Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy
TABLE OF CONTENTS Krisis, 2011, Issue 3 www.krisis.eu
Dossier: Revisiting Benjamin’s artwork essay GIJS VAN OENEN REVISITING BENJAMIN’S ARTWORK ESSAY AFTER SEVENTY FIVE YEARS. AN INTRODUCTION
2-3
PASCAL GIELEN THE ART OF DEMOCRACY
4-12
THIJS LIJSTER ART AND PROPERTY
13-22
JAMES MARTEL ART AND THE FETISH: SEVENTY FIVE YEARS ON
23-31
ISABELL LOREY AND GERALD RAUNIG MATRIX EXAMINATRIX DISPERSION AND CONCENTRATION Dossier: De onzichtbare vijand JAAP KOOIJMAN TIEN JAAR NA 9/11: DE ONZICHTBARE VIJAND BEATRICE DE GRAAF DE STRIJD TEGEN DE ‘ZWARTE INTERNATIONALE’ DE SAMENZWERING ALS VEILIGHEIDSDISPOSITIEF ROND 1870-1910 1
32-39
40-41
42-53
JOOST DE BLOOIS DE POLITIEK VAN DE HYPERBOOL OVER ONZICHTBARE VIJANDEN, POPULISME EN HARDWERKENDE NEDERLANDERS
54-58
MARIEKE DE GOEDE DATA-ANALYSE EN PRECRIMINELE VEILIGHEID IN DE STRIJD TEGEN TERRORISME
59-65
Essay ROGIER VAN REEKUM PUTTING OUR SPACES IN ORDER THE OCCUPATION OF POLITICAL CULTURE
66-73
Reviews PHILIPPO BERTONI TURNING TO SPECULATION?
74-78
LONNEKE VAN DER VELDEN LAW INTERRUPTED? LATOUR SNOOPING AROUND LE CONSEIL D’ETAT
79-83
SIGNALEMENTEN
84-85
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy
GIJS VAN OENEN REVISITING BENJAMIN ’ S ARTWORK ESSAY AFTER SEVENTY FIVE YEARS AN INTRODUCTION Krisis, 2011, Issue 3 www.krisis.eu
It is now 75 years ago that Walter Benjamin’s artwork essay first appeared, an essay that has become as famous as it has remained inscrutable – or if one prefers, inexhaustible.i Probably its two most central, and most celebrated, notions are those of the ‘aura’ and of ‘montage’. The aura, we might say, is the thing about the artwork that resists being reproduced. Even if we can reproduce an original work of art – and in modern times this is no longer an exceptional feat, as technology has made many works of art eminently reproducible – its aura will irretrievably be lost in reproduction. That is to say, it will lose its uniqueness, its authenticity, and its unapproachability or Unnahbarkeit. In line with this analysis, the concept of ‘montage’ indicates how the artwork is no longer directly connected to, and thus controlled by, its place of production and its immediate audience, as it was in the traditional stage play. Now dislocated, production has become montage – both in the film studio, and in the factory assembly line. Montage implies the almost limitless possibility of cutting up and realigning parts in the productive process, unmooring the (art)work from its fixed place of production and reconfiguring it so as to make it amenable to mass consumption. The work is thus ‘emancipated’ from its auratic-ritual productive origin. 2
Simultaneously, the new, reproducible work of art is subject to managerial supervision and commercial imperatives. The spectator is being ‘disempowered’, because his gaze, and his perspective, are now being ‘directed’ by the montage of the artwork, by the way the film is being cut; he is no longer autonomous in his contemplation of the artwork. Moreover, we tend to remain unaware of this loss because of the ‘transparency’ of the new technology: when we are immersed in a movie, we do not literally perceive the machinery that ‘produces’ our experience. But the work of art and its perception are also politicized. Lacking an immediate audience, the movie-actor must now struggle to retain his humanity literally in the face of technology: the camera. In this struggle, he is ultimately the representative of the masses, with whom he can be ‘united’ once the process of (film) production is released from the bonds of capitalism. And famously, in both the Vorwort and the Nachwort – sections that were either stricken or modified on account of Horkheimer and Adorno when the essay was first published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1936 – Benjamin claimed that the conceptual framework he had developed in his essay was resistant to ‘fascist purposes’, while being eminently suited to the purposes of communism, or ‘revolutionary demands in the politics of art’. These are some of the transformations that, for Benjamin, were inherent in the era of the ‘reproducibility’ of the work of art. His essay seems to derive its compelling force from its idiosyncratic combination of an apodictic pronouncement on the contemporary condition of art, its cavalier reduction of the concept of art to visual arts, the reckless way in which it connects artistic transformation to political radicalism, or communism, and the disharmony between the melancholic loss of artistic aura and the revolutionary possibilities opened up by art that has become mechanically reproducible. On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of Benjamin’s artwork essay, we invited a number of authors to reflect on questions such as: how should we describe the ‘era’ which now shapes, or directs, the production, reception, and experience of the work of art? What implications does this have for the work of art, for politics, and for society? While taking Benjaminian
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy themes as reference points, we expressly did not ask authors to interpret, or comment upon, Benjamin’s text. Rather, we invited them to present their own assessment of the contemporary condition of the artwork, deriving inspiration from Benjamin’s questions in as far as these may be relevant to our economic, political, and cultural condition. The four essays that made their way into this issue are remarkably united in their focus on the political dimension of Benjamin’s essay. Pascal Gielen argues that the ‘post-auratic’ status of the contemporary work of art implies that artists are necessitated to collectively engage in a social praxis of discussion, argumentation, and debate; the contemporary work of art is therefore by nature ‘political’. And if this debate is practiced in an ‘agonistic’ style, artistic practice can even be called democratic, as it constructs a ‘democratic space’ in which it is shown that ‘things can always also be otherwise’. Thijs Lijster, in turn, points out that the technology and practice of new social media may open up a new space of ‘the common’, in which capitalist property rights are contested or negated, creating an ‘artistic common’, or perhaps we should say a kind of artistically grounded communism. James Martel directs our attention to the ability of the work of art to resist the fetishism through which we, captured by capitalist logic, tend to perceive it. As fetishism distorts or subverts representation and is thus inherently political, the Benjaminian challenge of ‘politicizing art’ involves ‘enhancing the power of the objects to interfere with representation, to visibly fail to represent’ – a power of which Martel presents several examples from contemporary art. Lorey and Raunig, finally, latch on to Benjamin’s ambiguous valuation of Zerstreuung as the modern form of perception art to highlight a new form of political participation that they see materializing in the practices of the Occupy movement. In the present political and economic context, ‘dispersion’ takes on a new political meaning as signifying ‘precarious singularity’, and the ‘zerstreute Versammlung’ that characterizes Occupy is able to constitute itself as a new kind of ‘public’.
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Gijs van Oenen – Revisiting Benjamin’s artwork essay Gijs van Oenen (1959) teaches philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research is concerned with citizenship, public space, architecture, democracy, and especially interpassivity. His monograph Nu even niet! Over de interpassieve samenleving has recently been published by Van Gennep, Amsterdam. He is an editor of Krisis.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License (AttributionNoncommercial 3.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nl/deed.en for more information.
i For those of you who would like, on this occasion, to (re)read Benjamin’s essay itself, we recommend the version with comments and other documents, published a few years ago by Suhrkamp in its new Studienbibliothek series: Walter Benjamin (2007) Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Kommentar von Detlev Schöttker. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy
PASCAL GIELEN THE ART OF DEMOCRACY
Krisis, 2011, Issue 3 www.krisis.eu
mocracy, which consequently can only survive in democracies? But also: what is the art of realizing and maintaining a political democracy? The phrase The art of democracy can be interpreted in two ways: that of which art facilitates democracy and of which conditions should a political regime meet to be defined as democratic nowadays? These questions make it necessary to first re-examine some basic concepts, such as: What actually is democracy and, perhaps even more difficult: what is the definition of modern art?
The basic formula of democracy
‘as soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production, the whole social function of art is revolutionized. Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics.’ – Walter Benjamin (2003: 256-257)
Although democracy harks back to principles from the year 508 B.C., it was only at the end of the eighteenth century that modern democracy was firmly outlined. In the United States, this happened with the Declaration of Independence, while Europe had to wait for the French Revolution. Remember that the polis in Athens did not include slaves, immigrants or women. Classic democracy applied to a small segment of the population only. ‘Thus, whether we can legitimately refer to Athens as a democracy at all is a question that at least has to be posed.’ (Held, 2006: 19)
In the afterword of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin links cultural mass production with the aestheticization of politics and with fascism. Beside his main thesis that art has lost its aura through technical reproduction, Benjamin thus initiates – in his renowned essay – another interesting train of thought, one that assumes there is a specific relationship between art and society or, more specifically, between cultural production and political regimes. Earlier in his essay, Benjamin had already mentioned in passing that in the future, when its ritual function has evaporated, art will be founded in politics. This line of thinking arouses curiosity. It sets in motion a train of thought that has become highly topical nowadays. Would there also be a direct connection between a kind of art and a kind of political regime that dominates the western hemisphere? Is there a link between modern art and the democracies in which it is embedded? Is there a specific art of de-
It is important to realize that democracy is a relatively young form of government, for which, and other reasons, it is still rather fragile and vulnerable. Quite a few politicians and citizens regard it all too easily as something obvious, however. On the other hand, some political philosophers, such as Oliver Marchart, doubt whether the current liberal-capitalist regimes meet the criteria for democracy (Marchart, 2007: 158). In many cases democracy still needs to be established and in those political regimes where it already exists it requires constant maintenance. Surveying the world in a wider sense quickly reveals that not only are there still sovereign dictatorships, but also theocracies and even capitalist communist regimes. Both China and Russia demonstrate how not-very-democratic regimes are maybe even more in line with the capitalist market imperative than the democracy we are so accustomed to. According to the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, the Chinese brand of communism may herald a fundamental development in the 21st century: the transition to an auth-
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Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy oritarian capitalist world system (Sloterdijk, 2004: 193). This system ‘implies the project of including all forms of labour, desire and expression of the people caught within the system in the immanence of spending power’ (Sloterdijk, 2004: 195). So, democracy is no more than one of many possible political regimes. But then, what exactly is democracy? Just as there are many different forms of government, there are, of course, different interpretations of democracy. The political scientist David Held, for instance, distinguishes four basic forms: the classic Athenian model, Republicanism, the liberal model and forms of direct democracy. From these, several other forms have been derived during the twentieth century (Held, 2006). This multiplicity does not, however, mean that we cannot trace every modern democracy back to a concise basic formula. Putting it simply, the bottom line of any democratic regime consists of two fundamental principles. Firstly, the assurance that the power of the demos is represented by a majority and, secondly, the guarantee of a legal framework that at least protects minorities (Lukacs, 2005: 5). At best, such a framework also supports, encourages and emancipates minorities. So, paradoxically, within a democracy the majority creates or protects the possibility of the minority becoming the majority and assuming power. This is why the political philosopher Claude Lefort says that the seat of power within a democratic form of government is in principle empty (Lefort, 1988: 17). More concretely, it can de jure always be declared vacant. Whoever occupies the seat of power must accept that there may come a time when they will have to surrender it. Not only that, but within a radical democracy the majority will even encourage this process, constantly preparing, in fact, for its own abdication. It is important to note that democracy has no fixed foundation. We can only articulate legitimizations or provide good arguments as to why democracy would be a better political regime than any other. Neither God, ideology nor scientific positivism can provide democracy with a steady foundation. And yet this form of political government is not bottomless. Its grounding lies in the very emptiness in which the foundation must be rediscovered time and again. This is why Marchart does not speak of anti-fundamental politics, but of post-fundamental politics: ‘Democracy is to be defined as a regime that seeks, precisely, to come to terms with the ultimate failure of grounding rather than simply repressing or foreclosing it.’ (Marchart, 2007: 157-158) 5
Pascal Gielen – The art of democracy Neo-liberalism and neo-nationalism The formula outlined above also defines when democracy starts to fail. As soon as politicians fail to design and pass legislation to protect minorities, democracy dwindles. There are subtle mechanisms to keep the weaker elements from coming to power. For instance, barriers to good education can be made so high that the lower social classes or less affluent migrants find it hard to get access to it. Or a government may fail to facilitate things like child care, making it harder for women to gain positions of authority in society. It can also cause the cultural and media landscape to become intellectually impoverished, so that citizens are misinformed and any critical voice is nipped in the bud by light entertainment. Establishing or maintaining obstacles to upward cultural, intellectual and social mobility reduces the opportunities for civil participation. This is why collective mechanisms of solidarity between social classes, between generations, between men and women, between immigrants and natives and even between regions or continents are essential to democracy. Ideologies or political regimes such as neo-liberalism, which argue for dismantling such collective responsibilities by placing as much as possible back on the shoulders of the individual (through private insurance and pensions, by giving out student loans rather than scholarships, et cetera), over time easily slide into a timocracy, in which the power to rule lies, if not de jure but de facto, with those better situated in society. But political programmes that only wish to ensure democratic guarantees within the borders of the nation state in fact also risk taking an undemocratic attitude towards all those outside their own political territory. Such a political stance, underwritten by all forms of nationalism, is indefensible in a globalized world. That is, as long as one still subscribes to the rules of democracy. After all, many national decisions will either directly or indirectly have an impact on the environment outside the territory of the sovereign decision-maker, according to Held quoted above (2006). Just like real or virtual viruses and nuclear fallout, cultural movements and media-scapes cannot be stopped at the gates of the nation state. Therefore, some unilateral decisions can be undemocratic for the outside world, which has no say in them. In short, in a globalized world in which large parts of the world population are networked with each other and every-
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy thing is connected to everything else on a worldwide scale, both neoliberalism and neo-nationalism are unable to provide satisfactory answers for the demands of democracy. When neo-liberalism and neo-nationalism cover for each other, their undemocratic tendency is even strengthened. Unlike nationalism, its predecessor, neo-nationalism practices a selfreflexive pragmatism that uses all information about globalization, including neo-liberalism, to obtain national privileges. In doing so, it no longer appeals to the heavy-handed blood-and-soil model, but rather to cultural diversity to legitimize and maintain economic advantages for its ‘own’ culture. Neo-nationalism and neo-liberalism interact in a particular way here. Take the European Union, for instance. Neo-liberals have argued for the free movement of money, goods and people within the Union, whereas neo-nationalists try to obstruct transnational (and transregional) structures of solidarity wherever possible. The free flow of money, for instance, is encouraged within the European domain, but as soon as a member state runs into financial difficulties, this domain is no more than a collection of nation states in conflict. People are free to move within the European Union, until Fortress Europe is overrun by refugees. Then all of a sudden only the country where these refugees first arrive bears the full responsibility. Where neo-liberalism in some cases benefits from neo-nationalism because the latter selectively applies the freedom and rights propagated by the former, neo-nationalism can benefit from neo-liberalism by continuing to reap its benefits outside the nation state. Neo-nationalism has no qualms about international trade and even turns a blind eye towards immigration in those cases where it is good for the national economy. Neonationalism, or the ‘political folklore of territorialism’ as Sloterdijk (2004: 160) calls it, also happily makes use of neo-liberal principles such as marketing strategies and branding to construct a national and cultural identity. Moreover, cultural essentialism is commonly used to gain economic benefits and to protect standards of living. Or economic arguments are presented harshly as cultural ones: ‘They are lazy while we are a hardworking nation’ and ‘they live on our pocket while we have to scrape and save’. Within neo-nationalism, economic achievements are translated culturally and are ‘essentialized’ as, for example, the only Dutch culture or the American way of life. In this way neo-nationalism cleverly hitches a 6
Pascal Gielen – The art of democracy ride on the wagon of neo-liberalism. And when the cross-border traffic of money and especially people gets ‘out of hand’ and undermines neoliberalism’s urge for accumulation, neo-nationalism comes in handy in helping to maintain a selective policy as to freedom. At least we can say that neo-nationalism and neo-liberalism can play a clever game in which the rules of a true global democracy do not apply. Finally, according to Held, the faulty forms of democratic government have everything to do with the obsolete model on which most regimes in the Western world have based themselves historically, namely, liberal, representative democracy. This model reduces democracy too much to the individual responsibility of citizens, who can only realize their democratic momentum once every few years, in elections. In other words, the model neglects its duty to ‘nourish’ the civil domain. According to Held, ‘The structures of civil society (including forms of productive and financial property, sexual and racial inequalities) – misunderstood or endorsed by liberal democratic models – do not create conditions for equal votes, effective participation and deliberation, proper political understanding and equal control of the political agenda; while the structures of the liberal democratic state (including large, frequently unaccountable bureaucratic apparatuses, institutional dependence on the imperatives of private capital accumulation, political representatives preoccupied with their own re-election) do not create an organizational force which can adequately regulate “civil” power centres.’ (Held, 2006: 275) So Held sees liberal representative democracy as a democracy of the majority that finds it difficult to organize citizenship. But civil initiatives in which minorities can also have a voice presuppose serious social and cultural programmes for the emancipation of citizens, enabling them to learn how to use their political voice. A democracy does, however, need a social programme to offer weaker groups every opportunity to obtain participatory power, and it needs a cultural and educational programme to generate the necessary conceptual frameworks and reflection that can produce alternative forms of government and power over and over again. This last element is necessary to safeguard the ‘emptiness’ in a democracy outlined above by always filling it only temporarily. Both neo-liberalism and neo-nationalism ignore this post-fundamental condition by suggest-
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy ing that there actually is a foundation. Neo-nationalism sees the individuality of a cultural identity as the ultimate basis, while neo-liberalism elevates the laws of the free market to a transcendental level. In doing so, both philosophies harden their external legitimization into a kind of second nature. For neo-nationalism, nationality acquires the quality of an unchanging culture, while neo-liberalism practices the metaphysics of finance within a Darwinist model. As such, both political movements suggest that the reasons for political actions lie outside of the political realm and is therefore very hard to influence. To them, good politics are much more a matter of ‘tuning into’ the laws of external reality. In agreement with the political philosopher Chantal Mouffe (2005), we could therefore label these movements as ‘post-political’. Among other things, Mouffe applies the term to political movements that no longer legitimize their policy by referring to an ideology but by referring to external or seemingly non-political social factors, such as ‘the market’, ‘the economic climate’, or ‘cultural identity’. In such a framework politicians give the impression of being ‘forced’ to take certain decisions, while relegating their ideological and active freedom of choice to the background. But how do these political issues relate to art?
The singular ‘dismeasure’ Articulating a definition of art is a tricky undertaking at best. Historically, art has covered many fields and taken on many different shapes. Benjamin, for instance, refers to the ritual function that artistic artefacts once had, but he also talks about how the perception of art is transmuted by technological developments (2003: 261-262). When speaking of modern art here, it’s important to point out that the word is used for art that lost its aura, as Benjamin has described. This art will be mentioned in this essay as ‘post-auratic’, to point at art that has its origins in modernity or in the historical avant-garde – not coincidentally the same period in which photography and film came to flourish. So although this may include art that is created in unique shapes and in authentic fashion, it is art that is created – in Benjamin's words – with an eye to its reproducibility (Benjamin, 2003: 256). Benjamin's distinction between auratic and non-auratic art is also 7
Pascal Gielen – The art of democracy clearly postulated in his 1931 essay A Small History of Photography, in which he lucidly explains how the auratic work pretends to exist outside of history. It therefore denies its own transitoriness, or at least its potential transformation. This is why Benjamin calls it monumental art (1999: 169). The post-auratic artefact, on the contrary, emancipated itself from the aura. Among other things, this means that it is open to the future and to the transformations that may befall it there (1999: 157). In short, postauratic art is contingent. The French art sociologist Nathalie Heinich adds that this post-auratic art aims at transgression, ever since the demise of the academic system (the Académie française) and its rules (Heinich, 1991). This is why today we may speak of not only post-auratic art but also of post-academic art. The philosopher Paolo Virno has coined this principle of transgression as ‘dismeasure’ (Paolo Virno, in Gielen and Lavaert, 2009). According to him, modern art introduces a ‘dismeasure’ inside the general measure or common sense of a culture. This dismeasure is not necessarily only aesthetic or formal in nature. It can also be political or – as Virno suggests – cognitive and affective in nature. When, for instance, the Belgian artist Jan Fabre binds the hands of his dancers to their ballet shoes and makes them dance ‘un-virtuoso’, he introduces a dismeasure into the idiom of classical ballet. In doing so, Fabre produced a formal or aesthetical dismeasure. The Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletti takes this even one step further by proclaiming his organization ‘Cittadellarte’ – in which scientists and businesses develop and implement practical new economic methods of productions and production relationships (Gielen, 2009: 207-237) – to be a work of art. In doing so, Pistoletto in any case makes an attempt to install a different measure outside of art as well. The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s view on art enables us to better frame the views of Benjamin, Heinich and Virno in a sociological sense. When he asks himself what role art plays in contemporary society – art that is often regarded by society as ‘useless’ and therefore without function – Luhmann concludes that art creates a ‘sense of possibilities’ (Möglichkeitssinn). ‘Nothing is either necessary or impossible’ or ‘Everything that is, can also always be otherwise’, is the message that art brings to contemporary society (Luhmann, 1995). With this functional definition of modern art Luhmann also makes room for ‘dismeasure’ as one of the possibilities of art. Moreover, when the measure is defined by everything
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy that exists or by everything that is regarded as culturally obvious, then something can only be labelled as art if it deviates from this standard and thereby introduces a dismeasure. Within the dominant measure there's always the chance of dismeasure occurring. Whether this dismeasure will be recognized as art, however, depends on its historic and cultural context. And this is exactly where the connection lies between post-auratic and post-academic art, between Benjamin and Luhmann. Both views on art share the notion that the modern artwork is contingent. This constant possibility of dismeasure is why confrontations with modern artistic expressions often lead to debate and dissent. It is precisely this debate that has been at the core of the artistic ever since modernity: the principle of contingency makes it necessary to argue that other visions, opinions and interpretations are always possible. The point is not so much whether this alternate vision is more beautiful or more interesting or comes closer to the truth, but rather that there is always another way of looking at things. Just like democracy, modern art is also polyphonic and post-fundamental. Artists always propose other possibilities, which then have to be grounded each time again. After all, when neither religious or political representation nor virtuoso craftsmanship or the rules of the Académie française apply any longer, art loses the ground beneath its feet. This leads some populist voices to conclude that ‘anything goes’ and that modern art is therefore anti-fundamental. However, the postfundamental interpretation of modern art realises that the only way for artists to get credit within the art world is by postulating a dismeasure based on their own singular gesture. In other words, they must take the risk of making their own artistic gesture and in doing so they make their own position as artists the subject of debate. It should be noted that, following Heinich (1991), I have deliberately chosen to use the notion of ‘singularity’ here, rather than that of ‘individual’ art, as the latter is associated too much with the idea of the isolated talent, personal genius or psyche from which the work of art originates. It carries a notion that is also echoed in political philosophy: ‘The difference lies in the fact that the individual is modelled upon the self-sufficient modern subject which, in its monadic existence, does not rely on other individuals, it does not relate, it does not compare and it does not share. Singularities, on the other hand, are exposed to the in-between through their relation of sharing.’ (Mar8
Pascal Gielen – The art of democracy chart, 2007: 73-74) Finally, it should be noted that according to Heinich a collective can also defend a unique and singular position (Heinich, 2000 and 2002). It is not the artist who has to be individual, but the artistic gesture – the work of art – must be singular, whether it is proposed by an individual or a collective. At the core of modern art lies the movement from non-art to art that offers the singular position a place within a (sometimes limited) collectivity. The post-fundamental nature of post-auratic art lies in this grounding movement that has to be performed time and again from a position of singularity. This is precisely why anyone who is even slightly familiar with the current professional art world knows that definitely not anything goes. To be on the left side of the dichotomy art/non-art, artists often have to make their own difficult, lonesome and argumentative way to find their footing. When art is no longer embedded in religion or rituals and therefore is post-auratic and contingent, in the words of Benjamin, it has to be argued from every idiosyncratic artistic position. This is perhaps most evident in the visual arts, where nowadays craftsmanship or artistic skills are not necessarily required to make a work of art. Artists must then first and foremost find a social base for their artistic gesture and the only way to do this is by ‘publicizing’ their work and by providing arguments as to why the things they make – or, in the case of ready-mades, select – should be accepted as art. It is only when others are convinced of this artistic gesture that the proposed artefact or idea may enter the realm of ‘art’ in the dichotomy of art/non-art. And precisely this movement from the singular, idiosyncratic position to a collective base is a quest for a foundation which has to be undertaken with every new work of art. Art would be anti-fundamental if ‘anything goes’ and if, for instance, the individual intention of the artist would suffice to call something a work of art. This, however, is not the case. All artists also have to find a collective base for their intentions by searching for a foundation that can legitimize their art. Art would be fundamental if there were fixed rules that would decide beforehand the distinction of art/non-art. Such was the case with the Académie française, that had clearly defined rules with which, for instance, a landscape or a genre piece had to comply. Within postfundamental art such rules do not exist. On the contrary, artists have to reinvent or make them themselves time and again and find a collective
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy basis through public argumentation. This is necessary because the mother work of art is fundamentally undecided or contingent.
The art of democracy: modern art is only possible in a democracy Precisely because it seeks a dismeasure in both the art world and society, modern art always occupies the position of the minority or heterodoxy, in the words of cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1977). Those who confront society with something ‘different’ or ‘possibly otherwise’ find themselves alone, especially in the beginning. The dismeasure may become more acceptable over time or even come to belong to the orthodoxy within the artistic field, but the dynamic within the modern art world is only guaranteed by the constant arrival of new dismeasures. And it is precisely this law of transgression that leads to so much discussion, debate and writing in the art world. After all, those who cross the line constantly have to legitimize their actions in public, while those who excel within the rules do not. Therefore, art needs a civil framework for discussion, argumentation and debate. Without arguments and the room for counter-arguments to decide the distinction between art and non-art, there can be no modern art. This is why post-auratic art can only survive socially by leaning on politics, as suggested by Benjamin (2003: 257). However, politics can become aestheticized themselves, as in fascism. What Benjamin means is that fascism presents itself, like the auratic work of art, as monumental or timeless. So, in an artificial way, fascism tries to reinstall aura and does so by using technical means of reproduction such as mass media. The answer of communism to that is via an opposite movement, especially the politicization of art. Communism affirms the mobility of identities and a permanent transformation of experience, whereas fascism, according to Benjamin, tries to fixate and monumentalize identities (Caygill, 1998: 103). By now, 75 years on, we know the results of communism. It is highly disputable whether the political art of, for instance, the former Soviet Union produced openness and contingency. But perhaps Benjamin envisioned a communism that was different from the bureaucratic and technocratic variation that eventually became the historic reality. The openness and sense of contingency that Benjamin ascribes to 9
Pascal Gielen – The art of democracy communism are nowadays perhaps more easily found in the ideal of democracy. This is why I state here that the post-auratic and post-academic or modern art – which came into being after and outside of the standardized rules for works of art of the Académie française and similar institutes in, mostly, Europe – can only be supported by democratic politics. Not only because democracy allows for contingency but also because art as dismeasure occupies the position of a minority within wider society and it will only stand a chance within a political system offering guarantees, as noted before. Artists who constantly remind society of what could be ‘possibly otherwise’ will always go against common sense. Consequently, those who choose to make art opt for a minority position in society, even if that minority is dismissed as ‘elitist’. For that matter, an elite can also be part of a minority and a cultural elite is therefore not necessarily a political or economic elite, as Bourdieu tells us (1979). Elitist or not, postauratic and post-academic art can only survive by the grace of democracy.
The art of democracy: the modern art world as a model for a minority democracy But modern art also demonstrates quite a few parallels with political democracy, such as its post-fundamental nature noted earlier. That doesn't make art into politics, but it does belong to the domain of ‘the political’, especially if we see this notion, as Jacques Rancière puts it, as ‘expressing living together in form’ (2000). Interventions by artists and activities by art institutes also mould social interaction. If on top of that we characterize modern art as the provider of a dismeasure, it does not have to be limited to so-called ‘high’ culture. When standard formats are deserted or molested, dismeasure can also be detected in popular cultural expressions such as film or pop music. In this respect, the direct impact of art as a shaping force of society may be bigger than we think. As post-auratic art’s rationale is that it points out that things can always also be otherwise, the modern art world has even more things in common with politics. To conquer a position each time again by providing arguments from the singularity proposition presupposes a polemic domain of many voices, all competing for a place for their own singular work. Those visiting an art
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy biennial or a theatre festival can easily observe how contradictory artistic styles and voices often go side-by-side. In this sense, the modern art world cultivates an ‘agonistic’ way of (at least temporary) togetherness, as within art scenes, and even within one exhibition, we often see a multitude of contradictions, diverging cultures and conflicting visions co-existing without their constantly denying each other's rationale or legitimacy (Gielen 2009). Artists may fight against any compromise from their singular position, and relationships within the art world can often be irreconcilable, but they are rarely hostile. According to the Belgian political philosopher Chantal Mouffe – who gave the term ‘agony’ a politicalphilosophical twist – this attitude is only possible when ‘we see each other as taking part in a shared symbolic space that contains the conflict’ (Mouffe, 2005: 26). Just as in a democratic political domain, antagonism in the art world is sublimated into an agonistic way of co-existence. The singular minority position within this domain is, however, only accepted on the basis of the arguments that support it. Argumentation here refers to the activity by which one tries to obtain public support (however limited) from the singular artistic gesture. Such arguments may be rational, theoretical, emotional, or aesthetic, but they can also reside within the artistic gesture itself. The agonistic democratic space is always constructed from a multitude of such singular argumentation activities, which mostly come from a minority position. In that sense, the modern art domain is very much different from the liberal representative (majority) democracy outlined earlier. The latter, after all, is not grounded on the voiced argumentation of the voters but on an anonymized act in a polling booth that is not publicly substantiated. In liberal representative democracy only the numbers count. All voters can vote without ever having to defend their vote in public. Within the agonistic space of the artistic domain, however, people are allergic to democratically ‘elected’ works of art, because any dismeasure that is preferred by the majority ceases to be a dismeasure and becomes measure. Within the democracy of the art world, the only way to convincingly obtain a position for dismeasure is by means of argumentation or ‘publicizing’ the singular artistic gesture. This is why we could also speak of a minority democracy, in contrast to the liberal democracy of the majority. Within a minority model one can only gain a position or obtain a broader social basis by 10
Pascal Gielen – The art of democracy means of argumentation. One only gains a voice by making one's choices public, not by anonymously checking a box in a polling booth. If one seeks one's way by argumentation, however, a confrontation with other minorities who are also claiming a position is inevitable. In other words, a minority democracy is agonistic. Because it is continuously confronted with always changing possible minorities it does, however, acknowledge its modest place in the world. Because of this confrontation with the always possibly otherwise, a minority democracy is much more a continuous, self-reflexive search for democratic forms than a consolidation of power by a majority. Minority democracies do not see democracy as an entitlement but as goal worth striving for. Perhaps this minority democracy does offer some handles for a future political democracy. If we are to believe Held, not a single classical, republican, liberal or direct democracy would survive in a globalized world. Only a democratic autonomous model would have any chance of success, according to this political scientist (Held, 2006). Held is referring to a democracy that stimulates and organizes a multitude of singular civil voices; a formula that experiments on a large scale with self-government by individuals, businesses, civil initiatives, organizations and all sorts of collectives. In other words, a democratic autonomy is a form of government that constantly promotes and facilitates the autonomous economic, social and cultural development of a range of minorities. This multitude of singular initiatives in turn makes every effort to reach democratic self-rule. And it is precisely this multitude of diverging initiatives that brings them into an ever more symmetrical negotiating position with states, transnational governments, local authorities, civil initiatives, et cetera. The state or supranational governing bodies are just democratic decision-making systems like so many others. In the future, democracy can only maintain its legitimacy if it makes the transformation of inequalities the core of its politics, according to Held. Among other things, this means that it must declare the minority as the focal point of its policies.
