Iron Curtain Call

Shuffle sideways

2009-08-14T17:44:00.002+02:00

I have decided to draw the curtain (irresistible!) on this blog. Various reasons. None of them very dramatic.

I have started another blog. It is on Tumblr, which I think is a better platform for hosting photos and short pieces of text. Tumblr favours brevity, whereas my usual mode of writing does not. I hope it will discipline my writing, bringing it into tighter lines. This is also keeping with an idea Mark and I have discussed many times: a journal dedicated to the 'fragment' - short, distilled, potent bursts of text. Tumblr is also more aesthetically interesting and customisable.

It will be less Ostalgie focussed, but that interest/preoccupation/burden will be part of the various transmissions/emissions to be found there. Keeping this blog with such a narrow focus made it ultimately unappealing.

The new blog is here.

Exeunt.

Stay on the internet

2009-07-03T22:58:00.003+02:00

Despite what your superego tells you, it's never the right thing to stay off the internet.

For example, you could be writing an essay about histories of GDR design and 'everyday life' and miss something like this: a Der Spiegel-related special on GDR design. Then, hypothetically, you could submit your article without realising that there was fresh new meat online to churn through your analytic sausage machine. Then, speculatively, you could finally get around to reading all those saved 'tabs' you accumulated in Firefox during the essay writing - when the battle between id and superego was at its most frenzied - and find the meat, just laying there, a little grey now around the edges, a few flies (other hackademics?) buzzing around the slab of historic carcass.

Fleisch-laden bitterness aside, this A-Z of GDR design is pretty interesting. There's an English translation and summary of the text here.

Interesting, of course, but problematic. As my essay argues. I have intentions of posting bits from it here one day, so I won't preempt too much now. It is worth pointing out though that all this harking about the consumables of the GDR is a peculiarly capitalist way of telling the history of that state. So we continue the usual oscillation between a history of the Stasi state and a history of the consumer shortage state. Invasion. Privation.

Also, once you're done ogling, a new survey:

Glorification of the German Democratic Republic is on the rise two decades after the Berlin Wall fell. Young people and the better off are among those rebuffing criticism of East Germany as an "illegitimate state." In a new poll, more than half of former eastern Germans defend the GDR.

Academic narcissism makes me happy about this. "My topic remains relevant. The media says so!" One day they'll be asking me for rubbish quotes. Specialisation has its rewards.

I know you are, you said you are, but what am I?

2009-05-15T09:51:00.002+02:00

Mr. Lafontaine, is Germany embroiled in a class struggle?

With a first question like that, an interview is going to be either combative ('you silly old leftist with your outdated class ideas') or flattering (a doozy Green Left Weekly question, setting the tone for mutual reinforcement of mutually-held opinions).

As it happens, this Der Spiegel interview with Oskar Lafontaine (chairman of Die Linke), is more combative than deferential. There's a strong note of disbelief from the interviewers -- a sense that Die Linke is wasting its time, that they have little support, that their slogans are too strong, their election platform "sounding like Marx and Engels." Still, it makes for entertaining reading.

I was, of course, interested in the following volley of Q&A:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: German Chancellor Angela Merkel wants to continue to measure the Left Party by its attitude toward East Germany's past.

Lafontaine: An interesting psychological case. People tend to accuse other people of their own mistakes. Ms. Merkel needs to deal with her own past in East Germany and that of her own party. She was an FDJ functionary for agitation and propaganda (ed's note: The FDJ was an official youth movement in communist East Germany). As such she belonged to the fighting reserve of the party (ed's note: the Communist Socialist Unity Party (SED)).

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What's at issue here is how one sees East Germany, 20 years after the fall of the Wall. One has the impression that this issue has not been definitively resolved within your party.

Lafontaine: The PDS has, as one of the Left Party's predecessor parties, dealt with the question of its relationship to East Germany at many party conferences and in the papers (ed's note: For an explanation of the PDS and the parties that united to form the Left Party, please click here ). Only the CDU has not done so. It swallowed the assets of two of the SED's satellite parties, and otherwise covers up its past with a cloak of silence.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Was East Germany a dictatorship in which the rule of law did not apply?

Lafontaine: The GDR was not a state based on the rule of law -- that is a much more precise answer.

Mayday! Left lost!

2009-05-04T09:56:00.005+02:00

This was published in Crikey today.

And so it comes around again, the ritual of rocks and bottles, batons and boots. May Day. Berlin. Kreuzberg. You know this one.

The trend of declining violence during Berlin's May Day celebration/streetparty/protest/happening/boozebath was successfully reversed this year. Congratulations to all involved: the Polizei -- green, riot-helmeted lemmings, bobbling off to their job as representatives of Order, State and Democracy, 200 of them injured; the protestors -- black-hooded hurlers, tabloid media favourites, ready for their frontpage close-up.

Before all the evening clashes, early in the day, the first flashpoint was out in Köpnick, a town in the former East. It's 800 years old, I learned a week previously as I inadvertently walked into birthday celebrations for its Old Town, one of the few unmarked by WWII. Visiting on a warm spring day, the usual bunch of beige-chinoed local history buffs and old folks were celebrating. Grey people were parked in rows by the front of a traditionally-dressed oom-pah band.

Beyond such pleasantness, Köpnick is also the home of nationalist NPD party leader, Udo Voigt. On May Day the ailing party -- bankrupt, discredited, despised, a sad joke -- was to host a picnic there. A "family day". Much like the one I’d seen the week before, along the banks of the Spree, only this time with generous servings of Turk-bashing and anti-Semitism between burgers.

Various anti-fascist groupings decided to blockade the town, laying down on the train tracks in both directions, shutting the station for at least an hour. Police did their usual heavy-handed thing, a warm-up for the later street battles. The situation briefly erupted after a local funny-guy made the Hitler salute from his balcony. Rocks. Abuse. Etc. No blut(wurst) was spilled, but the Left's point, I suppose, was made. Whether their point could be made more effectively by, erm, organising and speaking with the NPD-sympathetic East Germans left behind by re-unification -- well, that's a debate for another meeting.

After the NPD had been dispatched, around lunchtime, there was the union and 'legit' show of labour and left politics along Unter den Linden. Speeches. Applause.

For the assembled masses, it was onto the U8 train and out to Kreuzberg, a place retaining some of its infamous radical politics. There have been recent signs of increasing militancy: some 90+ upmarket cars have been torched and upturned this year in a campaign against gentrification along the Eastern axis of the city (Friedrichshian, Kreuzberg, Treptow, Neukölln). With the winds of capital blowing through its streets, this corner of Berlin is still a site of foment.

It’s a pertinent place for discontent, for grievances to be aired. People living here, for example, have a life expectancy some four years lower than those living in Wilmersdorf, a few stops west along the U1. Around a third of Kreuzberg is living below the poverty line. Something like a third of the population is of Turkish origin, managing to not-quite-exist in a Germany that neither loves nor entirely loathes their presence. As elsewhere, for many Germans it's a matter of ethnic calculus -- one Turk (with a Döner shop), good; 2.8 million (with children), bad.

This year's violence took place at the bottom of Berlin’s signature post-war apartment towers – where many semi-integrated Turks live with their satellite dishes. Kottbusser Tor was once going to be the site of freeway, but with the Berlin Wall zagging around this corner of West Berlin and enclosing it on three sides, it was a road to and from nowhere, leaving Kreuzberg a place for squats and Nick Cave. The towers encircle a roundabout, with twelve lanes of traffic and two trainlines flowing through it. The perfect gathering spot for protests, an urban space that is at once dense and open.

May Day night, everything was in its place. Things flared, positions were staked. Fires, uplifted cobblestones, covered faces.

The police were prepared for their part in all this. 5,800 of them were deployed. Their vans lined up along surrounding streets and held some 300 arrested people by the night’s end. The vans stretched for hundreds of metres, two vehicles deep. Helicopters buzzed overhead all day. Sirens pierced the double glazing. Friends of mine, driving over from Prenzlauer Berg, could not reach us, the city streets locked down.

Police exploited access to the newest surveillance technologies. They openly sat in their vans, hunched over laptops in full combat wear, surveying real time maps and information on the flow and movement of people. They closed off streets at the first sight of trouble. The thin skein of democratic capitalism rests on Google Maps. Plus water cannons. And thermal imaging.

By 11pm, many of the scuffles around Kottbusser Tor had dissipated, the police segregating protestors into small groups. A carpet of broken glass and lumps of rock were reminders of earlier actions. The lumpy riot police stood around, shuttered in behind helmets and armour. Drunken blow-ins were shouting, raising false alarms and giggling. The macho nonsense of so much street protesting glides easily into the macho nonsense of drunk idiots out with mates.

Earlier, before the protest and dancing etc.

Around the corner from the Tor, Myfest -- the marketed, publicised and endorsed face of Kreuzberg's May Day celebrations -- was in full force. Or rather, at full blast. An ear-drum warping seven stages are arranged around Oranienstrasse and its sidestreets. (The revolution will not be ... without infrastructure?) Add to this some ad-hoc DJ sets outside cafes, bars and taxi schools. The street was thick with people, dancing, drinking, eating, contending with streams of other people navigating their way around the dancing people and the eating people and the drinking people and the people looking for other people they'd come with who were here a minute ago but now lost somewhere in this sea of people dancing, drinking, eating...

There was none of the Tor's tense quiet here. The music bounced off the tall apartment facades. The street party's energy -- bodies pressed in close, moving -- was different from that of the protest. Better. It felt spontaneous, joyful, open, creative, one vision of people creating something together. Families with food stands, musicians, DJs. It was telling that the protest, by contrast, felt only staged, repetitive and "blocked". Twenty-two years in a row of pitched battle on the same day, at the same time, on the same streets -- sometime soon, the value of this protest form must surely be questioned in whispers around the various circles of Berlin's Left.

Krise!

2009-03-31T09:52:00.007+02:00

The following "protest report" - wot I wrote - was published in Crikey. It appears here with the addition of my stunning photojournalism. The original was published in the same edition as Guy Rundle's commentary on the London protests. I would venture that the difference between London and Berlin protests is: in London, the dogs are on strings; in Berlin, the dogs roam and shit freely.

On a typically sodden Berlin afternoon in late March, the visages of the city’s Marx and Engels statues glower across Spandauer-Strasse. This particular Saturday, they stare deep into the assembled groupings of the left. The city’s squats and former squats are upturned, their residents gathered to protest against the financial crisis.

On one side of Spandauer-Strasse, anarchists sit around a van, refusing the dominant anti-capitalist drift -- instead they provocatively proffer anti-communist flyers, badges and badgering. Next to them, the first drum circle. Next to them, the anti-fascist campaigners and their van. Then the Trotskyists have a table of his finer works. Sales seem slow. The rain cover remains in place. Accepting every circulating flyer and pamphlet would weigh down any normal human wandering along thestrasse -- every man and his faction has something to say on the crisis. A lone man, dressed entirely in green but for the red star on his cap, carries a GDR flag.

Elsewhere in the square, just beyond Marx’s vision, the main platform is hosting the big groupings -- most notably, parliamentary party Die Linke (The Left) and the Ver.di union. A nice touch comes in the form of the second drum circle. All the way from Cameroon to play as house-band. Here for variety-show punctuation and interludes between speakers.

Given the nebulous reason for this Saturday protest -- a response to the response to the financial/neo-liberal crisis, plus unconfirmed intimations of being a satellite of the bigger London protests -- it was unsurprising that proceedings sprayed in any number of directions and programmes. Where some might see a carnival, a gathering, a happening -- others wouldn’t. A cynic would find something telling in the clashing soundsystems, pamphlets, stages, speakers -- even on a day apparently given to articulating a unitary response to the crisis. Nevertheless, the groups came to important consensus around the continuing relevance of the brezel stand. Trotskyist booksellers take note.

Although this protest was smaller than the slicker London affair, the greater militancy of the fifteen thousand (police figures) or thirty thousand (organiser figures) in attendance was marked. There were no NGOs. No video hook-ups. But also no cries of "more regulation". This was an anti-capitalist protest -- with some remnant traces of pre-9/11 street-theatre protest carnivals, but also with a newfound vigour and emphasis on neoliberalism’s evident pathologies. A hard left politics would seem easy to activate and invoke in Berlin. It is inscribed into the city map. Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse. Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse. Marx-Engels-Forum. These places mark the outline of Saturday’s protest.

In Germany -- and particularly in Berlin and the former East -- the Die Linke parliamentary party opens up on the left a channel for an "official" critique of capitalism. Certainly nowhere else in Europe does there seem to be a left-wing party so visibly and somewhat successfully running on an explicit anti-capitalist platform. Prominent Linke politican Gregor Gysi stood on a street corner as the march did one last lap through the streets around Hackescher Markt. People approached him. Shook hands. Discussed. His body guards failed to remain inconspicuous.

Die Linke was launched on an anti-neoliberal platform, although its experience governing Berlin in a power-sharing arrangement has suggested compromise is an ugly matter for members and constituents. This is perhaps the key question for the party now -- how it acts in coalition. Germans go to the polls in September. But Die Linke’s recent showing in the Hesse state election was lower than expected. Given that it’s practically impossible for one party alone to form government here, the compromise question is an imminent one within Die Linke.

From outside, the question of the left’s position on the state still remains an open one (see the anarchist van above) -- the presence of Die Linke at the protest was matched by those calling for a revolutionary overthrow, not a process from within state institutions. Such faultlines may explain why Linke leader Oskar Lafontaine was pelted with eggs during his speech.

Despite Chancellor Merkel and Germany’s central role within European negotiations, some recent analysis suggests Berlin has been less affected by the crisis than other spots around the world. The city has long been bankrupt. The financial and business centres are elsewhere. The Berlin economy ticks over on the basis of government business (public service, embassies, business visitors after a ministerial ear), tourism (figures rose again last year) and creative labour. All of this makes it a service economy. The diplomats need tastefully appointed restaurants. The tourists want currywurst and schnitzel. The creative labourers head to one cafe to do their work; then head to their subsidiary cafe job over the road. Hipsters and diplomats have insulated Berlin’s economy.

Nevertheless, as brunch was served along Oranienburger-Strasse, the assembled masses marched along a negotiated, circular path through Mitte. The slow, somewhat enervated shuffle seemed more like window-shopping with chanted slogans. A brief scuffle near Alexanderplatz suggested the Polizei’s amp’d-up, muzzled German Shepherds were their answer to earlier protest experiences. But the antics were shortlived and the rest of the march itself was free of violence -- although, as always, there was the ambient threat of buff young cops out for some smash-n-bash and marchers looking for an immediate discharge of rage and resentment. This later snapped. Things turned heated later in the day, as bottles and rocks were launched at police and their vehicles. Twenty-five people were arrested. Twelve police were injured. A quiet day by Berlin standards. Still, May Day’s just around the corner.

This may merely have been the calm before that day’s ritual Kreuzberg sh-tstorm.

Grass mowed down

2009-03-02T18:20:00.003+01:00

Sign and Sight has translated Monika Maron's lacerating critique of Günter Grass's diary of German reunification. In the recently published selection, Grass, she writes,

is doing precisely what he accuses others of doing: he is colonising, if only mentally. He decides whose opinions are valid, he knows what's right for those gullible, backwards, Deutsch-Mark crazed East Germans, what they should want and idiotically don't want, and he steps up to intercede in their best interests, as if they were too stupid to articulate them themselves. He decides what succeeded and what failed. And German reunification was a failure for Grass, today and 18 years ago when, on 13 January 1991, finally reunited with his beloved Portuguese cacti he writes. Should, if have time and energy, take stock again next October 3rd in my usual 'dogmatic' way.

And this is exactly what he did. On October 2, 1991 Günter Grass rattled off a speech in Bitterfeld about bargains, victors, the reunification treaty as colonial order, the failure of unification. But the emphasis was on the stupidity of having ignored his, Grass's, suggestions for a cautious rapprochement and a later confederation of the two states. No, this unity is not worth celebrating, Grass said. ...Which of history's devils has ridden us, driving us to botch the gift of a possible confederation, and instead to hammer together a unity that supports nothing but its own ends.

Twelve months after reunification Grass explained to the people of Bitterfeld, who had been catapulted out of all certainties and habits, that German reunification had failed, that they themselves had been betrayed, robbed and colonised and, what's more, they were idiotic enough to have voted for this unfortunate mess.

While it's worth taking exception to some of her later points about the triumph of green capitalism in the "new states" of the re-unified country, Maron's main mark against Grass is a strong one about the rhetoric of "colonialism" doubling back on itself. The sketch of the pitiful East German is an easy one to draw. Certainly the material and systemic power was against them, but any reading of their "passivity" needs to take account of the interplay between individual autonomy and institutional, structural arrangements. (Easy on the Giddens and Castoriadis, mister!) A book like Birgit Müller's Disenchantment with Market Economics - an anthropological study of Ossis and their workplaces, review coming soon - shows the complexity of these negotiations. After reading such a work, it would seem flatly wrong to characterise as "passive" those affective and biographical labours that were entailed in the Wende for many Ossis - and Wessis, too.

Grass seems to get a few things right and his passion is certainly admirable, if a little misguided. If my bodgy Deutsch can stand it, the thing seems worth a look.

The parting of the curtain

2009-02-24T16:57:00.012+01:00

The 2009 Berlinale ran a series called After Winter Comes Spring (Winter Adé) in which was shown a selection of films that "presage the Fall of the Wall".

The press release says: "The prints we are presenting are mostly new and have come from Bulgaria, Germany, Poland, Romania, Russia, Hungary and the Czech Republic. They include feature and documentary works, as well as animated and experimental films, all of which were produced between 1977 and 1989, and convey a sense of the radical changes to come."

