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Beyond Multiculturalism? HKW Internationaler Kongress starts Tomorrow 17:00

Beyond Multiculturalism? 04.06.2009 – 06.06.2009 Fragen an die Einwanderungsgesellschaft Internationaler Kongress – Eröffnung <!–Genre: Gesellschaft / Wissenschaft–>

Do 04.06.2009 17:00h Teilnahme frei http://www.hkw.de/de/programm2009/beyond_multiculturalism/veranstaltungen_30155/Veranstaltungsdetail_1_32652.php

Tag 1 | Tag 2 | Tag 3 Begrüßung durch Bernd Scherer Enführung und Moderation durch Susanne Stemmler, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Eröffnungsvortrag von Arjun Appadurai, New York University Beyond Culture. Constructions of Community in Contemporary Video Art. Film-Lecture von Hito Steyerl, Berlin Die Gestaltung von Einwanderung wird in den meisten Staaten immer noch national gedacht, obwohl Fragen von Migration und gesellschaftlicher Diversität im Kontext der Globalisierung nicht mehr im Rahmen einer Nation verhandelt werden können. Angesichts von weltumspannenden Migrationsströmen und zunehmender sozialer Ausdifferenzierung werden Vorstellungen von homogenen Bevölkerungen obsolet, Grenzen zwischen Mehrheit und Minderheiten immer verschwommener. Führt das einerseits zu neuen, hybriden Identitäten, so auch andererseits zu sozialer Unsicherheit, die sich punktuell in Rassismus, Ausgrenzung und Gewalt entladen können. Der Abend zeigt Zusammenhänge von Globalisierung, Migration und Gemeinschaft und sucht nach einem neuen Verständnis sozialer Formationen. Arjun Appadurai, weltbekannter Anthropologe, thematisiert in Werken wie „Modernity at Large“ oder „Fear of Small Numbers“ die kulturellen Dimensionen von Globalisierungsprozessen. Arjun Appadurais Website | Arjun Appadurai beim Suhrkamp Verlag Hito Steyerl, Filmemacherin und Videokünstlerin, Autorin und Hochschulprofessorin, war mit ihrer Arbeit u.a. 2007 auf der documenta XII zu sehen. Susanne Stemmler ist Kulturwissenschaftlerin und Leiterin des Bereichs Literatur, Gesellschaft, Wissenschaft am Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

The pre-metaphysics of Things through Iranian Cinema

 

It is all because of my fascination with perhaps arguable and no doubt problematic ideas of pre-metaphysical, non-cultural and a-human givenness of objects and things and of life stripped down to its minimum, that I suggest we watch some of the Iranian masterpieces, which i think presisely deal with the issues.

Here are some films to chose for our screening as well as the quotes from Hamid Dabashi’s seminal book on the Iranian cinema ‘Close Up’. let me know what you prefer cause I’ll be seeing those again in anyway 

 

Abbass Kiarostami: ‘Through the Olive Trees’ or ‘Close Up’ 

Kiarostami presents us with  ‘a different kind of ‘morality’, a ‘countermorality’ emerges here that is entirely contingent on the reality of the event itself and not on abstract ethical imperatives.’ CU p. 55 ‘Kiarostami’s cinema, from its very inception, is an aesthetics of the real, a countermetaphysics of the factual. It is here to filter the world and thus strip it of all cultures, narrativities, authorities, and ideologies.’ C.U P54

‘Close Up’

 

‘Through the Olive Trees’

 

 

 Rakhschan Bani-Etemad ‘Gilaneh’(2004)

‘If Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf’s cinema are two visual modes of rereading Iranian culture in order to tease out its virtuality and thus negotiate a creative emancipation from it, the cinema of Bani-Etemad is a visual assault on that culture’s Achilles’ heel, namely, its conception of femininity…Her work has a much wider spectrum of implications than the condition of Iranian women. What is at stake in her project is the constitution femininity as the weakest and most vulnerable point of a much wider pathology of power, cultural constituted, socially institutionalized, economically based and metaphysically theorized. Bani-Etemad’s cinema is a visual theorization against that violent metaphysics.’ C.U. P. 223

‘Bani-Etemad launches her destruction of patriarchal constitution of sexuality from the depth of her documented reading of Iranian society…The result is a cinematic cosmovision that renegotiates the whole colonially militated culture of capitalist modernity and its colonial consequences.’ C.U.23

 

‘From Iranian filmmakers Rakhshan Bani-Etemad (NARGESS; OUR TIMES) and Mohsen Abdolvahab comes a searing anti-war film presented in two parts. On the Iranian New Year of 1988, Gilaneh (Motamed Arya), a woman from the country whose only son Ishmael (Bahram Radan) is fighting in the Iran-Iraq war, takes a perilous trip into besieged Tehran with her pregnant daughter. Fifteen years later, on March 20, 2003, as another New Year approaches, fatigued Gilaneh cares for her bedridden son as TV newscasts cover America’s opening attack on Baghdad.’

