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‘THE END OF ISLAMIC IDEOLOGY’

Reading the chapter from Hamid Dabashi’s IRAN a people interrupted

‘The Islamic Republic is a categorical contradiction in terms- it is neither a republic nor Islamic. It is not a republic because it is a theocracy; it is not Islamic because Islam (Shi’ism in particular) cannot be in power without instantly discrediting itself. From its very earliest manifestation, Islam emerged as the religion of protest, and in its long and tumultuous history, both political and doctrinal, it has never lost that initial defining moment of its political potency. The dialectical paradox that has remained textual to Qur’ranic revelation- its Meccan chapters charismatic and revolutionary, its Medinan verses somber and institution building- has never abandoned the long and arduous Islamic
history. In these terms, Shi’ism is the quintessence of Islam as a religion of protest and can only remain valid and legitimate as long as it posits itself as a revolutionary project. The instant that Islam (Shi’ism) becomes a dominant (state) ideology it contradicts itself. This paradox is definitive to Islamic political and doctrinal history. The Islamic Republic, as a result, and ipso facto, has placed Islam in a position of tyranny, which in turn discredits and dismantles Islam itself- in the most basic tenets of its doctrinal principles. From Umayyads (661-750) to the Abbasids (750- 1258) down to all other major and minor Islamic empires and dynasties, there has never been a Islamic form of government that has not been radically challenged and opposed in precisely Islamic terms. As soon as a dynasty has come to power in Islamic terms of legitimacy, a revolutionary movement has arisen to challenge it in precisely in Islamic terms. This paradox is now the central dilemma of the Islamic Republic, in which it is trapped and from which it has no escape, except dismantling itself. A regional integration of the most progressive forces in both the reformist and the conservative camps in Iranian politics is the only way it can at once sustain its domestic legitimacy and pose a highly effective politics of resistance to the predatory demands of globalized capitalism and the empire it engendered. But it cannot do so without radically revisiting its very doctrinal basis- and thus the self defeating paradox that at once animates and contradicts it.

A radical reformulation of ‘Islam’, now incarcerated within the clerically anchored ‘Islamic Republic’, effectively amounts to (1) recognizing its own polyvocality- its jurisprudence historically checked and balanced by its philosophy and mysticism; and (2) allowing the cosmopolitan context of its contemporary anti-colonial modernity to work the dialectic of its polyvocality out- its Islamism placing itself next to to the nationalism and socialism that have historically checked and balanced it. Among the myriad consequences of such an emancipatory reimagining of Islam in its modern and medieval history is the effective abandoning of the faulty Eurocenticity of a singular modernity, by which the rest of humanity must abide. In its contemporary context, this full-bodied version of Islam will posit the terms of an anti-colonial modernity that is worldly in its roots and cosmopolitan in its consequences.’ (217/18)

‘Trapped in the charismatic appeal of that abiding memory [‘the collective sentiment of the earliest nucleus of revolutionary Shi’ism], Ahamdinejad may indeed go to war- with the United States, with Israel, with any of the Persian Gulf states (or perhaps the United States and Israel may hand him the opportunity by invading Iran)- for the fire of war cleanses and purifies the evil that this zealotry sees dominant in the world […] The effective transmutation of a popular vote into populism , its alliance with the militarism will put Ahmadinajad’s presidency on a catastrophic course leading to a frightful fascism. [the book was published in 2007]…The republic of fear..will result [that] will impose draconian limitations on the latitude that has, in the past, been allowed to the social behavior of middle-class Iranians, the flamboyant youth, and the Gucci revolutionaries. [even though, I think, the recent Ahmadinajad’s speeches included talking about relaxing the activity of the ‘moral police’] This will scare and dishearten the middle-class Iranians and force them even more into belligerent secularism, vulgar consumerism, and ultimately escape the claws of the Islamic Republic[..] The impoverished classes will most certainly not be the beneficiaries of this exodus of capital. The Islamic Revolution never had the economic courage of its political imagination, never dared to opt for a socialist economy, even from its very ideological basis in the ideas and principles of ideologues such as Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleqani and Abu al-Hassan Bani Sadr. So called Islamic economics are fundamentally based on a secured niche in global capitalism. But this economics wants to have its cake and eat it too. It needs foreign investment and a robust capitalist economy, but it doesn’t want the Bourgeois International and its preference for tight jeans, loose scarves, and the democratic institutions that go with global capitalism. [although, someone like Chakrabarty would disagree: individual freedom is not a necessary condition for capitalism as it is for Marx] The Iranian economy under Ahmadinejad will thus remain heavily dependent on oil revenues. Jobs will remain scarce unless A. can transmute the oil revenue into a productive, labor-intensive economy- a critical task that all his predecessors have failed to meet. Chances are that he will not succeed, for he is very much at the mercy of the global economy, which allots Iran only a role as an oil producer […] (235)