I say: this was a strong run of films. Given the generally fucked nature of ticketing at the Berlinale—in which, it seems, even a ticket can't guarantee you entry—I didn't get to see all that I wanted to see. Nevertheless, there's only so much cinema a regular human (das ist mir!) can swallow in eight days. There are those professional festival haunters who seem to run from screening to screening with a kind of detached passion—rolling out of their 4-star suite each morning, grizzled yet tastefully attired (recycled-materials shoulder bags, department store jackets, North Face trousers), checking Gmail on their iPhone until the credits roll, eating chain cafe baguettes and slurping over-milked cappuccinos. Long ago they liked movies. Now they just see them. I am not one of these people. Although, y'know, I understand the appeal. I did a Cinema Studies degree, after all...

I present below a few summaries/reviews/reflections/desecrations. A couple of these weren't in the Winter Adé series. But, for some regrettable reason, I decided to only see German or socialist films this year. (Hence the slightly bitter tone at points. Why am I here watching these Romanian dunces when I could be seeing Kate Winselet?) So that, at least, ties them together.

The Scarecrow (Tschutschelo)

Decent Soviet two-parter in which a girl is ostracised by her peers in a primary school. A new pupil in an established group, the twelve year-old is immediately tainted by association with her eccentric uncle. More than that, she is an upstanding citizen, willing to be moral and true to her sense of self. She is cast out by a particularly mendacious girl who leads the rest of the class in their physical attacks and verbal taunting. Willingness of boys to beat the shit out of a girl shows the success of Soviet egalitarianism. Equality for all in schoolyard beatings!

Made between 1983 and 1986, there is an obvious thematic core, overlapping with other children's narratives (Lord of the Flies etc) but of immediate importance for an audience in a Soviet state sliding toward its end: dissent, moral fibre and the folly of blind support for leaders. Many of the children it was made for, of course, were to reach adulthood under a new system—where these lessons were of just as much use.

Experimentalfilme

A suite of seven experimental films made in or about communist countries.

-In-Sight (Ein-Blick)
A camera is set-up in the window of a West Berlin apartment abutting the Wall. It films one frame a second for twelve hours. Shot in 1987, Ein-Blick shows indolent border guards, lovers breakfasting, gymnastics groups and schoolchildren playing. Whenever a subject looks directly at the camera, the movement freezes. "This GDR," I think to myself, "looks OK."

-From My Window (Z mojego okna)
Similar to the above in concept, but different in form and content: Polish guy—Józef Robakowski—films the square in front of his Łódź apartment each day for thirteen years. In voiceover, he tells the stories of those we see on screen—not bored automatons (a grey mass) but characters full of life.

The film is an illustration of everyday Polish life: he underscores this through the narration, which was clearly done after the events but is told with an immediacy. He inadvertently charts the fall and rise and fall of May Day marches, in sympathy with the fortunes of the State and Solidarity. He reflects ironically and negatively on post-socialist Poland in his "postscript". The square, he notes, is now a "parking lot," emphasising the strangeness of these words. The language changes in train with the economic system. (This can be watched in full at Robakowski's website. Click into the "videography" and find either Z mojego okna or From My Window. No subtitles, unfortunately—and his flat delivery won't make it obvious where the gags are. See it with a Polish friend.)

-Trabantománia
Hungarian film of marginal merit. Shows Hungarian bohos—nomenklatura children?—making post-punk music and childlike, outsider art. The point of its inclusion seems to be: Hungary had bohemian, post-punk, outsider-art making people. Ergo, the fall of socialism was inevitable!

-The Severe Illness of Men (Schestokaja bolesn muschtschin) & Woodcutter (Lessorub)
Two offerings from the planet of Soviet Parallel Cinema. Bizarre, strange, funny. Various humanlike corpses are thrown around and ravaged. A man is chased through the woods. Plot is ostensibly missing. Jerky and discontinuous, like early silent cinema. Illness of Men is available to download and stream at Ubu.

-Sanctus, Sanctus
Shot in the GDR in 1988, this is one trick over twelve minutes. Public political ('ideological'?) celebrations are filmed on the street, then overlaid with religious choral music. To wit: the similarities between real-existing-socialism institutions and religious institutions. The idea is an old one with plenty of analytic scope (for instance: is it merely appealing because the religious narrative is such a familiar one to us, that the content of this political belief can so easily fit the form given to religious belief?), but only the surface is touched here. As a visual representation of that core idea, it works. As twelve minutes of cinema, it is twice its needed length. Generously, one could add that it gestures in a more complex direction: the way rituals become rote over time, the similarity in a distance between the mouthed beliefs of parishioners/subjects and the enaction of those in everyday lives. Or perhaps it might push towards another thought, something about the instrumentality of belief in both settings—say this, get that. My future film project: put a socialist song—bold brass, strident lyrics, amassed voices—over a religious ceremony. What would happen then? If only I had research assistants to do this kind of leg work for me...

-Konrad! The Mother Said... (Konrad! Sprach die Frau Mama...)
An odd student film, made in the last year of the GDR. Someone is on the run from someone in the GDR. Beyond that, the rest of it simply flew past me. Escape. Commitments. Etc. It was the last film. I was hungry.

Little Valentino (A kis Valentinó)

"The band kept playing on the Titanic, even as it was sinking..."—these are the final words of this 1979 film from Hungary. This little gesture—which seemed slightly at odds with the film—seems to have bestowed upon it a prescience that makes it worthy of inclusion in the Winter Adé series. In my notebook afterwards, the best I could muster was: "aimlessness as metaphor? Valentino as state—spending your way out of trouble?"

Nevertheless, it is one of the better films in the series. The narrative is the tale end of a heist movie, what would happen if the credits rolled and the crooks had gotten away: a sullen teen boy (or is he 20?) attempts to find high-price kicks in Hungary with a wad of money, only to meander aimlessly from one to another, finding mere sugar-rush excitement and an inevitable ennui. It's an unlikely cross between You, the Living and Richard Linklater's slacker films: Little Valentino is strong on surrealist imagery and scenarios—plus strange surrealistic poems are projected on screen as kind of "chapter headings"—but equally at ease with long stretches of banal action.

The Grass is Greener (Überall ist es besser, wo wir nicht sind)

The title gives away the thematic concern: the lure of elsewhere, an oasis always just out of reach, the elusiveness of happiness. A Polish guy travels to West Berlin and then New York, in search of contentment. He continues running into another young Polish exile—a discontented young woman, running through the same circuits, ending up in the same towns. Romance sparks. Romance dies. Bags are packed. Romance returns. The film uses a simple but effective conceit which avoids suggesting quietism (i.e. the argument that would run: unhappiness is everywhere, forget about leaving home or acting otherwise) but suggests a critical approach to the appealing fantasies of 'elsewhere...'. At only 70min, the story thankfully gets in-and-out quickly.

How's Work on the High-Rise Block, Ion? (Ioane, cum e la constructii)

Short, well-shot documentary about a young Romanian couple who are both construction workers. They await—and then get—their own apartment. Although there is a lot of unspoken material here, suggesting dissatisfaction, the film was made with the approval of Romanian communist authorities. So it delivers an optimistic, happy-ending version of high-rise living...

Panelstory

...which isn't quite delivered in Panelstory. This is a less rosy portrayal of high-rise living, set on the outskirts of Prague. A great film, worthy of more attention. It blends Tati-esque elements—a devilish child and a freewheeling, dissatisfied grandfather—with the energy of some 1970s Western avant-garde films. Slapstick. Free jazz. Dolly camera. It depicts a chaotic, barely functional new estate. Construction workers and middle-class residents rub shoulders and trudge through the same mud patches.

Like Tati, there's a critique of new individualism and commercialism here—the grandfatherly figure injects reminders of old values into a scene where modern practices and technology have exploded any strong sense of solidarity and community. A pregnant woman and an old woman (who appears to be dead) are left aside by others as they seek to furnish their new apartments.

Memory (Der Tag, an dem ich meinen toten Mann traf)

Soporific, repressed drama in which a soporific, repressed German woman finds a replacement husband. (The translation of the German title is: "The day I met my dead husband.") A new film set among the concerned middle classes (hydro-power, 20^th-century classical music), this airless piece mistakes tension for silence and overwrought 'stillness'. And doppelgangers for Hitchcock-style suspense. Like Lantana, a ponderous Australian tale of leafy-suburb professionals committing adultery, this lets clichés (woman cries desperately in shower after holding it together in public) and self-conscious cinematography (shallow depth of field [see above] and dim lighting) assume the weight of gravitas. 90 minutes felt like 120. Audience members left, heads were held in hands, there was a slow exhaling of breath. Even with the director in attendance. Ouch.

Jadup and Boel

Based upon a GDR book I have not read (Jadup), this late period East German film was banned until 1988. It is a tale of small-town life in the GDR, understandably banned (y'know, within the context) for its depiction of bumbling officials, disregard for authority and general slapstick hi-jinx. It's a pleasant film, which seemed to be something of an old favourite with audiences. A love story. A small town. Touches of Hitchcock (a church belltower, an old love, domestic tensions). Like much else in this series, it is thought remarkable because it presages the imminent collapse of European communism. But the narrative template here is so utterly generic, that I wonder if a decent film—telemovie?—has been overinflated for political significance. Much more interesting, I thought, were the gasps of "Eric!" from the audience when Herr Honecker's portrait appeared in a Buro office.

Berlin Playground (Hans im Glück)

As already mentioned here, this film is a documentary about post-Wall life in Berlin. Its singular focus is Hans Narva, a 40 year-old musician who spent half his life under socialism and half under capitalism. The well-handled documentary manages to convey something of Hans then and now. His punk days in bands on the wrong side of the regime—notably, Herbst in Peking—and his sombre new musical work suggest a discomfort under both economic and political regimes. As does his incarceration in both periods. Often, director Claudia Lehmann lets Hans wander around the city and tell stories as they walk. This is an effective way to get him talking—where he is somewhat uptight in talking head mode, he relaxes and narrates easily as he walks. Wandering into the prison-cum-apartments, he lays out the terrain—the yard where he once used to exercise, the cells where he spent solitary time. He hates "The New Berlin," as it is always called, for the stupidity of its planning, for the way old sites have been so quickly erased. His school is razed—for what new purpose is never exactly clear. "It could've been a cultural centre," he suggests. The Palast der Republik is the least of it. Yet, equally, the "Old Berlin"—the GDR one, the one seemingly beyond the scope of heritage marketing—is somewhere he never wants to revisit. For its value alone in illustrating this viable, ambivalent position, Berlin Playground is a worthwhile documentary.

Material

A stunning montage documentary film by former GDR resident, Thomas Heise. Playing out over an expansive 166 minutes, Heise lets the tape—and it mostly is VHS tape—run on some extraordinary events in East and West Berlin, circa '89: subjects boo speeches as GDR apparat attempt to quell the coming end of the regime; police turn their hoses on protests in Kreuzberg; far-right goons smash up a small screening of a documentary about Ossis shortly after reunification; prisoners and prison wards criticise GDR amnesties and prison systems in front of official organs; Müller debates the staging of a new play. By far the best film I've seen about the GDR near and after its end. Barebones in its presentation—the film is framed by minimal contextual information ("Kreuzberg, 1989") and no voiceover. The virtue of this is the presentation of material that accumulates explanatory power together—each segment supports the other in a way that is not immediately clear. Avoiding the usual footage of Berliners clambering upon the Wall, Heise manages to convey more than others about the criticism, hope and nastiness of the Wende. It is complex and deeply informative—a single viewing is not enough.

A Cell of One's Own

2009-02-17T00:13:00.004+01:00

In London Orbital, Iain Sinclair writes vividly of the way former prisons and asylums have been turned over to developers. In Hans im Glück—Berlin Playground, a recent Berlinale premiere, we see the same thing happening. The protagonist visits a former GDR prison in which he spent quite a few months. It’s now a row of apartments. (Why do my fingers move automatically to type “luxury apartments”—has the advertising seeped into us that much, their catchphrases actually catching?)

Or, rather a “campus”. Berlin Campus. University. Creativity. Esteem. Cloistered?

Asylum seekers were here last. The walls still bear their wallpaper. The homely touches of the hopeful itinerants. Floral wallpaper and crumbling walls. Asylum seekers have taken over the asylum. A grotesquery in the months after the fall of the Wall, before this place was packaged up, marketed and sold—by the devilish Treuhand, I suppose.

There is a striking similarity in this to the developments Sinclair (and, earlier, Ballard) details in London. See it in the brochure puff: “the area offers a wide variety of attractions for residents, including trendy bars and restaurants and the famous parks of Treptow...”

...with their triumphant Soviet monuments and detailed anti-capitalist friezes.

“This area is developing a reputation as the leisure and media centre for Berlin. The new headquarters for Universal and MTV are located in this area in addition to the new O2 Arena. The project is less than 20 minutes from Schoenefeld International Airport which is being redeveloped into one of the most impressive modern airports in Europe.”

So don’t worry, there are bars and restaurants. (Has anything worth anyone’s time ever been spruiked as “trendy”? Is there anything less trendy than the word “trendy”?) Sports. Leisure. Global media headquarters. An enormous airport. A global somewhere. A node to call your own. Node sweet node.

Where am I, again?

“All the apartments have been completely re-developed from the original 19th century red-brick buildings.”

All the inmates have been completely re-developed and renovated, repurposed and reassigned.

“This is a unique opportunity to invest in a prestigious building, charged with history in a vibrant district of one of Europe’s greatest cities.”

Mysterious—charged and vibrant, prestigious and 19^th century. History. Softly. Sells. Buy yourself a padded cell.

Delicious

2009-01-06T07:05:00.003+01:00

Quadrant magazine, the local grey brigade fighting the neocon culture wars, has been hoaxed! Yum. The story of the hoax was published today in Australian newsletter and website Crikey.

Keith Windschuttle, the editor of the conservative magazine Quadrant, has been taken in by a hoax intended to show that he will print outrageous propositions.
This month’s edition of Quadrant contains a hoax article purporting to be by “Sharon Gould”, a Brisbane based New York biotechnologist.
But in the tradition of Ern Malley – the famous literary hoax perpetrated by Quadrant’s first editor, James McAuley – the Sharon Gould persona is entirely fictitious and the article is studded with false science, logical leaps, outrageous claims and a mixture of genuine and bogus footnotes.
In accepting the article, Keith Windschuttle said in an email to “Sharon Gould”:
I really like the article. You bring together some very important considerations about scientific method, the media, politics and morality that I know our readers would find illuminating.
“Gould’s” article, which is blurbed on the front cover of Quadrant and reproduced online, (subscribers only) argues for the insertion of human genes in to food crops, insects and livestock. [...]
Windschuttle asked for some changes, which involved cutting a lengthy explanation of the Sokal hoax from the first paragraphs – which the hoaxer had intended as a clue.

The hoaxer, thankfully, has kept a public diary of the experience. (It was taken offline recently, but is now being mirrored by Crikey.)

Margaret Simons has printed more detail on her media blog. As she writes,

This is a good story, in journalistic terms. Not earth shattering, not life and death, but within intellectual Australia a significant and serious piece of mockery.
Quadrant is a significant part of our intellectual life, with several claims to an important history and present. [...] Keith Windschuttle is a significant person and public figure.
The sting of this hoax as I understand it is to establish that despite its attacks on post-modern slackness, and despite Windschuttle’s nitpicking of other people’s research, despite the fulminating against academic slackness from the right, it is possible for Quadrant and Windschuttle to publish pseudo-scientific nonsense, so long as it appears to fit in with their ideological view.

For those outside Quadrant's small circle, Simons provides a nice summary of the magazine's place in Australian life -- as explained by former conservative prime minister John Howard.

Quadrant is an historically important conservative magazine, praised by John Howard when he was Prime Minister as his “favourite” magazine and as a forum for "fine scholarship with a sceptical, questioning eye for cant, hypocrisy and moral vanity" and a "lonely counterpoint to stultifying orthodoxies and dangerous utopias that at times have gripped the Western 'intelligentsia".” Howard said Quadrant was: "Australia's home to all that is worth preserving in the Western cultural tradition". Howard described Windschuttle’s articles on Aboriginal history as particularly close to his heart.

[Windschuttle, too, is not above using retro, gay-baiting euphemisms: "Windshcuttle replaced the controversial Paddy McGuiness as editor of Quadrant early last year. When his appointment was announced, Windschuttle was quoted as saying that he would campaign against decadence in the arts." Decadence!]

The debate about the importance -- or not -- of the hoax will continue over coming days. Windschuttle has responded. Simons is blogging regularly. And the Australian broadsheets are all knocking up stories for tomorrow's papers.

For those aware of Windschuttle's form, the hoax has a delicious flavour to it.

Keith Windschuttle is a leading cultural warrior. In recent years he has accused senior historians of falsifying and inventing the degree of violence against Aborigines. He has also accused academic historians of exaggerating the racism involved in the White Australia policy.

He notoriously went about searching through the footnotes of previous histories.

The nub of the Sharon Gould hoax is a play on Windschuttle and Quadrant’s advocacy of empirical research as being divorced from social and political consequences, and therefore beyond question.

~

And nice to see that George W. Bush is in the mood for a jolly old hoax too, with news that he is awarding beloved ex-PM John W. Howard the "freedom medal". This is a hoax, yes?

A sentimental education

2008-12-08T04:20:00.007+01:00

First in the US, now here: the fronts of the neocon culture war passing over the universities seem (surprise!) to be misguided.

An Australian Senate committee has turned up little evidence of left-wing bias in the academy.

The committee found Liberal student organisations were the main agitators for the inquiry and their submissions had a strongly "undergraduate" tone.
"Indeed, the committee believes that the case that Make Australia Fair [the Young Liberal group] makes for the existence of a leftist conspiracy in education faculties and schools borders on the farcical," it said.

Farcical!