www.imdb.com/title/tt0450428/ 

 

 Samira Makmalbaf. ‘Blackboards’

  

 

‘Everything is on the verge of happening in Blackboard; everything is in a critical moment of expectation…The constellation of these emotive urges of expectation and urgency, accentuated by the imminent danger of an Iraqi gas attack, splits open the plaster of normalcy in the appearance of the real and pulls every aspect of the evident culture out for negotiation. The most critical moment Samira chooses for this negotiation is the pre-moment of naming, when things are still things and have no name. When the band of student-less teachers are wandering through the rugged mountains, desperate for students, we witness something more than Samira getting back at her teachers. In a brilliantly choreographed scene, a young woman who is milking a goat gives some milk to a teacher. He has finally persuaded a single boy to learn to write his name, and when the boy takes in this knowledge as the teacher drinks his milk. In this epiphatic scene, the camera oscillates between the milk and the chalk, between a living white substance and the dead, white knowledge…Instantly, a gunshot rings out and the boy falls dead. As the teacher is revived by his drink, the boy dies the moment he learns to write his name’ C.U. 274

 

 

 

the Opening Counterrealism meeting !

 

It was fun and rigorous, with Dipesh Chakrabarty joining us for a Q n A, which put some issues into focus and rather opened a lot more questions then we had time to discuss.

 One of the most interesting things that came only in retrospect to me was Dipesh mentioning his current work on global warming and the postcolonial perspectives on the issue of environment. I don’t know how it happened that we didn’t ask him to talk more about the exciting prospects of the postcolonial philosophy of science, which to my knowledge (and I still feel quite new to the debate, so let me know of any useful literature) is a rather underdeveloped and not widely discussed topic.

 Because of the pre-analytical ready- to-hand breaking into our everyday present-at-hand of the technology (the mic’s batteries ran out) we recorded only around 10 min of Dipesh talking. So, it seems, we’ll have to rely on the tradition of typing. My and Enrique’s thoughts and reflections are on their way and should be up in some time soon.

Anna suggested we do some other session on Chakrobarty again in June to finalize some points. We could read some of his more recent stuff then!

an

How to do things with farts: Factory Work and Subversive Farting

I work part-time in a Factory in Berlin, on a traditional assembly-line. Its 12hours shifts so i thought there would be plenty of time to think about what occurs according to Marx’s theory of value. Although the occassional mental reliefs when one can gasp at the theoretical implications of work were rare. So i sought mental relief not in a theorized rationalization but in reflections on the concrete activities of working and farting (or rather the burned sulfur smell on the assembly line), through a Benjaminian ‘Profane Illumination’

Marx writes of work: ‘He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be. (Capital Chapter Seven: The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value)

This was quite obvious when subjected to traditional disciplnary assembly-line procedure. It is an insight that doesnt emerge in service-jobs where your communicative personality is subsumed into some sort of production process, since the labour-activity is expirienced as an authentic ‘being yourself’, like a bartender or something. Although the line is thin, call center jobs involve an equal mechanization of bodies, minds and voices. Alienation it seems should be a self-evident concept, but i suppose its out of fashion since yuppie/media jobs involve now some sort of project of self-realization, of the pursuing of the prescribed inner purpose, like being a creative and autonmous market actor.

Im posted at the sulfur-section of the solar panel assembly line. A group of 3 workers waits every 5 minues for a box containing the panel-to-be to come out of an oven onto a portable conveyor belt, that looks like a foosball table. Someone weighs a few grams of Sulfur, which are distributed on the side of the box that will contain the next unprocessed panel that will be inserted in at the front of the conveyor belt oven. A second worker takes the hot panel, where the sulfur has been burnt onto to the next station in the assembly line. I was mostly unscrewing and screwing the bolts of the box after the processed panel had been replaced by a new one to be inserted into the front.

I made some jokes to entertain during the occasional free minute. But i aimed to deploy a humour that employs its immediate surroundings, that designtes the immediate symbolic surroundings through their materiality. This strategy emerged, as a counter to the jokes of another worker, who put a piece of black tape on his upper lip and did the hitler things. I also passed through a stage of conservative joking. There was an air-brush to blow away dust, and while waiting i used it to fan my sweaty forehead and made the same joke “Im in a convertible car, or on the Titanic”. This joke like the Hitler makes external references and introduces them to the immediate surroundings, but doesnt challenge them, they are just a prop like the square bit of black tape to put on your face. Its an escapist joke, wishing to be somewhere else, more bourgeois (The joke wouldnt work as an escapist relief i had said “Im in a hurricane”)

A subverisive joke would have as its butt the concrete, or more specifically the arbitraryness and fragility of what we assume to be the concrete. A made a fart joke that brought in the materiality of the situation, not of the general economic materiality, which people there were quite aware of, but of what we were up to. When the boxes were opened for the processed panel to be taken to the next stage, there was sometimes still a wiff of the burned sulfur, so i said “Either someone farted or someone has been burning sulfur nearby”. The fart is just a signalling to the joke and its butt, because if someone had actually farted it would be embarassing rather than funny. If the joke had just been “Did someone fart” it would have been incomplete, what was added was the concrete dimension, the literal incorporation of the surroundings: that we were burning sulfur. The comic signalling of the fart allowed a suspension of what we were seamlessly and continually doing. It brought to display our material surroundings, momentarily bringing the activity of burning sulfur into a fragility. This seemed clear since one of the workers quickly responded in a serious tone “No, the smell comes from the burned sulfur in the box”, in order to performatively reassert the taken for grantedness and self-evidentness of our material undertaking, in order to pull back the symbolically suspended material process of the assembly line that was the butt of the fart joke.