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy
Pascal Gielen – The art of democracy
To conclude: modern art as a test for democracy?
Bibliography
Regardless of this second speculative idea of the art of democracy in which it is suggested that an art world could provide handles for a future agonistic democracy, the first thesis of the art of democracy still holds true that the post-auratic and post-academic art of dismeasure can only survive by the grace of democracy. Neo-nationalism will always suppress this type of art because it undermines the alleged foundation of a stable national culture from within, which it tries to monumentalize. This is why modern art may appear as even more threatening to neo-nationalists than the migrant who brings a ‘possibly otherwise’ culture from the outside. Neoliberalism, in turn, is not quite sure how to deal with the art of dismeasure because this art can hardly be legitimized through the power of measure or numbers, regardless of whether those numbers represent money, audiences, or opinion polls. The numeric democracy of neo-liberalism is also at odds with an argumentative democracy, as it still assumes a fixed and therefore not arguable foundation outside of politics, especially that of the laws of the free market. Within this neo-national and neo-liberal context of fundamentalisms, post-auratic and post-academic art may well prove to be a test for democracy. In any case, modern art is one of the domains in which the post-fundamental idea of contingency that anything that is, can also always be otherwise is very much alive.
Bejamin, W. (1999) Selected Writngs. Volume 2 – 1927-193. Harvard: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Pascal Gielen (1970) is director of the research center Arts in Society at the Groniningen University where he is associate Professor of sociology of art. He also leads the research group and book series ‘Arts in Society’ (Fontys College for the Arts, Tilburg). Gielen has written serveral books on contemporary art, cultural heritage and cultural politics. In 2009 Gielen edited together with Paul De Bruyne the book Being an Artist in PostFordist Times (NAi) and he published his new monograph The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude. Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism (Valiz). In 2011 De Bruyne and Gielen edited the book Community Art. The Politics of Trespassing and in January 2012 their new book Teaching Art in the Neoliberal Realm. Realism versus Cynicism will be launched. 11
Benjamin, W. (2003) Selected Writings. Volume 4 – 1938-1940. Harvard: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1977) ‘La production de la croyance: contribution à une économie de biens symboliques’, in: Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 13. Bourdieu, P. (1979) La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Caygill, H. (1998) Walter Benjamin. The Colour of Experience. London and New York: Routledge. Danto, A. (1986) The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia University Press. De Duve, T. (1998) Kant after Duchamp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gielen, P. (2003) Kunst in netwerken. Artistieke selecties in de hedendaagse dans en de beeldende kunst (Art in Networks. Artistic Selections in Contemporary Dance and Visual Art). Leuven: Lannoo Campus. Gielen, P. (2009) The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude. Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism. Amsterdam: Valiz. Gielen, P. and S. Lavaert (2009) ‘The Dismeasure of Art. An interview with Paulo Virno’, in: P. Gielen and P. De Bruyne (eds.) Being an Artist in PostFordist Times. Rotterdam: NAi-Publishers, 17-44. Heinich, N. (1991) La Gloire de Van Gogh. Essai d’antropologie de l’admiration. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy Heinich, N. (2000) ‘What is an artistic event? A new approach to sociological discourse’, in: Boekmancahier 12 (44), 159-168. Heinich, N. (2002) ‘Let us try to understand each other. Reply to Crane, Laermans, Marontate and Schinkel’, in: Boekmancahier 14 (52), 200-207. Held, D. (2006) Models of Democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Laclau, E. (1996), Emancipation(s). London and New York: Verso. Laermans, R. (2011) ‘De democratie van de kunst (The Democracy of Art)’, in: L. Van Heteren, Q. Van der Hogen, And P. Gielen (eds.) A Fight for the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press (in press). Lefort, C. (1988) Democracy and Political Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Luhmann, N. (1995) Die Kunst der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Lukacs, J. (2005) Democracy and Populism. Fear and Hatred. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Marchart, O. (2007) Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mouffe, C. (2005) On the Political. London and New York: Routledge. Rancière, J. (2000) Le partage de sensible. Esthétique et politique. Paris: Editions La fabrique. Sloterdijk, P. (2004) Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals. Für eine philosophische Theorie der Globalisierung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
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Pascal Gielen – The art of democracy This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License (AttributionNoncommercial 3.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nl/deed.en for more information.
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy ple who actually deserve and need attention. If you can’t beat them, join them!’ THIJS LIJSTER ART AND PROPERTY
Krisis, 2011, Issue 3 www.krisis.eu
Introduction: Plessner vs. Vuitton In January 2011 the Danish artist Nadia Plessner exhibited her painting Darfurnica in the Galleri Esplanaden in Copenhagen. Referring to Pablo Picasso’s Guernica both in name, theme and style, the work seeks to draw attention to the conflict in Darfur, while at the same time addressing the fact that mass media in the western world have closed their eyes to it, directing their attention to celebrities instead. Hence, next to players in the conflict like president Al-Bashir, Barack Obama, Janjaweed militia and Chinese oil companies, the picture shows paparazzi chasing stars like Victoria Beckham, Paris Hilton, and Britney Spears (shaving her head). Most importantly, in the center of the painting the two themes collide in the shape of an emaciated black child carrying a Chihuahua and a Louis Vuitton Audra-model handbag. The famous logo with the designer’s initials is replaced by the letters S and L, referring to Simple Living, the title of a 2007 drawing by Plessner depicting the same boy.1 Then she wrote: ‘Since doing nothing but wearing designer bags and small ugly dogs apparently is enough to get you on a magazine cover, maybe it is worth a try for peo13
On the basis of the 2007 drawing and the distribution of it on the Internet and on T-shirts, Louis Vuitton had already accused the artist of violating intellectual property rights. The court in Paris had decided in favor of the multinational bag manufacturer. Plessner stopped using her drawing. Until 2011, that is, when the boy with the bag reappears in Darfurnica, as well as on posters and advertisements that went with the exhibition. Once more Louis Vuitton takes legal action, this time at the court in The Hague, since the artist lives and works in the Netherlands. In a so called ‘ex parte’ case, in which the claimant can ask for a preliminary decision to defend his or her intellectual property rights and which neither requires the presence nor even the notification of the defendant, the judge forbids Plessner continuous use of the bag. In a subsequent preliminary injunction filed by the artist, however, the court of The Hague decides in favor of Plessner. According to the judge, there is a conflict between intellectual property rights and freedom of expression, but since the artist’s usage of the bag is not of a purely commercial kind, and since it lies in the nature of art to ‘offend, shock, or disturb’, he considers it ‘functional and proportional’. Plessner is allowed to use the bag, in her art as well as in publicity.2 The themes of Plessner’s work together with her political commitment as an artist already form an interesting example of how global politics finds its way into the arts. Even more relevant, however, is the court case between Plessner and Vuitton, which has nothing to do with Darfur, but draws our attention to a fundamental relation between art and politics. The case raises the question: to whom does art belong? This concerns not so much the simple question of who owns a work of art, but rather the more important one of who can lay claim to the various images, icons and ideas which are present in art, but which are also part of our everyday lives? This question becomes all the more urgent now that digital reproduction makes images potentially ubiquitous. The question of the relation between intellectual property and artistic (re)production can be formulated in old-fashioned Marxist terminology:
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy what is the nature of the contemporary relations of production and property in the arts, and how do they relate to the means of production? This question, posed in this way, may seem highly untimely, but it should be of interest to any aesthetic theory that pretends to be thoroughly materialist, which means one that is concerned with the relation between art and the (re)production of human life and of social relations. So what does it mean to ask this question?
Art and Intellectual Property Property relations in the arts have been defined, since the eighteenth and nineteenth century, by copyrights and intellectual property rights. These seemingly self-evident institutions, in other words, have existed for barely two hundred years. According to Martin Luther, for instance, there is no such thing as intellectual property, since all ideas belong to God and can therefore neither be claimed nor owned by individuals (cf. Woodmansee 1994, 42). The dawn of modernity witnesses the birth of the aesthetics of ‘genius’ (for instance in Kant and Schopenhauer): the idea that artists make their own rules and that art is good art if it is original and authentic. Nathalie Heinich calls this the ‘vocational regime’ of art (Heinich 1996, 35). This regime is closely related to the importance of the individual in other spheres of society, such as politics and economy. One can argue, as Paul de Bruyne and Pascal Gielen do, that ‘the myth of the individual artist is a product of the mental space of free market capitalism’ (De Bruyne and Gielen 2011, 5). Indeed, unlike those of the Middle Ages, ideas of scholarly and artistic nature are from now on thought to belong to their inventor like commodities belong to their owner; and the creative genius, like the property owner, needs to be protected by the law. Within the arts, the notion of creative genius is challenged by the avantgardes of the twentieth century. Dadaism and Surrealism, for instance, mock the idea of originality by producing nonsensical artworks and performances, poems made from newspaper scraps, and ‘automatic’ writing. Coincidence and the subconscious rule their art instead of the ‘strong’ artistic subject. The surrealist painter Max Ernst writes that ‘the fairy-tale 14
Thijs Lijster – Art and property of artistic creativity, this pitiful relic of the myth of divine creation, has remained the last delusion of Western culture’ (Ernst 1992, 492) – a delusion that the avant-gardes are intent to do away with. Not only did the avant-gardes criticize the idea of artistic genius, but they deliberately refrained from originality by presenting as artworks ordinary objects (readymade), advertisement and popular culture (pop-art), or exact copies of other artworks (copy or appropriation art). After Walker Evans (1979) by Sherrie Levine, for instance, is a photo of a photo by Walker Evans from 1936, and hardly discernible from the ‘original’. She herself is copied, in turn, by Michael Mandiberg, who scanned the pictures and placed them on the website www.aftersherrielevine.com (2001), where one can download an ‘original’ Levine (or Evans) complete with a ‘certificate of authenticity’. In spite of its revolutionary spirit and frivolous jests, the avant-garde has not succeeded in overthrowing our modern understanding of art and the artist completely. Rather, as is quite common in history, the new paradigm or regime coexists with and runs parallel to the old one. As Boris Groys argues, the artist today has to be both creator and selector. The artist’s selection is his creation, but what he creates has to be first selected to become a work of art: ‘[T]he creative act has become the act of selection: since Duchamp, producing an object is no longer sufficient for its producer to be considered an artist. One must also select the object one has made oneself and declare it an artwork. Accordingly, since Duchamp there is no longer any difference between an object one produces oneself and one produced by someone else – both have to be selected in order to be considered artworks. Today an author is someone who selects, who authorizes. Since Duchamp the author has become a curator. The artist is primarily the curator of himself, because he selects his own art. And he also selects others: other objects, other artists.’ (Groys 2008, 93-94) Groys fails to note, however, that there is a tension between these two identities of the artist; between what one could call the ‘modern’ and the ‘avant-gardist’ side of contemporary art. After all, even though the avant-
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy garde artist rejects the idea of genius, he still depends on it. One could even say that he is an extreme form of it: as with a magic wand, the avantgardist turns a urinal into a work of art. There is no skill involved; only the ‘touch’ of the artist. The contemporary artist, as Groys describes him, therefore has two souls in his chest: he bears traces both of the creative genius and of its negation, the frivolous copyist. His products are at the same time masterpieces and heaps of trash. This tension expresses itself, among other things, in the problematic attitude of contemporary art towards intellectual property rights, of which the Plessner case is but one example. On the one hand, intellectual property is, as we have seen, the very condition of possibility of the figure of the artist in modernity, and is inseparably connected with our notions of originality and creativity. On the other hand, intellectual property forms a problem for contemporary art practices, which involve copying, appropriation, and montage of existing fragments of the world as well as of other works of art. One could reformulate this problem in Marxist terms, as a conflict in the mode of production caused by the development of artistic means of production (cf. Tucker 1978, 4). Relations of production – intellectual property rights – have been more of less static since the nineteenth century. To be sure, laws of copyright and intellectual property have developed and have become increasingly detailed. However, its basic premise (creative expressions are commodities) and goal (to protect these commodities) have remained the same. Means of production – that is, artistic techniques – have, on the contrary, altered drastically. This was already true for the historical avant-gardes, and even more so for our time. ‘Technique’ should here be understood in its broad meaning, not merely entailing styles of painting, composing etc., but also materials, instruments, sources, and technologies of (re)production. The Internet, obviously, plays a key role, since it makes possible the digital reproduction and distribution of images, texts, music, and ideas. As a consequence, questions concerning copyrights, intellectual property and ‘free use’ are the subject of hot debate within the arts. On one side are industries (most notably the film and music industries) as well as several 15
Thijs Lijster – Art and property artists that disapprove of free exchange, which would deprive them of their income. They conceive of it as criminal activity, labeling it as piracy, theft, or plagiarism. Court cases are held against creators of peer-to-peer networks such as Napster (successfully) and torrent-websites such as the Pirate Bay (unsuccessfully), as well as against some of their users.3 On the other side are artists who see in the Internet not a threat to their intellectual property, but rather the possibility to reach their audiences in new ways, without the interference of institutional mediators such as museums, record companies, or publishing houses.4 Initiatives such as ‘Creative Commons’ and ‘Wiki loves art’ promote the free exchange of the products of intellectual labor. Some artists, such as the remix artist Girl Talk and cartoonist Dan O’Neill, criticize the notion of intellectual property, which, so they argue, was once meant to protect artists, but now mostly functions for the profit of big companies.5 They consider themselves an artistic vanguard, striving to initiate a political debate on the use and misuse of intellectual property for art. For audiences, finally, and especially for young audiences, illegal downloading and file sharing seems to be the norm. Polls show that few think of it as criminal activity.6 During the elections for the European Parliament in Sweden in 2009, the Pirate Party, affiliated with the website The Pirate Bay, even received enough votes for two seats. But not only do many share the intellectual property of others. Web 2.0 depends on people sharing the output of their own creativity – music, movies, pictures, ideas, news – by means of YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. How should we understand these developments? It appears as though new media, and most notably social media, are causing a shift in the artistic relations of production, undermining intellectual property and copyright laws and blurring the difference between artist and audience. Are we indeed on the brink of an age in which, as Joseph Beuys once said, ‘everyone is an artist’? Do the ‘internal dynamic’ of Internet use and consumer demand make intellectual property moribund? Or will capitalism tighten its grip and will all these debates merely lead to the setting of new boundaries, the production of new legislation?
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy Intellectual Property and ‘the Common’ To appreciate fully the range of this problem, one should broaden one’s scope beyond art and look at shifts in the structure of capitalist production per se. Intellectual property has been one of the key issues in recent debates in political philosophy and social theory about what is called ‘the common’. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, following eighteenth century political and economic theory, use the concept of ‘the common’ to refer to goods that are neither private property, owned by individuals, nor public property, owned by a government. In earlier days ‘the commons’ referred to the meadows where everyone could graze their cattle and the forests where everyone could collect firewood. In their most recent book Commonwealth (2009) Hardt and Negri distinguish between two different kinds of ‘common’. The first concerns the common in the traditional sense of natural resources: air, water, the ‘fruits of the soil’, etc. More important, however, is their introduction of what they call a dynamic, artificial, or human common, existing of, among other things, language, knowledges, codes, images, affects – in short those things which form the fabric of social interaction and communication (Hardt and Negri 2009, 139). Unlike the first type of common, the second type has no scarcity. If I share an idea with someone, this does not reduce my possibilities of using this idea. On the contrary, in most cases the possibilities of a successful appropriation of an idea increase the more it is shared. As many theorists have argued, capitalism today increasingly depends on information, communication, ideas and knowledge (cf. Virno 2004, Boltanski and Chiapello 2005, Hardt and Negri 2009). In what is called ‘postindustrial’, ‘post-Fordist’, or ‘biopolitical’ production, the main products and resources are no longer material goods, but rather codes, interactions, information, social relations and forms of life. Obviously, this does not mean that production of material goods, or the exploitation of natural resources have ceased to exist; it means, rather, that immaterial production has become ‘hegemonic’, in other words, it has become the driving force behind those other forms of production. According to Hardt and Negri this implies that capitalist production increasingly depends on the common. 16
Thijs Lijster – Art and property Marx referred to the exploitation of common property as ‘primitive’ or ‘original’ accumulation. Drawing on Rosa Luxemburg and Hannah Arendt, David Harvey argues that this kind of accumulation should not be considered a transitory phase of capitalism that is no longer relevant, but rather as a continuous condition and source of capitalist creation of surplus value. This is why he prefers to call it ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2005, 144). Indeed, several theorists have argued that today we are witnessing a new wave of ‘enclosing’ the commons (Harvey 2005, 148; Žižek 2009a, 92). In contrast to the eighteenth century, however, today people are not merely dispossessed of natural resources on which they depend for their very lives; they are also deprived of common knowledge, information, images, and codes, which are turned into private property through patenting and copyrights. Commodification extends from human interaction such as care, culture, and communication, to life in the most literal sense, since genetic codes are considered types of information too. According to Slavoj Žižek this new wave of accumulation, of harvesting and enclosing the common, poses the threat ‘that we will be reduced to abstract subjects devoid of all substantial content, dispossessed of our symbolic substance, our genetic base heavily manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment’ (Žižek 2009a, 92). Hardt and Negri, by contrast, are more optimistic. They argue that capitalism in the age of biopolitical production is haunted by an internal contradiction. Capitalism benefits from, and even depends on, the free and frictionless exchange of information and ideas, on creativity and communication. Scientific developments, for instance, would be unthinkable without the free exchange of ideas and knowledge in journals and in conferences. The relations of property ruling the common, however, contradict capitalist relations. Exploiting the common, capitalism destroys the very basis of biopolitical labor, reduces its productivity, and therefore forms its own obstacle. In the shape of biopolitical production, Hardt and Negri argue, capitalism ‘provides the tools or weapons that could be wielded in a project of liberation’ (Hardt and Negri 2009, 137). Biopolitical production, in other words, empowers the multitude of workers and expands the common:
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy ‘This is how capital creates its own gravediggers: pursuing its own interest and trying to preserve its own survival, it must foster the increasing power and autonomy of the productive multitude. And when that accumulation of powers crosses a certain threshold, the multitude will emerge with the ability to rule common wealth.’ (Hardt and Negri 2009, 311) Several theorists have criticized Hardt and Negri’s analysis of capitalism, and especially their expectation of its transition or transfiguration into communism. Žižek argues, for instance, that the way they turn the flexibility of work relations and the mobility of financial capitalism into the power of the ‘multitude’ is nothing more than a purely formal inversion. Moreover, they have fallen prey to the old Marxist dream of historical progress, assuming the existence of an internal dynamic within capitalism which causes its inevitable downfall. Hardt and Negri, he argues, return to the idea that ‘history is on our side’ (Žižek 2009b, 266). According to Harvey, capitalist accumulation thrives on having something ‘outside of itself’. If this ‘other’ is not given in the form of non-capitalist societies, it can even create it itself, as in Marx’s notion of the industrial reserve army (Harvey 2005, 141). Consequently, it would be highly naïve to believe that capitalism will take care of its own demise. Similarly, Franck Fischbach, Étienne Balibar, and Jacques Rancière reject any kind of thinking in terms of historical necessity (Fischbach 2011, Balibar 2011, Rancière 2010). This is not the place to go into the details of this complex politicalphilosophical debate. However, it is clear that the debate on the developments of capitalism towards post-Fordist or biopolitical production, and the shifts in the mode of production that these developments entail, are of great importance to certain pressing questions within the field of art. One can easily draw a parallel between the ‘scientific common’ and an ‘artistic common’, which would then exist of shared expressions, images, tunes, stories, etc. Likewise, culture and art depends on the common, on the free exchange, sharing and combining of these cultural goods. Art, especially since the avant-gardes, involves varying on a theme, copying, parodying, pastiche, montage, etc. An enclosure of the artistic common, such as we are witnessing today, would seriously jeopardize a vital artistic practice.
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Thijs Lijster – Art and property Formulated in terms of the above mentioned debate in political philosophy, then, we can now ask the following question: will intellectual property rights eventually collapse under the weight of new technological developments, dissolving into an artistic and cultural ‘common’ or will artistic practices be continuously and increasingly frustrated by patenting and privatization, in short by the enclosure of the common?
The Artist as Producer In light of this question it is worthwhile to take a look at one of the first texts concerned with art and the common, namely Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’. Although Benjamin never explicitly uses the concept, it will prove fruitful to read his essay through the lens of our present situation. Perhaps Benjamin’s essay, written on the threshold of an earlier shift in the means of artistic production, will provide our contemporary discussions with a ‘dialectical image’, ‘wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation’ (Benjamin 1999, 462; V.1, 576).7 The thesis of the ‘artwork essay’ is familiar enough: technological reproducibility, most notably through photography and film, destroys the artwork’s unique appearance in time and space, and consequently the magical remnant Benjamin calls ‘aura’. The artwork’s emancipation from ritual makes its foundation in politics possible. This connection between aesthetics and politics, however, is only partly understood in most of the literature. Most readings focus on the ‘democratic’ potential of technological reproduction: the sheer ubiquity of technologically reproducible art makes it available to many at once, providing the masses access to works of art traditionally reserved for the happy few. While this is certainly one of the ways Benjamin conceives of the relation between aesthetics and politics, it is not the whole story. An extension of the audience alone is not a sufficient condition for what he famously calls the ‘politicizing of art’ by communism (SW 3, 122; VII.1, 384).8 His remarks on communism are often regarded with unease, ignored, or considered to
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy belong to the context of his time and hence unimportant for ours. Nevertheless, it is precisely the communist thesis of the artwork essay that makes it relevant for our present purposes. What is, then, the relation between technological reproducibility and communism? Benjamin is primarily concerned with a shift in the means of production of art (i.e. the technological reproducibility of art) and its possible consequences for the relations of production. The latter he analyzes, broadly speaking, in two terms: in terms of an inversion of authority and in terms of a redistribution of property. With regard to the first, the artwork’s authority consists of its aura. While in primitive times, this authority was granted by the ritual character of the work of art, in modernity this has been replaced by its uniqueness and its ‘eternal beauty’. When one admires the beauty of an artwork, Benjamin argues, one really admires the judgment of one’s ancestors, hence affirming the authority of tradition (see the important note in the essay ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, SW 4, 352-53; I.2, 638-39). Reproducible art departs from the notion of ‘eternal beauty’. While Greek sculpture is necessarily created in a single stroke, a finished film is, by contrast, the result of the selection and montage of an abundance of material (SW 3, 109; VII.1, 362). Likewise, the movie actor playing in front of the camera does not give a single and unified ‘performance’, since his role in the film consists of a series of discrete moments. The camera, for which the actor is playing, as he himself is well aware of, is in fact the invisible eye of the masses. They control him, ‘test’ him, as it were, through the apparatus, and their ‘invisibility heightens the authority of their control’ (SW 3, 113; VII.1, 370). Hence, the traditional relation of authority between performer and audience, in which the latter is enchanted and controlled by the former, is reversed, placing the audience in control. More important for our present purposes, however, is the way Benjamin considers the shift in the relations of production with regard to property. Referring to Russian documentary films, he argues that ‘any person today can lay claim to being filmed’ (SW 3, 114; VII.1, 371), thus transposing Marx’s call to place the means of production in the hands of the proletariat to the realm of art. According to Benjamin, art too is an industry, in 18
Thijs Lijster – Art and property which the relations between artist, artwork and public are mediated by record companies, studios, and publishing houses. A truly revolutionary art, he argues, not merely (and not even necessarily) has property relations as its theme: it will in itself, by means of artistic technology, contribute to a revolution in property relations. It is here where one should locate the link between technological reproducibility and communism or ‘the common’. According to Benjamin, means of technological reproduction have the potential of granting everyone equal access to artistic means of production – creating the possibility not only of becoming the subject of an artwork, but also of becoming an artist. Furthermore, reproduction techniques enlarge the reservoir of accessible images, tunes, etc., of which the ‘artistic common’ exists, to an unprecedented scale. Benjamin refers to a similar shift in the means of literary production that occurs with the emergence of journalism. Every reader has the potential to become a writer, and hence ‘the distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character’ (SW 3, 114; VII.1, 371). These remarks refer back to Benjamin’s lecture ‘The Author as Producer’ (1934) where he writes the following: ‘Rather than asking, “What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time?” I would like to ask, “What is its position in them?” This question directly concerns the function the work has within the literary relations of production of its time. It is concerned, in other words, directly with the literary technique of works.’ (SW 2, 770; II.1, 686) As an example he mentions the Russian ‘operative’ writer Sergei Tretyakov, who in his literary experiments actively participated in agricultural communities, and engaged these communities for writing literature. What distinguishes Tretyakov from other forms of ‘committed’ literature such as Activism and New Objectivism is the fact that politics is not so much the subject of his literature as it is the objective of his technique. Likewise, a truly revolutionary form of visual art would be one that places the means of production in the hands of the many, turning the audience into a producer.
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy Technological Determinism Benjamin has often been accused of ‘vulgar’ Marxism and technological determinism. Many criticize his naïve optimism, reading the artwork essay as a ‘prediction’ of how reproduction technologies will necessarily bring about a democratic culture (cf. Bürger 1974, 38-42; Jameson 1981, 25; Rochlitz 1996, 161). This reading, however, is incorrect. Not only would this kind of technological determinism contradict Benjamin’s suspicion of the notion of ‘progress’ (cf. Lijster 2010), it also contradicts his intentions in the artwork essay. Writing to a friend about the Arcades Project Benjamin tells that he is ‘pointing [his] telescope through the mist of blood towards a mirage of the nineteenth century, which I am trying to paint in the strokes that it will have for a future state of the world, one freed from magic. Of course I will first have to build this telescope myself’ (Benjamin 1966, 698). The artwork essay, he adds, is meant to be this telescope. In other words, the essay is the attempt to rewrite history from the perspective of a redeemed future. It is therefore neither a description nor a prediction, but should be understood as emphatically messianic. Benjamin did not believe that the new means of technological reproduction would necessarily bring about social progress, nor a definitive destruction of the aura; he believed, however, that they constituted a unique historical chance.9 To understand what Benjamin means by a world ‘freed from magic’ we should consider his distinction between two kinds of technology – a distinction often overlooked, since it is absent from the third and most familiar essay version of 1939. Technology, he argues, mediates between humanity and nature, but can do this in different ways. The first technology, based on magic, seeks to master nature. In doing so, however, it makes maximum use of human beings, culminating in sacrificial death. By contrast, the second technology, based on play, ‘aims rather at an interplay between nature and humanity’ (SW 3, 107; VII.1, 359). It aims, in other words, not at mastery over nature, but rather mastery over the relationship between nature and humanity.10 Art, according to Benjamin, is part of both the first, magical, and the second, playful, technology. The artwork’s aura, its enchanting semblance, and its uniqueness and inap19
Thijs Lijster – Art and property proachability, subject the beholder to the authority of tradition. Its playful side, on the other hand, entails its ability to create and facilitate new forms of intersubjectivity and perception. Film, according to Benjamin, constitutes a potential breakthrough of the latter: ‘In film, the element of semblance has yielded its place to the element of play, which is allied to the second technology’ (SW 3, 127; VII.1, 369). But again, for Benjamin this is a mere potentiality, and is neither the actual situation, nor is it something very likely to happen. Even the most advanced human technologies – of this he is acutely aware – can be employed for the goal of a mastery of nature, and subsequently result in human sacrifice. Likewise, artistic technologies are ever threatened to be absorbed by ‘magical’ practices. Western film industries, Benjamin notes, recreate a false aura for the movie star to compensate for the his loss of aura and authority inside the studio, while fascist politics answer to the withering of aura with the cult of the leader and the cult of the masses, thus fixating traditional relations of authority and property. Benjamin’s point in the artwork essay is not that the technological reproduction of art necessarily resists this process of re-enchantment. His effort, as he makes clear in the introduction, is to ‘neutralize a number of traditional concepts – such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery – which, used in an uncontrolled way […] allow factual material to be manipulated in the interests of fascism’ (SW 3, 101-102; VII.1, 350). The essay, in other words, attempts to provide the present with critical force. It is not the description of a politics of art, but the execution thereof.
Conclusion: Art and Revolution The question, then, whether shifts in the means of production of art, such as the one Benjamin detected in his day and the ones which we are witnessing today, will bring about a shift in the relations of production of art has to remain open. We cannot rely, in other words, on an internal dynamic or necessary course of history, and it is not to be expected that new means of (re)production and the subsequent dependency on the artistic
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy common will cause the end of intellectual property. On the contrary: in the case of literature, the developments of reproduction technologies resulted in the implementation of laws of intellectual property, which until then had been superfluous. New technologies, new means of production can be exploited by and implemented in existing relations of production. Of this Benjamin was well aware: his Arcades Project was to become an archeology of nineteenthcentury technologies which never reached their full potential due to the fact that they were incorporated in existing power relations, and fettered by the range of possibilities of older technologies (what today we would call the ‘horseless carriage’ syndrome) (Benjamin 1999, 4-5; V.1, 46-47). The lessons we can learn from Benjamin’s artwork essay for the contemporary discussions concerning art and intellectual property are the following. First, there is no straight line from digital reproducibility or any other technological development to a revolution in intellectual property relations. If anything, these technologies provide an opportunity to ask questions that before could not be asked. They create and expand the ‘artistic common’ which is however always in danger of being exploited and enclosed by capital. Second, political commitment does not mean that the artist, as a prophet or saint, discloses the truth about society, but rather means that he is involved in revolutionizing the artistic production process by redistributing the means of production.11 This implies, however, that we understand this debate not merely in terms of intellectual property rights, but in terms of private property per se. As Žižek argues, to disconnect these issues means to strip this debate of its genuinely revolutionary and subversive edge (Žižek 2009a, 98). Third, to rethink artistic modes of production a new theory of art is required. As earlier remarked, intellectual property is fully entangled with a discourse on art, still quite dominant today, that revolves around the creative genius, eternal beauty and the masterpiece. Benjamin’s artwork essay was an attempt to formulate a theory of art that would no longer depend on these notions. They have proven to be quite stubborn, however, 20
Thijs Lijster – Art and property not least because they are related to the way in which art and authorship is organized in our society. Within this theoretical framework, it will be impossible to come up with alternative ways of organizing intellectual property. Stepping out of it, however, may mean getting rid of the idea of the individual artist altogether. And this is a step that few even of the opponents of intellectual property rights would be willing to take.
Thijs Lijster is researcher at Arts in Society, an interdisciplinary research centre of the University of Groningen. In several research projects the relation of the arts in society is studied with regard to art politics, education, (new) media, ethics and cognitive theory. In the spring of 2012 he will defend his PhD thesis Critique of Art. Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno on the Value and Function of Art and Art Criticism.
References: Balibar, É. (2011) ‘Occasional Notes on Communism’ in Krisis. Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, issue 1, 2011. Benjamin, W. (1966) Briefe 1929-1940. Edited by Th. W. Adorno and G. Scholem. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Benjamin, W. (1974-1989) Gesammelte Schriften (I-VII). Edited by R. Tiedemann en H. Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Benjamin, W. (1993-2003) Selected Writings 1-4. Translated by E. Jephcott et al. Edited by Michael Jennings et al. Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Benjamin, W. (1999) The Arcades Project. Translated by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin. Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
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Boltanski, L. and E. Chiapello (2005) The New Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by G. Elliott. London: Verso.
Rancière, J. ‘Communists without Communism?’ in: C. Douzinas and S. Žižek (eds.) (2010) The Idea of Communism. London: Verso.
Bürger, P. (1974) Theorie der Avantgarde. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Rochlitz, R. (1996) The Disenchantment of Art. The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. New York: The Guilford Press.
De Bruyne, P. and P. Gielen (2011) ‘Introduction: Between the Individual and the Common’, in idem (eds.) Community Art. The Politics of Trespassing. Amsterdam: Valiz.
Tucker, R. C. (ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader (second edition). New York: Norton.
Ernst, M. (1992) ‘What is Surrealism’ in: C. Harrison and P. Wood (eds.) (1992) Art in Theory (1815-1900): An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Malden MA: Blackwell.