This is not surprising. Having worked for a year side-by-side with these polo-shirted young idiots, they lack a coherent sense of their own politics, let alone an ability to coherently criticise (or characterise) someone else's politics.

It may be an optimistic position, but it seems like the mood has passed for this kind of thing. In Australia, that seems to have happened with the removal of John Howard from office. In the US, with the imminent departure of Bush. It has always been wrong to claim that these culture wars were a mere distraction from another, more important branch of the neoliberal-neoconservative family tree. But we now see a version of neoliberalism without the culture war tendencies. A version not without its own campaigns to be waged against neoliberal, managerial approaches to education. (Victoria University is out on strike and picket at this very moment, campaigning against the announced 270 job losses.)

Another barometer of a new mood might be Bryan Cooke's striking article on questions of education, history and politics—"Another Country"—in Traffic journal:

In what follows I would like to show how thinking about some of the different attitudes to the two different kinds of ‘countries’—those from which we are separated by space and those from which we are divided by time—can illuminate some of the assumptions that underlie many debates about the role of history in education. Comparing different modern attitudes to history and travel, I will discuss the question of why we might teach history in the first place, and why we might think it worthwhile to do so. In addition, I will use this comparison to try to show how attempts to ensure that teaching achieves certain outcomes (almost irrespective of what those outcomes are) can ironically end up preventing students from having any real encounter with the past, by imposing a kind of prophylactic between them and the historical material upon which they are supposed to be reflecting. In referring to a ‘real encounter’ I am not naively suggesting that the goal of history should be historical simulations of sufficient verisimilitude to fool a real Cathar or an actual Victorian chimney-sweep. The only necessary (although obviously not sufficient) condition for such an encounter to take place is that any confrontation with historical
materials is not totally subordinated in advance to the function of flattering one of the prevailing ideologies of the age. Such flattery can be directed at any number of contemporary prejudices, the prejudices of the ostensible left as much as the putative right; the vanity of the students as much as the designers of curricula. But history cannot, I argue, be history without entailing a risk—which can never be completely eliminated without turning teaching into ‘management’, as the corporate world uses the term. Such a replacement would itself be an unfortunate step towards the substitution of democratic and humanistic ideals for technocratic/managerial ones; a process that may be going a little too smoothly of its own accord without making
peremptory concessions.

And, while you're there, you can also find a publication of mine in the very same issue: it is concerned with ostalgie and German film. (But who isn't, I ask you?)

Ghosts of the RAF

2008-11-30T08:41:00.003+01:00

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

2008-11-30T08:01:00.006+01:00

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

2008-11-28T23:32:00.001+01:00

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

2008-11-27T07:14:00.004+01:00

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'):

"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."
"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."
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

2008-11-21T04:35:00.000+01:00

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

2008-11-11T06:05:00.002+01:00

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:

"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?
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....

Madly conflating

2008-10-23T09:55:00.006+02:00

Always interesting to note the way that some people (like, you know, Arendt) insist on running together Nazism and Communism(/Bolshevism). People are still at it:

During these sessions Elke Urban models herself on Margot Honecker [above, beaming!], the leader's wife who was also a hardline education minister. She said that only one group had dared to stand up and defend the dissident pupil during her classes. "I deliberately create a totalitarian atmosphere and I am still always shocked how quickly and easily people are conditioned by it," she said. "East Germany may have left a pile of Stasi files behind rather than a pile of corpses, but the similarities with the Nazi regime are there."

"Nazi, Stasi, Germany's festering half-rhyme," as Garton-Ash has put it.

Trouble is, they then go on to show up why that argument doesn't really hold water.

But museum directors like Ms Urban are not ready to apply the same techniques to the Nazi era. "There are too many neo-Nazis around who would probably relish the chance of sitting in a National Socialist classroom. We don't dare to do it."

Zizek has been fairly clear on this, now Badiou is also saying it often: there is something worth retrieving in communism, in spite of its horrific manifestations. The difference, surely, is a matter of the political and ethical commitments mouthed by these two 'totalitarianisms', the kernels of these two different politics. The idea of an equal, inclusive society makes intuitive sense; the idea of a society riven by friend-enemy distinctions* along race/ethnic lines, not so much; the idea of a teacher inculcating values of community and fairness is OK; the idea of a teacher slagging off Jews and running out the gamut of inhuman insults about abject outsiders, not so good.

[*Clearly this was trotted (!) out in Soviet times too, but I think the retrievable kernel(s) are about first principles: there is an argument, which even Arednt kind of admits, that the early days of Soviet Communism were not so concerned with bloodletting and opening up these internal fronts. Those grand days of peasant kicking were yet to come. Instead, we're talking about Russia, 1917. Although perhaps, to be fair, we should be talking about Berlin, 1933? Were Jews integral to Nazism, or a kind of lynchpin -- as Bauman argues in Holocaust and Modernity? Could it have been anyone, or did it have to be the Jews, perverse lodestone of many a nationalist dunce? Is it not just about the structure of us-versus-them, a question of extreme and violently instrumentalised boundary maintenance?]

S.N. Eisenstadt puts these matters in a helpful light in his recent two volume work, Comparative Civilisations and Multiple Modernities -- both a doorstopper and a bravura performance.

It was in so far as such multifaceted modes of construction of collective identities and of strong but flexible centres faltered that the two major forms of absolutising tendencies, bearing within themselves the kernels of barbarism, of destruction, of drastic exclusion, demonisation and annihilation of others -- the Communist and the extreme fascist, especially the National Socialist movements and regimes -- triumphed.

Within each of these movements and regimes instituted by them there developed strong tendencies to exclusivism and to barbarism -- as has been recently stressed in the discourse around Alan Besancon's theses about the equivalence of Communism and National Socialism in and around the publication [of] The Black Book of Communism. But contrary to the claim to a total equivalence of the barbaric tendencies of these two types of regimes, and despite many similarities between them, there was a crucial difference between them. This difference, as Leszek Kolakowski and Martin Malla have shown in their comments on Besancon, was rooted in the attitudes of these respective movements and regimes to the universalistic and concomitant potentially -- even if only potentially -- inclusivist components of the modern cultural and political program. The socialist and communist movements were fully set within the framework of the cultural program of modernity, above all of the Enlightenment and of the Revolutions, and their criticism of the modern capitalist bourgeois society was made in terms of non-completeness of the modern program -- entailing the potentiality of continual inclusion -- even if these potentialities were strongly counteracted by the barbaric exclusivist practices of these regimes rooted in their absolutising tendencies. Hence within the Communist movements and regimes with all their destructive annihilating forces there could develop tendencies of resistance which could at least potentially challenge the barbaric and exclusivist practices of the regimes.

The extreme fascist or national-socialist regimes, aimed above all at the reconstruction of the boundaries of modern collectivities, negated the universalistic components of the cultural program of modernity and promulgated ideologies and praxis of total exclusion, total barbarisation without possibilities of challenge from within to the total demonisation of the excluded. It is indeed when these two absolutising tendencies come together -- as in Cambodia -- that they give rise to some of the most gruesome aspects of modern barbarism.

Same, but different.

And on we go....

2008-10-06T08:13:00.004+02:00

You know this one.

A CDU-convened panel in Germany has "called for an end to nostalgia about East Germany." Well, good luck.

I'd like to call for an end to self-satisfied parliamentary panels. But I think we'd both end up having about the same level of success.

There's a kind of tiring inevitability about this kind of thing. You know: young CDU members have started an anti-ostalgie brigade. "She agreed with social scientist Schroeder that unemployment and economic deprivation should not be an excuse to paint a glossy picture of life in East Germany." "We have to honor their achievements in adapting to a completely different environment."

Etc. Etc.

Social scientists should not be an excuse to trundle out the same old garbage, I say. The report pulls off the familiar move of pointing toward "economic deprivation" and "unemployment," then wandering off in another direction entirely as if these idiots from the chancellor's party weren't fundamental to that problem.

(Pic via Flickr)

Capitalism, the mini-series

2008-09-30T08:38:00.002+02:00

Between reading the new translation of Dany-Robert Dufour's The Art of Shrinking Heads and getting caught up in coverage of the current capitalist market kerfuffle, it's a dizzying time. More on Dufour another day.

Over at Eurhythmania, you can find posted a piece published today by the previously celebrated Australian journalist/writer (I hedge bets here, depending on your predilections) Guy Rundle. He's over in America currently, covering the election for a few Australian outlets.

Before today, I had been sceptical about the meaning of this trumpeted crisis. On one hand, it seemed like leftist pants-wetting: 'the crisis is here, the crisis is here!' On the other, it seemed like a crisis provoked, diagnosed and (in theory) cured by outsized capitalists. Dennis Kucinich suggested as much on DemocracyNow! yesterday: "It seems to me there’s a possibility that this crisis has a little bit of manufacture to it."

This disposition on my behalf was a function, I think, of distance: in the sense of being, shall we say, disembedded from the most often mentioned, most deeply effected circuits -- I have no mortgage, no shares etc -- but also in the sense of being in Australia. It just did not seem to have hit as hard over here. (I speak specifically, by the way, of the past few weeks. There has been some noticeable, earlier fallout on mortgages etc. But even that seems relatively minor compared to the US disasters.)

But now, I think, there is something afoot. And Guy Rundle's piece gets at that.

But here is what is really, really important to understand about this current event is that this is not merely a financial system crisis – that is a mere ripple of a much deeper problem. Desperate to gain some political capital out of this, the right have been suggesting that the problem is over-regulation, which is mad. But no less illusory is the centre-left assertion that the problem is simply one of lack of regulation, and that if a proper framework could be put in place everything would be all right.

For the great truth of this mess is that the folks who designed the deregulation were, in a narrow sense, right -- if their goal was to give western capitalism another lease of life. What the market faced in the US at the end of the 90s, was a crucial lack of things to invest in, for the free money sloshing around the markets. By 2001, the dotcom bubble had burst and you couldn't shove $X billion into Ewidgets.com, and so there was a desperate need for another object that would keep the circus going. Mortgage backed securities was it – bricks and mortar, which looked like the most concrete investment was actually the most abstract, the notional capacity of people with no-deposit mortgages to repay.

Crazy, but what could you do? For the bitter fact is that without these pseudo-investments, the West is running on fumes. As China and the East roars ahead in classical 19th century high capitalist mode, the West runs on financial services, and rents – such as intellectual property, and debt and debt and debt.

Thwarted thunderbolts

2008-09-24T07:10:00.004+02:00

The even-keeled Sheila Fitzpatrick navigates 970 pages of a Solzhenitsyn biography and lives to (re)tell the tale. It's perhaps the best -- relatively short -- assessment of the Russian author.

The Soviet Union’s collapse paved the way for Solzhenitsyn’s return in 1994, which he staged with typical élan and instinct for publicity, taking a train from Vladivostok and proceeding through the length of Russia to Moscow. There isn’t a theatre director in the world who could have thought that one up, [biographer] Saraskina comments (admiringly). It was intended as the return of the Prophet Vindicated, filmed in every detail by the BBC, but it didn’t quite come off. Too late, many said; a great figure, but now irrelevant. Solzhenitsyn was equal to that, plunging again into one of his favourite roles, that of Jeremiah. The Russia he discovered in the mid-1990s was a moral sink, national consciousness and spiritual traditions lost, criminality rampant, party and Duma politics contemptible, the plight of the Russian people appalling and ignored by the new-rich rulers, privatisation a theft of public assets in broad daylight, Russia’s ‘liberal’ intellectuals as posturing and out of touch as ever, the break-up of the empire and consequent loss of Russia’s ‘iconic regions, outlets to the sea, and millions of Russian people’ a catastrophe, ‘shock therapy’ an outrage, even the Russian language corrupted. As for the free Russian press, they were a bunch of jackals, worse than the Cheka.

(pic via Flickr)

North East

2008-09-19T06:05:00.003+02:00

Photographer Eric Lafforgue: "Pyongyang view, taken from Yanggakdo hotel. You can find a famous satellite picture on the net showing a map of the Korean peninsula by night, with a huge difference between the north and south. In North Korea, there is no public lighting, and people use very low wattage bulbs in their houses. The North Korean capital is as surreal by night as it is by day. Due to the fuel crisis there's hardly any traffic to be heard after dark, and nightlife is virtually non-existent. Only monuments are lit during local festivities. Every hour, on the hour, from 6 am to midnight, loudspeakers blast out a patriotic song. Tourists are totally forbidden from leaving their hotels to walk around town, even though Pyongyang is safe, that's the rule."

This is what a feminist looks like?

More photos of North Korea at The Big Picture. This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the country.

Photos: (c) Eric Lafforgue; AP Photo/Kyodo News

Radical contingency

2008-09-19T04:28:00.003+02:00

I miss, by a few days, the London V&A "Cold War Modern" exhibition (as reviewed in New Statesman by Owen, with characteristic insight).

This is like a sick joke, arranged by travel agents, airlines and my brother. Christ.

Soft Focus History

2008-09-17T04:00:00.004+02:00

As mentioned previously, I've been preparing some papers—both written and spoken.

The content of this post forms part of what became my university confirmation seminar paper. It will also be published in a forthcoming journal article. It is an introductory section, concerned with getting some of these ideas around ostalgie to crack a bit under the weight of analysis, to push the "object to the point where that object destroys its own illusion," as Mr Bctzoiwp puts it. I am talking here and in the paper more broadly about the relation of nostalgia to three films—Sonnenallee, Good Bye Lenin! and The Lives of Others.

It's reported by Edward S Casey that there's a piece of graffiti in Paris that reads: 'Nostalgia is not what it used to be.' This says a lot and opens a few gaps for thinking about the topic. One of the questions rarely asked by cultural analysis of ostalgie is a simple one: what is nostalgia? Is it: a state of being, that is an ontological homesickness; is it a kind of pathology or recurring error; is it a form or phase of mourning; is it a transient disposition due to circumstances; is it a mere passing mood, encountered about 3pm each Sunday afternoon? The common, everyday response, of course, is pejorative. Nostalgia is a longing for the past which buffs away rough edges, a kind of soft-focus history. It's, at best, diversionary and pleasant, at worst, wrongheaded and dangerous.

To complicate this with some more precise terms and reflection, we can propose that: nostalgia is a feeling at the interface of individual and collective remembrance. It is often a personal mode of remembrance populated by items belonging to the 'collective'—that is, circulating goods and specific locations. It's often a compression of time and place, biography and history. As Casey writes, "this paradoxical interplay of the definite and the indefinite in space as well as in time…gives rise to nostalgia's baffling combination of the sweet and the bitter, the personal and the impersonal, distance and proximity, presence and absence, place and no-place, imagination and memory, memory and nonmemory." This is one of the chief reasons for its conceptual difficulty.

However, in discussing cultural forms—films or otherwise—we get access to one juncture of the individual-collective interaction, be it set up in distinction or compliance with the common understandings of particular plots of collective memory. Refining further, we could say: nostalgia represents a mode of orientation to the past, an act of remembrance calling on social cues and individual biography. To say this, though, is to open up another question elided by much discussion of ostalgie: where does nostalgia reside? Often, films and other cultural forms are invoked as 'ostalgic'—but is it possible that a reel of celluloid or a book alone can be nostalgic? I will not answer this question here, but it forms a kind of background thought throughout much of this essay. I will return to it in closing.

One matter which recurs in the broader literature on nostalgia is the feeling of a deepening in its presence over the past thirty years in the West. To provide only a quick catalogue of the reasons given for this: we are embedded an overarching 'postmodern' epoch; we have seen the rise of visual, screen culture; the decline of long-running personal and institutional attachments through the individuation of 'second modernity'; an amnesia in contemporary culture, despite ever greater digital archives. In many senses, then, according to these accounts, all three of the films analysed here are films of their time. For one, they fit within a broader movement of nostalgia films seen over the past three decades, a cultural mood about which Pam Cook's writings on British and Hollywood nostalgia films makes us aware. And all three are undeniably postmodern nostalgia films in Jameson's sense, rendering the past in a 'consumable set of images,' ticking all the boxes he offers: 'music, fashion, hairstyles and vehicles'. They carry within them an inventory not of 'facts or historical realities (although [such a film's] items are not invented and are in some sense 'authentic'), but rather a list of stereotypes, of ideas of facts
and historical realities.' In Jameson, of course, this links up to a broader denigration of postmodern nostalgia culture—denigrated for its purported lack of depth and its association with a crass commercial culture—a position which I do not wish to take up and which has already been widely critiqued. I would briefly note here, though, that both Sonnenallee and Good Bye Lenin! derive much of their comic value from dealing ironically and subversively with the very stereotypes they show on screen.

Thus if Jameson's description of the 'nostalgia film' on one level rings true but can be seen as problematised by at least two of the films discussed here, those films also underscore a problem with the negative cast nostalgia generally receives in the critical corpus. For one, these po-faced theories are inadequate in the face of comedic and ironic deployments of nostalgia. Yet perhaps the bigger problem with the dominant denigration is its paralysis on questions of the losses to which nostalgia may be a response—even as it's laughing. At its worst, such a negative characterisation of nostalgia does not admit of the pleasures nostalgia can offer—therein foreclosing a genuine understanding of the feeling, disregarding the phenomenology of the nostalgic. This confusion is understandable, as I have noted. Nostalgia is notoriously hard to pin down: 'nostalgia remains unsystematic and unsynthesizable,' Boym writes, 'it seduces rather than convinces.' Across the diversity of understandings and interpretations, across its manifold attachments to the present and politics, nostalgia culture is saddled with a paradox, as Radstone has outlined: "While [on the one hand] nostalgia is criticised for its commodification of the past—for its transforming of the past into a publicly traded commodity—it is also [on the other] conversely criticised for turning social change into private affect."