Might a Fart be something subversive (if we read it into “bodily collective innervation” and “revolutionary discharge”)
“The collective is a body, too. And the physis that is being organized for it in technology can, through all its political and factual reality, only be produced in that image sphere to which profane illumination initiates us. Only when in technology body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto”" (Walter Benjamin – Surrealism The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia)

I have a Marxist Fart-Joke:  What does one do when “all that is solid melts into air”? Fart

Yes Men Workshop

Andy Bichelbaum from the Yes Men was in Berlin for a workshop, where he discussed with activists their plans for actions in a YesMen tradition. In the evening we went to see his new movie ‘The Yes Men Fix the world” and here are a few thought about their strategy.

This is fantastic, spoiling the glamour of the red carpet and shifting the spectators gaze onto the rotten core of the glamourous spectacle, bringing into focus the absuridity of the festivity and its pomp.

The YesMen exemplified this intrusion and subtraction well that i talked about in my previous post on the G20 protest. Their innovative strategy is revealed when their at their comic best, when they play the corportate exaggerations (like WTO representative, McDonals, Halliburton and the Survivaballs), rather than in their simulation of Corporate Social Responsbility (like Hurricane Kathrina or the infamous 300 million viewed Union Carbide Bhopal disaster intervention, that is when they’re strategy is “identity-correction”, where they demask and denounce the individual corporations negligence, putting up logos of corporations and personifying the cause of troubles). In these latter Corporate Social Responsibility stunts, the aim is somekind of positive project, an alternative agenda/possibility. In the first variation of YesMen stunts, exaggeration and grotesqueness’ are the main techniques. I think they differ from Billionares for Bush and the like, because they go through the process of intrusion and therefore undertake the work of breaking the binary to get at that non-binaric stance momentarily reached by the subtraction. For Example when you see those security / weapons manufacturers ask questions about how the new Halliburton Survivaball suite could withstand biological attacks then you witness their state of being duped of their dupidity, which shows how the whole weapons industry depends on the nodding support and forced awe and applause directed at positions of power (also in the classic WTO example of the yesmen, where people still clap at the end). Somehow the systems symbolic power is revealed, to the viewer, or the non-dimwitted. But it seems its not so much a matter of wit, as the fact of not being materially immersed in the structuring envirments that ritually calls for your mental and bodily obidience to those with the sceptre and crown. But by switching these insignias of power in the immersed environment (the survivaballs at the Conference-Hall for Corporates listening to the hotshots) they reveal the relations which sustain the corporate fests. As with the survivorballs suits when the crash the BMW gala in Berlin (the video above), the grotesqueness of the gowns and all those bodies dressed in suits is amplified.

So the intrusion is the mimicking /performing of the e.g. Corporate-Capitalist symbolic identity, but the attendees dont notice these impersonations, for them it would be ‘buisness as usual’”. This is more destabalizing than ‘denouncing’, since it allowes a momentary burst of laughter, an incredulity and anxiety that contains an awareness of the fragility and arbitraryness of the Symbolically based mechanism of corportate power.

(Ill try to post radical jokes at the end of each post)
Stephen Colbert – what happens if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it – then my illegal logging buisness is succeeding

Terry Eagleton Berlin 4th May 18.15

TERRY EAGELTON – “The Death of Criticism”
Der Vortrag findet am Montag, den 4. Mai 2009, um 18:15 Uhr im Großbritannien-
Zentrum der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Mohrenstr. 60, Raum 105, in englischer
Sprache statt. Alle sind willkommen, der Eintritt ist frei.

http://www2.hu-berlin.de/gbz/downloads/pdf/PM_Eagleton.pdf

Laughing all the way to the Bank, and eating a Banker – Notes on Subversive Humour and Impossible Violence

Events at the G20 protest in London simulate the possibilities of violence as an activist strategy that can step out of the trappings and co-optations of the binaries set up by the media-police. How can the symbolic mechanisms that prop up a hegemonic order be effaced? A partial, potential strategy is not one of opposition and realizable violence, but of and through intrusion and subtraction, which has the effect (not for the dim-witted) of defacing the symbolic order on which capitalists social power bases itself. It is a subtractive comic stance from which an impossible violence can be waged.
A suspiciously hip protester

