris, megalomania and blind joy. To grow in reciprocal care and become those holy individuals we are meant to be.

On the 27th of May 1992 at 12 noon, we proclaimed the state of Elgaland-Vargaland.

Carta Aberta aos que Condenam as Pilhagens

Evan Calder Williams

Caros todos,

Temo que nada tenhamos a dizer uns aos outros.

O que se segue pode por isso constituir uma das metades de um diálogo, da mesma forma que berrar em frente a uma jukebox feita de gelo o seria. É concebível que o próprio esforço de falar – uma certa quantidade de ar quente – amoleça um pouco a superfície, mas não deixa por esse facto de ser uma discussão unilateral. E não implica, igualmente, que vocês possam ou cheguem de facto a interromper a repetição dos discos que vos foram dados para tocar, vossas frases e evasões em circuito fechado e contínuo. 
Afinal de contas, já ouvimos o que têm para nos dizer. Também nós conhecemos as letras de cor. Na melhor das hipóteses, achamo-las profundamente duvidosas e, na pior, uma papa biliosa, racista, banal e assassina, imprópria para as nossas bocas e ouvidos. E não é que haja por aí muita coisa melhorzinha, nos dias que correm.
Presumo que dirão o mesmo da nossa posição, embora usando diferentes adjectivos. Pueril, destrutiva, irrazoável, e ingénua são os primeiros que me ocorrem, isto se o vosso historial de acusações servir de indicador. Infelizmente, dada a estrutura dos media e dos fluxos de informação, não podemos deixar de ouvir o que vocês dizem, ao passo que vocês podem muito bem continuar a ignorar aquilo que nós fazemos. Pelo menos até que uma data de pessoas comece a incendiar a vossa cidade, altura em que porventura, num lapso de fraqueza, se dignem a ouvir aqueles que têm umas ideias sobre o assunto. Não que isso seja muito provável. Vivemos em tempos ruidosos.
É pena, porque na verdade até concordamos numa série de pontos. Isto porque vocês classificam estes motins, e estas pilhagens, como oportunistas. Como algo de irrazoável e estúpido. Que “isto não é um protesto, é um motim”. Que “não são políticos”. Que estamos perante “indivíduos que usam a desculpa do que aconteceu nas primeiras duas noites para garantir que a terceira seja ainda pior.” Que isto é “o caos”. Que isto é “criminalidade pura e simples”. Que eles “não têm o direito” de fazer isto. Que “benefício algum, a longo prazo” poderá resultar do acto de “pilhar uma loja de bairro”, “incendiar um autocarro” ou “gamar um telemóvel”. Acima de tudo, como vocês, Ministros da Administração Interna, gostam de colocar a questão: “Não há justificação possível para a violência. Não há qualquer justificação para a pilhagem.”

E nós concordamos. 

Existem entre nós alguns pontos de divergência, é certo. Nós não vemos “esta gente” como “símios”, “ratazanas” ou “cães”. Mas acreditamos que vocês os vêm assim mesmo e que as razões da vossa crença não são os acontecimentos recentes: estes são apenas uma confirmação daquilo que vocês sempre pensaram acerca dos que são definitivamente mais pobres e frequentemente mais escuros do que vocês. Quanto ao argumento de que o erro consistiu em não “termos ajudado a polícia a aproximar-se mais e mais cedo da família de Mark Duggan”, parece-me que já ajudaram a polícia a chegar-se perto o suficiente da família dele e da pior maneira possível. Não se pode verdadeiramente dizer que é no atraso da abordagem da Polícia à família que reside o problema, não vos parece? Não será antes o facto de ele não ter disparado sobre os polícias que o assassinaram?
Por último, estamos em desacordo quanto à ideia de que “aquilo a que assistimos não tem absolutamente nada a ver” com esse homicídio a tiro. E aqui reside a diferença essencial, a pequena brecha entre nós. Uma brecha que se abre num vasto fosso, uma divisão que não pode ser colmatada. Porque nós queremos entender o mundo na sua particularidade histórica, como e porque é que ele veio a ser aquilo que é, e as razões pelas quais isso é insuportável. Vocês, contudo, querem simplesmente assegurar que ele perdura por tanto tempo quanto possível. Independentemente da sua qualidade, independentemente das consequências, independentemente de tudo à excepção da vossa capacidade colectiva de declarar que o mundo é um sítio horrendo, sim senhor, mas ao menos mantemos a nossa decência. Ao menos estamos instalados suficientemente alto para podermos contemplar os campos de extermínio. Ao menos chegámos cá por meios legais. E como é que eles se atrevem? Como é que eles se atrevem? 
Mas apesar disto, muito do que vocês disseram está inteiramente certo. Comecemos então por aquilo em que concordamos.

Carta Aberta A Todos Os Que Condenam As Pilhagens

Evan Calder Williams

3. ELES ESTÃO SIMPLESMENTE A SER “MATERIALISTAS,” A ROUBAR COISAS QUE NÃO CONSEGUEM COMPRAR.

Não me digam que estavam à espera que as pessoas se revoltassem imaterialmente? Estavam à espera que apenas pilhassem coisas que conseguem comprar?

[...] 

Sejamos pois completamente sinceros. Vocês que trabalham, que têm a oportunidade de o fazer, tanto aqueles a quem essa oportunidade foi dada de mão beijada como os que tiveram de lutar com unhas e dentes para a terem, vocês que têm o vosso “ganha-pão honesto”: será que trabalham mesmo para cobrir as necessidades básicas e nada mais? Trabalham apenas o suficiente para sacar a dosagem mínima recomendada de calorias, um cilício, um quartozinho vazio, uma merecida imperial quando chega o fim-de-semana, o passe para se deslocarem até ao trabalho? Será que desdenham verdadeiramente o desejo para lá disso? 

Não. Não desdenham. Nós também não. Mesmo que estejam entre aqueles que raramente se podem dar a esses luxos, querem, esganam-se e esfalfam-se e enganam e pedem emprestado para terem uns ténis caros, uma televisão grande, um jipe, um carrinho de bebé que parece um jipe, vodca do caro, calças com o nome de uma certa marca no rabo e que vos faz o rabo jeitoso, brincos, água-de-colónia, cigarros que não sabem a cartão, jogos de computador, diamantes, bife da vazia (Ou, pior ainda, fazem de conta que estão acima dessas coisas. E portanto querem antes um novo carro híbrido, sabão feito de cânhamo, uns produtos de agricultores das redondezas, um apartamento com chão de bambu, as obras completas de Matthew Arnold ).

E portanto, mesmo antes de emergir a questão da criminalidade (a forma como esses bens foram obtidos), vocês condenam os saqueadores por outra coisa: por quererem os objectos que vocês querem. Estão a condená-los por partilharem o vosso desejo. 

Estão a classificar o vosso desejo como algo de abjecto e inaceitável, assim que é desligado da legitimação do trabalho. A vossa ideia, portanto, é que eles devem desejar mas, ao mesmo tempo, verem-se privados da recompensa. Que essa é a condição fundamental do pobre: querer e continuar a querer. Que o querer deve equivaler apenas àquilo a que se pode aceder.

De tal modo que quando dobram o pau na direcção do contra-factual (como muitas das condenações vindas da esquerda encostada ao centro) e dizem, bem, a coisa seria diferente se eles estivessem a tirar comida, fraldas, remédio, estás a ver, as coisas de que precisamos para sobreviver, o que está a ser dito é que eles deviam roubar apenas bens de uma qualidade equivalente ao seu estatuto social. Os pobres, cujo nível de vida não é muito alto, deveriam ter bens de um nível não muito alto. Não deviam tirar cigarros pré-enrolados. Não deviam tirar champanhe, ou pelo menos não daquele bom que se guarda para ocasiões especiais. Não deviam estar a tirar televisões com uma data de polegadas. Porque eles não merecem estas coisas. Deviam olhar-se ao espelho e ter mais juizinho.

[...]

