Ghosts of the RAF

Once you've looked at Emmy/Anwyn/a_'s poetry in Overland, click through to Andrew McCann's article on the "literary afterlife" of the Red Army Faction. Or "Militancy and Melancholia," as he titles it.

Put together before the release of Baader Meinhof Complex, the article focuses instead on a couple of RAF books.

It opens, though, with the image of Gerhard Richter's October 18, 1977 series of RAF portraits hanging in New York's MoMA, mere months after the 9/11 attacks.

Richter’s sequence was finished in the late 1980s, and sold to MoMA in 1995. At that point, it might have seemed as if the moment of its relevance had passed. Today, the sequence is merely the most prominent manifestation of a recent artistic infatuation with the political subcultures that developed in the wake of 1968. In Germany, the contemporary fascination with the Red Army Faction has led to a flood of films, artworks and biographies. In an Anglophone context, the same trend is evident in relation to the American urban guerrilla group, the Weather Underground. And, of course, the academy is never far behind the market: academic work on these subcultures and their ambivalent afterlife also seems to be burgeoning.

The timing is hardly coincidental. With the West paralysed by a fear of terrorism that is also driving its military adventurism, the spectres of the 1960s and 1970s appear as uncanny projections of political disquiet that doesn’t quite know how to articulate itself. Hence the utterly confused and extremely variable forms of affect that attach to these images of left-wing militancy: from the ambivalently celebratory, James Dean-like portrait of Andreas Baader in Christopher Roth’s 2001 film Baader, to the often shamed, somewhat abject responses of academics eager to rethink their youthful identifications in the wake of more recent events. At both poles, the earlier radical subcultures appear as avatars of defeat and error. In them, we see the disaster of an ideology that didn’t have the rigour or the patience or the tactical know-how to actualise itself, and became irrationally violent as a result. As Emily Apter puts it, ‘a revolutionary stance of ethical militance’ was thus ‘compromised by the impetus towards militarisation’.

Middle class fantasy

Yes yes. This is not news, but in the present environment it's particularly baffling.

Rupert Murdoch - Australia's very own salaried nonsense-tycoon, charged with peddling nonsense around the globe - has set us all straight on the future: it will be a middle-class one. Phew.

One of the most under-reported stories of our day is the rise of a huge new global middle class.

People have emerged from poverty or, I should say, have lifted themselves out of poverty, given this chance through market reforms. A world dominated by a new middle class, of course, is not what supposed radicals had in mind a century ago when they spoke of revolution.

Get your hand off it, gramps.

I submit as countervailing evidence - from a field of hundreds - the Habermas article linked just below, if only because it is close to hand:

In America and Great Britain...the political elites viewed the wild speculation as useful as long as things were going well. And Europe succumbed to the Washington Consensus. In this regard there was also a broad coalition of the willing for which Mr. Rumsfeld didn't need to advertise.

Die Zeit: The Washington Consensus was the notorious economic plan proposed the IMF and the World Bank in 1990 that was supposed to provide the template for economic reform, first in Latin America and then throughout half of the world. Its central promise was "Trickle Down": led the rich become richer and affluence will trickle down to the poor.

Empirical evidence of the falsehood of this prognosis has been accumulating for many years. The effects of the increase in affluence are so asymmetrical, at both the national and the global level, that the zones of poverty have grown before our very eyes.

Nevertheless, Murdoch gets to propagate these lies through his very own newspaper (The Australian) and through the annual Australian government-funded ABC lecture series ('The Boyer Lectures').

Habermas in/on crisis

Sign and Sight translate a recent interview with Habermas:

Let's confront the past a bit: How did it come to this? Did the end of the communist threat strip capitalism of its inhibitions?

The form of capitalism reined in by nation-states and Keynesian economic policies – which, after all, conferred historically unprecedented levels of prosperity on the OECD countries – came to an end somewhat earlier, already with the abandonment of the system of fixed exchange rates and the oil crisis. The economic theory of the Chicago School already acquired practical influence under Reagan and Thatcher. This merely continued under Clinton and New Labour – and during the period as British chancellor of the exchequer of our most recent hero Gordon Brown. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a fatal triumphalism in the West. The feeling of being among the winners of world history is seductive. In this case it contributed to inflating a theory of economic policy into a worldview permeating all areas of life.