One of the pictures on the Guardians G20 gallery shows a suspiciously, rather hip protester in the act of hurling a monitor into the already broken RBS branch . Surrounding him is an amphitheater of journalists, lined up with cameras held over their heads, their clicking drowning out the sound of glass breaking, as Charlie Brooker noted in his newswipe. It seems that every newspaper send a cameraman, or all the freelance photographers of London were seeking out the money-shot of a masked protester breaking property defended by the law. This fixation on violence fixes the protesting on the street and co-opts it as a binaric oposite to the liberal-pacificst Order. This narrow inter-play precludes violence in its symbolic dimension. The images of skirmishes only include violence as grievous bodily harm or assaults on property:  ”Journalists have a fairly idiosyncratic definition of “violence”: something like ‘damage to persons or property not authorized by properly constituted authorities’. This has the effect that if even one protestor damages a Starbucks window, one can speak of “violent protests”, but if police then proceed to attack everyone present with tazers, sticks and plastic bullets, this cannot be described as violent.” (Graeber – Giant Puppets). Street Violence is condemned and easily neutralized by police violence in return.

Although this problem emerges from the strategy of the protesters on the frontline too. Their violence is a realizable violence, hurling a stone at the police or smashing a window, which folds into and reinforces the police-state’s representation of protest. The ‘Reclaim the Streets’ slogans are repetitive, predictable & waning. They are slogans of territorial occupation and usurpation “Whose streets, our streets”, which operate only in their immediate spatiality, and operate with an idea of politics as presence & declarations & as acts of reclaiming. This demarcation of the sphere of political action as delineated by the slogans during the protests, leads to a closure of reference points for attacks. They’re hysterically shouted at the police men, and are futile in a historical and strategic sense. The Big Other does not hear them. What message can assault and suspend it then?

Realizable violence, completely misses the target, if the target is the symbolic order that attempts to structure our perceptions of hegemonic categories as stable. The Red Army Faction apparently indulged in some exploratory torture of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, a former SS officer and industrialist. In this situation of carnal vulnerability, or on a much larger scale the Khmer Rouge, it is clear the bourgeois cannot be killed. To ordinarily perceive capitalism as a property of things or of people in themselves misses the, in rather spooky terms, the supersensous phantasmogoric ectoplasm, on which the machinations of the capitalist economy operate. In Marx’s terms these are the social relation of production which is the abstract couplet of concrete activities within capitalism. To start targeting the former, if it can make sense, an apt strategy, or its secondary effects, would move beyond only honing in on the identities emerging from alienation that political economy masks us with: ‘the capitalist’the worker’ ‘the consumer’. More or less one can’t “Smash Capitalism” or its incarnated agents as another slogan exclaims. To get to the point, and to sharpen our target, we can even quote from the Communist Manifesto “To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production…Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.”

The long tradition of rioting and storming contained in it a momentum for an actualisable, realizable violent usurpation and infliction of bodily pain, which as strategy here in Europe is rather passe’. A subversive strategy in the space of the streets could be performed as an “impossible violence” that can therefore exceed the confines of momentary acts of realizable violence and affronts the socio-symbolic underpinnings that enable the power of the ruling classes to flow. Of course money and the police are the pillars of bourgeois-bureaucratic rule. But this monetary-military power, that compels workers to work for them and forces dissenters into their police vans is the acknowledged basis of their power. The ruling classes have the monopoly, both monetary and in the use of physical violence. A critique that reveals this as the source of their power (like the themes of inequality, billionaires and police-repression highlighted by demonstrators) seems to misfire, since they and everybody else knows this very well. Even the ideological legitimacy of their bourgeois values comes from this: the wealthy classes are responsible for prosperity, and the big-spending state for protecting property.

The anarchist Anthropologist, David Graeber, makes a distinction between social power based on the ability to act directly on others, and the power arising from the ability to define oneself which can convince others how they should act towards you. The first is rooted in money, or to be more inclusive in capitalist-bureaucratic (or monetary-military) monopolizations of weapons of coercion. The second has its centrifugal core in their social status of production from which spin and spew out their symbolic power. This power is based on insignia, symbolic codes that structure our perception of them, and signal us to act with deference and respect. Even in our binary opposition and critiques, in which the contours of their power are retraced, we acknowledge and reproduce its format and therefore contribute to its stability. An opposition that sustains its enemy, as a sinister conspiratorial figure, and by erecting itself as the opposition, allows the enemy, through the media, the conditions for its own legitimation, securing law and order and wealth production, as opposed to “unproductive rioting”. To deface the character masks of capitalism, a strategy that can tear the symbolic identities of their social status (the Banker, the Politician) could be attenuated by a comical analytical stance that intimates their spectrally objective underpinnings. For example:

Chris Night, the Communist Anthropologist at the University of East London, who let it slip that he might accidentally hang a banker, or start gnawing at a bankers leg rather than get a sandwich if he gets a little bit peckish ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2009/mar/31/g20-protests-chris-knight ) exemplifies this effect emerging through impossible Violence. It remains outside the trappings of the binaries of the media-police (atleast for the viewer since the media took it literally… that he was actually planning to hang a banker, grab a person in a suite coming out of the office, and throw a rope over the nearest lamppost, while the 5000 police people stand by) but is still present on the streets and in streams of dissemination.

