e-flux journal

e-flux journalissue #3505/2012

Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle01 pp. EditorialElizabeth A. Povinelli09 pp. After the Last Man: Imagesand Ethics of BecomingOtherwise01/01Bilal Khbeiz06 pp. Dubai: A City Manufacturedby CuriosityBoris Groys13 pp. Under the Gaze of TheorySotirios Bahtsetzis12 pp. Eikonomia: Notes onEconomy and the Labor ofArtIrmgard Emmelhainz09 pp. Between ObjectiveEngagement and EngagedCinema: Jean-Luc Godard’s“Militant Filmmaking”(1967-1974), Part IIJohn Miller20 pp. Politics of Hate in the USA,Part III: Posse Comitatus,Grassroots Rebellion, andSecret Societiese-flux journal #35 — may 2012Contents05.30.12 / 07:55:45 EDT

1“Too Young to be a Hippy, Too Oldto be a Punk (Discussion withMike Kelley),” Be Magazin,Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin,vol. 1, no. 1, 1994, 119–123.2James Wickstrom, The AmericanFarmer: 20th Century Slave(1978) quoted in Richard Abanes,“Oh, What a TangledWeb,” America’s Militias:Rebellion, Racism, Religion(Downers Grove: Illinois:Intervarsity Press, 1996), 171.(Hereafter abbreviated AM.)3Carol Moore, “The BATF’sRuthless Raid Plan,” TheDavidian Massacre: DisturbingQuestions About Waco WhichMust Be Answered (Franklin,Tennessee and Springfield,Virginia: LegacyCommunications and the GunOwners Foundation, 1995), 99.(Hereafter abbreviated DM.)Moore further points out thatthe Posse Comitatus Act hasbeen recently amended tosanction non-reimbursable US.military and National Guardsupport of civilian police incounter-drug operations.4James Coates, “PosseComitatus,” Armed andDangerous: The Rise of theSurvivalist Right (New York:Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988),105. (Hereafter abbreviated AD.)5Lyman Tower Sargent, “PosseComitatus,” Extremism inAmerica: A Reader (New York:New York University Press,1995), 343-44.6Ibid, 343.7Morris Dees with JamesCorcoran, Gathering Storm”American’s Militia Threat (NewYork: Harper Collins, 1996), 10.(Hereafter abbreviated GS)8Catherine McNicol Stock, “ThePolitics of Producerism,” RuralRadicals: righteous rage in theAmerican grain (Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 1996), 18.9As a southerner, Jeffersonnaturally opposed theFederalists (Hamilton, Madisonet al.) who, playing upon anti-Catholic sentiments, in turndisparaged his close ties withFrance. Jefferson, however,viewed immigration as a threatto American democracy.10Stock, “The Politics ofProducerism,” 15-86.11Dees and Corcoran, GS, 11.12Coates, “The Politics ofHatred,” AD,197.13Coates, “Posse Comitatus,” AD,111.14Ibid, 118.15Ibid, 112-13.16Ibid, 112-15.17Ibid, 116.18Abanes, “MisinformationSpecialists,” AM, 118.19James Ridgeway, “PosseCountry,” Blood in the Face: TheKu Klux Klan, Aryan Nations,Nazi Skinheads and the Rise of aNew White Culture (New York:Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1995),138-42. (Hereafterabbreviated BlF)20Coates, “Posse Comitatus,” AD104-09.21Coates, “Posse Comitatus” and“The Compound Dwellers,” AD,120-6.22Coates, “The CompoundDwellers,” AD, 121;132.23William L. Pierce, “The Lesson ofDesert Storm,” Extremism inAmerica, 18724Coates, “The Order,” AD, 48.25Lyle Stuart, “Introduction by thePublisher,” William Pierce (asAndrew McDonald) The TurnerDiaries: A Novel (New York:Barricade Books, 1996)unpaginated.26Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt,“Establishing the WhiteAmerican Bastion,” The SilentBrotherhood: The Chilling InsideStory of America’s Violent, Anti-Government, Militia Movement(New York: Signet, 1990), 105-06. (Subsequent chapterreferences are followed by theabbreviation SB. )27David Bennett, “Reshaping ofthe New Right, Rise of the MilitiaMovement,” The Party of Fear:The American Far Right fromNativism to theMilitiaMovement, (New York:Vintage, 1995), 419. (Hereafterabbreviated PF.)28Pierce (as MacDonald) TheTurner Diaries, 43.29Ibid, 45.30Ibid, 63.19/20e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 John MillerPolitics of Hate in the USA, Part III: Posse Comitatus, Grassroots Rebellion, and Secret Societies31Ibid, 51.32William L Pierce, “A Program forSurvival,” Extremism in America,176-182.33Flynn and Gerhardt, “Enter theZionist OccupationGovernment,” SB, 174.34Mormons believe that women’ssacred calling is to providephysical bodies for God’sspiritual children and that thesecond coming of Christ is near.In preparation for themillennium, like the survivalists,they stockpile food and otherprovisions.35Flynn and Gerhardt, “Robbie, theAll-American Boy,” SB, 27-57.36Ibid, “Establishing the WhiteAmerican Bastion,” SB,105-127.37Ibid, “The Turn to Crime,” SB,128-167.38Ibid, “Enter the ZionistOccupation Government,” SB,203-208.39Dees had founded the SouthernPoverty Center’s KlanwatchProject. Through Klanwatch, heeffectively used the criminaljustice system to battlingracism. In 1981 he obtained acourt order to stop Louis Beam’sTexas Emergency Reserve fromharassing Vietnamese immigrantfishermen in Galveston Bay. In1984 he sued Glen Miller’sCarolina Knights of the Ku KluxKlan, which led to thedissolution of that group. Miller,in the end, turned state’sevidence. In 1986 he obtained a$7 million judgment against theUnited Klans of America forlynching a black college studentin Mobile, Alabama. This put thegroup out of business. In 1987,he bankrupted Georgia’sInvisible Empire with a $12.5million court judgment. In 1989he won a class action lawsuitagainst Tom Metzger’s WhiteAryan Resistance group for theirpart in the beating death of anEthiopian immigrant in Portland,Oregon. This, too, bankruptedthe organization. See Dees andCorcoran, “The Seditionist,” GS,37-41 and “Recipe for Disaster,”GS, 98-103. Celebrity TVproducer, Norman Lear, is bestknown for his character ArchieBunker, who epitomized bigotryas ignorance. Lear also foundeda liberal lobby group with aconservative-sounding name:the American FamilyFoundation.40Flynn and Gerhardt, “Alan Berg:the Man You Love to Hate,” SB,233-250.41Ibid,“Brink’s and the $3,800,000War Chest,” SB, 255.42Ibid,” 271-290; “Survivalism: theMan Who Ate the Dog,” SB, 291-6.43Ibid, 349.44Ibid,“Judas Arrives on AmericanAirlines,” SB, 379.45Ibid, “Survivalism: the Man WhoAte the Dog,” SB, 348-9.46Ibid, 354-5547Ibid,, “Judas Arrives on AmericanAirlines,” SB, 357-40648Ibid, “Blood, Soil and Honor,” SB,407-449.49Ibid, “Epilogue: Blood Will Flow,”SB, 450-51.50Ibid, 469-7051Former Green Beret FrazierGlenn Miller is the onetimeleader of the ConfederateKnights and the White PatriotParty. He was present at theGreensboro slayings ofcommunist anti-Klandemonstrators in 1979 and ranfor governor of North Carolina in1984. That same year, attorneyMorris Dees succeeded inbarring Miller from furtherparamilitary organizing througha North Carolina civil suit. Thiseffectively brought an end to hisConfederate Knights. Miller wentunderground and declared waron ZOG. After his May 1987capture, he turned state’sevidence and received a reducedsentence of five years in prison.See Flynn and Gerhardt, “Enterthe Zionist OccupationGovernment, SB, 203-3 and“Epilogue: Blood Will Flow,” SB,467. The minister James Ellisonbegan the CSA as theZarephath-Horeb Church nearBull Shoals, Arkansas. Duringthe 1970s, Ellison took on asurvivalist orientation andembraced Christian Identitytheology. He set up a survivalisttraining center that included anobstacle course and SilhouetteCity, an urban mockup for streetwarfare. Randall Rader, later akey member of the Order, hadbeen Ellison’s “defenseminister.” By the early 1980sEllison grew more extreme andmore erratic. He declaredhimself to be “King James of theOzarks” (tracing his lineage backto King David) and proclaimedthat theft (from non-Identitypeople) and polygamy weresanctioned by the Lord. This,coupled with extreme povertywithin the CSA compound, led toa general exodus by 1983. Ordermembers Richard Scutari, ArdieMcBreaty and Andy Barnhill alsoElizabeth A. PovinelliAfter the LastMan: Imagesand Ethics ofBecomingOtherwise01/09e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Elizabeth A. PovinelliAfter the Last Man: Images and Ethics of Becoming OtherwisePolitics and art, like forms of knowledge,construct “fictions,” that is to say materialrearrangements of signs and images,relationships between what is seen and what issaid, between what is done and what can bedone … They draft maps of the visible,trajectories between the visible and the sayable,relationships between modes of being, modes ofsaying, and modes of doing and making.– Jacques Rancière, The Distribution of theSensible 1Huddled within one of the most influentialtheories of human desire and the destiny ofdemocracy is an image of history and its future.This image is of a horizon. In lectures delivered atthe École Pratique des Hautes Études from 1933to 1939, Alexandre Kojève argued that thehorizon of universal human recognition(“democracy”) was already in the nature ofhuman desire but, paradoxically, had to beachieved through concrete struggles thatintensified political life. These struggles weredependent on and waged against the backgroundof human finitude. Yet, at the end of thesebattles, when the horizon had been breached,the world and the humans within it would be aform of the undead.What was the future of this image? Andwhat is its future now? Is it “huddled within,” oris it the architectural framework on whichaffective and institutional futures were built andnow face us? What other imagistic architectureof human being and politics might have made analternative history and future of political action?Here I extend a set of thoughts first published ina previous essay on a very different image andgrammar of social and political life – the bag andembagination. 2 What would happen if wereplaced the transcendental architecture of thehorizon with the immanent architecture ofembagination? And how is embagination notreplacing other images of immanent becoming –the fold and the rhizome – but rather confrontingthem.1.We can begin with the fall of a wall and a set ofproclamations that followed. That is, thedifference between the fall of the Berlin Wall andclaims about the meaning of this materialcollapse. Who better to illustrate this differencethan Francis Fukuyama? In The End of Historyand the Last Man (1992), Fukuyama asserted thatthe fall of the Berlin Wall demonstrated that “aremarkable consensus concerning the legitimacyof liberal democracy as a system of governmenthad emerged throughout the world over the past05.22.12 / 03:14:25 EDT05.22.12 / 01:41:10 EDT

few years, as it conquered rival ideologies likehereditary monarchy, fascism, and most recentlycommunism.” 3 For Fukuyama, liberal democracy– we might also say “neoliberal capitalism” –constituted the “end point of mankind’sideological evolution” and the “final form ofhuman government.” 4 As such, it marked the“end of history” and the emergence of “the lastman.”Fukuyama was a student of Allan Bloom anda disciple of Leo Strauss, two prominentintellectual leaders of the neoconservativemovement in the US. But to understand what isat stake in Fukuyama’s proclamation about the“end of history,” we must travel across theAtlantic and back in time. Fukuyama’s reading ofthis material collapse depends on thephilosopher Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel’sPhenomenology of Spirit. 5 Interpreting Hegelthrough Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, Kojèveargued that the history of humankind wouldcome to an end when equal recognition had beenuniversalized in the form of liberal democracy.Why? Because the desire for recognition is whatdifferentiates human and nonhuman animals –what defines the human qua human – andconstitutes the motive force of history.Much depends on the difference between02/09animal and human desire. The animal – and theanimal part of man – becomes aware of itself asit experiences a desire, such as the desire forfood, which is the consequence of finding itselfin a state of hunger. This state of hunger createsin the animal a sentiment of self, a rudimentary“I” that says, “I am hungry.” In this sense, desireis empty: desire is the experience of lack. Thisexperience of emptiness is, however, a positiveforce, for it rouses and disquiets being, moving itfrom passivity into action. In other words, desirecreates in human and nonhuman animals a“sentiment of self”: an awareness of theexistence of the self as an “I” at the momentwhen the emptiness of desire asserts itself overbeing.But whereas animal desire satisfies itselfmerely by consuming what is in the world, humandesire looks beyond what is already at hand. ForKojève, the differentiating mark of the human –what makes man a human animal; his“anthropological machinery,” to paraphraseAgamben – is that his desire doesn’t seeksomething that already exists in the world butsomething that doesn’t yet exist. 6 Human desireis doubly empty. It is awakened by the experienceof a lack, but the form of satisfaction it seeksgoes beyond the given world of things, forms,government was never an achievable goal fromthe outset. However much ideological heat canbe produced by stoking such fantasies couldnever drive a full-blown, right-wingrevolution. Second, the logic of globalization,once so tempting for extremists to condemn as aconspiracy, has inexorably come to be acceptedas part of twenty-first century socialreality. Nonetheless, the extremist rightcontinues to exert a disproportionately largeideological influence both domestically andinternationally, though no longer in the form ofan underground movement. The Tea Partyrepresents the most recent expression of itsdisaffection, the roots of which can be tracedback to the ongoing decimation of the middleclass and the economic and social dislocationwrought be global capitalism. The progressiveleft has responded to these conditions as well,most notably through the Occupy Movement,which re-asserts the principle of communalpublic space and property against the logic ofongoing privatization. It is notable that howwealth is allocated is what fundamentally movesthe populist right and left. Domestically, an eversmallerelite lays claim to ever-moreprofits. Internationally, the distribution capital isbeginning to include Third World economiesrising out of the conditions of neo-colonialism.These are the underlying conditions of the GreatRecession of the 2000s, which has sodramatically reduced the size and political cloutof the middle class. The mandate, then, for theTea Party has become to transform government,not overthrow it. It casts the proposedtransformation as returning to the values of thefounding fathers, even when such proposalsblatantly contradict fundamental Constitutionalprinciples. Embedded in the idea of such a returnis the assumption that this will lead to arestoration of a once vibrant middle class. Forexample, Republican presidential candidate RickSantorum’s recent assessment of John F.Kennedy’s 1960 speech to Baptist ministers inHouston, a speech that reaffirmed Constitutionalseparation of church and state is one such“return.” Santorum said the Kennedy’s speechmade him want to “throw up.” What is perhapsmost alarming in this is, apart from itsvehemence, that it signals a perceived feasibilityof merging church and state. For the immediatefuture it seems that the battle over such issueswill be waged by debate within the ranks of theRepublican Party – and not with weapons fromremote and isolated survivalist compounds.×18/20e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 John MillerPolitics of Hate in the USA, Part III: Posse Comitatus, Grassroots Rebellion, and Secret SocietiesJohn Miller is an artist and writer based in New Yorkand Berlin. He received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize in2011 and teaches in Barnard College's Art HistoryDepartment as a Professor of Professional Practice.JRP/Ringier will publish a new selection of his writing,titled The Ruin of Exchange, in March.Hiroshi Sugimoto,Tyrrhenian Sea, Conca, 1994.05.22.12 / 01:41:10 EDT05.22.12 / 03:14:25 EDT

Catron County, New Mexico with the CountryRule program. Here, attorney James Catronsucceeded in passing an ordinance that declaredthat the country government supersedes federallaw, including such questions as whether cattlemay graze on federal lands. With this precedent,some 100 more western counties have followedsuit. 89 The biggest militia confrontation to datecame in March 1996 when members of a groupcalling itself the Montana Freemen planned tokidnap and execute a judge and a secondgovernment official. Previous Freeman actionshad included tax resistance, counterfeiting andimpersonating government officials. FBI agentsintercepted two members who were bringing atruckload of weapons from North Carolina to acompound they called “Justus Township” nearJordon, Montana. After this, sixteen othermembers, lead by Russell Dean Landers, holedup in this community for what would become an81-day siege, the longest in American history.During that time, a total of 633 agents worked intwelve-hour shifts with sometimes as many as150 agents surrounding the compound. AfterRuby Ridge and Waco, FBI director Louis J. Freehhad decided to exercise extreme caution. Onlyafter seventy-one days, did the FBI cut electricalpower to the compound. Some criticized theagency for wasting time and money, but thisapproach paid off on June 13 when the FBI endedthe armed standoff with no loss of life. Freehdeclared, “The message that comes out veryclear to everybody – if you break the law, theUnited States government will enforce the law. Itwill do it fairly but firmly.” Attorneys Kirk Lyonsand David Holloway from the CAUSE Foundationin North Carolina will represent the Freemen incourt. The CAUSE Foundation calls itself a civilrights organization for right-wing activists.Randy Trochmann declared that the trial wouldprovide an ideal platform for militia propaganda.Although the federal government madeegregious mistakes at the Ruby Ridge and Wacosieges, these were exceptions. Nonetheless, thefar right has aggressively exploited these events,turning its criminals into heroes. This mighttempt Americans to forget that law enforcementofficials have routinely risked and lost their livesto keep otherwise unregulated paramilitarygroups in check. No one has turned the deadBATF or FBI agents into martyrs. Morris Deesnotes that no other country in the world toleratesprivate armies that build bombs and train withassault weapons; local police seldom enforcestate laws that forbid these armies. 90 Moreover,he warns of a racist component in the toleranceextended to these groups:It would be interesting to see the reaction ofthe state attorneys general if the militia groups17/20e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 John MillerPolitics of Hate in the USA, Part III: Posse Comitatus, Grassroots Rebellion, and Secret Societiesoperating today were all located near largemetropolitan cities like Detroit and Philadelphia,and were comprised only of blacks. If lawenforcement’s violent reaction to the BlackPanthers of the 1960s is any example, I seriouslydoubt if black militia units training with assaultweapons, distributing recipes for building bomb,and preaching hatred for the government wouldbe tolerated. 91Any analysis of the constitutionality of themilitia movement entails two questions: i) theright to bear arms and ii) the right to form privatemilitias. While the constitutional right to beararms is unclear and subject to debate, theConstitution expressly prohibits forming privatemilitias. A militia may consist of the citizenry atlarge, just as the patriot movement claims. Itfails to note, however, that only Congress can callup a militia, which, in turn, remains subject togovernment regulation:Private citizens cannot simply bandtogether, saying “Okay, we’re a militia. We’re hereto protect our rights against what we believe is atyrannical federal government.” The militias oftoday’s patriot movement are functioning outsideconstitutional boundaries. They areunconstitutional militias. The Constitutionstipulates, “Congress shall have the power…Toprovide for calling forth the militia…To provide fororganizing, arming, and disciplining themilitia…reserving to the states respectively, theappointment of officers, and the authority oftraining the militia. 92Alarmed by the World Trade Center bombingof 1993, the Clinton administration tried to passthe Omnibus Counter-Terrorism Act of 1995. Itintended this legislation to allow the FBI moreleeway to collect information and to conductsurveillance without prior court authorization.The act did not pass. Appearing before theSenate, Morris Dees advised lawmakers simplyto enforce existing laws; the FBI did not needsuch sweeping powers. Most important, Deesreminded his audience, although they shouldnever accept misconduct by federal lawenforcement agencies, they should never takeeffective law enforcement for granted. It forgetsthat even before Ruby Ridge the government hadpeacefully resolved dozens of standoffs. Sincethen, it acknowledged its mistakes and hastaken steps to insure that they will not happenagain.AfterwordThe Clinton Administration’s decision to limitdeadly force significantly helped defuse themilitia movement in the short term. The longrangeimpetus behind the militias waned forother reasons as well. The first, and mostobvious, is that overturning the Federalaffects, and so forth. What might thisnonexistent object of desire be? According toKojève, it can only be another human’s desire,equally as empty and as ravenous forsatisfaction. This is the atomic kernel of thebattle for recognition: the desire is to be theobject of another’s desire. I want to be what youwant. What I want is to have you want “me.” And“me” is what I desire to be in the world, my visionof the world. You want me to do the same, andthus there is a battle over whose vision willprevail. It is this duel between the ravenousempty dualities of desire that leads to theintensification of politics and is the motive forceof human history.From this simple diagram of desire andrecognition comes the material dialecticalunfolding of the world of liberal democracy – orneoliberal capitalism – which begins in theconfrontation that produces the master-slaverelationship and ends in the universalization ofequal recognition. The battle of recognition,which is a battle to be the object of the other’sdesire, is what for Kojève intensifies political andsocial life and thrusts the human being towardsthe horizon to which human history has alwaysbeen leading – namely, a form of governance inwhich recognition is mutual and universal. MostMark Lombardi, World Finance Corporation and Associates, ca. 1970-84: Miami, Ajman, and Bogota-Caracas, (1999).03/09importantly, Kojève did what Kojève theorized.He put his theory into practice through specificbureaucratic battles to institutionally shape thepolitical and economic world of Europe and theUS. 7 Kojève materialized a theoretical image(imaginary) by seducing others into thinking hisdesire was their desire – and that this desire wasthe truth of the future in the present and notmerely one image among many of human beingand history.But if the dominant image of this theory ofdesire and democracy begins as a horizon, itends as something very different. If liberaldemocracy is the horizon of desire alreadyinscribed in the fight for recognition (theorientation and end of human becoming, andthus the end of history itself), then when liberaldemocracy has been universally achieved,human historical becoming collapses into asatisfied human state of being. The horizon thenbecomes what I will call a surround, a form ofenclosure without a wall or gate. The surround iswithout an opening. It is an infinity ofhomogeneous space and time. It is an“everywhere at the same time” and a “nowhereelse.” One can go here or there in the surroundbut it really makes no difference because thereare no meaningful distinctions left to orient05.22.12 / 03:14:25 EDT05.22.12 / 01:41:10 EDT