Neoliberalism is a form of life. All citizens are supposed to become entrepreneurs of their own labour power and to become customers...

...and competitors. The stronger who win out in the free-for-all of the competitive society can claim this success as their personal merit. It is deeply comical how managers – though not just them – fall prey to the absurd elitist rhetoric of our talk shows, let themselves be celebrated in all seriousness as role models and mentally place themselves above the rest of society. It's as if they could no longer appreciate the difference between functional elites and the ascriptive elites of estates in early modern societies. What is so admirable about the character and mentality of people in leading positions who do their job in a halfway competent manner? Another alarm signal was the Bush Doctrine announced in Fall 2002, which laid the groundwork for the invasion of Iraq. The social Darwinist potential of market fundamentalism has since become apparent in foreign policy as well as in social policy.

It's patchy, but worth a look.

Not the financial crisis

This is Cornelius Castoriadis in 1989:

we may say that there cannot not be a crisis of the identification process, since there is no self-representation of society as the seat of meaning and of value, no self-representation of society as inserted in a history that is past and to come, itself endowed with meaning not 'by itself' but by the society that is constantly reliving it and recreating it in this way. These are the pillars of an ultimate identification with a highly cathected 'we', and it is this 'we' that is today becoming dislocated. Society is now posited, by each individual, as a mere 'constraint' imposed on the individual - a monstrous illusion, but one lived so vividly that it is becoming a material, tangible fact, the indicator of a process of desocialization - and yet, simultaneously and contradictorily, it is to this society, illusorily lived today as an external 'constraint', that the individual also addresses uninterrupted demands for assistance. And with this contradictory attitude toward society comes the complementary illusion that history is, at best, a tourist attraction to be visited during a vacation.

Castoriadis is not necessarily putting forward a wholly novel argument (particularly not for us, 19 years later), but this has some similarity to Dufour's argument in (the much more recent) The Art of Shrinking Heads. What differences there are mostly stem from their theoretical attachments - Castoriadis to Freud, Dufour to Lacan. But the shape of the argument - the dwindling meaning of a big Other (Dufour) or social imaginary significations (Castoriadis) - responds to a similar interest: locating a reason, beyond mere reference to "neoliberalism" but certainly within the processes it unleashes, for the decline of social attachments and the upswing in pseudo-individualism. ("Pseudo," for Castoriadis, because he argues that we actually see a stronger conformism now, despite the language of individualism.) Castoriadis argues that there is no "meaning lived as imperishable by the men and women of today."

What Castoriadis says in this piece can be taken in a number of different directions - and the question time which followed the spoken version of this paper (all reprinted as "The Crisis of the Identification Process" in Thesis Eleven, n49, 1997) certainly does engage Cornelius on a few different topics.

Nevertheless, the year is interesting to me. 1989. In Germany, a few months later, we have a notionally reunified/reunifying nation. At this point, a whole sector of the population come into a society in which, according to Castoriadis, socially instituted meanings and values are displaced. As has been documented and mentioned regularly, the intial euphoria of this westward pouring soon turned sour for many. I need to do further research on this, but I have an early hypothesis that at least one explanation for this disappointment would lay in a strong disjunct between the social imaginary significations of these two places (the GDR and the FDR). Even if the GDR was going to shit in its final years, one of the arguments strongly made by Alexei Yurchak is that right up until the end, many within the communist populations held strong attachments to the values of the communist idea (or hypothesis, as Badiou/Sartre might have).

This was the case even as they bought sly copies of Western rock music and dressed themselves up in Levis. As such, the very things that held the GDR together (or Soviet society, in Yurchak's case), are those significations which that the society makes together, sometimes in spite of itself. As Castoriadis himself relates in response to a question, "Totalitarianism certainly failed in reality, but nothing guaranteed that it had to fail. This is undoubtedly what Orwell, too, had in mind when, at the end of 1984, totalitarianism's greatest triumph is achieved not through violence but through the fact that Winston Smith cries because he loves Big Brother - that is, he has internalized Big Brother completely." There's a dynamic at work between the communist systems of surveillance (predicated, of course, on a deep mistrust) and the actual attachment to a certain portion of the party-state's envisoned future (gleaming, communal, modern, progressive etc).

"Every society creates its own world in creating the significations that are specific to it," Castoriadis says. "Indeed, it creates a magma of significations, such as the...significations that go with the emergence of capitalist society (or, more exactly, of the capitalist component of modern society)." Or the communist system.