A symbolic attack of impossible violence can step-over the cordon of bashing police men. An impossible violence, is so grotesquely overdrawn that it permeates out of the binaries of street-skirmishes & the media, into the symbolic order, such as into the figure of the overlord banker. So Chris Knights ‘threat’ to gnaw at a bankers leg when he gets hungry, is subversive because it is an image that crawls its way into the category, and gnaws at it. The humorous rather than the violent element is responsible for dividing the image of the unitary power of finance, for inserting a space of critical reflection. It has an undermining presence, dislocating the position of the banker and forcing it into a more vulnerable positions, where it can be mocked, and in a first maneuver exposed for their petty materiality as embodied in the fleshy leg or dismembered bloody hand at the end end of a pin-stripe sleeve, that Chris Knight’s “Festival of the Dead” Procession costumes contained. Since it is a symbolic assault that splits the categories of mastery in the Symbolic Order, by lodging itself within, it remains after the protest, humorously clinging onto the figure of the banker, constantly revealing its vulnerability by having effaced the confident strut of the baron. But it is in the second maneuver where a further, secondary effect can be found in this strategy of subversive humour. This effect goes beyond revealing the bankers petty bodies, beyond the simple intrusion of corporeal or economic material reality. This strategy is not a blockade, an autonomous alternative space or a physical attack that can hinder capitalist spurts. By ‘allowing’ the capitalist to continue, this strategy can merely suggest the mechanisms of its reproduction, by revealing how the bankers continue to strut in the pace of their supremacy after having been symbolically tripped by their defacement (see ‘the universal-at-work chapter in Zupancic, 2008). The Guardian reported on some personal testimony of a few bankers: “The riots, they said, were only a minor inconvenience: “We’ve been in this morning, made a lot of money and now are chilling out”” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/02/bankers-betting-protesters-g20).
This is what is actually funny, that after the pompous baron slips on the banana peel he is up again and walking around arrogantly, firm in “the belief of his own aristocratic Self” (Zupancic: 29-30)
“The process of joking is not only “work done with the help of the Symbolic” (condensations, displacements, playing with homonyms, and so on) but always also something that displays the “Symbolic at work” (Zupancic; 143). A bad example, from the placards at the protest “Banker rhymes with…?”. There could be better ones.

From Chris Knights performative strategy can be intimiated that the source of their efficiency exceeds their material presence, such as the banter of bankers about poker-nights and stocks over a starbucks coffee. This is revealed because of the comic stance this maneuver provides, whose effect is a distance, from which perspective we can witness the functioning of symbolic structures, as the absurdity of the individual banker who assumes and continually inserts him or herself into the position of an ordained invincibility. It scathes this symbolic order on which social power rests, through this subtraction (from symbolic hierarchies and binaric media representations). This stance then enables a subtraction, that like in the image Zizek used in the Conference “On the idea of Communism” consists of pulling out a a card from the house of cards, which leads to the crumbling of the whole structure, only from that distanced stance of course. This is a strategy unlike the declarations of temporary autonomous zones, that remains a green patch within the social order, that like Robert Owens utopian villages can idyllically co-exist and not fundamentally challenge the ruling symbolic order.
The question is then how to come up with tactics that efface social power, not by opposition, but by intrusion and subtraction, which has the effect (not for the dim-witted media) of delegitimisng the symbolic order on which the capitalists social power is based. Something like this seems pressing, because the uncanny, gruesome puppeteering can bind the opposites of Violence and Humour. This can side-step mediation through the news, which propagates the liberal myth of the feckless consciousless agitator, of the violent ones, the few trouble-makers who wreak havoc and ruin it for everyone else, those are the true ‘people’, who are peace-loving, and as the media reported share a joke and their organic cookies with police men. In this ideological deadlock the possibility for harming the police-state order is foreclosed.

David Graeber, 2003 Chapter 3 – Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value

David Graeber – ON THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF GIANT PUPPETS: broken windows, imaginary jars of urine, and the cosmological role of the police in American culture

http://balkansnet.org/zcl/puppets.pdf

Jacques Ranciere, The concept of ‘critique’ and the the ‘critique of Political Economy’