A vossa ansiedade e nervoso miudinho face a isto é inteiramente compreensível, dado que tem pouco a ver com “eles”. Regista antes a forma como entendem a vossa própria propriedade, a vossa lascívia, os vossos gostos. Mais especificamente, o facto de vocês não terem especial interesse por aquele belo par de ténis por ser confortável/bonito/vos ajudar a correr depressa. Esta parte é acessória. A especificidade do vosso desejo é negativa. Reside no facto de não quererem que outras pessoas os tenham. 

[...]

4. ELES NÃO TRABALHAM, SÃO CRIMINOSOS 

Sim. Não trabalhar sob o capital é criminoso. É-o estruturalmente: uma falha, uma transgressão, aquilo que pede castigo – fome, prisão, coerção. Agora que deixámos para trás a era das guerras generalizadas, da habitação própria e da produção interclassista de crianças, o emprego a tempo inteiro é a garantia do estatuto de adulto, da cidadania, de se ser um sujeito de pleno direito. A ausência de trabalho – ou melhor, de trabalho reconhecido enquanto tal – equivale a uma criminalização generalizada das populações, mesmo antes de qualquer transgressão legal ocorrer de facto.

É-o também localmente, isto porque, na medida em que o trabalho significa trabalho sancionado, não trabalhar implica que uma pessoa trabalhe em moldes que são tecnicamente criminosos: roubar, vender bens roubados, vender drogas, vender o corpo, burlar, pedir, ocupar, pilhar.

E num tempo como o nosso, em que não há empregos suficientes à disposição, ou, cruzes credo, em que as pessoas não querem trabalhar, não querem mergulhar as suas vidas em horas de suor e tédio das quais tanto elas como as suas famílias ou a sua vizinhança apenas colherão uma ínfima porção da recompensa, num tempo como este, continuar a dizer às pessoas que esta não é a maneira certa de fazer as coisas é, literalmente e sem tirar nem pôr, dizer-lhes: vocês não poderão trabalhar e vocês não poderão não trabalhar. Têm que se desenrascar e devem fazê-lo sem grande escarcéu.  

Contudo, conviria que vocês, bem como nós, tirássemos a limpo o que significa, ao certo, o termo trabalho.

Sucintamente, é a troca do nosso tempo e esforço – uma porção de uma vida – por uma certa quantidade de bens, sendo o dinheiro o mais comum e o mais infame de todos. A especificidade de tal trabalho sob o capital é a de que o valor dos bens que o trabalhador recebe não é equivalente ao valor gerado pelo seu trabalho: isso é o que os Marxistas denominam de mais-valia. Isso é aquilo a que os capitalistas chamam fisgar a presa.

Para o trabalhador, a taxa de retorno do trabalho não é constante. Os salários não são idênticos, e um retrato adequado da economia mundial torna evidente que, à excepção de algumas correlações genéricas para trabalho muito especializado (cirurgiões, assassinos, pianistas de jazz), e pondo de parte a nossa fantasia de que os salários e a valia são comensuráveis, a quantidade auferida tem pouca relação com a qualidade ou quantidade de trabalho realizado. Algum trabalho é pouco qualificado e paga muito mal. Algum trabalho é altamente qualificado e paga muito bem. Algum trabalho é altamente qualificado e paga muito mal.

Estou certo que estaremos todos de acordo neste ponto, mesmo que esse facto não nos agrade muito. É, afinal de contas, verdade.

É também verdade, então, que esta pilhagem é uma forma de trabalho, ao mesmo tempo que arruína a própria categoria do trabalho.
É, tal como o crédito, uma inflexão da crise do pleno emprego. É uma actividade de elevado risco, precária, informal e com dividendos potencialmente muito elevados. Aqueles que pilham estão a trocar uma porção do seu tempo – uns quantos minutos ou horas, embora potencialmente se possam traduzir em anos de prisão ou na sua morte, pelo que a remuneração horária é de cálculo muito incerto – as suas capacidades intelectuais e físicas e a sua energia, pelo acesso a um conjunto de bens que eles, como tantos outros, desejam.

Estão a trabalhar, e isto num tempo em que o trabalho é um bem escasso. Estão a trabalhar em conjunto, o que, como todos bem sabemos, é aquilo que verdadeiramente vos assusta. É verdade que nós lhe dissemos para se juntarem e trabalharem em comunidade de modo a melhorar as suas vidas, mas não era bem isto que nós queríamos dizer...

[...]

Isto significa ainda que o vosso argumento de que é de alguma forma moralmente repreensível, ou pelo menos tacticamente equivocado, as pessoas levarem estes produtos em vez das “necessidades básicas” é, em boa verdade, uma idiotice. Querem-nos convencer, portanto, que é suposto os pobres não só restringirem o âmbito dos seus desejos, mas igualmente não serem capazes de entender os fundamentos do valor de troca? Que eles deviam ter enchido carrinhos de compras com farinha e feijões, em vez de computadores que poderiam, em teoria, ser vendidos de modo a obter uma maior quantidade de farinha e feijões? Ou ainda ficar com eles e dar-lhe uso, uma vez que o acesso à internet, a capacidade de escrever a amigos ou contar histórias, ouvir música, olhar para fotografias daqueles que amam ou com quem fantasiam amores: ao que nos é dado saber, a pobreza não abole o desejo de tentar gozar a existência que se tem e de partilhá-la com outros, por mais desesperados que estejam os tempos.

An open letter to those who condemn looting

Evan Calder Williams

3. THEY ARE JUST BEING "MATERIALISTIC," STEALING THINGS THEY CAN'T AFFORD

Do you really expect people to riot immaterially? You expect them to loot only what they could afford?

[...]

Because let us be very honest. You who work, who have the opportunity to do so, who perhaps had it handed to you or who fought tooth and nail to get that opportunity, you who "earn an honest living": do you truly work only to cover the bare necessities? Do you work just enough to pull off a base level of caloric intake, a hair shirt, an empty room, an indulgent pint at the end of the week, and bus fare to get you to your job? Do you disdain desire beyond that?

No. You don't. We don't. Even if you are among those who can rarely afford them, you want, and you work and scrape and cheat and borrow to get, expensive trainers, big screen TVs, sport utility vehicles, prams that resemble sport utility vehicles, expensive vodka, pants with the name of a certain brand on the ass and that make your ass look good, earrings, cologne, cigarettes that don't taste like cardboard, video games, diamonds, good quality beef.

(Or worse, you play at being above that. And so you want a brand new hybrid, soap made from hemp, something locally farmed, a flat with bamboo floors, the complete works of Matthew Arnold.)

And so, even before the question of criminality emerges (how those goods get gotten), you are condemning the looters for something else: for wanting the very objects you want.

You are condemning them for your desire.

You are declaring that desire to be abject and unacceptable, as soon as it is untethered from the legitimation of labor. You think, then, that they are supposed to desire and be refused its payoff. That such is the fundamental condition of the poor: to want and to go wanting. That want is supposed to be identical to access.

Such that when you bend the stick toward counterfactuals (as many of the condemners slightly left of center do) and say, well, it would be different if they were just taking food, nappies, medicine, you know, the things you need to get by, what is being said is that they should steal only goods of a quality equivalent to their social standing. The poor, whose standard of life is not very high, should have goods whose standard is not very high. They should not be taking pre-rolled cigarettes. They should not be taking champagne, or at least not the good stuff and only for special occasions. They should not be taking large televisions. For they do not deserve these things. And they should know better.

[...]

Your nervous, pacing anxiety at this is entirely understandable, given that it has very little to do with "them." Rather, it points up the way you understand your own property, your own lusts, your own taste. Namely, that you have no particular interest in a nice pair of trainers because they are comfortable/look good/help you run fast. That is incidental. The specificity of your desire is negative. It is that you don't want other people to have them. 

[...]

4. THEY DON'T WORK, THEY ARE CRIMINALS 

Yes. To not work under capital is criminal. It is structurally so: a fault, an offense, that which calls out for punishment — hunger, jail, coercion. Now that we have left behind the era of general wars, home ownership, and the cross-class production of children, full-time work is the guarantor of adult status, of citizenship, of being a proper subject. The absence of work — that is, labor recognized as such — is a general criminalization of populations, before any legal transgression technically occurs.