For Castoriadis these significations have three roles or functions (hold the 'functionalism'):

1. "They are what structure the representations of the world in general, without which there can be no human beings. These structures are each time specific: our world is not the ancient Greek world, and the trees we see beyond these windows do not each shelter a nymph; it's just wood, we say, which is a construction characteristic of the modern world."
   
2. "These significations designate the finalities or ends of action; they dictate what is to be done and not to be done, what is good to do and not good to do. One should, for example, adore God or, perhaps, accumulate the forces of production - whereas no natural or biological law, nor even any psychical one, says that one must adore God or accumulate the forces of production."
3. And the most difficult to grasp, he admits, "these significations establish the types of affects that are characteristic of a society. For example, there clearly is an affect that is created by Christianity, which is faith. We know or believe we know what faith is, this nearly indescribable sentiment that establishes a relationship with an infinitely superior being whom one loves, who loves you, who can punish you, all of this steeped in a strange psychical humidity, and so on and so forth. This sort of faith would be absolutely incomprehensible to Aristotle: for, what can this idea really mean, that one might love the gods or be loved by the gods in this fashion, be possessed by these affects, the undeniable expression of which can be seen on the faces of the true faithful in Bethlehem on any given Christmas Eve? This affect is social-historically instituted, and one can point to the person who created it: the apostle Paul. With the de-Christianization that has occurred in modern societies, it is no longer as present as it once was. But there really are affects that are characteristic of capitalist society, too. Without entering into a description that would risk taking a merely literary turn, allow me to recall that Marx described these capitalist affects very well when he spoke of a perpetual restlessness, constant change, a thirst for the new for the sake of the new and for more for the sake of more - in short, a set of socially instituted affects."
   

There is much more to be said about this - if not done with it: particularly with the idea that nostalgia may well be one of the affects of our age, as one could take Jameson to suggest. But I think it's striking enough to warrant this provisional post.

In a sense, Castoriadis is trying to have it both ways in this paper, suggesting that the crisis of identification is both an outcome of neoliberalism in the West and a more dispersed global phenomenon. The West, I think it's safe to extrapolate from his three page spray at contemporary Europe toward the end, is held by Castoriadis to be leading the way: "we are living the society of 'hobbies and lobbies'." (Zing!)

Consequently, to make this analysis work in the post-communist or 'transition' context, a certain amount of careful navigation needs to happen. In particular, one should be particularly mindful to maintain in view - as the horizon, even - Castoriadis' strong emphasis on the subject's capacity for creativity. That is, to steer away from simply quoting the bracing social critique without due reference to Castoriadis' complex theoretical schemata.

Public art strategy

Excuse the large deviation from this blog's nominal topic. I'm not even going to try to tie this in...

I just read Owen Hatherley's piece on roadside architecture in Britain:

Today’s landscape is morphed and sullied by the car via all sorts of underinvestigated types, from out-of-town shopping centres to drive-ins, business parks and hotels, the Americanised space hymned by JG Ballard, who in the eighties claimed “the future is going to be boring”.

This boredom is represented very neatly in the architecture the car currently inspires.

The situation, for a number of reasons, is rather different in Australia. Like home ownership, the ownership of a car is held to be something like an inalienable human right in Australia. More than this, though, the car is a key mythological symbol in contemporary Australia. The road, even more so. This supremacy of the vehicle and highway recalls the situation in the US, except Australia has its own versions of this modernist frontier narrative. See Mad Max. Listen to The Triffids. Read Meaghan Morris. Skim Graeme Davison.

A debate about the merits of public transportation and private transportation is ongoing in Australia. It's fairly heated in Melbourne at the moment, as the state government insists on building large freeway projects and neglecting a PPP rail network.

EastLink is one of the recent freeway projects. A toll road, it arcs around the belly of this sprawling city's eastern suburbs, delivering city drivers to the Mornington Peninsula and vice versa. The road, it seems, has not been as popular as projected - although one of the hallmarks of such constructions is the way in which they launch housing prices upwards and thereby increase the 'desirability' of certain suburbs around them. The fallow fields next to the freeway will be sprouting houses soon enough.