Virno, P. (2004) A Grammar of the Multitude. For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Translated by I. Bertoletti, J. Cascaito and A. Casson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Fischbach, F. ‘Marx and Communism’ in: Krisis. Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, issue 1, 2011.
Woodmansee, M. (1994) The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Press.
Groys, B. (2008) Art Power. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Wohlfarth, I. (1978) ‘No-man’s-land. On Walter Benjamin’s “Destructive Character”’, in Diacritics vol. 8 no. 2.
Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2009) Commonwealth. Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Harvey, D. (2005) The New Imperialism (paperback edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heinich, H. (1996) Être Artiste. Les transformations du statut des peintres et des sculpteurs. Paris: Klincksieck. Jameson, F. (1981) The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaka NY: Cornell University Press. Lijster, T. (2010) ‘Een zwakke messiaanse kracht. Nu-tijd en gedenken in Walter Benjamins geschiedfilosofie’ in Krisis. Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, issue 1, 2010. Ramaer, J. (2011) ‘Een klap van eigen handtas. Artistieke vrijheid versus het grote geld’ in: De groene Amsterdammer (25 May 2011). 21
Wohlfarth, I. (2002) ‘Walter Benjamin and the Idea of a Technological Eros. A Tentative Reading of Zum Planetarium’ in: H. Geyer-Ryan, P. Koopman and K. Yntema (eds.) (2002), Benjamin studies I: Perception and Experience in Modernity, 65-110. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi. Žižek, S. (2009a) First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London: Verso. Žižek, S. (2009b) The Parallax View. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License (AttributionNoncommercial 3.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nl/deed.en for more information.
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy
1 The title of the drawing refers, in turn, to the title of the reality show ‘The Simple Life’ starring Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. 2 For my discussion of this case I have drawn on Ramaer (2011) and the artist’s website www.nadiaplessner.com. The full verdict of the court can be read on: www.rechtspraak.nl. 3
For now, film and music industries are the ones most affected by file sharing. As ereaders will grow more popular similar problems are to be expected for the publishing industries. And consider the consequences of file sharing for product design once, in the near future, 3D printers become affordable for individual users. 4
This is not just the case for beginning artists. A famous example is the band Radiohead, who placed their 2007 album In Rainbows on the Internet. 5
See Brett Gaylor’s documentary RiP!: A Remix Manifesto (2008). In this documentary Gaylor discusses, among other things, a U.S. law from 1998 which extends the protection of intellectual property until 75 years after the author’s death, and which was called by its opponents the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, since it prevented free exchange and use of Walt Disney’s earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons. 6
See for instance a poll by CBS News, February 9 2009.
7
Roman numbers refer to the volumes of Benjamin’s Gesammelte Schriften (1974-1989), while references to Benjamin’s Selected Writings (1996-2003) will be abbreviated as SW. 8
For reasons to be explained below, I will refer to the second (1936) edition of the essay.
9
Consequently, one could consider the artwork essay, in Irving Wohlfarth’s words, ‘a historical gamble’ (Wohlfarth 1979, 60). 10
The origin of this distinction in Benjamin’s work can be found in the important last fragment of One-way Street, titled ‘To the Planetarium’: ‘The mastery of nature (so the imperialist teach) is the purpose of all technology. But who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education? Is not
22
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education, above all, the indispensible ordering of the relationship between generations and therefore mastery (if we are to use this term) of that relationship and not of children? And likewise technology is the mastery not of nature but of the relation between nature and man. Men as species completed their development thousands of years ago; but mankind as a species is just beginning his. In technology, a physis is being organized through which mankind’s contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form from that which it had in nations and families’ (SW 1, 487; IV.1, 147). For an elaborate interpretation of this fragment, see Wohlfarth (2002). 11 Considering this, one could even say that Plessner’s artistic technology runs counter to her explicit political commitment. As a ‘technician’ she opposes intellectual property right, but as a committed artist she remains within the modern or romantic image of the artist as a prophet.
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy
JAMES MARTEL ART AND THE FETISH : SEVENTY FIVE YEARS ON
Krisis, 2011, Issue 3 www.krisis.eu
In 1936, Walter Benjamin laid down a challenge to art. In his ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,’ he writes ‘Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art’ (Benjamin 2003a). ‘Politicizing art’ suggests realizing the subversive possibility inherent in art, challenging the way that fascism (and, by extension, capitalism as well) has turned political life itself into a (faux) aesthetic. Such a view harkens to Benjamin’s broader critique of representation, and especially his understanding of the phantasmagoria, the miasmic swirl of misrepresentation and idolatry that comes from commodity fetishism. For Benjamin, the object is both an idol, a perpetuator of the faux reality that we are all occupied with just as it is also potentially a source of resistance to that very same idolatry. The radical potential in art, in his view, lies in this double nature of the object and in our ability to respond to that split in ways that subvert rather than reproduce the commodity fetishism that we otherwise wholly subscribe to. In this essay, I will briefly describe this radical potential in Benjamin’s theory in order to think critically about contemporary art today. To what extent has the promise in Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art’ piece to ‘politicize art’ been realized? How can that potential be further enhanced and with what import for the practice of art and its relationship to contemporary politics? I 23
will be looking specifically at four well established contemporary artists, all of whom have had major shows in the US and Europe in the last few years: Bozidar Brazda, Charles LeDray, Kara Walker and Paul Chan. I will seek to engage with Benjamin’s seventy-five year old essay to evaluate and consider the radical potential of these artists’ work and to think further about what ‘politicizing art’ might mean in the contemporary moment.
Politicizing art Benjamin’s view of art comes out of the wider context of his political philosophy and theology. Although the ‘Work of Art’ essay is not explicitly about fetishism, an understanding of Benjamin’s understanding of the subject helps to explain both the ‘Work of Art’ essay itself and the larger implications of Benjamin’s political agenda. For Benjamin, the phenomenon of fascism was a result of the ever-growing power of commodity fetishism, which might also be called political idolatry. Here, representation of the object, captured as it is by a capitalist logic, turns even the objective world into a projection of capitalist phantasm so that the most foundational elements of our reality become the basis for furthering capitalism. This process culminates, for Benjamin, in the way that fascism ‘aestheticizes politics’ i.e renders politics itself into a kind of aesthetic structure that is dictated by fetishism. Whereas, from a more orthodox Marxist interpretation, commodity fetishism is largely associated with the industrial revolution and capitalist forms of production, for Benjamin, the roots of such fetishism are laid much earlier and are explained via his political theology, (although Benjamin would agree that the most virulent form of fetishism comes with the advent of the commodity). In the Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin lays out a genealogy of the object beginning with the time before the fall wherein Adam exists in a non-representative relationship with the objects of the world. In paradise, Benjamin tells us, Adam doesn’t try to control or determine the objects before him. Instead he merely names them. Once the fall has occurred however, human beings are condemned to representation, an attempt, however fallible, to reproduce the
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy kind of truth and objectivity that was to be found in paradise itself. Critically, for Benjamin in our postlapsarian world, we do not have the choice between representation and truth; we are forced to resort to representation. In his view, an anti-fetishist is distinguished from a fetishist not by her superior relationship to truth but rather by her recognition of its absence. Only the fetishist believes in the possibility of successful representation; the anti-fetishist recognizes representation as a ruin, a broken remnant of a truth that is no longer available to humanity. Here once again, Benjamin is distinguished from more conventional Marxists. For them, the fetishization of commodities can be lifted off to reveal an objective reality. Benjamin, however, holds that reality itself reflects the loss of truth. Rather than seeking truth, we can only seek the disruption or subversion of fetishism. For Benjamin we have a crucial ally in our attempt to avoid fetishism: the object itself. In his writings on Franz Kafka, for example, Benjamin appreciates the way that Kafka accurately portrays the failure of representation. He writes in a letter to Gershom Scholem that: ‘To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure’(Benjamin, 1968a: 144-145). For Benjamin, Kafka resists the lure of the object, the seductions of representation, by expressly and legibly failing to communicate the ‘truth’ it would otherwise seem to convey (Benjamin also writes in an earlier essay on Kafka that ‘No other writer has obeyed the commandment ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image’ so faithfully’ (1968a, 129)). For Benjamin, Kafka epitomizes the fact that even as the objects that constitute fetishism are busily forming the phantasmagoria, they are also undermining it. He writes to Scholem that Kafka’s parables: ‘do not modestly lie at the feet of the doctrine, as the Haggadah lies at the feet of the Halakah. Though apparently reduced to submission, they unexpectedly raise a mighty paw against it.’ (Benjamin 1968a, 144) Here we see that objects can and do rebel against the fetishism they convey. Whereas the Haggadah (the representation of the divine law) is ex24
James Martel – Art and the fetish: seventy five years on pected to merely and meekly convey the truth of that law (Halakah), Kafka’s parables rebel against this requirement in ways that are ‘unexpected’ even, perhaps to the author, Kafka himself. By putting himself in alignment with the way that objects distort or refuse the fetishism that we would put on them, Kafka has turned to art as a way to distort the fetishism that his own stories would otherwise produce. This is where the possibility for art more generally comes into the picture. For Benjamin, Kafka models a relationship to the object wherein the object’s own inherent resistance to fetishism is evoked and turned into a weapon, a ‘mighty paw’ of resistance. Herein lies yet another difference with find with Benjamin, not only with orthodox Marxists but even with key figures from the Frankfurt School such as Adorno. Whereas for Adorno theory, and in particular dialectical theory, alone has the ability to realize the radical potential in art, for Benjamin, by contrast, the radical potential in the object can only be realized by and through the object itself.1 If we return briefly to the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin tells us that the audience or viewer of art (and, by extension, of everything else as well) is ‘distracted’ (2003a: 268). Distraction – the effect of living in the phantasmagoria where our attention is always diverted and preoccupied – is the basic stance of our time. Benjamin’s strategy here is to use the art object’s own seductive qualities to fight one kind of distraction with another. He goes on to say: ‘The sort of distraction that is provided by art represents a covert measure of the extent to which it has become possible to perform new tasks of apperception’ (Idem.). These ‘new tasks of apperception’ are the training ground (especially in film, he states) for distracting the distracted more generally, engaging with the objects (i.e. the commodities) of the world to overcome the commodity fetishism they evoke in us. Here, we are left with a set of ideas that can be applied to an analysis of contemporary art.2 First and foremost, we see that for Benjamin representation cannot be avoided. We must be as suspicious of claims to be able to throw off idolatry and fetishism as we are of the fetish itself. Any claim to
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy be ‘true’ or ‘real’ or ‘post-fetish’ are instantly suspect (as I will argue further, even an ‘ironic’ or ‘savvy’ stance in which we know the fetish for what it is, is not sufficient to disrupt the power that the fetish has over us). At the same time we see that the purpose of representation (in keeping with Benjamin’s analysis of Kafka) is not to succeed in conveying the significance of the object to the viewer but rather to distort, subvert or undermine that conveyance (in coordination with the object’s own inherent tendency to interfere with the representational process). Thus the challenge of ‘politicizing art’ involves enhancing the power of the object to interfere with representation, to visibly fail to represent (and, in that way, avoid becoming just another fetish). Finally, Benjamin teaches us to be more suspicious of theory and the intention of the intellectual than other theorists (Adorno very much included) would allow. It is not for the artist to ‘free’ us from fetishism but rather that the artist should strive, like Kafka, to enable the object to demonstrate its own freedom from the fetishism that we project onto it. Applying Benjamin’s ideas about fetishism to modern artwork comes up against several problems. First of all, virtually all art is, in some form or other, a commodity. How can a commodity itself be the source of resistance to commodification? For Benjamin the fact that someone or something is compromised by capitalism does not instantly condemn them in his eyes. In fact, for Benjamin, the more someone or thing is ensconced in the phantasmagoria the more it is able to do maximal damage to the phantasm from within. His appreciation, for example, of Charles Baudelaire arose in part because Baudelaire was so much a creature of his time, a stooge as much a resistor of the development of the phantasmagoria. Like all other commodities, the commodities that are works of art have the capacity to rebel against the fetishism we project onto them (perhaps they are especially suited for this possibility, in fact). Another question we might raise is how could an essay on art that is seventy- five years old (and which, in some ways, can seem quite dated) have anything to say about an art scene that Benjamin could not possibly have imagined? Here too, however, the apparent problem turns out to be an asset; for Benjamin juxtaposing two eras in time breaks both moments out of their own self-regard, their own sense of reality and conviction. 25
James Martel – Art and the fetish: seventy five years on A final caveat is in order before proceeding to an examination of contemporary artwork. All the artwork being examined in what follows – whether it has realized a radical potential or not – has already come and gone and yet still we live under conditions of commodity fetishism. We must be careful not to ask too much of the artwork, to lay the entire burden of politics on this one sphere of human life. But in learning from Benjamin how to discern revolutionary potential in the object through the study of art, we can see how to enhance resistance more generally, to see in the art object a model for how to resist and upend the faux reality of the phantasmagoria more generally. So, we should not condemn a work of art just because it has not led us to revolution, just as we should not refrain from praising or admiring a work of art just because it seems so obviously redolent of the phantasm that art is meant to upset.
Contemporary art: Can you eat the fetish? Let me begin to look at contemporary art proper by noting that even a piece of art that seems to point to its own fetishization does not necessarily serve an anti-fetishistic agenda, (to be fair it doesn’t necessarily serve a fetishist agenda either). As Wendy Brown points out in ‘Politics out of History’ we can recognize that something is a fetish and still engage in fetishism (she cites Freud’s patient who says ‘I know, [it’s just a fetish] but still…’) (Brown 2001: 4). A large category of artwork could fall into this category of art that points to, but does not necessarily overcome, its own fetishism. For example, Bozidar Brazda makes artwork wherein ordinary objects are highlighted as such, often by putting them into strange and sometimes literally fetishistic context. One of his pieces, entitled ‘Eat Fetish’, features a table that is hung from the ceiling by chains.3 The table is trussed up like something from a leather scene, somewhat literalizing the question of fetishism (and, of course, the title ‘Eat Fetish’ leaves no mystery that fetishism is part of the question being put to this object). The table is completely ordinary and unremarkable, but hung as it is upside down, suspended by chains, the viewer is drawn to it in a way that denies or subverts its ordinariness.
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy On one level, this art may succeed in a sense in calling into question our certainty over the nature and use of objects. What is a table when it’s hanging upside down? Why is the table chained up like that? How can we eat (a fetish) when the table is upside down?
James Martel – Art and the fetish: seventy five years on bility of the object ‘raising a mighty paw’ against whatever fetishism it promotes (even a kind of self-aware fetishism). Another piece by Brazda that similarly evokes the question of fetishism is entitled ‘Idle Idol.’4 Here, we see a Television (the Idol) painted bright orange (with car paint). Here too the object is trussed up, this time by rope and the rope is suspended from a big metal handle on the wall (which also resembles a giant switch). The TV in this case is ‘idle’ because it is not turned on, but its fetishistic power, the piece suggests, is not completely erased (once again the title markedly brings our attention to such questions). Here the question of the use of the object, its status as a commodity, again seems called into question (why is the TV hanging from the wall? Why is it trussed up? What power does it still have when it is turned off or ‘idle’?). Yet the power of the object does not seem to come qua object but rather from its relationship to human perception. The object seems very much a tool, a thing that we humans have the power to turn off and turn on. The work’s power then does not lie in itself but in what it conveys, that is, what it represents (or appears to represent). Such a stance assumes that there is a truth that is to be represented, something that we can and should be able to figure out.
At the same time however, we can see that it is not necessarily the case that such questions in any way suggest the failure of representation (i.e. the politicization of art). We continue to expect answers to our questions. Surely there is a reason that the artist chained up the table. Surely the intriguing title ‘Eat Fetish’ means something, has some secret to impart. From a strictly Benjaminian perspective we can say that this artwork prominently features the will and the intention of the artist over and above the object’s own failure to mean something. We ask: what is the artist trying to say? Here the human dimension, the creativity of the artist and the question of human interpretation may be said to defeat the possibility 26
We see here, perhaps, the limits of turning to visuality as a way to challenge or undermine our own fetishism. In the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin writes ‘For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at historical turning points cannot be performed solely by optical means – that is, by way of contemplation. They are mastered gradually – taking their cue from tactile reception – through habit.’ (Benjamin 2003a, 268, italics original) In other words, seeing the fetish as a fetish (if that is indeed what is achieved by Brazda’s art) does not in and of itself relieve us of our own fetishism. We need a change in our habits of apperception, one that is triggered, I would argue, not by the ‘exposure’ of fetishism (including titles that knock us over the head with their fetishistic nature) but rather by introducing an element of apperception that does not merely continue our distraction (so that we can see almost literally anything and not be in any way affected by it).
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy
James Martel – Art and the fetish: seventy five years on actually challenging the fetish qua fetish itself. Such a view suggests a ‘savvy’ position from which it is possible to be ‘in the know’ about fetishism, but from Benjamin’s perspective there is no position outside of representation or fetishim; we can only fight and subvert it from within. Thus we have no privileged perch from which to mock or depict the ‘false consciousness’ of the fetishist, no ironic stance from which to deconstruct and escape it. Another artist who may be similar in some ways to Brazda is Charles LeDray. LeDray’s use of imagery and his relationship to the object is perhaps more subtle than Brazda. Here, we are not overtly reminded of the fact of fetishism. LeDray’s art juxtaposes many objects together (objects that he constructs himself) which, in their juxtaposition and in their display, seem to potentially overcome their ordinariness, perhaps piercing our distraction as well. For example, LeDray has a piece called ‘Flip Flops’ (2006) in which a bunch of flipflops (or what appears to be flipflops) are hung from a cord off the wall.5 Here too, the viewer is invited to ask questions about the value and meaning of the object in question: Why are these flipflops here? Why so many? What use are they hanging from the wall?
In making this point I am thinking of a trend that one sees in contemporary popular Hollywood movies wherein an ironic and inside-joke-like tone is adopted about product placement. For an (admittedly dated) example, in one of the ‘Austin Powers’ franchise, one of the headquarters of Dr. Evil (played by Mike Myers who also played Austin Powers) was the Seattle space needle that now had a giant Starbucks sign on it. Inside, there was a Starbucks café and everyone was drinking coffee. The joke is supposedly on the filmmaking industry. Look how bought-into commercialism it is! But in fact the joke is still on us, the viewers. This joke ‘at the expense’ of product placement makes the act of product placement all the more memorable. When we see the movie, we remember to buy Starbucks coffee afterwards. I say this not to argue that Brazda does anything like this but only to show the limitations of a reading of art which relies exclusively on leading our attention to the question of fetishism without 27
A much earlier piece ‘workworkworkworkwork’ (1991) reproduced the kind of spontaneous sidewalk flea markets that one used to often see on Astor Place in New York City, a public space now gentrified to the point where such events no longer (or rarely) take place.6 This piece reproduces the kind of items that were on display, including the sweaters and coats that were spread out under them as part of the ad hoc flea market. The miniaturized art objects were also laid out on the sidewalks of Astor Place thus producing a duplicate market, a miniature version of the more humble side of the commodities market. Both of these pieces by LeDray suggest a way to become more aware of the object as such, to see it out of context (or even, in the case of ‘workworkworkworkwork’, in its same context albeit in a different form). I’d suggest that LeDray’s work may bring us a bit closer to Benjamin’s model than Brazda’s if only because of its subtlety. In this case, the objects are allowed to speak a bit more for themselves (even though they are objects that the
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy artist himself has created). Yet, here too, I would argue that we may discover the allure of the object, see it as a fetish, without having that fetishism finally altered or undermined. We still seem to be striving to represent, to communicate something, and so the failure of the fetish does not become paramount, only its existence.
Fighting fetish with fetish There are some artists who, in my view, may better advance the Benjaminian project than those already discussed insofar as they help make it clearer what allowing the object to subvert its own fetishism might look like. Two artists in particular, Kara Walker and Paul Chan, may help in this regard. Kara Walker is well known for her outlandish silhouettes that transform a traditional southern (US) artform and turn it on its head.7 The silhouettes are shown engaged in intense pornographic and scatological activities. The idea of a happy slave society, the nostalgic evocation of an era that is implicit in the genre of silhouette that Walker adopts, is revealed to be a scene of intense violence and sexual exploitation. In some ways, it appears as if Walker is engaging with simple stereotypes; the idea of hypersexualized African Americans, the violence of Southern life, all seem to be portrayed here. Yet, as the Lacanian philosopher Joan Copjec writes of her art: ‘Kara Walker’s silhouettes are filled with figures violently merging with and protruding from each other. They swallow and secrete, tear at and torture each other. It is as if they represented not just a number of different figures battling among themselves, but a parasitized body joyously trying to free itself from its slavery to itself. For this reason it is precisely wrong to criticize them as a recycling of stereotypes. They are on the contrary an erotic disassembling of them, a mad and vital tussle to break away from their stale scent and heavy burden. Allowing her work to be haunted by the traumatic event of the antebellum past, that is, by an event that neither she nor any other black American ever lived but that is 28
James Martel – Art and the fetish: seventy five years on repeatedly encountered in the uncanny moment, she opens the possibility of conceiving racial identity as repeated self-difference.’ (Copjec 2004: 107) If we consider Copjec’s understanding in terms of our inquiry regarding Benjamin, we can see that in some ways Walker’s art allows the object (in this case the stereotypical object) to supersede itself, rather than merely succumb to the phantasms that we project onto the object, that is, our own relationship to the fetish, Walker turns that fetish on its head. We could even say that Walker can be read as fighting the fetish with a fetish – oversaturating it with its own fetishization so that the whole system overloads into a ‘disassembling’. (If this is the case, it is analogous to Benjamin’s suggestion to fight the distraction of the contemporary viewer with a further, and subversive, distraction). In this way, Walker does not deny or ignore the violent and racist past (and present) of the American South (Copjec writes of her work that ‘History flows through these figures but it does not contain them.’).8 Nor does she point to some utopian future that can be free of such representational forms. Instead she employs the tropes, figures and forms of that place as a way to disrupt and disassemble the sense of the inevitability of such arrangements, the ‘truth’ of what those forms convey. To make this argument is not to claim that Walker somehow avoids the framework of representation in a way that Brazda and LeDray do not. Her silhouettes clearly inhabit a representational discourse. In fact, in their lack of color or internal content, Walker’s works point to a kind of pith of representation. But in her hands representation is both noted (as it is with the other artists) and resisted (as it is not). The failure of representation is, in a sense, rendered legible in Walker’s work not by turning away from such forms (once again implying that there is a position that is free from representation or fetishization) but rather by turning deeper into the fetish. As already noted, she fights the fire of fetishism with the fire of representation itself – turning the materiality of representation (‘a mighty paw’) into a weapon against the fetishism it would otherwise foment in us.
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy A very different artist, Paul Chan, may be said to achieve a similar result in an entirely different way. One of his works, a series entitled ‘The 7 Lights’, engages with shadow and light (not unlike Walker’s silhouette’s in that one sense).9 Using old computer technology, images from Greek myth, and Baroque painting, Chan evokes many moods and responses in his work. No actual objects are visible. Instead, shadows are produced by strong lights which change colors and force over the course of the day, revealing and submerging images as it goes along.10 What is critical to note for our own purposes is that the objects themselves are not available. This is a fetishism with no apparent fetish; once again it evokes the pure pith of representation, the merest promise of a form. Thus all of our responses, emotional or otherwise, to what we see before us is purely spectral, purely phantasmatic. Here, the materiality of the object has itself been withheld, both exposing and denying our longing for answers and certainties in the process. In this case, as with Walker’s art, I would say that Chan has engaged with the fetish by going deeper into it, by really giving us a vision of what fetishism is, how it works, what needs and fantasies it evokes in us. Whatever our response to it, Chan suggests the unreality, the shiftingness, and ultimately, again, the failure of the fetish. By rendering our relationship to commmodification so dreamlike, so phantasmic, Chan reveals more the fact of phantasm itself than the promise of a successful ‘truth’, a fetish that is at once exposed and undermined. These two artists are certainly not unique, but with them it becomes possible to better see how the object’s own rebellion against fetishism can be enhanced, rendered legible by art. For Benjamin art is a kind of training ground, a way to distract the distracted, to fight the fire of fetishism with more fetishism in a way that is self-cancelling. In this respect these works point a way (I wouldn’t say the way) towards both a rethinking of what art can do for us and what it cannot.11
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James Martel – Art and the fetish: seventy five years on Conclusion At this point it should once again be stressed that no piece of art (at least none I’ve ever heard of) has had the power to disrupt capitalism or bring an end to the phantasmagoria. We shouldn’t oversell the power of art to resist the fetish, but it seems just as clear that art can play its part – and a crucial part – in resistance and in producing what Benjamin refers to as ‘new tasks of apperception.’ To politicize art is a step in the right direction, a way to resist the manner in that fascism (and, after fascism, yet more capitalism in its liberal variant) has turned politics itself into a kind aesthetic form where groups and masses become themselves mere objects meant to be displayed in pleasing and symmetrical styles. Looking at the question of art via Benjamin’s attention to the fetish helps us to better understand what he might have meant by his call to politicize art. It means to engage art itself in the task of combating the miasma of misrepresentation that constitutes the phantasmagoria. It also gives us a discerning mechanism by which to make judgments about individual art pieces. I do not engage with such a mechanism in order to condemn one artist and praise another (personally, I like all of these artists’ work very much) but rather to show how a critique is possible that is based on a relationship to fetishism and our connection to the object. It is true that by its nature, art tends to take an object, and via the very fact that it has put the object on display, render it something other than itself. Yet, as we have seen, this in and of itself does not lessen the allure of the fetish; we can know we are seeing a fetish and still be drawn by its insistence on being true or representative. What Benjamin offers us then is a language of critique that can be of service to us in thinking further about the politics of art, its possibility of resistance and the ways that even (or, for Benjamin, especially) artistic commodities can be employed in fighting the effects of commodity fetishism. For all of these reasons, I find that Benjamin’s essay on the Work of Art, despite being 75 years old, is as relevant as it ever was. More accurately, it is Benjamin himself in his ‘On the Concept of History’ who shows us that moments in the past will always be relevant insofar as they can serve to subvert and undermine the certainties (and hence, fetishism) of our own time. Benjamin tells us that two moments can be connected ‘through events that may be separated […] by thousands of
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy years’ (Benjamin 2003b: 397). In light of this, the seventy-five years that have passed since Benjamin wrote his essay vanish and are no barrier at all.
James Martel teaches political theory in the department of political science at San Francisco State University in San Francisco, CA., USA. He is the author of four books: Love is a Sweet Chain: Desire, Autonomy and Friendship in Liberal Political Theory (Routledge, 2001); Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat (Columbia, 2007); Textual Conspiracies: Walter Benjamin, Idolatry and Political Theory (Michigan, 2011); Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin and the Eschatology of Sovereignty (Routledge/GlassHouse, 2011). His work concentrates on the question of representation in its political, theological and linguistic senses.
Literature Adorno, Th.W. and W. Benjamin (1999) The Complete Correspondence 1928-1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, W. (1968a) ‘Some Reflections on Kafka’, Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books. Benjamin, W. (1968b) Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books. Benjamin. W. (2003a) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (Third Version), in H. Eiland, M.W. Jennings (eds.) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol. 4, 1938-1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (Belknap). Benjamin, W. (2003b) ‘On the Concept of History’, in: H. Eiland, M.W. Jennings (eds.) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938-1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 30
James Martel – Art and the fetish: seventy five years on Brown, W. (2001) Politics Out of History. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press. Buchloh, B.H.D. (1982) ‘Allegorical Procedures; Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art’, Artforum September, 43-56. Copjec, J. (2004) Imagine There’s No Woman. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press. Eiland, H. and M.W. Jennings (eds.) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol. 4, 1938-1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (Belknap). Foster, H. (ed.) (2002) The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. New York: New Press. Owens, C. (1980) ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism Part 2’, October 13, 58-80. Ulmer, G. (2002) ‘The Object of Post-Criticism’, in H. Foster (ed.) The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. New York: New Press.
Image sources: http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/bozidar_brazda.htm Bozidar Brazda http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/CharlesLeDray/Images Charles LeDray http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/KaraWalker Kara Walker http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/20 Paul Chan
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License (AttributionNoncommercial 3.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nl/deed.en for more information.
1
Adorno writes to Benjamin (on March 18, 1936) that the effects he sees in the work of art which in fact can only be ‘accomplish[ed] through the theory introduced by intellectuals as dialectical subjects’ (Adorno and Benjamin 1999: 129). Of course, Benjamin too is engaging in theory on some level but his theory is devoted to getting out of its own way by allowing the object to speak, as it were, for itself. 2 It should be noted that there has been a significant school of Benjamin-influenced art critics who have taken his notion of fetishism – as well as his notion of the role of allegory in fighting such fetishism – seriously. See Foster 2002, including Ulmer’s essay; Owens 1980; Buchloh 1982. 3
Image courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery, London, © Bozidar Brazda.
4
Image courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery, London, © Bozidar Brazda.
5
See http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/CharlesLeDray/Images.
6
See http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/CharlesLeDray/Images.
7
See http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/KaraWalker.
8 Copjec 2004, 107. This understanding of time is, I would argue, very consistent with the understanding of time and narrative that Benjamin himself evokes in his ‘On the Concept of History’. For Benjamin, time itself is not a linear progression but a series of events that can be made contiguous and mutually influential by juxtaposing them side by side. By having the racist past evoked as she does, Walker engages with a racist present as well; she has one moment in time interfere with the fetishes and notions of another in the same way that Benjamin does in his own work. 9
See http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/20.
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James Martel – Art and the fetish: seventy five years on
10 For bringing Paul Chan to my attention, and also noting that in his case the absence of an actual object is critical, I am indebted to Tina Takemoto. 11 This question of the possibility of art to resist fetishism also raises the question of the role of art institutions in doing so, especially in light of Benjamin’s own interest in such institutions. While this question goes beyond the purview of this paper, I would still say that it is by no means a sure thing that an art institution, by virtue of its engagement with commercial interests and the need to support itself financially, is condemned to fetishism. One of Benjamin’s greatest insights is that commodity fetishism is best fought (as his work on Charles Baudelaire suggests) from deep within the maw of the phantasmagoria. No actor or institution is thus lost from the ability to fight fetishism and, when it is dealt a blow from the center of the commercial phantasms that sustain it, fetishism suffers all the more.
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy
ISABELL LOREY AND GERALD RAUNIG MATRIX EXAMINATRIX DISPERSION AND CONCENTRATION
Krisis, 2011, Issue 3 www.krisis.eu
‘Die Masse ist eine matrix […] Das Publikum ist ein Examinator, doch ein zerstreuter.’ – Walter Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner Reproduzierbarkeit’, XV
‘The mass is a matrix’ That’s how Benjamin starts the last chapter of his artwork essay. Before becoming the title of a blockbuster movie, a ‘matrix’ was an electric apparatus for automatically steering the flows of cinema. But of course, matrix also means the place where something is born, the mutant organ that gives birth. According to Benjamin, the quantity which is inherent in masses (not only as art or cinema audiences) has the potential for the transmutation into quality. With the introduction of mechanical reproduction, in Benjamin’s words, ‘the greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation’. In the framework of Benjamin’s attempt to generally carve out ‘some fundamental aspects of a new materialist art theory’ (SW I, 984), the central concept for this changed mode of participation is Zerstreuung. Yet, ‘Zerstreuung’ is an ambiguous term. It refers to the absence, the dispersion, the distractedness of minds, in contrast to ‘Sammlung’, ‘Versenkung’, ‘Konzentration’. On this level, Benjamin does not at all follow 32
Adorno’s attack on ‘de-concentration’ in the cultural industry, who in his critique of the artwork essay wrote to Benjamin: ‘The laughter of the cinema audience is […] full of the worst bourgeois sadism; the expertise of newspaper boys discussing sports appears highly dubious to me; I do not find the theory of “Zerstreuung” convincing, despite its seductiveness.’ (SW I, 1003f.). On the contrary, Benjamin puts hope in a new and emancipatory mode of reception in dispersion: ‘A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it […]. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art.’ We need to break through the opposite relations of concentration versus dispersion, of high culture versus culture for the masses, of attention versus enjoyment, and understand dispersion as something other than the negation of concentration, as something other than the destruction and dissolution of concentration as assembly – so that Benjamin’s emancipatory dimensions of dispersion can unfold and concatenate with the (process of) assembling. Going beyond the customarily dichotomous relation, dispersion and concentration condense into an assemblage of two foldings: there is an intensification, a densification in dispersion, which does not necessarily consist in concentration or contemplation. And there is a dispersion, a multiplication in assembling, which does not consist in unification. ‘The public is an examiner’, aber ein zerstreuter, an absent-minded one, a distracted and dispersed one, this is how Benjamin ends one of the versions of his last chapter of the artwork essay. The public inspects and researches, it is no longer in the passive position of spectators or on-lookers of an artistic or political representation. In dispersion, the public becomes publicum, it constitutes a new publicness of distracted participants and is part of the event. At the same time, with their participation the many change not only their part, but the mode of participation, the distribution and the composition of the public. With participation as recomposition of the many a kind of attention arises that does not correspond to the bourgeois concentration in front of a work of art or a political speaker. The participatory attention of the many is a presentist one, it is real and medial at the same time.