It is locally so, because insofar as work means sanctioned labor, then to not work means that one must labor in modes that are technically criminal: steal, sell stolen goods, sell drugs, sell your body, con, beg, squat, loot.

And in a time when there aren't enough jobs to be had, or, God forbid, when people don't want to labor, don't want to throw their lives into hours of toil and boredom from which they, their families, their friends, their parts of town will only reap only the smallest portion of reward, in such a time, to keep telling people that this isn't the right way to go about things is literally, and precisely, to say to them: you will not be able to work, and you will not be able to not work. You should scrape by, and you should be quiet about it. 

However, it would behoove you, and us all, to clarify just what is meant by work.

In brief, it is the exchange of one's time and exertion — a portion of a life — for a certain quantity of commodities, money being the most common and infamous one. The specificity of such labor under capital is that the value of commodities returned to the worker is not equivalent to the value generated by her labor: that's what Marxists mean by surplus-value. That's what capitalists mean by making a killing.

Work does not have a constant rate of return for the worker. Wages are not identical, and an adequate portrait of the world economy makes it clear that barring certain overall correlations for highly trained work (surgeons, assassins, jazz pianists) and excluding our fantasy that it must be the case that wages and worth are commensurate, the amount earned bears very little relation to the quality or quantity of labor performed. Some work is unskilled and paid very little. Some work is unskilled and paid a lot. Some work is highly skilled and paid a lot. Some work is highly skilled and paid very little.

I'm sure we can all agree on this, even if you don't particularly enjoy doing so. After all, it is true.

It is also true, then, that this looting is a form of labor, even as it ruins the category of labor. It is, like credit, an inflection of the crisis of full employment. It is high-risk, precarious, informal potentially high-yield activity. Those who loot are trading a portion of their time — a few brief minutes or hours, but with the potential for years in jail or with death, such that the hourly wage is highly uncertain — and intellectual and physical skill and energy in exchange for access to a set of goods which they are not alone in wanting.

They are working, in a time in which work is hard to come by. They are working together, which, we all know, is really what scares you all. We know we told them to band together and work as a community to improve their lives, but we didn't mean it like this...

[...]

It means also that your claim that it is somehow morally reprehensible, or tactically misguided, for people to take these items instead of the "bare necessities" is, strictly speaking, an idiotic one. Are we to insist that along with restricting the scope of their desires, the poor are not supposed to understand the fundamentals of exchange-value? That they should have been loading shopping carts with flour and beans, rather than with computers which could, in theory, be sold for a larger quantity of flour and beans? Or kept and used, because access to the internet, the ability to write friends or stories, to listen to music, to look at photos of those you love or might like to: last time we checked, poverty doesn't abolish the desire to try and enjoy the existence one has and to share that with others, however blighted this era may be.

An open letter to those who condemn looting

Evan Calder Williams

Dear you all,

I fear we have nothing to say to each other.
What follows may therefore represent one half of a dialogue in the way that yelling at a iceberg does.  Perhaps the sheer exertion of speaking - a certain quantity of hot air - will soften the surface a bit, but it's a pretty one-sided discussion. 
After all, we've heard what you have to say.  We too know the words by heart.  We find it, at best, deeply unconvincing, and, at worst, bilious, evasive, racist, average, murderous pap not fit for mouths or ears.  And there is very little that is best these days.
I expect you would say the same about our position, albeit with a different set of adjectives. Juvenile, destructive, unreasonable, and naive come to mind, if your previous history of accusations gives any indication.  Unfortunately, given the structure of the media and the flow of information, we cannot but hear what you say while you can very easily continue to ignore what we do.  Until lots of angry people are burning your city, at which point you might, in a fit of weakness, concede to listen to those who have some opinions on the matter.  Unlikely, though.  We live in noisy times.
It is too bad, though, because we actually agree on a few things.  For you say of these riots, and this looting, that they are opportunistic.  That they are unreasonable and stupid.  That "this isn't a protest, this is a riot."  That they are "not political."  That "this is about individuals using the excuse of what happened the first two nights to make sure what happens the third night is worse".  That this is "havoc."  That this is "criminality pure and simple."  That they do not "have the right" to do this.  That "no benefit will come in the long term," from "looting a local shop," "setting a bus on fire," or "nicking a mobile phone."  Above all, as you, Home Secretary put it, "There is no excuse for violence.  There is no excuse for looting."  (For a further litany and bestiary of speech, see here.)

And we agree.

There are some points of difference, it's true.  We don't think "these people" are "apes," rats," "dogs".  But we believe that you truly see them that way, and that what happens now is not the reason for your belief: it is merely a confirmation of how you've always thought of those who are definitely more poor and often more brown than you.  As for the claim that your error lay in that "we should have helped the IPCC come closer to the Mark Duggan's family more quickly," it seems that you have already helped the police come plenty close to his family, in the worst way possible.  One can't really say that it was the delay of the IPCC's approach to the family that is the problem here, can we?  Doesn't it have more  to do with the fact that he did not shoot at the police who murdered him?
Lastly, we disagree that  "what we're witnessing now has absolutely nothing to do with" that shooting.  And that is the real difference, the tiny crack between us that widens into a yawning gulf, a division that  cannot be squared.
For we want to understand the world in its historical particularity, how and why it has gotten to be the way that it is, and why that is insupportable.  You, however, simply want to make sure that it goes on as long as possible.  Regardless of the quality, regardless of the consequences, regardless of anything other than your collected capacity to declare that it's a nasty world out there, but at least we have our decency.  At least we sit high enough to look out over the killing fields.  At least we got here by legal measures.  And how dare they.  How dare they.
But despite this, you've said much that is entirely correct.  Let us, then, begin with where we agree.

The Complete History of SHREDDING

John Woestendiek

(...) 