"Desiring Machine" by Simeon Nelson

One of the selling points of this road - alongside "extensive park and wetlands for native plants and animals" - is that it is dotted by public art projects. These must form part of what their website calls "eye catching urban design features."

"Hotel" by Callum Morton

The best of these is Callum Morton's "Hotel." This is part of an ongoing exploration by Morton of the anonymous international hotel space. In his "Valhalla" and "Babylonia" installations (see them here), external structures of 'ruins' and a cave harbour blank luxury-hotel corridors and foyers. The "Hotel" piece is a scaled-down version of a tall, uninspiring hotel structure. Less luxury, this one, and more family-roadtrip pitstop. Although you can't go inside, its windows blink at night, glowing blue as its imagined visitors distractedly flick through channels of - what? Porn and chat shows? The scale - it must be about 2/3rds, enough to make a normal-sized human not-quite-fit - and semblance and feasible roadside position make the structure uncanny, sure to make many do a double-take.

But there's more than art on EastLink. Cyclists and walkers can wander the EastLink Trail. May a thousand Iain Sinclairs bloom: the trail "includes vantage points from which to enjoy the EastLink Environment." (Capital E!) This is a nod to the exigencies of the car-dictated suburban environment in Melbourne, with its poorly provisioned estates and momentarily glamorous housing developments. (These were once called exurbs, but that feels a bit dated.) What better way to get some exercise than by walking along the road which takes you to work each day.

This type of activity is both encouraged and admonished. A large warehouse along the freeway - somewhere around Dandenong, I believe - carries an injunction in the form of its occupier's brand slogan: "Work. Don't play." This peculiarly aggressive and patrician invocation seeks a strong-armed embrace of alienation. No time to recreate, fuckers, keep working.

These slogans form part of the entertainment for those driving the road's sleek and smooth new lanes. This is "the sad anomie of the individual bunkered in the car," as Owen puts it, "refusing to get on the train that would get them there in half the time." But the car has its pleasures. The car has always been for me one of my favourite places to listen to music. There I get to do it loudly and with a focus I barely manage elsewhere.

"Public Art Strategy" by Emily Floyd

Out along EastLink, trains are barely an option. There are no trains servicing large parts of this tract. Consequently, the public art - let alone the "eye catching urban design features" - plays the role of product differentiator. With a number of other roads leading to the same destinations - the CBD, other eastern suburbs, the Peninsula - the toll road must spruik for trade. Aside from the art, a primary attraction for the driver is its lack of congestion. In a city growing by over a thousand people each week, with little affordable new housing anywhere near the city, the roads are busier for longer (peak-hour begins earlier and ends later, the midday drop off now barely perceptible) and bottles-up much further out from the city.

"Ellipsoidal Freeway Sculpture" by James Angus

Obviously, the toll has the effect of segregating commuters based upon financial means. Those who can afford the toll get the benefits of a pleasant, smooth driving experience: uncongested roads, endlessly serviced by a team of sub-contractors, with a smatter of public art curios installed next to the service lanes.

The art and architectural design features, then, aid the marketing and 'delivery' of a 'product' aimed at a more discerning commuter-consumer. In a city with an ailing public transport system, the roads have their own websites and art projects. In a (once?) neoliberal economy with little space for independent culture, the public art is given titles and content pointing to a certain self-consciousness about being involved in a road project - or, in the case of "Public Art Strategy," given to commenting on the controversy surrounding other public art projects.

And, in the final loose thread, it's perhaps in this context that middling singer-songwriters find the inspiration to film clips next to these arterials, staging something of their own public art extravaganza (I refer, specifically, to the reverse hat throw at 4:39):

Beyond the State

An otherwise dormant site posts a Badiou lecture: "Is the Word 'Communism' Forever Doomed?"

The lecture was given on Thursday, November 6, 2008 in New York.

Two interesting things in Badiou's biography, probably written by someone else:

1. "For many years a Maoist, [Badiou] remains a committed political activist." A transition, then - from 'committed' Maoist 'activist' (presumably) to 'committed political activist'. Is there no neat name for his current position?
   
2. Zizek's endorsement of Badiou: "His work aims at the very heart of politically correct radical intellectuals, undermining the foundations of their mode of life!" I suspect his work would be deeply boring and insular if he only aimed at this. Zizek is reading into Badiou a rather more Zizekian concern, no? Or is Zizek just being ironic? All those loaded terms....