So if nostalgia is thus swatted every which way it turns, how can we turn it into a productive concept? A number of theorists—from Linda Hutcheon to Foucault to a handful of lesser known psychoanalysts—have offered relatively nuanced takes on the phenomenon. Psychoanalysis directs us to the essential basis of nostalgia: another version of the 'grass is always greener' modality, nostalgia functions as a necessary psychic buttress, a sunny counterpart to the ongoing disappointments in failing to achieve contentment. This is psychoanalysis in its anti-utopian mode. Beyond such a psychoanalytic account, Russian-born US-based academic Svetlana Boym has given us a useful schematic for post-communist nostalgia in the characterisation offered in her book The Future of Nostalgia. This dyadic scheme disarticulates divergent responses to the same impulse, to the seeking of comfort in the past—one of them unaware of its nostalgic gloss, one playfully aware of its daydreaming. Such a characterisation fits with the two dominant yet divergent critical accounts of nostalgia, but Boym valorises them in a way different from other writers: at one end, the consumerist and playful version of nostalgia, usually derided, is offered as a positive, or at least amiable and harmless, style of remembrance; at the other, a bracingly serious, politically valenced embrace of what we might sometimes call 'invented traditions,' is held to be dangerous. To explain this distinction further: Restorative nostalgia, for Boym, defies a linear conception of history in the quest to reconstruct a lost home, understanding itself as seeking truth and tradition. Dead serious, it reconstructs 'emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialise time.' This is the type of nostalgia at the heart of much nationalism. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, circles the past in a wistful and ironic fashion. It dwells, ambivalently, on longing and belonging. It has no singular plot, ranging across dispersed places at once; ensconced in details, not symbols. Reflective nostalgia in this mode is 'not merely a pretext for midnight melancholias'—it is more creative and useful than the common caricature of nostalgia would allow.

While helpfully moving us away from commonplaces about nostalgia, this bifurcated scheme is limited in what it can proffer for the analysis of Ostalgie. Boym is upfront in admitting that these two forms are endpoints on a continuum of nostalgia types. She also offers some illuminating examples of cases she sees fitting these types of nostalgia. Nevertheless, such clear-cut binary categories ultimately offer an all-too-easy checklist, a kind of shortcut to analysis. If we follow her model, the meanings and significance of these nostalgias—what might be called their politics—go unnoticed. As Radstone reminds us, "debates concerning the politics of nostalgia require analyses of nostalgia culture that differentiate between its varieties, and that attend to the specificities of nostalgia culture's representations of the past, its strategies of address and its appeal." That is to say, an analysis that merely noticed ostalgic phenomenon and shifted them into one of Boym's two categories would be deeply flawed—one must draw apart this simplistic 'ostalgie' concept, to name its parts, to precisely call it by different names, to notice different species, different attenuations, different imperatives. The journalistic tendency to conflate ostalgie pays little attention to these qualitative differences. German reportage on this score does, of course, vary from the warmly dismissive to the tabloid panic styles, but in some ways this just alerts us to the need to avoid the temptation to come up with similarly neat categorisations in an academic context. This requires reflection on the very status of nostalgia. One of the questions we should ask of these films, for example, is a complex one: what makes a film about memory and not history? These two terms—memory and history—form a binary which has structured much recent academic analysis. This is literature which I do not wish to navigate here, but the distinction remains worth keeping in mind: why have these films been classified as nostalgic? Are the films—as texts—nostalgic? Or do they merely depict nostalgia? Are they not just more in a line of German historical dramas? If not, how are they different?

As I have already implied, ostalgie could be both of Boym's forms at the same time. It can be: postmodern capitalism's 'playful reappropriation of the everyday objects of East German culture,' be it the market in GDR pedestrian traffic lights or the Trabant car; or Ostalgie 'may be a reclamation of one's own biography, recalling happy times that are excluded from those discourses that reduce life in the GDR to the experience of oppression'; or, perhaps in a more fundamentally political way, it can represent 'an insistence upon a distinct set of East German values born out of the GDR past, such as a solidarity that challenges the supposed 'Ellbogenmentalität' [elbowing-out mentality—i.e. single minded pursuit of one's own interests] of Western capitalism.' These three types—and there are more—interleave in manifold ways. Radstone alerts us to this complicated tenor of any nostalgia—the manner in which affect, politics, biography and time blur in a text or set of texts that might all too easily be cast as nostalgic. The question must always be, nostalgic for what, for when, for whom—and, if it seems relevant, to what end. In analysing these films, then, we need to be awake, all at once, to the textual specificities of film—that is, its address, its appeal, its narrative choices—as well as to the historical and political specificities of production and reception.

Image taken from German Propaganda Archive.

The Healthy Body

2008-09-15T11:12:00.007+02:00

This will all be wildly off topic, so apologies for those expecting commie kitsch, thoughts on Tacheles closing or a devastating analysis of the rise and rise of Die Linke! There are some nice ironic pictures about halfway through, so they're worth sticking around for....

I'm currently doing some research work for an academic looking at the water bottle as a modern thing, what it represents -- there's Latour, biopolitics, risk, neoliberal privatisation and many other theoretical bits floating around in the framing of the project. I don't get to touch most of that. I am just researching one specific campaign. I have managed, though, to spend a day or two reading Feher and Heller's 1994 slim book on biopolitics. (If you can't turn academic research jobs into explorations of pet topics/ideas/authors, what's the goddamn point?)

There's a clear sense in which this is a book written by people spooked by a far-reaching state. Presumably if you were in communist Hungary, saw 1956, had hopes crushed, academic positings withdrawn etc etc, this is something you'd be fairly careful about.

Nevertheless, they do a good job here of taking their longer view -- a fairly worked-through set of ideas about modernity's genesis and meanings (for them, in this context, it's an ongoing debate of life versus liberty) -- and marrying it to some contemporary analysis. So you get your Kant with some Rodney King race riots, your Hegel with some Andrea Dworkin and your Weber with anti-smoking campaigns.

It's this last point where we start to get crossover with the marketing of water bottles. I don't always fully agree with their positions, but they get in some cracking lines, paragraphs and, well, whole pages of analysis. Below is one of my favourites.

Since health politics demands that we force our sense of mortality into oblivion and continually remain fit labour machines, an odd version of the age-old dream of eternal youth also becomes one of ‘health’s’ metaphoric meanings. The politics of health runs a desperate race with time. It wants to bring time to a halt in order to raise the bodily state of the adolescent boy and girl to the pedestal of the ideal. The alliance of health politics with health industry makes this feature even more explicit.… Theoretically, one could expect at least an aesthetic yield from this exaggerated cult of youth, a new adoration of beauty. But the standards of youthfulness are technologically set; they aim at mass production. In the pursuit of health, biopolitics becomes unfaithful to the spirit of the post-modern. Instead of promoting ‘difference’—beauty as the mark of individuality—it promotes the production of ‘the healthy body’ en masse.

And just before this passage, they make a nice series of linkages between the stigma of being unhealthy, utilitarianism and the Protestant ethic.

He who commits ‘health crimes’ is ‘unreconstructed’ (a term of the re-education camps) and ‘contaminated’. Above all, he causes public expenditure (by the implied crime of eventually falling ill, being hospitalised, and perhaps even buried at public expense). Those who waste too much time discussing ‘progress,’ should rather compare the stone-hearted utilitarianism of health politics with medieval caritas. But the reference to ‘public expenditure,’ more than anything else, betrays that one of the major objectives of health politics is to restore the shattered Protestant work ethic to its abandoned central position, by reviving its neurotic self-discipline; its imperative to subject the individual to ‘public goals’ and the world of labour, as well as to Protestant work ethic’s inherent miserliness.

So the body -- our 'health' -- must be disciplined and punished. Health as a political metaphor can be seen, for them, in the various exhortations for the individual. Health, in such a setting

cannot be pursued without the binary of ‘friend and foe’. It is for this reason that the concept of ‘secondary smoking’ was created. It is not the general pollution of cities and the industrial environment, not AIDS, drugs, alcohol, the creeping back of tuberculosis (as well as other diseases which have never been mastered) that will cause our premature deaths but the results of Secondary Smoking. It is useless to waste time considering the ‘scientific basis’ of this inquisitorial concept. More important is to recognise its function. Our needs and habits no longer have a private character; we are directly responsible from them in front of the ‘public eye’. ‘Science’ has to be mobilised to ‘prove’ that in indulging in our particular health crime we endanger our fellow citizens, pollute (and thus abuse) our children, upset the mental peace of our neighbours, and contaminate the moral atmosphere. The conclusion is self-evident: either submit to the norm, or pay the penalty, perhaps la mort civile. This is what justifies sniffing the ‘secret smoker’ out of the toilet booth (as once the secret masturbator was sniffed out) and denouncing him without further delay or calling the guard to remove the perpetrator from the premises.…By and large the politics of health is successful insofar as it transplants a massive guilt feeling, the prerequisite for the victory of the course of ‘discipline and punish’, into the psyche of the individual. One sees on the same TV-set a host of young men and women who tell you that because they lost x pounds or kilos in their last diet, they no longer feel guilty.

In matters of water bottles and marketing, these healthy bodies are linked to healthy Nature. Drinking from those bottles, we undertake an ethic of care for the self/body -- health politics -- and for Nature -- environmental politics. We forego the less healthy choice -- sugary soft drinks, fattening milk, stimulant coffee -- in order to move closer to nature and purity, away from contamination and stigma/shame/guilt.

Following a kind of Weberian line, I wonder if this didn't represent re-enchantment of the water bottle: its messages and attachments are to connect [re-connect?] the consumer-as-body to nature, purity, clarity, a kind of singularity of nature, both universal (nature, the earth, the body) and particular (my body, my environment, my world). The tap is non-unique, anonymous, tracked by bureaucracy and water bills, immobile because owned by all. The bottle is unique, specific, instantly locatable and mobile.

(Pics via Flickr and Healthy Living Tip [?])

Polska posters

2008-09-12T03:21:00.002+02:00

As if in some visual exercise of dialectics, Polish artists seem to take a Polish appreciation of illustration play it off against Hollywood film and come out with some genius synthesis. This Well Medicated post attests to as much, fifty times over. A Polish aesthetics for Hollywood?

Symposiasts, unite!

2008-08-14T11:14:00.005+02:00

A break in the roaring silence. Fans will know that I have been busy elsewhere - jumping roundabouts and swinging on hurdles for University bureaucracy, teaching psychoanalysis to 17 year olds and laying awake at night thinking about the dissertationy things that I can't find the time to think about at any other point. The upshot of this is that new content will appear here, forthwith. Promise.

Nevertheless, the reason for this break in the static is to give later-than-late notice of a symposium at the University of Melbourne tomorrow. It takes on/up/over/aim at the topic of May '68. I paste below the official circular sent to me late today. (Breaking news!) I had thought of preparing a presentation on the (overwhelming) tinges of nostalgia in the remembrance of May '68. As it was, time got the better of me, and the topic seemed a fair stretch from my Easterly homepatch. Much too occidental a concern for me to dally with.

All are welcome to listen to the papers, and enjoy the provocation and opportunity to talk about revolting students!

The order of speakers is not yet confirmed, so if you wish to disregard the rest of us and only come to hear your favourite, I am afraid you will have to await a further update, or contact your pet directly.

Following the program is the general outline of the nature and intentions of the symposium.

Provocations of '68
A Social Theory Postgraduate Symposium

Friday 15th August
Multi-function Room, 1888 Building
The University of Melbourne
10am – 4pm

Welcome
9:30 - 10:00 am
Coffee and Tea in the Multifunction Room

Foreword
Assoc/Prof. John Rundell - 1968 and Social Theory

Session 1
10 – 12:00 am
Bryan Cooke - Cassius at the Carnival, or How much light does it take to be invisible?

Yoni Molad - The concept of the Situation in Guy Debord's 'Society of the Spectacle'

Thea Potter - Les Cadres: from Revolution to Evolution

Sergio Mariscal - On Other '68s: Prague, Berlin and Mexico City

Session 2
1:00 – 2:30 pm
Stefan Siemsen - Intellectual Labour - Then and Now

James Field - Beyond the Barricades

Michael Ashcroft - Althusser and 1968

Afternoon Tea
2:30 – 3:00 pm

Roundtable discussion
3:00 – 4:00 pm
Moderated by Dr. John Cash

Afterword
Professor Ghassan Hage - Closing Remarks: The Meanings of 1968

Abstract/invitation/summary/prelude/outline/intentions
May ’68 stands as a loadstone to the imagination. With forty years hindsight interpretations of the significance of the events, the demands, the causes and consequences continue to provoke debate and the taking up of positions not only on the past but also on our current situation. Beyond the question of what ’68 was, taking a standpoint on ’68 entails the engagement with the content of ideology, practice and social change and its continuity or discontinuity with the present.

The events of ’68 were formative for a generation of French intellectuals that have become canonical. The responses of theorists and philosophers who observed and participated in the events of ‘68 acted (and still act) as a litmus test of their political positions. But ‘68 should not be seen only as a battle of intellectuals, particularly since the events were perhaps unprecedented to many of the thinkers that we associate with that time, challenging and provoking them to rethink positions towards both capitalist and socialist modernity.

And the social action of ’68 was not confined only to France or to a student uprising. In the Americas as much as in Europe movements contested the legitimacy of social life, of domination political and economic, of the ubiquity of state violence and the one dimensionality of work.

The intention of this symposium is to gather together for a day of presentations and discussion on the social, cultural and philosophical legacy of May ’68, to examine the debates around what happened, but also what was demanded, what were the causes, and what is the legacy of a failed revolution or a cultural watershed or a social movement.

(Pic via marcuse.org)

The main thing...

2008-06-16T11:05:00.002+02:00

There is the issue of nostalgia culture’s place in the constitution of social identities and groups, and, by implication, the question of the ‘politics of nostalgia’: the question, that is, of the meanings and significance of the view(s) of the past offered by nostalgia culture. What [Radstone's] survey [of critical 'nostalgia' literature] does reveal is that debates concerning the politics of nostalgia require analyses of nostalgia culture that differentiate between its varieties, and that attend to the specificities of nostalgia culture’s representations of the past, its strategies of address and its appeal.
- Susannah Radstone, The Sexual Politics of Time: Confession, Nostalgia, Memory, 2007, p129. Emphasis mine.

Radstone names here one of the fundamental impulses in my work: to draw apart this simplistic 'ostalgie' concept, to name its parts, to precisely call it by different names, to notice different species, different attenuations, different imperatives. The journalistic variety of 'ostalgie' - wherein Good Bye Lenin! is posited as being the same as Trabant fan clubs or a post-unification justification of the Berlin Wall - pays little attention to these qualitative differences. The reportage does, of course, vary from the "oh, look at this backward whimsy" to the "hark! Communists among us!" varieties, but greater subtlety than this seems a lost hope.

(Until the emergence of my dissertation, when all will be right again in the world.)

(Pic via DHM)

Radstone

2008-06-06T05:11:00.004+02:00

Brit academic Susannah Radstone visited Melbourne University last year. She has visited Australia multiple times, with research for her most recent book supported by ANU. Her works in the various corners of memory research are consistently some of the best writings in this field - an ~~sometimes disappointing~~ endlessly frustrating field. A serious, engaged and clear thinker, her writing arrives at deceptively simple conclusions. This masks the way she can clear away obfuscation and confusion. To wit:

We also need all the time to be asking whether there are inassimilable or incommensurable aspects to memory, and if so how they can be understood. In other words, we need to attend not only to the articulation of memory by the discourses and institutions of the public sphere, but also to the absences, gaps and slips produced by such articulations—absences that might beg questions concerning both memory’s incommensurability or untranslatability and questions of power, politics and recognition.…Without this dual focus, studies of memory will share with approaches grounded in identity politics a limited view of the processes, practices and institutions through which experience or memory make their mark and are made. Understandings of memory, that is, whether personal, social, collective or cultural, cannot be derived from experience and memory alone.

Which might sound self-evident, but you'd probably be amazed how much work on memory misses this dimension. Radstone has written elsewhere about what she notices as the impact of the 'ethical turn' in discussions of memory.

Antze and Lambek have pointed out that the contemporary emphasis on individual trauma and the recovery of personal memories of victimhood might be conceived of as ‘a triumph over the political… Here historical trauma is displaced by individual drama’. As Antze and Lambek go on to suggest, the current politics of memory and its associated culture of victimhood draw attention away from collective forces and issues, and produce a shift from collective obligations and modes of accountability to narratives of individual suffering and accusations of individual blame. Within this memory culture, a focus by memory studies on individual narratives of remembered suffering may be contributing to what Richard Sennett, deploying as yet unproblematised oppositional terms, described as people ‘working out in terms of personal feelings public matters which properly can be dealt with only through codes of impersonal meaning.’ Memory studies too, that is, with its focus on questions of personal suffering and individual testimony, may be viewed as contributing to what Sennett sees as ‘the erosion of the delicate balance between the public and the private.’

In discussing nostalgia, it is easy to slip into such an ultimately unsatisfactory stress on the individual. But retaining the dual focus Radstone outlines in the first excerpt (above) helps to guard against this.

(Quotes taken from Radstone's "Reconceiving Binaries: the Limits of Memory," History Workshop Journal, 59)
(Pic via Flickr.)

New News

2008-05-22T02:49:00.003+02:00

I have been tagged by the proliferating educator meme. I will respond to this soon.

But, first, something briefer. Getting regular and relevant news is one of the challenges of studying the contemporary social/cultural/political phenomena of a country other than your own. Of course the intertubes have helped everyone become an instant (surface level) expert on all manner of arcane stuff. Access to news has, perhaps, never been greater -- even if much of it is just re-written press releases and unreflective reportage, there is a glimmer of news in there. But this all comes to naught if your area of interest speaks a different language; Google translator only gets you so far. Getting news from Russia, Germany and other places East is a continuing quest.