It is generally agreed that the paper-shredding machine originated in Germany around 1935 when a toolmaker named Adolf Ehinger, taking his inspiration from a kitchen utensil, invented a device to render thrown-away paper unreadable.
For the next three decades, shredders were used primarily by the military, government and banking industry. Most of the public wasn't aware of their existence until they began to surface in connection with great American scandals: first, in the 1970s, with Watergate; again in the 1980s with Iran-Contra; and most recently, this year, with Enron.
In each, paper shredders - more specifically, the allegedly nefarious use thereof - became part of the story.
Paper-shredding machines kept popping up during historic moments. Yet, for some reason, they lacked any documented history of their own. One might well ask why. Was it shredded? Forgotten? Or simply never recorded in the first place?
Many in the industry don't know the whole story, though it should be pointed out that they, as a rule, are not the type to spill any beans. News organizations have repeatedly printed inaccurate versions. Encyclopedias, while they contain lengthy entries on the invention of paper and the copying machine, have no mention of the invention, or inventor, of the shredder.
It's almost as if paper shredders - because of their tremendous potential to abuse, disrespect, even negate, history - are getting a similar treatment by history itself.
(...)
Adolf Ehinger was a simple, hard-working man. By day, he made and repaired tools and small machines in his shop in Balingen, Germany. But when no one was looking, he secretly printed anti-Nazi material.
One day, a neighbor spotted some of it in his garbage can, confronted Ehinger and threatened to report him to authorities. He didn't, but the incident made the tinkerer start thinking, both about what society was coming to and what he threw away.
"He was not a friend of the Third Reich," Ehinger's daughter-in-law, Renate Ehinger, 65, said in a telephone interview from Balingen. "He thought, when it gets to the point you can't write what you want to write, it was time to do something."
Ehinger couldn't change the world. But he could alter his garbage. The question was how.
He found the answer in the kitchen: the pasta maker.
Commonly used by Germans to make both pasta and their more traditional spaetzle, the hand-cranked devices turned sheets of dough into strips. Using that concept, he built a hand-cranked shredder inside a wooden frame, one with an opening wide enough to accept sheets of paper. Later, he constructed one with an electric motor. He patented the invention in Germany in 1936, and soon after that, took his aktenvernichter, or paper shredder, to a trade show.
"He was all excited. He went there with great hopes," said Mrs. Ehinger. "But all the people did was laugh at him. They said there was no way would you ever need something to shred paperwork. He came home very disappointed."
Ehinger was a strong-willed sort, though, and he persisted in trying to market the device. His method of destroying the written word - borne, ironically enough, out of his desire to protect his freedom of expression - worked even better than fire, his daughter-in-law said.
"You can burn something but still find little pieces."
In the 1940s, amid the fears and paranoia of wartime, his contraption caught on. Ehinger began selling them locally, then across Germany and to other countries; governments and embassies bought them, and even individuals. During the war, Mrs. Ehinger said, people would use the device not just to shred paper, but tobacco, pasta and vegetables as well.
Ehinger built a company around his invention, and, with a boost from the Cold War, it thrived. By 1956, EBA Maschinenfabrik was selling shredders in almost every country, mostly to government offices and financial institutions.
In 1959, EBA introduced what many believe was the first crosscut, or particle-cut, shredder. It allowed the paper to be cut both horizontally and vertically. Before that, truth be told, a vertically shredded document, sitting alone in a trash can, was pretty much asking to be reassembled, and easily could be.
(...)
For nearly 40 years, shredders, despite being noisy devils, operated quietly behind the scenes.
Then came Watergate.
Using a Shredmaster 400, G. Gordon Liddy, it would later be revealed, disposed of evidence pertaining to the 1972 break-in at National Democratic Party headquarters. Liddy, a former FBI agent working for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, served more than four years in prison for his role in the burglary and cover-up. Liddy is now host of his own radio show.
Fourteen years later, at the helm of an Intimus 007-S, National Security Council aide Lt. Col. Oliver North (with help from his secretary, Fawn Hall) shredded documents relating to the Iran-Contra scandal. North now has his own radio show.
While the humans operating the machines bounced back nicely, shredders developed a negative public image they have not been able to shed since. At times, they were destroying crucial evidence about illegal deeds. At others, they were not destroying documents well enough.
In 1979, when the American Embassy in Tehran was seized by Iranian militants, top-secret documents - in the process of being shredded by a low-tech, vertical-only cutter when the militants took their hostages - were pieced back together with the assistance of Iranian women who were skilled at weaving Persian carpets. (That massive security leak led to a governmentwide upgrade of shredding standards (requiring 1 / 32-inch-by- 1/2 -inch pieces).
Those standards remain in effect today, but are under review. Just last week, in fact, shredding industry leaders from across the country gathered at the National Security Agency in Fort Meade to discuss new and stricter rules.
By the late 1980s, shredding machines were becoming more efficient, affordable and recognized. Desktop machines were showing up in the offices of top executives, where, still seen as a tool of somebody with something to hide, they mostly raised eyebrows. Why, employees wondered, does the boss need one of those?
In the ranks of office machines, the shredder was viewed as an arrogant, harsh and unfriendly newcomer. Its loud grinding was intrusive, compared with, say, the friendlier whir of a photocopier.
Too, it had a different mission. The photocopy machine is used to "spread the word." It makes an entirely new document. It can make one for everybody. The shredder chews the document into so many pieces no one can hope to ever put it back together again. The copier says, "Let's share." The shredder says, "It's none of your business."
The two, unarguably, have entirely different karmas.
If the copier machine can be seen as a symbol of America's psyche in the '60s, '70s and '80s, then the shredder, somewhere in the '90s, was poised to become the symbol for the new millennium.
Environmental regulations banned burning and encouraged recycling. There had been an information explosion and, despite computers, more and more of it was ending up on paper. The U.S. Supreme Court, in 1987, had ruled that your garbage, once put out on the curb, is public property. Corporate espionage and identity theft had both surged in the '90's. And the economy was headed for a deep dive, prompting some profit-minded corporations to look at new, creative, shredder-intensive ways of bookkeeping.
(…)
Shredders, unlike many other implements of destruction / protection, get little respect from historians.
The infamous Watergate shredder, for instance, was spurned by the Smithsonian Institution. In 1984, Whitaker Bros., which had bought the shredder back from President Nixon's re-election committee, tried to sell it to the Smithsonian. Then they tried to donate it. Both offers were rejected. The shredder now sits, shrink-wrapped, in the Maryland company's secondary warehouse.
The 1938 Ehinger shredder was displayed at the National Office Machine Dealer's Association museum in Kansas City. But the museum was dismantled so that organization (now called the Business Technology Association) could lease out the space. So the Ehinger shredder now sits, plaqueless, on the showroom floor at ECCO Business Systems in mid-town Manhattan.

Raiding the Icebox

Peter Wollen

On a simple level, there was a fascination with movies, soaring towers, powerful machines and speeding automobiles. But behind this was a growing recognition that the USA was providing the world with a new model of industrialism. Taylor was the pioneer of what we now know as ergonomics. By observation, photographic recording, and experiment, he broke down the physical gestures of workers to find out which were the most efficient, in time and expenditure of labour power, for any particular job. These model gestures then became a standard for all workers, to be instilled by coercion or by habit. All would perform the same maximally efficient, radically simplified movements. Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911, heralded a new epoch in which the worker would become as predictable, regulated, and effective as the machine itself.¹

By the time of Taylor's death in 1915 the assembly line at Henry Ford's factory in Highland Park, Detroit, was fully in operation after two years of experiment. Fordism meant more than the mass production of standardized objects. It meant a new form of organization of production. This involved bringing together three principal elements: first, a hierarchy of standardized segmented and subsegmented parts, all interchangeable, plus a parallel hierarchy of machine tools (themselves made up from standardized parts) which both formed and assembled the parts into the finished product; second, a fully Taylorized workforce, themselves performing segmented and standardized repeated actions (a de-skilled labour force, controlled by an elite of engineers, supervisors and designers); third, a continuous, sequential assembly line, with a tempo determined by time and work studies, which transferred the parts through the whole process, designed so that the worker never had to move, even to stoop to pick something up. In effect, Fordism turned the factory into a kind of super-machine in its own right, with both human and mechanical parts.²

In the 1920s Fordism became a world-view, whether extolled, feared, or satirized. Matthew Josephson, editor of the avant-garde magazine Broom, wrote there in 1923: 

«Mr Ford, ladies and gentlemen, is not a human creature. He is a principle, or better, a relentless process. Away with waste and competitive capitalism. Our bread, butter, tables, chairs, beds, houses, and also our homebrew shall be made In Ford factories. There shall be one great Powerhouse for the entire land, and ultimately a greater one for the whole world. Mr Ford, ladies and gentlemen, is not a man... Let him assemble us all into his machine. Let us be properly assembled. Let us all function unanimously. Let the wheels turn more swiftly.³»

Fordism became a vision not only of greater productivity, necessary for the development of capitalism, but also of a new model of social organization, with universal implications. 

Thus, one of the most favourable accounts of Fordism was that given by Gramsci in his prison notebooks.⁴ In his classic essay 'Americanism and Fordism', Gramsci unreservedly welcomed the advent of Fordism. He saw it as a necessary and desirable restructuring not only of the capitalist system but of the working class itself. At one point Gramsci asked himself, in view of the high labour turnover at the Ford plant, despite high wages, whether this did not indicate that Fordism was a 'malignant phenomenon which must be fought against through trade union action and through legislation'. But Gramsci decided in favour of Fordism. 'It seems possible to reply that the Ford method is rational, that is, that it should be generalized; but that a long process is needed for this, during which a change must take place in social conditions and in the way of life and habits of individuals. ' The key word here, of course, is 'rational’.

Gramsci came to a positive conclusion about Fordism despite his recognition that the old 'psycho-physical nexus' of work involved 'a certain active participation of intelligence, imagination and initiative on the part of the worker’, whereas the de-skilled Taylorized and Fordized worker finds labour reduced 'exclusively to the mechanical, physical aspect'. 

[...] 

Gramsci argued for a new puritanism, a kind of communist phase two of Weber's Protestant ethic, extended from the bourgeoisie to the workers. 