oneself – to determine where one goes or whatone believes or holds true. To paraphraseNietzsche, there is no shepherd or herd in thesurround. Everyone wants the same becausethey are the same. Even the hope of themadhouse, as the place where difference isinterned, is lost because difference no longerexists. 8But when I say “the human in the surround,”I misspeak. When humankind finally reaches thehorizon it has been producing through the battlefor recognition, the thing that emerges is not thesame thing that had created it. What haddistinguished humans from nonhuman animalschanges. The thing that inhabits the surround isnot an animal. But it is also not human. The LastMan is the end of Man. The surround is inhabitedby what Agamben calls a “nonhuman human,”something that seems quite similar to thecontemporary televisual obsession with theundead – a kind of being which is deceased andyet behaves as if it were alive. Kojève and hisstudents understood this. In losing the horizon ofdesire, man became a kind of post-man. Whenthe wall falls and the horizon collapses, manreceives the package he had sent himself whenfirst starting out on his journey. But the recipientis as foreign to the human who sent the packageas the human was from the animal.In debating what was the sensuous andaffective nature of the last man left in history’swake, Kojève and his students demonstratedhow thoroughly they themselves had becomedominated by their own dominant image. Kojèvedescribed the affect of the Last Man assatisfaction, which he distinguished absolutelyfrom enjoyment. Raymond Queneau tried tocapture the existential state of satisfaction in hisnovels, and Georges Bataille attempted to findsome way of intensifying life in the surround ofsatisfaction through blood and sacrifice, entrailsand excrement. But rather than determining thesensuous affect of this state of being in thesurround, Kojève, his bureaucratic colleagues,and his students used theory, literature, andbureaucratic practice to materialize the image asa circuitry connecting institutions, significations,and affects in such a way that they producehopes and expectations, disappointments andrage – and perhaps most important of all for acritical politics – senses of justice and the good.And lest we think our political imaginaries havetranscended this image, we can turn to LeeEdelman’s scathing critique of the film Childrenof Men, which assumes that without the futureas a horizon of being, figured in the promissorynote of the child, all pleasure and drive wouldcollapse like so much air in a punctured balloon. 9And here I think we can see how a dominantimage of human history, and human political04/09e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Elizabeth A. PovinelliAfter the Last Man: Images and Ethics of Becoming Otherwiseintensification in particular, has come todominate human becoming. It does not matterwhether the horizon is out there in a reachable orunreachable form. It does not matter whetherthe horizon is there before we start our journeyor is constituted from the activity of walking. Itdoes not matter whether the horizon is figured asa wall, a frontier, a checkpoint, or a fence. Thehuman production of an image of humanbecoming and being as a future in which a limit –or condition – has been achieved has led to areduction of our capacity to imagine alternativeimages of human becoming. While we might notagree with Rancière’s aesthetic periodizations,his understanding of the politics of aesthetics asthe entanglements of power and visibility and ofsensuous embodiment, of affects and energies,is right. Images of history have a habituatedfeeling to them.The habituated affects of the image of ahorizon were on full display in two materialcollapses that occurred decades after the fall ofthe Berlin Wall. Dominated by the image of thehorizon of history, what wonder then that 9/11and 2008 were exciting, not merely dangerous,moments? Perhaps history had not ended,perhaps a limit, a front, a back, a horizon, and aborder had miraculously appeared in the “clashof civilizations” and the crash of the financialmarkets, and with them an opening, a gate, adirection, a movement of becoming. Perhapsuniversal recognition either had not arrived in theform of Western democracy, or this system had aradical new context in which to unfurl its form,meaning, and legitimacy. Maybe we were not in asurround but were instead surrounded bysomething that could be overcome. Maybesomething could still be done. Note how thesequestions do not disturb the political imaginaryof recognition so much as they merely change itsclock.Events since 9/11 and 2008 have notsupported this hope. Being remains enclosed, ifnot by a political form of government(democracy), then by an economic form ofcompulsion. Celebrations of democratic springacross the Arab world were soon followed by theinstallation of technocratic rulers in Italy andGreece, with global pundits celebrating theability to bypass the democratic function. And inChina, the supposed inevitable conjoint of liberalmarket and government remains a recedinghorizon as the country’s economic power seemsceaselessly to expand. Rather than neoliberalfinance unveiling its internal limits in a globalmarket, democracy has all but given waythroughout Europe and has never seemed to beneeded in China. If democracy is the back ofhistory, there seems to be no front to neoliberalbeing. How do we think about the sources of thesupposedly the work of a global secretgovernment that had even orchestrated theOklahoma City bombing as a pretext to crackdown on Patriot groups. Richard Abanesassessed the movement shortly thereafter:This loosely knit network of perhaps 5 to 12million people may be one of the most diversemovements our nation has ever seen. Within itsranks are college students, the unemployed,farmers, manual laborers, professionals, lawenforcement personnel and members of themilitary….Interesting, patriots have no singleleader. The glue binding them together is anoxious compound of four ingredients: (1)anobsessive suspicion of the government; (2) beliefin anti-government conspiracies; (3) a deepseatedhatred for government officials; and (4) afeeling that the United States Constitution…hasbeen discarded by Washington bureaucrats. 82Reporters have described the militia trendas paranoid. It is largely an expression of middleclassrage – not of the broad middle class itself,only a tiny, disaffected extreme. Since the onsetof the Reagan Revolution, .5 percent of thepopulation has consolidated its hold over almost40 percent of total national assets. With the gapbetween rich and poor turning into a gulf, themiddle class has seen its incomes shrink and itsprospects for a higher standard of livingdisappear. It is further enraged by economicagreements such as the North American FreeTrade Agreement (NAFTA), the GeneralAgreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and theMexican “bailout.” It views gun control andenvironmental restrictions as government“meddling” in their private affairs. Many militiamembers are “weekend warriors” who simplyenjoy dressing up and marching around; others,of course, fully intend to use their weapons. 83Robert DePugh’s Minutemen, formed in theearly 1960s, were the first contemporary,paramilitary group. Nonetheless, it was RubyRidge which gave birth to a national militiamovement. During the standoff, sympathizersand local citizens had gathered outside theWeaver property to protest the government’shandling of the case. The resulting negotiationsthrew Bo Gritz into the limelight; after theWeaver incident, his Specially PreparedIndividuals for Key Events (SPIKE) program tookon a bigger role in training militia groups.Meanwhile, Louis Beam introduced the idea ofleaderless resistance at the Rocky MountainRendezvous in Colorado. Beam argued that thepatriot movement imitate “the communists”; itshould discard traditional, military “pyramidstructure” in favor of small, independent cells,impervious to infiltration by federal agents. 84Other protesters formed the United Citizens forJustice in October 1992 to protect citizens from16/20e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 John MillerPolitics of Hate in the USA, Part III: Posse Comitatus, Grassroots Rebellion, and Secret Societies“overzealous government.” That organizationsoon fizzled, but one member, Randy Trochmann,moved back to Noxon, Montana to form theMilitia of Montana (MOM) with his father, Dave,and his uncle, John. The Trochmanns all have tiesto Christian Identity. Unlike other militia groups,MOM concentrates on publishing training andpropaganda material. 85 Its titles include theM.O.D. Manual (a home guide to guerilla warfare),The Road Back (reclaiming America from the NewWorld Order) and the instructional video Invasionand Betrayal (a survey of New World Orderconspiracies). MOM members have had armedencounters with local police, but their primarysignificancy has been to spread the “militiagospel.” 86The Michigan Militia, founded by NormanOlson and Ray Southwell, is one of themovement’s best known. Six months after it wasfounded in 1994, brigades had sprung up in sixtythreeof the state’s eighty-three counties.National attention focused on the MichiganMilitia when investigators learned that suspectsin the Oklahoma City bombing may haveattended the group’s meetings. University ofMichigan janitor Mark Koernke (“Mark fromMichigan”) is the militia’s chief propagandist. Heinveighs against the Federal ManagementAgency (FEMA) as a wing of the “shadowgovernment” and has produced a two-hour videoAmerica in Peril: a Call to Arms that outlines thewhole gamut of current conspiracy theories. Inkeeping with “need to know” tactics, most othermilitia groups prefer to operate in relativesecrecy. Daniel Junas described how militiaideology differs from region to region in CovertAction Quarterly:the militias vary in membership andideology. In the East, they appear closer to theJohn Birch Society. In New Hampshire, forexample, the 15-member Constitution DefenseMilitia reportedly embraces garden variety U.N.conspiracy fantasies and lobbies against guncontrol measures. In the Midwest, some militiashave close ties to the Christian right, particularlythe radical wing of the anti-abortion movement.In Wisconsin, Matthew Trewhella, leader ofMissionaries to the Preborn, has organizedparamilitary training sessions for his churchmembers. 87Claiming that the New World Order controls50 percent of the United States, USRepresentative Helen Chenoweth (Idaho) haslent official credence to such otherwise crackpottheories. In line with so-called Wise Use doctrineshe also declared “spiritual war” onenvironmentalism and introduced a bill requiringall arms-bearing federal agents to obtainpermission from local sheriffs before entering astate. 88 Tactical anti-environmentalism began in05.22.12 / 01:41:10 EDT05.22.12 / 03:14:25 EDT

Turner Diaries, the bomb consisted of ammoniumnitrate fertilizer and fuel oil; the target was abuilding used by the FBI. One Aryan Nationsgroup had already targeted the Murrah buildingin 1983. A key member of that group, in fact, wasRichard Wayne Snell, executed in Arkansas onthe very day of the 1995 bombing. 76 Before hisdeath, Snell warned, “Look over your shoulder,justice is coming!” 77U.S. Air Force personnel from alongside civilian firefighters to removerubble from the explosion site of the Federal Building in OklahomaCity.Shortly after the bombing, a state trooperstopped a yellow Mercury sixty miles outsideOklahoma City to check a missing license plate.He arrested the driver after finding a Glocksemiautomatic pistol and a five-inch huntingknife inside the car. The driver turned out to beTimothy McVeigh, a twenty-seven-year-oldveteran who had received a Bronze Star inoperation Desert Storm. With an identificationnumber from a mangled axle found in thewreckage, investigators soon linked McVeigh tothe bombing. They traced the axle to a Rydertruck from Elliott’s Body Shop in Junction City,Kansas. Shop owner Eldon Elliott identifiedMcVeigh as the man who had rented the truck onApril 17. The FBI found McVeigh’s fingerprints onfertilizer receipts as well. Other evidencesuggested that the brothers James and TerryNichols may have been involved as well. Once inpolice custody, McVeigh said little, conductinghimself like a prisoner of war. 78The radical right, in fact, had earmarkedApril 19 as a symbolic date. The Militia ofMontana (MOM) called for a “national militiaday” to commemorate not only Snell’s executionbut also the Waco tragedy. 79 Telephone recordsshow that McVeigh called William Pierce’sunlisted telephone number in West Virginia oneweek before the bombing. 80McVeigh went to trial on April 24, 1997 inDenver, Colorado. Michael and Lori Fortier, the15/20e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 John MillerPolitics of Hate in the USA, Part III: Posse Comitatus, Grassroots Rebellion, and Secret Societiesprosecution’s chief witnesses, recounted howMcVeigh had diagrammed his plan on theirkitchen floor with soup cans six months beforethe bombing. On June 3 the jury found McVeighguilty of conspiracy, two bombing charges andeight counts of murder for the federal agentskilled in the blast. During the penalty phase ofthe trial, McVeigh’s defense team changed itstactics. Instead of insisting on McVeigh’sinnocence, they stressed his outrage at the Wacomassacre, as a justification for taking 168 lives.Morris Dees, however, disputes the far right’sputative “eye for an eye” logic:The fact that lives were lost during both theWaco debacle and the Weaver incident does notmake those tragedies morally equivalent to theOklahoma City bombing as the militias havesuggested. Viewing the Waco incident from theperspective of the government’s complicity, thedeaths were by accident. Viewing the OklahomaCity disaster from the perspective of thebomber’s responsibility, the deaths were bydesign. And even if one were to buy thethoroughly discredited militia line that thegovernment started the blaze that engulfed theDavidians, a crucial distinction would stillremain. The FBI pleaded with Koresh and theDavidians to come out of their compound forfifty-one days. The Oklahoma City bombersstruck without warning. 81McVeigh received the death penalty on June13. He remained stoic as he heard the verdictand, leaving the courtroom, flashed the “victorysign” to his family. He was executed on June 11,2001. Terry Nichols went to federal trial onSeptember 29, 1997. Unlike McVeigh whoreceived a sentence of life imprisonment afterthe jury deadlocked on the death penalty. Forthis reason, Nichols was tried again by the stateof Oklahoma – which had declined to prosecuteMcVeigh – in 2004. That jury also balked duringthe death penalty phase and, for 161 counts ofmurder, Nichols received an equal number ofconsecutive life sentences without possibility ofparole.The Militia MovementBefore the Oklahoma City bombing, fewAmericans knew of the militia movement.Suddenly, Ted Koppel’s Nightline, The New YorkTimes, The Washington Post and Time magazineall featured stories about it. For the first time,the mainstream public heard eccentric figuresclad in camouflage gear warn of blackhelicopters, an invading strike force of NepaleseGurkhas, secret tracking devices installed intheir car ignitions, and the construction ofmassive crematoria in Minneapolis, Indianapolis,Kansas City and Oklahoma City. All of this waspolitical otherwise when being seems trapped inan enclosure rather than having a front or aback? Where are the sensuous modes ofbecoming within the global circulations of beingthat have defined modern politics and markets, ifnot in a horizon?2.For some time now scholars have been thinkingabout the concept of circulation in relationshipto the making and extinguishing of social worlds.Why do some forms move or get moved along?What are the formal/figurative demands placedon forms as the condition of their circulation inand across social space? What are thematerialities of form that emerge from, andbrace, these movements, and that make “things”palpable and recognizable inside the contextsinto which they are inserted? And finally, how issocial space itself the effect of competing formsand formations of circulation?Given the profound influence of myindigenous colleagues and friends on mythinking, it is no surprise that the dominantimage of circulation I have is of a stringbag, orwargarthi in Emiyenggel, an indigenous languageof the northwest coast of Australia. A stringbagis formed through a reflexive, dense to semidenseweave. It is capable of dynamic expansionand contraction and has a load-sensitiveshaping. The stringbag has a formal mouth butthe body is composed of openings that cananchor new weavings or ensnare objects. (Thesame basic weave and technology is used tomake fishnets.) And, depending on their materialcomposition, these bags are likely to decomposein different ways under different conditions. Inother words, the stringbag is a mode ofcirculation insofar as it is a reflexive form withfigurative material force that constitutes andobligates everything in and between it, and yet itis shaped by that which it tries to contain andcan be reshaped by tying new strings andanchors into its body. It is the stringbag I see inTomas Saraceno’s architectural environmentsand Mark Lombardi’s drawings of the socialnetworks that compose modern power.But bags are only experienced as bags – assomething capable of holding something else –when the things that fit into them fit in a more orless compatible way. Thus we might think of thefunctionality of bags as dependent on the thingsthat will enter them. But what if we thought ofembagination as the process by which thingsthemselves come into being and then come tohave a residence, a domicile? What if theformations of a specific form of reflexivemovement were the conditions in which new lifeforms emerged and found domicile – though at05/09e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Elizabeth A. PovinelliAfter the Last Man: Images and Ethics of Becoming Otherwisethe price of extinguishing other forms?In his Playing and Reality, the Britishpsychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott describes thecase of a young boy of seven who had “becomeobsessed with everything to do with string.” 10Not string per se, but what string seemed toallow him to overcome – the separation ofobjects due to a diminution of the forces that hadpreviously held them together. Whenever hisparents would enter a room, “they were liable tofind that he had joined together chairs andtables; and they might find a cushion, forinstance, with string joining it to the fireplace.”The parents only became disturbed, rather thansimply bemused, when a “new feature” of histethering practices emerged. “He had recentlytied a string around his sister’s neck.” 11For Winnicott, these elaborate webs were“transitional objects” that manifested the youngboy’s denial of maternal separation. 12 His patientused string to reintegrate material that was onthe threshold of disintegration and to confine theforces responsible for the disintegration. Thusthe string tied around his baby sister, the objectthat posed the first serious threat to his bondwith his mother. 13Winnicott first became aware of the psychicside of the boy’s obsession during a “squigglegame.” In his work with children, Winnicott woulddraw a squiggle and ask the child to completethe drawing. In the represented space ofWinnicott’s notebook, the young boy’s creationslooked like webs, but in the lived space of theboy’s home the webs were more like badlyconstructed bags. He embagged space as hewove together new object forms anddependencies, hoping to save a world he hadalready lost. In the process he conditioned howthings could move in and through this new world;how things – such as himself – could be held init; and whether things – such as himself or hissister – could exist in it. What resulted wasneither what had been nor what currently was.Nothing he did could undo the damage done bythe arrival of his sister. But in trying, the boycreated new habitations, new ways of being held.He did not mean to do this, but his refusal was acreative act. It provided an environment foralternative possibilities of life. Cushions were nolonger able to be manipulated, visibly or tangibly,independent of the fireplace. The fireplace nowhad the cushions as one of its internal organs.The cushions had the bricks. Winnicott’s job wasto normalize these possible trajectories –impose on them the proper image ofsingularities, difference, and development.The thresholds of being and separation thatthe boy saw and the new thresholds of being hecreated are the same thresholds that manyadults come to forget, repress, or attempt to05.22.12 / 03:14:25 EDT05.22.12 / 01:41:10 EDT

Yayoi Kusama, The Passing Winter (detail), 2005. Photo: Tate Photography.06/09visited Israel where he claimed to have avisitation from God who instructed him to studyand to teach the prophecy of the Seven Sealsfrom the Book of Revelations. During the sameperiod, he also claims God told him to create a“House of David,” in which many wives wouldbear his children. His offspring would becomethe rulers of a new, purer world. Although theDavidians were apocalypticists, they were notracists like Christian Identity adherents; thecongregation was racially and ethnically diverse.After his mother’s death, George Rodenchallenged Howell’s leadership of the new group.He went so far as to dig up a coffin at MountVernon, daring Howell to raise the corpse insidefrom the dead. A gunfight resulted after Howellsnuck onto the property to photograph the coffin.US District Judge Walter A. Smith sentencedRoden to six months in jail after Roden hadthreatened to infect him with herpes and AIDs.With Roden out of the way, Howell urged thecountry to put a lien on Mount Carmel for sixteenyears of unpaid back taxes. By paying these off,Howell legally regained possession of MountCarmel on March 22, 1988. In 1990 he changedhis name to David Koresh, after the OldTestament King David and Cyrus, the Persianking who freed the Jews in Babylon. 69When Koresh declared in 1989 that God hadcommanded him to take the sect’s marriedwomen as his wives, follower Marc Breaultbecame angry and left the group. In a 1990affidavit he described Koresh as “power-hungryand abusive, bent on obtaining and exercisingabsolute power and authority over the group.” Hetook up the role of “a cult buster” andencouraged over a dozen Davidians to signaffidavits against Koresh. The charges includedstatutory rape, tax fraud, immigration violations,illegal weapons possession and child abuse. In1991 Breault informed David Jewell that hisyoung daughter Kiri would soon be eligible tobecome one of Koresh’s many wives. Jewell suedfor custody in January 1992 and Jewell’sestranged wife surrendered the childvoluntarily. 70 In October of that year a WacoHerald-Tribune reporter contacted Assistant US.Attorney Bill Johnson about an exposé he waswriting about Koresh, called “The SinfulMessiah.” It would detail the Davidian’s allegedchild abuse and arms buildup. 71The BATF felt pressured to take action atWaco. On one hand, Jewell and the local mediahad raised charges of child abuse within thecompound; on the other, due to charges ofinefficiency, racism and sexism – not to mentionthe Ruby Ridge debacle, the BATF faced possiblebudget cuts and reorganization. Clear anddecisive action at Waco might clear up bothproblems at once. Instead what resulted was a14/20e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 John MillerPolitics of Hate in the USA, Part III: Posse Comitatus, Grassroots Rebellion, and Secret Societiesfifty-one-day siege that cost the lives of fourBATF agents and that culminated in the deathseventy-six Branch Davidians. As in the RubyRidge incident, the FBI failed to follow standardagency rules of engagement. Instead, afterDavidians shot one marshal, agents receivedorders to shoot on sight. Reports suggest thatalthough the Davidians were heavily armed, theywould have complied with regularly servedsearch warrants – as they indeed had done in thepast. By beginning with a siege, the FBI and theBATF may have unnecessarily escalated theentire confrontation. FBI Director Louis J. Freehlater suspended Larry Potts and reprimandeddozens of other federal employees for thebotched standoff at Ruby Ridge. 72 Potts hadoverseen both Ruby Ridge and Waco. After thisoutcome, popular resentment ran deep. In afund-raising letter, the otherwise mainstreamNRA characterized BATF agents as “jack-bootedgovernment thugs” who wear “Nazi buckethelmets and black storm trooper uniforms.” Thatletter caused President George Bush to resignhis NRA membership, stating, “Your broadsideagainst federal agents deeply offends my ownsense of decency and honor, and it offends myconcept of service to my country.” 73 In responseto both Waco and Ruby Ridge, in October 1995Janet Reno set forth new rules of engagementprocedures for all federal law enforcement.These directives restrict the use of deadly forceto a last resort and prohibit changes, even underextenuating circumstances. 74Right-wing propagandists were quick toexploit Waco – notably Linda Thompson. Callingherself “Assistant to the US CommandingGeneral NATO” with a “Cosmic Top Secret/AtomalSecurity Clearance,” Thompson produced aninaccurate and misleading two-volume video seton the massacre called “Waco: the Big Lie.” 75Ironically, because of “race mixing” many ofThompson’s supporters would have otherwisetargeted the Davidians themselves. Whitesupremacist Timothy McVeigh nonetheless usedWaco to justify the Oklahoma City bombing.Oklahoma CityOn April 19, 1995, a truck bomb exploded atOklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah FederalBuilding, killing 168 people and wounding about500 others. As for loss of life and sheerdestruction, this was by far the worst terroristaction in US history to date. Nineteen of thevictims were children, most from the building’sday care center. In the wake of the World TradeCenter bombing, the Clinton administration wasquick to blame Arab terrorists, but then had toretract this accusation as it became clear theperpetrators were, after all, American. As in The05.22.12 / 01:41:10 EDT05.22.12 / 03:14:24 EDT