The English version of Der Spiegel is useful, their regular email newsletters keep pumping information down my intertube pipe daily. There was the much more old school (pure text! webpage frames!) German News translations via email, although this has recently shut down.

Russia has presented more difficulties. The Cold War winds are still blowing in much reporting of Russian politics and society. A certain judgement of 'backwardness' is still there in the arched eyebrows of many Western journalists. (And, to be sure, peniscopters aren't a regular occurrence in many other countries' politics, but that's arguably to everyone else's detriment.) In which case getting some less coloured material becomes an important task.

Window on Eurasia is a blog run by Paul Goble. He provides a set of three comprehensive articles each day. Often these are drawing from reports translated for the first time, which is invaluable. He (re-)reports regularly on new statistics and analysis about the population in post-communist Russia and elsewhere. Goble may have his own political pursuits -- "promoting Baltic independence and the withdrawal of Russian forces from those formerly occupied lands" -- but the reports don't seem unfairly tilted by this interest. He's currently working at Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy, but has worked as an academic in Estonia and in the US public service. This included a stint in the CIA and Radio Free Europe (America's radio service into Soviet territory), which obviously needs to be borne in mind. (In related news, Radio Free Europe's research department is to close. A sign of political convergence? The propaganda for free markets and 'liberty' now too orthodox to be worth budgeting for?)

A scan over Goble's pieces in recent days yields some interesting material: "Kremlin’s Ties with Religions Said to be Strengthening ‘Archaic’ Elements in Each," "Russia’s Poor – Fewer in Number but Further Behind the Wealthy," "The Red Army Did Not Liberate East Europeans or the Russians Either, Moscow Commentator Says".

The latter, referring to the removal of the Soviet memorial in Estonia (see image above), presents the intriguing thesis of Igor Dzhordan:

Dzhordan’s core argument is as follows: The Soviet political system was based on “an institutionalized civil war. The USSR was the geographical-political form of the state of the civil war.” And consequently, when the CPSU was overthrown and the USSR dissolved, these were “the most important steps toward the end” of that civil conflict.

Consequently, after 1991, there was the promise of “civil peace” in which “force would no longer be the foundation of social life. But then Vladimir Putin created “a post-modernist cocktail,” in which thre was “(almost) the tsarist coat of arms and (almost) the Soviet hymn and in which the MVD traced its roots to Benckendorf and the FSB to Derzhinsky.”

Such a compound state needed some things from the tsarist system and some from the Soviet one, Dzhordan says, and one of the things it needed from the Soviet was “the myth of liberation,” the idea that the Soviet Red Army “liberated” Eastern Europe and thus justified the use of force at home and the Communist mission abroad.

Such a myth, of course, would have been “impossible” to insist upon “if it was not based on something real, on the genuine experience of a grandiose people’s war, which ended with a victory over Hitlerite Germany.” But the “integral” quality of this myth represents “its weak side.” One cannot allow any part of it to be challenged, or the entire myth disintegrates.

While one can no doubt argue against this analysis, it's an argument that wouldn't be possible without access to sources of news and debate inside Russia and its former satellites.

DDR Montage

2008-05-14T06:22:00.003+02:00

Hopefully the silence is not awkward. I've been busily preparing two papers, one of them on 'insecurity' in post-communism, the other on some post-unification films in Germany. Bits and pieces from both might appear up here. Meanwhile, get your dance/trance on:

Classicists may prefer:

John Waters and Christoph Schlingensief fans may prefer:

Eagleton on Žižek on Everything

2008-05-14T03:50:00.006+02:00

Two names already invoked on this here blog: Terry Eagleton reviews Slavoj Žižek's latest book of tenuously linked paragraphs, In Defense of Lost Causes. I haven't read it yet. But seems like it might contain some interesting arguments on the 'usefulness' of communism today. Which might have something to say about the nature of some nostalgia.

Žižek's already rehearsed some of these arguments, if not in full then at least by implication: the redemptive potentialities of communism's ideological edifice, which is not the same as the system which delivered the purges and the prisons and the phone tapping and the.... In the Parallax View, for instance, the 'eternal return of the same' invoked by Nietzsche is re-interpreted by Žižek: not the one-dimensional 'past as it was' (objective history), but the past with all redemptive potentialities intact. And in his review of The Lives of Others, he suggests that this is why there is more nostalgia for communism than there is for Nazism: communism had a much more positive set of politico-ethical ideas than Nazism -- and it's this program which people yearn for, not the grey totality of really-existing socialism.

This is all, of course, open to dispute. But I'll get the book and read the thing first.

(pic via Flickr, thanks to Andrew for Eagleton link)

The non-rational and ambiguity?

2008-05-03T15:53:00.009+02:00

There are other more substantial posts waiting in the wings -- checking themselves in the mirror, brushing their shoulders off, preening their hair -- but a passing observation...

I think the appeal of Castoriadis clicked when I read this article abstract:

Neither Habermas nor his communitarian and poststructuralist critics sufficiently explore the non-linguistic, playful, and performative dimensions of contemporary public spheres. I argue that the approaches of Castoriadis and Touraine can inform a theoretical understanding of the history and current resonance of this public sphere of performance. Their concepts of the social imaginary, the autonomous society, and subjectivation highlight the role of fantasy, images, individualism, and other non-rational factors in late modern public life. (From the Imaginary to Subjectivation: Castoriadis and Touraine on the Performative Public Sphere by Tucker, Kenneth H., Jr in Thesis Eleven, Nov 2005; vol. 83)

Other non-rational factors in late modern public life. Snap! Memory or, more particularly, nostalgia is a non-rational encounter with the past -- and with the present. It follows no logic, other than, perhaps, this very shapeshifting rascal: the paradigm of non-rationality. It can be experienced in Proust's involuntary memory or the willful voluntary reminscience of pulling a family photograph from out of the draw. In both, however, the tracks of logic aren't traceable -- memory doesn't work by deductive or inductive argument but in fragments, frustrating as these are to analyse.

Castoriadis's imaginary fits more neatly with this than the dry circuits of Habermas. This is precisely the problem I've had with Habermas (the crypto-liberal, as my housemate put it the other night) and Beck (the crypto-liberal, if I may extrapolate). While doing well on describing various factors in the conditions of life under post/reflexive/cosmo-modern (Western) societies, they both fail to acknowledge the realm of ambiguity fundamental to human anthropology -- at the general level and particularly at the current conjuncture. Call it the social scientist impulse. Life, though, doesn't fit into a table, graph or series of bullet points. Much to no one's chagrin...

No doubt the lack of engagement with these non-rational factors is partly the very difficulty of talking about them in the academic argot. The strut and pose of the academic journal, monograph and conference loses its shimmer when one introduces doubt, uncertainty and ambiguity into its movement. A sign of weakness, it's whispered.

The nascent field of Memory Studies, for all its many faults (as spelt out by Radstone, Klein, Kansteiner and others), seems in its better moments to want to address this drive to will away ambiguity. Of course we must generally retain something like the apparatus of rationality and reason if we want to convey something to a reader -- as Habermas himself argued in his "performative contradiction" criticisms of Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment -- but the point is to acknowledge the unknowability of certain things, the ambiguity of certain feelings, the strangeness of certain impulses. That sounds vague. And it is. But the will-to-explanation, as we might call it, seems like a stiff, macho academic pose. Memory is fuzzy. That is the challenge to academics everywhere engaged in saying something useful and enlightening about it. Castoriadis and other thinkers interested in the subject and imagination offer some nice ways of confronting this challenge.

Our dear Hungarians, refashioned...

2008-04-21T13:49:00.002+02:00

...by a fellow Australian transplant from Europe. I always find it invigorating, energising and generally exciting -- I'm a nerd -- to come across a thinker clearly engaged in their project, passionate about articulating ideas/concepts and measured in their appraisal of 'the literature'. In this case, the cool blast of European wind comes from Johann P. Arnason, another academic -- like Agnes Heller -- who once found their antipodean place in the humanities department of La Trobe University.*

I had been vaguely aware of him before now. I've read some of his contributions to the debate about the theoretical viability of something called "Communist Modernity." He's edited and contributed a commanding breadth of material to the social theory journal Thesis Eleven, while a 2000 article by Wolfgang Knöbl in that journal ("In Praise of Philosophy: Johann P. Arnason's Long but Successful Journey Towards a Theory of Modernity") argues for Arnason as a social theorist of modernity, one worthy of challenges to Giddens, Castoriadis and Habermas. Arnason has written both philosophical and sociological works, ultimately weaving the two together in what has been described as "macro-sociology". It's his 1993 book, entitled The Future that Failed: Origins & Destinies of the Soviet Model, which has really interested me over recent days. It's one where the empiricism of the study meets philosophical acumen, a series of his own insights poking through the historical outline of both Soviet society and thinking around that society.

The blank library "due date" slip and pristine condition of the book I'm reading tell a story of neglect. As does the necessity to import the book via interlibrary loans, my home university library lacking its own copy.

For all that, it fell into my possession at the correct time. I say this for two reasons. Firstly, with my own recent slow attempts at teasing out some conceptual distinctions, Arnason came along to clearly draw up some helpful lines of demarcation. The questions I was puzzling over are in the realm of differentiation and integration. A large part of the introductory chapter of The Future that Failed is dedicated to precisely this problematic, as I explore below. Secondly, he navigates between the work of Castoriadis and Dictatorship Over Needs (which is itself an often uncited deployment of Castoriadis' ideas), the very two frameworks which I've been seeing as increasingly likely to be those which will be guiding work in the relevant chapters of my thesis. He also introduces some names -- Touraine, for instance -- not commonly heard in these circles. And, on a rather more minor note, the very title of Arnason's book gets at the question of Communist historicity -- that emphasis on the future, the forever radiant golden horizon -- I argue is important to the notes of nostalgia recognisable in the post-communist remembrance of Communism.

So what does Arnason have to say? Well, if his 24 pages of survey can be distilled down further to a survey paragraph or nine, it would look something like this. Arnason is at pains to disentangle the Soviet model as a "social regime" from the movement which "rose to power in some states but failed to achieve its global aims." This, for him, is important because "the impact of the regime -- its built-in aspirations as well as its structural transformations -- on the movement which it controlled was more decisive than the traces left within the regime by the movement that had paved the way for it." This is the long view, obviously. Not localised to the time of the revolution, but Soviet Communism taken as a whole. While the study of the movement is important and the origins of the regime leave their mark, as he readily admits, the stress here is placed on the system of government and society developed by that regime. This is more useful for me as it tracks the regime through its various modulations, highlighting those relevant points of continuity. "The focus is, in other words, on the Soviet model as a social regime (in the broad sense suggested by Castoriadis, i.e. a comprehensive institutional pattern) with global ramifications and universal pretensions; its ability to absorb and instrumentalise the legacy of a social movement, as well as to control or at least influence a whole spectrum of movements outside its domestic arena, is only one aspect of a more complex picture, and not the most directly relevant to the present discussion."

For Arnason, the Soviet regime is one laden with imperialist designs, which I spell out more below. Of most interest to me is his argument about the matters of integration and differentiation.

"Differentiation" here refers to those attempts at distinguishing the social field. Perhaps the most common of these is the tripartite formula which splits into economic, political and cultural components. This is the one Arnason deploys in the book, but not without heavy qualification. For one, he gives accounts of: the Habermasian conception of three cultural spheres ("cognitive, moral and aesthetic"), as well as his system-lifeworld argument; the Giddens analysis of "institutional clusters"; Weber on the internal conflicts of modernity; Castoraidis on the fit of capitalist development, cultural premises, imaginary development, democracy and the autonomous society; Touraine on the state as "complex actor"; Marx's flawed conceptual apparatus (that is, overdetermining the economic realm) with the large holes darned by his critical followers from Wallerstein to Lukacs to Durkheim to Weber; Elias on state-formation as a multi-dimensional process. Arnason isn't just name dropping. He's situating his analysis in a field of other candidates, foregrounding his theoretical decision as a rational fit rather than an arbitrary pluck. An awareness of these other accounts allows him to see the shortcomings of a crude tripartite divison, it affords him qualifications to bolster the trans-functional account he provides -- and will use in the rest of the book.

The autonomy of the economic and the political sphere can only be articulated on the basis of cultural contents, i.e. patterns of meaning that are specific to each sphere and conducive to its far-reaching but necessarily incomplete separation from the broader cultural context. These built-in cultural orientations can, in turn, function as sources of further differentiation: the arenas of conflicting interpretations, rather than domains of unequivocal and uncontested principles. Finally, the cultural constitution of economy and politics as separate spheres is accompanied by different projects of reintegration. This last point -- integrative models as roots of conflict and differentiation -- will be of particular importance for the following discussion.

The point is that "the overall configuration of the spheres lack the unity and coherence of a system, and each sphere is too autonomous and multi-faceted to be reducible to a subsystem." A dilemma, then? One way lies an all-too-neat system, the other lies sub-systems too large to fully be considered "secondary." Each of these spheres tends to "constitute itself as a world in its own right and project its logic onto the social field as a whole." (Which can be seen reproduced not least in the different analytic orientations of academics: sociologists, economists and culturalists.)

What's more, though, hiding all the folds forecloses rupture or irruptions or eruptions or disruptions. The importance remains -- politically and theoretically, as Castoriadis and Touraine would argue -- to leave space for radical creativity, for aporia. Analysis of the social field needs to be concerned with its "specificity, autonomy and historicity." Ultimately, Arnason argues, the three-way division, despite its shortcomings, is the most useful way to articulate these elements of social reality, leaving space for creativity and change.

Integration refers to the way a unifying framework brings these three spheres into co-ordination. It's another thorny matter. We don't, for instance, start our mornings in the economic sphere, proceed to the political sphere by lunchtime and dally in the cultural sphere by sundown. We're in all three at once, but might predominantly be in one (or two) more than the other. The neatness of the splits is a theorist's conceit. But, by the same measure then, to describe these three spheres as a coherent, seamless "system" is to totalise them beyond any recognisable reality. Arnason again does the work of reviewing the literature on this front. He argues that the influential Parsonian view of integration in modernity is too total. "Modernity is, in a very fundamental sense, less integrated and less integrable than some of its most influential interpreters have assumed." What's more, he argues, these overly unifying accounts often smuggle in a normative dimension, suggesting that the tensions and contradictions of modernity will -- and can -- be overcome. Marx, in this way, offers an account of utopian integration.

For Marx, the diversification of the relations between humans and the world is an important part of the civilising role of capitalism, and post-capitalist humanity will pursue the same goal in a more conscious and co-ordinated way. At the same time, Marx has his own version of a constitutive principle of modernity: the continuous and self-accelerating growth of the productive forces. This interpretive device allows him to link the analysis of the capitalist version of modernity to the prognosis of its self-destruction and the project of a post-capitalist alternative.

For Arnason, the Soviet model strives for a radical de-differentiation of the spheres -- where politics, economy and culture sing the same song. This is what others have described as totalitarianism -- the totalising control of the social field -- but he largely resists this appellation, but not without outlining his reluctance.

He argues, in turn, that to understand the Soviet model, we must see its position in drawing on "alternative currents" of Western and non-Western modernity.

It may be argued that the very peculiar characteristics of the Russian tradition, which combined a peripheral position within the Western world with some attributes of a separate civilisation and was shaped by a historical experience that further enhanced both aspects, were conducive to the equally distinctive mixture of a refusal of Western modernity with a claim to outdo it on its own ground and to prefigure its future.

This is where Arnason gets to an account of the Soviet system's imperialism, something that's not particularly fashionable these days. If Dictatorship Over Needs glues together continuist and "rupture" accounts of Communism (which it does by holding a clutch of, more or less, unvarying features in one hand as it goes about describing the historical twists and variations and changes in the other), Arnason goes back even further. That is, to the socio-historical ground for the Russian revolution: the tsarist empire of Russia, one of three prevalent Eastern European empires coming into the twentieth century (+ Ottoman and Habsburg/Austro-Hungarian). While aiming some well-placed blows at the general and overplayed traditional/modern distinction (I enter as evidence the section which my marginalia summarised with the phrase "Hobsbawm smackdown"), Arnason comes to settle on the idea of "imperial modernisation." In this respect, the Soviet state -- or any centre so described (he also mentions Communist China, which was influenced, of course, by the prior development of the Russian-Soviet imperial model) -- is marked by four interconnected factors. Arnason argues that the origins and transformations of the "totalitarian project can [not] be understood without reference to this background." These four matters, then, are fundamental to his argument: "the interplay of empire and revolution must be analysed in connection with the long-term process of state formation and its socio-cultural underpinnings."

The imperial centre has its structure and symbolism modified by the process of modernisation...
...Yet the framework and vector of those changes is also determined by imperial structures and strategies.
Tension and conflicts result from this combination (1 + 2), reinforcing the "disintegrative potential of modernity," resulting in "crises and collapses that differ from other types of modern revolutions."
Post-revolutionary developments and the resultant power structure reflect the "persistence of the imperial syndrome."

The point, then, is the continuity of certain imperial designs right through the tsarist and Communist eras. This became the site of many problematics, as he outlines in a sentence large enough to require its own postcode, pastry chefs and tourist maps.

[My] argument is that the most serious problems faced by a modernising empire were related to new forms and dimensions of differentiation in the global as well as the domestic arena; the post-revolutionary rebuilding of the imperial centre went hand in hand with the development of a new and much more extreme form of integration, but the totalitarian logic of this model could -- in the long run -- neither absorb nor accommodate the plurality of socio-cultural spheres, and the result was a process of decomposition which ultimately led to the collapse of the centre and the fragmentation of its internal and external periphery. Although this prolonged process of imperial breakdown, reconstruction, fusion and fragmentation obviously limits the autonomy of social actors and the scope of social conflicts, the latter aspect cannot be left out of the picture. It was a social revolution that destroyed the old order and paved the way for the Soviet model. But the forces that mobilised for collective action, their ways of pursuing their goals and articulating their interests, had been shaped by pre-revolutionary developments.