«'Puritanical' initiatives simply have the purpose of preserving, outside of work, a certain psycho-physical equilibrium which prevents the physiological collapse of the worker, exhausted by the new method of production. This equilibrium can only be something purely external and mechanical, but it can become internalized if it is proposed by the worker himself, and not imposed from the outside, if it is proposed by a new form of society.»

Gramsci identified with Henry Ford's support of Prohibition and even approved his monitoring of the private lives of his workers. For Gramsci, as for Ford, the question of sexuality was intimately involved with that of labour. Gramsci saw the new labour discipline as a blow against sexual promiscuity. The new (assumed-to-be-male) worker would want (in the words of Horace) 'venerem facilem parabilemque', easy and accessible sex, a woman to return home to, 'sure and unfailing.’

«It might seem that in this way the sexual function has been mechanized, but in reality we are dealing with the growth of a new form of sexual union, shorn of the bright and dazzling colour of the romantic tinsel typical of the petit bourgeois and the Bohemian layabout. The exaltation of passion cannot be reconciled with the timed movements of productive motions connected with a fully perfected automatism.»
[...]
Gramsci went even further than Benjamin and argued that Taylorized work itself be potentially liberating. 

«Once the process of adaptation has been completed, what really happens is that the brain of the worker, far from being mummified, reaches a state of complete freedom. The only thing that is completely mechanized is the physical gesture: memory, reduced to simple gestures repeated at an intense rhythm, 'nestles' in the muscular and nervous centres and leaves the brain free and unencumbered for other occupations. »

Just as, when we walk, we can synchronize our physical movements automatically and still 'think whatever we choose', so the new worker, instead of being a ‘trained gorilla' (Taylor's unfortunate phrase), can become a free intellectual.⁵

Gramsci reached this counter-intuitive conclusion after considering the case of the skilled compositor (he viewed typesetting as a prototype of mechanized work processes). The compositor, he argued, has to learn to isolate the symbols of a text from its 'often fascinating intellectual content'. In the same way, the worker on the assembly line performs a series of symbolic operations without any regard for their meaning. As Ilya Ehrenburg put it in his brilliant novel The Life of the Automobile, 'The worker doesn't know what an automobile is. He doesn't know what an engine is. He takes a bolt and tightens a nut... Upwards to the right, half a turn and then down. He does this eight hours in a row. He does it all his life. And that's all he ever does.’⁶ Benjamin similarly compared the drudgery of the assemblyline worker to that of a gambler: the endless repetition of futile, empty gestures, none of which has any meaning. 'They live their lives as automatons and resemble Bergson’s fictitious characters who have completely liquidated their memories.⁷

Fordism introduced an industrial regime — for the worker — of pure signifiers, stripped of meaning. Medieval copyists, Gramsci observed, became interested in the texts they were copying and consequently made mistakes, interpolating glosses and comments, distracted by the signifieds, the meaning of the text. 'He was a bad scribe because in reality he was "re-making" the text.' The mechanization of copying through printing led to a mechanization of the labour process, a suppression of the signified, an end to the creative re-writing of the copyist. Now the Ford worker carries out a single symbolic operation. The assembly line proceeds like an algorithm, carrying out a predetermined sequence of formalized instructions. Meaning is suspended until the process is completed and there is an output that can be interpreted: in the case of the Ford factory, a fully assembled automobile with a meaning, not for its producer, but for its purchaser. Gramsci's argument was that this very formalization, this reduction of work to a series of empty signifiers, made it possible to think about something else, left a space for other signifieds. 

¹ Frederick Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper, 1911). See also Michael O'Malley, Keeping Watch, A History of American Time (Penguin: New York, 1990).
² For Fordism, see Henry Ford, My Life and Work (London: Heinemann, 1923) and Giedion. The concept of Fordism as an economic system of production is developed in Emma Rothschild, Paradise Lost: the decline of the auto-industrial age (New York: Random House, 1973), Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation (London: Verso, 1979), and Alain Lipietz, Mirages and Miracles (London: Verso 1987).
³ Matthew Josephson, 'Made in America', Broom, no. 2 June 1922). Cited in Dickram Tashjian, Skyscraper Primitives (Middletown: Wesleyan University, 1975).
⁴ Gramsci, 'Americanism and Fordism'. The preface to the English edition of Prison Notebooks contains detailed bibliographic account of the notebooks by the editors, Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith.
⁵ According to Céline, the doctor at Highland Park ‘confided to us that what they really wanted was chimpanzees'. See Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 'La Médecine chez Ford', Oeuvres Complètes, vol. I (Paris: 1962).
⁶ Ilya Ehrenburg, The Life of the Automobile (1929) (New York: Urizen, 1976).
⁷ Benjamin, 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire', in Illuminations.