trapped inside and began to protest theparamilitary assault. Finally, Weaver agreed tosurrender only after another former Green Beret,Bo Gritz, and a local Baptist minister, ChuckSandelin, assured him that he and his familywould go unharmed. 58About one month later, Randy Trochmann,Chris Temple (publisher of a Christian Identitynewspaper, The Jubilee) and several others whostood vigil during the siege formed a group calledUnited Citizens for Justice. They proposed toexpose government abuse of power and to formchapters in every state to protect fellow“patriots.” The organization, however, fell apartafter only a few months. 59 Another, moreominous organizing effort followed. Thismeeting, called “the Rocky MountainRendezvous,” took place on October 22 at EstesPark, Colorado. Besides Trochmann and Temple,Louis Beam, Richard Butler and other prominentmembers of the patriot movement attended. 60Their purpose was to mobilize the far right in thewake of Ruby Ridge. To do so, they decided tofocus on anti-government sentiment and todownplay racism, which had been too divisive. Asthey re-prioritized Jews and blacks as“secondary” enemies, euphemisms replacedracist epithets in movement propaganda. In this,they took their cue from David Duke’s successfulcampaign for the Louisiana legislature. Identitypastor Pete Peters observed:Men came together who in the past wouldnormally not be caught together under the sameroof, who greatly disagree with each other onmany theological and philosophical points,whose teaching contradicts each other in manyways. 61All agreed that they must take extrememeasures to check the tyranny of the federalgovernment. Beam stated:When they come for you, the federals willnot ask if you are a Constitutionalist, a Baptist,Church of Christ, Identity covenant believer,Klansman, Nazi, home schooler, Freeman, NewTestament believer, [or] fundamentalist….thosewho wear badges, black boots, and carryautomatic weapons, and kick in doors alreadyknow all they need to know about you. You arethe enemy of the state. 62They concluded that small, unorganizedarmies would be the most effectivecountermeasure. Thus, the contemporary militiamovement was born. As Morris Dees notes, “AtEstes Park, the movement changed from adisparate, fragmented group of pesky – and attimes dangerous – gadflies to a serious armedpolitical challenge to the state itself.” 63Ron Howen later tried to prosecute Weaverand Harris. The jury, however, in what The NewYork Times called “a strong rebuke of force13/20e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 John MillerPolitics of Hate in the USA, Part III: Posse Comitatus, Grassroots Rebellion, and Secret Societiesduring an armed siege,” acquitted the two of allthe serious charges: murder, conspiracy andaiding and abetting. They found Weaver guiltyonly of failing to appear in court and violating theterms of his bail. 64 The Weaver family and KevinHarris later filed a wrongful death and civil rightslawsuit against the federal government. OnAugust 16, 1995, Attorney General Janet Renoannounced that the Justice Department hadreached a $3.1 million settlement with theWeavers. Yet the government, as customary insuch cases, admitted no wrongdoing. 65 Under agovernment probe, however, E. Michael Kahoe,who supervised the siege for the FBI, admittedshredding documents detailing the shoot-to-killorders. 66 Clearly the FBI and the BATF, under theClinton administration, had overstepped theirauthority to such an extent that extremistwarnings of a nascent police state began toseem credible. Tactically, the encounterfurnished the far right with invaluablepropaganda. Even so, just as the Weaver casewas being tried, the BATF blundered again – witheven more horrible consequences.WacoOn April 19, 1993, the FBI and the BATFlaunched a concerted, paramilitary assault on aheavily armed and fortified compound in Waco,Texas. They used gas, tanks, and helicopters toincinerate and destroy a complex that belongedto the Branch Davidian religious group and hadbeen under siege for 51 days. When thegovernment ended the siege, they had killedBranch Davidian leader David Koresh andseventy-five of his followers. Of these, all butnineteen were women and children. 67Branch Davidians grew out of VictorHouteff’s Shepherd’s Rod Church in the 1960s.Shepherd’s Rod was a Seventh Day Adventistchurch; Adventists believe in the “SecondComing” of Jesus, which entails the fiery,apocalyptic destruction of the earth from whichonly true believers will be spared. After herhusband and Branch Davidian founder, BenRoden, died in 1978, Lois Roden became the newprophet, pronouncing that the Holy Spirit wasfemale. 68David Koresh was born as Vernon WayneHowell on August 17, 1959. He joined theDavidians in 1981, moving to the Mount CarmelCenter. Howell became popular with the otherDavidians and by 1984 began to emerge as thesect’s new spiritual leader. This led to a disputewith Lois Roden’s son George who ejected Howellfrom Mount Carmel. Many other Davidiansfollowed him and set up a community on rentalproperty in Palestine, Texas. In 1985 Howelldestroy – or perhaps they give them a clinicaldiagnostic such as the persistent denial ofreality. Adults accept a given assemblage asnatural to the world, and experience thisassemblage as a pre-existing collection ofobjects and subjects independent of theembagged space that has created it. As such, itis little wonder that many adults see theseobject/subjects as the anchor around whichother things are tied. But the boy had anintuition, or an irritation, that the cushion andfireplace were not there first, nor the string after,but are themselves effects of a kind of tetheringwhose conditions he does not understand andwhose immanent undoing he is equally at a lossto explain. The boy knows that the world he hasinhabited – which has securely held him – will nolonger be habitable if the underlying wovenpattern takes on a new form. So he uses string asa form of communication in an older sense ofintercourse – a reflexive form with figurativeforce that mutually constitutes and obligateseverything in and between it. His sister probablyexperienced this intercourse as a kind ofstranglehold. But the boy finds himself in a bind.From his perspective, her arrival has created anew circuit of care that is suffocating him. Heknows it takes force to hold something in place.The boy sees his options as either to strangle orbe suffocated.Winnicott may have thought his youngpatient was using his strings to slowly reconcilehimself to the natural progression of maturation.But the young boy intuited that demandingenvironments are not held in place by the naturalorder of things. They are historical arrangements(agencements) that depend on a host ofhistorically formed interlocking concepts,materials, and forces that include human andnonhuman agencies and concepts. Because weare merely one mode of being in one location ofbeing, we cannot and will never be able tounderstand or explain the conditions that makeup our world or what causes its immanentundoing. Thus, as we try to secure it – or toremake it – we create and extinguish. And, likethis young boy, the reflexive movements shapingspace nonetheless have a figurative force. Ourspaces sag, impede, irritate, or scare others.In other words, in trying to secure or disturba world, we also do two additional things. On theone hand, we mark the itinerary of our desire asan obligation to something rather than a battlefor recognition for something, as a compositionand decomposition, but without the dominatingimage of a horizon. On the other hand, weextinguish one world in the very act of trying tokeep another world in place, to return to thisplace, or to create new places. And this secondpoint is crucial: the topologies we compose to07/09e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Elizabeth A. PovinelliAfter the Last Man: Images and Ethics of Becoming Otherwisehold and give domicile always have the figure ofthe sister as their ethical counterpoint.3.Since the late 1960s a number of images havechallenged the dominance of the dialecticalhorizon – especially Deleuze’s image of the foldand Guattari’s image of the rhizome. Deleuze sawthe image of the fold as combating a model ofsubjectivity and being that contrasted forms ofinteriority and exteriority, or placed them indialectical tension. For Deleuze, the interior ofbeing does not come up to an edge, border, orfrontier that defines what is outside itself.Rather, interiority is itself complexly composedof “forces of the outside.” All interiority can beunderstood as extimite (“extimité”), a term Lacancoined in order to describe the intimateexterior. 14 Deleuze extends the concept of theextimite outside human subjectivity, making it ageneral condition of all entities. In other words,at the heart of an assemblage – the subjectobjectsthat the parents of Winnicott’s patientassumed to preexist their child’s string play, orthe subject-objects that will emerge from it – isthis folding of the external into the intimateinternal. In some way the rhizome simplyprovides an organic foundation to, andelaboration of, the image of the fold.Unlike arboreal images, a rhizome can besevered and yet still be productive. But mostimportantly for Deleuze and Guattari, therhizome represents radical potentiality existingon the plane of pure immanence. “Unlike thegraphic arts, drawing, or photography, unliketracings, the rhizome pertains to a map thatmust be produced, constructed, a map that isalways detachable, connectable, reversible,modifiable, and has multiple entranceways andexits and its own lines of flight.” 15 There is nohorizon simultaneously within the rhizome andtowards which it inexorably moves.Insofar as this image conjures the hope fora radical potentiality that exists on the plane ofpure immanence, it is in line with Deleuze’s longengagement with Spinoza – more specifically,his reworking of Spinoza’s concepts of conatusand affectus. Deleuze is not the only one who hasreevaluated these key concepts of Spinoza.Weaving together the writings of Deleuze andIrigaray, Rosie Braidotti has noted the “implicitpositivity” of the “notion of desire as conatus,”and through it a new form of politics. 16 ForDeleuze and Guattari, this implicit positivitydwells not merely in all actual things, but also inall potential things – the body with organs andthe body-without-organs within every organicarrangement. 17 And in his effort to develop apositive form of biopower, Roberto Esposito hasrecently linked Spinoza’s notion of conatus to his05.22.12 / 03:14:24 EDT05.22.12 / 01:41:10 EDT

claim in the Political Treatise that “every naturalthing has as much right from Nature as it haspower to exist and to act.” 18It is exactly here that the image of the foldand rhizome have lost their political nerve andwe return to our little boy madly tying togethervarious pieces of his domicile in a perhapsdesperate attempt to return it to its previousform and in that form find a dwelling. Note thatEsposito places the emphasis on “the intrinsicmodality that life assumes in the expression ofits own unrestrainable power to exist” ratherthan on what might be a more Nietzscheanreading, namely, the relative power that restrainsthe existence and actions of variousbioformations in a given field of often opposingstriving actors (actants). 19 What if one strivingpotentiating meets and opposes another? Canprogressive politics avoid this question – andthus the problem of extinguishment? How wouldthe sign “progressive” read if it were understoodas always actively maintaining, producing, andextinguishing worlds? In its refusal of therepressive hypothesis, how has progressivepolitics avoided the politics of its own practice’sextinguishment, and in avoiding these politics,lost its ethical depth?The problem is especially acute if we do notreturn to the image of the horizon already withinus that nonetheless necessitates a building. Thisimage of the horizon elevates intotranscendental truth a kind of affect (acombative desire for the desire of the other), aform of life (universal recognition), and a shapeof governance (liberal democracy). All isadjudicated from the perspective of thesecardinal measures. The fold and rhizome weremeant as a politics and ethics grounded onradical immanence – the becoming community –in which “immanence is no longer immanence toanything other than itself.” 20 Pure immanence isa life – not to life or the life. All forms of life areimmanent in this sense and all life is a form oflife. This is what Winnicott’s patient intuited anddesired: a life, not life. But his sister sat to oneside. From her side of the room, his attempt topotentiate a life threatened her own, or moreprecisely, the form of life that was her life at thatpoint. How much more intense might theconflicting embaginations be when the life thatis a life is more fully formed, elaborated, selfaware?When the girl is the boy become a man?When the seedling is the plant that becomes therainforest that my friend dreams of finding amida growing web of deforestation frommultinational mining?What are the ethical grounds of theseconflicting forces of embagination against abackground of finitude that is withouttranscendental value? In my previous essay on08/09e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Elizabeth A. PovinelliAfter the Last Man: Images and Ethics of Becoming Otherwiseroutes and worlds I tried to suggest how thematerial heterogeneity within any one sphere,and passing between any two spheres, allowsnew worlds to emerge and new networks to beadded. This heterogeneity emerges in partbecause of the excesses and deficits arisingfrom incommensurate and often competinginterests within any given social space. But theseheterogeneities and their “interests” pressmateriality toward different fabricated futures.How can we imagine pure immanence andradical potentiality without becoming blind tothe extinguishments of forms of life that everyactual world entails?×the house itself for fear of being seen. Onemarshal threw pebbles near the cabin to distractWeaver’s dog. It started barking. Weaver, hisfourteen-year-old son Sammy and a friend, KevinHarris, grabbed their guns, thinking the retrieverhad found game. They followed him as he chasedthe marshals. Randy Weaver split from theothers and, spotting a figure in camouflage gear,shouted a warning and ran back to the cabin. Asthe others began to follow, Marshal Art Roderickshot the dog. Sammy Weaver shot back. Then hecontinued running. After another burst of gunfirefrom the concealed marshals, Sammy Weaverfell to the ground dead, shot in the back. Harrisreturned fire. That exchange left veteranMarshall William Degan dead. It remainsunproven exactly who shot whom in thisexchange, but clearly Ron Howen hadprematurely authorized use of excessive force toarrest Randy Weaver. 55The remaining five officers immediatelycontacted the US Marshals Service inWashington, DC, which in turn called in theFederal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBImobilized its crack Hostage Rescue Team,headed by Richard Rogers. It brought in agentsfrom around the country. By the day’s end, Idahogovernor Cecil Andrus had called a state ofTea Party in Washington D.C..12/20emergency, by that authorizing the use of boththe National Guard and state militias to captureWeaver. The next day, about four hundred militaryand police specialists had converged on RubyRidge with a helicopter, “humvees” (a militaryvehicle used in “Desert Storm”), armoredtransport and personnel carriers, andcommunications equipment. This forceblockaded the Weaver’s property. Rogers haddrawn up special “Rules of Engagement” for theoperation, authorizing agents to shoot any adultscarrying weapons on sight. 56About 6:00 p.m. that day, Weaver finallydecided to venture out to reexamine his deadson, whom he had carried to a small shed nearthe cabin. Harris and Weaver’s daughter Sarahcame with him. As he tried to enter the shed, abullet ripped through the soft flesh under hisarm. All three ran back to the cabin. Vicki,Weaver’s wife, held open the door, a baby in herarms. As they raced inside, a federalsharpshooter’s bullet passed through VickiWeaver’s head, killing her instantly and severelywounding Harris. 57 Fearing for their lives, Harrisand the remaining Weavers refused to go outsidefor the next nine days. During this time Harris’scondition grew critical. By the barricades, ahundred local residents kept a vigil for those05.22.12 / 01:41:10 EDT05.22.12 / 03:14:24 EDT

Knowing things were at an end, Mathews drafteda declaration of war on ZOG and an AryanDeclaration of Independence, which newspapersin every state were to receive. The BrudersSchweigen would no longer remain underground.The end, however, was nearer than Mathewscould have ever known. On December 4, the FBIreceived an anonymous tip that Mathews and adozen others had gone to Whidbey. AlanWhitaker, special agent-in-command at theSeattle FBI office, quickly assembled SWATteams, a Hostage Rescue Team and reserveagents. By Friday, December 7, he deployed themaround the Order’s three safe houses andevacuated nearby local residents. In the firsthouse Randy Duey gave up without a fight. Next,counterfeiting expert Richard Merki surrenderedwith his wife Sharon and an older woman, IdaBauman. Merki had taken care to burn as muchevidence as possible before giving up.Meanwhile, in the third house Mathews refusedto respond to negotiators. The FBI then broughtin Duey and Merki who urged him to surrender.Mathews, however, demanded that Idaho,Washington and Montana be set aside as anAryan homeland before he would talk.Meanwhile, his partner, Ian Stewart, gave up, butrefused to confirm whether Mathews still hadwomen or children inside with him. Next SWATteams forced their way in, but Mathews sprayedthem with machine-gun fire from above, shootingthrough the floorboards. They retreated. Thefollowing day the FBI brought a helicopter tohover above the house; Mathews sprayed itthrough the roof. At 6:30 p.m., the FBI commandpost issued orders to lob M-79 Starburst flaresinto the besieged building. Within twentyminutes the house went up in a firestorm.Sunday morning, investigators, sifting throughthe debris, found Mathews’ charred remains nextto a blackened bathtub. 48The federal government’s case against theOrder had become the government’s biggestsince the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapedPatty Hearst. In the wake of Mathews’ death, thegroup itself dissipated, but its influence did not.Seattle US District Attorney Gene Wilson puttogether a massive racketeering case against theremaining members, consisting of sixty-sevenseparate counts. On April 12, 1985, a federalgrand jury indicted twenty-four members onracketeering and conspiracy. When the trialbegan that September, twelve pleaded guilty.Prosecutors convicted ten more that December30. After police captured Richard Scutari inMarch 1986, he too pleaded guilty. In spring1988, the government sued ten of the movementfor sedition, including the leaders Richard Butler,Bob Miles and Lois Beam. This jury, however,acquitted everyone. 49 After these events, William11/20e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 John MillerPolitics of Hate in the USA, Part III: Posse Comitatus, Grassroots Rebellion, and Secret SocietiesPierce declared that America was not yet readyto embrace the revolution he had outlined in TheTurner Diaries. He instead bought up enoughAmerican Telephone and Telegraph (ATT) stock toforce a corporate phase-out of ATT’s affirmativeaction policy. 50 Pierce’s renunciation of terrorism,however, was disingenuous, simply part of hisstrategy to separate the movement intounderground and aboveground wings.In the end, Robert Mathews succeeded inbecoming the kind of martyr figure that Piercedeemed necessary for a popular revolution.Gordon Kahl had come first, but he was a loneindividual. There had been other paramilitarygroups too, like the Covenant, the Sword and Armof the Lord (CSA) or Frazier Glenn Miller’sConfederate Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. 51 Yetthese functioned more like gangs of thugs, whileMathews’ Order quickly developed into, a modelterrorist cell. Although Mathews had even drawnrecruits from these other groups, he was the onewho managed to take them from talk to action.Ruby RidgeIn 1989 at an Aryan World Congressmeeting, a biker identifying himself as GusMagisono befriended former Green Beret RandyWeaver. Since his time in the military, Weaver hadadopted Christian Identity beliefs and moved hisfamily to an isolated cabin near Naples, Idaho.Overlooking Ruby Creek, the news media latercame to call this place Ruby Ridge.That fall, when Weaver was almost broke,Magisono encouraged him to sell sawed-offshotguns to right-wing militants. 52 After Weaversold his first two, “Magisono,” a.k.a. KennethFadeley, identified himself as a federal operativeand threatened to turn him in unless he agreed tospy on Aryan Nations meetings. The FBI hadpromised Fadeley a reward if Weaver eithercomplied or was arrested. In short, the USgovernment had entrapped Randy Weaver.Weaver, however, refused and warned AryanNations of the plan. 53 In turn, the federalgovernment indicted Weaver on firearms chargesin December of 1990 and arrested him thefollowing January. He posted a $10,000 bond andwas released. The BATF set a court date forFebruary 20 but sent Weaver a summons datedMarch 20. Six days before he thought he wassupposed to appear in court, Assistant USAttorney Ron Howen issued a warrant for hisarrest. 54 March 20, however, came and went;Weaver ignored the summons and stayed holedup in his cabin.August 21, 1992, six US marshals, part of aSWAT-like team called the Special OperationsGroup, surrounded the cabin on Weaver’sisolated twenty-acre property. They kept clear ofElizabeth A. Povinelli is Professor of Anthropology andGender Studies at Columbia University. Her workseeks to develop a critical theory of late liberalism.She is the author of four books, Labor's Lot (Chicago,1994); The Cunning of Recognition (Duke, 2002); TheEmpire of Love (Duke, 2006); and Economies ofAbandonment (Duke, 2011). She was formerly aGerman Transatlantic Program Fellow at the AmericanAcademy in Berlin and editor of the journal PublicCulture. She is currently completing on a graphicmemoir.09/09e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Elizabeth A. PovinelliAfter the Last Man: Images and Ethics of Becoming Otherwise1Jacques Rancière, The Politics ofAesthetics: The Distribution ofthe Sensible, trans. GabrielRockhill (London and New York:Continuum, 2004), 39.2See Elizabeth A. Povinelli,“Routes/Worlds,” e-flux journal27 (September2011), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/routesworlds/.3Francis Fukuyama, The End ofHistory and the Last Man (NewYork: Harper Perennial, 1993), xi.4Ibid., xi.5Alexandre Kojève, AnIntroduction to a Reading ofHegel: Lectures on thePhenomenology of Spirit, trans.James H. Nichols (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University press, 1980).6Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Manand Animal, trans. Kevin Attell(Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 2003).7After the Second World War,Kojève left his position at theÉcole Pratique des HautesÉtudes and took up a position inthe French Ministry of EconomicAffairs, where he was one of thechief ideologues for theEuropean Common Market, thebureaucratic predecessor of theEuropean Union. See DominiqueAuffret, Alexander Kojève, LaPhilosophie, l’état, la fin del’Histoire (Paris: Grasset, 1993).8Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus SpokeZarathustra, trans. Adrian DelCaro (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2006). GivenFukuyama’s mutual admirationof Kojève and Leo Strauss, it isimportant to note that these twodisagreed about the inherentdifference between philosophyand politics and the goal ofmutual recognition. See LeoStrauss, On Tyranny(Chicago:University of Chicago Press,2000).9Lee Edelman, No Future: QueerTheory and the Death Drive(Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 2004).1Donald W. Winnicott, Playing andReality (London: Routledge,1982), 17.11Ibid.12Donald W. Winnicott,“Transitional Objects andTransitionalPhenomena,” InternationalJournal of Psychoanalysis 34(1953): 89-97.13Playing and Reality, 19.14In an essay on the extimite,Jacques-Alain Miller describesthe intimate as parasitical onthe externality of the Other. SeeJacques-Alain Miller,“Extimity,” The Symptom 9(2008).15Gilles Deleuze and FelixGuattari, A Thousand Plateaus:Capitalism and Schizophrenia,trans. Brian Massumi(Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1987), 21.16Rosie Braidotti, Transpositions:On Nomadic Ethics (London:Polity Press, 2006), 150.17Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans.Sean Hand (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press,1988).18Roberto Esposito, Bios:Biopolitics and Philosophy,trans. Timothy Campbell(Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 2008), 185.19Ibid., 185-6.20Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence:Essays on A Life, trans AnneBoyman (New York: Zone Books,2001), 27.05.22.12 / 03:14:24 EDT05.22.12 / 01:41:10 EDT

Bilal KhbeizDubai: A CityManufacturedby Curiosity01/06e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Bilal KhbeizDubai: A City Manufactured by CuriosityIt is hard to distinguish individuals in a crowd.Citizens of the Gulf states appear to the visitoras crowds, with their identities as individualsmomentarily suspended. Such a crowd is slightlydifferent from the kind described by EliasCanetti. This is a crowd perceived as such by avisitor conscious of his individuality against themultitude. The crowd exerts no control over thisvisitor, nor does it repress his personality. Rather,this visitor exerts a form of authority – engagingin an exchange of power with the crowd. For him,the citizen is imprisoned within the crowd,incapable of assuming the authority of anindividual.Visual encounters between citizens andvisitors take place primarily in neutral publicspaces where the visitor’s behavior is lessrestricted. By entering a hotel lobby, for instance,the citizen declines the possibility ofestablishing authority and becomes helpless.The citizen can be neither a soldier nor a nobleperson, but is also incapable of becoming abarbarian, an indistinguishable part of a greatmultitude – a grain of sand along the seashore,as Ernest Renan described barbarians.Barbarians for Renan are numberless; theytirelessly procreate despite the numerous deathsthey suffer. Furthermore, their deathscomplement their procreation, which is why theyappear countless to Renan and other nineteenthcenturyEuropean racialist thinkers.But this is not how the visitor perceives thecitizen of the United Arab Emirates; this citizenis part of an absent crowd. In public he appearsisolated and weak – lonesome in a colonizedland. The citizen appears to be performing therole of an individual, summoning a display ofmannerisms in the hope of finding a place for thenational costume in public space. This “uniform”is a national disposition, or perhaps an assertionof loyalty to an identity in spite of knowing it isrestrictive. It is a form of reconciliation betweena constructed identity and a possible connectionto a formalistic modernity. The modernityexperienced in hotels is superficial, and thiscitizen seems to imply that his costume is butone extra mask in a stage full of masks.We can think of the national costume as aveil – not the veil that allows fundamentalists toretain their individuality, but a veil that elevatesidentity above intermingling. As a socialnecessity that is very costly to the individual, itmarks a restrictive obsession with identity. Itappears to instigate a challenge to visualidentity, to provoke a deeper form of intimacythat transcends this outer veil. It suggests a formof intimacy requiring an effort in order to beearned. The costume then becomes a form ofauthority that allows people to see without beingseen. By blending into the crowds, the citizento armored cars. They set up a system underwhich they would “tithe” most of the stolenmoney to other racist groups, setting aside partfor their own operation and dividing theremainder as “salaries.” Several men quit theirday jobs and began to think of themselves asrevolutionaries. With their stolen money, theybegan to build up an arsenal. 37Meanwhile Pierce had, on his own initiative,ineffectually bombed a Boise synagogue. Thisbreach of security enraged Mathews, but theirtroubles were just beginning. Aryan Nationsmember Walter West had begun to spout off inlocal bars about a new white guerilla group. Westalso had a reputation for beating his wife, BonnieSue, and Order member Tom Bentley had taken aromantic interest in her. Mathews directedBentley and three others – James Dye, RandyDuey and Richard Kemp – to kill West. Sunday,May 27, 1984 Kemp and Duey brought theunsuspecting West to a remote logging road inthe Kaniksu National Forest where Dye andBentley waited hiding, having already dug agrave. Coming from behind, Kemp struck West’sskull with a three-pound sledgehammer. Whenthis failed to kill him, Duey finished him off withhis own Ruger Mini-14 automatic rifle. After that,Bentley moved in with Bonnie Sue; Mathews alsobegan keeping a mistress of his own, ZillahCraig. 38 West was neither black nor Jewish, buthis murder marked a turning point. The Order hadcrossed over into lethal violence.Outspoken radio talk show host Alan Bergspecialized in agitating racist listeners. He couldbe rude, arrogant and insulting, but he was aman of conviction. With his programcommanding more than 10 percent of the Denveraudience, he nonetheless regarded hisprovocations as mostly show business. Not soBob Mathews. He made Berg Number Three onhis hit list – after Morris Dees, co-founder of theSouthern Poverty Law Center, and Norman Lear,acclaimed television producer and liberalpolitical activist. 39 When Mathews stated thatthe time had come to “take out” Berg, opinionwas split within the group. Some felt they werenot yet ready, but Mathews refused to wait. Hisgoal was to start a race war; if he were martyredin the struggle, the propaganda would beinvaluable. When Mathews asked for volunteers,Bruce Pierce demanded to be the triggerman.Pierce pictured himself as “a true Aryan Warrior.”According to Louis Beam’s “point system,” oneneeded a full point to become this. Killing a Jew(i.e., Berg) was worth one-sixth of a point; killingthe US President was worth one full point. At9:20 p.m. Monday, June 18, 1984, Pierce gunneddown Berg in his driveway as he was climbing outof his Volkswagen Beetle. David Lane andMathews watched from a Plymouth parked10/20e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 John MillerPolitics of Hate in the USA, Part III: Posse Comitatus, Grassroots Rebellion, and Secret Societiesnearby. Detectives quickly found .45 calibershells from the 12 rounds that riddled thevictim’s body. This was no ordinary slaying: thekiller clearly wanted to “send a message” to thepublic. Based on the shells and slugs,investigators quickly identified the murderweapon as an Ingram MAC-10 machine pistol, aweapon of choice for right-wing gun buffs. 40Investigative Division Chief Don Mulnix thereforewasted no time in calling the Colorado Bureau ofInvestigation, the FBI and the BATF in on thecase. 41Again desperate for cash, Mathews plannedthe Order’s next heist. Thanks to a disenchantedBrinks Company employee, he learned of aregularly scheduled truck – often loaded withmillions of dollars – that took an especiallyvulnerable route north of Ukiah, California.Mathews put together a crew and thanks tocareful planning by newly recruited RichardScutari, pulled off the heist without a hitch. Thistime they netted $3,800,000. The only problemwas that Mathews left behind a pistol registeredto his follower Andrew Barnhill. Before long,federal investigators had tied the robbery to theBerg slaying. Their prime suspects belonged tothe Order. Meanwhile, Mathews promptly tithedmuch of the take to his favorite charities: RichardButler’s Aryan Nations, William Pierce’s NationalAlliance, Frazier Glenn Miller’s Carolina Knightsof the KKK, Louis Beam, Tom Metzger’s WhiteAryan Resistance, Bob Miles’ Mountain Kirk andDan Gayman’s Church of Israel. 42 With the FBIclosing in, he set his sites on the next target:Morris Dees. His preliminary plan called forkidnapping and interrogating Dees, then flayinghim alive. 43 He also tried to contact the Syriangovernment to fund his war against the Jews. 44Finally, he gave his group a provisional name,taken from a book about Hitler’s Waffen SS:Bruders Schweigen, which refers to “the SilentBrotherhood.” 45On October 1, 1984, Tom Martinez went ontrial at the US District Court in Philadelphia.Martinez was charged with helping pass theOrder’s counterfeit bills. Shortly before thehearing, his attorney warned him that the FBIhad already linked the Order to the Berg slayingand the Brinks heist. Martinez lost his nerve andturned state’s evidence. 46 Based on his tips, theFBI stepped up its manhunt, nearlyapprehending Mathews and key member GaryYarbrough twice. Mathews found safe houses forthe Order on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. OnOctober 23 Martinez led FBI agents to the CapriMotel in Portland where he was to meet Mathewsand Yarbrough – ostensibly to discuss the Deeskidnaping. They caught Yarbrough, but Mathewsgot away, his right hand wounded. 48The Order regrouped on Whidbey Island.05.22.12 / 01:39:08 EDT05.22.12 / 03:14:24 EDT