This isn't to say, by way of parallel argument, that a revolution today would unquestionably re-form itself into the image of a free-market liberal democracy. But Arnason is stressing the un-readiness of the immediate post-revolutionary elites to do root-and-branch reform of the imperial institutions. This, combined with the vision articulated through Trotskyist worldwide projections, suggests the ultimate swing toward a military obsession. (A military obsession, of course, which put the military "front" of the formation largely beyond the reach of the crippling bureaucracy and party, all of it making such a muddle of of day-to-day existence: its "bombs-before-butter policies," in Castoriadis' nice phrase.) This is socialism with Russian characteristics.

I'm not yet entirely convinced of this argument. The rest of the book will spell it out in further detail, I'm sure. But I'm becoming aware of the argument about this kind of Russian exceptionalism and the way it can sneak in something like Orientalism in Eastern Europe. Maria Todorova spells this out in a recent contribution to the Kritika journal ("Does Russian Orientalism Have a Russian Soul?"). She goes so far as to ask the question, in this commentary, about whether Sovietology, as the study of Russian Communism, does not have Orientalism marked into its very heart. She does similar things in Imagining the Balkans, a book I'm yet to read but which, I understand, applies the Saidian insights to the east of Europe. It takes Said's insights, but argues differently. In the H-Net review, a few reasons for this separation are spelled out: "The Balkans are concrete, whereas the notion of 'the Orient' is vague and intangible"; "Orientalism is a refuge from the alienation of industrialization, a metaphor for the forbidden--feminine, sensual, even sexual. Balkanism, on the other hand, is not forbidden or sensual. It is male, primitive, crude, and disheveled"; "Balkanism is a transitional concept, something not quite non-European, not a final dichotomy"; "Orientalism posits Islam as the other, whereas Balkanism deals with Christian peoples"; "Balkan self-identity is itself created against an oriental other". Another reference here might be Larry Wolff's Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment in which the "barbaric" condition attached to Eastern Europe is put in its proper historical context, its quite specific emergence. In all cases we are dealing not just with mere discourse but with a series of attitudes that have delivered structural and economic effects. Zizek once played with this notion of exoticism, chiding the Western Left for its condescending attitude to the East (or Yugoslavia or Slovenia, more specifically) -- see the start of his article, "Eastern European Liberalism and its Discontents," for instance.

All of which is to say both Arnason and Dictatorship Over Needs seem to be invoking "backwardness" (the phrase DON uses throughout), which is, erm, a touch problematic if it describes anything other than purely relative objective conditions.

(* For overseas readers, perhaps imagining La Trobe as a powerful global drawcard, it ought to be noted that, despite some evidently wonderful academics, La Trobe University is largely considered a "second-tier" university in Australia. In Melbourne, it'd be put behind the University of Melbourne and Monash University. Melbourne is the sandstone institution, minutes from the CBD and well into its second century. Monash is the post-war concrete monolith out in the Eastern suburbs. Deakin Uni, another second-tierer with some wonderful academics, is also dispersed across the outer metro area. La Trobe, too, is a good car/tram ride away from the CBD. The history of tertiary education in Australia ought not be recounted here, lest to say the "tier" distinction is largely a self-perpetuating cycle of perceptions. Discursively produced, one could say. Yet it produces very real economic and funding differences -- and very different attractions for students. Melbourne Uni has high entry scores because of the demand to get there, which is because of perceived exclusivity, which is because of the prestige, which is because of the high entry scores and on...until the whole thing doubles back on itself and everyone's going there because everyone else is going there and parents tell their friends at the deli about their daughter/son with a little glow of pride and the funding's going there because it's highly sought after, which is because....)

Leninade

2008-04-17T05:52:00.006+02:00

Leninade. A Lenin statue in Seattle. Amazing. Even Laura Bush thinks so (note: the real Laura Bush may not think so). Nice diversions, now business...

Kiwi sociologist Chamsy el-Ojeili has penned a very considered and measured review for the most recent issue of Thesis Elven. Its title is wonderfully obstinate and pissy: "'No, We Have Not Finished Reflecting on Communism': Beyond Post-Socialism." The quoted part of the title is pulled from Lefort's new (in English, at least) Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2007). It is one of the books under consideration, alongside: Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj Žižek (eds), Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth (Duke University Press, 2007); Cornelius Castoriadis, The Rising Tide of Insignificancy (The Big Sleep, 2003); Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable (The Big Sleep, 2005); Filip Kovacevic, Liberating Oedipus? Psychoanalysis as Critical Theory (Lexington Books, 2007). And many others besides; the bibliography runs to five pages. El-Ojeili handles the various tasks well, managing to be both critical and able to give an evenhanded overview of those works with which he disagrees. There's a lot that could be pulled out of this. For one, I think Castoriadis is a much more interesting thinker than most acknowledge -- which certainly emerges from this review. His latter work absolutely cannot escape the tag of pessimism and "impossibilist," as el-Ojeili puts it, but it still carries that same core concern with the politically productive capacity of the radical imaginary.

What I want to focus on here, though, is el-Ojeili's most stinging comments. They're directed toward Lenin Reloaded, a book I too am deeply suspicious of -- if not wearied by. I'll quote his comments at length, because I think they're worth following, rather than picking over. I think his comments are relevant to my work on nostalgia, as I see two motivations at work in the entire Reloaded book: petulant political iconoclasm and high-toned nostalgia. (Oh, 1917! Oh, revolution!) Like all nostalgic reveries, it's not as easy to write off as that. There's some wonderful thinkers involved, and they're not all wilfully misguided. There are glimmers. But the entire project seems like a waste of critical energies. At the present conjuncture, is a resuscitation of Lenin -- a "Weekend at Vladie's" -- truly what we need?

Without a doubt, this more assertive, reconstructive mood is in evidence in the Budgen et al. volume, which is brimming with intelligence, decisiveness, and energy, despite being wrong-headed in just about every imaginable way. In the introduction, Budgen, Kouvelakis and Žižek insist that the name ‘Lenin’ is urgent today, given his determination to intervene in the situation, to adopt ‘the unequivocal radical position’ (p. 3), and thus to offer the possibility of changing the co-ordinates of our situation. The Lenin to be retrieved, they argue, ‘is the Lenin-in-becoming, the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which old reference points proved useless, and who was compelled to reinvent Marxism’ (p. 3) – ‘What Lenin did for 1914, we should do for our times’ (p. 4). On this score, war, globalization, ‘the human face of market tyranny’ (Bensaid, 2007: 148) are, throughout the collection, the connecting, mobilizing points – Labica, for instance, emphasizing this link in reading contemporary globalization as a higher stage of capitalism, as imperialism with some new twists: ‘the predominance of speculative finance capital, the technological revolutions . . . and the collapse of the so-called socialist countries’ (2007: 228–9). Lenin as philosopher, then, is read in the context of this earlier ‘dramatic turning point of history’, which pushed him towards Hegel (the Philosophical Notebooks) and towards strategic reformulations (the ‘April Theses’, The State and Revolution) (Michael-Matsas, 2007: 102). Similarly, Etienne Balibar argues that these circumstances moved Lenin away from laws of history, unfolding capitalist dynamics, etc., towards the discovery of the ‘field of the overdetermination intrinsic to class antagonisms’, to the ‘analysis of concrete situations’ (2007: 211), to the ‘non-predetermined constitution’ p. 212) of theory and practice.

While my reservations about this sort of line are legion, there’s obviously a great weight of intelligence in play here, some of the best stuff coming from the French thinkers – Badiou, Balibar, Lazarus, Lecercle. The boldness of assertion and declarative style is often bracing and provocative: Badiou on the ‘short twentieth century’ as ‘a century of the act’, whose ‘subjective determination is Leninist’ (p. 9); Lazarus on the 20th-century’s ‘new figure of politics’ (p. 255), politics as ‘party-like’, and on the contemporary need for ‘an intellectuality of politics without party or revolution’ (p. 265) – ‘The end of the nation-state, which must be dated from 1968, is basically the end of the state as object of an “inherited” conflictuality’ (p. 266); Lecercle’s reading of Lenin’s qualities – firmness, hardness, and subtlety – as forces towards a much needed new direction for the philosophy of language. It is also interesting to see Callinicos contesting Žižekian decisionism, in favour of ‘an ethics of political action’ (p. 35) – improbably constructed by way of Trotsky.

A central issue, casting a shadow across the entire collection, is the question of the party – foregrounded, in a very different way, in Lefort’s Complications. In noting the necessary encounter with the Real for any genuine change, Žižek has previously pointed to the crucial facilitating role of three figures – God, Analyst, Party. In line with this emphasis, Kovacevic endows the discourse of the analyst with special significance, in ‘making desire emerge, stimulat[ing] the creation of new frameworks for the life of the analysand’ (2007: 205), arguing that, in the world of politics, this role is played by leaders, a ‘responsible, emancipatory, analyst-type leadership’ (p. 207). In the Budgen et al. collection, Jameson puts forward something similar – Lenin in the position of the discourse of the analyst, ‘who listens for collective desire and crystallizes its presence in his political manifestos and “slogans”’ (p. 71).

Again, there are some good points made here on issues of organization, intellectuals, strategy: for instance, Eagleton arguing that ‘intellectual’ ‘designates a social or political location . . . not a social rank or origin’ (2007: 46), distinguishing between elite and vanguard, and making some sound arguments against the easy, thoughtless rejection of authority per se. But, on the whole, for anyone influenced by the efforts of Castoriadis and the ultra-Left more widely, the whole endeavour will smack of a magnificent regression. For all its sparkle, we might want to read the volume as a sort of Sorelian myth around Lenin and Red October, bearing very little connection to the realities of Bolshevism or to any political realities and possibilities currently in play or ahead of us. For instance, Shandro considers the relationship between the Bolsheviks and the workers’ movement, arguing against the image of Lenin as Machiavellian opportunist formulating conflictual positions solely in the interests of power, contending instead that, in Lenin, ‘vanguard and masses play different, potentially complementary but sometimes essentially contradictory parts in the class struggle’ (2007: 329–30). Lenin, then, is seen as steering an intelligent path beyond both naïve spontaneism and substitutionism, delicately, dialectically thinking the relation between different actors in social change. At times, there seems an implicit ‘bid’ at work, here, in relation to the present and future course of the alternative globalization movement with Bensaid, for instance, arguing that:
A politics without parties (whatever name – movement, organization, league, party – that they are given) ends up in most cases as a politics without politics: either an aimless tailism toward the spontaneity of social movements, or the worst form of elitist individualist vanguardism, or finally a repression of thepolitical in favour of the aesthetic or the ethical. (2007: 162)
This connection – globalization-socialist organization – is interestingly in play in the most uncomfortably out-of-place piece in the collection, the contribution of Antonio Negri, who makes some effort to begin with Lenin but is clearly of another tradition – ‘Lenin beyond Lenin’ (2007: 300), ‘Everything has changed’ (p. 300), ‘the limitations . . . of the Leninist point of view’ (p. 305). And I would suggest that, for all the problems with Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004), we have, here, an instance of second phase post-Marxism, alive with a bold return to ‘logic of the social’ theoretical synthesis, and reconstructive ultra-Left/anarchistic utopianism. In this ‘post-Marxism II’, I think we can see movement past demobilizing, onesided cultural criticism, really existing liberal democracy, post-modern deconstruction, and Leninist retrievals – some decent attempts to offer replacements for Marxism’s broken triangle and chart paths beyond the post-socialist condition.

Emphasis mine. Thoughts, yours? More Leninade?

Gulag

2008-04-17T05:14:00.005+02:00

Gulag Peephole

Ferenc Fehér’s article “In the Bestiarium—A Contribution to the Cultural Anthropology of ‘Real Socialism’” (from Eastern Left, Western Left: Totalitarianism, Freedom and Democracy, ed. Ferenc Fehér and Agnes Heller (Cambridge: Polity, 1987)) gives an account ‘from below’ of Communism. For him, like Foucault’s histories of the clinic, prisons and asylums, it is the Gulag which tells the, by now, not so secret history of this system: “the Gulag, in its past and present forms, is an encyclopaedia and an open display of the hidden principles which keep the society of the dictatorship over needs running.”

To put it briefly, the principles are displayed in the control by authorities in the camps, the disavowal of collectivisation and individual rights, the denial of leisure and opportunity to do non-prescribed work. The control of the prisoner, too, reveals the forms of total social control: “mobilising the endlessness of time against the finitude of an individual’s life,” thrown out of the wagons and into the stone-age arctic climes of remotest Soviet Union, “abandoned to nature, to the ‘natural’ process of decomposition and disintegration”—the undernourished prisoner, self-tortured by denied medical care, was systematically weakened, the listless form opening up an obedient mind, subservient in all respects. For Fehér, this distinguishes the Gulag from the concentration camp. There is none of the camp’s bombast, violent efficiency and operatic melodrama in the Gulag. (Which is perhaps one reason why the Holocaust is endlessly more appealing to the cinematic lens and the literary novel than any of the ravages of the Gulag.)

In the Gulag, the body is exposed to “excesses of climate, heat or frost”—and systematically, passively in effect, run down. “But in all cases,” he notes, “it was a kind of bestial utilitarianism, never aesthetic sadism, as with the Nazis, that prevailed.” Fehér sees in this the telos of the entire “dictatorship over needs,” “the principle of total social control, a self-abandonment of enlightenment, a return to the tutelage of authority, i.e. to complete disenlightenment.” He sees it here in the “re-education process…the process of ‘voluntary’ self-abandonment of one’s Ego, of one’s opinions”; the admission to re-education a “sign of grace” from on high, which entailed “being fully absorbed by an alien and unchallengeable authority”—the better option than being “selected for destruction.” Throughout his essay, Fehér is playing with the Cartesian split—arguing that the Soviets use “the finitude of the body in the service of an alienating and imprisoning ‘soul’.” Against the individual body’s finite imprisonment, the attempt to imprison the soul is the greater barbarism, in Fehér’s account.

His biographical details—former Communist dissident in the Budapest School, marginalised by the Soviet-friendly Kádár leadership—suggest his theoretical investment in this role of dissidence in exile. For Fehér, Communism has become a shell. The attempt of the totalising Soviet rulers to gain the minds—souls?—of its citizens is the frontline of the entire system—the souls of the people are to vibrate in sympathy with that of the system. And yet: “the Soviet bestiarium imposes a false ideology of collectivism and cheerful optimism on every citizen which is no longer internalised even by a minority but which has no accepted public competition.” Returning to the soul-body metaphor but in a different register, he suggests that Bolshevism—and Fascism, for that matter—discover “illness in the body[:] Fascism finds it in the alien body (this is why it can and must be destroyed), Bolshevism in the body of ‘its own’ subject* which, therefore, has to be incarcerated and re-educated.” Bolshevism, then, is the maintenance of a false ideology by a system of incarceration, re-education and totalised socialisation.

(* At last night's Michael Dutton talk, he remarked that -- unbelievably -- in the period of the Maoist revolution in China, the Communists executed as many from the inside as the Nationalists did from the outside. This Communist quest for purity is endlessly brutal and irrational. As Fehér notes in his sweeping section of Dictatorship Over Needs, Communism has a preference for hyperrationality but largely delivers social irrationality: "anyone entering these societies from the world of calculative rationality has, as a first impression, the feeling that he has arrived in Bedlam. Nothing functions, or at least nothing does in the way one would expect having been brought up in the spirit of rationalist standards; mysterious interdictions block the road from one to the other in the shortest and most innocent peripatetics of everyday life, and usually the question 'why' receives no answer at all." Far from being some Eastern quaintness though, this wholly apparent irrationality -- despite the Communist formation's "enormous, technologically perfectionist army" and sixty years of existence -- masks a genuine social problem.)

Passionate Dutton, in the Flesh

2008-04-15T10:44:00.006+02:00

Given the previous posts on his work, it's worth mentioning this talk at Melbourne Uni tomorrow night. Late notice, but...he has been known to lecture in a Mao suit, so it's worth the effort.

For those unable to make it, perhaps sample a little Mango Mao at home.

Contemporary Cultures and Societies
The seminar series of Anthropology, Gender Studies & Social Theory, University of Melbourne

Passionate Politics
Professor Michael Dutton

Wednesday, 16 April 2008 - 5:15 PM - 6:45 PM
Lecture Theatre A, Old Arts

Beginning with Mao Zedong’s Selected Works, Michael Dutton raises the question that was fundamental to the Chinese revolutionary process: ‘Who are our enemies, who are our friends’. In Dutton’s hands, however, this is more than a Chinese revolutionary question, it is one of relevance to all forms of politics that require strong commitment. Given recent events, such as 9/11, the London bombings of 7 July and the war in Iraq, this question takes on new salience. Through examples from China, Dutton explores this ‘passion of politics’, which is something, he fears, the West may have lost the capacity to fully understand.

Michael Dutton is Research Professor in Chinese Political Culture, Griffith University & Professor of Politics, Goldsmiths College, University of London. In 2007 he was awarded the Joseph Levenson Prize (Post-1900), for Policing Chinese Politics: A History. His most recent book – Beijing Time, co-authored with Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo and Dongdong Wu – is to be published in May.

For further information about the Contemporary Cultures and Societies Series (Anthropology, Gender Studies and Social Theory) contact Andrew Dawson

Couldn't Have Said It Better Myself...