The tirany of the clock

George Woodcock

Modern, Western man, however lives in a world which runs according to the mechanical and mathematical symbols of clock time. The clock dictates his movements and inhibits his actions. The clock turns time from a process of nature into a commodity that can be measured and bought and sold like soap or sultanas. And because, without some means of exact time keeping, industrial capitalism could never have developed and could not continue to exploit the workers, the clock represents an element of mechanical tyranny in the lives of modern men more potent than any individual exploiter or any other machine. It is valuable to trace the historical process by which the clock influenced the social development of modern European civilisation.
It is a frequent circumstance of history that a culture or civilisation develops the device which will later be used for its destruction. The ancient Chinese, for example, invented gunpowder, which was developed by the military experts of the West and eventually led to the Chinese civilisation itself being destroyed by the high explosives of modern warfare. Similarly, the supreme achievement of the ingenuity of the craftsmen in the medieval cities of Europe was the invention of the mechanical clock, which, with its revolutionary alteration of the concept of time, materially assisted the growth of exploiting capitalism and the destruction of medieval culture.
There is a tradition that the clock appeared in the eleventh century, as a device for ringing bells at regular intervals in the monasteries which, with the regimented life they imposed on their inmates, were the closest social approximation in the middle ages to the factory of today. The first authenticated clock, however, appeared in the thirteenth century, and it was not until the fourteenth century that clocks became common ornaments of the public buildings in the German cities.
These early clocks, operated by weights, were not particularly accurate, and it was not until the sixteenth century that any great reliability was obtained. In England, for instance the clock at Hampton Court, made in 1540, is said to have been the first accurate clock in the country. And even the accuracy of the sixteenth century clocks are relative, for they were only equipped with hour hands. The idea of measuring time in minutes and seconds had been thought out by the early mathematicians as far back as the fourteenth century, but it was not until the invention of the pendulum in 1657 that sufficient accuracy was attained to permit the addition of a minute hand, and the second hand did not appear until the eighteenth century. These two centuries, it should be observed, were those in which capitalism grew to such an extent that it was able to take advantage of the industrial revolution in technique in order to establish its domination over society.
The clock, as Lewis Mumford has pointed out, represents the key machine of the machine age, both for its influence on technology and its influence on the habits of men. Technically, the clock was the first really automatic machine that attained any importance in the life of men. Previous to its invention, the common machines were of such a nature that their operation depended on some external and unreliable force, such as human or animal muscles, water or wind. It is true that the Greeks had invented a number of primitive automatic machines, but these where used, like Hero's steam engine, for obtaining 'supernatural' effects in the temples or for amusing the tyrants of Levantine cities. But the clock was the first automatic machine that attained a public importance and a social function. Clock-making became the industry from which men learnt the elements of machine making and gained the technical skill that was to produce the complicated machinery of the industrial revolution.
Socially the clock had a more radical influence than any other machine, in that it was the means by which the regularisation and regimentation of life necessary for an exploiting system of industry could best be attained. The clock provided the means by which time - a category so elusive that no philosophy has yet determined its nature - could be measured concretely in more tangible forms of space provided by the circumference of a clock dial. Time as duration became disregarded, and men began to talk and think always of 'lengths' of time, just as if they were talking of lengths of calico. And time, being now measurable in mathematical symbols, became regarded as a commodity that could be bought and sold in the same way as any other commodity.
The new capitalists, in particular, became rabidly time-conscious. Time, here symbolising the labour of workers, was regarded by them almost as if it were the chief raw material of industry. 'Time is money' became on of the key slogans of capitalist ideology, and the timekeeper was the most significant of the new types of official introduced by the capitalist dispensation.
In the early factories the employers went so far as to manipulate their clocks or sound their factory whistles at the wrong times in order to defraud their workers a little of this valuable new commodity. Later such practices became less frequent, but the influence of the clock imposed a regularity on the lives of the majority of men which had previously been known only in the monastery. Men actually became like clocks, acting with a repetitive regularity which had no resemblance to the rhythmic life of a natural being. They became, as the Victorian phrase put it, 'as regular as clockwork'. Only in the country districts where the natural lives of animals and plants and the elements still dominated life, did any large proportion of the population fail to succumb to the deadly tick of monotony.
At first this new attitude to time, this new regularity of life, was imposed by the clock-owning masters on the unwilling poor. The factory slave reacted in his spare time by living with a chaotic irregularity which characterised the gin-sodden slums of early nineteenth century industrialism. Men fled to the timeless world of drink or Methodist inspiration. But gradually the idea of regularity spread downwards among the workers. Nineteenth century religion and morality played their part by proclaiming the sin of 'wasting time'. The introduction of mass-produced watches and clocks in the 1850's spread time-consciousness among those who had previously merely reacted to the stimulus of the knocker-up or the factory whistle. In the church and in the school, in the office and the workshop, punctuality was held up as the greatest of the virtues.
Out of this slavish dependence on mechanical time which spread insidiously into every class in the nineteenth century there grew up the demoralising regimentation of life which characterises factory work today. The man who fails to conform faces social disapproval and economic ruin. If he is late at the factory the worker will lose his job or even, at the present day [1944 - while wartime regulations were in force], find himself in prison. Hurried meals, the regular morning and evening scramble for trains or buses, the strain of having to work to time schedules, all contribute to digestive and nervous disorders, to ruin health and shorten life.
Nor does the financial imposition of regularity tend, in the long run, to greater efficiency. Indeed, the quality of the product is usually much poorer, because the employer, regarding time as a commodity which he has to pay for, forces the operative to maintain such a speed that his work must necessarily be skimped. Quantity rather than quality becomes the criterion, the enjoyment is taken out of work itself, and the worker in his turn becomes a 'clock-watcher', concerned only when he will be able to escape to the scanty and monotonous leisure of industrial society, in which he 'kills time' by cramming in as much time-scheduled and mechanised enjoyment of cinema, radio and newspapers as his wage packet and his tiredness allow. Only if he is willing to accept of the hazards of living by his faith or his wits can the man without money avoid living as a slave to the clock.
The problem of the clock is, in general, similar to that of the machine. Mechanical time is valuable as a means of co-ordination of activities in a highly developed society, just as the machine is valuable as a means of reducing unnecessary labour to the minimum. Both are valuable for the contribution they make to the smooth running of society, and should be used insofar as they assist men to co-operate efficiently and to eliminate monotonous toil and social confusion. But neither should be allowed to dominate men’s lives as they do today.
Now the movement of the clock sets the tempo men's lives - they become the servant of the concept of time which they themselves have made, and are held in fear, like Frankenstein by his own monster. In a sane and free society such an arbitrary domination of man's functions by either clock or machine would obviously be out of the question. The domination of man by the creation of man is even more ridiculous than the domination of man by man. Mechanical time would be relegated to its true function of a means of reference and co-ordination, and men would return again to a balance view of life no longer dominated by the worship of the clock. Complete liberty implies freedom from the tyranny of abstractions as well as from the rule of men.

Privatising Culture

Chin-Tao Wu

EMBRACING THE ENTERPRISE CULTURE: ART INSTITUTIONS SINCE THE 1980s

With the Government giving less to art and education, somebody’s got to give more. And that somebody is America’s corporations.

Chase Manhattan Bank, NA¹

Statements such as the above, presenting business to the public consciousness at large as an enlightened patron of the arts, were a common feature of the Reagan years. They form part of a wider phenomenon that was also characteristic of the 1980s under successive Reagan and Thatcher governments, that of the intervention of business into contemporary culture. Such an intervention was unprecedented in the sense that never before had the corporate sector in both America and Britain mobilised its resources so forcefully in order to extend its sphere of influence and effect an entrée into the world of culture.

[...] By the end of the 1980s, whether in Britain or America, art museums had become just another public-relations outpost for corporations, and we live with the consequences to this day. Across the Atlantic, Lexus sedans were regularly displayed outside museums and concert halls, such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Lincoln Center in New York, while in Britain both the Royal Academy and Royal Festival Hall converted their courtyards into car showrooms for corporate sponsors. The transformation of art museums in the 1980s from purveyors of a particular elite culture to fun palaces for an increasing number of middle-class arts consumers has thus to be seen within the dual perspective of government policies and business initiatives.

[...]

«That environment [of freedom] is being persistently eroded everywhere by ill-advised and ill-conceived regulation, taxation, and other forms of government control. So we are engaged in an important work in furthering the arts. We are not merely meeting a civic obligation which we can accept or reject as we wish. We are helping to keep open those avenues of freedom along which art and commerce both travel.»²

But freedom of artistic expression, in which an individual asserts his or her right to advance his or her art at a personal level, is of an entirely different order from the freedom that businesses with vast amounts of private capital have to follow their altogether more earthly pursuits.

The significance of this pro-business offensive can only be fully understood against the background of an even larger corporate strategy; that is, to quote Willard C. Butcher (successor to David Rockefeller as president and chief executive of Chase Manhattan Bank), to take a ‘visible role in communicating the private enterprise perspective on a variety of critical public issues’. During the 1980s, it was not only business executives who made concerted efforts to speak out through media appearances, as Butcher had urged his fellow executives, to ‘take our message directly into American homes, to the people.… We need nothing less than a major and sustained effort in the marketplace of ideas.’³ Companies also spent millions of dollars on issue advertising, not directly to sell products, but to propagate company views on contemporary political and social issues. [...] By sponsoring art institutions, corporations present themselves as sharing a humanist value system with museums and galleries, cloaking their particular interests with a universal moral veneer.

[...]

The engagement of this business elite in the arts can thus be interpreted both on the individual and corporate levels. Despite all the media attention given to self-made entrepreneurs during the Thatcher and Reagan years, top corporate management was, and still is, dominated by an economically privileged, and thereby socially and educationally prominent, class in both countries. By virtue of their social background and corporate positions, they are participants in an intricate and complicated web of economic and social networks of acquaintance, friendship and inter-marriage. However, inherited wealth or a high-status occupation, as Thorstein Veblen argued in the nineteenth century, does not of itself constitute a sufficient credential for membership of the dominant section of the class.⁴ It also depends upon the adoption and display of a particular set of values and life styles. To be seen as a patron of the arts is part and parcel of a distinct style of life required and sanctioned within this ‘sophisticated’ stratum of society. The exercise of high culture has become an increasingly important social activity: it is above all at exclusive events in arts venues that the business and political elite meet and recognize one another. It is no surprise that the names of executives often crop up in arts sponsorship in media reporting. To put it bluntly, there is more than a grain of truth in Thomas Hoving’s cynical comment: ‘Art is sexy! Art is money-sexy! Art is money-sexy-social-climbing-fantastic!’⁵

It is appropriate at this juncture to recall Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of ‘cultural capital’.⁶ By participating in arts sponsorship, these elites are using their corporate positions to advance their personal interest and social status. Slightly modifying Bourdieu’s theory, one could argue that these business elites are transforming the economical capital of the corporations that they oversee into cultural capital for their own personal ends, while simultaneously acting in the corporate interest. It is sufficient, for our present purposes, to point out, following DiMaggio’s elaboration of Bourdieu’s concept, that cultural capital can in turn be transformed into the social capital of acquaintances and connections, and that this in turn can be put to use for the accumulation of economic capital.⁷

[...]