The hope for the restitution of that cosmopolitan culture, now compromised by a militant Islamism that has no patience or tolerance for anything it deems un-Islamic, can come from an entirely unexpected corner if we consider the flowering relationship between President Hugo Chaves of Venezuela and his Iranian counterpart….Chaves has a categorical admiration for the Islamic Republic, and sees it as a potential ally across the globe. This admiration can extend beyond a mere transcontinental but vacuous camaraderie, with occasional economic benefits for both, only if Chaves uses his leverage with the Islamic Republic to have it open up its medieval gates to political dissent and institutional changes in its theocracy. The relationship is of course reciprocal- namely, if Chavez fails to raise principled questions with the Islamic Republic and thus help restore the Iranian cosmopolitan political culture, then the theocratic disregard for human rights and the mutation of Iranian cosmopolitan political culture into a clerical tribalism of the worst kind, now definitive to the Islamic Republic, will turn around and corrupt the social democratic aspirations of Chaves.’ (237)

What seems to be exciting about the Iraninan movement now is that it got organized precisely without such a benevolent intervention from the outside, but by the people, across the class lines, themselves. Hopefully, it will have implications beyond the conservative reformism of Mousavi and contribute towards the re-articulation of the cosmopolitanism of Islamic anti-colonial modernity again.

Appadurai Audio

Here is the recording from the recent Arjun Appadurai opening speech from HKW coference Beyond Multiculturalism

Beyond?! and where? Multiculturality blog has a nice review of the event

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”?

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

a (non) formalist film or a play i’d like to make one day

 

the cast and stage directions:

 

thebes and oedipus (both at the same time):

 

Reading greek tragedy through marx e.g. as the allegory of capitalist s collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

The forsaken u.s. military radar i. e. the pinnacle of overproduction, hedonism and imperialism is the blinf oedipus And the buerocratic strong hold of creon 

creon himself: image (or visibility, perceptibility, and..the ‘human animal’ ?)

polynices: sound (and how do the unburried dead sound? Maybe, various ‘ internationals’ slowed down  to the point where its just an indesernible, inhuman sound  playing at the same time out of  sync)

ismene: time (her indecisiveness makes the film go on)

chorus: nothing (absent) no morality

antigone: montage (only one cut , every image is contained within the other before antigones  act)

and i want another character to appear after the cut

the raven from passolini’s  ‘the hawks and the saprrows’ to walk inside of the derelict radar interiors

starts in 1.3 minutes

he will say something wise and silly and look out of  the window

and there will be all the multitudes of people from the anti G20 anti Nato

protests marching together

(:

 

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.

Click to access PM_Eagleton.pdf

Harun Farocki: Image in Violence

http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/lon/kue/en4375269.htm

julia wrote: ‘around 40min. farocki makes the point about the use of re enactement strategies nowadays
by pointing at that it is often defended and used as the only mimesis possible to get access to realism.. which can/shall be criticise..some interestings connections are made between participation and
immersion.’

Spivak Other Asias, Butler Frames of War, Audio of Lectures, Berlin Feb 2009

Gayatri Spivak – Other Asias February 14 2009 Berlin WIKO

Judith Butler – Frames of War – February 2009 FU Berlin

Political Power and the Kings Magic – Graeber and Lacan

short passage ( which expands the point of power’s symbolic base in my previous post)

from

THE SADNESS OF POST-WORKERISM
or
“ART AND IMMATERIAL LABOUR” CONFERENCE
A SORT OF REVIEW
(Tate Britain, Saturday 19 January, 2008)

Click to access graeber_sadness.pdf

by David Graeber
It is the peculiar feature of political life that within it, behavior that could only otherwise be considered insane is perfectly effective. If you managed to convince everyone on earth that you can breathe under water, it won’t make any difference: if you try it, you will still drown. On the other hand, if you could convince everyone in the entire world that you were King of France, then you would actually be the King of France. (In fact, it would probably work just to convince a substantial portion of the French civil service and military.)
This is the essence of politics. Politics is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge its essence. No king would openly admit he is king just because people think he is. Political power has to be constantly recreated by persuading others to recognize one’s power; to do so, one pretty much invariably has to convince them that one’s power has some basis other than their recognition. That basis may be almost anything—
divine grace, character, genealogy, national destiny. But “make me your leader because if you do, I will be your leader” is not in itself a particularly compelling argument.