09/2002/06Burj Al Arab Hotel Dubai Lobby.Armed militia member portrayed as patrolling the U.S. border.05.22.12 / 03:14:24 EDT05.22.12 / 01:39:08 EDT

disappears from view, but can still observe theothers wearing their masks in public.Let’s take a closer look at this form ofauthority that the costume grants the citizenover the visitor. There is a legal aspect, but also amoral one that presupposes that the citizenalways has the last word on any matter – andthese mask a more complex condition.In legal terms, the citizen can mastergeography through the rights of propertyownership. But this is a fragile mastery that caninstantly turn the geography into a desert. Thecitizen has the right to die. His entitlement todeath and burial is geographic – he is free tomate and procreate, but always in the deep sandthat the entire place is made of. Let’s proposethis equation: the citizen is entitled to be buriedin the sand, while the guest is entitled to livethere. These are not equal entitlements, for it isthe guest who turns the virginal geography into asemblance of a city. The citizen meanwhile shunsthe ease of life in the city, leaving this life to thevisitors. But it is a life lived transiently, as if forone night. The masters of geography live thereforever.Morally speaking, it appears that thecitizen’s loyalty to his costume and identitygrants him the authority to shun different waysDubai's skyscrapers seen from the 85th floor of Burj Hotel.03/06of living. Through his tolerance and compassion,he allows others to live without infringing uponthe lightness of their existence with his decisiveauthority. But there remains a dichotomy thatforces a choice between a more noble andelevated sense of entitlement and an easy life, alightness of being that favors a loss of rootsextending deep into the sand.And while the citizen has the uncontestedright to rule decisively on any matter, this is aright that is seldom practiced. Exercising thisauthority confronts the citizen with death, andso it is an authority that is predicated by itsinfrequent use.Petrol in this land flows pure as gold. Oil isthe indisputable pillar on which this country hastransformed itself. This precious substanceplayed a substantial role in three generations ofsocial transformation. The generation of the1950s and early 60s established the basis for thecountry’s relationship with the outside world,with its leaders striving to connect their societiesto modernity without betraying their heritage andtraditions. The people of that generation traveledaround the world, experiencing it as individuals.There were giant leaps between these threegenerations that would have never been possiblewithout the proceeds of oil trading, and the thirdOrder, and by Timothy McVeigh. Among otherthings, they anticipate baiting law enforcementofficials to use excessive force and exploiting theoverkill as movement propaganda.The Bruders SchweigenWe just want to be a nameless, whiteunderground.– Robert Mathews 33Bob Mathews was a man with a mission. Asan eleven-year-old boy in Phoenix, Arizona, hejoined the John Birch Society. Later he becameinterested in Robert DePugh’s Minutemen.Mathews then started a group of his own calledthe Sons of Liberty. He also converted to theMormon faith. 34 Under the guidance of fellowMormon Marvin Cooley, Mathews became a taxresister. In his 1973 W-4 tax form he claimed tendependents as a single, unmarried man – by thatreducing his tax burden to zero. This improbableclaim quickly alerted IRS agents, who soonbrought him to trial. There, Mathews had a rudeawakening when only one of his militia friendsagreed to vouch for him as a character witness.Shortly after this, a second friend killed himself,his wife and another couple in a bitter domesticdispute. Disillusioned, Mathews left Phoenix andresettled in Metaline Falls, Washington. 35Bob Mathews founder of The Bruders Schweigen confronting an antiracismprotester.After taking an apartment, the industriousMathews soon managed to earn enough moneyto purchase and clear his own 60-acre plot ofland. He found a wife and seemed to settle down.Eventually, his parents and two brothers, onceestranged by his extremist views, moved up toWashington as well. Then, in 1978, after four08/20years of relative calm, Mathews read WilliamGaley Simpson’s Which Way Western Man? whichleft a deep impression. He learned about WilliamPierce’s National Alliance. By 1981 Mathewsdiscovered William Butler’s Church of JesusChrist Christian/Aryan Nations in nearby HaydenLake. Although he had reservations about Butler,he nonetheless attended Aryan Nations events.Around this time, he conceived the “WhiteAmerican Bastion” by which Aryans wouldbecome the racially self-conscious political forceof the Pacific Northwest. This idea echoedButlers “10 percent solution,” except thatMathews felt numbers alone would be enough;he did not, at this time, envision the need for aseparate government. To this end, he beganadvertising his “Bastion” plan in the LibertyLobby’s magazine, The Spotlight. Ultimately, theads did not pan out; after all his efforts, only onecouple moved there. He increasingly resentedthe apparent docility of most whites andcondescendingly called them “sheeple” – sheeppeople. He also read and absorbed the lessons ofThe Road Back, an instruction manual for runningan underground terrorist group; Essays of aKlansman by Louis Beam, which laid out a pointsystem of awards for Aryan Warriors; and TheTurner Diaries. After this, Mathews establishedhis leadership by confronting rowdy counterdemonstratorsat Spokane, Aryan Nations rally.Before long he had assembled a small, but hardcorecircle of friends and Aryan Nationsmembers around him. He stressed that the timefor talk was over. Now was the time for action. Ina bizarre ceremony, each swore a loyalty oathbefore a six-month-old baby, pledging to securethe future propagation of the Aryan race. Beforelong, the group was planning armed robberiesand counterfeiting schemes. 36On October 28, 1983, World Wide Video,Spokane’s only XXX-rated pornography store,became the group’s first target. After days oftalks and building up their nerve, they netted agrand total of $369.10. If serious, they were goingto have to play for bigger stakes. ThatThanksgiving, unbeknownst to Richard Butler,Mathews’ friend Gary Yarbrough began printingtheir first counterfeit $50 bills on the AryanNations printing press. He had a hard timegetting the color right, though. Police picked upMathews’ right-hand-man Bruce Pierce (norelation to William Pierce) on December 3 whenthe group tried to pass the phony money. WithPierce in jail, on December 18 Mathews pulled aone-man bank heist in desperation. During hisgetaway, a dye-pack exploded in the loot bag,staining him and the cash red. He managed toclean most of the $25,952 with turpentine andbailed Pierce out of jail. The gang continued torob banks and restaurants, but soon graduated05.22.12 / 01:39:08 EDT05.22.12 / 03:14:24 EDT

woods. Once they retrieve their weapons, theyturn to robbery and murder simply to survive; asgun owners, they can neither work nor identifythemselves in public. Meanwhile, Congresspasses more stringent laws requiring all citizensto carry “internal passports” –used for alltransactions from banking to medical care topurchasing gasoline. This pushes theOrganization to more extreme measures,culminating in bombing a new supercomputer(for processing internal passports) housed in theFBI’s Washington headquarters. To carry this out,The Organization uses a truck filled withexplosive chemical fertilizer. To finance itsintensified level of operations, it startscounterfeiting as well. Trained as an engineer,Turner becomes responsible for bombs,communications and counterfeiting.Soon, Turner’s superiors invite him to join“the Order,” an elite mystical cadre within theOrganization. Its grey-hooded members reveal tohim that white supremacy is divinely ordainedand that Aryan terrorists are “the instruments ofGod.” As the struggle continues, theOrganization’s leaders realize that only theSystem can win a war of attrition and accordinglystep up their approach. In an all-or-nothingeffort, they concentrate their entire force inSouthern California and, through inside agents,trigger an insurrection within the armed forcesstationed there. In the resulting chaos, theOrganization manages to establish regionalsovereignty, fending off the System by seizingnuclear warheads and threatening to use them.After setting up free zones in major Americancities, it nukes Tel Aviv, saving a few remainingmissiles for the Soviet Union. This, in effect, killstwo birds with one stone, devastatingcommunism and subverting the System’s controlin America. The story ends with an inadvertentallusion to Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”:Turner flying a suicide mission to the Pentagonwith a nuclear warhead strapped to his cropduster.The editorial notes confirm that, becauseof Turner’s noble sacrifice, the Aryan racesuccessfully purges every other race from theface of the planet. Thus begins the New Era – acartoon version of xenophobia with pointedconsequences for the American politicallandscape of the 1990s.Pierce’s hatred of other races istautological. He accuses others of conspiracyand degradation, when he himself is the worstoffender. The Turner Diaries depicts both Jewsand African-Americans as stereotypes; Pierceeven writes in dialect to further ridicule them. Inlieu of social or historical analysis, Pierceinvokes God to justify his beliefs. His stancetoward the social movements of the 1960s and70s is wholly reactive:07/20e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 John MillerPolitics of Hate in the USA, Part III: Posse Comitatus, Grassroots Rebellion, and Secret SocietiesI remember a long string of Marxist acts ofterror 20 years ago, during the Vietnam war. Anumber of government buildings were burned ordynamited, and several innocent bystanderswere killed, but the press always portrayed suchthings as idealistic acts of “protest.”There was a gang of armed, revolutionaryNegroes who called themselves “BlackPanthers.” Every time they had a shootout withthe police, the press and TV people had theirtearful interviews with the families of the Blackgang members who got killed -- not with thecops’ widows. And when a Negress who belongedto the Communist Party [a reference to AngelaDavis] helped plan a courtroom shootout andeven supplied the shotgun with which a judgewas murdered, the press formed a cheeringsection at her trial and tried to make a folk heroout of her. 28“Women’s lib” was a form of mass psychosiswhich broke out during the last three decades ofthe Old Era. Women affected by it denied theirfemininity and insisted that they were “people,”not “women.” This aberration was promoted andencouraged by the System as a means of dividingour race against itself. 29...the knee-jerk liberals have forgotten all abouttheir “radical chic” enthusiasm of a few yearsago, now that we are the radicals. 30As a tactician, however, Pierce is coldlylogical and utterly clearheaded. For starting aterrorist cell, he advises in the essay “A Programfor Survival” (1984) published under his ownname, a general three-phase program for Aryansupremacy comprised of:1. cadre building;2. community building;3. community action;4. make propaganda as militant as possible toattract only the most committed element;5. operate on a “need to know” basis;6. communicate either by meeting face-to-faceor through short coded messages;7. separate into “legal” and underground units(like Shin Féin and the I.R.A.);8. “...[O]ne of the major purposes of politicalterror, always and everywhere, is to force theauthorities to take reprisals and to become morerepressive, thus alienating a portion of thepopulation and generating sympathy for theterrorists.”9. “...[T]he other purpose is to create unrest bydestroying the population’s sense of security andtheir belief in the invincibility of thegovernment.” 32If the term “community action” soundsbenign, however, The Turner Diaries shows justwhat Pierce means by that.Pierce’s tactics and ideology would beadopted both by Robert Mathews’ group, Thegeneration discovered suddenly that the modernworld could not justify its presumptuousness.They immersed themselves in knowledge andexploration, accelerating the pace of theirdevelopment in an astounding manner. Thepeople of this land can always surprise you –they conceal themselves and hide their charmsfrom transient eyes. But real interaction withthem remains perplexing. Within threegenerations, they went a long way towardsestablishing their identity and the basis of theirrelationship to the Other, but later experiencedchallenges to this identity abroad and thedichotomies of being suspended between twocivilizations. They encountered confrontationswith the Other that made it necessary tosummon arguments to prove the strength of theiridentity.The oil boom allowed this country todevelop at record speeds, overcoming challengesthat in other countries led to disaster. But oil’scurse is no secret. These rapid achievements,massive public works, and grandiose projectsonly widened the generational gap, and dialoguebetween the different generations has only beenfurther suppressed. The outside observer doesnot detect this tension, but to those concernedthese differences appear to be insurmountable.Identity appears to be suspended by an invisiblewire, which wants to disappear completely butThe Ferrari World Theme Park at Abu Dhabi on Yas Island.04/06still remain intact. Everything here is judgedthrough touch and experience – the eye isineffectual because it only sees the surface.Thus, the people of this land try to concealthe cracks that could be noticed by the visitor.Many visitors are shocked by the presence ofpoor neighborhoods in some cities. The Gulfstates are under scrutiny, and poverty there is aconcern for others. News of poverty andunemployment in Saudi Arabia are greeted withshock, for the country is expected to eradicatepoverty.The second generation of citizens in theUAE enjoyed positive relations with the West.However, this relationship demanded that theysever their links with their history. They inheritedtheir image from their predecessors, but wererequired to deny its roots in order to attainknowledge and satisfy their curiosities in theWest. Sharing knowledge and communicatingwith the Other are difficult tasks, and theydictate a single driving desire: a curiosity thatvoids the self and renders it ready to acceptanything that promises fulfillment.For these reasons, the passion formonuments in the Gulf remains a curiosity,because the monuments are made to conceal anidentity. There is an ongoing spectacle of modernmusic, high-end retail, fashion designers,expensive hotels, luxury cars, all of which05.22.12 / 03:14:24 EDT05.22.12 / 01:39:08 EDT

comprise a compensatory escape act – aresistance to the feeling of confronting death,but by way of a frantic level of activity, that is,through exhaustion. The meeting of exhaustionand vitality in one body makes deathsimultaneously tangible and distant. They allowone to invite death so as to escape its clutches.Encountering the Other, and attempting tointerrogate and recreate the Other’s experience,requires a form of betrayal. Immersion inanother’s experience is a self-deprecatingexercise. There is an instantaneous confusion: astrong identity and known lineage must berenounced. This renounced self becomes proofof the Other’s loyalty to his own identity, as wellas of the possibility of its denial.Countries allow us to belong when they havethe resources at their disposal to secure a stablefuture. Oil then becomes very important as themedium through which we and the Otherscollude to anticipate our future. In internationaltrade, oil also promises a stable future, but it is aleased future, manufactured through a chain ofintermediaries. It is a future built bymercenaries, and it is through them that thiscountry is allowed to be distinctive in itsmodernity.Sketch of a fountain monument for Dubai.It is a form of betrayal to seek to attractsuch a high volume of skilled labor, for thearchitects and designers who unleash theircreativity onto the desert develop a sense ofcustodianship towards the cities they build. Toemploy engineers, educators, and doctors as themakers of the future, is to transform them intoartists – and they will defend their products likevaluable works of art. In the meantime, thecitizen becomes a viewer, watching his or hercountry on a screen rather than living in it.Rather than emigrating abroad, the citizensimmigrate inwards, as if into a secret. As they dothis, they cease to be visible, yet they can always05/06see the masterpiece their land has become. Theywatch it from the inside out, as if they lived in thebelly of a statue.×Translated from the Arabic by Karl Sharro.The Turner DiariesThe great danger of democracy, of course,is the same danger that exists with anyother form of government; namely, that thewrong minority will be in the driver’s seat.That’s the problem we must overcome now– or perish as a race.Before the advent of television, it wouldn’t havebeen feasible to run a truly progressive nationdemocratically; the process of control was tooawkward. That’s why the United States driftedthe way it did, subject to various pressuregroups, until the worst of all possible groupselbowed the others aside and took over. Thesedays the process of control is reasonablyefficient, and if we ever manage to break the gripof the present media bosses we can look forwardto the use of the same process to speed Americaalong the upward path again.– William L. Pierce 23The Turner Diaries is an influential rightwingtract written by former physics professorWilliam Pierce. Pierce published it, however,under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald.Critics call the book the Mein Kampf of Americanneo-Nazism. Before starting his own NationalAlliance, Pierce had, in fact, been a member ofGeorge Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Partyand the John Birch Society. Society presidentRobert Welch introduced Pierce to an apocalypticstory called The John Franklin Letters that Pierceused as a model for his own book. 24 In the guiseof a futuristic novel, The Turner Diaries is partpropaganda, part primer for guerilla war and partjuvenile blood lust. Its publisher Stuart Lyle06/20described it as “an underground classic,” sellingmore than 185,000 copies outside bookstoresbefore its above ground publication anddistribution in 1978. Pierce himself gloats:It offends almost everyone; Afro-Americans,feminists, gays and lesbians, liberals,communists, Mexicans, democrats, the FBI,egalitarians, and Jews. Especially Jews: for itportrays them as incarnations of everything thatis evil and destructive. 25Former liberal William Gayley Simpson laidthe ideological foundation for Pierce’s book in hisown Which Way Western Man? After working asan integrationist, Simpson became obsessedwith the idea that white Christians riskedforfeiting their identity through policies ofdesegregation and affirmative action. These,moreover, he viewed as part of a sinister Jewishplot: a divide-and-conquer strategy ofmiscegenation that would leave only Jewishracial integrity intact. Consequently, he arguedvehemently for eugenics, segregation and thedeportation of Jews. 26 Even so, Pierce sharplydistinguishes between these beliefs and those ofChristian Identity which he dismisses as a“lowbrow” theology incapable of attractinganyone but “hicks.” 27The narrative conceit of The Turner Diariesis the belated discovery of a unique record of“the Great Revolution,” the diaries of one EarlTurner, which historians have republished on therevolution’s one-hundredth anniversary. Pierceenvisions this event in apocalyptic – rather thanpolitical – terms. The struggle occurs in 1999, atthe outset of the millennium. Copying the FrenchRevolution, Pierce even sets out a new datingsystem, with time divided BNE (Before the NewEra, analogous to prehistoric time) and the yearsfollowing it. Nevertheless, Pierce’s revolution istotalitarian, not democratic; the rights of manevaporate before a phantasm of racial purity. Healso adds “editors’ notes” as additionalcommentary to Turner’s firsthand account. This“historicizes” the fantasy, a posture notdissimilar to Kruschev’s boast “History is on ourside. We will live to see you buried.”The plot begins when the federalgovernment passes an anti-gun law called,suggestively enough, the Cohen Act. Blacksbegin raping white women in great numbers (oneof Pierce’s deep obsessions) and, as specialdeputies, round up all those who refuse to turnover their guns. Jews, of course, havemasterminded this turn of events. Only onegroup stands ready to resist “the System,” asmall network of underground cells called only“The Organization.” Earl Turner belongs to onesuch cell of four people operating in Washington,DC. Long before the Cohen Act, his group hadburied a cache of guns in a remote Pennsylvania05.22.12 / 01:39:08 EDT05.22.12 / 03:14:24 EDT

Posse targets. When these fail, they sometimesturn to guns. In 1980, the Internal RevenueService (IRS) identified 17,222 individuals who, asa form of tax protest, either refused to filereturns or filed and refused to pay what theyowed. By 1983 that number jumped to 57,754 andsubsequent efforts by a special IRS task forcehave hardly made a dent in this figure. 13 InWisconsin the aforementioned JamesWickstrom, onetime candidate for governor andUS Senate, openly espoused tax revolt andviolence. 14 Some groups, like CharlesShugarman’s Virginia Patriots Network, conductspecial seminars in tax resistance, stating thatwages are a special form of barter betweenemployer and employee and, therefore, notsubject to taxation. 15 With a similar barter idea,Denver Posse member John Grandboucheinitiated a system of warehouse banks wheredepositors could convert their money to gold orsilver to avoid taxes. Grandbouche called hisorganization the National Commodities andBarter Association (NCBA). The Wall StreetJournal reported that the NCBA laundered up tohalf a million dollars a day for as many as 20,000depositors. Federal agents raided Grandbouche’soffices in 1985, recovering thousands ofdocuments and an estimated $250,000 in goldbullion. A federal judge, however, ordered thereturn of this property. 16 Other warehouse bankshave turned out to be simply old-fashionedbilking schemes in which otherwise skepticalfarmers have lost their life savings to con men. InJune 1986, for example, authorities convictedRoderick Elliot in one such an embezzlementoperation. Elliot was the publisher of themovement’s key tabloid, The Primrose andCattleman’s Gazette (its name insinuating thatJewish bankers had led farmers “down theprimrose path”). 17 More recently, RoySchwasinger’s organization, We The People, soldabout 3,000 bogus “information kits” at $300each to gullible farmers. These explained how toclaim one’s portion of a supposed $600 trillionclass action suit against the government broughtby ranchers and farmers. In 1995 Schwasingerreceived a nine-year prison sentence for his partin the scam. 18In 1983 the death of the sixty-three-yearoldtax resister Gordon Kahl created the Posse’sfirst martyr. Kahl was a decorated World War IIveteran who kept his farm afloat by workingwinters in Texas as an auto mechanic. He joinedthe Posse in 1974, stopped paying taxes andappeared on television two years later urgingothers to follow suit. Going public landed him inLeavenworth prison for one year. Authorities thenreleased him on probation with the proviso thathe stay away from the Posse. Unrepentant, Kahlstill refused to pay taxes and still urged others to05/20e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 John MillerPolitics of Hate in the USA, Part III: Posse Comitatus, Grassroots Rebellion, and Secret Societiesdo the same. Although he owed only a pittance,his very public defiance made him a thorn in theside of government officials. On February 13,1983, federal marshals tracked Kahl, his son andsome friends as they were leaving a Possemeeting in Medina, North Dakota. Kahl stoppedat the marshals’ roadblock and a gunfight began.The marshals wounded his son. A crack shot,Kahl killed two marshals and wounded threeothers in retaliation. 19 He went on the run forfour months, then holed up in the Smithville,Arkansas “earth home” of his Posse friends, Leonand Norma Gintner. This dwelling was asurvivalist bunker stockpiled with weapons andfood. Federal agents and local Sheriff GeneMatthews surrounded the bunker on June 3.Outside, they captured Leonard Gintner. Shortlythereafter, Gintner’s wife came out to surrender.Neither would confirm whether Kahl was hidinginside. Matthews entered the bunker, hopingthat, as sheriff, he could convince the fugitive tosurrender peacefully. Kahl fatally woundedMatthews with one round from his Ruger Mini-14. Police experts believe that, in the exchange,Matthews killed Kahl as well. Unsure whetherthe fugitive was dead or alive, agents proceededto spray the bunker with gunfire. The assaultended only after a commando detonated thebunker’s more than 100,000 rounds ofammunition with a grenade. Death left Kahl alongstanding hero in the movement. 20 It also setthe stage for a siege/shootout syndrome thatwould be tragically repeated as the strugglebetween right-wing dissidents and the federalgovernment continued to escalate.Other Posse figures include Arthur Kirk, whodied in a 1984 firefight with a Nebraska SWATteam, and the eccentric Michael Ryan. Ryanpresided over a polygamous, survivalistcompound in Rulo, Nebraska where he forced hismale followers to sodomize each other and a petgoat. 21 Once considered a leader chosen by God,Ryan was convicted by jurors for torturing andkilling two of his followers, twenty-seven-yearoldJames Thimm and five-year-old Luke Stice.For refusing to sodomize the goat, Ryan shovedgreased rake handles up Thimm’s rectum, thenliterally skinned him alive. When police raidedthe Rulo compound, they discovered more than$250,000 in stolen farm equipment, an arsenal offull- and semiautomatic weapons and 150,000rounds of ammunition. 22 By anyone’s standards,Ryan was certifiably insane. His exampleillustrates the individual extremes that becomeavailable once the social contract is jettisoned.Conversely, Ryan’s case – among others – raisesthe question of how violence and irrationalitybecome legitimized, both within extremist cultsand within the mainstream.Bilal Khbeiz (1963, Kfarchouba) is a poet, essayist, andjournalist. He regularly contributes to the newspapersBeirut Al Masa', Al Nahar, and to Future TelevisionBeirut, among other publications and networks.Published poetry and books on cultural theory includeFi Annal jassad Khatia' Wa Khalas (That the Body is Sinand Deliverance), Globalisation and the Manufacture ofTransient Events, The Enduring Image and theVanishing World, and Tragedy in the Moment of Vision.06/06e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Bilal KhbeizDubai: A City Manufactured by Curiosity05.22.12 / 03:14:24 EDT05.22.12 / 01:39:08 EDT