2008-04-13T05:21:00.004+02:00

Indeed, didn't say it better myself. Guy Rundle's searing critique of Australian left-liberal cultural production, published in Arena Magazine last year, has turned up again. This time it's in The Best Australian Political Writing 2008. It's alongside the usual neo-liberal and simpering-left op-ed drivel -- from the likes of that "sensible Aboriginal" Noel Pearson -- so it's not surprising it's been a tad "neutralised" via editing. Nevertheless, in the full-cream PDF linked above, it starts with Australian film Jindabyne and wends onward from there, not stopping at our borders but extrapolating from the Australian example.

So it's much of what I was gesturing toward in my earlier post, only articulated at greater length and with stronger examples.

Museums and the Objectification of Memory

2008-04-11T07:05:00.009+02:00

In her book on the remembrance of Hungary 1956, James looks at both 'official' and 'unofficial' collections or museums. This distinction divides her analysis. Both, she implies, contribute something different to the discursive construction of '56. One is the work of a street fighter from the time -- now accused of nationalism and connections with the far-right -- and the others the state-run Hungarian National Museum and the Military History Museum. There is also now the Terrorhaza (House of Terror), a state-run, embattled museum of Communist terror. It's worthy of its own post.

The first official exhibition about the revolution in 1956 was held in June 1957, documenting the "counter-revolutionary events" of 1956 at Contemporary History Museum. Another exhibition was held here in 1989, lasting a month and titled "Objects, Documents, and Photographs, October 23-November 4, 1956." The main exhibit is now at the Military History Museum.

The unofficial exhibition is in the Hungarian countryside. The 1956 Museum is run by Gergely Pongrátz. He was a leader of insurgents and fled the country when the Soviets began attacking. He only returned in 1991 "after some thirty-five years of exile 'to tell the truth about 1956'." James:

A number of ideological questions are at issue in competing currents of popular thought about Hungary's 1956 revolution: What social group instigated the uprising? Who were its heroes? Who was to blame for its failure? What are its implications for Hungary's position in the international community today? And who can be trusted, both within and beyond the nation's borders?

There's some nice references on museums here. Appadurai and Breckenridge express the role of the public museum well when they say, via James' paraphrase, "the museum presents static displays through which group identities are fixed and stablized as artefacts and are abstracted from their dynamic contexts." While Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (2000, 124) "writes that the interpretation of visual culture in museums can be approached from the point of view of the curator or the visitor." James' concern is with the curator.

Ordinarily this mode of institutionalising the past is directed by national governments. In Hungary, for instance, public museums are under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of National Cultural Heritage. But Raphael Samuel argues for the significance of the amateur museum as a site for the construction of collective memory.

These amateur museums, as we see in the 1956 example, are still thoroughly ideological.

This seemingly capricious collection locates the revolution within a broader conservative ideology of traditional, Christian nationalism that comes from the heart. While the museum owner has carefully and methodically assembled a narrative of 1956 through the material culture available to him, he has done so on the basis of principles that are held at a deeply intuitive and emotional, rather than cognitive, level and derive from the authenticity of experience.

The conservative ideology that frames the production of culture in the 1956 Museum requires elaboration. Analyses of conservatism in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe tend to emphasise its most extreme, protofascist, anti-Semitic forms. (In Hungary this usually means focusing on ultraconservative writer and politician István Csurka.) Sabrina Ramet (1999, 18-19) writes that at the core of radical-right beliefs is 'an ideological and programmatic emphasis on 'restoring' supposedly traditional values of the Nation and imposing them on the entire Nation or community.

This fits with the outline of "restorative nostalgia" theorised by Svetlana Boym. For Boym, this juxtaposes with "reflective nostalgia":

Restorative: this stresses nostos (home), defying a linear conception of history in the quest to reconstruct a lost home. It is not self-consciously questing, however, but understands itself as seeking truth and tradition. It "protects the absolute truth." This is the type of nostalgia at the core of revivals in nationalism and religion. Its plot is that of a return to origins or conspiracy. It prefers pictoral and oral culture. Dead serious, it reconstructs "emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialise time."
Reflective: this is longing itself, algia. It "delays the homecoming," circling in a wistful, ironic and desperate fashion. Consequently, it dwells, ambivalently, on longing and belonging. It is embedded -- without struggle -- in the "contradictions of modernity". It questions -- even doubts -- "truth". It has no singular plot, ranging across dispersed places at once; ensconced in details, not symbols; it imagines different time zones. At its best, it can challenge, ethically and creatively, modernity, progress, truth -- and their assumptions. In this mode it is "not merely a pretext for midnight melancholias"; it is more creative and useful than the common caricature of nostalgia would allow.

This typology is offered to illuminate "nostalgia's mechanisms of seduction and manipulation." Boym believes these can help make the distinction between: a restorative national memory, "based on a single plot of national identity"; and a reflective social memory, made up of individual memories marked -- but not defined -- by collective frameworks. Nostalgia is memory at the interface of individual and collective remembrance. This interface is a difficult relationship to theorise. Collective memory, as an object of study, is a slippery thing. For Boym, it "is a messy, unsystematic concept that nevertheless allows one to describe the phenomenology of human experience." As Radstone has pointed out, the field of memory studies has left undertheorised the meaning of 'collective memory'. In some usage, collective memory is merely a synonym for history (it emerged as a scholarly interest, after all, contemporaneously "with the so-called crisis of historicism"), in others a name for ritual and commemoration, in yet others a social glue holding against forces of change. It often carries a political charge without ever really describing this provenance. Halbwachs, an early theorist in this field, has been criticised for effectively substituting "collective memory" for the bad, old and unfashionable vocabulary of the "spirit" or "inner character of a race or nation". Moreover, collective memory, at points, harbours a hidden essentialism. A leap is made from individual memory to Memory through material artefacts -- although this is problematic as, James Young notes, "individuals cannot share another's memory any more than they can share another's cortex." Young, instead, has argued for "collected memory" to replace "collective memory." I will return to these critical points elsewhere.

James' discussions with Pongrátz, curator of this 1956 "collected memory," are interesting in this context.

Many years later, he continued, Boris Yeltsin visited the United States and stated on television that the downfall of communism started in 1956 in Hungary. 'So these kids,' he added, 'they weren't making only Hungarian history; they were making world history. Thanks to these kids, the whole communist system collapsed' (Pongrátz 2000).

Both of these exhibits...locate the revolution within a narrative of oppression, triumph, betrayal, and ultimate victory. This theme is subtly but forcefully written into the carefully scripted exhibit of the Military History Museum. The eclectic nature of the 1956 Museum's holdings, together with their more whimsical arrangement, invites a more imaginative reading that centres around the romantic image of the courageous and selfless young street fighters.

An analysis of the arrangement of collections follows. "Walter Benjamin (1968, 67) once observed that 'the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter.' The emotional power of the collection displayed in the Military History Museum is indeed blunted by its abstraction from the lived social world."

Again, on the public/private collection difference, James finishes her chapter discussing the homely presentation of objects in the unofficial museum.

Here the vase of chrysanthemums departs entirely from professional display practices. Viewers are not only reminded of a shrine, they are forced to realise that someone has made this shrine. And therein lies the unintended emotional power of this display and of the 1956 Museum as an institution: it speaks to the human drive to honour and preserve the past regardless of the limitations of the composer.

For me, the interest lies in the way these museums tell the same history. Or, better put, the way they narrate the same event. Their imperatives are not so different, in the end. Wishing to unite the nation in the restorative way Boym outlines. This is not so surprising in the case of the national institution, but its romantic evocation in the private collection is not so inevitable. James comes away from the private collection at once touched by the personal mode of presentation, but angered by the curator and his manipulative, unassuming style.

Restorative nostalgia, believing its project is reinstating the 'truth' of the past, is the kind of remembrance given to "total reconstruction of monuments of the past," to a return of national symbols and myths, to conspiracies. Etymologically it has its roots in re-staure -- re-establishment. It suggests stasis and a return to the prelapsarian state. The invented traditions circulating the restorative drive suggest a sensed loss of community, offering, in Hobsbawm's phrase, a “comforting collective script for individual longing." The invented tradition, of course, is not created out of nothing and it can be emancipatory, not just conservative. Its appearance may afford multiple imagined communities and forms of belonging, not just national and ethnic ones. (We're back with Eagleton now and the sense of tradition that can be central for radical politics.) The 1956 Museum seems so uncomfortable for James because it marries an individual, personal -- almost lonely -- campaign with a nationalist, conservative one. Where the grand gesture for reconstituting national unity is undertaken by the same man who changes the vase water every day. The sense of purpose and vitalism endlessly circling and deeply invested in what is, literally, a past battle.

For the restorative nostalgic, home, or the nation here, is "forever under siege, requiring defence against the plotting enemy"; it is not a place "made of individual memories but of collective projections and 'rational delusions'." The nuance and ambivalence of history is forgone for a paranoid view of the world, a "fantasy of persecution". Tradition is the fortification to hold these impostors at bay, to bind 'we' against 'them': "'they' conspire against 'our' homecoming, hence 'we' have to conspire against 'them' in order to restore 'our' imagined community". Conspiracy theories have a tendency to flourish after revolutions. There has been a rise of conspiracy theories around this second millennial turn. These two tendencies coalesce in one particular formation given to embracing this nationalist nostalgia:

It is not surprising that many former Soviet Communist ideologues have embraced a nationalist worldview, becoming 'red-and-browns,' or Communist-nationalist. Their version of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism was revealed to have the same totalizing authoritarian structure as the new nationalism.

Nostalgia, Boym remarks, is a "double-edged sword." It is "an emotional antidote to politics, and thus...the best political tool." She explores this largely in a Russian setting. Her operative framework comes when she poses questions as relevant to her project as mine:

While aversion to politics is a global phenomenon, in Russia mass nostalgia of the late 1990s shared with the late Soviet era a particular distrust of any political institutions, escape from public life and reliance on indirect language of close interpersonal communication. What made everyday Soviet myths, affections and practices survive long after the end of Marxist-Leninist ideology? How is nostalgia linked to the beginning and the end of the Soviet Union?

Left vs Right Art

2008-04-11T05:03:00.006+02:00

This was originally going to be part of the post below, until I realised that missive is cumbersome and ungainly enough as it is. So...

How do these two quotes, also derived from the James book discussed below, speak to each other?

The first derives from Barthes:

While the mythology of the Right is 'well-fed, sleek, expansive [and] garrulous,' the mythology of the Left is barren: 'Whatever it does, there remains something about it stiff and literal, a suggestion of something done to order….In fact, what can be more meagre than the Stalin myth? No inventiveness here, and only a clumsy appropriation: the signifier of the myth…is not varied in the least: it is reduced to a litany.

The second, just a Chunnel trip away:

Terry Eagleton makes an observation that radicals and conservatives alike -- as opposed to postmodernists -- are traditionalists, ‘it is simply that they adhere to entirely different traditions’ (Eagleton 1996, ix).

So if radicals have myths and traditions just the same as conservatives do, why does Barthes think the radicals get it so wrong in their imagery? He certainly seems to be slipping the Communist art wholesale -- and, well, "unproblematically" -- into the leftist constellation. While I don't agree with this association, I think what Barthes is getting at is still, more or less, the case. I'm speaking mostly of those insufferably programmatic leftist art works that leave ambiguity aside, contradicting their (supposed) political belief in the non-hierachic distribution of human intelligence, capabilities and potential. So that the political endpoint of the piece is not so much implied as bellowed. The rhetorical devices -- be they visual, literary or musical -- are not bothered by things like nuance, ambivalence and uncertainty. Perhaps it's consciousness raising that's aimed at? The rough hewn piece veritably shocking the viewer into action and out of apathy? Is the slow-burn of art not valid here? Those pieces which come back and back to you because they don't quite compute? I'm not admonishing passion in art. (Although I am starting to feel like the pompous Olivier Castro-Staal character from Six Feet Under.) But I must've seen/heard/read tens of such pieces in the last years of the Howard era in Australia, yet none of them truly stuck.

The Socialist Body + Scrubbing History Clean

2008-04-11T02:19:00.008+02:00

I'm back looking over my notes about the historicisation of the Hungarian 1956 revolution. It's certainly one of those events which, as history, is actually worthy of that favourite old cultural studies descriptor, "contested". It's split between leftists claiming the history of an attempt to reform socialism and right-wingers claiming it as a nationalist, anti-Soviet, anti-imperialist and anti-Communist uprising. (The Flickr photo accompanying this paragraph, for instance, is an image of a rally organised by the conservative Fidesz party on the occasion of the 51st anniversary of 1956.) That bifurcation is another post for another time. What is interesting me at the moment is the socialist body and its use in aesthetic regimes.

Most useful here has been Beverly A. James' Imagining Postcommunism: Visual Narratives of Hungary's 1956 Revolution, a TAMU press book from 2005. She talks in there quite a bit about statuary, both in Socialist Realist and later forms. Statuary is at the heart of 1956, of course, because a statue was at the heart of the revolution's stunning sweep through Budapest. The toppling of the enormous Stalin statue was at once a spontaneous spectacle and a definitive political statement. (Spontaneous in the way the US-staged Hussein-statue debacle in Iraq precisely wasn't.)

Following Yampolsky, James suggests that the power associated with the destruction of a monument is redoubled by its representation in other media -- it elevates it to a “super symbol.” The internet, for one, has become a repository of related Stalin-statue images -- see, for instance, hungary1956.com, from where the above collage is drawn. The destruction of a monument is a powerful intervention because of the very "intended durability" of the statue; the "memorial is designed to cheat history through the eternal commemoration of an individual, event, or concept," James writes. The memory and account of the events surrounding the toppling is doubly important because of the "repression of memories of that glorious moment throughout the thirty-one years of the Kádár regime," the Soviet-friendly regime which ruled following the revolution. They introduced certain approaches to the monument, specifically, and history, more generally, just as their predeccesors had and followers would do: "the codes that governed (or were intended to govern) the collective consciousness of Hungarians were radically revised several times over the course of the monument’s life and afterlife." (That is, Socialist Realism, denunciation of the cult of personality, softening in artistic policy, liberal democracy etc.)

The Stalin statue was widely damned as artistically worthless, merely a doctrinaire execution of socialist realist programming. The Socialist Realism form the statue represented was, for the Hungarians, its own indictment -- regardless of the equally despised body and visage it represented. "Observers of the Stalin monument," James writes, "'saw' reflected in its patina the heavy hand of the state, with its clumsy attempt to recast history." Indeed, the statue was made from the very stuff of the Soviet cultural imperialism:

Quite apart from the fact that Stalin...was the prime symbol of everything bad, people held a grudge that the bronze for this eight-metre monstrosity, on its ten-metre-high podium, had been obtained by melting down the statues of a host of still widely respected Hungarian figures, such as István Tisza, Gyula Andrássy and Artúr Görgey.

The statue, then, certainly had it coming. Following the Khrushchev denunciation, the authorities were already discussing removing the iconic monument. The revolutionaries beat them to it. This destruction has been "prominent in the discursive revisions that have ensued[:] the scene is recounted through language that is highly metaphoric, with its references to Gulliver and the Lilliputians, and highly visual, with its images of fiery sparks flying against the clear, black October night[;] what is most striking about the narratives is how the visual imagery illuminates the courage and will to freedom that motivated the destruction of the monument." The base of the monument stood until 1990.

James ends the chapter on the monument with a nice story about Stalin’s enormous hand. It was picked up by Sándor Pécsi, put in a taxi, taken home and secreted away for years. It's now on display at Hungarian National Museum.

[T]he most potent symbol of the regime had been destroyed at the hands of the people, an event that endures in Hungary’s collective memory. If socialist realism loomed large in its physical scale and in its ability to inspire terror, the destruction of its epitome by a people armed only with the tools of their trade is a powerful narrative indeed. The humiliation and physical suffering inflicted on Hungarians during the period of reprisals was (bitter)sweetened by the memory of this mythic event. And when the end of the long revolution finally came, the memories would come out of hiding as objects to behold, just like Pécsi's Stalin hand.

If this was simply the bloodless symbolic and monumental victory of the revolutionaries, more problematic were the events of the Republic Square. James' following chapter looks at Memorial to Martyrs of the Counter-Revolution -- a "colossal bronze statue" -- which was one of the (few) public markers of the 1956 uprising during the Kádár regime. It was sited in Republic Square, a site of resistance in 1956. It sat opposite what was the Communist Party’s municipal branch. Defended by the ÁVO -- the secret police -- in 1956, revolutionaries nevertheless managed to get inside and shoot, "in cold blood," a number of staff. Police and military were "hanged on the spot, and their bodies mutilated." It was, in all, "the scene of the revolutionaries' most reprehensible actions in the thirteen days of the uprising." By the mid-70s the siege was forgotten.

As virtually the only public [that is, sanctioned] memento of October 30, 1956, [sculptor Kalló's] Memorial to the Martyrs of the Counter-Revolution shouldered a heavy rhetorical responsibility. But what was the nature of this responsibility if the party's aim was the obliteration of the memory of 1956? The martyrs monument embodied a narrative that was generated in various public discursive spaces long before the bronze was cast.…With the suspension of the terror that had been enacted in the form of imprisonments, show trials, and executions, the state could now exercise social control through the microphysics of power. And Kalló's monument would blend into the landscape as one more barely noticed apparatus of control.

This monument complicates memory of the revolution in precisely the same way the events of Republic Square altered the tenor of the uprising.

The purity of the revolution was a point of pride during the uprising itself, and it has taken on the character of a central myth in the post-communist rehabilitation of 1956. With national sovereignty as a rallying point, Hungarians experienced a deep sense of solidarity and national honour during the thirteen days of the uprising. A small country with limited resources had faced off against a superpower bent on world domination, and they had pursued this cause with a standard of honour and integrity seldom experienced in peacetime.…The massacres in Republic Square were immediately denounced by the various revolutionary groups at the time.…Despite such [denunciations], Republic Square is the black eye of the uprising. [Emphasis mine]

The years which followed were uneven in their approach to the revolution. As noted above, clutches of people were charged, some of them executed or imprisoned for "life". However, the government's smear campaign, which immediately followed the revolution, was brief -- it lasted only a few years. Much longer was silence, repression and concealment.