In this sense politics is very similar to magic, which in most times and places—as I discovered in Madagascar—is simultaneously recognized as something that works because people believe that it works; but also, that only works because people do not believe it works only because people believe it works. For this why magic, whether in ancient Thessaly or the contemporary Trobriand Islands, always seems to dwell in an uncertain territory somewhere between poetic expression and outright fraud. And of course the same can usually be said of politics”

————————————————————

also the Lacan and the Crazy King thing, from  “Everything Politics is, Chomsky is not”  by Henrik Jøker Bjerre

Click to access Everything%20Politics%20is,%20Chomsky%20is%20not.pdf

This is why Lacan famously stated that the madman, who thinks that he is a king, is no crazier than the king, who thinks that he is a king. In as far as the king identifies with his symbolic mandate to such a degree that he doesn’t see that that is all it is, or in other words: in as far as he believes that there is no difference between his position of enunciation and the content of what he is (described as), he is as crazy as the madman. Another Lacanian paraphrase of the cogito could thus be: “I don’t think, therefore I am (the king).”

The rest of the audios from On the Idea of Communism

Finally lernt how to upload streaming audio. Here is the rest of the conference:

SATURDAY 14 March

00:00 Alessandro Russo “Did the Cultural Revolution End Communism?”

40:55 Alberto Toscano “Communist Power / Communist Knowledge”

01:16:50 Antonio Negri “Communisme: reflexions sur le concept et la pratique”

01:54:00 Discussion

On the Idea of Communism (Saturday)

SATURDAY AFTERNOON SESSION

07:00 Terry Eagleton “Communism: Lear or Gonzalo?”

35:08 Jacques Ranciere “Communists without Communism?”

01:10:00 Alain Badiou ”Communism: a generic name”

02:12 Discussion

On the Idea of Communism (Saturday 2)

SUNDAY

03:44 Slavoj Zizek “To begin from the beginning over and over again”

55:40 Gianni Vattimo “Weak Communism?” 01:34:50

Judith Balso “Communism: a hypothesis for philosophy, an impossible name for politics?”

Concluding Debate

On the Idea of Communism (Sunday)

Friday.

Peter Hallward – Communism of the Intellect, Communism of the Will

Bruno Bosteels – The Leftist Hypothesis: Communism in an Age of Terror

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Smoke World Map – In this world 2

Instant

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

Click to access puppets.pdf

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

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

Ranciere 2 – Preface to the new Hindi translation of ‘Nights of Labour’

from hydrarchy.blogspot.com

http://hydrarchy.blogspot.com/2009/01/ranciere-2-new-preface-to-hindi.html

‘Then I read documents in which this same worker described an entire vision of life, an unusual counter-economy which sought ways to reduce the worker’s consumption of everyday goods so that he would be more independent of the market economy, and better able to fight against it. Through these texts, and many others, I realised that workers had never needed others to explain the secrets of domination to them, and that the problem they faced was having to submit themselves, intellectually and materially, to the forms by which it inscribed itself on their bodies, and imposed upon them gestures, modes of perception, attitudes and language. “Be realistic: demand the impossible!” the protesters cried in 1968. But for these workers in 1830, it was not about demanding the impossible but making it happen themselves: of appropriating the time they did not have, either by spying opportunities in the working day or by giving up their own night of rest to discuss or to write, to compose verses or to work out philosophies These hard-won bonuses of time and liberty were not marginal phenomena, they were not diversions from the building of the worker movement and its great ideals. They were a revolution, discreet but radical nonetheless, and they made those other things possible…..’

‘This is also why I am not afraid that this book will suffer too much from distances of time, place and language. For it does not simply tell the story of the working class of a far-off time and place. It tells a form of experience which is not so far away from our own. Contemporary forms of capitalism, the explosion of the labour market,the new precariousness of labour and the destruction of systems of social solidarity, all create forms of life and experiences of work that are possibly closer to those of these artisans than to the universe of hi-tech workers and the global bourgeoisie given over to the frenetic consumption described by so many contemporary sociologists and philosophers. In our world, just as in theirs, the
challenge is to obstruct and subvert the order of time imposed by a system of domination. To oppose the government of capitalist and state elites and their experts with an intelligence that comes from everyone and anyone…’

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