Boris GroysUnder the Gazeof Theory01/13e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Boris GroysUnder the Gaze of TheoryFrom the start of modernity art began tomanifest a certain dependence on theory. At thattime – and even much later – art’s “need ofexplanation” (Kommentarbeduerftigkeit), asArnold Gehlen characterized this hunger fortheory was, in its turn, explained by the fact thatmodern art is “difficult” – inaccessible for thegreater public. 1 According to this view, theoryplays a role of propaganda – or, rather,advertising: the theorist comes after the artworkis produced, and explains this artwork to asurprised and skeptical audience. As we know,many artists have mixed feelings about thetheoretical mobilization of their own art. They aregrateful to the theorist for promoting andlegitimizing their work, but irritated by the factthat their art is presented to the public with acertain theoretical perspective that, as a rule,seems to the artists to be too narrow, dogmatic,even intimidating. Artists are looking for agreater audience, but the number oftheoretically-informed spectators is rather small– in fact, even smaller than the audience forcontemporary art. Thus, theoretical discoursereveals itself as a counterproductive form ofadvertisement: it narrows the audience insteadof widening it. And this is true now more thanever before. Since the beginning of modernity thegeneral public has made its grudging peace withthe art of its time. Today’s public acceptscontemporary art even when it does not alwayshave a feeling that it “understands” this art. Theneed for a theoretical explanation of art thusseems definitively passé.However, theory was never so central for artas it is now. So the question arises: Why is thisthe case? I would suggest that today artists needa theory to explain what they are doing – not toothers, but to themselves. In this respect theyare not alone. Every contemporary subjectconstantly asks these two questions: What hasto be done? And even more importantly: How canI explain to myself what I am already doing? Theurgency of these questions results from theacute collapse of tradition that we experiencetoday. Let us again take art as an example. Inearlier times, to make art meant to practice – inever-modified form – what previous generationsof artists had done. During modernity to make artmeant to protest against what these previousgenerations did. But in both cases it was more orless clear what that tradition looked like – and,accordingly, what form a protest against thistradition could take. Today, we are confrontedwith thousands of traditions floating around theglobe – and with thousands of different forms ofprotest against them. Thus, if somebody nowwants to become an artist and to make art, it isnot immediately clear to him or her what artactually is, and what the artist is supposed to do.dislocations of modernization, bankrupt smallfarmers wanted to pin their troubles on a Jewishbanking conspiracy. Few, however, botherednoting that Jews own none of the big,international banks.The idea of the family farm as a wellspringof American identity runs deep in the UnitedStates. It derives in part from Thomas Jefferson,who viewed big cities with distaste andenvisioned the United States as a vast array ofindependent farms:Those who labor in the earth are the chosenpeople of God, if ever he had a chosen people,whose breasts he has made his peculiar depositfor substantial and genuine virtue.They are the most vigorous, the mostindependent, the most virtuous, and they aretied to their country, and wedded to its libertyand interests, by the most lasting bonds. 8Jefferson’s philosophy reflected thepolitical economy of the southern plantationsystem in which each plantation produced muchor all of what it needed. (The autonomy of theplantation, of course, depended on slave labor.)Jefferson himself owned a Virginia plantation –though, ironically, a not very successful one.Unlike George Washington, he did not free hisslaves after the Revolutionary War. 9 Conversely,Washington was a land speculator in the trans-Appalachian region and therefore less alignedwith small property interests. Jeffersonvigorously championed small farming yet, byestablishing a liberal political culture within acapitalist economy, his policies paved the wayfor America’s transition to industrial capitalism.The small farmer’s aspirations forindependent production and land ownershipconstitute as much an ideal of civic virtue as theydo a means of livelihood. Even so, the supposedautonomy of the small farm has always beentenuous at best, subject to the vagaries of goodand bad crops, variable interest rates and supplyand demand. In other words, the autonomy of thesmall farmer was always a relative state – onerested on a precarious economic foundation.During bad times, small farmers have oftenresorted to wage labor to keep their farms intact.Nonetheless, their aspirations mark them aspetit-bourgeois and have rarely shown solidaritywith labor movements. Moreover, they resentfederal farm subsidy programs – not onlybecause policy makers attach them to bigagricultural conglomerates, but also becausethey render the small farmer a dependentconsumer instead of a virtuous producer. 10 Thistension is not new. Frontier farmers often foundthemselves at odds with a centralizedgovernment unwilling – or unable – to protecttheir interests. Rural vigilante justice and itsattendant gun culture are legacies of that04/20e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 John MillerPolitics of Hate in the USA, Part III: Posse Comitatus, Grassroots Rebellion, and Secret Societieshistory. Taking the law into one’s own hands thussurvives as a cherished rural tradition. And yetthat civic independence has been frustrated inrecent years. American farmers have been forcedinto the painful admission that the small farmhas become inefficient and wasteful relative toconglomerate “agribusinesses.” Here, their senseof civic deprivation, plus very real materiallosses, goes back to a promise held out byhomesteading: land ownership. James Corcoranhas described its importance:Land doesn’t only serve as a farmer’scollateral for operations loans, the ability to buythe seed, fertilizer and chemicals to plant hisfields – land is a farmer’s identity. It is hisconnection to God; it is his religion, hisnationality, his family’s heritage, and his legacyto his children. Land is a farmer’s way of life, andin the early 1980s he was losing it. Like thepeople he replaced on the land – the AmericanIndian – the farmer became a modern exile,forced to migrate to strange cities and states insearch of a new life. 11Driving people from the land is part of theprocess of long-range accumulation that Marxidentified as a structural feature of capitalistdevelopment. The farmers’ resistance todispossession does raise the radical question ofwho is entitled to land ownership. But claiming aholy right to the land – as do the Posse andIdentity Christians – is a self-serving ideology;not only does it justify the farmer’s existenceagainst abstract economic forces, it alsorepresses the historical memory of how frontierfarmers violently drove their predecessors, theNative Americans, off the very same soil. Thismanifest destiny of the small farmer simplytransmutes the divine right of kings into the ruralpopulist homestead. Even the ideal ofindependent production can, at times, undercutthe small farmer’s sense of social responsibility.Thus, to consider small farming an inalienableand God-given way of life entails reactionaryidentifications with blood and soil.Alarmed by an anti-Semitic flare up in thefarm belt, in 1986 the Anti-Defamation Leaguecommissioned the Lois Harris organization topoll Iowa and Nebraska residents on theseissues. Seventy-five percent of the respondentsblamed “big international bankers” for farmproblems, with 13 percent specifically blamingJews. 27 percent agreed, “Farmers have alwaysbeen exploited by international Jewish bankers.”Among people older than sixty-five, that numberleapt to 45 percent. 12 The growth of the Posseclosely followed this trend.Typical Posse tactics include highlyeffective forms of “paper terrorism” such as taxresistance and filing nuisance liens and lawsuits,which tie up courts and make life miserable for05.22.12 / 02:07:56 EDT05.22.12 / 03:14:24 EDT

Comitatus may be the largest. A true grassrootsmovement, it is also the most amorphous andthe hardest to pin down. James Ridgewaycompares its organizational flexibility with thatpioneered by the SDS, yet it also takes the anti-Federalist logic of states’ rights to a topicalextreme. “Posse Comitatus” literally means“power of the county” in Latin. The name refersto the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 which forbidsthe use of US military and national guard forcesas civilian police forces. 3 Congress passed thislegislation after the Civil War to preventPresident Grant from using soldiers to guardballot boxes against election fraud in southernstates. 4 The Posse Comitatus believes this lawempowers a sheriff to call a posse into being orto disband it as necessary. A posse is simply “allthe men that a sheriff may call to his assistancein the discharge of his official duty, as to quell ariot or to make an arrest.” 5 The Posse Comitatussees the law as a wellspring of radicaldecentralization, granting the sheriff ultimateauthority. Accordingly, its members considerincome tax, social security payments, drivers’licenses and even license plates as violations ofthe Constitution. The Posse claims that, whennecessary, it may usurp even the sheriff’sauthority. According to a doctrine set forth by03/20Christian Identity minister William Potter Gale,the Posse claims its authority comes straightfrom God.Although the Posse Comitatus is freeformby definition, Lyman Tower Sargent traces itsorigin to the Citizens Law Enforcement andResearch Committee, founded by former SilverShirt and Identity Christian Henry L. Beach in1969. 6 With the spate of family farm foreclosuresbeginning in the late 1970s, ranks of the Posseexpanded as farmers withheld taxes and foughtto save their property. Amidst the greater periodrecession, high interest rates combined with asevere drop in demand for crops to touch off afarm crisis. After a major US-Soviet grain dealfell through, rising inflation forcedunderdeveloped countries to redirect theirbudgets from grain purchases to debtmaintenance. In the US, the small farmer wasleft holding the bag. What made the crisis evenworse was farmland itself sometimes dropped toa third of its previous value. A congressionalreport estimated that almost half the nation’s 2.2million farmers would lose their farms by the endof the century. 7 Unable to make ends meet, someturned to community activism, some to alcoholand spousal abuse, and others to anti-Semitism.Just as Nazis once blamed Jews for the02/13Rodney Graham, Rheinmetall/Victoria 8, 2003, Installation, 35mm film, color, silent.Second part of the video "Waco, the Big Lie" by Linda Thompson.05.22.12 / 03:14:24 EDT05.22.12 / 02:07:56 EDT

In order to start making art, one needs a theorythat explains what art is. And such a theory givesan artist the possibility to universalize, globalizetheir art. A recourse to theory liberates artistsfrom their cultural identities – from the dangerthat their art would be perceived only as a localcuriosity. Theory opens a perspective for art tobecome universal. That is the main reason for therise of theory in our globalized world. Here thetheory – the theoretical, explanatory discourse –precedes art instead of coming after art.However, one question remains unresolved.If we live in a time when every activity has tobegin with a theoretical explanation of what thisactivity is, then one can draw the conclusion thatwe live after the end of art, because art wastraditionally opposed to reason, rationality, logic– covering, it was said, the domain of theirrational, emotional, theoretically unpredictableand unexplainable.Indeed, from its very start, Westernphilosophy was extremely critical of art andrejected art outright as nothing other than amachine for the production of fictions andillusions. For Plato, to understand the world – toachieve the truth of the world – one has to follownot one’s imagination, but one’s reason. Thesphere of reason was traditionally understood toinclude logic, mathematics, moral and civil laws,ideas of good and right, systems of stategovernance – all the methods and techniquesthat regulate and underlie society. All these ideascould be understood by human reason, but theycannot be represented by any artistic practicebecause they are invisible. Thus, the philosopherwas expected to turn from the external world ofphenomena towards the internal reality of hisown thinking – to investigate this thinking, toanalyze the logic of the thinking process as such.Only in this way would the philosopher reach thecondition of reason as the universal mode ofthinking that unites all reasonable subjects,including, as Edmund Husserl said, gods, angels,demons, and humans. Therefore, the rejection ofart can be understood as the originary gesturethat constitutes the philosophical attitude assuch. The opposition between philosophy –understood as love of truth – and art (construedas the production of lies and illusions) informsthe whole history of Western culture.Additionally, the negative attitude toward art wasmaintained by the traditional alliance betweenart and religion. Art functioned as a didacticmedium in which the transcendent, ungraspable,irrational authority of religion presented itself tohumans: art represented gods and God, madethem accessible to the human gaze. Religious artfunctioned as an object of trust – one believedthat temples, statues, icons, religious poemsand ritual performance were the spaces of divine03/13e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Boris GroysUnder the Gaze of Theorypresence. When Hegel said in the 1820s that artwas a thing of the past, he meant that art hadceased to be a medium of (religious) truth. Afterthe Enlightenment, nobody should or could bedeceived by art any longer, for the evidence ofreason was finally substituted for seductionthrough art. Philosophy taught us to distrustreligion and art, to trust our own reason instead.The man of the Enlightenment despised art,believing only in himself, in the evidences of hisown reason.However, modern and contemporary criticaltheory is nothing other than a critique of reason,rationality, and traditional logic. Here I mean notonly this or that particular theory, but criticalthinking in general as it has developed since thesecond half of the nineteenth century – followingthe decline of Hegelian philosophy.We all know the names of the early andparadigmatic theoreticians. Karl Marx startedmodern critical discourse by interpreting theautonomy of reason as an illusion produced bythe class structure of traditional societies –including bourgeois society. The impersonator ofreason was understood by Marx as a member ofthe dominant class, and was therefore relievedfrom manual work and the necessity toparticipate in economic activity. For Marx,philosophers could make themselves immune toworldly seductions only because their basicneeds were already satisfied, whereasunderprivileged manual laborers were consumedby a struggle for survival that left no chance topractice disinterested philosophicalcontemplation, to impersonate pure reason.On the other hand, Nietzsche explainedphilosophy’s love of reason and truth as asymptom of the philosopher’s underprivilegedposition in real life. He viewed the will to truth asan effect of the philosopher overcompensatingfor a lack of vitality and real power by fantasizingabout the universal power of reason. ForNietzsche, philosophers are immune to theseduction of art simply because they are tooweak, too “decadent” to seduce and be seduced.Nietzsche denies the peaceful, purelycontemplative nature of the philosophicalattitude. For him, this attitude is merely a coverused by the weak to achieve success in thestruggle for power and domination. Behind theapparent absence of vital interests thetheoretician discovers a hidden presence of the“decadent,” or “sick” will to power. According toNietzsche, reason and its alleged instrumentsare designed only to subjugate other, nonphilosophicallyinclined – that is, passionate,vital – characters. It is this great theme ofNietzschean philosophy that was later developedby Michel Foucault.Thus, theory starts to see the figure of theWeaver family and Kevin Harris make the cover of a Spokane newspaper after winning the wrongful death and civil rights lawsuit against the federalgovernment for the Ruby Ridge shootout.02/2005.22.12 / 02:07:56 EDT05.22.12 / 03:14:24 EDT

John MillerPolitics of Hatein the USA, PartIII: PosseComitatus,GrassrootsRebellion, andSecretSocieties01/20e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 John MillerPolitics of Hate in the USA, Part III: Posse Comitatus, Grassroots Rebellion, and Secret SocietiesThe following text, which is the final of threeinstallments, traces back to a conversation I hadwith Mike Kelley in 1994, “Too Young to be aHippy, Too Old to be a Punk.” 1 Christophe Tannertat Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin had invitedus to discuss underground political and aestheticculture in the US for the first issue of Bethanien’sBe Magazin. One year later, I followed this up witha narrative account and analysis of the subject,“Burying the Underground.” Meanwhile, a seriesof sieges, armed standoffs, and bombings madeAmericans increasingly aware of a growingpolarization between the US federal governmentand what was hardening into a grassroots militiamovement: Ruby Ridge (1992), Waco (1993),Oklahoma City (1995) and Fort Davis, Texas(1997). I began to see this as a right-wingcounterpart to militant leftism. In fact, the rightseemed to be mirroring tactics that hadpreviously belonged to the leftist underground.This led me to write a complementary essay, “HeilHitler! Have a Nice Day!, the Politics of Hate inthe USA” By 2001, the militia movement had runout of steam. When al-Qaeda terrorists stagedthe September 11 attacks, however, these soclosely resembled events described in The TurnerDiaries that I had initially suspected the radicalright. Although unemployment and economicdislocation drove the militia movement, the GreatRecession has not provoked a similar response.Instead of overturning – or seceding from – thefederal government, the far right, now exemplifiedby the Tea Party, wants to work from within thepolitical system by downsizing government andconverting it to a states’ rights model. This shift isevident in the current Republican debates leadingup to the next presidential election, wherecandidates have tried to turn “moderate” into apejorative term.– John Miller***Posse ComitatusThe Jew run banks and federal loanagencies are working hand-in-handforeclosing on thousands of farms rightnow in America. They are in essence,nationalizing farms for the jews [sic], as thefarmer becomes a tenant slave on the landhe once owned….The farmers must prepareto defend their families and land with theirlives, or surrender it all.Dennis Oppenheim, Reading Position for Second Degree Burn, 1970. Book, skin, solar energy. Exposure time: 5 hours. Jones Beach,New York.– James Wickstrom, 2 Christian Identity ministerand radio talk show hostOf all the far right factions, the Posse05.22.12 / 03:14:24 EDT05.22.12 / 02:07:56 EDT

meditating philosopher and its own position inthe world from a perspective of, as it were, anormal, profane, external gaze. Theory sees theliving body of the philosopher through aspectsthat are not available to direct vision. This issomething that the philosopher, like any othersubject, necessarily overlooks: we cannot seeour own body, its positions in the world and thematerial processes that take place inside andoutside it (physical and chemical, but alsoeconomical, biopolitical, sexual, and so on). Thismeans that we cannot truly practice selfreflectionin the spirit of the philosophicaldictum, “know yourself.” And what is even moreimportant: we cannot have an inner experienceof the limitations of our temporal and spatialexistence. We are not present at our birth – andwe will be not present at our death. That is whyall the philosophers who practiced selfreflectioncame to the conclusion that the spirit,the soul, and reason are immortal. Indeed, inanalyzing my own thinking process, I can neverfind any evidence of its finitude. To discover thelimitations of my existence in space and time Ineed the gaze of the Other. I read my death in theeyes of Others. That is why Lacan says that theeye of the Other is always an evil eye, and Sartresays that “Hell is other people.” Only through theprofane gaze of Others may I discover that I donot only think and feel – but also was born, live,and will die.Descartes famously said “I think, therefore Iam.” But an external and critically-theoreticallyminded spectator would say about Descartes: hethinks because he lives. Here my self-knowledgeis radically undermined. Maybe I do know what Ithink. But I do not know how I live – I don’t evenknow I’m alive. Because I never experiencedmyself as dead, I cannot experience myself asbeing alive. I have to ask others if and how I live –and that means I must also ask what I actuallythink, because my thinking is now seen as beingdetermined by my life. To live is to be exposed asInscription on the tomb of Marcel Duchamp, as requested by the artist before his death.05/13living (and not as dead) to the gaze of the others.Now it becomes irrelevant what we think, plan,or hope – what becomes relevant is how ourbodies are moving in space under the gaze ofOthers. It is in this way that theory knows mebetter than I know myself. The proud,enlightened subject of philosophy is dead. I amleft with my body – and delivered to the gaze ofthe Other. Before the Enlightenment, man wassubject to the gaze of God. But following thatera, we are subject to the gaze of critical theory.At first glance, the rehabilitation of theprofane gaze also entails a rehabilitation of art:in art the human being becomes an image thatcan be seen and analyzed by the Other. Butthings are not so simple. Critical theory criticizesnot only philosophical contemplation – but anykind of contemplation, including aestheticcontemplation. For critical theory, to think orcontemplate is the same as being dead. In thegaze of the Other, if a body does not move it canonly be a corpse. Philosophy privilegescontemplation. Theory privileges action andpractice – and hates passivity. If I cease to move,I fall off theory’s radar – and theory does not likeit. Every secular, post-idealistic theory is a callfor action. Every critical theory creates a state ofurgency – even a state of emergency. Theory tellsus: we are merely mortal, material organisms –and we have little time at our disposal. Thus, wecannot waste our time with contemplation.Rather, we must act here and now. Time does notwait and we do not have enough time for furtherdelay. And while it is of course true that everytheory offers a certain overview and explanationof the world (or explanation of why the worldcannot be explained), these theoreticaldescriptions and scenarios have only aninstrumental and transitory role. The true goal ofevery theory is to define the field of action we arecalled to undertake.This is where theory demonstrates itssolidarity with the general mood of our times. In128; and Baudrillard’s critique ofthis position in “Requiem for theMedia,” ibid.15Baudrillard, ibid.16“N’importe quelle imagequotidienne fait partie d’unsystème vague et compliqué, oùle monde entier entre et sort àchaque instant.”17“Le cinéma ce n’est pas uneimage après l’autre, c’est uneimage plus une autre qui enforment une troisième, latroisieme étant du reste forméepar le spectateur au moment oùil voit le film.” Godard in “ProposRompus,” Jean-Luc Godard parJean-Luc Godard (Paris: L’Étoileet Cahiers du cinéma, 1985),460.18See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II:The Time-Image, trans. HughTomlinson and Robert Galeta(Minneapolis: The University ofMinnesota Press, 2001), 180.19Gilles Deleuze, “Trois questionssur Six fois deux: A propos deSur et sous lacommunication,” Cahiers duCinéma 271 (November 1976).20Here I am taking after thelinguist Oswald Ducrot whoargues that the talkingsubject introduces sentences (inenunciation) that necessarilycontain the responsibility of theutterer; in other words, inenunciation the speaker iscommitted to the semanticcontent. That is why for Ducrot,speech actsconstitute expression. SeeOswald Ducrot, Logique,structure, énonciation: Lecturesur le langage (Paris: Minuit,1989); and Les mots dudiscours (Paris: Minuit, 1980).21From the voiceover in Here andElsewhere.22According to Jacques Derrida, inthe domain of écriture there is amovement in language at itsorigin, which conceals anderases itself in its ownproduction. This means thatin écriture the signified alwaysalready functions as a signifier.With écriture, Derridaundermines the Aristotelian ideaof theLogos as the mediation ofmental experience along withthe movement of“exteriorization” of the mentalexperience as a signof presence. The functionofécriture is, therefore, toconceptualize the dissolution ofthe signifier in the voice bysplitting signified and voice:in écriture, the subject of a textis coherent with the text,becoming the object of écriture,displacing the signified from theauthor. See Derrida’s OfGrammatology, correctededition, trans. GayatriChakravorty Spivak, (Baltimoreand London: The Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1997).09/09e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Irmgard EmmelhainzBetween Objective Engagement and Engaged Cinema: Jean-Luc Godard’s “Militant Filmmaking” (1967-1974), Part II05.22.12 / 02:07:56 EDT05.22.12 / 02:45:15 EDT

Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent writer, scholar,and translator based in Mexico City.08/09e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Irmgard EmmelhainzBetween Objective Engagement and Engaged Cinema: Jean-Luc Godard’s “Militant Filmmaking” (1967-1974), Part II1For an analysis of Here andElsewhere as it relates to themovement of Third Worldism andGodard’s engagement withPalestine, see IrmgardEmmelhainz, “From ThirdWorldism to Empire: Jean-LucGodard and the PalestineQuestion,” Third Text 100(September 2009),100th Anniversary Special.2See Serge Daney, “Le thérrorisé(Pédagogiegodardienne),” Cahiers duCinéma nos. 262–263 (January1976): 32–39; and RaymondBellour, L’entre-images Photo.Cinéma. Vidéo. (Paris: LaDifférence, 1990).3“On a fait comme pas mal degens. On a pris des images et ona mis le son trop fort. Avecn’importe quelle image: Vietnam.Toujours le même son, toujourstrop fort, Prague, Montevideo,mai soixante-huit en France,Italie, révolution culturelleChinoise, grèves en Pologne,torture en Espagne, Ireland,Portugal, Chili, Palestine, le sontellement fort qu’il a fini parnoyer la voix qu’il a voulu fairesortir de l’image.” Ici etailleurs (Here and Elsewhere), 55min, Chicago: FacetsVideo, 1995. Emphasis mine.4Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Mai 68,L’Héritage impossible (Paris: LaDécouverte, 1998), 201.5Adorno’s Commitment wasoriginally published in 1962 asboth a radio address and ajournal article. In 1968 a numberof US protests against the war inVietnam used Guernica as apeace symbol. A year earlier,some 400 artists and writerspetitioned Picasso: “Please letthe spirit of your painting bereasserted and its messageonce again felt, by withdrawingyour painting from the UnitedStates for the duration of thewar.” In 1974, Toni Shafrazispray-painted the words “KillLies All” on Picasso’s iconicpainting. See Picasso’sGuernica, ed. Ellen C. Oppler(New York and London: SyracuseUniversity Press, 1988). Thesymbolic power of Guernica wasfurther highlighted in January2003 when a reproduction of thepainting in the UN headquarterswas covered during ColinPowell’s presentation of the casefor invading Iraq to the SecurityCouncil. This blocked theproduction of images (by thepress) of the Security Councilwith the reproduction in thebackground.6Jean-Paul Sartre, What isLiterature?, trans. BernardFrechtam (New York: HarperColophon Books, 1965), 4. Firstpublished in France in 1947.7See Walter Benjamin, “TheAuthor as Producer,” New LeftReview vol. 1, no. 62(July–August 1970) 84-85. ForJacques Derrida, Guernica’sdenunciation of civilizedbarbarism occurs in a deadsilence that allows one to hearthe cry of moaning oraccusation. This cry joins thescreams of the children and thedin of the bomber. See Derrida,“Racism’s Last Word,” CriticalInquiry 12 (Fall 1985), 290-301.8See Adorno, “Commitment,”in Notes toLiterature, Volume Two, ed. RolfTiedemann, trans. ShierryWeber-Nicholsen (New York:Columbia University Press,1992), 76-94.9This is Adorno and PierreMacherey’s position regardingthe relationship betweenaesthetics and politics. ForMacherey, art has an end insofarit presupposes a subjective pactbetween viewer and authorbased on general trust: theauthor’s word is to be believed,the receiver’s is an act of faith.Before the work appears, thereis an abstract spacepresupposing the possibility ofthe reception of the author’sword. See Pierre Macherey, Pourune théorie de la productionlittéraire (Paris: FrançoisMaspero, 1966), 89-91. Thierryde Duve posits the problem ofart as an end via Kant’saesthetic judgment, arguing that“the notion of artists speakingon behalf of us is essential to artas art, and its legitimacy doesnot hinge on the artist’spurportedly universal mandatebut rather on the artwork’suniversal address.” (Myemphasis) See Thierry de Duve,“Do Artists Speak on Behalf ofAll of Us?,” in Voici -100 d’artcontemporain (Brussels:Museum of Fine Arts, 2001).10Jean-Paul Sartre et al., On araison de se révolter (Paris:Gallimard, 1974), 288-340.11Kristin Ross, May ’68 and itsAfterlives, (Chicago and London:The University of Chicago Press,2002), 114-116.12“People seize speech and keepit.”13See Jean Baudrillard, “Requiemfor the Media” (1972), NewMedia Reader, ed. NoahWardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,2003), 280.14See Brecht’s “The Radio as anApparatus for Communication”(1932); Walter Benjamin’s “TheAuthor as Producer”; HansMagnus Enzensberger’s“Constituents of the Theory ofthe Media,” in TheConsciousness Industry (NewYork: Seabury Press, 1974), 95-earlier times, recreation meant passivecontemplation. In their free time, people went totheatres, cinemas, museums, or stayed home toread books or watch TV. Guy Debord describedthis as the society of spectacle – a society inwhich freedom took the form of free timeassociated with passivity and escape. Buttoday’s society is unlike that spectacular society.In their free time, people work – they travel, playsports, and exercise. They don’t read books, butwrite for Facebook, Twitter, and other socialmedia. They do not look at art but take photos,make videos, and send them to their relativesand friends. People have become very activeindeed. They design their free time by doingmany kinds of work. And while this activation ofhumans correlates with the major forms of mediaof the era dominated by moving images (whetherfilm or video), one cannot represent themovement of thought or the state ofcontemplation through these media. One cannotrepresent this movement even through thetraditional arts; Rodin’s famous statue of theThinker actually presents a guy resting afterworking out at a gym. The movement of thoughtis invisible. Thus, it cannot be represented by acontemporary culture oriented to visuallytransmittable information. So one can say thattheory’s unknowable call to action fits very wellwithin the contemporary media environment.Joos van Craesbeeck, The Temptation of St. Anthony, 1650.But, of course, theory does not merely callus to take action towards any specific goal.Rather, theory calls for action that would perform– and extend – the condition of theory itself.Indeed, every critical theory is not merelyinformative but also transformative. The scene oftheoretical discourse is one of conversion thatexceeds the terms of communication.Communication itself does not change thesubjects of the communicative exchange: I havetransmitted information to somebody, andsomeone else has transmitted some information06/13to me. Both participants remain self-identicalduring and after this exchange. But criticaltheoretical discourse is not simply aninformative discourse, for it does not onlytransmit certain knowledge. Rather, it asksquestions concerning the meaning of knowledge.What does it mean that I have a certain newpiece of knowledge? How has this newknowledge transformed me, how it hasinfluenced my general attitude towards theworld? How has this knowledge changed mypersonality, modified my way of life? To answerthese questions one has to perform theory – toshow how certain knowledge transforms one’sbehavior. In this respect, theoretical discourse issimilar to religious and philosophical discourses.Religion describes the world, but it is notsatisfied with this descriptive role alone. It alsocalls us to believe this description and todemonstrate this faith, to act on our faith.Philosophy also calls us not only to believe in thepower of reason but also to act reasonably,rationally. Now theory not only wants us tobelieve that we are primarily finite, living bodies,but also demonstrate this belief. Under theregime of theory it is not enough to live: one mustalso demonstrate that one lives, one shouldperform one’s being alive. And now I would arguethat in our culture it is art that performs thisknowledge of being alive.Indeed, the main goal of art is to show,expose, and exhibit modes of life. Accordingly,art has often played the role of performingknowledge, of showing what it means to live withand through a certain knowledge. It is well knownthat, as Kandinsky would explain his abstract artby referring to the conversion of mass into energyin Einstein’s theory of relativity, he saw his art asthe manifestation of this potential at anindividual level. The elaboration of life with andthrough the techniques of modernization weresimilarly manifested by Constructivism. Theeconomic determination of human existencethematized by Marxism was reflected in theRussian avant-garde. Surrealism articulated thediscovery of the subconscious that accompaniedthis economic determination. Somewhat later,conceptual art attended to the closer control ofhuman thinking and behavior through the controlof language.Of course, one can ask: Who is the subjectof such an artistic performance of knowledge? Bynow, we have heard of the many deaths of thesubject, the author, the speaker, and so forth.But all these obituaries concerned the subject ofphilosophical reflection and self-reflection – butalso the voluntary subject of desire and vitalenergy. In contrast, the performative subject isconstituted by the call to act, to demonstrateoneself as alive. I know myself as addressee of05.22.12 / 02:45:15 EDT05.22.12 / 02:07:56 EDT

this call, and it tells me: change yourself, showyour knowledge, manifest your life, taketransformative action, transform the world, andso on. This call is directed toward me. That ishow I know that I can, and must, answer it.And, by the way, the call to act is not madeby a divine caller. The theorist is also a humanbeing, and I have no reason to completely trusthis or her intention. The Enlightenment taughtus, as I have already mentioned, to not trust thegaze of the Other – to suspect Others (priestsand so forth) of pursuing their own agenda,hidden behind their appellative discourse. Andtheory taught us not to trust ourselves, and theevidence of our own reason. In this sense, everyperformance of a theory is at the same time aperformance of the distrust of this theory. Weperform the image of life to demonstrateourselves as living to the others – but also toshield ourselves from the evil eye of the theorist,to hide behind our image. And this, in fact, isprecisely what theory wants from us. After all,theory also distrusts itself. As Theodor Adornosaid, the whole is false and there is no true life inthe false. 2Detail of Ad Reinhardt's cartoons from the book How to Look at art.Having said this, one should also take intoconsideration the fact that the artist can adoptanother perspective: the critical perspective oftheory. Artists can, and indeed do, adopt this inmany cases; they see themselves not asperformers of theoretical knowledge usinghuman action to ask about the meaning of thisknowledge, but as messengers andpropagandists of this knowledge. These artistsdo not perform, but rather join thetransformative call. Instead of performing theorythey call others to do it; instead of becomingactive they want to activate others. And theybecome critical in the sense that theory isexclusive towards anyone who does not answerits call. Here, art takes on an illustrative,didactic, educational role – comparable to thedidactic role of the artist in the framework of, letsay, Christian faith. In other words, the artistmakes secular propaganda (comparable toreligious propaganda). I am not critical of this07/13propagandistic turn. It has produced manyinteresting works in the course of the twentiethcentury and remains productive now. However,artists who practice this type of propagandaoften speak about the ineffectiveness of art – asif everybody can and should be persuaded by arteven if he or she is not persuaded by theoryitself. Propaganda art is not specificallyinefficient – it simply shares the successes andfailures of the theory that it propagates.These two artistic attitudes, theperformance of theory and theory aspropaganda, are not only different but alsoconflicting, even incompatible interpretations oftheory’s “call.” This incompatibility producedmany conflicts, even tragedies, within art on theleft – and indeed on the right – during the courseof the twentieth century. This incompatibilitytherefore deserves an attentive discussion forbeing the main conflict. Critical theory – from itsbeginnings in the work of Marx and Nietzsche –sees the human being as a finite, material body,devoid of ontological access to the eternal ormetaphysical. That means that there is noontological, metaphysical guarantee of successfor any human action – just as there is also noguarantee of failure. Any human action can be atany moment interrupted by death. The event ofdeath is radically heterogeneous in relationshipto any teleological construction of history. Fromthe perspective of living theory, death does nothave to coincide with fulfillment. The end of theworld does not have to necessarily beapocalyptic and reveal the truth of humanexistence. Rather, we know life as nonteleological,as having no unifying divine orhistorical plan that we could contemplate andupon which we could rely. Indeed, we knowourselves to be involved in an uncontrollable playof material forces that makes every actioncontingent. We watch the permanent change offashions. We watch the irreversible advance oftechnology that eventually makes any experienceobsolete. Thus we are called, continually, toabandon our skills, our knowledge, and our plansfor being out of date. Whatever we see, we expectits disappearance sooner rather than later.Whatever we plan to do today, we expect tochange tomorrow.In other words, theory confronts us with theparadox of urgency. The basic image that theoryoffers to us is the image of our own death – animage of our mortality, of radical finitude andlack of time. By offering us this image, theoryproduces in us the feeling of urgency – a feelingthat impels us to answer its call for action nowrather than later. But, at the same time, thisfeeling of urgency and lack of time prevents usfrom making long-term projects; from basing ouractions on long-term planning; from having greatGodard produces a sort of mnemotechnics thatallows us to memorize the images and thus linktheir signifiers in diverse contexts: theoperations of disjunctive repetition andappropriation pull out what the signifiers lack orpush out their excess. This assemblage ofimages and sound-images from diverse regimesof visibilities and discursivities, linked throughthe word “and,” creates additional images,providing a multiplicity of points of view. Such anassemblage destroys the identities of images,insofar as “and” substitutes and takes over theontological attribution of those images: their“this is,” the eidos of images (their being-with, orÊtre-ET). 19Still from Dziga Vertov Group and Sonimage’s film, Here andElsewhere, 1970-1974.Privileging the act of seeing thatunderscores the distinction between speech anddiscourse in Here and Elsewhere, Godard andMiéville speak in the first person in the voiceover,calling for an ethics of enunciation that accountsfor the intransitivity of mass media andundermines the code of objectivity proper to themedia. 20 For Godard and Miéville, “objectivity”requires that images hide their own silence, a“silence that is deadly because it impedes theimage from coming out alive.” They thus workwith the imperative to ask of images: “Whospeaks?” And for them, all images are alwaysaddressed to a third: “Une image c’est un regardsur un autre regard présenté à un troisièmeregard.” 21 Thus, images must be understood asimmanent to an interlocutionary act, especiallydocumentary and photojournalistic images,which, obliterating the mechanism of mediation,put forth objectivity as a discursive regime inwhich either “no one speaks,” “it speaks,” or“someone said.” The ethico-political imperativebecomes, therefore, to take enunciativeresponsibility, to speak images and acknowledge07/09e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Irmgard EmmelhainzBetween Objective Engagement and Engaged Cinema: Jean-Luc Godard’s “Militant Filmmaking” (1967-1974), Part IIauthorship over them, to make images speak andto restore the speech that has been taken awayfrom them, accounting for the intentionalityimmanent to the act of speaking for and ofothers as an act of expression emphasizingdirect address – absolutely foreign to confessionor situated knowledge, in the manner ofécriture. 22 By means of direct address, thesubject of speech in Here and Elsewhere islocated at the juncture of diffusing, receiving,emitting, and resending images and reflectingupon them. Godard and Miéville thereby becomeimmanent to the videographic apparatus,speaking from an inter-media discursive siteconstituted by video passing in betweentelevision, cinema, photography, and printmedia.Godard’s war of position between 1967 and1974 can be summarized as the production ofcontradictory images and sounds that callviewers to produce meaning with the films, asopposed to consuming meaning. We can name ita politics of address, a “the(rr)orising” pedagogy,or Brechtian didacticism. Godard’scollaborations with Gorin and Miéville createdissensus while calling for a radical way ofhearing and seeing. In their work, the task of artis to separate and transform the continuum ofimage and sound meaning into a series offragments, postcards, and lessons, outlining atension between visuality and discourse.Evidently, for Sonimage the stakes in asking thequestion “Who speaks, for whom, and how?” hadmigrated from the realm of cinema into televisionand the communications media. This is due notonly to the mediatization of intellectualmediation sketched out above, but mostimportantly, because of the ethical and politicalproblems raised by the Palestinian footage inrelation to militant engagement with Third Worldrevolutionary movements and the pervasivenessof images of such movements in the media. ForGodard and Miéville, it became pressing toarticulate a regime of enunciation that wouldcontinue DVG’s critique of auteur theory in film,while addressing in a pedagogical manner thediscursive regime of mediatic information andthe problem of the expiration of speech.×05.22.12 / 02:07:56 EDT05.22.12 / 02:45:15 EDT

freedom is reduced (like the viewer of politicalfilms) to the acceptance or rejection of content,such efforts are fruitless. Mediatization entailsthe coding of information into “objective”messages which are transmitted from a distanceand which, because of the very nature of theapparatus, never get feedback. As Baudrillardput it, with the media “speech is expiring.”Baudrillard compares the media to voting,referendums, and polls. For him, all three sharethe logic of providing a coded state of affairswith which we must either agree or disagree,without having any agency over the content. 15Godard and Miéville sought to break away fromthe dichotomies of producer/consumer,transmitter-broadcaster/receiver, addressingthem as a matter of the transformation ofknowledge and communication into information(or codes), as a problem of cinematic voice andaddress.May 4, 1976, in the streets of Besançon, the Lip factory workers, afteroccupation protest in the streets bear a sign written “LIP will live.”Here and Elsewhere is, therefore, a filmabout utterances and visibilities gliding into oneanother in relation to cinematic voice, speech,discourse, expression, and their becominginformation,challenging the dominant forms ofthe shared sensible. Throughout the film, we seea multitude of open, speaking mouths: those ofpoliticians, militants, and average people. Wehear an array of sounds, speeches, anddiscourses: revolutionary songs and the soundsof war and the voices of the fedayeen, all fromdifferent discursive sites. Pointing out thediscrepancies and the heterogeneous quality ofthe relationships between visibilities andutterances, Godard emphasizes the act ofseeing, giving primacy to vision over discourseand speech; montage becomes the site ofenunciation, shifting the problem fromrepresentation to matters of visibility, the visible,06/09and the imageable. As he puts it in the voiceover:“Any everyday image is part of a vague andcomplicated system where the world comes inand out at each instant.” 16Through montage Godard makes imagesappear (comparaître) before the viewer, “giving tosee” (donner à voir) as opposed to rendering ormaking visible. Here and Elsewhere presents amélange of images: those filmed by Godard andGorin in the Middle East, images filmed inSonimage’s studio in Grenoble, images fromjournals and newscasts, and appropriated“historical” images and cartoons. The imagesappear in different formats or dispositifs: intelevision monitors, in filmed photographs, invideo collages, in film footage, in slides, and innewspapers. Thus, the film is an accumulativedisjunction of regimes of visibilities anddiscursivities embedded in their diverse materialsupports and channels of circulation. Theregimes of visibilities can be divided intocategories (slogan-images and trademarkimages),genres (documentary, photojournalistic,pedagogic, epic), series (revolutionary additions,libidinal politics), and media (televisual screen,photography, and cinema). Sounds and soundimagesare brought together through montageusing the word “and” as the glue. For Godard,having been influenced by Walter Benjamin andAndré Breton, the actualization of an image isonly possible through the conjunction of twoothers: “Film is not one image after another, it isan image PLUS another image forming a third –the third being formed by the viewer at themoment of viewing the film.” 17 In Here andElsewhere the conjunction/disjunction of theFrench working-class family and the fedayeen(who have the history of all revolutions incommon) creates a fissure in the signifying chainof association in the film. The interstice betweenthe “states of affairs” of the two (sociohistorical)figures allows resemblances to beranked, and a difference of potential isestablished between the two, producing athird. 18 Such difference of potential is lodged inthe syncategoreme “and.” The “and” is literally inbetween images, it is the re-creation of theinterstice, bringing together the socio-historicalfigures along with the film’s diverse materials ofexpression in a relation without a relationship.Godard differentiates images by de-chainingthem from their commonsensical chains ofsignification and re-chaining (or recoding) themin such a way that their signifiers becomeheterogeneous. Such heterogeneity resists theformation of a visual discourse resonant with thecommonsensical image of the Palestinianrevolution found in photojournalistic anddocumentary images visible in the French massmedia. Through appropriation and repetition,personal and historical expectations concerningthe results of our actions.A good example of this performance ofurgency can be seen in Lars von Trier’s filmMelancholia. Two sisters see their approachingdeath in form of the planet Melancholia as itdraws closer to the earth, about to annihilate it.Planet Melancholia looks on them, and they readtheir death in the planet’s neutral, objectifyinggaze. It is a good metaphor for the gaze of theory– and the two sisters are called by this gaze toreact to it. Here we find a typical modern, secularcase of extreme urgency – inescapable, yet atthe same time purely contingent. The slowapproach of Melancholia is a call for action. Butwhat kind of action? One sister tries to escapethis image – to save herself and her child. It is areference to the typical Hollywood apocalypticmovie in which an attempt to escape a worldcatastrophe always succeeds. But the othersister welcomes the death – and becomesseduced by this image of death to the point oforgasm. Rather than spend the rest of her lifewarding off death, she performs a welcomingritual – one that activates and excites her withinlife. Here we find a good model of two opposingways to react to the feeling of urgency and lackof time.08/13Indeed, the same urgency, the same lack oftime that pushes us to act suggests that ouractions will probably not achieve any goals orproduce any results. It is an insight that was welldescribed by Walter Benjamin in his famousparable using Klee’s Angelus Novus: if we looktowards the future we see only promises, while ifwe look towards the past we can see only theruins of these promises. 3 This image wasinterpreted by Benjamin’s readers as beingmostly pessimistic. But it is in fact optimistic –in a certain way, this image reproduces athematic from a much earlier essay in whichBenjamin distinguishes between two types ofviolence: divine and mythical. 4 Mythical violenceproduces destruction that leads from an oldorder to new orders. Divine violence onlydestroys – without establishing any new order.This divine destruction is permanent (similar toTrotsky’s idea of permanent revolution). Buttoday, a reader of Benjamin’s essay on violenceinevitably asks how divine violence can beeternally inflicted if it is only destructive? Atsome point, everything would be destroyed anddivine violence itself will become impossible.Indeed, if God has created the world out ofnothingness, he can also destroy it completely –leaving no traces.Richard Artschwager, Live in yourhead, 2002.05.22.12 / 02:45:15 EDT05.22.12 / 02:07:56 EDT

09/13But the point is precisely this: Benjaminuses the image of Angelus Novus in the contextof his materialist concept of history in whichdivine violence becomes material violence. Thus,it becomes clear why Benjamin does not believein the possibility of total destruction. Indeed, ifGod is dead, the material world becomesindestructible. In the secular, purely materialworld, destruction can be only materialdestruction, produced by material forces. Butany material destruction remains only partiallysuccessful. It always leaves ruins, traces,vestiges behind – precisely as described byBenjamin in his parable. In other words, if wecannot totally destroy the world, the world alsocannot totally destroy us. Total success isimpossible, but so is total failure. The materialistvision of the world opens a zone beyond successand failure, conservation and annihilation,acquisition and loss. Now, this is precisely thezone in which art operates if it wants to performits knowledge of the materiality of the world –and of life as a material process. And while theart of the historic avant-gardes has also beenaccused often of being nihilistic and destructive,the destructiveness of avant-garde art wasmotivated by its belief in the impossibility oftotal destruction. One can say that the avantgarde,looking towards the future, saw preciselythe same image that Benjamin’s Angelus Novussaw when looking towards the past.From the outset, modern and contemporaryart integrates the possibilities of failure,historical irrelevance, and destruction within itsown activities. Thus, art cannot be shocked bywhat it sees in the rear window of progress. Theavant-garde’s Angelus Novus always sees thesame thing, whether it looks into the future orinto the past. Here life is understood as a nonteleological,purely material process. To practicelife means to be aware of the possibility of itsinterruption at any moment by death – and thusto avoid pursuing any definite goals andobjectives because such pursuits can beinterrupted by death at any moment. In thissense, life is radically heterogeneous with regardto any concept of History that can be narratedonly as disparate instances of success andfailure.For a very long time, man was ontologicallysituated between God and animals. At that time,it seemed to be more prestigious to be placednearer to God, and further from the animal.Within modernity and our present time, we tendto situate man between the animal and themachine. In this new order, it would seem that it05/09Still from Dziga Vertov Group and Sonimage’s film, Here and Elsewhere, 1970-1974.Peter Hujar, Thek Working on the Tomb Figure, 1967-2010. Pigmented ink print.05.22.12 / 02:07:56 EDT05.22.12 / 02:45:15 EDT