The competition for the statue was called in 1957. The statue was to be erected in 1960. By this time, a general amnesty saw free most of those imprisoned, even those with life sentences. (Less lucky, of course, were those who had already been summarily killed.) At the time of the erection, this shift had already begun. Consequently, the text to be written on the inscription was a matter of some controversy and debate. (Glossing somewhat so as to accelerate...)

There are some interesting remarks on the relationship of socialist realism and the body. Kalló's monument breaks with the stiff form favoured by socialist sculpture. "The result was a monument that is undeniably more subjective, expressive, and dynamic than Sándor Mikus's [toppled] Stalin." Despite this, the figure was still passably socialist realist, it thematically "represents the struggle against the [']reactionary enemies['] of the socialist project, and stylistically it meets Christina Lodder's specifications: 'an essential descriptiveness which is reliant for its impact on a stark monumentality.' (1993, 17)" Now we're at the interesting bit.

What is this emphasis on the body all about? Tibor Wehner's work on socialist realist sculpture helps us make sense of it. He writes that most of the statues commissioned in Hungary during the 1950s and 1960s depicted the generic worker or peasant engaged in productive activity. In keeping with the didactic function of Zhadanovian art, such representations almost always featured a tool so that the public could easily read the figure's occupation and understand the role he or she played in the building of socialist society -- the miner was armed with his lamp, the welder with his torch, the engineer with his compass, the soldier with his rifle, the peasant with her scythe, and the student with her book. In the final moment of his life, though, Kalló's figure is no longer defined by the clichéd tools of socialist production. He has now become an archetypal martyr, and his 'tool' is the body he sacrifices in performing this role.…Unlike the martyr of Christianity, whose virtues of fatalism and passivity evoke a sense of pathos, the martyr of communism -- following Marx's admonition to make man the agent of history -- is resolute, determined, and self-controlled. The result, iconographically, is that the robust, heroic body of the communist displaces the sickly, weak, pale body of the Christian martyr. (Aradi 1974, 140).

Representations of the communist martyr's physical body reflect the broader trope of the 'new man,' which dates back to early Soviet art and literature. From that time the human body was used to display projections of the coming utopia and to personify its ideals of a perfectly functioning body politic. The movement toward a classless society would free people from the physical debilitations of hunger, poor nutrition, inadequate medical care, and back-breaking manual labor. In turn, workers and peasants who were liberated from the crippling and stunting effects of capitalism would be willing and able to build the new society by virtue of their strength, stamina, vigor, and health. In the worldwide class struggle, the flabby, enervated capitalist that so often appeared in Soviet propaganda would be no match for the superhumans engineered according to Marxist specifications. (Clark 1993)

The monument, today, is a different matter. It's missing from its original location in the square, abandoned to the outskirts of the city.

The absence of the Martyrs Monument conveys a more complicated set of meanings. It stood in Republic Square for thirty-two years -- far longer than the Stalin statue -- yet few people today remember it. The statue came down not in a memorable fit of revolutionary zeal, but in the routine of government activity by municipal bureaucrats who aimed to scour the city of its communist iconography. While the public had registered its preference for leaving such monuments in place, the truth is, most people didn't much care.

The abandoned platform in Republic Square speaks volumes about the complex processes of remembering and forgetting, of revealing and concealing, that characterize the formation of historical memory in postcommunist Hungary. The symbolic erasure of a once-dominant narrative -- in this case the literal removal of a monument -- is only the first step in re-remembering the past. The empty space must be filled in, the pedestal must be recycled to support a new narrative. This is not so simple. David Lowenthal writes (1985, 326), 'though the past is malleable, its alteration is not always easy: the stubborn weight of its remains can baulk intended revision.' In other words, reconstructions of the past must come face to face with elements of the old narrative.

The monument now lurches into the sky at the Statue Park outside Budapest. A place of fascination itself, where the stark desolation of the setting clashes with outsized monuments and their embodied litany of ethico-politico-historic ideals. A place I'll no doubt return to in future posts...

A Bureaucratic Clarification

2008-04-03T00:50:00.003+02:00

A friend questioned me the other day on the distinction between Heller's and Badiou's account of bureaucracy -- or at least the versions I fumbled out in my earlier post. As Badiou's reference is a passing one and Heller's a more systematic engagement, it is perhaps unfair to pin Badiou down to a mere phrase. But I get the feeling that he is positing precisely what Heller is arguing against.

In the lead-up to the section I quoted, Heller points out that: "All Soviet leaders, from Lenin on, regularly blamed the inefficiency of the system on bureaucracy; they launched campaigns against it, against the dimensions of paper-production, against the lack of initiative and the narrow-mindedness." (p175) Which is to say that they were the scapegoat, the whipping boy, for the endemic problems of the system itself. The centralisation of power cannot avoid bureaucracy. "The totalisation of the whole society (economy included)," she writes, "cannot function without a hierachic administation of immense dimensions.... [I]n order to realise its set aims, it needs bureaucracy." To blame bureaucracy, as I think Badiou may have been doing, is to engage in the game of the party leaders. "These charges cannot be taken seriously," Heller writes, "not because they were not true, but because they localised the source of the decay in the wrong spot."

Passion Politics

2008-04-01T09:17:00.004+02:00

More on this Dutton book, Policing Chinese Politics...

I am drawn to a comment by Dutton in the newspaper article linked in the previous post. It is about commitment politics or what he calls, elsewhere, passion politics. It describes, as the newspaper gloss puts it, those moments when "people were drawn to a cause that took on, for them, a great moral importance, over-riding all other considerations." For Dutton, it's crucial. "It is really that alien type of politics ," he says, "that liberal democracy doesn't understand but needs to take into account." This is to continue the point made at the end of the previous post -- the distinction between system and lifeworld, what happens when the two collide and merge and behave in ways outside of the liberal democratic frame.

In regard to this topic within the book, Dutton speaks first of Hannah Arendt. She "writes of politics as something that speaks to the very heart of the human condition." (p9) Arendt's understanding of politics is one which values action shared with others. The condition of the political is action "based upon a recognition of plurality" but one that distinguishes "between life, instrumental control and freedom." So it is striving for freedom, individual identity and plurality that are the ground of politics. When other categories like life and instrumental action are placed in political categories, in Arendt's theorisation, considerable costs are exacted. Politics, then, is a contained thing. When it becomes a question not of freedom but compassion, "it starts to raise the specter of terror". (p9)

But, this for Dutton, stops too short.

It is only when 'the political' oversteps the mark in this way and 'colonises' other domains, that one comes to see clearly the types of intensities that would drive one to act beyond oneself in the name of a cause. That is to say, it is only at those moments of intensity that one comes to see the political clearly.... Indeed, I would argue that politics is not about freedom per se, but about the production of a particular set of desires and intense feelings based upon the commitment to a cause. To speak 'in the name of' something suspends one's own egocentric desires but, simultaneously, leads one to cast aside own's own moral bearing for the pursuit of a greater good. To fight 'in the name of...(the political)' is to produce and release a series of non-agonal intensities. These are not necessarily reducible to a striving for freedom but they do entail commitments to action that sometimes speak in freedom's name. Only by rephrasing Arendt in this way do we come to capture something of the human condition that is political. And while this may only constitute a minor linguistic modification, it proves a significant theoretical one. (p9-10)

We come then to a question of commitment, a point of focus that extends from Arendt. The actions carried out under this sign can vary. "Hence, a striving for commitment entails recognition of the fact that one strives for a multitude of freedoms (freedom from economic want, from chaos, from oppression) and while this leads one many miles from Arendt's position, it has the virtue of highlighting the centrality of passion and intensity in any political expression." (p10) This commitment -- these passions and intensities -- are what draw us toward the distinction of friend and enemy. And so we come to Schmitt, Hitler's "crown jurist." Mao's comment ("Who are our enemies, who are our friends? That is the question germane to the revolution.") has the effect of laying bare the "policing of the political," for Dutton. He nicely terms this the "Chinese passion play of policing." (p11) The book, in moving from these opening theoretical meditations to the empirical and historical narrative, is a study of these abstractions via a concretisation of the friend/enemy distinction in everyday life. "It tells of a social life in which friend and enemy moved from being a state of mind to a station of nation." The book, then, is one in which the author has "almost entirely focused upon expression of, responses to, attempts to place limits upon, and techniques to promote...this friend/enemy dichotomy." Where it is to end up, having told its history of the revolutionary era's friend/enemy dichotomy, is the post-revolutionary reform-era. He is strident here. "I want to show how the Chinese reform-era state has successfully eaten away at the marrow of these old-style political commitments, and, through this, learn something of the way it has tamed, if perhaps only temporarily, the beast that is politics."

There is a potential commentary to be offered here on recent protests in China, particularly surrounding the Olympics juggernaut. The return of the repressed (beast)?

More interesting for my project, though, is the question of the subject's interpellation. For Dutton, it is one produced by policing procedures and directives: a new recruit learns the orthodox history of the force and its role in the society etc. For Soviet and Eastern European subjects, it is one no less structured by the role of the police, of being inside/outside the 'correctly' conceived politics. The Stasi, of course, are front-and-centre of many accounts of the GDR. This focus, not least in the vapourtrail of The Lives of Others, has been criticised for good reason -- eclipsing and overvaluing the role of this organ. But Dutton makes a good point about policing the borders of the political, about what is acceptable (friendly) and unacceptable (enemy). This ought to take us from the mere question of the secret police -- with its tantalising and melodramatic smell of espionage and spying and power plays -- to the conception of politics and the legitimation of a certain order. This then concertinas out to considerations of the subject's (non-)commitment to an alternative politics and should, with any hope, land me somewhere in the region of my topic.

Dutton, Schmitt & Sino-cops

2008-04-01T06:17:00.004+02:00

At the bidding of my supervisor, I’ve been dipping into Michael Dutton’s award-winning Policing Chinese Politics: A History from 2005. I can see why it was recommended to me. It’s going to take some work to get its insights all lined up with my direct area of research, but the results will be worth that effort.

His fundamental insights come from drawing together Mao's writings, empirical work on Chinese policing, archive work on Chinese political and policing history and theory from Schmitt, Arendt and Foucault. He begins with the opening line from a 1926 Mao article: "Who are our enemies, who are our friends? That is the question germane to the revolution." Anyone with the slightest understanding of Schmitt will instantly see here the connection: friends and enemies as the fulcrum of politics.

And so Dutton presses on, outlining his project: "For nigh on fifty years this deadly division between friend and enemy framed revolutionary politics and life in socialist China. This division would take a variety of names (class struggle, contradictions, etc.) and forms (psychic, social, governmental) but it would always remain the central question of the Chinese revolutionary movement." (p3). This question of friend and enemy, he notes, is both the birth of the revolution and its epitaph -- 1926 and 1976, "these two dates demarcate the chapter conventionally marked out as revolutionary in Chinese history. In its revolutionary phase, the nation operated almost entirely on the basis of this binary divide. It was a divide that carved out a revolutionary path and paved that path with endless empirical exemplifications and permutations of this politico-philosophic distinction. Through the figure of public security, this book traces the life cycle of this distinction in China." (p4)

And yet the book is more than this.

It offers, in effect, the tale of the political told empirically through the re-telling of the concrete story of Chinese policing. It is the tale of this binary division as it develops and takes on organisational forms. It is the story of what happens when the binary of politics saturates the lifeworld to become its doxa -- when every facet of life turns on knowing who the enemy is and acting against that figure. It is at that moment that we arrive at the point where society and life itself become fused in politics. (p4)

This names something I'm currently trying to work out in my PhD work: the system and lifeworld distinction, as Habermas has it, of Soviet Communism. More pointedly, the way this distinction under Communism is collapsed to 'invade' the private (and psychic) space of the subject. (Always subject, never citizen -- as Heller puts it.) This is where Dictatorship Over Needs has been so useful, but I think Policing Chinese Politics could be just as instructive. More on it another day...

Did Somebody Say Communism?

2008-03-26T23:39:00.016+01:00

Alain Badiou is always worth reading. Some Badiou is more worth reading, though. Less interesting are the borderline fascist tendencies. But for a part-time fascist, I like the guy. His piece in the first New Left Review for 2008 is certainly worth reading.

What interests me here is the way "communism" is used as a term. It seems a deliberate provocation -- something like Zizek's circulation of Mao and Lenin tracts, not to say his ironic invocation of himself as an "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist." (With Zizek, I wonder too if it's not becoming manifest, though -- like an owner and his pet morphing into similar visages.) With Badiou, "communism" is a willfully ambivalent and ambiguous term. The lack of capitalisation (!) by Badiou is telling, for this is no proper noun. It names something but not the Soviet Union, per se. Perhaps it just describes something; it's either a noun or an adjective -- not always one or the other.

Badiou ventriloquises Sarkozy: "It is not enough that empirical communism
has disappeared. We want all possible forms of it banished. Even the hypothesis of communism—generic name of our defeat—must become unmentionable." Generic name of our defeat. This reveals something of Badiou's tactic. Why this word? He sees the provocation of the term, its very banishment, as its most useful property. Its use for him, then, is the ability of the term to corral a set of banished ideas. Badiou goes on to say, Sarkozy dummy put aside and now back in his straight-man role, that: "'Communism' as such denotes only [a] very general set of intellectual representations." These are Ideas, in the Kantian sense, of (in)equality, collectivity, class analysis. Shards of this vision are notable in every truly mass action opposing state coercion, Badiou writes. His final call is one for the communist hypothesis triumphant.

This is our task, during the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground.

Local action, international thought processes. Does this amount to anything other than the old slogan: think global, act local? It is different because Badiou recognises the seriousness of turning this ship around, so to speak. The conditions are, in one sense, unfavourable (Communism is largely dismissed, if not laughed at) and yet in others the problems are clear (market troubles, recessions etc). They are unfavourable because of the absolute marginality of alternatives.

This seems to reflect the dynamic of legitimation, as Weber has it. I have been working through Dictatorship Over Needs: An Analysis of Soviet Societies by Hungarian émigrés Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller and György Márkus. In there, Heller writes of the legitimation of Soviet societies.

According to one formulation of Max Weber, a social order is legitimated if at least one part of the population acknowledges it as exemplary and binding and the other part does not confront the existing social order with the image of an alternative one as equally exemplary. Thus the relative number of those legitimating a system may be irrelevant if the non-legitimating masses are merely dissatisfied. (p137)

She goes on to note that while the Russian centre was more or less legitimate -- albeit differently legitimised at its various points of existence -- the Eastern European satellites were never far from, or were actually otherwise embroiled in, an ongoing legitimation crisis. (A legitimation crisis does not inevitably lead to collapse or downfall of a given social order.) This was particularly the case in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. An important point follows from this.

That is as true of Hungary as it is of Poland or Czechoslovakia despite the popular support lent to the present government in Hungary. Legitimation means not so much the legitimation of government as of a form of domination, and relative popular support is given to the Hungarian government precisely because it practises the otherwise rejected form of domination in a more tolerable fashion than is the case in other countries. (p138, emphasis mine)

For Badiou, then, the question is one of bringing about a legitimation crisis. It's the task of making a compelling alternative vision of a social order, one that doesn't just circulate in the same-old cliques but tips over, escaping the circuits of Brown's/Benjamin's leftist melancholy. No doubt Badiou would speak of an Act or an Event to do this. But I prefer Heller's and Weber's terms. They carry less of the metaphysical romanticism loaded on to the capitalised Badiouian terms. In essence Badiou, Heller and Weber draw towards the same realisation -- the political necessity for a vision of something outside present conditions, for a rupture from current orthodoxies. This, then, is precisely what "communism" is for Badiou -- a set of co-ordinates for an ethic and a politics outside of our current conjuncture. A provocation, a (re-)activation of the defeated, the disappeared.

And before I let you go... Dictatorship Over Needs points to some problems with Badiou's historical analysis. He writes that "police coercion could not save the 'socialist' state from internal bureaucratic inertia....The last great convulsions[--]the Cultural revolution and May 68, in its broadest sense--can be understood as attempts to deal with the inadequacy of the party." Our dear Hungarians suggest otherwise. "Bureaucratic inertia" is precisely what the moguls wanted, as Heller tells us in a masterly sequence of argument (p177-8): "[Bureaucracy's] function is primarily to practise dictatorship over needs, and this is being done thoroughly. The system of directives (orders) is a corrective one (or at least is meant as such): it clears the way for the break-through of ideological, doctrinal priorities." So food shortages are purposely inefficiently handled, while housing applicants in an accommodation shortage are systematically disheartened. Regarding the party -- Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland attest to numerous early attempts to reform the Muscovite party from the outside. Its inadequacy was fundamental, arguably apparent from the time of the first rash of Terror. May 68 is perhaps one of the last great convulsions, but is a peculiarly Western way of accessing this history. (And precisely the type of thing addressed by Márkus in the first section of Dictatorship Over Needs -- the chapter titled "Eastern European Societies and the Western Left")

But, y'know, I like the guy...

Hurtling

2008-03-26T13:51:00.004+01:00

It's getting to that time, y'know, when I need to get serious. When the thoughts need to come together. When the laces need to be tied, the back needs to be straightened, the books piled up on the desk. When writing needs to happen.

A year goes quite quickly in this game. You get less done than you hope. Your topic narrows, broadens and then sags. Your interest does the same. Flagging, expanding and then just sitting, held in stasis.

So this blog intends to invigorate the coming days of writing and getting things down. An incentive, I tell myself, to write for a diffuse -- that is to say, potentially non-existent -- audience.

Let's see how we go. Please comment freely.

More soon.