Retort: Opening Salvo
Retort's installation at the Seville Biennial (about which more in a later posting) had its origins in a broadsheet, Neither Their War Nor Their Peace, that we produced for the manifestations of Spring 2003 on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. We well recall how many felt our prologue to be hyperbolic, even hysterical: "We have no words for the horrors to come, for the screams and carnage of the first days of battle, the fear and brutality of the long night of occupation that will follow, the truck bombs and slit throats and unstoppable cycle of revenge, the puppets in the palaces chattering about 'democracy', the exultation of the anti-Crusaders, Baghdad descending into the shambles of a new, more dreadful Beirut, and the inevitable retreat (thousands of bodybags later) from the failed McJerusalem." Who would now call this hyperbole?
We produced the broadsheet because we were unwilling to go into the streets under either of the banners we knew would dominate the marches - "Peace" and "No Blood for Oil". To the opponents of the war, we wished to say that a deeply militarized US state, and indeed the reality of permanent war, rendered inadequate the notion of "peace" as a rallying cry and a strategy. We had in mind the indelible line of Tacitus, "They make a desert and call it peace", which speaks to us across the centuries. These were words he put in the mouth of a Gaelic chieftain on the eve of battle against a Roman legion in the Scottish highlands, at the far north-western edge of the empire. Tacitus reminds us what kind of peace is delivered by the masters of war – it is the peace of the "peace process" , the peace of cemeteries. The anti-war movement, if it was not to evaporate again, had to recognize the full dynamics of US militarism – to understand that peace, under current arrangements, is war by other means.
Nor was it lost on us that the kind of planes which Atta and his crews refunctioned as missile-bombers to strike at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon actually originated as weapons of mass destruction. The Boeing Corporation took the old bombers used to create firestorms over European and Japanese cities during the Second World War and redesigned them for purposes of mass tourism and corporate air travel in the 1960s. Atta himself was an urban planner (in Cairo and Aleppo) disgusted with the disneyfication he saw coming in the wake of the failure of secular national development in Egypt and the Third World. He was right; Dubai is one face of neoliberal globalization, megaslums the other. At the same time it is necessary to acknowledge al-Qaida's love affair with image-politics. Even in its rejection of the West, the Islamic vanguard displays a mastery of the virtual and of the new technics of dissemination. This is one aspect of the current moment that those in opposition to both Empire and Jihad, two virulent mutations of the Right, must take very seriously.
We intended to expand the broadside into a pamphlet, but it bloated into the book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. Essentially we aimed to confront the strange doubleness of the new world situation – a seeming brute return to the 17th century Wars of Religion familiar to Milton, from whose Paradise Lost we took our title, twinned with an intensified deployment of the apparatus of the production of appearances. The U.S. in particular feels a dual threat, first, to the monopoly of the means of mass destruction, and second, to its management of the image-world – in both cases from non-state actors of various kinds. The events of September 11th 2001 were, we believe, a defeat for the imperial state at the level of spectacle (to which, by the way, its managers have been unable to stage an answer – not that they haven't tried.) Likewise, if the recorded collapse of the World Trade Center wordlessly proposed – revealed, actually – the vulnerability of the US heimat, then the global circulation of the Abu Ghraib snapshot struck a parallel blow at the ideological claim of the United States to be the guarantor of “human rights”, “freedom”, and so on. Now, we further insist that the attack on the towers by a neo-Leninist vanguard of Islamic militants was a symbolic but none the less real defeat not only for the capitalist hegemon but also for those who count themselves (Retort included) enemies of capitalist globalization – for the "movement of movements" such as it is. In that sense, we intend "afflicted powers" to refer ambiguously to this Janus-faced defeat. We appreciate that, in identifying with Milton's resonant phrase, we belong to the party of Satan, as he is summoning the rebel angels to storm heaven.