the other: they are separate, but aware of eachother. Such a link presupposes film’s autonomyas relying on its having an end, which is differentfrom being an end, or being instrumental to acause: art appeals to viewers, calling forjudgment or consideration. 9Still from Dziga Vertov Group and Sonimage’s film, Here andElsewhere, 1970-1974.As we have seen, Maoists, breaking fromthe model of the Leninist vanguard intellectual,labored in factories alongside workers, all thewhile imbued with a Christian sacrificial rhetoricthat claimed to serve the people, rejecting whatthey considered the exteriority of discourse infavor of the interiority of practice, and believingin the workers’ creative potential. Maoiststruggles, however, were rendered obsolete bythe self-managerial breakthrough at LIP, a watchfactory in Besançon. In a 1973 interview withMaoists Philippe Gavin and Pierre Victor (thelatter was Bernard-Henri Lévy’s pseudonym),Sartre discusses the LIP strike at length inrelation to how it evinced the limits of Maoistrevolutionary practice. Posing again the question“Who speaks?,” but now in humanist terms,Sartre, Gavin, and Victor sketch out the figure ofthe “New Political Man,” a synthesis of Maoistactivist, intellectual, and politician. The NewPolitical Man’s tools would be critical awareness,persuasion, and a renunciation of thesuperstructure. He would disseminateinformation in the public domain while remainingaware of the danger of becoming a “mediaticvedette.” 10 A parallel figure – or perhaps anextension of the New Political Man – was thejournalist: an intellectual who injected pressingdebates into the public domain. After thedissolution of the Proletarian Left in 1973, itbecame necessary for the Maoists toreconceptualize engaged practice in order tofurther the politics of direct democracy. Theye-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Irmgard EmmelhainzBetween Objective Engagement and Engaged Cinema: Jean-Luc Godard’s “Militant Filmmaking” (1967-1974), Part IIpublicly rejected their earlier Maoist activism, agesture that went hand in hand with theircritique of anti-totalitarianism. A new project,supported by Sartre and Foucault, was thefounding of the daily newspaper Libération in thespring of 1973. Maoists demonstrated that theywere increasingly media-savvy by producing anumber of spectacular symbolic events coveredby the media – therein the genealogy of “tacticalmedia.” Not surprisingly, they rearticulated thepractice of revolutionary journalism in terms of acollective “public writer.” 11 One of the keythemes of the May ’68 utopia was a societycompletely transparent to itself; thistransparency was supposed to be achieved bythe direct exchange of free speech withoutmediation, a theme that was then realized inLibération’s redefinition of mediation. Thenewspaper sought to democratically let all sidesin a given conflict speak. Serge July defined themission of the newspaper as the struggle forinformation under the direct and public controlof the population, continuing the Maoist task ofhelping people to “capture speech,” as in theirslogan “Peuple prend la parole et garde-la.” 12Libération’s impulse to democratize and tosubvert content, to restore the “transparency ofthe code” by giving control of the informationprocess to the people, was an attempt to reversethe circuit of information by initiating debate, aswell as an attempt to realize the classic positionof the Left regarding the democratic potential ofthe mass media. Influenced by the mass mediatheories of Benjamin, Brecht, and Enzensberger,their argument was that capital had hijacked themeans of communication to promote and realizeideology. In this account, the media is posited asintransitive because it produces noncommunication.In other words, communicationthrough the media is unilateral. 13 Ideally, thedemocratic potential of the media could berealized by breaking through this intransitivityand revolutionizing the apparatus and itscontent. 14As discussed above, for Godard and Miévillethe leftist voice incarnated in Maoist activism didnot go far enough in its contestation ofintellectuals’ vanguardist position as theproducers of common sense for the proletariat.Thus, in Here and Elsewhere they posed the newproblem of the propagation of leftist doxa by thebecoming-information of leftist discourse.Miéville and Godard would agree withBaudrillard’s critique of a leftist utopian view ofthe media, which held that unlimited democraticexchange is possible through communication.Such a position overlooks the fact that inessence, the media is speech without response.Even if efforts are geared toward the problem ofthe idle, passive reader-consumer whoseis better to be an animal than a machine. Duringthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but alsotoday, there was a tendency to present life as adeviation from a certain program – as thedifference only between a living body and amachine. Increasingly, however, as the machinicparadigm was assimilated, the contemporaryhuman being can be seen as an animal acting asa machine – an industrial machine or acomputer. If we accept this Foucauldianperspective, the living human body – humananimality – does indeed manifest itself throughdeviation from the program, through error,through madness, chaos, and unpredictability.That is why contemporary art often tends tothematize deviation and error – everything thatbreaks away from the norm and disturbs theestablished social program.Here it is important to note that theclassical avant-garde placed itself more on theside of the machine than on the side of thehuman animal. Radical avant-gardists, fromMalevich and Mondrian to Sol LeWitt and DonaldJudd, practiced their art according to machinelikeprograms in which deviation and variancewere contained by the generative laws of theirrespective projects. However, these programswere internally different from any “real” programbecause they were neither utilitarian norinstrumentalizing. Our real social, political, andtechnical programs are oriented towardsachieving a certain goal – and they are judgedaccording to their efficiency or ability to achievethis goal. Art programs and machines, however,are not teleologically oriented. They have nodefinite goal; they simply go on and on. At thesame time, these programs include thepossibility of being interrupted at any momentwithout losing their integrity. Here art reacts tothe paradox of urgency produced by materialisttheory and its call to action. On the one hand, ourfiniteness, our ontological lack of time compelsus to abandon the state of contemplation andpassivity and begin to act. And yet, this samelack of time dictates an action that is notdirected towards any particular goal – and canbe interrupted at any moment. Such an action isconceived from the beginning as having nospecific ending – unlike an action that endswhen its goal is achieved. Thus artistic actionbecomes infinitely continuable and/orrepeatable. Here the lack of time is transformedinto a surplus of time – in fact, an infinitesurplus of time.It is characteristic that the operation of theso-called aestheticization of reality iseffectuated precisely by this shift from ateleological to a non-teleological interpretationof historical action. For example, it is notaccidental that Che Guevara became the10/13e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Boris GroysUnder the Gaze of Theoryaesthetic symbol of revolutionary movement: allrevolutionary undertakings by Che Guevaraended in failures. But that is precisely why theattention of the spectator shifts from the goal ofrevolutionary action to the life of a revolutionaryhero failing to achieve his goals. This life thenreveals itself as brilliant and fascinating – withno regard for practical results. Such examplescan, of course, be multiplied.In the same sense, one can argue that theperformance of theory by art also implies theaestheticization of theory. Surrealism can beinterpreted as the aestheticization ofpsychoanalysis. In his First Manifesto ofSurrealism, Andre Breton famously proposed atechnique of automatic writing. The idea was towrite so fast that neither consciousness norunconsciousness could catch up with the writingprocess. Here the psychoanalytical practice offree association is imitated – but detached fromits normative goal. Later, after reading Marx,Breton exhorted readers of the Second Manifestoto pull out a revolver and fire randomly into thecrowd – again the revolutionary action becomesnon-purposeful. Even earlier, Dadaists practiceddiscourse beyond meaning and coherence – adiscourse that could be interrupted at everymoment without losing its consistency. The samecan be said, in fact, about the speeches ofJoseph Beuys: they were excessively long butcould be interrupted at any moment becausethey were not subjected to the goal of making anargument. And the same can be said about manyother contemporary artistic practices: they canbe interrupted or reactivated at any moment.Failure thus becomes impossible because thecriteria of success are absent. Now, many peoplein the art world deplore the fact that that art isnot and cannot be successful in “real life.” Herereal life is understood as history – and successas historical success. Earlier I showed that thenotion of history does not coincide with thenotion of life – in particular with the notion of“real life” – for history is an ideologicalconstruction based on a concept of progressivemovement toward a certain telos. Thisteleological model of progressive history hasroots in Christian theology. It does notcorrespond to the post-Christian, postphilosophical,materialist view of the world. Artis emancipatory. Art changes the world andliberates us. But it is does so precisely byliberating us from history – by liberating life fromhistory.Classical philosophy was emancipatorybecause it protested against the religious andaristocratic, military rule that suppressed reason– and the individual human being as bearer ofreason. The Enlightenment wanted to change theworld through the liberation of reason. Today,05.22.12 / 02:45:15 EDT05.22.12 / 02:07:56 EDT

after Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, and manyothers, we tend to believe that reason does notliberate, but rather suppresses us. Now we wantto change the world to liberate life – which hasincreasingly become a more fundamentalcondition of human existence than reason. Infact, life seems to us to be subjected andoppressed by the same institutions that proclaimthemselves to be models of rational progress,with the promotion of life as their goal. Toliberate ourselves from the power of theseinstitutions means rejecting their universalclaims based on older precepts of reason.Thus, theory calls us to change not merelythis or that aspect of the world, but the world asa whole. But here the question arises: Is such atotal, revolutionary, and not only gradual,particular, evolutionary change possible? Theorybelieves that every transformative action can beeffectuated because there is no metaphysical,ontological guarantee of the status quo, of adominating order, of existing realities. But at thesame time, there is also no ontological guaranteeof a successful total change (no divineprovidence, power of nature or reason, directionof history, or other determinable outcome). Ifclassical Marxism still proclaimed faith in aguarantee of total change (in the form ofproductive forces that will explode socialstructures), or Nietzsche believed in the power ofdesire that will explode all civilized conventions,today we have difficulty in believing in thecollaboration of such infinite powers. Once werejected the infinity of the spirit, it seemsimprobable to substitute it with a theology ofproduction or desire. But if we are mortal andfinite, how can we successfully change theworld? As I have already suggested, the criteriaof success and failure are precisely what definesthe world in its totality. So if we change – or, evenbetter, abolish – these criteria, we do indeedchange the world in its totality. And, as I havetried to show, art can do it – and in fact hasalready done it.But, of course, one can further ask: What isthe social relevance of such a non-instrumental,non-teleological, artistic performance of life? Iwould suggest that it is the production of thesocial as such. Indeed, we should not think thatthe social is always already there. Society is anarea of equality and similarity: originally, society,or politeia emerged in Athens – as a society ofthe equal and similar. Ancient Greek societies –which are a model for every modern society –were based on commonalities, such asupbringing, aesthetic taste, language. Theirmembers were effectively interchangeablethrough the physical and cultural realization ofestablished values. Every member of a Greeksociety could do what the others could also do in11/13e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Boris GroysUnder the Gaze of Theorythe fields of sport, rhetoric, or war. Buttraditional societies based on givencommonalities no longer exist.Today we are living not in a society ofsimilarity, but rather in a society of difference.And the society of difference is not a politeia buta market economy. If I live in a society in whicheveryone is specialized, and has his or herspecific cultural identity, then I offer to otherswhat I have and can do – and receive from themwhat they have or can do. These networks ofexchange also function as networks ofcommunication, as a rhizome. Freedom ofcommunication is only a special case for the freemarket. Now, theory and art that performstheory, produce similarity beyond the differencesthat are induced by the market economy – and,therefore, theory and art compensate for theabsence of traditional commonalities. It is notaccidental that the call to human solidarity isalmost always accompanied in our time not by anappeal to common origins, common sense andreason, or the commonality of human nature, butto the danger of common death through nuclearwar or global warming, for example. We aredifferent in our modes of existence – but similardue to our mortality.In earlier times, philosophers and artistswanted to be (and understood themselves asbeing) exceptional human beings capable ofcreating exceptional ideas and things. But today,theorists and artists do not want to beexceptional – rather, they want to be likeeverybody else. Their preferred topic is everydaylife. They want to be typical, non-specific, nonidentifiable,non-recognizable in a crowd. Andthey want to do what everybody else does:prepare food (Rirkrit Tiravanija) or kick an iceblock along the road (Francis Alÿs). Kant alreadycontended that art is not a thing of truth, but oftaste, and that it can and should be discussed byeveryone. The discussion of art is open toeveryone because by definition no one can be aspecialist in art – only a dilettante. That meansthat art is from its beginnings social – andbecomes democratic if one abolishes theboundaries of high society (still a model ofsociety for Kant). However, from the time of theavant-garde onwards, art became not only anobject of a discussion, free from the criteria oftruth, but a universal, non-specific, nonproductive,generally accessible activity freefrom any criteria of success. Advancedcontemporary art is basically art productionwithout a product. It is an activity in whicheveryone can participate, that is all-inclusive andtruly egalitarian.In saying all this, I do not have somethinglike relational aesthetics in mind. I also do notbelieve that art, if understood in this way, can bedenunciation of power was a practical “settlingof accounts,” denouncing oppression,exploitation, and racism by creating sensationalmedia events. On this account, the Maoistsfailed due to an excess of dissent. 4 Similarly, thevoiceover in Here and Elsewhere claims that inspite of their self-criticism, the Maoists failedbecause their vociferous ideology drowned outthe voice seeking expression through the filmedimages. The intellectual’s failure to engage withrevolutionaries abroad is rendered analogous tothe impending breakdown of activist practice athome. In the quote cited above, “sound” shouldbe understood as militant ideology, and theimage inside the sound as art. Art had beendrowned out by politics. When Godard andMiéville say that “people always speak about theimage and forget about the sound,” they implythat the ideology that informed the discourse ofpolitical art-making overpowered the image.Images were thus spoken and not seen,obliterating the fact that sound had taken powerover and defined them.There is a scene in Here and Elsewhere thatdirectly addresses matters of representativity. Ittakes place in the home of a working-classfamily, in a room where a young girl does herhomework below a reproduction of Guernica thathangs from the wall. Off screen we hear hermother ask her father, “Did you find a job?” “No, Iarrived too late,” he answers. The father goes intothe room to greet the girl, who asks him, “Canyou explain to me dad? I don’t understand.” Heanswers while walking out: “No, I don’t havetime, we’ll see later.” The scene ends with thegirl’s sigh of frustration. Guernica is the icon parexcellence of intellectual militant struggles.Condemned by Sartre (in What is Literature?[1947]) and championed by Adorno (inCommitment [1962]), the image’s status as bothan icon for militant struggles and a kitsch object,unlikely to be hanging in a working-class home,renders its presence in this scene ambiguous. 5Here Godard and Miéville allegorize the puttingout-of-workof political representation, aligningit with the crisis of patriarchy. The father canneither work nor help, like the union delegate orthe intellectual. Explaining and helping tounderstand, which are tasks for intellectuals,militants, and fathers, are deferred or put out ofwork. In addition, Godard and Miévilleamalgamate patriarchal responsibility and therevolutionary’s responsibility to mobilize at home(as opposed to going abroad). Instead ofanswering the call, revolutionary action getspostponed indefinitely: “I don’t have time, we’llsee later.” They critique through self-critique(which is the only means of problematization atthis point) the intellectuals who went abroad andbrought back materials to speak about the03/09e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Irmgard EmmelhainzBetween Objective Engagement and Engaged Cinema: Jean-Luc Godard’s “Militant Filmmaking” (1967-1974), Part IIstruggles of others without looking at what washappening at home, as Godard and Miévillelament having themselves done in the MiddleEast. The citation of Guernica and the (self-)indictment of “having spoken too loud” summonsilence: Godard and Miéville call for silencingleftist ideology in the face of the failure of thePalestinian revolution, which embodies thefailure of all revolutions. They are speechless.When Godard declares in the voiceover that“we turned the volume up too high,” he ispositioning himself in relation to Sartre’s conceptof commitment. As we saw in Part I of this essay,Godard criticized Sartre for being unable tobridge his double position as writer and asintellectual. Godard himself sought to bridge thisgap between art production and engagedactivism in his practice of “militant filmmaking.”By citing Guernica and stating that “we turnedthe volume up too high,” Godard and Miévillecontest Sartre’s skepticism about the power ofimages as a medium for the denunciation ofinjustice – a skepticism exemplified by Sartre’sdismissal of Guernica. For Sartre, insofar asimages are mute, they are open receptacles ofmeaning and therefore invite ambiguousreadings, as opposed to conveying a clear,unified message, like writing. Sartre claims thatonly literature can be successful as committedart because the writer guides his audiencethrough a description, making them see thesymbols of injustice and thereby provoking theirindignation. 6 Opposing Sartre, Godard andMiéville invoke Guernica’s quiet, visual scream,making a plea in favor of a flight from the prisonof language, from logocracy. 7The fact that Guernica is not a speech act isperhaps the reason why it became the epitomeof an autonomous yet committed work of art.While it remains separate from the public sphere(the domain of opinion and speech), it lets theGerman culpability surface, and, at the sametime, it does not have as its end Picasso’sdeclaration of indignation. 8 While we can, withSartre, doubt whether Guernica convertedanyone to the Spanish cause, this painting, likemuch of Godard’s work (a later example is his1982 film Passion), posits a reflexive andanalogical relationship between aesthetics andpolitics, as opposed to a transitive link.Transitivity is the effect of an action on an object,or the application of something to an object: herethe application of politics to art, or vice versa. Bycontrast, an analogical relationship between artand politics implies a linking via aesthetics andethics: if aesthetics is to ethics what art is topolitics, it means that each term necessarily actsindividually. A reflexive or analogical linkbetween aesthetics and politics implies arelationship that acknowledges the presence of05.22.12 / 02:07:56 EDT05.22.12 / 02:45:15 EDT

Still from Dziga Vertov Group and Sonimage’s film, Here and Elsewhere, 1970-1974.02/09truly participatory or democratic. And now I willtry to explain why. Our understanding ofdemocracy is based on a conception of thenational state. We do not have a framework ofuniversal democracy transcending nationalborders – and we never had such a democracy inthe past. So we cannot say what a trulyuniversal, egalitarian democracy would look like.In addition, democracy is traditionallyunderstood as the rule of a majority, and ofcourse we can imagine democracy as notexcluding any minority and operating byconsensus – but still this consensus willnecessarily include only “normal, reasonable”people. It will never include “mad” people,children, and so forth.It will also not include animals. It will notinclude birds. But, as we know, St. Francis alsogave sermons to animals and birds. It will alsonot include stones – and we know from Freudthat there is a drive in us that compels us tobecome stones. It will also not include machines– even if many artists and theorists wanted tobecome machines. In other words, an artist issomebody who is not merely social, but supersocial,to use the term coined by Gabriel Tarde inthe framework of his theory of imitation. 5 Theartist imitates and establishes himself or herselfas similar and equal to too many organisms,figures, objects, and phenomena that will neverbecome a part of any democratic process. To usea very precise phrase by Orwell, some artists,are, indeed, more equal than others. Whilecontemporary art is often criticized for being tooelitist, not social enough, actually the contrary isthe case: art and artists are super-social. And,as Gabriel Tarde rightly remarks: to become trulysuper-social one has to isolate oneself from thesociety.×12/13e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Boris GroysUnder the Gaze of TheoryBoris Groys (1947, East Berlin) is Professor ofAesthetics, Art History, and Media Theory at theCenter for Art and Media Karlsruhe and GlobalDistinguished Professor at New York University. He isthe author of many books, including The Total Art ofStalinism, Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into Spacefrom His Apartment, Art Power, The CommunistPostscript, and, most recently, Going Public.05.22.12 / 02:45:15 EDT05.22.12 / 02:07:56 EDT

1Arnold Gehlen Zeit-Bilder. ZurSoziologie und Aesthetik dermodernen Malerei, (Frankfurt:Athenaeum, 1960).2Theodor Adorno, MinimaMoralia: Reflections fromDamaged Life, trans. E.N.Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974),50 and 39 respectively.3Walter Benjamin, “On theConcept of History,” in SelectedWritings, vol. 4: 1938-40, ed.Howard Eiland and MichaelJennings (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 2003), 389-400..4Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,”in Selected Writings, vol. 1:1913-26, ed. Marcus Bullock andMichael Jennings (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1999),236-52.5Gabriel Tarde, The Laws ofImitation (New York: H.Holt andCo., 1903), 88.13/13e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Boris GroysUnder the Gaze of TheoryIrmgard EmmelhainzBetweenObjectiveEngagementand EngagedCinema: Jean-Luc Godard’s“MilitantFilmmaking”(1967-1974),Part II01/09e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Irmgard EmmelhainzBetween Objective Engagement and Engaged Cinema: Jean-Luc Godard’s “Militant Filmmaking” (1967-1974), Part II→ Continued from “Between ObjectiveEngagement and Engaged Cinema: Jean-LucGodard’s ‘Militant Filmmaking’ (1967-1974), PartI” in issue 34.If the films Godard made with the DzigaVertov Group (DVG) show the historical, political,and sociological actuality, in Here and ElsewhereGodard and Miéville carve out a discursiveposition from which to retrospectively analyzeMay ’68 in France. They do this in 1974,concurrent with the Palestinian revolution. 1 DVGfilmed some of the material for Here andElsewhere in Palestinian training and refugeecamps in 1970. The material was edited after thedissolution of the DVG, under the auspices ofSonimage, the production company Godardfounded with Anne-Marie Miéville in 1974. Hereand Elsewhere is usually interpreted asadvancing a revisionist discourse that critiquesDVG’s “militant excesses,” claiming selfrepentancefor erroneous engagement in theface of the Black September massacres of 1970and the wave of terrorism that followed, eventsthat allegedly made Godard and Gorin realize thelimitations of their previous engagement andcompelled them to take a “turn” in their work. 2However, Here and Elsewhere does not differdrastically from other DVG films: it articulates anavant-garde point of view (here: the thirdworldistor the militant abroad), uncovers thecontradictions inherent to the situation itanalyzes, and proceeds to self-critique. Thedifference is that instead of reflecting thepolitical actuality, the film examines May ’68 andits practical and theoretical consequences.Godard and Miéville analyze, from the point ofview of 1974, the contemporary legacy of May ’68in Paris and Palestine. In the voiceover Godarddeclares:We did what many others were doing. Wemade images and we turned the volume up toohigh. With any image: Vietnam. Always the samesound, always too loud, Prague, Montevideo, May’68 in France, Italy, Chinese Cultural Revolution,strikes in Poland, torture in Spain, Ireland,Portugal, Chile, Palestine, the sound so loud thatit ended up drowning out the voice that it wantedto get out of the image. 3Here Godard and Miéville address thepredicament of May ’68, framing the question“Who speaks, for whom, and how?” as a failure:the putative speaker’s position is problematizedbecause the supposedly self-criticalintellectuals had spoken out too loud, drowningout the voice inside the images. Godard’sstatement can be compared to Jean-Pierre LeGoff’s assessment of the failure of Maoism. LeGoff argues that the logic animating Maoists’05.22.12 / 02:07:56 EDT05.22.12 / 02:45:15 EDT

1Max Horkheimer and TheodorAdorno, The Culture Industry:Enlightenment as MassDeception (London: ContinuumInternational Publishing Group,1976), 121.2Interestingly, the moraljustification of this neoliberalcult coincides with thephenomenon of the artist assuperstar, which actuallycommences with the so-calledthird phase of contemporary art– art since the mid-1980s – andshould be seen as symptomaticof an equivalent transformationin society. As Olav Velthuisremarks in his insightfulsociological analysis of the artmarket, 1980 was the first yearthat the highest price paid for awork of art was for a work by aliving artist, $1 million for thepainting Three Flags by JasperJohns. What is more significant,however, than the winner-takealleconomic model that beganto inform the art market, is theso-called superstar circuit thatemerged in the New York artworld of the 1980s. According toVelthuis, Julian Schnabel is therepresentative case of an artistwhose work saw a rapid rise ofprice level (and equally fastdecline), and is characteristic ofthe new market’s mentality and“aggressive superstar pricingstrategy.” (In a period of lessthan seven years, Schnabelprices soared from $3,000 to$300,000, improving the“symbolic” and financial positionof the artist, his dealers, and hiscollectors.) Warranted or not,this mixture of show businessand stock-market mentalitylinked to prospective financialsuccess has, since then,infiltrated the art world andproduced a Darwinian networkof success or burn-out. OlavVelthuis, Talking Prices:Symbolic Meaning of Prices onthe Market for Contemporary Art(Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP,2005), 145.3Peter Osborne, “ImaginaryRadicalisms: Notes on theLibertarianism of ContemporaryArt,” in Verksted 8 (2006): 15.4Ibid., 18.5Stewart Martin, “Critique ofRelational Aesthetics,”in Verksted 8 (2006): 113.6Ibid., 106.7Karl Marx, ÖkonomischphilosophischeManuskripte(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009),195.8“The sensible rises toward thedivine and enters art only at thestate of ideality, of the abstractsensible. Art thus ‘lies nearer tothe spirit and its thinking thanpurely external spiritless naturedoes.’ The matter it exerts itselfon is ‘a spiritualized sensibleappearance or a sensibleappearance of the spiritual.’ ”Alain Besançon, The ForbiddenImage: An Intellectual History ofIconoclasm (Chicago: TheUniversity of Chicago Press,2000), 205.9Obviously, the conflict betweengalleries and action houses aspresented here is a theoreticalexample. The reality is oftensimpler: Because auctionhouses not only often presentthe appearance of a free market,but also a powerful system ofinterdependencies between agallery, an auction house, and aprivate or corporate collection,they control – and monopolize –prices and values.10As Norbert Trenkle explains,“credit and speculation capitalare fictitious because they onlyapparently serve as capital. Theyyield high interest rates andspeculative gains for investors inthe relative absence of realvalorization, which alwayspresupposes that abstract laboris spent on the production ofcommodities and services andthat a proportion of it issiphoned off as surplus value.”See http://www.krisis.org/2009/tremors-on-the-global-market#more-3383.11Franco “Bifo” Berardi,“Cognitarian Subjectivation,”in Are You Working Too Much?Post-Fordism, Precarity, and theLabor of Art, ed. Julieta Aranda,Brian Kuan Wood, and AntonVidokle (Berlin: Sternberg Press,2011), 135.12Ibid., 138.13See Marie-José Mondzain, Image, icône,économie: Les sourcesByzantines de l’imaginairecontemporain (Paris: Seuil,1996).14Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdomand the Glory: For a TheologicalGenealogy of Economy andGovernment (Stanford, CA:Stanford UP, 2011), xii. Doxa inGreek means both Glory and“common belief” or “popularopinion.”15I freely use the term eikonomiain reference to theoreticaldebates during Byzantineiconoclasm. See Emanuel Alloa,“Bildökonomie. Von dentheologischen Wurzeln einesstreitbaren Begriffs,” in Image 2(2005): 13–24.16MaurizioLazzarato, Videophilosophie.Zeitwahrnehmung imPostfordismus (Berlin: B-Books,2002).12/12e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Sotirios BahtsetzisEikonomia: Notes on Economy and the Labor of ArtSotirios BahtsetzisEikonomia:Notes onEconomy andthe Labor of Art01/12e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Sotirios BahtsetzisEikonomia: Notes on Economy and the Labor of ArtMuch has been said about the dangerous impactof a superficial, lifestyle-based, money-orientedculture: it has often been invoked as theexplanation for why people become passive,docile, and easy to manipulate irrespective ofhow disadvantageous their economic conditionsare. Following the illustrative critique of twoeminent proponents of this criticism, TheodorAdorno and Max Horkheimer, the culture of ourtimes is endangered by the uncontrollableexpansion of the culture industry into higherartistic production – manipulating the massesinto passivity and cultivating false needs. 1 “Art”that produces standardized cultural goodsreflects a peculiar type of aestheticization of theeveryday world: a dream-like immersion intomass-produced commodities. This immersion isequivalent to the adoption of behavioralstereotypes and tastes linked to a continuouslyadvertised petit-bourgeois phantasmagoria, andalso reflects the advanced commodification ofsocial life.Furthermore, this conviction has had anenormous impact on the current understandingof art as derivative of a monopolized marketwhich functions on the same terms as thegeneral financial market, a view that experts inart business share. What is at stake in thecontemporary art field, according to so many ofits critics, is that the art market, as formed in thenineteenth century, was replaced by art businessin the mid-1980s, not only reflecting the fact thatcontemporary art has become a serious signifierof wealth, but also making visible thedevastating influence of neoliberal financialdoctrines and uncontrollable fiscal policiesformulated by pirate capitalists and corporatelobbyists on an art system that now runs on thebasis of speculation and self-promotion. 2But is art’s relation to money so transparentthat it can be seen solely as an heroic struggle ofart against its subjection to commodification, anattempt to assert its aesthetic autonomy? Theimplied dialectic of the autonomy of art, acentral concept in Adorno’s critique, refers to acomplex condition that can only be understoodthrough a more dialectical critique. As PeterOsborne observes, the integration ofautonomous art into the culture industry is “anew systemic functionalization of autonomyitself – a new affirmative culture” – thatpromotes “art’s uselessness” for its own sake. 3Ultimately, the self-legislated “laws of form” inpure art – autonomous meaning production bythe work – are an illusion. “Works of art are thusautonomous to the extent to which they producethe illusion of their autonomy. Art is selfconsciousillusion.” 4Let us concentrate on this point, as it allowsfor a further meditation on the connection05.22.12 / 02:15:02 EDT05.22.12 / 02:15:02 EDT