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy Benjamin associates the artistic transformation with radical politics, the dissolution of the artistic aura with the revolutionary possibilities which arise with the new art that has become mechanically reproducible. It is able to ‘mobilize masses’, inasmuch as these masses take on a new quality, becoming distracted masses, non-conforming masses in twofold perspective: Outwardly, this mass disagrees, is disobedient in terms of how it is governed. Yet it is most notably the composition of the mass itself that sets it apart from, for instance, the Canettian criteria of a stagnating, dense or agitated mass. Non-conformity here means the refusal of identitarian and striating structures, the dismissal of con-formity in the sense of a harmonization of its parts. Above all, a dispersed mass is non-conforming in that it conceptualizes composition as a concatenation of singularities.
The Impossibility of Assembling the Dispersed Masses It is an ancient fear of the elites that the masses are set in motion, that actions come into being along with desires and ways of life that can no longer be controlled, no longer subdued, no longer governed. And it is an ancient discursive pattern to ridicule the moving of masses as populist seduction, to stress their ignorant laughter and to infantilize them by only observing the (‘newspaper’)boys, in order to ultimately discredit them as negligible and apolitical. However, the threat of mobilized masses persists, the fear of an insurrection that challenges and breaches the established order. How the masses are mobilized for governmental participation, and precisely not for insurrection, that is the pivotal question of democracy. Since the 18th century, discourses about the rule of the demos have been permeated by a recurrent topos: one of the relation between crowd and assembly. In western political philosophy, the practice known from Greek as well as Roman antiquity is regarded as the ideal practice of selfgovernment: all free citizens of a city or an empire – the so-called demos or populus – gather in the market square, debate and decide on common concerns. But when an actualization of this civil form of government was debated in 18th century, doubts about the practicability of a ‘direct’ or ‘ab33
Isabell Lorey and Gerald Raunig – Matrix examinatrix solute’ democracy concerning larger state structures predominated. Because of its numerical quantity, the populace was deemed not to be able to assemble anymore, and thus no longer to have the ability to immediately govern itself. The citizen was in danger of disappearing in the crowd, not only in a mass of his peers, but in the much larger quantity of those who did not even count when it came to the assembly: the women, the poor and foreigners. There were fierce arguments about whether the demos of patres familias was able to or had to convene firsthand in the 18th century for political decisions in a large state like France or a far larger one like the USA. The advocates of one side of the debate – among them Locke, Montesquieu, and not least of all Madison – argued that the citizens had to have themselves be represented by parliament and delegates. In order to oppose the danger of a tyranny of the masses yet still stand up for a plurality of interests, representative democracy was considered by James Madison to be the only form of popular rule possible, de facto the government of the minority over the majority, of the property owners over the less wealthy and the poor. The federalist founding fathers of the USA saw the stability of the polity threatened by a radically democratic participation of the masses; democratic passions were not supposed to define political day-today business immediately and unguidedly.1 Here the masses are considered as too dispersed for modern democracy on two accounts: They are dispersed because too many of them are distributed over a territory to make an assembly seem possible. Because of this dispersion they are denied direct participation in the distribution of space. On the other hand, the masses are assessed as being too emotional. It is alleged that they can only exert democratic practices as a sentiment, as a passion, as an emotional distraction; they lack contemplation and containment. For the advocates of representative democracy the comprehensive participation of the people harbors the danger of affect and insurrection. Their dispersion has to be subdued by representation. In absolutist times, Hobbes had already worded the fear that a dispersed, ungovernable multitude that cannot be unified by the representation of the Leviathan under his indivisible sovereignty through obedience gives
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy rise to turmoil in the body politic, makes it sick and can even destroy it. ‘Concord, health; sedition, sickness; and civil war, death’ (Hobbes 1966[1651]: 5). However, it is not just the non-unified dispersed who present a threat to sovereignty in the eyes of the first modern state theorist, but also their uncontrolled assemblies, which are always suspected of conspiring against the representation. Hobbes cautions against the irregular political motions of the multitude: ‘Irregular systems, in their nature but leagues, or sometimes mere concourse of people without union to any particular design, not by obligation of one to another, but proceeding only from a similitude of wills and inclinations’ (Hobbes 1966: 181) Nonrepresentationist assemblies of the many jeopardize sovereignty. Even so, in 18th century an equally notable protagonist of modern state theory vehemently argued against the necessity of political representation in regards to the taming of the demos, and explicitly against the reasoning of unconvenable, dispersed citizen masses. In his Contrat Social, JeanJacques Rousseau felt compelled to phrase an unequivocal contradiction. Rousseau’s key argument is that size does not play a part in the feasibility of an assembly. Refuting his contemporary critics, Rousseau refers to the Roman republic where, in spite of its size in numbers, assembling the ‘people of Rome’ succeeded frequently and periodically (Rousseau 1762: III 12). To him, the physical presence of the entire citizenry constitutes the foundation of legislative power. Rousseau writes, ‘The Sovereign cannot act save when the people is assembled’ (Rousseau 1762: III 12). Also: ‘Sovereignty [...] cannot be represented’ (Rousseau 1762: III 15), because the sole sovereign is the mutual will of the ‘people’ (la volonté générale). No elected government, no delegates and no public servants can act in place of the assembled. But as soon as the multitude gathers, it has to become a unified political body, a volonté générale of legislative power. ‘As soon as this multitude is so united in one body, it is impossible to offend against one of the members without attacking the body, and still more to offend against the body without the members resenting it’ (Rousseau 1762: I 7). No longer dispersed, the multitude is unified in the popular assembly as a sovereignty, and is, in self-empowerment, forced to obedience (Rousseau 1762: III 13). As is known, the Rousseauian criticism of representation did not achieve a hegemonial position, on the contrary: the triumph of democracy in ‘the West’ was based substantially on its interconnection with 34
Isabell Lorey and Gerald Raunig – Matrix examinatrix political representation. In democracy theory up to the present, the factual dispersion of the masses constitutes the negative foil and basis for the legitimacy of representative democracy. Forms of protest are, as collective democratic practices of participation and self-organization beyond elections, hardly appreciated; only representative democracy is valid as a normative, normalized and positively connoted mode of democracy. Positions are still taken today that participatory aspects even burden the democracy of mass societies, actual participation is discredited as ‘“bad” normality’ (Kreisky and Löffler 2010: 94). Therefore in Europe, the demos is not structurally excluded, but it is currently ruled in a neoliberal-governmental nexus of social insecurity and free market and finance economies.
Non-representationist Practices of the Masses of the Precarious ‘They do not represent us’ (‘No nos representan’) is one of the slogans that could be heard in the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, and read on banners in May and June of this year. Those who do not represent, meant not only the elected social-democratic government, but also the oppositional conservative party. Both parties and government were denied the capability of representation. Similar attacks on elected and electable democratic representatives could also be heard and seen in Greece and Portugal. These movements of the precarious, called the ‘outraged’ from Spain to Greece after the best-seller by Stéphane Hessel, relate to the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and concatenate again and again with the slogan ‘Real Democracy now’.2 Democracy yes, representation no – that is nothing new, it could be objected; once again it is a matter of the traditional contrast between representative democracy on the one side and grassroots or direct democracy on the other. But there is more to it: it is a matter of collective political practices, which in 2011 are testing forms of non-representationist democracy in the Europe of representative democracy to an unusually great extent. Non-representationist practices are not a wholly new invention,
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy they have historical genealogies, not only in anarchism, but also in the Zapatist movement of the 1990s, and the anti-globalization and EuroMayDay movement of the 2000s. Yet the current protests of the precarious go far beyond the leftist social-critical spectrum. And what was already becoming evident in the EuroMayDay movement is that it is not by chance that the precarious of postfordism reject political representation. The precarious cannot be unified or represented, their interests are disparate, classical forms of corporatist organization prove ineffective. These scores of the precarious are dispersed across production conditions and also by various production methods, which absorb and generate subjectivities, expand their economic exploitation, multiply identities and workplaces. It is not only work that is precarious and dispersed, but also life. For this very reason, the protesting precarious can not be unified and subdued through representation. They do not make reductionist demands, but fight for fundamental changes in society.
The Assemblies of the Dispersed Since May the dispersed precarious have also been gathering in Europe, as non-conforming masses in the central squares of smaller and bigger cities. These squares no longer signify a location where the male citizens assembled as in the Greek Agora, and they are now far from constituting a materialization of modern – also with a male connotation – public sphere. For the main part, public space is assigned to private commercial use, staged for touristic appropriation. The squares are spaces you cross, yet in which you do not linger. Running counter to this development, for the past several months a concentration has been occurring in dispersion, and a multiplication in assembling, in these very places. It was not the old, limited demos that reoccupied streets and squares, and not one ‘people’ that banded together independently from its representatives. Entirely heterogenous compositions occupied the squares, organised the protest camps and held the assemblies. 35
Isabell Lorey and Gerald Raunig – Matrix examinatrix The protests were open to the dispersed masses, they did not limit themselves to a certain clientele or a collective subject with a necessarily inscribed constructed identity. ‘Our diversity is our strength!’, was one of the slogans at Syntagma Square in June of 2011, at one of the largest protests since the end of the military dictatorship; Greek flags were unwelcome. Everybody was welcome to participate in their singularities. And they gathered from everywhere, people from all parts of the population participated in the protest marches, assemblies and camps. On a European day of action in June the dispersed gathered masses numbered up to a million in Spain. Predominant parts of the population showed solidarity with the movements and acted supportively. ‘Democracy belongs to the people’ is stated in the manifesto of ¡Democracia Real Ya!, ‘which means that government is made of every one of us’.3 No unification is sought, instead the diversity of voices is practiced in assembling. These democracy movements reject the imagined community of a nation, the dividing identities that seek to striate and normalize the dispersed singularities. This becomes most evident in the ‘Manifest Transmaricabollo’ that was adopted by the queer part of the ¡Democracia Real Ya! movement at the assembly Transmaricabollo del Sol in Madrid at the beginning of June.4 In general, in these movements no identitary, closed and exclusive We is to be generated, but a radical openness, accompanied by the invitation to everyone to affiliate and participate in – on the basis of a respectful contact with each other. Precarization also always involves the impossibility of clear identity positions, and in the context of the transnationalization of labor markets, coupled with increasing exploitation, the rejection of homogenizations in relation to gender, sexual preference, ‘race’, culture and nation. In the declaration of the participants of the 15M-Hub Meeting in Barcelona in mid-September of 2011, not only can a solidarization with migrants be found, but migrant living and working conditions are identified as the most distinct example for the privatization of labor rights and the devaluation of productive activities, as the one model of the degradation and denial of social, political and civil rights that will become the prevailing one for the entire working population. The transformation of democratic modes, this is made clear in the declaration, can only proceed through
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy associations and alliances with migrants: ‘We are all migrants. No one is illegal!’5 In their criticism of representative democracy, the movement breaches the established order in which the distribution of space takes place by assigning and revoking rights as well as by means of social positionings through established identities. When the dispersed precarious gather in great numbers as nonconforming masses, the normalized mainstream usually expects their dispersion, being a filthy deformation, to leave behind its marks, also in the very tangible form of a stinking chaos of garbage and excrements. These are the public signs feared by both bourgeois press and government, the non-occurrence of which, again, is highlighted in the media in an annoyed manner. The expectation of scattered garbage implies that these are occupations carried out by those who are not exactly capable of taking responsibility for the common, who act against the norm which in cleanliness attests conformity and governability. In that logic, rebelliousness and lack of concentration manifest themselves in disorder and filth the same way as do disintegration and the ethnically other, those who are not only in danger of dropping out of society and nation, but by tendency also out of the European Union. The expectation of a scattered spread of waste equates to a racist, classicist and depoliticizing distribution of the dominant orderly space. Yet the protests do not comply with this hegemonial distribution of social space. They do not leave trash behind, they evade the expectation of chaos, disorder and filth. At the same time, they introduce a ‘disordered’, reordering order with their camps that thwarts the conventional use of that place. A variety of committees are established, among other things for security, medical assistance, hygiene and publicity work. Public kitchens come into existence, libraries (Barcelona) and even schools (Tel Aviv) – a new sociality on a public square in a process of self-organizing. In Spain, the countrywide protests take shape in dispersed concentrations. During the ¡Democracia Real Ya! movement, at times over sixty Spanish city squares were occupied, and converted to an inclusive public camp sociality. On a daily basis, assemblies of the dispersed precarious take place in them, in which ‘real democracy’ is practiced and intensified. Not as a 36
Isabell Lorey and Gerald Raunig – Matrix examinatrix direct democracy which involves the electorate in government decisions by way of a referendum, but as a self-organized, non-representationist, presentist democracy which transpires in the moment of the assembly. The assembly takes on the dispersed form of an assemblage made up of precarious singularities. In it the dispersed become visible and audible to each other, and the fact that they are many and that they are diverse can be perceived. They multiply and amplify each other in coming together, they become aware of each other in the moment of presentist democracy. And the police reacts and legitimates their operations with foreseeable argumentations of order, security and hygiene. Eviction means cleansing and a demonstration of the re-established control and governability of the public – without comprehending, but perhaps sensing that the practices of presentist democracy are in the process of breaching these logics. To the repressive expulsion of the occupiers of public spaces by the police, to the clearing-out of camps and squares, the gathered dispersed always react by returning and with persistence, to then disperse out to the borough assemblies in further practices of self-organization. The intensification in dispersion and the multiplication in assembling become the crucial components of the non-conforming mass as the presentist mode of democracy. Initially focused on the central square of a city, the paradigmatic space of publicness, the movement soon again disperses into the boroughs and spreads the practices of presentist democracy through decentralized local debates. Barcelona has a long tradition of dispersed assemblies in the parts of the city, they initialized a general strike in autumn of 2010 and now have been reactivated for the democracy movement. However, the current borough assemblies do not revolve around a traditional strike, but rather around the practice of exodus from existing conditions in order to exercise different economies and socialities. The self-organizing people assembled do not want to address the government, their goal is not the takeover of power and not the setup of a new society in another place. The exodus of the assembled precarious ones does not lead into a beyond, but it leads beyond the limits of the public and the private set by the dominant order, out onto the central squares and into innumerable as-
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy semblies. Breaches open in the dispersed concentration of the diffusing and heterogenous precarious ones, in which the setup of a different, solidaric and ‘better society’6 commences. Through the association with local social struggles, the forceful statemandated expulsions in Spain, the eviction of people from flats they no longer can pay the mortgages for, are sought to be prevented nonviolently. Quite a few of the numerous evictions could be averted. The dispersed concertedly face the police expulsions and not only expand the space of publicness, but at the same time the one of the rightfully private. They turn dispersion into a constituent power against eviction and for the right to housing.
Isabell Lorey and Gerald Raunig – Matrix examinatrix mentation on a worldwide scale, and bring together a diversity of positions or inter- and transnational events on individual websites at the same time, create transversal networks and the possibility of pandemic contagion. On occasions like these, new media are more than communication networks and forums of self-representation and counter-public. With the help of live streaming, virtually real participations over great and small distances are made possible.
When Quantity Transmutates into Quality
Yet to label them Internet or Facebook revolutions does not grasp the tendency of the concatenation of medium and event. The protests materialize on the streets, and with that they are nothing entirely different from their materialization on the web. Part of the dispersed virtual masses who concentrate around a becoming event and enter into an exchange with each other are, simultaneously or at another point in time, physically present at the actual assemblies. Infos and live streams of the assemblies are put on the web instantaneously. The widespread exchange via electronic media has, on the one hand, unmistakably contributed to the mobilization of the masses. On the other hand, live streams have expanded the traditional understanding of physical participation. With this of course, the new media have also taken over the classic amplifying function of media, sometimes in the form of a detour because the mass media were not open as a result of censorship and other ways of preclusion. The by far more interesting aspect, however, is in the conjunction of the medial and located components of concentration and dispersion, in the inseparable concatenation of medium and event. Only with this does quantity change into quality: in the day-to-day handling of the multiplication in the assembly, in the trying-out of polyvocal assemblies of the singularities ‘on site’, constantly in exchange with the help of social media tools, but also in the equally day-to-day handling of the concentration in the dispersion, when those parts of a movement who are not ‘on site’ carry out new appropriations in the social media or in other sites.
Benjamin associates the technical reproducibility, as a form of progress, with radical politics and revolutionary possibilities, because it ‘can mobilize masses’. Electronic and new media like social networks and Twitter also play an important role in the mobilization of the dispersed in current democracy movements. They disseminate and distribute infos and docu-
Quality transmutates into quality when, especially with the help of new medial and social modes, the form of organization transmutates as well; when, instead of the dichotomy of concentrated and dispersed mass, a non-conforming mass develops, in which the potentialities of assembling and dispersing are no longer understood as opposites, but actualised in
To defamate the protest of the democracy movements as merely being distribution battles underrates the qualitative change of the participation that the participants generate. In line with this, the ‘right to housing’ is not demanded in the manifesto of the ¡Democarcia Real Ya! movement, but it is emphasized that active measures of support for it are taken.7 The threat to this right was also the immediate cause of the protests in Israel. The resistance against the police evictions from the flats ‘works through our ability to reinvent the social alliance. For it is not the state that can put a stop to the logic of the market, but it is the other stranger who plants himself in front of my building and halts the fateful automatism of eviction. Today for me, for you tomorrow,’ says Amador FernándezSavater, journalist and participant in the Spanish protest movement, in an interview with the Argentinian paper Página/12 (Gago 2011).
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Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy their exchange. This non-conforming mass is indeed a matrix, because it operates as a multiplicity, and because it not only concatenates singularities, but also produces them. Its publicum is no figure of reception, of contemplation, of immersion, but one that stays dispersed in its assembly and carries out intensities and concentrations in dispersion: a publicum in an involved and simultaneously ‘examining posture’, as a non-conforming mass and as a matrix examinatrix. Translated from German by Thomas Taborsky.
Isabell Lorey, political scientist, teaches political theory, social sciences, cultural and gender studies as a visiting professor at the Humboldt University Berlin, the Vienna University and the Basel University. She currently works on the occupy and democracy-movements in Europe and the US. Lorey has published texts on feminist and political theory, and particularly: critiques on intersectionality, critical whiteness studies, political immunization, and precarization of work and life. Latest publications: Her studies on Roman struggles of order, the Plebeian, concepts of community and immunization were published in Figuren des Immunen. Elemente einer politischen Theorie with diaphanes, Zürich 2011. She coedited Inventionen 1. Gemeinsam. Prekär. Potentia. Kon-/Disjunktion. Ereignis. Transversalität. Queere Assemblagen, together with Roberto Nigro and Gerald Raunig, Zürich: diaphanes 2011 (for the English version see the multilingual webjournal transversal ‘Inventions’, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0811). She also co-edited the issue of transversal on the world wide movements of occupation and assemblies in 2011, http://eipcp.net/transversal/1011. In May 2012 her book Die Regierung der Prekären will be published with Turia + Kant in Vienna. Find more here: www.eipcp.net/bio/lorey.
Gerald Raunig is philosopher, works at the Zurich Art University and at the eipcp (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies). He is coeditor of the multilingual webjournal transversal 38
Isabell Lorey and Gerald Raunig – Matrix examinatrix (http://transversal.eipcp.net/) and the Austrian journal for radical democratic cultural politics, Kulturrisse (http://www.igkultur.at/kulturrisse), as well as member of the editorial boards of the edu-factory journal and the Dutch art magazine Open. His books have been published in German, English, Serbian, Spanish, Slovenian and Russian. Recent books in English: Art and Revolution. Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, translated by Aileen Derieg, New York/Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press 2007; Art and Contemporary Critical Practice. Reinventing Institutional Critique, London: Mayflybooks 2009 (Ed., with Gene Ray); A Thousand Machines, translated by Aileen Derieg, New York/Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press 2010; Critique of Creativity, London: Mayflybooks 2011 (Ed., with Gene Ray and Ulf Wuggenig).
References Benjamin, W. (1974-1989) Gesammelte Schriften (I-VII). Edited by R. Tiedemann en H. Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hamilton, A., J. Madison, and J. Jay (2003[1887/1888]) The Federalist Papers, C. Rossiter (ed.), C.R. Kesler (intr. and notes), New York: Signet Classic. Jörke, D. (2011) ‘Demokratie in neuen Räumen. Ein theoriegeschichtlicher Vergleich’, in: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft, 2011(1), 7-19. Hobbes, T (1966[1651]) Leviathan – oder Stoff, Form und Gewalt eines kirchlichen und bürgerlichen Staates. Trans. W. Euchner, ed. and intr. I. Fetscher, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp (http://history.wisc.edu/sommerville/351/HobbesLev.html). Rousseau, J.-J. (1762) The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right, trans. G.D.H. Cole, public domain, URL (consulted Oct. 2011): http://www.constitution.org/jjr/socon.htm: III 12. Kreisky, E. and Löffler, M. (2010) ‘Demokratietheorieentwicklung im Kon-
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy text gesellschaftlicher Paradigmen’, in: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft, 2010(1), 89-104. Gago, V. (2011) ‘Después de la Puerta del Sol’, interview with Amador Fernández-Savater in: Página/12, August 29, 2011, http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/dialogos/21-175561-2011-08-29.html.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License (AttributionNoncommercial 3.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nl/deed.en for more information.
1 See Hamilton, Madison, and Jay (2003[1887/1888]); also see Jörke (2011). 2 The protests in Israel, Chile and the U.S. in turn relate to the ‘indignants’ in Spain and Greece. 3 http://www.democraciarealya.es/manifiesto-comun/manifesto-english/ or: http://spanishrevolutionforoutsiders.blogspot.com/p/democracia-real-yamanifesto.html. 4 Manifiesto del Grupo Transmaricabollo del Movimiento 15M en Madrid, http://madrid.tomalaplaza.net/2011/06/03/manifiesto-del-grupo-transmaricabollo-delmovimiento-15m-en-madrid/. 5 Common Statement of the participants of 15s Hub Meeting, http://bcnhubmeeting.wordpress.com. 6 http://www.democraciarealya.es/manifiesto-comun/manifesto-english/ or: http://spanishrevolutionforoutsiders.blogspot.com/p/democracia-real-yamanifesto.html. 7 http://www.democraciarealya.es/manifiesto-comun/manifesto-english/ or: http://spanishrevolutionforoutsiders.blogspot.com/p/democracia-real-yamanifesto.html.
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Isabell Lorey and Gerald Raunig – Matrix examinatrix
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie
JAAP KOOIJMAN TIEN JAAR NA 9/11: DE ONZICHTBARE VIJAND
Krisis, 2011, Issue 3 www.krisis.eu
Onmiddellijk na de terroristische aanslagen van 11 september 2001 gingen stemmen op dat de wereld voorgoed was veranderd en dat met name het westen zijn onschuld had verloren. 9/11 werd het markeermoment van onze huidige tijd, net zoals JFK (de moord op president John F. Kennedy in 1963) een markeermoment was voor eerdere generaties. Juist doordat miljoenen kijkers 9/11 ‘live’ op televisie meemaakten was het effect zo groot. Volgens Slavoj Žižek was dat ook precies de bedoeling: ‘The “terrorists” themselves did not do it primarily to provoke real material damage, but FOR THE SPECTACULAR EFFECT OF IT’ (Žižek 2002: 11). Zonder het lijden van de ‘echte’ slachtoffers in New York te bagatelliseren kan worden gezegd dat de werkelijke impact van 9/11 deze collectieve ervaring is. Door de televisiebeelden – zowel live als de constante herhaling – waren we allen getuige en zullen we ons altijd herinneren waar we waren op ‘de dag dat de wereld voorgoed veranderde’. In haar boek Precarious lives stelt Judith Butler dat een kritische blik op 9/11 als gebeurtenis wordt bemoeilijkt omdat we persoonlijk getuige zijn geweest. Reflecties op 9/11 beginnen dan ook meestal vanuit ‘a first-person narrative point of view’ (Butler 2004: 4). Vanuit dit persoonlijke perspec40
tief wordt 9/11 al snel gezien als een trauma dat individuele of collectieve genezing behoeft, in plaats van een politiek-terroristische daad die ons dwingt na te denken over de rol van de Verenigde Staten van Amerika en andere westerse natiestaten in de internationale politiek. Ook in Nederland is dit een gangbaar perspectief. In de inleiding van de bundel Stof en as. De neerslag van 11 september in kunst en populaire cultuur beginnen de samenstellers Liedeke Plate en Anneke Smelik met de persoonlijke getuigenis van het hoofdpersonage uit de roman De woordvoerder, geschreven door cabaretier Vincent Bijlo. Vervolgens presenteren zij 9/11 als een trauma dat door middel van kunst en populaire cultuur kan worden verwerkt: ‘Al gebeurde het aan de andere kant van de oceaan, ook voor ons in Europa is 11 september een traumatische gebeurtenis geweest’ (2006: 16). Inmiddels zijn we ruim tien jaar verder. Logischerwijs werd 11 september 2011 een herdenkingsdag waarop niet alleen herinnerd kon worden waar we waren toen ‘het’ gebeurde, maar welke ook een moment bood om te reflecteren op de daadwerkelijke impact van 9/11. Is de wereld voorgoed veranderd? En is 9/11 inderdaad een traumatische ervaring gebleken? Ter voorbereiding op een discussieavond in SPUI25, gehouden op 12 september 2011, hebben we deze vragen gesteld. Een belangrijke ‘erfenis’ van 9/11 kwam meteen naar voren: de angst voor een onzichtbare vijand, waardoor we regelmatig aan 9/11 worden herinnerd. In publieke ruimten worden we door surveillancecamera’s in de gaten gehouden; bij het reizen worden onze bagage en lichamen gescreend; burgers worden opgeroepen alert te zijn op verdachte personen en pakketjes. Maar wie of wat is deze onzichtbare vijand eigenlijk? Is het georganiseerd terrorisme, fundamentalisme, radicaliserende moslimjeugd, of is het gevaar meer abstract, een gebrek aan controle in een tijdperk van mondialisering, economische onzekerheid en technologische revolutie? De volgende drie bijdragen nemen de notie van de onzichtbare vijand als uitgangspunt om de erfenis van 9/11 in een bredere context te plaatsen. Beatrice de Graaf maakt een historische vergelijking met de strijd tegen het internationale anarchisme rond 1900, waarin parallellen met de hedendaagse War on Terror zichtbaar worden. Joost de Bloois beargumenteert dat 9/11 geen markeermoment was, maar juist een mogelijkheid om
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie het neoliberalisme te verstevigen en voort te zetten. Marieke de Goede laat zien hoe ook binnen Europa data-analyse en surveillance als preëmptieve middelen worden ingezet om de vijand ‘zichtbaar’ te maken. Gezamenlijk laten de drie artikelen zien hoe de impact van 9/11 veel dieper gaat dan de herinnering aan de plaats waar we waren toen wij 9/11 voor het eerst live op televisie ervoeren.
Jaap Kooijman is universitair hoofddocent Media en cultuur aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam en auteur van Fabricating the absolute fake. America in contemporary pop culture (AUP 2008).
Literatuur Butler, J. (2004) Precarious life. The powers of mourning and violence. Londen/New York: Verso. Plate, L. en A. Smelik (red.) (2006) Stof en as. De neerslag van 11 september in kunst en populaire cultuur. Amsterdam: Van Gennep/De Balie. Žižek, S. (2002) ‘Welcome to the desert of the real’. The symptom. Te raadplegen op www.lacan.com [23 november 2011].
De Creative Commons Licentie is van toepassing op dit artikel (NaamsvermeldingNiet-commercieel 3.0). Zie http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nl voor meer informatie.
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Jaap Kooijman – Tien jaar na 9/11: de onzichtbare vijand
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie BEATRICE DE GRAAF DE STRIJD TEGEN DE ‘ ZWARTE INTERNATIONALE ’ DE ‘ SAMENZWERING ’ ALS VEILIGHEIDSDISPOSITIEF ROND
1870-1910
Krisis, 2011, Issue 3 www.krisis.eu
The man who was thursday In 1908 verscheen de roman The man who was thursday van de Britse schrijver Giles Keith Chesterton (1908, herdruk 2008). De roman begint met een debat tussen Gabriel Syme en Lucian Gregory, op het eerste gezicht twee poëten die allebei een pool van de op dat moment gangbare lyrische stromingen vertegenwoordigen. Gregory is een exponent van de typische laatnegentiende-eeuwse postnapoleontische stroming waarin chaos en verval worden verheerlijkt. De Franse dichter Baudelaire maakte daar furore mee. Volgens Gregory behelst het ultieme gedicht uiteindelijk niets anders dan de destructie, de ondermijning van alle literaire en poëtische structuren: ‘An artist is identical with an anarchist, he cried. You might transpose the words anywhere. […] The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only.’ Voor Syme geldt precies het tegenovergestelde. Hij is een adept van de neoclassicistische stroming en geeft de voorkeur aan het sonnet. Maar het 42
toppunt van dichterlijke inspiratie is voor hem het spoorboekje van de Londense Spoorwegen. In dat spoorboekje vallen structuur, ritme, symmetrie en inhoud in volstrekte harmonie met elkaar samen. ‘Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street, or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose, let me read a time-table, with tears of pride’ (45). De twee dichters debatteren tot diep in de nacht, waarna ze met elkaar een borrel gaan drinken. Gregory neemt Syme mee en Syme wint diens vertrouwen. Zo wordt hij meegezogen in een anarchistisch complot om de wereld te vernietigen. Maar dan komt de aap uit de mouw. Syme is geen gewone dichter. Hij is in het dagelijkse leven een keurige Britse politieman die werkt voor Scotland Yard. Zijn liefde voor het klassieke sonnet is niet gefingeerd, maar zijn pose als dichter wel. Hij is door zijn chef gerekruteerd om te infiltreren in de Britse anarchistische beweging met als opdracht hun plots te ontrafelen en zo de orde weer te herstellen. Dat lukt hem maar al te goed. Hij maakt razendsnel carrière binnen het anarchistische netwerk van Gregory en wordt afgevaardigd naar de Central Anarchist Council. Deze bestaat uit zeven topanarchisten, genoemd naar de dagen van de week, die gezamenlijk de Zwarte Internationale bestieren. Naar goed gebruik leveren de Britse anarchisten de persoon die de zetel van Donderdag mag bekleden, en dat is Syme. De president, een reusachtige gestalte, is Zondag. De rode draad van de roman is de zoektocht naar de identiteit van de eerste dag van de week, de dag die voor christenen gewijd is aan de Zoon van God en waarop zij Zijn verrijzenis herdenken. De roman grossiert in dit soort religieuze symbolen. Na een spannend verhaal – thriller, whodunnit en karakterroman in één – eindigt Symes nachtmerrie in een Londens park, niet ver verwijderd van zijn huis. Dan volgt de ontknoping (spoiler alert!). Stuk voor stuk blijken alle vijf leden eveneens geheim agent te zijn, geïnfiltreerd in de anarchistische beweging op last van een Europese politiedienst. En Zondag? ‘His face frightened me’, realiseert Syme zich
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie vlak voor het einde, ‘as it did everyone; but not because it was brutal, not because it was evil. On the contrary, it frightened me because it was so beautiul, because it was so good’ (159). En dan onthult Zondag zijn ware identiteit: ‘I am Sabbath. […] I am the peace of God’ (170). Zondag is de ware poppenspeler, hij stond al die tijd aan de goede kant, hij was het hoofd van het antianarchistisch complot dat hij had opgezet om uiteindelijk de orde weer te herstellen. De schrijver Chesterton was een gelovig christen. Zondag neemt in zijn roman de gedaante aan van Jezus Christus en God de Vader tegelijk. Aan het slot is hij ‘draped plainly, in a pure and terrible white, and his hair was like a silver flame on his forehead’ (168). ‘Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of’, antwoordt hij op de vraag van Syme waarom hij de leden van de Council deze beproeving had aangedaan (173). Die zin komt letterlijk uit het Markusevangelie (Marcus 10:38) en werd uitgesproken door Jezus tegen zijn discipelen, toen ze op weg waren naar Jeruzalem waar Hij de kruisdood zou sterven. De roman staat bol van dit soort religieuze verwijzingen naar het evangelie van lijden en sterven. Symes verheerlijkte geliefde heet Rosamunde. Zij is de zus van Gregory, de anarchist, maar haar naam betekent letterlijk ‘roos van de wereld’, een vroegchristelijke benaming van Christus. Christus staat naast zondaren. Zondag offerde zichzelf op om de orde te herstellen en de nachtmerrie te beëindigen. Er is nog veel meer te zeggen over deze christelijke symboliek, de ambivalentie van de roman en Chestertons bedoelingen. Het gaat hier echter niet zozeer om die diepere spirituele lagen, maar om de ‘verpakking’: de roman werd beroemd omdat hij precies de geest van de tijd raakte; het is een superspannend verhaal over een wereldwijde samenzwering. Die samenzwering was werkelijkheid en projectie in één, het was een samenzwering van anarchisten en hun bestrijders, waarbij die uiteindelijk niet meer van elkaar te onderscheiden zijn. De discipelen van het Kwaad bleken allen voor het Goede te werken. Goed en Kwaad versmolten, het was niet meer zichtbaar wie de vijand was en wie de bestrijder. ‘So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. […] We have descended into hell’(172-173).