Our intention was to turn the two notions – "the society of the spectacle" and "the colonization of everyday life" – back to the task for which they were originally deployed, namely, to understand the powers and vulnerabilities of the capitalist state. We set out to grasp the logic of the present moment, in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001 and the seeming historical regression of US statecraft. Specifically, we asked ourselves about the possibility of real interaction between the political economy of neoliberalism, the warfare state, and new developments in the realm of the image. To put it in a single phrase – a dense phrase but one which captures the analytic linkages – we aimed to explore "the contradictions of military neoliberalism under conditions of spectacle". We remain agnostic about the possibilities of destabilization in a system that increasingly depends on image-management. The spectacle accelerates as a result of the falling rate of illusion; the disenchantment of the image-world may follow. In any case, we take spectacle in a minimal, matter-of-fact way to characterize this new stage of accumulation of capital. By no means just a piling up of images, as media studies would have it, but in Debord's sense of a social relationship between people that is mediated by representations. Crucially, our analysis depends on the complementary notion of the colonization of everyday life, and of subjection to an endless bombardment of brands, logos, slogans, consumption-motifs, invitations to feel happy. Globalization turned inward, as it were. And, by the way, the universal (that is, from all points on the political/cultural compass) opinion that image has somehow trumped or superseded word in the brave new media world strikes us as nonsense. To the contrary, never has the image-array been so much auxiliary to scripts of one kind or another, typically written by modernity's specialists in solitication – copywriters, public relations hacks, human resources officers, soundbite artists, poets of the advertisement – and delivered into a mediascape in which language itself has been flattened and truncated.
We argue in Afflicted Powers that globalization is producing "weak states" across the world economy, and "weak citizenship" at the spectacular centre, the result of the thinning of the texture of daily life. Weak citizenship may be optimal for the demands of the market, but not when the state has to embark on a major round of primitive accumulation, as we argue the US imperial state attempted in Iraq. Never before has politics been conducted in the shadow of defeat both on the ground and at the level of the spectacle. However, although Paul Bremer's dreams of a neoliberal paradise in Iraq lie in ruins, the context of resistance to capitalist globablization is the continuing assault on the commoners of the South, the further disembedding of basic elements of the life-world from the matrix of social relations, and generalized commodification whose end-point is reached only when property and price come to mediate all relations with nature and humanity. The situation is dire but that is precisely why we recurred to Milton, who himself was writing in the face of defeat. "And reassembling our afflicted Powers,/ Consult how we may henceforth most offend/Our enemy…"
Retort is a gathering of antagonists of the present - writers, artists, artisans, and activists - based for the last two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their new broadside, All Quiet on the Eastern Front, forms part of Retort's installation at the Seville Biennial.
> Retort
Download broadside All Quiet on the Eastern Front by clicking here
We produced the broadsheet because we were unwilling to go into the streets under either of the banners we knew would dominate the marches - "Peace" and "No Blood for Oil". To the opponents of the war, we wished to say that a deeply militarized US state, and indeed the reality of permanent war, rendered inadequate the notion of "peace" as a rallying cry and a strategy. We had in mind the indelible line of Tacitus, "They make a desert and call it peace", which speaks to us across the centuries. These were words he put in the mouth of a Gaelic chieftain on the eve of battle against a Roman legion in the Scottish highlands, at the far north-western edge of the empire. Tacitus reminds us what kind of peace is delivered by the masters of war – it is the peace of the "peace process" , the peace of cemeteries. The anti-war movement, if it was not to evaporate again, had to recognize the full dynamics of US militarism – to understand that peace, under current arrangements, is war by other means.
Nor was it lost on us that the kind of planes which Atta and his crews refunctioned as missile-bombers to strike at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon actually originated as weapons of mass destruction. The Boeing Corporation took the old bombers used to create firestorms over European and Japanese cities during the Second World War and redesigned them for purposes of mass tourism and corporate air travel in the 1960s. Atta himself was an urban planner (in Cairo and Aleppo) disgusted with the disneyfication he saw coming in the wake of the failure of secular national development in Egypt and the Third World. He was right; Dubai is one face of neoliberal globalization, megaslums the other. At the same time it is necessary to acknowledge al-Qaida's love affair with image-politics. Even in its rejection of the West, the Islamic vanguard displays a mastery of the virtual and of the new technics of dissemination. This is one aspect of the current moment that those in opposition to both Empire and Jihad, two virulent mutations of the Right, must take very seriously.