Bernardette Corporation, Is Everybody on the Floor, 2009. Digital inkjet print.02/12labor is not a commodity, but the production andconsumption of content-time.It is indeed difficult to imagine a world inwhich the economy of the artwork will have astronger influence on the global distribution ofimages, stock market courses, and the biopoliticsof labor, and will be able to establish aparadigmatic shift in society. But even if such aworld remains utopian at the moment, art’sdouble nature, which intervenes both in cycles offinancial speculation and in the actualproductive economy of affective time, still offersoptions for working within the structures ofmanagerial, economic, and political control.Beyond any romantic ideas of a revolution thatwould end the evils of capitalism, themarketability of art should not be seen as itshandicap, but as its safeguarding screen – atrompe-l’œil until a universal economy of theartwork can be established. This might notcancel out the condition of alienation inherent tothe human condition and create a society free ofconflicts – the romantic dream of all socialrevolutions – but it might be able to suspend itsforce to destroy our inherent social-being. Theprice to be paid is often very high: present-dayimpoverishment and precarization of intellectuallabor, which makes artists (as well as inventors,philosophers, therapists, and educators) appearsimply as ornamental accessories of theeconomy. Indeed, present-day “immaterial” andcreative workers belong to the most exploitedpart of the labor society. Not so, though, if weevaluate this labor not according to economic,but eikonomic criteria. Nevertheless, in afuturistic post-human scenario, in whichsemiocapital is not only produced but is alsoconsumed by those who are able to deal with itsendless acceleration – meaning by “intelligent”machines – and in which humanity exists only asa beautiful, viral bubble within a gigantictechnological, informational, and fiscal Gestell(the beginning of which might be the so-calledInternet of Things), the intensified, nonfiscalized,and creative time offered by art wouldbe our only recourses. Focusing more on labor aspraxis, as a bringing-forth that takes intoaccount human labor’s product as anacheiropoieton and its specific oikonomia, mightoffer us some solutions: worshiping less thegolden calf of semiocapital and creating invisibledispositifs of intensified time! This project willrequire its own economists, theorists, andworkers. Even if, for now, leading a life that is ascreatively intense as it is economically effectiveshouldn’t be regarded as taboo, one should alsourge: Be careful whom you offer credit to!×11/12e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Sotirios BahtsetzisEikonomia: Notes on Economy and the Labor of ArtSotirios Bahtsetzis is a writer, curator and educatorbased in Athens and Berlin, with a PhD in Art History(TU Berlin) on the history of installation art. He iscurrently an adjunct professor at the Hellenic OpenUniversity. He taught at the London MetropolitanUniversity and was a Fulbright research scholar at theColumbia University in New York. His research focuseson methodology of visual studies, gender studies,history of presentation and display of art, continentalphilosophy including psychoanalysis.05.22.12 / 02:15:02 EDT05.22.12 / 02:15:02 EDT

Adorno art is critical insofar as it is mute, insofaras what it communicates is its muteness.)What if the present-day crisis ofsemiocapitalism is at the same time a crisis ofthe current political order? In order to elucidatethis last thesis, I would like to link the notion ofthe work of art with the notion of oikonomia asanalyzed by Giorgio Agamben. The theologicaldoctrine of oikonomia – originally meaning“stewardship,” or wise and responsiblemanagement or administration of domestic life –was first developed by early Christians tointerpret the divine intervention of a personalGod into the world. This concept was introducedin order to reconcile monotheism as an emergingstate religion with the doctrine of the divinenature of the Son (within the Trinity), and thusexplain and justify the intervention of God’shouse, the Church, into the earthly world. Theextremely sophisticated Byzantine discourse ofoikonomia is directly linked to an elaborateconceptualization of the icon (mainly that ofJesus and, by extension, of all imagery) as beingpart of both the heavenly and the earthlyrealms. 13 Understanding oikonomia (or dispositio,in Latin) as a Foucauldian project, Agambeninterprets it as a general theological genealogy ofmodern economy and governmentality. Modernpolitical and economic doctrines, such as theinvisible hand of liberalism over a self-regulatedmarket and society, go back to these earlyChristian theological concepts, which refer toGod’s activity in the world. Such a genealogy ofeconomy – meaning of a government of men andthings – is pertinent to a critical re-orientation ofthinking concerning key socioeconomic conceptssuch as the capitalist ethics of work (accordingto Max Weber) or the fetishism of commodities,alienation, and human labor (as per Marx). Notonly various political concepts, but also thetriumph of financial thinking over every otheraspect of life in our times, testifies to this closeconnection between modernity and thesecularized version of the theological concept ofeconomy and governance. The novelty ofAgamben’s claim – echoing both WalterBenjamin’s ideas of capitalism as religion andCarl Schmitt’s famous thesis about the moderntheory of state as a secularized theologicalconcept – is that modern power is inherent notonly in political and financial administration, butalso in Glory (doxa), meaning the ceremonial,liturgical acclamatory apparatus that has alwaysaccompanied it. As Agamben puts it:The society of the spectacle – if we can callcontemporary democracies by this name –is, from this point of view, a society inwhich power in its “glorious” aspectbecomes indiscernible from oikonomia and10/12e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Sotirios BahtsetzisEikonomia: Notes on Economy and the Labor of Artgovernment. To have completely integratedGlory with oikonomia in the acclamativeform of consensus is, more specifically, thespecific task carried out by contemporarydemocracies and their government byconsent, whose original paradigm is notwritten in Thucydides’ Greek, but in the dryLatin of medieval and baroque treaties onthe divine government of the world. 14This is exactly the issue of what is perceived asthe visual manifestation of power sustained bythe semio-time offered by consumers-creditorsof semiocapitalism, which allows mediationregarding art’s current state and future role. Inview of capitalism’s tendency to commercializeeverything as part of global financialspeculation, could art – understood as affectiveand sensuous time – offer an alternative? Ifeconomy alongside bio-politics is thesecularized pendant to oikonomia, and thetechnological spectacle produced by modernindustries of the imaginary is the equivalent toGlory, then the following question arises: If thework of art as a dispositif of acheiropoieton canbe turned back against the doctrines, whatcaused human labor to appear as a commodity atthe very beginning, and what caused currentsociety to look like a network simply of fiscalizedinfo-producers?It is pertinent to us that art permanentlyassumes its position as acheiropoieton – a slowand mute icon – offering the impression that it issituated outside the world of labor (semio-time)as part of a particular economy. In this regard,the economy of the artwork might be the hiddenequivalent of both the governmental machineryand the economic control power within ouralienated society. Because of this, art strives toinfiltrate current society with the ascetic notionof the acheiropoieton and to hijack the secretcenter of power: capitalism’s political andfinancial mechanisms and the spectacular“glory” that sustains them. Eikonomia, 15 aneconomy of the work of art, can serve as a Trojanhorse against the appealing and seductivedeluge of accelerated information produced by“creative” investment managers, film producers,software developers, and corporate advertisers,who sustain commodity fetishism and directconsensual political decision-making. Such analternative economy does not exist outside thegiven system of hyper-capitalism. It simplyworks outside the given informationalparameters of the system. It produces aninconsumable and intensified semiocapital,slowing down affective and cognitive time – or, inthe words of Lazzarato, it creates novel “timecrystallization-machines.”16 This is its hiddensurplus value in view of a future society in whichbetween the art system, post-capitalisteconomic power, and official, mainstreampolitics. Considering how politics work, wewitness first that the systemic “functionalizationof autonomy” observed by Osborne can also beseen as the grounding force of the postdemocraticforms of hyper-capitalism. In otherwords, it appears that contemporary art’susefulness offers to contemporary politics amodel of moral justification, as art, in itself,becomes synonymous with the absoluteautonomization and aestheticization of bothcommercial pragmatism and politicalfunctionality. Art does not expose itsuselessness for its own sake, but rather reflectsthe uselessness of neoliberal administrationand, by extension, of a post-capitalist market.Post-capitalist economics and neoliberalpolitics mime art’s claim of autonomy as one ofthe grounding ethical values of Westerncivilization. In other words, the alibi of autonomy,which was the main assertion and declaration ofmodernism during its constitution in thehistorical avant-garde, works today for thebenefit of politics and the market ofcommodities, which act in disguise as (modern)art. For example, Andy Warhol’s conflation of artand business attacks the culture industry byImage from Ad Buster's 2011 "Buy nothing day" campaign.03/12adopting its rules. On the other hand, this sameculture industry attacks Warhol’s subjectiveliberalism by adopting his artfulness. From thisstandpoint, art must reflectively incorporateneoliberal politics and the post-capitalist marketinto its procedures, not in order to remaincontemporary (neo-modern, postmodern, or“alter-modern”), but in order to continue offeringontological proof for the contemporaneity, bynecessity, of both market and politics. Bycontrast, of course, the market and politicsguarantee the contemporaneity and validity ofart within a given system. This is a win-winsituation. Every artwork produced today thatdoesn’t comply with this system of mutualrecognition is automatically ostracized anddisappears from global media and therefore fromthe public consciousness.But what exactly does this systemicfunctionalization of autonomy at work in both artand politics mean, in economic terms? What isthe material cause of such an interdependenceof art labor, fiscal games, and artful politics asseems to monopolize art discourse today? Isn’tthe debate of autonomy versus heteronomy aveiled way of talking about the fetishism of thecommodity – one of the major concepts ofMarxian analysis – and by extension, aren’t the05.22.12 / 02:15:02 EDT05.22.12 / 02:15:02 EDT

04/1209/12Sylvie Fleury, C'est la vie, 1990. Collezione Leggeri, Bergamo.Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Boxes, 1965.05.22.12 / 02:15:02 EDT05.22.12 / 02:15:02 EDT

attention, cognitive engagement, and time whilewatching commercials the actual creditors ofmedia and creative industries? This ismodernity’s credo. However, one must add thatinformation theory does not consider theimportance of the message, or its meaning –those are matters of the quality of data, ratherthan of its quantity and readability. In thisregard, the message quality distributed throughthe television is of no importance. Semiocapitalpays no attention to the importance ofdistributed messages. Such a disjuncturebetween informational quantity and the qualityof communication finds its equivalence in theeconomic system. Ever since the abandonmentof the gold parity rule, the value of monetarycurrency is determined according to its“informational” value, its exchangeability instock markets.In addition to that, today’s extremeacceleration of production and distribution ofsemiocapital has reached capacity, so that“deep, intense elaboration becomes impossible,when the stimulus is too fast.” 12 What if thepresent-day crisis of capitalism, which hasobviously reached the critical moment of “anoverwhelming supply of attention-demandinggoods,” is a crisis of goods that cannot beClaire Fontaine's neon sign at restaurant Grill Royal, Berlin.08/12consumed? What if the current crisis is not afinancial crisis, but a crisis of governance anddistribution of semio-time? What alternative tothis condition can art offer?Art represents a very particular type ofsemiocapital. In contrast to the accelerated anddigitally self-multiplied capital of the globalfinancial system, the semio-time produced andconsumed within the system of art is slow andpersonal. You need some ninety minutes towatch a film, but only seconds to consume a TVcommercial. With modifications, the sameapplies to the reading of a painting or a book ofpoetry. Furthermore, art deals primarily with theimportance of distributed messages, not with itsinformational quantity. In this regard, qualityequals the intellectual labor and cognitiveactivity invested by the production of art workersand the reception of connoisseurs of art. It is thedeceleration of intellectual labor and cognitiveactivity offered by art that makes the difference.Deceleration means to focus on the creation ofdeeper, slower, and intensified time, toconcentrate on the production and reception ofmeaning – ideally the maximum quantity ofinfinite and, for that reason, inconsumablemeaning! (This might be another way to describewhat Adorno has called art’s “muteness”; foronto-theological conditions of afunctionalization of autonomy best described bythe term “capital”?In Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism,capitalist exchange value is constituted at thelevel of social labor as a measure of abstractlabor. It is not the materiality of an object, whichassumes the object’s fetishistic nature, but thecommodification of labor that determines thevalue of “objective” commodities. 5 Althoughfetishism is immanent to the commodity form, itconceals not simply the exchange value of thecommodity, but also the exchange value ofabstract labor that stands for the product oflabor. 6 Based on that Marxian observation, bylinking it to the concept of the functionalizationof autonomy described above, we can view thefetishistic character of commodities as a form ofaesthetization of pragmatic human activity andautonomization, a disjoining of human actionfrom any moral or social realm. In this regard,individuality and morality are evaluated in termsof their materialistic creditability. The conditionof alienation in modernity demands this level ofsophisticated abstraction between labor andvalue. Isn’t this the real reason why we keepbuying our Nikes even though we are fullycognizant of the unbearable exploitation ofhumans in their production? Nike as “goldencalf” is the emblem of commodity fetishism thatsustains, in a sensuous way, our alienatedunderstanding of our inter-subjective relation toothers: a totally crude form of paganism thatalso illustrates the theological nature of Marx’searly socio-economical thinking.Does art occupy a particular status quowithin this theoretical edifice? Drawing on Marx’sseminal concepts of labor, alienation, andobjectified species-being (Gattungswesen) ofbeing human as described in the Manuscripts of1844, we can argue that an artwork represents aspecific type of product of human labor. 7 It is notoutside the human condition and social-being(das gesellschaftliche Wesen), which means thatit partakes in humankind’s universal sense ofalienation, which is an inevitable intermediatestage in the so-called socio-historical process.However, the product of human labor as asovereign and self-contained force (unabhängigeMacht) independent from its producer,potentially entails the means to overcome thealienated stage of current social-being.Radicalizing this Marxian analysis, we canthen offer a more refined description ofautonomous art. Artworks are, in any case, aproduct like any other and thus a part of thecapitalist exchange system. However, they aredefined by a special type of resistance; not aresistance to being subjected to their capitalistcommodification, but by another type of05/12e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Sotirios BahtsetzisEikonomia: Notes on Economy and the Labor of Artimmunity. They tend to refuse commodity’s ownraw fetishization, which, when unconcealed –that can happen at any time – simply exposes itsuselessness, drawing attention directly to themasked social constitution of capitalistexchange. It might be easy to see behind anysimple commodity as fetish and expose theexchange value structure that sustains it. Itbecomes, however, very difficult to look behindan artwork as it constantly negates its capitalistexchange value while preserving theconcealment of abstract labor assigned to it.Drawing on the above consequences, wecan argue that art is somehow different from allother types of commodities. Above all, thedebate between the autonomy and heteronomyof art, or the fiscalization of art and theaestheticization of the everyday world, does nottake place between the value of “pure” orautonomous art and its exchange value as acommodity, but is rather a combat between twoforms of fetishistic character. In this regard, theartwork (either as pure, commercial, or evenanti-artwork) is a second-order fetishcommodity: an intensified fetish. Thefunctionalization of autonomy can be seen asthis second fetish character of art, constituting anotion of fetish the reverse of that described byMarx. This is a category immanent only to theartwork. It conceals not only the exchange valueof the product, but, most significantly, thegeneric fetish character of commodities orcapital in general, and, therefore, thecommodification of labor, which constitutes thevalue of “objective” commodities.The work of art comes to be anacheiropoieton – not handmade – and thustheologized. This term is used in Byzantinetheology to describe icons, which are alleged tohave come into existence miraculously (notcreated by a human painter). According to AlainBesançon’s reading of Hegel’s Aesthetics, thenotion of modern art is closed to such a conceptof the icon. 8 One might assume that, even afterthe Hegelian proclamation of “the end of art,” theconcept of art as an acheiropoieton prevails,transcending art’s demise despite its continuoussecularization and humanization. If art’s functionwas once to make the divine visible (as in ancientGreece), its function in the modern era is to makethe visible divine. In other words, over and abovethe common phantasmagoria of the commodity(Adorno’s position), we have also the“asceticism” of the work of art. In this regard, anacheiropoieton appears to be outside humannature and the social order, possibly followinganother disposition or system – in other words, itcreates an illusion of autonomy from the (human)labor from which it arises and to which itbelongs. An artwork has the tendency to reside05.22.12 / 02:15:02 EDT05.22.12 / 02:15:02 EDT

outside the normal mechanisms of the market,to exist as something that cannot be sold, assomething that resists exchange, thus creatingthe illusion of a non-alienated social-being,although it is in fact located at the very heart ofneoliberal speculation.Let me give you a banal example from theeveryday world of art business as evidence forsuch a paradoxical thesis. We can honestly saythat the reason for the hostility with whichgalleries face the mercantile practices of auctionhouses can be traced back to this double natureof the artwork. By simply offering an artwork foropen sale, an auction house degrades theartwork to a mere commodity with an exchangevalue. In this case, the artwork appears to be aninterchangeable equity, like real estate or stockmarket shares, stripped of mystification andnegating its character as intensified fetish, as anacheiropoieton. Usually we experience only thenegative results of this double bind between theeconomy of commodity and the economy of theintensified fetish. The practice of an auctionhouse poses a potential threat to the controlledpricing and validation policy of a gallery; ittransforms an artist’s career into a speculativebubble, with the attendant precipitous drop inprice due to uncontrolled manipulations.06/12Suddenly, the artwork loses its value; it becomesa nothing, a useless plaything – or, looking at itfrom another perspective – a non-alienatedproduct of human labor! On the other hand,galleries, through their preferences for particularbuyers (collectors and museums), often try toprotect the symbolic and “universal” value of theartwork as something that can’t be sold. Havingenough cash doesn’t make someoneautomatically eligible to buy art. And this falseexclusivity is not simply a matter of the“conspiracy of art,” or the privilege of insidertrading attached to art by its practitioners, asJean Baudrillard remarks, but an inherent qualityof the artwork. In other words, the conspiracy ofart lies precisely within this paradox: theartwork’s unreachable nature in fact guaranteesthe commodity’s disposability. 9It can be argued that the artwork’s doublenature has enormous consequences for acapitalist market system. Actually, its characteras an intensified fetish safeguards anycommodity’s struggle to be presented as anacheiropoieton, which can thus be disguised andsold as a “pure” artwork. The new systemicfunctionalization of autonomy itself – a new“affirmative culture” – is a coy description of thisfact. Such a belief is gloriously performed in theRem Koolhaas and CecilBalmond's 2006 SerpentinePavilion conceived as a hot airballon.contemporary culture industry, which producescommodities that must be sold, howeverfrivolous, unnecessary, or even impossible (likeJapanese gadgets) they are. They only manage tocirculate if they can be masked with the aura offreedom that stands in for the allegedlyautonomous artwork. The culture of logos, luxurygoods, and cult objects benefits from this almosttheological dimension of the work of art. Thisfact should be seen also as the true reason whycontemporary art is so valuable to the financialmarket and political business today, and notnecessarily the other way around.Can we go even further and argue thatcontemporary art’s innate tendency to replacethe general fetishism of commodity with the“particular economy of the artwork” is the modelfor any and every semblance of societalpragmatism today? In light of such a comment,and if we ignore the fact that the art system isactually subjected to the dominant socialrelations of capitalist exchange as argued above,every wealthy collector appears to be a radicaltrickster, idealizing himself as a romantic heroand spiritual Parsifal, as some collectors indeedclaim to be. Indeed, they might represent a kindof hero if we consider the fact that one can easilyearn more investing in the stock market andcurrencies, instead of buying art. Investing in artis simply not as lucrative. If we take thisstatement seriously, the choice between the twoforms of investment is actually a combatbetween two forms of commodity fetishism:labor versus the intensified fetish. Both types ofinvestment are potentially unstable and theydemand the readiness of the investor to takerisks. But only the second can safeguardcapital’s ontological foundation.We can expand this discussion and arguethat a work of art in times of economic crisis, asin the current crisis, actually represents theideological means for capital’s own survival.Economic crisis is linked to the fluctuation of“fictitious capital” to which credit andspeculation capital belong. 10 According toNorbert Trenkle’s analysis of the late-2000sfinancial crisis, “the growth of fictitious capitalnot only provides an alternative choice forinvestors, but also constitutes, when viewed onthe macroeconomic level, a deferral of theoutbreak of crisis,” which is inherent to thecapitalist system. (Such a crisis is a crisis ofover-accumulation, or, to phrase it in thevocabulary of contemporary macroeconomics, acrisis of “over-investment.” In this case, aproportion of capital becomes excessive –measured according to its own abstractrationality as an end in itself – and is, therefore,threatened by devalorization.) The outbreak of aseries of capitalist crises from the 1970s to07/12e-flux journal #35 — may 2012 Sotirios BahtsetzisEikonomia: Notes on Economy and the Labor of Arttoday has demonstrated the extremeunreliability of credit and speculation capital;they threaten always to translate a particularcrisis of devalorization into a genuine globalmarketcrisis. Credit and speculation capitalgrow too fast because of electronic transactions– digitally automated – and, as a result, createvirtually instantaneous financial bubbles, alwaysready to burst.Art as intensified fetish always masks itsown existence as fictitious capital, eliminating inthis way any moral consideration regarding itsspeculative nature. We can then assume thatart’s fictitious capital represents the bestpossibility for a continuous deferral of theoutbreak of an unavoidable capitalist crisis, and,for that reason, view art on the macroeconomiclevel as the best option for safeguarding thesystem, deflecting a crisis of over-investment.Compared to the credit and speculation capitalof digitally multiplied finance, art represents inthis regard a slow type of fictitious capital. Itrequires its own investment time. This wouldmake art the perfect defense mechanism, anoptimal deferral of the possible outbreak ofsystemic crisis inherent to a capitalist system.Art would combat the stagnation of thevalorization of capital in the real economy. If so,collectors are indeed the heroes ofmacroeconomic planning.This is indeed true. However, in search of abetter understanding of the current status quo, itis important to choose an alternativeperspective. In the current state of hypercapitalism,human labor guarantees both theover-productivity and the accumulation, not ofgoods, but of information-commodities. AsFranco “Bifo” Berardi notes, for post-operaistthought (Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato,Christian Marazzi),social labor is the endless recombination ofmyriad fragments producing, elaborating,distributing, and decoding signs andinformational units of all kinds. Every semioticsegment produced by the information workermust meet and match innumerable othersemiotic segments in order to form thecombinatory frame of the info-commodity,semiocapital. 11If commodity fetishism conceals theexchange value of abstract labor (according toMarx), then labor today stands for the attentiveand affective time we produce and consume.Labor today is both a semiotic generator and acreator of organic time (of attention, memory,and imagination) to be produced and consumed.Let me give you a simple example. Televisionadvertisers purchase advertising time slots. Thequestion is, from whom do they buy this time?Aren’t the millions of spectators who offer their05.22.12 / 02:15:02 EDT05.22.12 / 02:15:02 EDT