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Beatrice de Graaf – De strijd tegen de ‘zwarte internationale’ De roman verwoordt in al zijn dubbelzinnigheid briljant de heersende stemming op de drempel van het victoriaanse tijdvak en de moderne eeuw: de angst voor chaos, voor een wereldomspannend netwerk van bommenleggers en anarchisten dat de bestaande samenlevingen in de ondergang wil storten. Daarmee zijn dit tijdperk en de literaire verwoording van de angst voor een wereldwijde samenzwering van anarchisten ook een voorafschaduwing van de eeuwwende van 2001. De roman van Chesterton over het wereldwijde anarchisme kan als een history of the present worden gelezen, zoals we hieronder zullen laten zien.
Anarchisme in beeld Chesterton raakte met zijn roman een gevoelige snaar. Rond 1908 wist iedereen wat een anarchist was. In de publieke beeldvorming was dat een bebaarde, gemaskerde student in slordige kleding die het had gemunt op koningen en staatshoofden. Net zoals in de strijd tegen terrorisme anno nu was het minstens zo’n ongrijpbaar fenomeen. Om een anarchist te vinden, moest je duizenden verwarde en ontheemde personen in kaart brengen die dankzij de verbeterde reismogelijkheden, de sociale onrust, politieke vervolging en de arbeidscrises door Europe zwierven. Dergelijke potentieel verdachte vreemdelingen hielden zich op in cafés, op zolderkamertjes of in achterbuurten. Ze hielden zich al dan niet bezig met het beramen van complotten om de status quo te ondermijnen, de autoriteiten uit te dagen of erger. Soms belegden ze discussieavonden, organiseerden ze lezingen in koffiehuizen, collegezalen of gewoon buiten in een park. Het konden socialisten zijn, communisten, anarchosyndicalisten of ‘echte’ anarchisten. Sommigen waren religieus gemotiveerd, anderen juist totaal niet. Bannelingen uit Rusland, immigranten uit Frankrijk, Duitsland en Engeland, repatrianten en voormalige communards uit de Nieuwe Wereld vonden elkaar in havencafés, waar ze aan land spoelden na hun omzwervingen via de nieuwe wereldwijde scheepsverbindingen. Ze reisden per trein naar Zwitserland, waar ze zich met voorliefde ophielden. Ze communiceerden met elkaar via de telegraaf, snelle postverbindingen en via pamfletten, tijdschriften en kranten (Butterworth 2010).
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie Was de dreiging van anarchisme pure projectie of constructie? Er zat in ieder geval een kern van waarheid in. Gedurende de periode 1880-1914 vielen er zo’n 160 personen ten slachtoffer aan (bom)aanslagen van anarchisten, en dan rekenen we Rusland niet mee. Meer dan 500 mensen raakten gewond. Toch waren dit maar kleine aantallen, gemeten aan de dodelijk slachtoffers die er vielen tijdens de opstand van de Parijse Commune (17.000!), tijdens hongerstakingen of arbeidsoproeren in Europa. Waarom hadden deze aanslagen dan zo’n enorme impact? De slachtoffers waren ten eerste geen ‘gewone’ burgers, maar vorsten of staatshoofden. Daarmee symboliseerden de aanslagen dat niemand veilig was voor deze nieuwe sinistere dreiging. Anarchisten maakten duidelijk dat ze voor geen enkele autoriteit ontzag hadden. Ze doodden tsaar Alexander II, de Amerikaanse president, drie minister-presidenten, een heleboel ‘gewone’ ministers, politiecommandanten en politici met als dramatische prelude op de Eerste Wereldoorlog de moord op de kroonprins van OostenrijkHongarije, Franz Ferdinand, op 28 juni 1914. Zelfs de alom geliefde keizerin Elisabeth van Oostenrijk werd niet gespaard, de Italiaanse anarchist Luigi Lucheni bracht haar op 10 september 1898 met dolksteken om het leven. De aanslagen kregen bovendien betekenis dankzij de massamedia die de losse incidenten in beeld brachten als gecoördineerde daden van een wereldwijd netwerk van anarchisten. Stakingen, arbeidsonlusten en communistische vergaderingen werden op één hoop gebracht met aanslagen van Russische nihilisten en Franse anarchisten. Incidenten in Europa, Australië en in Noord- en Zuid-Amerika voedden het beeld van de Zwarte Internationale. Zelfs in Egypte, China en Japan werd melding gemaakt van anarchistische activiteiten. In 1893 pleegde een Australische anarchist, Larry Petrie een aanslag op het schip Aramac, naar aanleiding van een arbeidsconflict. Ook in India werden dynamitards gespot. In 1898 zegde de Duitse keizer Wilhelm II een reis naar Egypte af uit angst voor Italiaanse anarchisten die daar een aanslag aan het beramen zouden zijn. In 1910 maakte Japan de arrestatie bekend van een groepje Japanse anarchisten die van plan zouden zijn geweest de keizer om te brengen. Er leek sprake te zijn van een wereldomspannende golf van anarchistisch geweld; vooral omdat de telegraaf, de vernieuwde en wereldomspannende transportatie44
Beatrice de Graaf – De strijd tegen de ‘zwarte internationale’ en communicatielijn die lokale incidenten ook op die manier aaneensmeedde. Ook de anarchisten zelf maakten zich groter dan ze waren en claimden in hun vele tijdschriften dat de wereldwijde revolutie en chaos slechts een kwestie van tijd was. Ze zetten die claim kracht bij met nieuwe, zeer zichtbare en afschrikwekkende technologische vernietigingstechnieken, zoals dynamiet (de infernal machine) en de automobiel (als vluchtmiddel en als vehicle born improvised explosive device) (Davis 2007). Anarchistische groepjes grepen ook dankbaar de nieuwe mogelijkheden aan die de versnelde wereldwijde communicatie en transporatietechnieken via boot en trein hen boden in het voorbereiden en assisteren van elkaars aanslagen. Westerse anarchisten hielpen hun Russische collega’s bij het voorbereiden van een aanslag op de tsaar (zie Butterworth). Een Poolse anarchist was in staat dankzij informatie uit de media een staatsbezoek van de tsaar in Frankrijk te verstoren. De Russische nihilist Sergei Nechaev zag dankzij de goedkopere druktechnieken kans om zijn Revolutionaire catechismus het land uit te smokkelen, te laten vertalen en wereldwijd te verspreiden. De periode 1880-1914 liet dus een verdichting, versnelling en wereldwijde disseminatie van dreigingsbeelden en veiligheidsdenken zien. Ook voor die tijd waren er gevaren gesignaleerd: de wereldwijde communistische beweging, het Communistisch Manifest en de Parijse Commune waren al achter de rug. Maar in deze periode maakten de nieuwe informatie- en communicatietechnologieën het mogelijk dat de suggestie van een wereldwijd complot, de angst daarvoor en de bestrijding ervan, wereldwijd op de agenda kwamen te staan. Ja, er was ook echt sprake van samenzweringen en complotten. Maar de mate waarin die anarchistische complotten communicatief werden uitvergroot en verspreid, hield geen gelijke tred met hun daadwerkelijke omvang. We zouden kunnen concluderen dat de anarchistische psychologische terreur de feitelijke terreur veruit oversteeg. Projectie, wensdenken en publieke afschuw vielen effectief samen. Maar er was ook nog iets anders aan de hand. Er sloop een nieuw element in het laatnegentiendeeeuwse discours van (on)veiligheid en (wan)orde. Een nieuw dispositief van veiligheid en governmentality ontstond: een ‘heterogene assemblage
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie van discursieve en materiële elementen om sociale problemen aan te pakken’, mogelijk gemaakt door de uitvinding en industriële en commerciële toepassing van nieuwe informatie- en transportatietechnologieën die zowel door daders als bestrijders werden omarmd.1
Het dispositief van de samenzwering De vraag naar schijn en werkelijkheid van de chestertoniaanse samenzweringsnachtmerrie is niet positivistisch te beantwoorden. De ‘wereldwijde samenzwering’ was het dispositief dat de anarchisten in hun geschriften gebruikten om hun millenaristische en apocalyptische utopie (of dystopie) enerzijds en hun geringe aantal anderzijds kracht bij te zetten. Het was tevens het dispositief dat regeringen, politie- en veiligheidsdiensten eropna hielden om zin en betekenis te geven aan de disparate incidenten en aanslagen van anarchisten in diverse landen. Het dispositief ‘samenzwering’ werd vanaf circa 1870 in toenemende mate favoriet als concept, strategie en tactiek om sociale problemen te duiden, onschadelijk te maken en tevens steun en resources voor uitbreiding, centralisering en professionalisering van de politie te mobiliseren en legitimeren. Zowel anarchisten als hun bestrijders maakten in deze periode gebruik van het dispositief van de samenzwering om hun strijd kracht bij te zetten. Zo ontketenden ze gezamenlijk een dynamiek van samenzweringsgeloof en praktijk die als ‘achterkant’ van de moderniteit sindsdien niet meer uit het politieke discours is weg te denken. Hoe kan dat succes worden verklaard? Ten eerste was de samenzwering de brug die het reactionaire tijdperk van repressie en autoritair bestel met de overgang naar een liberalere en vrijere vorm van heerschappij verbond. Het was het vignet van de ‘new political era, experimental, positive, scientific’ (Butterworth 2010: 46). In een tijdperk van enorme vooruitgang, van positivistisch geloof in wetenschap, technologie en experiment, was de samenzwering het ‘bewijs’ dat diende om de knelpunten en crises van de moderniteit te verklaren en er een positivistische oorzaak aan toe te kennen. De samenzwering was retorisch middel en logische bewijsvoering bij uitstek: achter alle ellende zat uitein45
Beatrice de Graaf – De strijd tegen de ‘zwarte internationale’ delijk een rationele actor die kwaad wilde. Het ging er alleen nog maar om die rationele actor te identificeren. En daar had de nieuwe era nu juist zulke mooie middelen voor gevonden. Daarmee bracht het dispositief van de samenzwering ten tweede discursief een onzichtbare vijand tot leven die voor die tijd niet of nauwelijks te definiëren viel. En wel voor beide partijen. Voor de anarchisten, Michail Bakunin voorop, was er sprake van een joodse samenzwering, aangestuurd door bankiersfamilies als de Rothschilds die wereldwijd een vinger in de pap hadden en achter de repressie van arbeiders, communards en communisten zat omdat zij immers de kapitalistische status quo en de voortgang van de productie ondermijnden (Butterworth 2010: 64). Dat soort ideeën leefde niet alleen onder anarchisten en communisten. Voor de politiediensten gaf het concept van de samenzwering vorm aan een diffuus conglomeraat van allerlei heterogene bedreigingen: van socialisten, reformisten, communisten tot het handjevol echte anarchisten. Butterworth maakt aannemelijk dat het een tsaristische dubbelspion was, Peter Rachovsky, die de beruchte en rabiaat antisemitische Protocollen van de wijzen van Sion in 1896 op basis van een ouder geschrift heruitgaf om de anarchisten en communisten in de ogen van het publiek in diskrediet te brengen. De Protocollen vielen in vruchtbare grond, gingen een eigen leven leiden en legden de basis voor veel later onheil (Butterworth 2010: 363-365; Benz 2007). Ten derde bood het concept samenzwering ook een operationeel houvast. Zelfs als er schijnbaar niets aan de hand was, zoals bij volkomen legale bijeenkomsten van sociaaldemocratische bonden en partijen, kon die schijn bedriegen. De samenzwering berustte immers op deceptie. Het mocht ordelijk lijken, maar onderhoeds woekerde het complot. Dat legitimeerde een continue inspanning en uitbreiding van veiligheidsbeleid. Want een samenzwering is tenslotte ook altijd progressief-exponentieel. Je weet immers niet hoeveel leden er lid zijn van het complot, waar ze overal kunnen zitten, wat hun doelwitten zijn, welke apocalyptische en explosieve middelen ze tot hun beschikking hebben en wat hun uiteindelijke doel is.
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie Dat leidde ten vierde tot een spiegeling van de elkaar bestrijdende partijen. De anarchisten gingen in daad en middel het verst. Maar tegen de voorsprong in macht en middelen die de politie- en veiligheidsdiensten hadden, konden ze niet op. Zeker niet als die zich, zoals de tsaristische veiligheidsdienst, de Ochrana, in geen enkel opzicht lieten matigen door principes van proportionaliteit, legaliteit en rechtmatigheid. Sterker nog, enkele Russische officieren en adellijken gingen zover om zelf een antianarchistisch netwerk op te richten, de ‘Heilige Broederschap’, die er niet voor terugschrok om dezelfde middelen als de terroristen te gebruiken (Butterworth 2010: 177). Om een modern adagium in enigszins aangepaste vorm te gebruiken: ‘It takes a conspiracy to fight a conspiracy’. Zo werd het instrument van intelligence en counterintelligence – dat immers ook op deceptie, infiltratie en bedrog berustte – het kenmerkende middel van veiligheidsbeleid rond 1900. Het dispositief van de samenzwering werd tevens een sociaal-culturele assemblage van governmentality. De suggestie van de samenzwering en de daarbij behorende veiligheidsmaatregelen sloten perfect aan bij de opvatting van de heersende partijen in Europa en daarbuiten, of die nu burgerlijk-liberaal van snit, absolutistisch, Pruissisch-autoritair of tsaristischfeodaal van aard waren, dat de goede orde en de sociale zeden werden bedreigd door een woekerend gezwel van sociale onrust. Via het dispositief van de samenzwering kon alle oppositie en al het legale protest tegen heersende verhoudingen of sociale misstanden als potentieel anarchistisch worden veroordeeld. En de anarchisten? Die bleven dat modern-positivistische dispositief vrolijk legitimeren; Bakunin gaf zijn medecomplottista’s viercijferige nummers om een lidmaatschap van een vermeende World Revolutionary Alliance te suggeren die in de duizendtallen liep. De Franse Bond van Nihilisten verspreidde in 1881 een manifest waarin deze opschepte bezig te zijn met een drie jaar durende campagne om honderden goedburgerlijke families te vergiftigen. De visie van de anarchistische utopie was een sociaal experiment dat met behulp van moderne vernietigingsmiddelen verwerkelijkt moest worden. Moderne media, wetenschappelijke methoden (vergiftiging via drinkwaterleidingen) en archaïsch-destructieve visioenen gingen hand in hand en leidden tot huiver en afschuw onder de bevolking 46
Beatrice de Graaf – De strijd tegen de ‘zwarte internationale’ en de progressieve uitbreiding van informatieverzameling van de internationale politie- en veiligheidsdiensten.
De bijbehorende assemblage van internationale terrorismebestrijding Het dispositief van de samenzwering gaf dus vorm aan het vijandbeeld van het internationale anarchisme. Het werd tevens weerspiegeld in de materiële technieken en instrumenten die werden ingezet om die nieuwe vijand te identificeren en op te sporen. Want het idee van de samenzwering was met de moderne technologie ook prima te operationaliseren. Sterker nog, die technologie maakte de samenzwering überhaupt pas ‘zichtbaar’. Dankzij de massamedia konden lokale incidenten tot nationale en zelfs globale gebeurtenissen aaneen worden gesmeed. Het dispositief van de samenzwering construeerde en deconstrueerde de onzichtbare vijand van het wereldwijde anarchisme tegelijkertijd. De anarchist was er niet, maar werd door nieuwe technologie zichtbaar gemaakt en tegelijkertijd in analoge onderdelen gedeconstrueerd. Het ging niet om individuele herkenning, maar om identificatie van categorieën. De anarchist was er tegelijk wel en niet: je zag hem zelf niet (want hij hield zich schuil en vermomde zich), maar je kon wel zijn profiel, of liever gezegd, onderdelen daarvan, wereldwijd in kaart brengen. De samenzweringstechnologie van 1900 kreeg vorm in kaartenbakken, vingerafdrukken, foto’s en coördinaten die de anarchist tot een set van lichaamskenmerken reduceerde en tegelijkertijd multipliceerde. Rond 1882 ontwikkelde de Franse politieprefect Alphonse Bertillon een antropometrisch systeem dat later naar hem werd vernoemd en wereldwijd werd ingevoerd. Dit systeem van ‘bertillonage’ hield in dat criminelen in kaart werden gebracht op grond van hun vermeende bioantropologische gezichts- en schedelkenmerken. Aan deze ‘wetenschappelijke’ methode lag de opvatting ten grondslag dat afwijkend, crimineel gedrag zichtbaar was in antropomorfe gezichts- en lichaamskenmerken. Dat paste naadloos bij het sociaaldarwinistische en eugenetische idee dat schurken genetisch gedegenereerd waren en dat er een biologische oor-
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie zaak of afwijking voor hun daden kon worden geïdentificeerd. De meerwaarde van dit systeem was dat die lichaamscoördinaten razendsnel werden doorgeseind aan bevriende politiediensten. De foto’s en vingerafdrukken konden met de nieuwe scheeps- en treinverbindingen achterna worden gestuurd (Fijnaut 2007: 283; Jäger 2006: 196-221).2 Bilaterale samenwerking en informatie-uitwisseling tussen politie- en veiligheidsdiensten kreeg in deze periode voor het eerst een geïnstitutionaliseerde internationale vorm. Twee maanden na de moord op keizerin Elisabeth (Sisi) op 10 september 1898 verzamelden zich 54 gedelegeerden afkomstig uit 21 verschillende landen in een wit marmeren palazzo in Rome. Het merendeel was afkomstig uit Europa, maar er waren ook een aantal Amerikanen aanwezig, waaronder vertegenwoordigers van de roemruchte Pinkerton Agency, een centrale van privédetectives die feitelijk de rol van Amerikaanse geheime dienst speelden. De Italiaanse overheid had hen uitgenodigd om de aftrap te geven voor een nieuw politiegremium: De Internationale Conferentie voor de Sociale Verdediging Tegen Anarchisten (Deflem 2005: 795-798). De moord op de keizerin, in het bijzonder de internationale publieke en politieke verontwaardiging hierover, was de druppel en de aanleiding voor de diverse regeringen om eens en voorgoed af te rekenen met het anarchisme. Politie- en veiligheidsdiensten zagen er een prachtige gelegenheid in om geld en middelen voor nieuwe technologische ideeën en programma’s te realiseren en hun organisaties een professionaliseringsslinger te geven. De gedelegeerden vergaderden bijna een maand lang, van 24 november tot 21 december, en formuleerden een eerste gezamenlijke definitie van het kwaad. Anarchisten waren ‘they, who perpetrate any act that used violent means to destroy the organization of society’. Daarmee was meteen de spanbreedte van de maatregelen aangegeven. De focus lag op de bedreiging van de samenleving als geheel. Het begrippenpaar van 1900 was dat van chaos versus orde, van anarchist versus de goede burger. Naast de overeenkomst over een gezamenlijke definitie leidde de bijeenkomst tot een serie nieuwe bestrijdingsmiddelen. Ten eerste besloten de aanwezige politie- en justitiechefs een centraal kaartenbaksysteem in te richten (Fijnaut 2007: 283; Jäger 2006: 196-221). Ten tweede maakten ze 47
Beatrice de Graaf – De strijd tegen de ‘zwarte internationale’ afspraken om elkaar sneller voor netwerken en mogelijke aanslagen te waarschuwen, al gebeurde dat op dat moment ook al. De Russische ambassade voorzag de Franse politie van foto’s van mogelijke anarchistische verdachten. In 1893 onderschepten Franse politiemedewerkers plannen om keizer Willem II en kanselier Caprivi te vermoorden. Ze stuurden die informatie door naar de Berlijnse politie die er nog bijtijds in slaagde het complot onschadelijk te maken. In 1898 wisselden de Franse en Italiaanse politie via hun consulaten informatie uit over bomaanslagen in Milaan en de diefstal van dynamiet in Zwitserland. De conferentie te Rome gaf aan die afspraken evenwel vastere vorm. Bovendien spraken de gedelegeerden in de derde plaats af om voor de uitwisseling een ‘wetenschappelijk’ gestandardiseerd format te gebruiken, de methode van het portrait parlé, gebaseerd op de bertillonagemetingen die zoals gezegd eenvoudig via telefoon en telegraaf konden worden doorgeseind. In de vierde plaats maakten de terrorismebestrijders afspraken over de uitlevering van personen die gearresteerd waren voor pogingen tot het ombrengen of ontvoeren van staatshoofden. Ook besloten de deelnemende regeringen om aan die misdaden de doodstraf toe te kennen. De resoluties leidden tot slot tot een slotakte waarin het verbod op illegaal bezit en gebruik van explosieven, lidmaatschap van een anarchistische organisatie, verspreiding van anarchistische propaganda en hulpverlening aan anarchistische activiteiten werd vastgelegd. De deelnemende landen spraken af dat ze de berichtgeving in de media over anarchistische activiteiten zouden proberen te beperken. Niet alle landen ratificeerden de slotakte, de Britse en de Amerikaanse regering onthielden zich van ondertekening. Maar los van die beperkingen gaf deze conferentie een grote politieke, administratieve en technologische boost aan het dispositief van de samenzwering, niet in de laatste plaats om hiermee de (vanzelfsprekend geheime) anti-anarchistische samenzwering te bezegelen.