We intended to expand the broadside into a pamphlet, but it bloated into the book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. Essentially we aimed to confront the strange doubleness of the new world situation – a seeming brute return to the 17th century Wars of Religion familiar to Milton, from whose Paradise Lost we took our title, twinned with an intensified deployment of the apparatus of the production of appearances. The U.S. in particular feels a dual threat, first, to the monopoly of the means of mass destruction, and second, to its management of the image-world – in both cases from non-state actors of various kinds. The events of September 11th 2001 were, we believe, a defeat for the imperial state at the level of spectacle (to which, by the way, its managers have been unable to stage an answer – not that they haven't tried.) Likewise, if the recorded collapse of the World Trade Center wordlessly proposed – revealed, actually – the vulnerability of the US heimat, then the global circulation of the Abu Ghraib snapshot struck a parallel blow at the ideological claim of the United States to be the guarantor of “human rights”, “freedom”, and so on. Now, we further insist that the attack on the towers by a neo-Leninist vanguard of Islamic militants was a symbolic but none the less real defeat not only for the capitalist hegemon but also for those who count themselves (Retort included) enemies of capitalist globalization – for the "movement of movements" such as it is. In that sense, we intend "afflicted powers" to refer ambiguously to this Janus-faced defeat. We appreciate that, in identifying with Milton's resonant phrase, we belong to the party of Satan, as he is summoning the rebel angels to storm heaven.
Our intention was to turn the two notions – "the society of the spectacle" and "the colonization of everyday life" – back to the task for which they were originally deployed, namely, to understand the powers and vulnerabilities of the capitalist state. We set out to grasp the logic of the present moment, in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001 and the seeming historical regression of US statecraft. Specifically, we asked ourselves about the possibility of real interaction between the political economy of neoliberalism, the warfare state, and new developments in the realm of the image. To put it in a single phrase – a dense phrase but one which captures the analytic linkages – we aimed to explore "the contradictions of military neoliberalism under conditions of spectacle". We remain agnostic about the possibilities of destabilization in a system that increasingly depends on image-management. The spectacle accelerates as a result of the falling rate of illusion; the disenchantment of the image-world may follow. In any case, we take spectacle in a minimal, matter-of-fact way to characterize this new stage of accumulation of capital. By no means just a piling up of images, as media studies would have it, but in Debord's sense of a social relationship between people that is mediated by representations. Crucially, our analysis depends on the complementary notion of the colonization of everyday life, and of subjection to an endless bombardment of brands, logos, slogans, consumption-motifs, invitations to feel happy. Globalization turned inward, as it were. And, by the way, the universal (that is, from all points on the political/cultural compass) opinion that image has somehow trumped or superseded word in the brave new media world strikes us as nonsense. To the contrary, never has the image-array been so much auxiliary to scripts of one kind or another, typically written by modernity's specialists in solitication – copywriters, public relations hacks, human resources officers, soundbite artists, poets of the advertisement – and delivered into a mediascape in which language itself has been flattened and truncated.
We argue in Afflicted Powers that globalization is producing "weak states" across the world economy, and "weak citizenship" at the spectacular centre, the result of the thinning of the texture of daily life. Weak citizenship may be optimal for the demands of the market, but not when the state has to embark on a major round of primitive accumulation, as we argue the US imperial state attempted in Iraq. Never before has politics been conducted in the shadow of defeat both on the ground and at the level of the spectacle. However, although Paul Bremer's dreams of a neoliberal paradise in Iraq lie in ruins, the context of resistance to capitalist globablization is the continuing assault on the commoners of the South, the further disembedding of basic elements of the life-world from the matrix of social relations, and generalized commodification whose end-point is reached only when property and price come to mediate all relations with nature and humanity. The situation is dire but that is precisely why we recurred to Milton, who himself was writing in the face of defeat. "And reassembling our afflicted Powers,/ Consult how we may henceforth most offend/Our enemy…"
Retort is a gathering of antagonists of the present - writers, artists, artisans, and activists - based for the last two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their new broadside, All Quiet on the Eastern Front, forms part of Retort's installation at the Seville Biennial.
> Retort
Download broadside All Quiet on the Eastern Front by clicking here