BURNISHING THE CORPORATE IMAGE

The concept of the publicity campaign is, therefore, essential to arts sponsorship. The need for publicity varies according to the products or service that the companies are marketing, but arts sponsorship is particularly effective for those companies, such as petroleum, tobacco and weapons industries, whose image is in need of some polishing. It is therefore no coincidence that oil companies such as Exxon and Mobil provide the largest amount of money for arts and culture in America.⁸ Likewise, in Britain, British Petroleum (BP), fully privatised in 1987, is one of the biggest arts sponsors in the country, on a par with British Telecom. Since 1990, the regular rehanging of the Tate Gallery collection, of which only a fifth is on display at any one time, has been sponsored by BP. For around £150,000 a year, a sum which can buy only two-and-a-half minutes’ commercial advertising on prime-time television in 1990, the BP logo appears all year round on the Tate’s large banners advertising the New Displays and on the front cover of the gallery’s publications.

[...] In 1980 Imperial launched its annual Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery, significantly at a time when the company’s sales of cigarettes had dropped to 120 billion from a peak of over 137 billion in 1973. Of its arts sponsorship, Peter Sanguinetti, its then external affairs executive, emphasized, in a Sunday Times interview, that ‘We want the arts people we pick to work hard to give us publicity. We don’t talk about “giving” money on sponsorship — the recipient gets the money, we get the publicity.’⁹

[...]

There are two main considerations behind corporate sponsorship: first, for companies whose products or service can make a ‘right’ connection with the sponsored show or the institution, the sponsored event is a sales promotion, however well disguised it may be; second, for companies whose products lack a direct link to exploit the sponsored event, association with the arts is more geared toward advertising their so-called ‘enlightened’ corporate image.

In the first instance, it is people within the ABC1 groups who are directly targeted. Over the last ten years the imported German beer Beck’s has been the favourite tipple of the official British avant-garde. It made its début conventionally enough sponsoring the exhibition German Art in the Twentieth Century at the Royal Academy in 1985, at a time when its British distributor, Scottish and Newcastle Breweries (S&N), were about to launch a nationwide marketing offensive, aimed at the under-30, style-conscious generation in an already over-crowded lager market.

Beck’s programme soon made a splash when it sponsored the retrospective of the newly garlanded Turner Prize winners Gilbert and George at the Hayward Gallery in 1987, with the brewers producing a ‘limited edition’ of 2,000 bottles carrying a label designed by the artists. The success of this ‘innovative art sponsorship’ is obvious: not only did it capture media attention, but the bottle itself became a collector’s item, with one of them actually being admitted to the Tate Gallery’s collection. To date, special edition bottles have included labels by Tim Head, Richard Long, George Wyllie, Bruce McLean and the 1993 Turner Prize winner, Rachel Whiteread. Compared with 20,000 barrels in 1984, S&N were importing 350,000 barrels ten years later. [...]

In the second case, where it is corporate image rather than indirect sales that are the concern, politicians, senior civil servants and opinion-formers figure among the most frequently mentioned target audience in my interviews. To quote from one of the top brewers in Britain: ‘Our target audience is very easy and very simple, and it’s probably no more than a thousand people. It would be the MPs … broker analysts, relevant journalists … and civil servants. Again these are all people relevant to our business.’ The same company is even more specific when it comes to defining its actual criteria. As far as geographical location is concerned, the spokesperson specified: ‘We would tend to sponsor things within a one-mile radius of the Houses of Parliament because we want to reach MPs.’ [...]

Ultimately, the significance of this corporate intervention has to be understood in political terms. By virtue of their being within the public sector or, in the case of American museums, in the domain of public prestige and authority, art museums have such a privileged position that association with them is a conspicuous signal of social prestige and power. This is further reinforced by the claim, widely made in the name of ‘art for art’s sake’ in bourgeois culture, that art, by its very nature, resides above the sordid world of politics and commerce; in the words of a senior officer in one prominent museum in New York, ‘We are non-political.’ Precisely because the ambience of art museums ostensibly absolves them from participating ideologically in the political process, they paradoxically provide the most discreet of venues where top politicians or government officials are invited to rub shoulders with equally prominent business leaders.

[...]

Nowhere is the transformed role that art museums came to play in the 1980s more clearly visible than in the immense popularity of ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions. According to Victoria Alexander, who studied the impact of public and corporate funding on art museums in America, the most significant effect of the shift in funding from public to corporate is the new emphasis being placed on ‘blockbuster shows’.¹⁰ These exhibitions, designed to attract the largest number of people possible to the museum, have become a yardstick whereby to judge its success, or otherwise. [...]

Museum expansion policy is thus closely bound up with the ambition of the director. In this respect, the directorship of Thomas Hoving at the Metropolitan Museum from 1966 to 1977 gave a foretaste of the ethos that would come to dominate the art world of the 1980s. With a ‘big business background’ as well as a training in medieval art, Hoving deliberately ventured into costly undertakings — new wings, blockbuster exhibitions and expensive acquisitions — thus forcing the museum into a desperate search for new sources of income. Hoving’s regime at the Met successfully transformed the traditional operation of the art museum from a warehouse of art artefacts into that of an entrepreneurial undertaking. The Met was marketed as a magnificent mansion providing a never-ending succession of blockbuster shows. As the conservative critic Hilton Kramer put it, Hoving made ‘the Museum bigger in almost every respect’, on a scale that can only be described as ‘imperial’.¹¹

[...]

SEROTA AT THE TATE

In Thatcherite Britain there emerged a new breed of museum director, what Antony Thorncroft referred to as ‘scholarly business managers’.¹² They included Neil Cossons at the Science Museum, with a background of running a commercial museum (Ironbridge), and, especially important for our purposes, Nicholas Serota at the Tate Gallery. They are, like their American counterparts, entrepreneurial, if somewhat less ruthless. [...] Serota’s task at the Tate was to make it ‘the biggest art fun-palace in Europe’.¹³

[...]

LUNCH WITH CÉZANNE

The new vision of the Tate produced a series of blockbuster shows, each bigger than the last: John Constable in 1991 (169,412 visitors), Picasso: Sculptor/Painter in 1994 (313,659 visitors) and the 1996 Cézanne extravaganza (408,688 visitors). Not only was a ticket to the Cézanne exhibition the ‘hottest’ in town, with its ticket agency taking some 5,250 bookings a day (admission cost £8.60), but the Tate also mounted an extensive merchandising campaign, with its shop stocking everything from vases, tea towels and CD-ROMs to £45 Cézanne scarves, not forgetting the ‘Cézannewich’ offered at the London branches of Prêt à Manger and a specially bottled ‘Cuvée Cézanne at the Tate’ wine. Back in 1989, it was Serota who was quoted as saying: ‘I don’t want the Tate to be a shopping mall. But if people want to buy something, they should be able to.’¹⁴

[...]

MUSEUMS FOR RENT

The meaning of this exclusive membership restriction (and the Tate is probably the only gallery in the Western world to have it) may not be immediately clear, not least because it is ultimately in contradiction with its professed claim to raise as much money as it can. Certainly, its intention is not to price the Gallery out of the market, but rather to place itself into a specific niche market. As the Tate spokesperson put it, the membership allows corporate members ‘to “belong” to an exclusive “club” which primarily gives them the exclusive opportunity to entertain in the Gallery’. Restricted access is thus designed to ensure that the Gallery can ‘deliver real and exclusive benefits’. As an anonymous Tate source put it, ‘There are only so many entertaining opportunities available in the year!’

The operative word in all this is ‘exclusive’. But exclusive from whom, and for whom? Although ‘employee benefits’ is one of the categories listed among the benefits of membership, most of the exclusive access and services are reserved for a very small number of people, with some benefits being exclusively earmarked for the chairman and the chief executive and a guest of their choice, such as attending the annual Tate Gallery Foundation Reception, the Annual Partners’ Dinner, and the most sought-after event of the contemporary art calendar, the Turner Prize Dinner, to name but a few. Restricted corporate membership is thus intended to make the Tate another powerful high-society club.

[...]