Alenka Zupancic, 2008 – On Comedy: The Odd one In

Tropical Mysteries, Luminous People – Die Filme von Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Der thailändische Filmemacher Apichatpong Weerasethakul (geb. 1970) ist einer der herausragenden und eigenwilligsten Vertreter des internationalen Autorenkinos der Gegenwart. Seine einzigartigen Filme entziehen sich herkömmlichen Kategorien: nicht eindeutig der Fiktion oder dem Dokumentarischen zuzuordnen, halten sie sich nicht an erzählerische Plausibilität und narrative Logik, sondern arbeiten bewusst non-linear, mit Leerstellen und Momenten der Irritation: Oft sind sie zweigeteilt, wobei das Verhältnis beider Teile meist undurchsichtig bleibt; Credits oder Vorspann laufen bisweilen mitten im Film; es gibt Zwischentitel, sprachbegabte Tiere oder plötzlich ein schwarzes Loch im Bild. Diese traumwandlerische Freiheit des Erzählens führt dazu, dass Weerasethakuls Filme eine faszinierende hypnotische Wirkung und große imaginäre Kraft entwickeln. Neben der dokumentarischen Basis seiner Ästhetik und der Arbeit mit Laien ist für Weerasethakuls Werk das Interesse an der thailändischen Oral History charakteristisch sowie der Rückgriff auf bestehende populäre Formate (Soap Operas, Sagen, Hörspiele, Comics, alte Filme), um diese in seinen Filmen neu zu kontextualisieren. Zentral für seine Arbeit ist der Topos des Dschungels, Ort einer anderen Intensität, einer anderen Bewusstseinsstufe, Ort einer Utopie oder auch eines mythischen Reichs, das der Ordnung der Realität entgegengesetzt ist. Seine Imaginationen beruhen auf Mythen und Erinnerungen, haben bisweilen aber durchaus politische Konturen, denn das Reale ist bei ihm für das Übernatürliche durchlässig (und umgekehrt).
Weerasethakul ist einer der wenigen Filmemacher Thailands, die außerhalb des strengen thailändischen Studiosystems arbeiten, und er ist schwul, was er wiederholt in seinen Werken thematisiert und was ihm – neben den latent regimekritischen Anspielungen in seinem Schaffen – beständig Probleme mit der Zensur einbringt. Mit seiner 1999 gegründeten unabhängigen Produktions- und Verleihplattform “Kick the Machine” fördert er den unabhängigen und experimentellen Film

http://www.arsenal-berlin.de/de/arsenal/programmtext-anzeige/article/1537/304.html?cHash=c706fd81be

anti-NATO protests and the politics of joy

The last few days were waterfalls of physical, political and imaginative experience. The debates and practical issues of organization and militancy were fusing organically with hippy, vegan consumerism and playful, symbolic gesticulation. It seems, there is a relatively widespread endorsement of thinking about political engagement generally, in terms of what Michael Hardt called the ‘activism based on joy’ i.e. on collective work instead of the sacrificial commitment to a certain economics of guilt towards the other. The reality of the recent anti-NATO protests, however, seems to show, that such affirmative, positivity could also be a comfortable excuse for the gentrification of the anti-capitalist movememtn and can, if taken crudely, occlude important analysis of the role of the dubious political subjectivities within it.

On the one hand, there was all the solidarity and collective action during the recent anti-NATO days, one of the most exciting things was probably the locals and migrants joining the protests and rioting. People cheered us from all over the place: waving from out of the windows or applauding. The workers at the train depots smiled brightly and raised their fists into the air, while the migrant youth danced around the demonstrators on motorbikes and enthusiastically joined the smashing and burning. At some point little girls ran out on the streets and started jumping on the loan chanting: ‘antifa!’, ‘antifa!’ On Thursday, the rioting in the suburbs sparked by the demo seemed to be hardly controlled by the police. The robocops were running around after migrants shooting at them with tear gas and beating some with their rubber clubs. At one point a window opened and a hand threw a metal teapot or something like this on the head of one of the cops, who was violently handcuffing someone. He got really mad and found nothing better to do than to just shoot his teargas grenade into the window!

On the other hand however, there were certain problems with the concatenation between the population in the area and the activists in the camp. Firstly, none of the farmers or the migrants from the suburbs was to my knowledge, present at the plenums. Talking to them there and then would have been important e.g. the organization of the demonstrations and the blockades etc. True, the organizers of the camp were locals, but it seemed that much of the communication with the rest of the people was done through them and not through some kinds of broader meetings or plenums as part of the regular meeting-program in the camp.

Secondly, despite all the self-affection by much of the black blockers about themselves, they were a problem. The rest of the demonstrators often ran into trouble as they pointlessly escalated the situation with the police starting to shoot tear gas almost indiscriminately. Their seeming obsession with ‘marking of space’, ‘territorial control’ and paranoid quest for ‘security’ as well as for the much beloved ‘spontaneity’ (which meant practically smashing things up like: the post office, pharmacy, cars and bus stops etc as well as the quite legitimately hateful targets e.g. the military barracks, old border control building etc). did at many point brought tension into the relationship with the local population.

The prognosis that one sympathizer at the nettime mailing list recently made about the bb movement, actually corresponds quite well to how many ‘militants’ actually seem to want to see themselves: ‘(…in a tendential hyphothesis) as a potentially emerging …european liberation army of sorts’ (my edits) Seeing such a self-organized militarism on the left, which seeks to ‘liberate the oppressed’, is a cause of concern. It seems, to think that you can smash the state and its structures by simply physically destroying buildings and controlling the space with the help of a ‘liberation army’ is to live in a one dimensional dream-world of military strategists. It’s because the bblockers rarely attended any plenums, didn’t really take part in the collective decision and acted mostly ‘autonomously’, that they often separated themselves from the movement and started to act as a sort of caricatured, headless vanguard party, aparantly, mostly interested in doing actions resembling some kind of street ‘outsider art’.