Ook in Nederland Ook in een relatief liberaal en parlementair-democratisch land als Nederland vatte het dispositief van de samenzwering post en kreeg een nieuwe
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie assemblage van governmentality vorm. Rond 1890 breidde het aantal stemmen op veiligheidsgebied zich uit. Er ontstond een partijendemocratie met bijbehorend publiek debat. Landbestuur en beleid raakten gepolitiseerd. Het heersende ideaal van rust en orde werd onderbouwd met verwijzingen naar wanorde en opstanden in het buitenland, die zich echter ook naar Nederland konden uitbreiden. Liberalen maakten zich zorgen over radicale theocraten in eigen land en staatsdwang en veroveringszucht in Duitsland. Antirevolutionairen zagen juist vanuit Frankrijk een ‘rood spook uit de afgrond’ opdoemen en waren lyrisch over Bismarcks protestantse daadkracht tegenover socialisten, katholieken en anarchisten (Te Velde 1992: 32-36). Onder de protestanten zaaide de Parijse Commune angst voor de gecombineerde samenzwering van communisme, socialisme en katholocisme – hoe vreemd die combinatie op het eerste gezicht ook lijkt. Volgens het hervormde maandblad Stemmen voor Waarheid en Vrede (SWV) waren in Frankrijk ‘jezuïeten’ aan de macht en ultramontanen. De Franse vijand stond symbool voor ‘ongeloof en zedeloosheid’ aan de revolutionaire kant, en ‘bijgeloof en dweepzucht’ aan de katholieke kant. Die dodelijke cocktail van ‘Internationale en Rome (die tweelings-broeders uit den Afgrond)’ moest wel tot de ondergang leiden (Bronsveld 1870: 791-813; 1871: 326 en 540). ‘Vertoont het grootendeels tot puin geworden en in vlammen stikkend Parijs niet al de kenmerken van een plaats, waaraan God een oordeel voltrekt, en mag het van ons niet gewacht worden, dat wij dat puin eens stilstaan en er inkeeren tot ons zelf? […] ‘Hij [God, BdG] geve, dat de mensen van Sodom, van Niniveh, van Parijs in den dag des oordeels niet opstaan tegen het eenmaal-gereformeerde Nederland!’(Bronsveld 1871: 357, 360-369, 552-553; De Graaf 2009: 199-210). Hier werd het beeld van de samenzwering vooral gebruikt om de eigen gereformeerde achterban te stichten en te mobiliseren. Onlusten en opstanden, zoals het Palingoproer van 1886, waarbij 26 doden te betreuren vielen, maakten duidelijk dat gezag en orde onder druk stonden (De Rooy 1971; Van de Wal 2003: 172-173). In 1887 werd er een artikel aan de grondwet toegevoegd waarmee de koning ‘ter handhaving van de uit- of inwen48
Beatrice de Graaf – De strijd tegen de ‘zwarte internationale’ dige veiligheid […] elk gedeelte van het grondgebied in staat van oorlog of van beleg’ kon verklaren. Op dat moment zou het burgerlijk gezag plaatsmaken voor militair gezag en kon het leger ingrijpen (Zuijlen 2008: 66).3 Dat was een nieuwe regel, die weliswaar de reeds bestaande praktijk een wettige basis gaf, maar tegelijkertijd signaleerde dat er meer belang aan handhaving van gezag en veiligheid werd gehecht. De grootste aanjager van het veiligheidsbeleid was de angst voor socialistische ondermijning die uitging van de Sociaal-Democratische Bond onder leiding van F. Domela Nieuwenhuis (Charité 1972). Hij kwam in maart 1888 in de Kamer, in dezelfde maand dat arbeiders in Friesland en Groningen in de veengebieden overal begonnen te staken, mede daartoe aangezet door medestanders van Domela Nieuwenhuis. De oprichting van de SDAP in 1894 zwengelde de angst voor de klassenstrijd als ultieme samenzwering tegen de orde en status quo verder aan. ‘De opruiende taal in sommige vergaderingen en bladen geuit, en de rustverstoringen, waartoe de bedoelde samenkomsten en het venten der bladen aanleiding geven’ baarden menig Kamerlid grote zorgen. ‘Men ontziet zich niet, onder verdachtmaking en laster voortdurend tegen de maatschappelijke orde op te hitsen en alle gezag te ondermijnen.’4 De minister van Justitie, W. van der Kaay, erkende dat er een probleem was met ‘die partij, die in ons land het evangelie der ontevredenheid verkondigt, die alle menschelijke ellende wijt aan den staat, aan de regering, aan de overheid, aan de Vertegenwoordiging […] die het gezag, de politie weerstreeft en belemmert, alle maatregelen der regering tracht te verijdelen, en door op te treden in grooten getale, luidruchtig en brutaal, de burgerij vrees tracht aan te jagen’.5 Om die samenzwering van socialisten, communisten en anarchisten te bestrijden, moest de politie geprofessionaliseerd worden. Die wens tot professionalisering kwam ook hier niet in de eerste plaats vanuit de regering, maar vanuit de politiediensten en hun rond 1890 opgerichte vakbonden zelf, die behoefte hadden aan betere bewapening en betere veiligheidsmaatregelen. Zij gaven van onderop een aanzet tot professionalisering en internationalisering van het nationale veiligheidsbeleid en de bijbehorende opvattingen. De grote steden breidden op grond van de ver-
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie hoogde economische bedrijvigheid, demografische ontwikkelingen en toegenomen mobiliteit hun politienet zelf gestaag uit. Rotterdam zette na 1880 vijftig extra agenten in boven op het bestaande korps van 226 manschappen (Fijnaut 2007: 292-295). Bovendien kreeg de marechaussee bevoegdheden om in het noorden van het land te opereren, wat betekende dat de organisatie in een paar jaar tijd, van 1889 tot 1895, verdubbelde, van tien officieren en 363 manschappen naar achttien officieren en 767 onderofficieren en manschappen (Smeets 2007: 87). Rond 1898 schafte de Rijksveldwacht allerlei nieuwe vaar- en voertuigen aan en ontwikkelde politietoezicht op de grote rivieren en in de Rotterdamse haven. Nederlandse agenten draaiden mee op de internationale conferenties in Londen, Parijs en Berlijn over het gevaar van het ‘rondtrekkende misdadigerdom’, radicalen en anarchisten die ‘helsche machines’ tot ontploffing brachten. De Nederlandse politie wachtte niet tot 1898, maar was al eerder begonnen met het aanpakken van het anarchisme. In 1888 ontvingen enkele Nederlandse hoogwaardigheidsbekleders bompakketten (Fijnaut 2007: 274; Smeets 2007: 75). In 1895 werden plaatselijke politie en marechaussee alsmede tientallen geheime agenten gemobiliseerd om het bezoek van regentes Emma en prinses Wilhelmina aan Tilburg en Maastricht te beveiligen tegen aanslagen.6 De Amsterdamse recherche beschikte rond dat tijdstip al over dossiers van zo’n vijftienhonderd buitenlandse anarchisten (Van der Linden 1986: 77; Fijnaut 2007: 300). Ook de opkomst van moderne wetenschap en technieken zwengelde het veiligheidsbeleid aan. In 1896 kondigde de minister van Justitie bij Koninklijk Besluit aan dat het departement van Justitie over zou gaan tot de invoering van ‘anthropologische signalementen’, twee jaar dus voordat dit systeem in Rome internationaal zou worden ingevoerd (Fijnaut 2007: 283; Jäger 2006: 196-221). Net als in Groot-Brittannië, Frankrijk en Rusland gingen er ook in Nederland stemmen op voor de oprichting van een antianarchistisch tegennetwerk. De liberaal Baron W. van der Feltz pleitte voor de vorming van een ‘korps geheime politie’, dat als Engelse detectives de gewone politie kon bijstaan. Dat was veertig, vijftig jaar geleden nog niet nodig, ‘maar bij het tegenwoordige uitgebreide en snelle verkeer, komen dikwijls personen 49
Beatrice de Graaf – De strijd tegen de ‘zwarte internationale’ van elders die zich onder de massa bewegen en, hoewel zij somwijlen door hun uiterlijk of door hunne bewegingen in het oog vallen, niet in het oog gehouden worden’.7 De geheime uitgaven werden in 1896 van 2500 naar 7500 gulden verhoogd, om deze rechercheurs te kunnen bekostigen.8 Het dispositief van de samenzwering bood de gelegenheid om veiligheidsbeleid steeds intrusiever vorm te geven. Ook de liberale regeringen gingen daarin mee. Artikel 3 van de grondwet gebood de regering immers om personen en goederen op Nederlands grondgebied bescherming te bieden. Dat hield volgens de liberalen rond 1900 meer in dan alleen ‘de zorg voor de rust en de veiligheid van den staat’. De commissie-Kist, die door de liberale minister van Justitie Cort van der Linden eind 1898 was ingesteld om het politiewezen te verbeteren, vond dat daar ook aan toegevoegd moest worden de ‘zorg voor de maatschappij, met het oog op anarchistische bewegingen en aanslagen, welke niet zoozeer den staat als wel elke maatschappelijke organisatie bedreigen’ (Commissie-Kist 1901: hoofdstuk 1; Fijnaut 2007: 325). Het rijtje veiligheidsdreigingen weerspiegelde die opvatting: anarchisten (van binnen of buiten Nederland), vreemdelingen, revolutionaire of anderszins gevaarlijke groepen en bedreigingen voor het Koninklijk Huis (Smeets 2007: 106). Dit dispositief paste uitstekend bij het minimale buitenlandse beleid dat de negentiende-eeuwse Nederlandse kabinetten eropna hielden. Veiligheid in de koloniën en afzijdigheid in de Europese perikelen stonden voorop. Dat betekende dat de handhaving en controle op binnenlandse onlusten, spionnen, anarchisten ook een buitenlands cq. koloniaal doel dienden. De neutraliteit en rust die immers ten goede kwamen aan de handel moesten worden gewaarborgd ten opzichte van allerlei apocalyptische dreigingen. De introductie van een dispositief van samenzwering, met bijbehorende middelen en methoden, bleef niet verborgen. De socialistische voorman P.J. Troelstra uitte in december 1904 in de Tweede Kamer het gerede vermoeden dat de Amsterdamse recherche had samengewerkt met de Russische geheime dienst, de Ochrana, tijdens een internationaal socialistisch congres in de hoofdstad. De Amsterdammers hadden de tsaristische agenten foto’s geleverd.9 Maar zoals altijd bij samenzweringstheorieën, ook al
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie berusten ze op een kern van waarheid, zijn ze per definitie niet te bewijzen noch te weerleggen. Troelstra’s protest werd niet geloofd. En dat brengt ons weer terug bij het begin. Het dispositief van de samenzwering werd hét middel, zowel van parlementaire democratieën als van absolutistische keizerrijken om sociale problemen te beheersen. De negentiende-eeuwse liberale visie op een marginale veiligheid van de staat versus een maximale vrijheid voor de burger had zelfs in een burgerlijk en gematigd-progressief land als Nederland plaatsgemaakt voor ‘moderne’, ‘wetenschappelijke’ en positivistische opvattingen over het beheersen van afwijkend gedrag. Veiligheidsbeleid, inclusief een ongekende toename van regelgeving, werd in dienst gezet van de ordening van de maatschappij rond deugden van nationalisme, liberalisme en plichtsbesef (Te Velde 1992: 205). Het semipositivistische, maar feitelijk volstrekt onwetenschappelijke dreigingsbeeld van ‘de wereldwijde anarchistische samenzwering’ maakte dat mogelijk. Slotsom Veiligheidsbeleid in de periode 1870 tot 1914 werd gekenmerkt door het dispositief van de samenzwering. Dankzij nieuwe media doemde een wereldwijde dreiging op van anarchie en destructie die staatshoofden en vorsten velde als grassprietjes in de wind en de bestaande bezitsverhoudingen ondersteboven trachtte te keren. Die dreiging viel samen met momenten van grote economische en sociale crises enerzijds en een razendsnelle vooruitgang op het gebied van technologie en communicatie anderzijds, leidend tot de mobilisering van grote groepen ontheemden, vreemdelingen en werkloze arbeiders en studenten. De ‘anarchist’ was afgezien van het honderdtal echte aanslagen, vooral een projectie van die malaise. Al vonden er daadwerkelijk aanslagen plaats, de strijd tegen anarchisme was vooral een middel om de sociale kwestie te onderdrukken, socialisten te vervolgen en politieke oppositie monddood te maken. Zowel het publiek als de politiek waren op zoek naar verklaringen voor de toegenomen complexiteit, de versnelling en verdichting van misdaad en geweld. Anarchisten werden de gezichtsloze projectievlakken voor het algemeen gevoelde onbehagen over de moderniteit, de toegenomen com50
Beatrice de Graaf – De strijd tegen de ‘zwarte internationale’ plexiteit, mobiliteit en anonimiteit van de samenleving. Anarchisten vulden het morele gat dat de burgerij voelde. In dit klimaat ontstonden allerlei samenzweringstheorieën. Het is niet toevallig dat de beruchte en rabiaat antisemitische Protocollen van de wijzen van Sion in deze periode werden ontdekt en op zoveel bijval stuitten. Maar er was meer aan de hand. Er ontstond ook een ‘dispositief van de samenzwering’. Die samenzwering werd aangewakkerd door de anarchisten zelf. Maar zij werden in het succes van hun psychologische oorlogsvoering nog overtroefd door de assemblage van petty sovereigns vanuit de politie en het leger, burgemeesters, en veiligheidsagentschappen. Politie, justitie en bewindslieden groepeerden zich tegen en rond de vermeende samenzwering van de Zwarte Internationale. Die dreiging bood hen een professionele en bureaucratische uitdaging en legitimeerde de uitbreiding van middelen en maatregelen. In 1898 legden circa twintig politiediensten vast dat ze voortaan een gestandardiseerde manier van dossiervorming, fotoherkenning en idenfiticatiemiddelen zouden invoeren. Dossiers van de tsaristische Ochrana, het Amerikaanse commerciële Pinkerton Agency en Scotland Yard werden gecombineerd om die complotten substantie te verlenen. De ‘anarchist’ werd tegelijkertijd geconstrueerd als wereldwijd vijandbeeld en gedeconstrueerd, opgeknipt in cijfertjes, nummertjes en metingen die via de telegraaf over de wereld werden geseind. Daar bleef het niet bij. In de loop van de jaren dertig werden de eugenetica en de biopolitiek steeds totalitairder toegepast en ingevuld. In Rusland werd de bezittende burger, de kapitalist de concrete vijand van de revolutie. Niet op grond van zijn daden, maar op grond van vermeende klasse- en bezitskenmerken. In Duitsland liep iedereen die politiek, sociaal of ‘genetisch’ afweek van het ideaal van de Germaanse burger het risico in een concentratiekamp te belanden, als zichtbare en onzichtbare vijand tegelijk, zoals Giorgio Agamben in zijn Homo sacer heeft uitgelegd. In de periode 1870 tot 1914 was het nog niet zover. De technologische verwachtingen overtroffen de praktische uitvoerbaarheid. Maar om met Chestertons sleutelroman te eindigen, de terrorist en de contraterrorist versmolten. Het verbindende tussen de agent en de anarchist, tussen het ‘goede’ en het ‘kwade’ was niet het feit dat ze allebei hun slachtoffers maakten in naam van hun principe, maar veel meer nog het feit dat ze het lijden, de fysieke en psychologische terreur met modern-technologische middelen uitbreidden en de basis legden voor het technocratische en dystopische vernieti-
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie gingsbeleid dat uitmondde in de Europese burgeroorlog van de jaren dertig en veertig. Postscriptum Nog kort een postscriptum. Zoals gezegd leest de geschiedenis van het samenzweringsdispositief rond 1900 wel wat als een history of the present. Zonder de lijn naar de jaren dertig door te willen trekken, kan ditzelfde beeld ook op het begin van de 21ste eeuw worden geplakt. Na 2001 ontstond een dispositief van een wereldwijde terroristische samenzwering, het werd, analoog aan het dispositief rond 1900, een vignet van de nieuwe, geglobaliseerde wereld van dreiging en terrorisme, van een vijand die met de modernste middelen erop uit was de westerse wereld te vernietigen. Westerse (gepostuleerde) onzekerheid, gekoppeld aan bestaande sociale en politieke kritieken op de multiculturele samenleving, immigratie en integratie en het ‘falen’ van overheden om daar een antwoord op te vinden, catapulteerden ‘de terroristische samenzwering’ als thema op de politieke agenda’s van veel (protest)partijen. Internationaal maakte de periode van het post-Koude Oorlogsdenken van de negentiger jaren toen termen als ‘vredesdividend’ nog in zwang waren, plaats voor een tijdperk van nieuwe chaos, failed states en small footprint wars.
Discursief kwam daarmee een bedreiging, een nieuwe vijand tot leven, die zich daarvoor ook al had gemanifesteerd (denk aan de aanslagen van Al Qaeda in de jaren negentig), maar die nu pas werd gezien en geïdentificeerd. Deze gaf vorm en politieke lading aan een conglomeraat van heterogene bedreigingen, van Hamas tot homegrown terrorism, van de Taliban tot de Tsjetjseense vrijheidsstrijders. Operationeel bood deze bedreiging daarmee houvast. Dat legitimeerde net als rond 1900 een continue inspanning en uitbreiding van veiligheidsbeleid, een samenzwering is immers altijd progressief-exponentieel. Ook de spiegeling van vijand en bestrijders trad op, ‘it takes a network to fight a network’, wat de globale uitbreiding van het contraterroristisch instrumentarium, uitwisseling van gegevens, Europese Kaderbesluiten, VN-resoluties en internationale arrest warrants mogelijk maakte. Het 51
Beatrice de Graaf – De strijd tegen de ‘zwarte internationale’ dispositief van de terroristische wereldsamenzwering, gespiegeld in de term war on terror, werd een sociaal-culturele en institutionele modus van gouvernmentalité. Dit dispositief ging tegelijkertijd echter verder dan het negentiende-eeuwse concept: nieuwe informatie- en transportatietechnieken, nieuwe methoden van datamining en computational policing maakten het mogelijk om de anarchist niet alleen in de werkelijkheid te lokaliseren, maar ook in de virtuele wereld, in de wereld van de worstcasescenario’s te plaatsen en daarmee de tijds- en ruimtedimensie van het veiligheidsdenken nog verder op te rekken dan rond 1900 mogelijk was. Maar dat is een ander verhaal, dat elders wordt verteld (zie bijvoorbeeld Mattelart 2007).
Beatrice de Graaf is associate professor (uhd) aan het Centrum voor Terrorisme en Contraterrorisme van de Universiteit Leiden (Campus Den Haag). Ze doet onder meer onderzoek naar ‘Enemies of the state: The making of a national security state in historical perspective’ (VIDIproject). http://hum.leiden.edu/history/enemies-of-the-state/.
Literatuur Aradau, C. en R. van Munster(2008) ‘Taming the future. The dispositif of risk in the war on terror’. In: L. Amoore en M. de Goede (red.) Risk and the war on terror. Londen/New York: Routledge, 23-40. Benz, W. (2007) Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion. Die Legende von der jüdischen Weltverschwörung. München: C.H. Beck. Bronsveld, A.W. (1870) ‘Kroniek’. Stemmen voor Waarheid en Vrede [SWV] (7): 791-813. Bronsveld, A.W. (1871) ‘Nabetrachtingen over den jongsten oorlog tusschen Duitschland en Frankrijk’. SWV (8): 321-333.
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie Bronsveld, A.W. (1871) ‘Nabetrachtingen (…)’ II. SWV (8): 540. Bronsveld, A.W. (1871) ‘Kroniek’. SWW (8): 357, 360-369 en 552-553. Butterworth, A. (2010) The world that never was. A true story of dreamers, schemers, anarchists and secret agents. Londen: Vintage Books. Charité, J. (1972) De Sociaal-Democratische Bond als orde- en gezagsprobleem voor de overheid, 1880-1888. Den Haag: Zuid-Hollandse drukkerij. Chesterton, C.K. (1908, herdruk 2008) The man who was Thursday. A nightmare. Londen. Davis, M. (2007) Buda’s wagon. A brief history of the car bomb. Londen/New York: Verso. Deflem, M. (2005) ‘International police cooperation’. In: R.A. Wright en J.M. Miller (red.) The encyclopedia of criminology. New York: Routledge, 795-798. Fijnaut, C. (2007) De geschiedenis van de Nederlandse politie. Een staatsinstelling in de maalstroom van de geschiedenis. Boom: Amsterdam. Foucault, M. (2004) Sécurité, territoire, population. Cours au Collège de France (1977-1978), Parijs: Gallimard/Seuil, hoofdstuk 4. Graaf, B. de (2009) ‘De Franse Revolutie als protestantse lieu de mémoire’. In: G. Harinck, B. Wallet en H. Paul (red.) Protestantse lieu de mémoires van 1750 tot heden. Kok: Kampen, 199-210. Jäger, J. (2006) Verfolgung durch Verwaltung. Internationales Verbrechen und internationale Polizeikooperation 1880-1933. Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft. Kist, H.J. (1901) Verslag der commissie door den minister van Justitie benoemd om advies uit te brengen nopens de maatregelen welke tot verbetering van de politie kunnen strekken. Den Haag: z.n. 52
Beatrice de Graaf – De strijd tegen de ‘zwarte internationale’ Lignian, F. (1894), ‘De anthropometrische signalementen volgens Alphonse Bertillon’. Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde: 987-996. Linden, J. van der (1986), De ordehandhaving en de organisatie van de politie in Amsterdam, 1840-1940. Nijmegen: ongepubliceerde scriptie. Mattelart, A. (2007) Kommunikation ohne Grenzen? Geschichte der Ideen und Strategien globaler Vernetzung. Berlijn: Avinus. Rooy, P. de (1971) Een revolutie die voorbijging. Domela Nieuwenhuis en het Palingoproer. Bussum: Fibula/Van Dishoeck. Smeets, J. (2007) De geschiedenis van de Nederlandse politie. Verdeeldheid en eenheid in het rijkspolitieapparaat. Amsterdam: Boom. Velde, H. te (1992) Gemeenschapszin en plichtsbesef. Liberalisme en Nationalisme in Nederland, 1870-1918. Den Haag: SDU, proefschrift. Wal, R. van de (2003) Of geweld zal worden gebruikt! Militaire bijstand bij de handhaving en het herstel van de openbare orde 1840-1920. Hilversum: Verloren. Zuijlen, R.W. van (2008) Veiligheid als opdracht. Een onderzoek naar veiligheid als fundamenteel recht en als positieve verplichting van de staat in het licht van de politietaak tot strafrechtelijke rechtshandhaving. Nijmegen: WLP, proefschrift.
De Creative Commons Licentie is van toepassing op dit artikel (NaamsvermeldingNiet-commercieel 3.0). Zie http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nl voor meer informatie.
1
Het begrip komt van Foucault. Zie voor Foucaults ideeën over dispositif en gouvernementalité: Foucault 2004; Aradau en Van Munster 2008: 24.
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie
2
Het eerste artikel over bertillonage in Nederland was geschreven door F. Lignian en verscheen in 1894 in het Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde. 3
Zie voor de tekst van de grondwet van 1887: http://www.denederlandsegrondwet.nl/9353000/1/j9vvihlf299q0sr/vi7df7it0ez5.
4
Eerste Kamer (EK), 1893-1894, Staatsbegroting 1894, IV, p. 232 (Fijnaut 2007: 247).
5
EK, 1894-1895, 12e vergadering, 31 januari 1895, p. 195 (Fijnaut 2007: 249).
6
Brief procureur-generaal Serraris aan minister van Justitie, 11 mei 1895. Minister van Justitie, invnr. 2.09.05, nr. 6487. Nationaal Archief. 7
TK, 1893-1894, 22ste vergadering, 7 december 1893, p. 394 (Fijnaut 2007: 276).
8
TK, 1896-1897, Staatsbegroting 1897, 2, IV, nr. 3, p. 33 (Fijnaut 2007: 278).
9
TK, 1904-1906, 36ste vergadering, 20 december 1904, p. 885-891 (Fijnaut 2007: 354).
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Beatrice de Graaf – De strijd tegen de ‘zwarte internationale’
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie
JOOST DE BLOOIS DE POLITIEK VAN DE HYPERBOOL OVER ONZICHTBARE VIJANDEN , POPULISME EN HARDWERKENDE NEDERLANDERS Krisis, 2011, Issue 3 www.krisis.eu
Wat tien jaar na 9/11 duidelijk is geworden, is dat het pathos van die dagen – ‘niets zal hetzelfde zijn’; het pathos van de historische breuk – inderdaad precies dat was: pathos. 9/11 is de gelegenheid gebleken voor het bestendigen en vooral intensiveren van politieke en economische ontwikkelingen die al op de grens van de jaren zeventig en tachtig zijn ingezet. Het pathos van 9/11 – het pathos van de strijd der beschavingen, de ondergang van het Avondland, de eindstrijd tussen goed en kwaad, de onzichtbare vijand – dat pathos heeft hierbij gretig lippendienst verleent, en doet dit nog steeds. 9/11 is de gelegenheid gebleken om de neoliberale, geglobaliseerde politieke economie, met verbaal en daadwerkelijk geweld wereldwijd, en zeker ook in Nederland, te institutionaliseren. Tien jaar na 9/11 zien we hoe de alliantie tussen neoliberale economische politiek en populistische retoriek, die al vorm begint te krijgen onder Thatcher en Reagan, zich heeft beklonken en tot een uiterst dwingende, en electoraal succesvolle consensus heeft geleid. Op de vraag ‘wat heeft 9/11 ons opgeleverd’, luidt het antwoord: de liberaal-populistische politiek die de obstakels voor de wereldwijde vrije markt – de welvaartstaat, democratische controle, actief burgerschap – langzaam maar zeker opruimt. Het is in die politieke en 54
economische constellatie dat de onzichtbare vijand een sleutelfiguur wordt. De geopolitieke wereldkaart kent na 9/11 nogal wat blinde vlekken. De war on terror is niet zozeer de oorlog tegen de onzichtbare vijand als wel het onzichtbaar maken van de vijand: ook in Europa staan de onzichtbare gevangenissen. Degenen die zich erin bevinden zijn, door het ontbreken van ieder juridisch statuut, onzichtbaar voor de radar van het recht. De permanente uitzonderingstoestand die de strijd tegen terreur mogelijk maakt, zet zowel het internationale als het binnenlandse recht, en degenen die het moet beschermen, buitenspel. Die uitzonderingstoestand is tevens de natuurlijke habitat van het neoliberale kapitalisme. Na 9/11 zien we hoe het verlies aan burgerrechten, hoe de onbemiddelde blootstelling aan de macht gepaard gaat met onze uitlevering aan het economisch darwinisme. Enerzijds zijn er de onzichtbare gevangenissen en juridische blinde vlekken als Guantánamo; anderzijds zijn er de speciale economische zones in bijvoorbeeld China, waar de regulering van de markt en de bescherming van arbeiders zijn opgeschort – of dichter bij huis: Europese staten die onder curatele van ondemocratische instituties als ECB of IMF staan, die regeringen geen andere keus laten dan het doorvoeren van een uitgesproken neoliberale agenda ten koste van hele bevolkingen. De sociaalgeograaf David Harvey vat de economische strategie van het neoliberalisme samen als ‘accumulatie door onteigening’. Oftewel de privatisering van alles wat los of vast zit, en vooral van de instituties van wat voorheen ‘de verzorgingsstaat’ was: gezondheidszorg, onderwijs, nutsvoorzieningen etc. (Harvey 2005). ‘Accumulatie door onteigening’ beoogt het veiligstellen van privaat belang ten koste van het gedeelde goed (volgens Harvey leidt de zogenaamde ‘vrije markt’ slechts tot de bestendiging van klassenbelangen). Het is precies die politiek van de privatisering ingezet in de jaren zeventig en tachtig, die na 9/11 in de hoogste versnelling is gegaan; en het is precies het politieke paradigma van de uitzonderingstoestand en het crisismanagement dat hierbij van dienst is. De strijd tegen de onzichtbare vijand is onlosmakelijk vervlochten met de politiek van de privatisering. De huidige alliantie tussen neoliberalen en populisten is de uitdrukking van die verwevenheid. Beide verlenen elkaar hun diensten: het liberalisme verzekert de belangen van de financiële elite; het populis-
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie me snoert iedere kritiek de mond door middel van de retoriek van de hyperbool en maakt gretig autoritaire maatregelen mogelijk. In zijn Commentaires sur la société du spectacle schrijft de Franse theoreticus Guy Debord dat hét model voor de huidige politiek de maffia is (Debord 1988). Dat wil zeggen: de maffia is niet zozeer de duistere onderwereld als wel de volstrekte omkeerbaarheid tussen de onderwereld van het brute eigenbelang en de bovenwereld van de democratische en juridische instituties. Na 9/11 zien we hoe op gelijksoortige wijze de fundamentele tegenstellingen verdwijnen die de moderne, democratische politiek hebben vormgegeven (het publieke en staatsbelang versus het private belang; de staatsrede versus burgerrechten en de onafhankelijke rechtspraak die deze moet garanderen; de belangen van de meerderheid versus de rechten van de minderheid, enzovoort): voor het liberaal-populisme doen deze tegenstellingen er domweg niet meer toe, waarmee het de facto afscheid neemt van de moderne democratie. In dit proces serveert het populisme de ideologische rechtvaardiging van het neoliberale eigenbelang; de belangrijkste politieke erfenis van 9/11 is het autoritair kapitalisme.
Consensus en autoritair kapitalisme De politieke betekenis van het afgelopen decennium is het cementeren van het autoritair kapitalisme als maatschappelijke consensus door het liberaal-populistische tandem. De beslissende politieke zet van de laatste dertig jaar is het vertalen, of beter: verplaatsen van politiek-economische vraagstukken naar morele en sociale ‘problemen’ (een strategie die in feite door het hele politieke spectrum heen wordt gehanteerd: van de liberale diehards Reagan en Thatcher tot sociaaldemocraten van de Derde Weg als Blair of Kok). De moral majority heeft weinig economisch belang bij de liberale politiek, maar identificeert zich met de morele, conservatieve retoriek die door diezelfde politiek wordt gehanteerd. De moral majority stemt op ethisch-ideologische gronden voor een economische politiek die volstrekt indruist tegen de belangen van diezelfde meerderheid: de economische politiek van de privatisering, van de wereldwijde vrije markt waarvan slechts een minderheid profiteert. Zoals Jacques Rancière het 55
Joost de Bloois – De politiek van de hyperbool stelt: consensus is het samenvallen van een politiek (en economisch) model en de veronderstelde, nationale moraal (de nationale cultuur of ethos) (Rancière 2009: 39). Consensus laat zodoende geen ruimte meer voor kritiek, of burgerschap als de uitoefening van kritiek, maar laat alle speelruimte aan uitsluiting en repressie. Die strategisch cruciale verplaatsing, richting consensus, wordt vandaag nog eens dunnetjes overgedaan door het liberaal-populisme: de Hardwerkende Nederlander identificeert zich met de belangen van een staat die allang geprivatiseerd is; wat als algemeen belang wordt gepresenteerd, is de facto het belang van de economische minderheid. Wat we zien is een groeiende zelfmarginalisering van de meerderheid die niet als zodanig wordt ervaren, en wordt afgewenteld op de onzichtbare vijand. Het populisme speelt hierin een sleutelrol: het nationalisme en de fixatie op symbolen zijn het vernis voor een economische politiek die zich van Hollandse folklore niets aantrekt. Het populisme laat zich het beste vertalen met het oxymoron ‘neoliberalisme in één land’. Het populisme parasiteert op de resten van de verzorgingsstaat, maar staat een economische politiek voor die in niets van het neoliberalisme valt te onderscheiden. Wat het voorstaat, is de uitholling van burgerrechten en uitsluiting van hele sociale groepen in naam van het behoud van de laatste restjes koopkracht en sociale zekerheid die tegelijkertijd door de economische politiek worden uitgehold. De onoplosbare tegenstellingen van het populisme vormen voor datzelfde populisme geen enkel probleem. Voor het populisme is het alle dagen carnaval: het wil én de vrije markt én gesloten grenzen, én vrijheid van meningsuiting én censuur, én de ontmaskering van ‘politieke’ rechters én de invoering van politieke rechtspraak, het zegt een cultuur te beschermen die én joods én christelijk én seculier is enzovoort. De liberaalpopulistische consensus drijft op dergelijke tegenstrijdigheden, die slechts worden bijeengehouden en gelegitimeerd door de hang naar autoritaire repressie – door repressie die gelegitimeerd wordt door het aanhalen van de ‘onzichtbare vijand’.
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie De politiek van de hyperbool De retorische figuur bij uitstek van het liberaal-populisme – dé retorische figuur van de politiek na 9/11 – is de hyperbool: de overdrijving die iedere vorm van dialoog, discussie en uitwisseling van argumenten bij voorbaat onmogelijk maakt. Het is precies de hyperbool die de fundamentele tegenstrijdigheden van het liberaal-populisme moet uitwissen, en het is precies in de hyperbool dat de repressie en het geweld schuilen. De ‘botsing der beschavingen’ combineert biologische en religieus-apocalyptische denkfiguren, die uiteraard geen alternatief toelaten: de confrontatie tussen het Westen en de islam wordt voorgesteld als een heuse eindstrijd, waarin het slechts een kwestie is van eten of gegeten worden; in de strijd op leven en dood is de ‘deportatie van miljoenen moslims’ – van het ‘islamitisch stemvee’ – noodzakelijk om het voortbestaan van de eigen cultuur te waarborgen. Dit profetisch-apocalyptisch denken laat uiteraard geen dialoog toe. De politieke tegenstander van de populist is geen gesprekspartner, maar een parasiet die ons in ons voortbestaan bedreigt. De anderen in het politieke speelveld worden door de populist dan ook steevast als pathologische gevallen voorgesteld: ze zijn ‘knettergek’, laf, ziek, gevaarlijk enzovoort; de publieke arena dient van hen gezuiverd te worden omdat zij een gevaar voor anderen en wellicht zichzelf vormen. In de politiek van de hyperbool wordt iedere vorm van kritiek een doodsdreiging, en in kwesties van leven of dood geldt uiteraard slechts één antwoord: het uitschakelen van de tegenstander. Het is in deze retoriek en politiek van de hyperbool dat de onzichtbare vijand een sleutelrol vervult, en dus eveneens een sleutelrol vervult in het in stand houden van de liberaal-populistische consensus. Die consensus steunt zodoende voor een belangrijk deel op wat de rechtsfilosoof Carl Schmitt, in zijn Theorie van de partizaan, de ‘absolute vijand’ noemt (Schmitt 2007). Geen politiek zonder vijand, aldus Schmitt, althans: geen politiek in de klassieke, ware zin. Politiek heeft bij Schmitt altijd nadrukkelijk een territorium: de vijand komt van buiten. De absolute vijand verstoort de wetten van de ware politiek: de absolute vijand heeft geen territorium; de anarchist of de terrorist trekken zich van de klassieke natiestaat niets aan. De absolute vijand maakt van de wereld zijn strijdtoneel en veralgemeniseert de burgeroorlog. Het antwoord dat vandaag wordt ge56
Joost de Bloois – De politiek van de hyperbool zocht op de absolute vijand is dubbelzinnig: enerzijds in de terugkeer naar een schmittiaans territoriaal model (de grenzen moeten dicht; de rolluiken op zijn Limburgs naar beneden; we moeten ons beschermen tegen de onzichtbare vijand uit het Oosten en de bureaucratie uit Brussel); anderzijds vervaagt de jacht op de onzichtbare vijand alle mogelijke grenzen. Niet alleen bestaat de war on terror uit eindeloze militaire interventies die zich niets gelegen laten liggen aan de grenzen van natiestaten en internationaal recht, de vijand bevindt zich ook onder ons. Het is de allochtoon, de kosmopoliet, de kritische journalist, de linkse kerk, de multicultimaffia enzovoort. Omdat de onzichtbare vijand onzichtbaar is, kan en moet hij dus steeds weer een nieuw gezicht krijgen. Alles en iedereen die zich niet conformeert aan de liberaal-populistische consensus kan tot onzichtbare vijand worden verklaard.
Over Hardwerkende Nederlanders en andere politieke dieren Étienne Balibar onderstreept het onbepaalde karakter van het begrip ‘identiteit’ in het populistische discours: de essentie van de Franse of Nederlandse identiteit wordt in de populistische retoriek nooit helder gedefinieerd (Balibar 1998: 133). Het begrip ‘identiteit’ is een leeg begrip en volgens Balibar schuilt in die leegte de politieke slagkracht (en het gevaar) ervan: juist vanwege het gebrek aan een heldere definitie kan iedereen er potentieel van buitengesloten worden. Iedereen is een potentiële onzichtbare vijand: de sociaaldemocraat zowel als de moslim. De onmogelijkheid van de definitie van ‘identiteit’ is niet zozeer de zwakte van het populistische discours, maar juist de kracht ervan; de onbepaaldheid werkt twee kanten op: zij werpt een dam op tegen beschuldigingen van racisme en rekt het vijandprofiel eindeloos op. De populist haalt altijd zijn gelijk. Het is juist de leegte van het begrip 'identiteit' dat het tot instrument van diffuse repressie kan maken. De Hardwerkende Nederlander is een voorbeeld van zo’n ‘leeg’ begrip, dat een centrale plaats inneemt in het huidige politieke discours. In de eerste plaats valt het tautologische karakter van de Hardwerkende Nederlander op: wie Nederlander is, is hardwerkend, wie hard werkt, is Nederlander.
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie De Hardwerkende Nederlander is een generiek concept, het kan dus alle kanten op. In de Hardwerkende Nederlander kan zich zowel de racist herkennen als de gewiekste zakenjongen, de Urker visser, de TurksNederlandse ondernemer enzovoort. De Hardwerkende Nederlander ziet zichzelf met nadruk niet als 'arbeider': de emancipatoire, in de voorbije eeuw cruciale, collectieve identificering met het klassenbegrip ‘arbeider’ is vervangen door een uiterst individualistisch werkethos, dat louter nog ruimte laat voor de collectieve symbolische, nationalistische identificering met de culturele identiteit. De Hardwerkende Nederlander voorziet maatschappelijke groepen die, in economisch en sociaal-politiek opzicht, logischerwijs tegenover elkaar staan van een schijnbaar gedeelde identiteit: de VVD-stemmer die financieel profijt heeft van de globalisering en economische deregulering én de PVV-stemmer die van diezelfde ontwikkelingen de keiharde consequenties ondervindt. Beiden identificeren zich met de Hardwerkende Nederlander. Tegelijkertijd, omdat het hier gaat om een minimale, generieke identiteit, maakt zij generieke uitsluiting mogelijk. De Hardwerkende Nederlander kan even gemakkelijk alle buitenlanders uitsluiten (zoals de ‘luie’ Zuid-Europeanen) als degenen die verraad plegen aan deze uiterst minimalistische definitie van Nederlanderschap: zij die blijkbaar niet hard werken (kunstenaars, werklozen, wetenschappers, studenten, psychiatrische patiënten enzovoort). Wederom zien we de volmaakte harmonie tussen het populistische discours (het discours van de uitsluiting) en het neoliberale discours (dat van het economisch darwinisme). Balibar volgend kunnen we stellen dat het succes van het concept van de Hardwerkende Nederlander ligt in het samengaan van het sociale en het nationale: de Hardwerkende Nederlander koppelt de voorstelling van nationale identiteit aan een economisch-sociaal model (Balibar 1998: 8). Hierin ligt wederom het gevaar: de identificatie met de Hardwerkende Nederlander ontneemt de burger het politieke burgerschap. Dat wil zeggen, een andere politieke overtuiging wordt onmiddellijk vertaald als ‘links landverraad’. ‘Niet lullen maar poetsen’ is een uiterst autoritair credo. De Hardwerkende Nederlander wil bijgevolg een staat die niet langer moederlijk verzorgend is, maar vaderlijk bestraffend en belonend: belonend, uiteraard, voor de Hardwerkende Nederlander en bestraffend voor 57
Joost de Bloois – De politiek van de hyperbool al diegenen die van deze identiteit zijn uitgesloten. Weer zien we de paradox van de huidige politiek: door de neoliberale globalisering verdwijnt de soevereiniteit van de natiestaat, maar die wordt onmiddellijk gecompenseerd, in woorden althans, door de populistische, patriarchale opvatting van de staat. De nationale soevereiniteit is een wassen neus in de context van de wereldwijde vrije markt, wat rest is de repressieve soevereiniteit die zich richt tegen ieder alternatief voor de economische politiek van de wereldwijde vrije markt.