The ‘PR-ization of art museums’ by corporate capital is clearly articulated in the language they now speak. The Metropolitan Museum in its brochure to lure corporate sponsorship tells it all: ‘Many public relations opportunities are available through the sponsorship of programs, special exhibitions and services. These can often provide a creative and cost-effective answer to a specific marketing objective, particularly where international, governmental or consumer relations may be a fundamental concern.’¹⁵ The Tate markets itself in a similar indirect and low-key fashion:

«The Tate Gallery’s central location, on the Thames close to Westminster, makes it especially attractive to businesses located in London, or seeking a central London venue in which to entertain.… The Tate Gallery’s fine buildings offer a range of unique settings in which to entertain clients, shareholders and other business guests. These facilities are available exclusively to corporate members and current sponsors; the Tate Gallery does not hire its buildings to other commercial organizations.»¹⁶

The appeal of being ‘close to Westminster’ is obvious enough. In one publication, the Tate even boasts that it has ‘a reputation for developing imaginative fund-raising initiatives’, and that it works ‘closely with sponsors to ensure that their business interests are well served’.¹⁷

The mercenary mentality, of course, is not only compartmentalized within the Development Office; it moves by osmosis into other aspects of the museum operations. For instance, at a conference on its purchasing policy, ironically captured in the title ‘New Directions for a National Collection’, Jeremy Lewison, deputy keeper of the Modern Collection at the Tate, not only referred to art dealers as ‘allies’ (‘We collaborate with the dealers’), but also remarked: ‘You can look for packages – buy two works and receive one as a gift, for example.’¹⁸ It is difficult not to see this as a variation of well-tried supermarket gimmicks. To the extent that identity is based in the structure of language, the mercenary transformation of the Tate, and art museums in general, cannot be more spectacularly expressed. How, then, is the Tate to prove that it is still a public gallery, belonging to the whole nation, and not simply an agent for big business bent on advancing its capital interests?

[...]

By incorporating the sponsor’s name into the title of the event or organization it sponsors, thereby making them inseparable, the sponsors are certain to wring as much publicity as possible from their act of ‘good will’. In the 1980s, this kind of ‘title sponsorship’, though popular, was largely confined to events such as BT New Contemporaries or Barclays Young Artist Awards. In the 1990s the practice was extended to labelling institutions. With its huge £1.8 million arts budget (not forgetting, however, that this equalled a mere five hours of BT profits, at a rate of £100 a second), BT now demanded that its name be incorporated into any sponsorship deal. So instead of having a ‘Scottish Ensemble’, we had the ‘BT Scottish Ensemble’. Rodger Broad, the company’s head of sponsorship and advertising, was reported as saying that arts organizations never objected to this contractual obligation.¹⁹

In the field of visual arts, the most notorious title sponsorship deal was that between the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and Toshiba Information Systems, which was set up in April 1994. Although it was not exactly called ‘Toshiba ICA’, but more discreetly, ‘ICA/Toshiba’, with the added phrase ‘sponsored by’, the new sponsorship logo was so designed that the Toshiba presence was conspicuous and unmistakable. Toshiba paid some £300,000 for the status of ‘Primary Sponsor’ for three years, with another £75,000 cash handout from the Conservative government through its Pairing Scheme (the National Heritage Arts Sponsorship Scheme) to pay for publicising and marketing the sponsorship, as well as contributing to the ‘Innovation Commission’, which was itself designed to raise the profile of the sponsor.²⁰

But what made the deal a ‘new departure’ was more than the ubiquitous appearance of the sponsor’s logo, which amounted to upwards of one million Toshiba logos in the first year. Not only did the ICA bulletins and catalogues now carry an editorial statement from the sponsor, sometimes called the ‘Toshiba Mission Statement’, at other times, stressing its slogan, ‘Toshiba — In Touch with Tomorrow’, but the premises of the ICA were turned into a commercial showroom for the company. A purpose-built showcase of Toshiba products, entitled ‘Toshiba Centre of Excellence’, was prominently on display in the entrance hall, and the company’s televisions and videos were extensively used in its exhibitions. Such changes (and there were many), according to its then director, Mik Flood, were due ultimately to the shortage of money, which ‘can make you become a tick-over organization with programming that’s dull and bland because you have nothing to finance your ambitions with’.²¹

¹ Quotation from a special Chase Manhattan advertising supplement, ‘American Business and the Arts’, Forbes, 27 October 1986.
² Winton M. Blount, Business Support to the Arts is Just Good Sense (New York: BCA, 1984).
³ Willard C. Butcher, Going Public for the Private Enterprise System (New York: Chase Manhattan Bank, 1980); cited in Useem, Inner Circle, p. 89.
⁴ See Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class.
⁵ Quoted in Louisa Buck and Philip Dodd, Relative Values or What’s Art Worth? (London: BBC, 1991), p. 63.
⁶ Bourdieu, Distinction.
⁷ Paul DiMaggio and Michael Useem, ‘Social Class and Arts Consumption’, Theory and Society, vol. 5, 1978, pp. 141–61.
⁸ According to the Conference Board, printing and publishing corporations provide the highest proportion of their charitable contributions, 20.4%, to culture and the arts; financial institutions provide 19.3%; and petroleum and gas companies 18.4%. In terms of the total amount of money given, however, petroleum companies are the largest contributors. See Kathryn Troy, Annual Survey of Corporate Contributions (New York, 1983), p. 30; cited in Schuster, ‘The Non-Fungibility of Arts Funding’, p. 12.
⁹ Cited in Rick Rogers, ‘The Ethics of Sponsorship’, Arts Express , June 1986, p. 10.
¹⁰ Victoria Dean Alexander, From Philanthropy to Funding: The Effects of Corporate and Public Support on Art Museums, PhD thesis, Stanford University, 1990, p. 91.
¹¹ Hilton Kramer, ‘The Hoving Era at the Met’, in Kramer, The Revenge of the Philistines: Art and Culture, 1972–1984 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1986), pp. 320–4.
¹² Antony Thorncroft, ‘Museums and Art Galleries’, The Financial Times, 11 June 1988.
¹³ Waldemar Januszczak, ‘The Shock of Serota’, Guardian, 26 November 1988.
¹⁴ Ernest Beck, ‘Nicholas Serota’, Artnews, vol. 88, no. 3, March 1989, p. 118.
¹⁵ Quoted in Hans Haacke, ‘Museums, Managers of Consciousness’, in Wallis, ed., Hans Haacke, pp. 69–70.
¹⁶ Tate Gallery Corporate Membership Programme, brochure, p. 5.
¹⁷ Tate Gallery, Cézanne (London, 1996), p. 597.
¹⁸ Jeremy Lewison, ‘New Directions for a National Direction’, Museum Management and Curatorship, vol. 10, June 1991, p. 201. Commercial art consultants and dealers such as Mary Boone in New York, Sonia Coode-Adams and Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London are also donors to the Tate Gallery.
¹⁹ Andy Lavender, ‘Patronage by Numbers’, The Times , 12 July 1994.
²⁰ The Pairing Scheme was launched in 1995 to replace the BSIS (Business Sponsorship Incentive Scheme), which was set up by the Conservative government in 1984 to encourage arts sponsorship by giving cash to corporate sponsors.
²¹ Claire Armitstead, ‘Risky Business’, Guardian, 13 January 1993.

Photographing the Bomb, A Memo

Yōsuke Yamahata

If the trains had been running normally, we would have arrived in about six hours. But as it was, the trip took us twelve hours and we arrived at Michino Station, just before Nagasaki, at around three in the morning.

I remember vividly the cold night air and the beautiful starry sky. Descending a sloping path that ran along the mountainside, and crossing over the ridge of the mountains, we reached the front gate of the Mitsubishi arsenal. A single sentry holding a fixed bayonet stood guard before the closed stone gate, and when we inquired about the situation within he told us that everything was in ruins, and that the city of Nagasaki was even worse off.

A warm wind began to blow. Here and there in the distance, I saw small fires, like elf-fires, smoldering: Nagasaki had already been completely destroyed. Higashi, Yamada, and I progressed quickly along the prefectural road that ran down the middle of the plain.