The creative aspect of bblock’s militancy, which was quite revealing about the movement as a whole. Before going to the demo they had actually erected the ‘barricades’ on the streets leading to the village. To see this amazing piece of ‘autonom’, infantile imagination was utterly fascinating. That construction had no utilitarian function whatsoever. It was art and ‘pure’ art, much better then the john bock/hirschhorn sculptures. To believe that it could really stop the movement of a police van or the robocops one would need to do a rather brave leap of faith, like that they would suddenly want to attack the camp barefoot. The ‘defence’ consisted of: the actual barricade made out of furniture looted from the house near by, with something like a Christian cross in the middle, the quite carefully separated rows of broken glass- presumably imitating the spikes that police uses against the vehicles- and the various metal rods, rather aesthetically arranged. Several Antifa Flags were hung from the houses on either side of the barricades so that one got a rather well balanced composition when one was approaching from the direction of the enemy. Here and there you could see groups of shabby teenagers dressed in black holding sticks or stones. On Saturday, the disused, building of the old border control between France and Germany together with a hotel and a pharmacy were smashed and set ablaze. It produced very familiar, majestic images of apocalyptic rioting and discontent, which made it to the media.

To end these notes, I’ll simply ask these questions.

Does the aesthetization of the political by South Park seems to show capitalist contradictions going mad to the extend, that even fashion trends (bb aesthetics of violence) become capable of mobilizing significant numbers of young people to against it?

Or is it simply, that in the absence of the significant power to prevent yourself from being ‘kettled’ by the police, the only way to resist, in this context, is to resist symbolically, meaning sending signals and images to the Other (the imagined people, workers of the world etc.) who might benevolently Answer if enough agitation is made?

If this is the case, then to what extend does it hollows out politics proper as everything is directed at signalling and demonstrating and not at say broad forms of civil disobedience?

What does it then mean to insist that there be a distinction made within the so called ‘joyous machine’ of protest and insurrection between the ‘politics of joy’, which contains aesthetics as the political and the self-indulgent, militant hedonism, which aesthetisizes politics and directs its seeking eyes towards the Other?

an

NOTES: Chakrabarty – When and What was Postcolonialism

Intro by Archeologist…
The title of his book ‘Provincializing Europe’ is so good that it is
sufficient to just read the title.

I’ll strart with the ‘When’ of the question, then move onto the What, and
hopefully there isnt’t enough time left for me to discuss the controversial
‘was’ of the title.

$B”# A good historian messes up Periodization & Chronology

●Anti-Colonialism and Decolonization movements of the post WWII were stuck
in a binary, what Bhabha called Difference without Hybridity. This was the
Pan-Africanism period, where ‘race’ played such a crucial part, in for
example the writings coming out of the Carribean
●Postcolonialism – emerged as a critique to make liberal-capitalism (or in
todays terms Globalisation) more democratic, include the hitherto excluded
and marginalized subjects,
●Latin American post-colonial theorist (Mignolo) have raised important
questions, such as what are the implications, that countries in Latin
America gained independence in the early 19th century, for seeing
postcolonialism as part of recent globalisation narratives.

Ill start with the Asia and Afrika Conference of 1955, or what is called
Bandung Conference.
●Richard Wright, African American Author who attended the confernce, wrote
that the “elites are more Western than the West”, partly because they took
European idealism to literally.
●The conference managed to create a “shared anti-imperialism” even though an
“alliance” was spurious. China was not allowed to join until the last
minute, and lots of countries were rather por-American.
●The desire to catch-up. The Engineer emerged as the eroticized image of
developmentalism. The new national hero and symbol.
●Leaders, Sukarno, Naseer, Nyere, Nehru, were all Pedagogical rather than
Dialogical, but I dont have time now to pursue this distinction.

The Nation

●During colonialism , the nation was made through street mobs, through
songs, rituals and poetry (except for collaborator-buerocrats in the British
Empire). After Independence, the nation became administrative and
bio-political
●After Charisma – After the death of leadership figures was dissilussionment
●In the 60s, the elite emigration, “brain drain”, signal of disillusionment
with the State
●Working-Class Migrations existed since the 19th century, but
Post-Colonialism impossible without the “chattering classes”, a
multi-culturalism.
●=> Emergence of Post-colonialism
●The circulation of anti-imperialism: For example how the figure of Ghandi
travelled, in USA in the 60s and during Anti-Apartheid struggle.