De onzichtbare opstand? Binnen een dergelijke consensus is kritiek uiterst precair: het is zeer moeilijk te ontsnappen aan voorstellingen van de onzichtbare vijand. Tegenover een dergelijke consensus, tegenover de alliantie van het wereldwijde, genetwerkte neoliberale kapitalisme en het populisme, lijkt alleen een asymmetrische strijd mogelijk: de kritiek rest slechts de rol van de onzichtbare, ingebedde vijand – de goede partizaan. Dit betekent in feite: het overnemen van een politieke figuur die bedoeld is als rechtvaardiging voor repressie; het herhalen van die figuur betekent de eindeloze intensivering van die repressie. De uitbarstingen die we na 9/11 gezien hebben in de banlieues van Parijs en in de zomer van 2011 in Engelse steden als Londen en Manchester, laten zien dat er ogenschijnlijk niets meer bemiddelt tussen (uitgesloten) sociale groepen en de repressieve, liberaalpopulistische consensus. De reactie op deze uitbarstingen was voorspelbaar. Het opvoeren van repressie door middel van buitenproportionele straffen, en ook: de volstrekt hysterische retoriek van de onzichtbare vijand die nu victoriaanse niveaus heeft bereikt in de veroordeling van de ‘beestachtige onderklasse’, het morele verval en de besmetting van de goede blanke zeden door de primitieve zwarte cultuur van hiphop en hoodies. Veel van de strategieën en theorieën in radicaal-linkse hoek zijn gebaseerd op een, ironisch genoeg verwant, geloof in een moderne Verelendung: in de totale uitsluiting en onteigening door het liberaalpopulisme schuilt de bevrijding; zie bijvoorbeeld theorieën als die van het Franse tijdschrift Tiqqun en het Comité Invisible, die van invloed zijn op recente sociale protesten in Griekenland, of de studentenprotesten in
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie
Joost de Bloois – De politiek van de hyperbool
Engeland en Italië (zie De Bloois 2011). De gedachte is: de totale onteigening bevrijdt de potentie voor een radicaal alternatief; in zekere zin wordt gezegd dat het liberaal-populisme zijn eigen onzichtbare vijand creëert die een bevrijdend-subversieve werking heeft. Echter, de consensus wordt door deze onzichtbare vijand helemaal niet weggenomen. Integendeel: de onzichtbare vijand neemt de rol van Kop van Jut op zich. De politiek na 9/11 is de politiek van de crisis en niets garandeert consensus zo goed als crisis, zie de verkiezing van Sarkozy, Cameron en Rutte. De politiek van de consensus blijft functioneren ook na het verdwijnen van de klassieke natiestaat, ook na het uiteenvallen van het sociale weefsel, juist omdat zij de perverse rechtvaardiging is voor deze fenomenen.
nieuwe Franse filosofie. Denkers en thema’s voor de 21e eeuw. Amsterdam: Boom.
Het pathos van 9/11 is dus louter pathos gebleken; het diende vooral om een politiek-economische beweging die een kwart eeuw eerder in gang was gezet te versnellen: de beweging van democratie naar algemeen cliëntelisme, naar privatisering van de restanten van democratische instituties, naar een louter nog repressieve staat, naar clustering van belangen, van tijdelijke allianties gedreven door financieel belang op de korte termijn. Dit alles wordt mogelijk gemaakt door een populistische retoriek die parasiteert op een moralisme en een nationale identiteit waaraan de politieke economie van het neoliberalisme geen enkele boodschap heeft. Je aan die houdgreep ontworstelen is de politieke opgave na 9/11.
Schmitt, C. (2007) Theory of the partisan. New York: Telos Press.
Joost de Bloois is universitair docent aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam (Capaciteitsgroep Literatuurwetenschap). Recent heeft hij onder andere gepubliceerd over Tiqqun, Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida en Guy Debord.
Literatuur Balibar, É. (1998) Droit de cité. Parijs: Presses universitaires de France. Bloois, J. de (2011) ‘Tiqqun en het Comité Invisible’. In: B. Ieven (red.) De 58
Debord, G. (1988) Commentaires sur la société du spectacle. Parijs: Gallimard. Harvey, D. (2005) Neoliberalism. A brief history. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rancière, J. (2009) Moments politiques. Interventions 1977-2009. Parijs: Éditions La Fabrique.
De Creative Commons Licentie is van toepassing op dit artikel (NaamsvermeldingNiet-commercieel 3.0). Zie http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nl voor meer informatie.
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MARIEKE DE GOEDE DATA - ANALYSE EN PRECRIMINELE VEILIGHEID IN DE STRIJD TEGEN TERRORISME 1
Krisis, 2011, Issue 3 www.krisis.eu
De onbekende terrorist In Richard Flanagans roman De onbekende terrorist raakt een jonge Australische vrouw die werkt als stripper en paaldanseres verweven in een web van verdenkingen en verdachtmakingen waardoor zij wordt aangezien voor een terrorist. Gina – bijgenaamd The Doll – beleeft een kortstondige liefdesaffaire met een man die zij op het strand ontmoet en die de zoon van haar vriendin uit het water redt. De volgende morgen is de man verdwenen – maar langzaam beseft The Doll dat zij doelwit is van een grote en steeds intensievere zoektocht van de Australische politie en veiligheidsdiensten. De korrelige beelden van een bewakingscamera waarop The Doll samen met de man zijn appartementengebouw binnenkomen verschijnen op tv, met de bijbehorende headline: ‘Terrorismeverdachte ontsnapt aan politieblokkade’ (Flanagan 2006: 92). Kleine brokjes informatie uit het leven van The Doll – haar werk in de stripclub, haar clientèle van politici en mediamagnaten, het gespaarde geld dat zij cash in haar appartement bewaart om op een dag te ontsnappen aan haar leven – worden samengevoegd en construeren een beeld van een homegrown terrorist: een ‘Aussie turned on her own’. Zoals pixels een computerbeeld vormen en kunnen veranderen, zo worden de brokjes data uit het leven 59
van The Doll samengevoegd om het beeld te vormen van een lokale terrorismecel, gefinancierd door de seksindustrie en de drugshandel. The Dolls vlucht voor het dichterbij komende veiligheidsnet gaat gepaard met steeds meer sensationele mediaverhalen en verdachtmakingen over Australiës eigen ‘zwarte weduwe’. Nadat zij een paar belangrijke momenten om zichzelf aan te geven heeft laten passeren, beseft The Doll dat het daarvoor te laat is geworden. Zij begint in te zien hoezeer haar marginale leven, haar sporadische drugsgebruik, haar gespaarde cashgeld, een verdacht beeld oplevert. Aan het eind, tegelijk met het besef dat zij niet zal kunnen ontsnappen, reflecteert Gina op de rol die zij ongewild is gaan spelen voor haar land, dat in de ban is van de terrorismedreiging: ‘And then she wondered: what if people could not live without such fear? What if people needed fear to know who they were, to reassure themselves that they were living their lives in the right way? [...] And part of her felt oddly, stupidly, proud, as if they had been specifically chosen for this clearly necessary role’ (Flanagan 2006: 268-269). Met de pakkende beschrijvingen van de manier waarop verdenkingen en verdachtmakingen worden geproduceerd en gecirculeerd, met het zichtbaar maken van de kwetsbaarheid van marginale levensstijlen en met de analyse van de rol van de media in het genereren en opblazen van de angst voor terrorisme, kan Flanagans roman worden beschouwd als een scherpe ontleding van het huidige veiligheidslandschap. Flanagan nodigt ons uit te reflecteren op de manier waarop data worden samengevoegd en geïnterpreteerd om te komen tot een beeld van de onbekende vijand. Zoals pixels een mediabeeld vormen, suggereert Flanagan, zo kunnen alledaagse data een beeld van dreiging en kwade intentie gaan vormen (Amoore 2009). In mijn bijdrage aan de discussie over de ‘onbekende vijand’, wil ik nader ingaan op de manier waarop commerciële data worden ingezet in de strijd tegen terrorisme en op de vragen rondom transparantie en legitimiteit die hier worden opgeroepen. Ik zal betogen dat het gebruik van (financiële) data in de strijd tegen terrorisme niet zozeer leidt tot een maatschappij van surveillance, maar tot praktijken van veiligheid zoals geanalyseerd door Michel Foucault. Belangrijker dan de vergaring en centrale opslag van data zijn de analysemodellen en interpretatieve schema’s die beogen
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie potentiële toekomstige terroristen preventief te identificeren. Deze preventieve politieke ambities, die worden uitgevoerd met behulp van commerciële en financiële data, roepen belangrijke maatschappelijke vragen op.
Data en de strijd tegen terrorisme Tien jaar na 9/11 is Flanagans uitnodiging van pertinent belang omdat de ambitie om te beschikken over alledaagse transactiedata een van de belangrijkste doelstellingen van het huidige veiligheidsbeleid is – met name in Europa (zie ook Broeders 2007; Den Boer en Van Buuren 2012; Dijstelbloem en Meijer 2009). Van de retentie van telefoongegevens tot de analyse van overboekingen, van nieuwe meldingsplicht voor banken en verzekeraars tot uitwisseling van informatie over luchtvaartpassagiers: alledaagse commerciële data worden beschouwd als zijnde van cruciaal belang in de strijd tegen terrorisme. De onderliggende redenering voor deze ontwikkelingen schrijft aan dergelijke data de capaciteit toe om risicovolle transacties te signaleren en verdachte netwerken in kaart te brengen. Met andere woorden, het denken is dat deze data, mits zij op de juiste wijze met elkaar in verband worden gebracht, een beeld kunnen vormen van toekomstige dreiging en terroristische intentie. Op deze manier, zo klinken de beleidsambities in het huidige veiligheidslandschap, kunnen terroristen in een vroeg stadium worden geïdentificeerd en verdachte netwerken preventief worden verstoord. In de woorden van de voormalige directeur van het Amerikaanse Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff: ‘If we learned anything from September 11 2001, it is that we need to be better at connecting the dots of terrorist-related information. After September 11, we used creditcard and telephone records to identify those linked with the hijackers. But wouldn’t it be better to identify such connections before a hijacker boards a plane?’ (Chertoff 2006). De onzichtbare vijand, in Chertoffs bewoording, is de terrorist die nog niet aan boord is gegaan, de aanslagpleger die zijn creditcard gebruikt om 60
Marieke de Goede – Data-analyse en precriminele veiligheid waterstofperoxide in te slaan, de potentiële toekomstige terrorist die verdachte websites bezoekt. In Europa loopt Nederland – samen met het Verenigd Koninkrijk – voorop in de ambitie om alledaagse commerciële data toegankelijk te maken voor veiligheidsdiensten. Op aandringen van het Verenigd Koninkrijk nam de Europese Unie in 2005 de richtlijn Dataretentie aan, die telecommunicatiebedrijven verplicht om communicatiedata tussen de zes maanden en twee jaar op te slaan zodat ze toegankelijk gemaakt kunnen worden voor politie en justitie. In november 2010 bleek dat het Nederlandse ministerie van Justitie liet onderzoeken of centrale toegang tot de financiele gegevens van burgers mogelijk gemaakt zou kunnen worden voor opsporingsdoeleinden. Bij het ministerie werd de implementatie van de richtlijn Dataretentie aangegrepen om niet alleen, zoals voorgeschreven in de richtlijn, telefoongegevens en gegevens over internetgebruik centraal op te slaan, maar ook financiële gegevens. Het projectplan Implementatie Dataretentie onderzoekt de ontwikkeling van een zogenoemde ‘verkeerstoren’, waarin financiële en communicatiegegevens kunnen worden opgeslagen voor toegang door de veiligheidsdiensten en het openbaar ministerie (ministerie van Justitie 2009). Na openbaring van de plannen werden zij door het nieuwe kabinet snel afgeblazen. Maar dat betekent niet dat zij op termijn niet door zullen gaan. Financiële data spelen een speciale rol in de zoektocht naar het geheime wapen van de strijd tegen terrorisme omdat, zo wordt aangenomen, moneytrails don’t lie. Met andere woorden, financiële gegevens (bijvoorbeeld creditcardtransacties of internationale overboekingen) worden beschouwd als een bijzonder waardevolle informatiebron die bovendien weinig fraudegevoelig is. Aan dit soort gegevens wordt de capaciteit toegeschreven om een reëel beeld te onthullen van het dagelijks leven van de potentiële verdachte en zijn of haar connecties. Zoals een Amerikaanse beleidsmaker het verwoordde: ‘The evidence that the financial system coughs up is actually true and correct; it doesn’t lie. There’s not much room, wiggle room for it being false or suspect, as opposed to the kind of evidence you might get out of extreme measures in interrogation rooms’ (Aufhauser 2003).
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie
Marieke de Goede – Data-analyse en precriminele veiligheid
De verkenningen van het Nederlandse ministerie van Justitie lopen dus slechts vooruit op bredere Europese ontwikkelingen, waarin op grote schaal de opslag van financiële gegevens van burgers zal worden gerealiseerd. Dit is afgesproken in een recent verdrag tussen de Europese Unie en de Verenigde Staten over de trans-Atlantische uitwisseling van de financiele gegevens van het Belgische bedrijf SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication). Na een vierjarige controverse over het feit dat SWIFT Amerikaanse veiligheidsdiensten toegang gaf tot financiële gegevens van Europese burgers in het kader van het zogenaamde Terrorism Financing Tracking Programme (TFTP), is er in dit akkoord afgesproken dat de Europese Unie een eigen systeem voor financiële dataanalyse zal opzetten. Hierbij zullen Europese veiligheidsdiensten en Europol inzage krijgen in de gegevens van SWIFT in het kader van terrorismegerelateerd onderzoek.
beeld Roessler 2006), vragen die door leden van het Europees Parlement veelvuldig aan de kaak zijn gesteld tijdens de onderhandelingen met de VS over toegang tot de SWIFT-gegevens. Maar het is niet zozeer het geval dat hier een bigbrotherachtige maatschappij aan het ontstaan is, al spelen overheden een belangrijke rol in deze ontwikkelingen en worden verschillende databases steeds vaker aan elkaar gekoppeld. De huidige literatuur over surveillance benadrukt de centrale rol van overheden in de verzameling en analyse van steeds uitgebreidere databestanden van burgers (bijvoorbeeld Lyon 2003; Ericson 2007). Toch zijn we nog ver verwijderd van Orwells dystopie: er is vooralsnog geen centraal collectiepunt voor alle veiligheidsprogramma’s; de grip van de overheid wordt gemarkeerd door gemiste kansen en technische problemen. De rol van de private industrie in de opslag en analyse van gegevens is enorm belangrijk en komt nauwelijks aan bod in het boek van Orwell.
Uit de rapporten en onderhandelingen die aan dit programma zijn voorafgegaan, is duidelijk geworden dat de relatie met terrorisme binnen dit programma zeer breed wordt geïnterpreteerd. Men spreekt hier van een nexus met terrorisme, waarbij onduidelijk blijft hoe zo’n nexus is gedefinieerd en op welk bewijsmateriaal deze zou moeten berusten. Momenteel onderzoekt de Europese Commissie bovendien of het programma kan worden uitgebreid naar andere soorten financiële data (bijvoorbeeld creditcardtransacties), meer financiële instellingen en naar het bestrijden van georganiseerde misdaad (Europese Commissie 2011; zie ook De Goede 2012). Het Europese Terrorism Financing Tracking System, de EUrichtlijn Dataretentie en het nieuwe verdrag inzake passagiersgegevens, laten duidelijk zien dat de EU als veiligheidsactor haar pijlen richt op de verzameling en analyse van transactiegegevens (Den Boer en Van Buuren 2012).
Het landschap van hedendaagse surveillance is eerder een patchwork, een oneven terrein met vele deelnemers, verschillende technische systemen, en ongelijke regelgeving. Zoals Huub Dijstelbloem (2009: 24) schrijft over wat hij de ‘migratiemachine’ noemt: ‘surveillance [geschiedt] niet vanuit een centraal punt (een grote regiekamer), maar vanuit een proliferatie van praktijken. […] Surveilleren en controleren zijn doorgedrongen tot in de haarvaten van de maatschappij’. In dit complexe landschap zijn private deelnemers een zeer belangrijk element, zowel omdat commerciële data als financiële gegevens worden herbenut voor veiligheidsdoeleinden, maar ook omdat burgers vaak zonder bezwaar en uit eigen wil hun gegevens laten registreren voor commerciële doeleinden, bijvoorbeeld bij het gebruik van de bonuskaart van Albert Heijn. In die zin vormt jacht op de onzichtbare vijand een uitdaging voor politiek-filosofische theorieën over de ‘surveillance society’.
Surveillance of security? Waarom is het belangrijk kritisch te blijven tegenover deze ontwikkelingen? Dit is niet alleen vanwege vragen rondom privacy van burgers en de juistheid van de gegevens die worden opgeslagen en gebruikt (zie bijvoor61
In zijn lezingen rondom de thema’s security, territory en population geeft Michel Foucault zich rekenschap van de complexiteit van macht die opereert in naam van veiligheid. Foucault benadrukt dat surveillance, zoals gebaseerd op ideeën van het panopticon een ‘archaïsche’ vorm van macht is, ‘the oldest dream of the oldest sovereign’ (2007: 66). In tegenstelling tot een dergelijke alziende macht werkt de machtspraktijk die Foucault ‘veiligheid’ (security) noemt op basis van risicotechnologieën en probabilisti-
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie sche interventies. Het doel van veiligheid, voor Foucault, is het organiseren van (economische) circulatie: ‘[I]t was a matter of organizing circulation, eliminating its dangerous elements, making a division between good and bad circulation, and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad’ (2007: 18; ook Amoore en De Goede 2008b). Eenvoudig gezegd, veiligheid als risicopraktijk heeft als doelstelling het toestaan en intensiveren van circulatie (passagiers in de luchtvaart, financiële transacties) door het onderscheiden en classificeren van normale en abnormale patronen en personen (Amoore en De Goede, 2008a). Ik zou dus willen suggereren dat we minder op weg zijn naar de toekomstvisie van Orwell – waarin een alles controlerende overheid volledig zicht heeft op het handelen van haar burgers – dan naar het zwarte scenario dat wordt geschetst in Flanagans Onbekende terrorist. Of misschien naar de dystopie van Philip Dick in zijn novelle Minority report, waar personen die ervan verdacht worden op het punt te staan een misdrijf te plegen, worden opgepakt en voor onbepaalde tijd in limbo gehouden. De huidige uitdaging van veiligheidsdiensten is niet zozeer het vergaren van alle transactiedata van burgers, maar het selecteren, filteren, weggooien en aan elkaar puzzelen van die data. Zoals Flanagan laat zien, is de verzameling van gegevens minder belangrijk dan de manier waarop ze worden geanalyseerd, geselecteerd en bijeen worden gebracht om een bepaald beeld aannemelijk te maken. Juist door de selectie, analyse en combinatie van hele specifieke gegevens wordt de onzichtbare vijand zichtbaar gemaakt (Amoore 2009). De huidige dataoorlogen tegen de onzichtbare vijand richten zich dus op normale en legitieme transacties waar een potentieel tot het steunen van terrorisme aan wordt toegeschreven. Deze transacties zijn niet per definitie illegaal, maar worden geoormerkt als abnormaal en beschouwd als zijnde pre-crime, ofwel precrimineel. Criminologe Lucia Zedner (2007: 262) legt uit dat deze benadering een verschuiving van ons temporale perspectief inhoudt: ‘“Pre-crime” shifts the temporal perspective to anticipate and forestall that which has not yet occurred and may never do so.’ Het is dan ook minder de doelstelling van overheid en veiligheidsdiensten om alle transacties van burgers te bekijken en analyseren. Eerder is het de bedoeling om op basis van geselecteerde gegevens een beeld te vormen 62
Marieke de Goede – Data-analyse en precriminele veiligheid van criminele intentie en mogelijk toekomstige terrorismedreiging. Het doel is de onzichtbare vijand op te sporen – de dader die nog geen bom heeft gemaakt; de potentiële aanslagpleger die nog geen concrete plannen heeft gesmeed; de toekomstige terrorist die nog niet is geradicaliseerd. In dit kader worden supermarkten en groothandelaren uitgenodigd de aankoop van ongebruikelijke hoeveelheden kunstmest of peroxide te melden; worden banken verplicht ongebruikelijke transacties te definiëren en te melden; en wordt het bezoeken van jihadistische websites en onthoofdingsfilmpjes als verdacht beschouwd. Het bijeenbrengen en analyseren van dergelijke meldingen, maakt ingrijpen in een vroeg stadium mogelijk. De strijd tegen de onzichtbare vijand behelst dus een politics of preemption – een preëmptieve veiligheidspolitiek – die gevaren beoogt aan te pakken voordat zij zich ontwikkelen tot tastbare en meetbare dreigingen of risico’s (Aradau en Van Munster 2011; Anderson 2010). De voormalige Amerikaanse president Bush heeft deze logica verwoord aan de vooravond van de invasie in Irak in een zin die beroemd is geworden: ‘If we wait for threats to materialise, we will have waited too long’, zei Bush (2002). Tien jaar later kunnen we zien dat het voorzorgsprincipe ten grondslag ligt aan data-analyseprogramma’s en antiradicaliseringsinitiatieven die het speerpunt vormen van Europese contraterrorismeinitiatieven, en die ingrijpende maatschappelijke gevolgen zullen hebben. Net als het Europese SWIFT-programma, zijn vele van deze initiatieven recent begonnen of liggen zij nog op de tekentafel. In die zin is de impact van de oorlog tegen terrorisme tien jaar na de aanslagen nog maar net begonnen.
Preëmptie en legitimiteit Preventief en preëmptief ingrijpen is niet neutraal. Intensivering van politie-inzet, vergaande analyse van persoonlijke transacties en aansporing tot waakzaamheid bij burgers die worden opgeroepen verdachte situaties en gesprekken te melden, brengen kosten met zich mee en kunnen maatschappelijke relaties beïnvloeden. In de novelle Minority report is uitein-
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie delijk de preventieve veiligheidsinterventie zelf de ramp die zich voltrekt in het verhaal (Coutin 2008). De precriminele aard van verdachte transacties en verdacht gedrag roept een aantal belangrijke vragen op omtrent de verantwoording die wordt afgelegd over het melden, analyseren en interveniëren op basis van dergelijke informatie, en de meer algemene legitimiteit van dergelijk veiligheidspingrijpen. Bij wijze van conclusie zou ik kort drie punten van kritiek onder de aandacht willen brengen. Ten eerste kan preëmptief optreden leiden tot gevoelens van maatschappelijk onbehagen en geïnstitutionaliseerd wantrouwen. Burgers worden aangemoedigd extra op te letten in de publieke ruimte, hun medeburgers met achterdocht te bekijken en verdachte gedragingen te signaleren. Rens van Munster (2004: 533) wijst op de mogelijke ondermijning van de sociale samenhang in de ‘risicomaatschappij’ die een ‘cultuur van suspicion’ veroorzaakt, ‘waarbij iedereen verdacht is en maatschappelijke saamhorigheid wordt ondergraven door individuen eerst en vooral te beschouwen als een risicoprofiel’. Zo werden in november 2005 twee moslimmannen gearresteerd in de trein van Frankfurt naar Amsterdam toen zij zich volgens medepassagiers verdacht gedroegen omdat zij traditioneel gekleed waren en samen het toilet bezochten. Toen een medepassagier het alarmnummer belde, werd al het treinverkeer rond Amsterdam Centraal Station stilgelegd totdat de mannen gemaskerd en in handboeien waren afgevoerd. Een paar uur later werden de mannen weer vrijgelaten, nadat politieverhoor had vastgesteld dat de mannen op terugreis waren van een bezoek aan een Duitse moskee, en in de trein een reinigingsritueel hadden uitgevoerd voor het bidden. De mannen ontvingen geen excuses of compensatie, en de politie benadrukte dat de actie van de medepassagiers gerechtvaardigd was: ‘Dat vragen we ook van mensen’, zei een politiewoordvoerder tegen de pers, ‘Dit gedrag was anders dan normaal. Godzijdank bleek er niets te zijn’ (geciteerd in Nu.nl 2005). Een tweede punt van kritiek betreft de onvoorspelbaarheid van veiligheidsingrijpen en criteria van abnormaliteit. Net zoals de terroristen, proberen veiligheidsactoren onvoorspelbaar op te treden en in te grijpen. Zo schrijft het Britse Home Office: ‘The response to crime and terrorism needs to be as supple as the criminals and terrorists themselves’ (UK 63
Marieke de Goede – Data-analyse en precriminele veiligheid Home Office 2007: 13). Maar dit leidt tot een situatie waarin burgers niet weten waarop zij kunnen rekenen en wanneer hun gedrag als verdacht zou kunnen worden bestempeld. In tegenstelling tot een disciplinaire macht, die werkt met duidelijke voorschriften voor de burger, laat het paradigma van security de burger in onzekerheid over de operationele criteria aangaande normaal en abnormaal gedrag. Engin Isin (2004) heeft het concept van de ‘neurotische burger’ ontwikkeld om te duiden hoe de moderne burger wordt geleid door stress en onvoorspelbare angsten, die een rationele afweging van maatschappelijke keuzes onmogelijke maken. Ten slotte is er een situatie ontstaan waarin onvoldoende politieke en maatschappelijke verantwoording wordt afgelegd over veiligheidsbeslissingen. De potentieel catastrofale aard van de terroristische dreiging fungeert als een rechtvaardiging voor ingrijpend veiligheidsoptreden. Traditionele kosten-batenanalyses worden niet langer van toepassing geacht nu de maatschappij wordt geconfronteerd met nieuwe, onvoorspelbare dreigingen. Dit geldt bijvoorbeeld in relatie tot de strijd tegen terrorismefinanciering waar, na investering van miljoenen euro’s door banken om aan nieuwe regelgeving te voldoen, de meeste experts twijfelen aan het nut van de opsporing van terrorisme(financiers) op deze manier. Maar we zien deze dynamiek ook bij publiek opreden van politie en het uitvoeren van zogenaamd preëmptieve arrestaties. In december 2010 werden in Rotterdam invallen gedaan in Somalische belhuizen, waarbij hard werd opgetreden, veel werd vernield en twaalf verdachten werden gearresteerd – en dat terwijl er maar vier personen werden gezocht. Toen in minder dan een week alle verdachten weer op vrije voeten waren gesteld, verdedigde de Nederlandse coördinator Terrorismebestrijding deze acties vanuit het voorzorgsprincipe. ‘Het moest heel snel’, zei Erik Akerboom tegen NRC, ‘het was pikkedonker en het arrestatieteam moest snel opereren. Dan is er geen tijd om van iedereen de identiteit vast te stellen. Dan neemt de politie het zekere voor het onzekere en arresteert ze iedereen van wie ze denkt dat die betrokken is’ (Rijlaarsdam 2010). Met dergelijke redeneringen worden de grenzen van legitiem veiligheidsoptreden binnen de westerse rechtstaat aanzienlijk opgerekt. Tien jaar na
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie 9/11 zijn we nog maar aan het begin van de strijd tegen de Onbekende Vijand.
Marieke de Goede is hoogleraar Politicologie aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam. Zij coördineert het NWO-Vidi-onderzoeksproject European Security Cultures, dat preventieve en preëmptieve veiligheidpraktijken in de EU analyseert. Haar boek Speculative security. The politics of pursuing terrorist monies verschijnt in 2012 bij University of Minnesota Press. Professor De Goede is associate editor van het tijdschrift Security Dialogue en lid van de commissie Vrede & Veiligheid van de Adviesraad Internationale Vraagstukken (AIV).
Literatuur Amoore, L. en M. de Goede (red.) (2008a) Risk and the war on terror. Londen: Routledge, Amoore, L. en M. de Goede (2008b) ‘Transactions After 9/11. ‘The banal face of the preemptive strike’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33 (2): 173-185. Amoore, L. (2009) ‘Lines of sight. On the visualization of unknown futures’. Citizenship Studies 13 (1): 17-30. Anderson, B. (2010) ‘Preemption, precaution, preparedness. Anticipatory action and future geographies’. Progress in Human Geography 34: 777-789.
Marieke de Goede – Data-analyse en precriminele veiligheid Aufhauser, D. (2003) ‘War on terror. Follow the money’. PolicyWatch 812, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=1690. Bibler Coutin, S. (2008) ‘Subverting discourses of risk in the war on terror’. In L. Amoore en M. de Goede (red.) Risk and the war on terror. Londen: Routledge. Boer, M. den en J. van Buuren (2012) ‘Security clouds. Toward an ethical governance of surveillance in Europe’. Journal of Cultural Economy, te verschijnen.Broeders, D. (2007) ‘The new digital borders of Europe. EU databases and the surveillance of irregular migrants’, International Sociology, 22 (1): 71-92 . Bush, G.W. (2002) Speech at West Point, June 1 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/01/international/02PTEX-WEB.html. Chertoff, M. (2006) ‘A tool we need to stop the next airliner plot’. Washington Post, August 29: A15. Dijstelbloem, H. (2009) ‘De raderen van de migratiemachine’. In: H. Dijstelbloem en A. Meijer (red.) De migratiemachine. De rol van technologie in het migratiebeleid. Amsterdam: van Gennep. Dijstelbloem, H. en A. Meijer (red.) De migratiemachine. De rol van technologie in het migratiebeleid. Amsterdam: van Gennep. Ericson, R.V. (2007) Crime in an insecure world. Cambridge: Polity. Flanagan, R. (2006) The unknown terrorist. Londen: Atlantic Books.
Aradau, C. en R. van Munster (2007) ‘Governing terrorism through risk. Taking precautions, (un)knowing the future’. European Journal of International Relations 13 (1): 89-115.
Foucault, M. (2007) Security,territory, population. Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978. M. Senellart (red.), vert. G. Burchell. Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Aradau, C. en R. van Munster (2011) Politics of catastrophe. Genealogies of the unknown. Londen: Routledge.
Goede, M. de (2012) ‘The SWIFT affair and the global politics of European security’. Journal of Common Market Studies, te verschijnen.
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Isin, E.F. (2004) ‘The neurotic citizen’. Citizenship Studies 8 (3): 217-235. Lyon, D. (2003) Surveillance after September 11. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ministerie van Justitie (2009) Projectplan implementatie dataretentie. Den Haag, 11 mei, https://www.bof.nl/live/wp-content/uploads/20090511-projectplanimplementatie-dataretentie.pdf. Munster, R. van (2004) ‘De conceptualisering van veiligheid binnen de IBleer’. Vrede & Veiligheid 33 (4). Nu.nl (2005) ‘Djellaba-mannen gebruikten treintoilet voor reiniging’. 2 november, http://www.nu.nl/algemeen/619275/djellaba-mannen-gebruiktentreintoilet-voor-reiniging.html. Rijlaarsdam, B. (2010) ‘Het moest heel snel. En je kunt niet een beetje ingrijpen’. NRC Handelsblad, 29 december: 5. Roessler, B. (2006) ‘New ways of thinking about privacy’. In: A. Phillips, B. Honig en J. Dryzek (red.) Oxford handbook of political theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zedner, L. (2007) ‘Pre-crime and post-criminology?’, Theoretical Criminology 11 (2): 261-281.