Post-Colonialism emerges
●Why was Vietnam rather Kurdistan the focus of international solidarity.
Because Kurdistan was a national issue.
●Issac Julian (made film on Fanon), with Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha in the
70s, organized a Conference on Fanon
●Also this was when writings of someone like Charles Taylor were emerging
around the issue of recognition. Its not co-incidental.
●Stuart Hall, at the Birmingham Cultural Studies, emerged 1st as a critique
of E.P. Thomposon & the History Workshop Journal

Recognization of Post-colonialism
●Anti-essentialist (not “white & black”)
●Suspicion – That the Man of the Universal is “white” (Fanon)
●The Man of the Universal does not know how to deal with difference
●Post-cololianlist went to look in the colonial archives, and developed a
critique of sameness (the sammeness of the catch-up impulse of
developmentalism
●But writings were no only about asserting difference
●Differences as Real, but not stable enough to stabilize into Disciplines
●((How to reproduce market functions, without its institutions))
●Theorized difference, after post-structuralist thinkers- Derrida, Irigaray,
for example Bhabha in his concept of mimicry
●=> But this doesnt mean that Post-colonialism is simply indebted to
European Thought, as critics such as Arif Dirlik like to point out.
●The alternative i’m proposing is that Post-colonialism is more influenced
by anti-colonialism.

QUESTIONS & ANSWER -
Q: What is Dialogical you mentioned?
●What I meant by Dialogical in terms of Pedagogical. Dialogical is basically
without imperialism. e.g. Enligh becomes Kreole through appropiation
●Quote from Cesaire “I am not a prisoner of French Language, Language is
arbitrary, I use the language to express my ideas” vs. Language of Empire as
Imperialism – Anticipates Debates on Globalization
● Leopolod Senghor vs. Hardt and Negri. For Senghor man is incarnate, always
already, positioned. Hardt and Negri use words like “placelessness and
nomadic” and emphasize the free movement of people

Q: What about the WAS of your title, is post-colonialism over?
The WAS of my Title (hope ive answered the when and what)
● Latin American Post-colonialism is based on the Renaissance (e.g. Octavio
Paz)
●Indian Post-coloanilism is more based on the Enlightenment
●West Remains Post-colonial. As Etienne Balibar has tried to address -
“Question of cultural and historical difference and how to respond”
theoretically. e.g. The police in Paris riots 2005 was a colonial police

Q:
●Fanons gesture of Double-Conscioussness in 1961, where he says Marxism is
indispensable, but simultaneuolsy reaffirms that we need to scrap Marxist
categories

Q: You haven’t mentioned Said
● Said, mh, he was quite different from people like Spivak and Bhabha. First
he signals that he’s influenced by French post-structuralism, by mentioning
Michel Foucault, but he does not remain very loyal to Foucaults notion of
“Discourse”. Also he does not intersect this with “Difference”. This is the
opposite of Bhabha. Also Said, who was older than Bhabha and Spivak, often
looked down upon them, seeing them as the children, dabbling with French
theory.

● There is a difference between post-colonialism done in history Departments
and in Literary Departments. In the first, theres the need for specifictiy
and context. Also theres the underlying idea that Language does not mediate
the past, the task of the historian is to represent the past. The Literature
branch of post-colonialism centeres upon the ‘singularity in poetry’. They
see language as the event. The play with Language and do all sorts of
wonderfull things with it. This is not accepted at History Departments, for
the better, since my prose is only capable of being that of the Historian

● In the 70s USA – Identitiy Politics
UK – anti-rascism and activism (Fanon big in France)
● Post-colonialism came from the left, but now moving to the right,
possibly… The 80s was the Right moving into the White House, and the Left
moving into English Departments
●My friend Sandro Mezzadra has been writing about Post-colonialism and
Politics

Q: On Palestine, and whether it is a colonized place.
A: Post-colonialism can be 2 things. One a metaphoric level, so to say,
which links different countries in History, Palestine can be said to be
colonized, thereby tracing some continuity with past expriences of
colonialism. But Post-Colonialism is also much more specific, in its
configuration as emerging in the 70s from an expirience of the British
Empire. Here context is more important.

Q: About Marxism, Post-colonialism an effect of economics of colonialism.
● If we relinquish Universality it leads to political paralysis, the
breaking down…black feminisits, 3rd world feminists… Leads to a politics
of Suspicion. This did not produce a poltics of dialogue
● vs. Zizek though, who thinks the Universal is only European
●Marxist Historiography failed in India, because it did not realize what
kind of politics caste gave rise to
● You can have difference, without having to essentialize it
● The Historian Ginzburg argue against expirience, such as Biographies, this
was challenged by feminsits in the 70s.
● Now the recent bestseller the US, is called “The trouble with diversity”,
which moves from a discussion from race to class.
● Intellectual Tradition, comes alive, when you debate as if they were
alive. Marx is still relevant, not consigned, or contained within the 19th
century context. Marxism needs to be renewed from & for the margins. Marxism
might be exhausted, but it is not invalidated
● Transfer- My intellectual trajectory as combination, for a non-eurocentric
Universalism, that is how to recombine, re-engage in contemporary
intellectual deadlock

Contact us to set up the meeting at: counterrealism@googlemail.com