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Dit essay is gebaseerd op bevindingen van het onderzoekproject Datawars. New spaces of governing in the European war on terror, gesubsidieerd door het NWO-ESRC Bilate-
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raal Verdrag en uitgevoerd in samenwerking met professor Louise Amoore van Durham University. Veel van de ideeën hier gepresenteerd zijn ontstaan in gezamenlijk werk met Louise. Dank aan Jaap Kooijman voor het organiseren van de publieke discussie met als thema ‘de onbekende vijand’ in september 2011. Dank aan de redactie van Krisis, en in het bijzonder aan Yolande Jansen, voor enthousiasme en nuttige suggesties.
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy
ROGIER VAN REEKUM PUTTING OUR SPACES IN ORDER THE OCCUPATION OF POLITICAL CULTURE 1 Krisis, 2011, Issue 3 www.krisis.eu
‘Even if the Occupy Wall Street movement were to begin to peter out because of exhaustion or repression, it has already succeeded and will leave a lasting legacy, just as the uprisings of 1968 did.’ – Immanuel Wallerstein, 2011 ‘What’s political or cultural about political culture?’ – Margaret Somers, 2008 [1995] ‘The Occupy Wall Street movements in the United States are saying something very specific: that inequality, in the end, is an inequality of power and we need to redistribute power, not just money.’ – Giorgos Papandreou, 2011
The big idea that has emerged in current attempts to understand the Occupy movement is that it has actually achieved ‘something’. This somewhat appeasing statement is not meant to deflate or ignore the achievements and prospects of the movement. What I mean to point out is the striking extent to which actually doing ‘something’ in public space, even only gaining a measure of mainstream recognition for certain grievances, 66
is the omni-recurrent motif in interpretations of what Occupy represents. To generalize, almost all reactions, from CNN to Žižek, note that a remarkable opening in the ideological landscape has taken place, hence the name acquired by the movement: ‘Occupy!’ Occupy happened with the coming together of a whole range of processes, among them a call by Adbusters magazine to occupy Wall Street, the encampments on Tahrir square, the so-called ‘Arab spring’ more generally, the Spanish indignados, the occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol, the notion of the 99%, the financial crisis of 2008, the austerity measures imposed in response, Wikileaks, the wars, the deception, the World Social Forum and the learning curve of alterglobalist activism, the increasing visibility of failing US hegemony, and unfortunately the utter failure of American democracy, a failure now spreading to other places in the West. What Occupy subsequently became and how it has been able to make a mark is quite a different story. In what follows, I want to argue that an appreciation of Occupy’s dramaturgical form (cf. Demby 2011; Alexander 2011) – it did ‘something’ in public space – helps us to recognize an aspect of the protests that may not be at the forefront of many substantive agendas, but is nonetheless taking place and, I hope, taking hold.
The art of interpellating the state The idea of effecting social change through protesting in public is familiar enough. There is a script which everyone more or less understands and abides by. I’ll rehearse my understanding of it here in some detail. What happens when people take up public protest, striving to translate their anger and grief into demands and accountability? Well, people emerge from their homes and typically amass into a crowd, ostensibly visible and disruptive of the normal scene outside. The presence of the crowd not only disrupts our senses, but it also disrupts assumptions about what people may be capable of. A crowd is a dangerous entity, not least for the people that compose it. What one does becomes inextricably embedded in what others are doing (Canetti 1960). Everyone becomes keenly aware of being massive. This points to a very particular aspect of
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy protesting crowds. There are a lot of different ways to contest: argument, proclamation, obstruction, ridicule, provocation, direct action, sacrifice, iconoclasm, etc. All of these may involve crowds, but they do not capture what gives a crowd power as such. Of themselves, protesting crowds have political force, because the dissolution of bodily control is so very frightening. It is precisely the threat of becoming massive, lawless and unpredictable that makes protesting crowds powerful: ‘do something to make us go away or else we’ll grow bigger and even we don’t know what will happen then!’ In this sense, a crowd is already a demand well before anyone has posed one: ‘govern us!’ The point of amassing a crowd is not, I would argue, to indefinitely be a crowd. The demand it embodies is not: ‘let us be a crowd!’ The demand, rather, is: ‘govern society in such a way that we may be integrated in it once more!’ Protesting crowds demand attention, recognition of their anger and responsive actions on the part of the authorities. Even if crowds become vehicles of revolution, they demand better governance, not the suspension of governance. Built out of people’s own flesh and blood, a crowd enables them, even when they have lost everything, to create an entity that authority needs to deal with, that it cannot keep ignoring. The crowd thereby effectively interpellates authority and confronts it with a challenge: ‘prove the legitimacy of your power by putting society back in order and us back at home.’ The narrative of a protesting crowd ends, one way or another, with the crowd dissolving and yielding the public square. The performative effect of the entire exercise is to expose the powerlessness of authority, to show that authority is dependent on the people and its orderly conduct. The greatest mistake any ruler can make, of course, is to deal with this crowd through naked force. The well-known problem with this line of action is that there is no way back. Once authority has shown itself so inept as to need to use violent repression to control the crowd, the fiction of popular rule is suspended. In fact, the idea of governance as such implodes. Why would authorities even engage in government if they are willing and able to physically coerce people into submission? Even demagoguery loses its rationale. The need for any form of consent simply evaporates. A ruler is well-advised to seek other ways of controlling masses. Therefore, when confronted with a crowd authorities desperately want representatives to talk to and demands to negotiate over. 67
Rogier van Reekum – Putting our spaces in order Only then can they hope to keep the performance of legitimate rule going. In highly disciplined societies people may come to expect the scenario of protest to unfold non-violently. Yet, even the efficacy of such pacified protests still depend, I would argue, on the virtual threat of a crowd going wild. Often, however, the play is distilled into a series of coordinated and carefully stylized gestures. This antagonistic play between governing elites and protesting crowds has a virtually endless variety of manifestations and possible outcomes. What is common to all of them is the way in which they are predicated on a split between state and society. As already noted, the demand that a protesting crowd materially represents derives its force from the threat of peaceful sociality erupting into an unpredictable, lawless, excessive mass. The threat is that the crowd becomes the very antithesis of society, disrupting the normal course of events. It is up to the state to put the crowd back into order, back into what may be properly called society: the familiarity of the home and the productiveness of the economy. Seen in this way, a protesting crowd forms an excessive third space, outside society. What’s more, the occupation of this third space by protesters is deliberately meant to be a transgression. Society has, in one way or another become unbearable. It is now up to the authorities to make society bearable again. Thereby, protesting crowds usually don’t contest the split between state and society. In fact, the efficacy of the entire protest often depends on it. The state-society duality is as much part of emancipatory discourses of protest, through which governance for the public good may be propagated, as it is part of state policing, enforcing the boundaries of society and expelling those that don’t belong. Both state and society may enlarge and proliferate, but the basic distinction is usually maintained.
At home in public At this point, we can see more clearly what makes Occupy so engrossing. What is striking about the kind of presence that the various encampments of the Occupy movement embody, is the fact that they do not fit into the established repertoire of emancipatory movements as described above. In
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy short, their embodied demand is not primarily to be included in the concerns of the state, even though at some moments specific negotiations might take place. Many, including participants within the movement (see in particular Graeber 2011), have suggested that the encampments are self-organizing communities, experimenting with new ways of living together and building a just society from the ground up. Indeed, many of the Occupiers call themselves anarchists. That would explain why Occupy doesn’t fit the conventional frame of a protest movement: it’s not a protest movement, it’s a way of life, namely leaderless social organization. Not only is this understanding of the movement rightly rejected as naive, if it were to become the dominant narrative, it would render the movement toothless. Posturing as a self-sustaining utopia-in-progress only more radically reiterates the split between state and society, but this time by suggesting that there can be society without a state.2 Either Occupy seeks to interpellate the state, meaning that self-organization is not the point – why else direct your attention to an authority? Or Occupy is selforganizing, meaning it does not seek to interpellate the state. Whoever genuinely thinks that Occupiers are turning their backs on the state and creating a new society in the midst of a failed one, should wonder how that will end. They should seriously consider, for instance, what happens to separatist movements. The charade of making a clean break, of starting anew, can only lead to dead ends. Occupy is a protest movement, it is interpellating the state. While practices of so-called ‘direct democracy’3, consensus building, experimentation and self-reliant organizing are certainly going on in the movement and part of the discourses associated with it, I would argue that the form of protest has nothing to do with these ideas about what Occupy is all about. The peculiarity of Occupy, I want to argue, consists in how the gesture of protest is executed and what it is thereby capable of demanding. In civic protest, all parties seek to re-constitute society, albeit for different, antagonistic reasons. Throughout the tumult a dualism of state and society is maintained. Demands are embodied by an excessive crowd that isn’t supposed to be there and should be put back in order by a more responsive and responsible state. Occupy’s encampments, however, are not exactly things out of place. As prolonged settlements, they display definite structure. They aren’t really crowds either. Typically, they form impro68
Rogier van Reekum – Putting our spaces in order vised villages, complete with general assemblies, libraries, homes, guards, barbers, and courses in global finance. The threat is not that the camps may erupt into lawlessness, although the non-serious press won’t stop associating Occupy with disorder. Rather, the threat is that their definite structure may become permanent. Again, I don’t think the encampments are actual attempts at post-capitalist life. Rather, they have drawn attention to themselves by completely usurping the regular script of protest: How extraordinary, a protest movement that threatens authority with sustained, civilized presence in public space! Occupy isn’t just non-violent, it’s shockingly civil and homely.4 Occupy has occupied third space, beyond the duality of state and society, not by forming an excessive mass, but by assembling a civilized camp. It is precisely its civil occupation of this third space that makes Occupy different from the regular and routinized repertoires of most protest movements. Occupy is not a labor movement, it’s not a women’s movement, it’s not a student movement, it’s not concerned with an immediately particularizing identity. As its acquired name suggests, it’s a movement that is first and foremost about occupying a space.5 Occupy doesn’t expose the state’s dependence on the orderly behavior of people, thus interpellating its responsibility to put society in order. Rather, through its particular gesture of protest, the encampment, Occupy normalizes a space outside of state and society. If a protesting crowd is the demand ‘govern us’, the presence of Occupy is the demand ‘give us a third space’. States have a hard time reacting to this demand as it’s not concerned practically with the governance of society. The question is not one of governance, but one of toleration. Will the state tolerate the enduring and normalized presence of a third space, beside the spaces of society and its own? What, by the way, is the state asked to tolerate in this regard?
Occupying political culture How can it be that the normalization of a third space has become an act of citizenship (Isin & Nielsen 2008), able to attract a huge amount of attention? Why is the gesture of building a camp such an attractive form of protest? Up to now, I have somewhat agnostically referred to the space cre-
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy ated by Occupy as a third space. But of course, this space has had other names already: the public sphere, the commons, the beautiful Dutch name middenveld6 or, more generically, political culture. All of these names suggest that there is a space between society and the state, connecting and integrating the two, hence the idea that it is a third. They suggest that a state can really only become rational, i.e. democratic, when it takes its cues from an outside space in which particular grievances have been generalized into public demands. In two extensive articles, first published in 1995 and reprinted in her Genealogies of Citizenship (2008), Margaret Somers discusses the historical formation of the concept of political culture. Her critical assessment of its genealogy, a round-about of Anglo-American democratic theory including Habermas, helps us to understand why the civilized occupation of a third space might be something that grabs people’s attention and unsettles their natural attitude towards the world. Somers comes to the conclusion that the concept of political culture has been caught within a very particular narration of citizenship. In this narrative, political culture can only be the public expression of autonomous, property-owning adults. That is, people must have already grown up and become responsible adults in the private domain, before they can take up citizenship and participate in political culture. The consequence of this narrative is that the concept of political culture is irredeemably collapsed into the private side of society, i.e. the family and the economy. The concept is part of a broader ideational regime in which families and markets are prescribed to be more natural and real than political culture, which means that true political culture can only emanate from them. At its core, this liberal narration of citizenship prescribes that one is a natural, naked, cultureless man first – a bearer of Lockean natural rights – only after which one’s natural freedom becomes entangled in the strictures of politics and culture. Political culture is thereby really just the name given to legitimate sociality, namely the culture of virtuous, productive men. Thus, the paradox of the concept is that it should mediate between society and the state but inevitably falls to one side of the public/private distinction and loses its mediating, democratizing function. What seems like a third space 69
Rogier van Reekum – Putting our spaces in order through which demands become public and publicized is really only allowed to be an extension of legitimate, naturalized society. It is already prescribed in the concept of political culture that everything that goes on in it affirms and naturalizes society. And so it goes in almost all forms of public protest: ‘govern us!’, the crowd demands. My argument is that Occupy has, somewhat unintentionally, gotten entangled in a different narration of citizenship, one that doesn’t affirm and naturalize society, doesn’t demand societal re-integration, and doesn’t end in making society whole again (see also Dean 2011). I want to speculate about why the occupation of squares in the form of civilized camps enacts a third space particularly well. The civilized encampments of Occupy may be attractive, because they take up a third space as if it is first. To reiterate, I don’t believe Occupiers are building society anew. They are, however, at home in the squares and streets. Through the particular form of their protest, they are able to raise a captivating question: Why would all claims, in the end, feed back to the presumed, first space of society? Why would any political culture, worthy of the name, have to collapse back into society proper? Why would the point of participation in political culture only be the mediation of society and the state? Occupy not only addresses the limits of the liberal narration of citizenship, but more importantly, it is acting out a different story about what citizens might demand of the state. By making public space their home, Occupiers are able to evoke the possibility that citizens might actually possess their own space and that the state is neither justified in, nor capable of, frustrating their embeddedness in this space. By more or less violently removing the protesters the state is not displaying its dependence on orderly conduct. Rather, what becomes evident is the state’s dependence on the illusion that citizens are firstly part of private society, that first there are families and markets and that citizens grow up in them only afterwards. What if citizens can exist, even thrive, without private society? What if family life and marketized labor are just some activities that citizens entertain in their free time, when they are not busy with the primary occupation: political culture? Why would public demands only be made for the sake of protecting families and worker’s rights? Occupy is effectively showing that the state must not only be responsive to suffering and injustice, but that it is also responsible for the autonomy of political culture. In this alternate
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy story about where democracy comes from and where it is going, the people do not emerge from their homes to, temporarily and excessively, occupy the streets. In this story, the people were always already at home in public and it is this people – Arendt’s demos – upon which legitimate rule is based. The ‘third’ domain of political culture – the axiom that it is third has become questionable now – is a space of belonging in the same sense as the familial home is. It can now be better understood why the marketization and privatization of the public sphere is the core concern associated with Occupy. The financial corruption of the political process and the government-led privatization of public wealth form the core substantive concerns articulated by Occupy. My argument has been that these concerns are now gaining attention and recognition because they are expressed through a form of protest that prioritizes life in public, enacts the public sphere as a sphere of belonging, and reclaims political culture.
Does Occupy travel? Finally, we may wonder if the dramaturgical understanding of Occupy developed here doesn’t suggest that its efficacy depends on the specific narratives it is confronting. If the hegemony of Somer’s Anglo-American liberal citizenship story explains why Occupy evokes an opening onto another path to democratization, the absence of such hegemony should lead to a different dynamic. In what remains I want to argue that this is precisely the case. Occupy has taken hold most forcefully in the US. There, the idea of building a home in public works its heretical magic most effectively. When we contrast this to the effectiveness of Occupy encampments in the Netherlands, we see a striking difference. To be sure, Occupiers in the Netherlands did successfully draw attention to themselves and were able to add considerably to the attention given to the ‘crisis’ in the Eurozone. But the protest narrative centers around a question very different from the Anglo-American one. In the Netherlands, Occupy has begun to stand for the idea that political compromise and consensus-seeking has failed. Occupiers are identified, and often self-identify, as those who reject the endless bartering between left and right, and propose a sustained effort of conflictual struggle. The protest form, although piggybacking on 70
Rogier van Reekum – Putting our spaces in order the notoriety of its American example, adds little in itself to this position. Although the content of their demands, ‘stop compromising!’, does seem to strike a chord with a variety of publics, the socialist party SP in particular, the gesture of protest hardly interpellates the state other than in the form of practical concerns: how long will they be staying, should public toilet facilities be installed, who will pay for that? The liberal narration of citizenship has been on the rise in the Netherlands, but it is in no way hegemonic. Rather, Dutch discourses of citizenship can best be understood as a surprising mix of conservatism and republican liberalism (De Haan 1993; Schinkel & Van Houdt 2010). Although mixed, this narrative is far from unstable. In it, qualified representatives voice claims on behalf of well-organized and visible social groups, taking care of their interests and concerns. Everything revolves around gestures of paternalism towards constituents and accommodation towards others. Republican liberalism became entangled in this narrative after WW II, but never as a challenge to the paternalist status quo. Republican liberalism ‘merely’ acts as a politico-cultural world view of one of the social groups, namely the moral majority, increasingly claiming precedence over a carefully crafted equilibrium. To be sure, this complex narration of citizenship also naturalizes society and collapses public demands back into society. Here too, a duality of state and society is prescribed. Society, however, is not composed of families and markets, but of ideational communities expressing themselves parliamentarily. The idea that families and markets are what really matter is considered as one of many, albeit ascending, world views. What Occupy is able to do in this context is to suggest that the parliamentary process is defunct and consensus-seeking is stifling the expression of silenced grievances. But building an encampment has no internal relation to this contention. Building a home in public is, in this context, not a specifically heretical gesture. In fact, the idea that politics consists of social groups visibly claiming their place and voice within the plurality of groups, places and voices is nothing less than Dutch doxa. The encampment in public space hardly disrupts the prevailing citizenship story, in fact it might even fit quite comfortably with in its established grooves.
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy In line with this assessment, we see two kinds of critical reactions to Occupy in the Netherlands, apart from altogether dismissive ridicule. First, it is questioned whether Occupy really represents a larger constituency. Apparently, it is expected to fall into the familiar repertoire of paternalist representation. Second, its conflictual strategy is questioned: will it help to form effective solutions to the problems-at-hand? This also shows how Occupy’s presence indeed calls forth the dilemma between consensual, parliamentary and conflictual, activist politics. Because Occupy’s protest form doesn’t disrupt hegemonic expectations about what citizens might demand and what democratic politics might look like, it has not been able to create more than a heightened awareness that the resolution of the Eurozone crisis will need popular support – itself not nothing, of course. This assessment of Occupy’s diffusion to the Netherlands leads to two different, yet complementary conclusions. First, citizens in the Netherlands at least have what American Occupiers want: a measure of democracy. More specifically, Dutch citizens at least know themselves and others through a narration of citizenship which doesn’t naturalize society into nothing more than families and markets. In this sense, there is something to be said for representationist paternalism: at least it routinely names and mobilizes social movements that are more than the sum of family and market relations. The second conclusion, however, is that the Dutch narration of citizenship seems immune to heretical gestures of protest. That is, it seems very hard to jolt this narration out of its familiar groove, very hard to come up with a form of protest that does not naturalize society and to demand what American Occupiers are able to demand: the toleration and protection of a politico-cultural space specific to citizenship. As research into citizenship practices in the Netherlands routinely shows, citizenship is not primarily, and almost never extensively, about involvement in political culture (Van Gunsteren 2008; Hurenkamp & Tonkens 2011; Dekker & De Hart 2005; Schinkel 2010). Practices of citizenship consist first and foremost of moral cohesion, duty to the community, and local solidarity. What Occupy in the US is still able to contest – liberalism’s attack on civic dignity – may be very hard to enact in the Netherlands, where protests against the erosion of civic dignity easily become assimilated to representa71
Rogier van Reekum – Putting our spaces in order tionist politics. In this way, concerns about the dismantlement of citizenship rights – i.e. the gradual process through which unconditional rights are being transformed into conditional privileges – inevitably become grievances of particular social movements – ‘leftists’ – trying to mobilize popular support for a particular, ideological position. It is very hard to display and contest, in the form of public protest, the consequences of dismantlement as a threat to civic belonging as such, without immediately becoming the representatives of a particular constituency. Even more worrying than the intractability of Dutch narrations of citizenship is the fact that the demand for political culture may to a large extent already be occupied by those who claim to speak for Dutch culture. In these discourses the demand for political culture takes on a nationalist logic in which civic and national belonging are homogenized. Although often ostensibly inclusivist, these discourses only allow civic belonging where there is national loyalty. In this way, political culture is once again stripped of its politics and its culture. The fight over political culture may therefore be a much more worrying phenomenon in the Netherlands than it is in the Anglo-American world. In the Netherlands, we should find ways to side-step the intractable self-evidence that all politics is representational and paternalist. Especially when serious discussion is directed to representing and protecting the nation as such. So without further ado: Occupy everything!
Rogier van Reekum is a PhD-candidate at the AISSR (Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research). Within ‘Citizenship, National Canons, and the Issue of Cultural Diversity. The Netherlands in International Perspective’ (NWO / Oxfam-Novib / Forum) he is conducting a study of the public and political debates on Dutchness and citizenship in the Netherlands (1989-2010). Rogier holds masters degrees in sociology (UvA) and philosophy (UvA). He is an editor at Krisis.
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy References Alexander, J. (2011) Performance and Power. Cambridge: Polity Press. Canetti, E. (1960) Masse und Macht. Hamburg: Claasen. Dean, J. (2011) Claiming Division, Naming a Wrong. Theory & Event. 14, 4. Available at: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v014/14.4S.dean01.html [14 December 2011] De Haan, I. (1993) Zelfbestuur en staatsbeheer. Het politieke debat over burgerschap en rechtsstaat in de twintigste eeuw. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Dekker P. & J. de Hart (2005) De goede burger. Tien beschouwingen over een morele categorie. Den Haag: SCP. Demby, N. (2011) Liberty Plaza. A "Message" Entangled with its Form. EIPCP, Transversal, #occupy and assemble. Available at: http://eipcp.net/transversal/1011/demby/en [14 December 2011] Graeber, D. (2011) Enacting the Impossible (On Consensus Decision Making). OccupyWallStreet.org. Available at: http://occupywallst.org/article/enacting-the-impossible/ [14 December 2011] Hurenkamp, M. & E. Tonkens (2011) De onbeholpen samenleving. Burgerschap aan het begin van de 21ste eeuw. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Isin, E. F. & G. M. Nielsen (2008) Acts of Citizenship. London: Zed Books. Papandreou, G. (2011) Interview with Democracy Now! At the Durban Climate Summit, 9 December. Available at: http://www.democracynow.org/2011/12/9/exclusive_ex_greek_pm_georg e_papandreou [14 December 2011] 72
Rogier van Reekum – Putting our spaces in order Schinkel, W. (2010) Virtualization of Citizenship. Critical Sociology. 36, 2. 265-283. Schinkel, W. & F. van Houdt (2010) The double helix of cultural assimilationism and neo-liberalism: citizenship in contemporary governmentality. British Journal of Sociology. 61, 4. 696-715. Somers, M. (2008) Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Gunsteren, H. (2008) Bouwen op burgers: cultuur, preventie en de eigenzinnige burger. Amsterdam: Van Gennep. Wallerstein, I. (2011) The Fantastic Success of Occupy Wall Street. Commentary No. 315, Oct. 15. Available at: http://www.iwallerstein.com/commentaries/ [14 December 2011]
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License (AttributionNoncommercial 3.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nl/deed.en for more information.
1 I want to thank Eva Valk, Robin Celikates and Jappe Groenendijk for their constructive criticism on an earlier version of this essay. 2 Without going into a semantic discussion of what does and does not count as statehood, most crucial is the question of whether people, in whatever form of social life, will be subject to violence. If we agree that all social life is violent, we can agree that all social life involves a regulation and exercise of such violence and thereby involves statehood. 3
A strange concept as a form of governance is democratic precisely insofar as it is indirect.
4 This is not to say that there is no violence involved in the protests, but violence is almost never the form of protest. In fact, the form of protest is ostensibly opposite to a threat of
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violence. 5 This idea of what Occupy is should not be understood in opposition to the recent occupations of ports. This form of occupation is clearly different from the one discussed here. The occupation of ports is about obstruction, which the occupation of a third space is not. But that does not entail that the occupation of the ports are necessarily detrimental to the movement as such. 6 This wonderful word directly translates to 'middle field' evoking the image of an open space, a polder perhaps, between the vested institutions of the state, the market and the family. Most often used in Christian democratic discourses, it serves to highlight the importance of societal integration and moral cohesion.
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PHILIPPO BERTONI TURNING TO SPECULATION ? Review of: Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (2011) The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re.press, 430 p.
Krisis, 2011, Issue 3 www.krisis.eu
These are exciting times in our field. […] it seems clear enough that something important is happening. In our profession, there has never been a better time to be young. – Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, Towards a Speculative Philosophy (2011)
On April 27th 2007, Ray Brassier, Ian Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux, hosted by Alberto Toscano, met at Goldsmiths for a one day workshop titled ‘Speculative Realism’. The aim was to bring together a diverse range of works that ‘questions some of the basic tenets of a “continental” orthodoxy while eschewing the reactionary prejudices of common-sense’. According to them, ‘Speculative realism is not a doctrine but the umbrella term for a variety of research programmes committed to upholding the autonomy of reality, whether in the name of transcendental physicalism, object-oriented philosophy, or abstract materialism, against the depredations of anthropocentrism’ (Mackay 2007). A 74
few years later, the breadth of the Speculative Realism movement, as it began to be called, had increased exponentially, also thanks to the extensive use its followers made of blogs and underground publishers. With the intention of assembling and charting speculative thinkers ‘who will be at the centre of debate in continental philosophy for decades to come’ (back cover), Bryant, Srnicek and, later, Harman, decided to publish this collection, whose online publication had already created a buzz1 on the blogosphere. In their introduction, the editors of The Speculative Turn adhere to this narrative of the new movement and conjure up a sense of a turning point, a radical change. Bryant, Srnicek and Harman are not alone in evoking this feeling of change. In fact, the idea that we are experiencing profound transformations is characteristic of contemporary thought, especially since 9/11.2 The editors make their plan explicit: they want to signal a turning away from the kind of anti-realism that Meillassoux dubbed ‘correlationism’, ‘according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other’ (Meillassoux 2008: 3). To counter this position and its focus on text, discourse, and – ultimately – human access to reality, the editors consider objects and ontologies. Obviously, the framing of this turn in such terms places the founding fathers of speculative thought in a central position in the collection. As they state, the Speculative Realism movement is not a well defined and homogeneous group of thinkers. Rather, heated debates are a characteristic feature of speculative realist philosophies.3 This internal diversity notwithstanding, Graham Harman’s position is one of the most paradigmatic and vocal, and is useful in making some characteristics of speculative thought evident. His philosophy pivots on objects. Starting from the Heideggerian intuition of the tool-being, Harman considers objects to be withdrawn ‘into depths inaccessible to all access’ (8) and to only exist in-themselves. In his essay, he criticizes anti-realists and realists alike for not accounting for objects as Aristotelian, withdrawn substances. Both positions, he argues, either ‘undermine’ objects, which means reduces them to a deeper material reality, or ‘overmine’ them, by ‘letting them exist only in their appearances, relations, qualities, or effects’ (9). To counter these moves
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy and speaking ‘on behalf of objects’ (36), Harman proposes a ‘realism without materialism’ which alone can account for objects in-themselves. Some of the criticisms this position receives in this volume help highlight some broader limits of a speculative frame. For example, contrasting Harman with Whitehead, Steven Shaviro shows how a more relational approach can better account for an ‘actual volcano’ – i.e. one that is open to change – than a world in which objects are withdrawn in-themselves. As he notes, ‘Relations are too various, and come in too many “different degrees of intimacy”, to be reducible to Harman’s caricature of them as reductive, external determinations’ (287). 4 Shaviro is not the only critical voice speaking against this speculative aversion for relational thinking. Beginning from a realist reading of Deleuze’s notions of virtual and actual, DeLanda indirectly erodes the essentialism of Harman’s objects. In his essay, he considers emergence as the product of nonlinear interactions between complex systems. Ontologies are thus not the substances of objects in-themselves, but the multifarious aspects of an ‘active matter […] animated from within by immanent patterns of being and becoming’, ‘an immanent real virtuality that changes and grows as new tendencies and capacities arise’ (392).5 Moreover, in a large section of the book dedicated to comments on Meillassoux’s After Finitude (2008), some more doubts on the direction speculative thought might take are made explicit. In his critique of correlationism, Quentin Meillassoux argues against Kant’s Principle of Correlation and suggests a return to Hume’s take on the contingency of causality. In doing so, he posits ‘a mathematical absolute capable of making sense of scientific claims to have knowledge of a time prior to humanity’ (8). Against this, Toscano’s comparison of After Finitude with the work of the Italian Hegelian Marxist Colletti argues that Meillassoux’s speculation fails in being materialist since it founders in the idealism of mathematical logics. Even Toscano, one of the original members of the Goldsmiths conference that gave birth to Speculative Realism, here takes a skeptical, if not critical, stance against speculation. The speculative umbrella, under which the collection was framed, already seems to shatter, reorienting the turn suggested by the editors. Despite being open to such critical standpoints, the collection is generally characterized by a strong sense of antagonism. Indeed, the turn-of75
Philippo Bertoni – Turning to speculation? century feeling evoked by the editors is often linked to a much anticipated ‘renewal’ of philosophical scholarship, hostile to traditional, anti-realist, post-Kantian thinkers. This new philosophy, the introduction suggests, will be one able to provide more space to originality and ‘democracy’, as the innovative publications Speculative Realism relies upon (on paper and, especially, online) should prove. Even if very seductive,6 this idea is far from the truth. Like Italian ‘futurists’ or British ‘angry young men’, many of these philosophers are characterized by a radical closure, a ruthless opposition towards everything that does not accept their premises, which is made evident in a prose that is direct, often to the point of arrogance. Ross Wolfe made this clear in his (otherwise similarly exaggerated) parody manifesto: ‘What few people seem to understand about the politics of blogosophy is that it’s secretly a war’ (Wolfe 2011). Out of this ‘war’, stubborn, individualized and atomized trajectories emerge. In reading some of these, Latour’s remark on Souriau’s ‘philosophical politeness’ is clearly relevant: ‘It seems that thinkers never have the necessary politeness for a true multirealism’ (330). This, unfortunately, applies also to The Speculative Turn, at least as far as the philosophical positions of some of the contributors are concerned.7 Besides the unpleasant and unnecessary character of these disputes, the problem, I argue, is not exclusively a problem of style or ‘politeness’. Rather, what we see is the effect of a holism deeply ingrained in the speculative project. This systematic attempt toward holistic descriptions also seems to affect Bruno Latour. In his lengthy contribution, he analyzes the work of Etienne Souriau, a French philosopher who – in the middle of World War II – elaborated a metaphysics to explore the plurality of the modes of existence of reality. A prelude to his forthcoming work, this essay offers an inspiring and creative list of possible ontologies, but simultaneously risks being taken in by the same holism that pervades much of the volume and, more dangerously, it often swaps empiricism for an idealized and abstract materialism that permeates the entire collection. Indeed, in stark contrast with what they characterize as a deconstructionist and Deleuzian period, many of these thinkers (and here, I think, is where the editorial project is most evident and less fair to many of the contributors of the volume) are concerned with the philosophical category of the Absolute. As Bryant, Srnicek and Harman claim in the intro-
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy duction, ‘By contrast with the repetitive continental focus on texts, discourse, social practices, and human finitude, the new breed of thinker is turning once more toward reality itself’ (3). This sci-fi sounding ‘new breed of thinker’ begins to assume almost dystopian tones as it showcases its systematism: ‘Genuine attempts at full-blown systematic thought are no longer rare in our circles; increasingly, they are even expected’ (1). The attempt to define what is real by starting from speculation, and to do so systematically, is concerning not only for what it does to self-reflexivity and critical thought, but especially for its dispensing with empiricism, its similarities with dogmatism and its wild generalization of (EuroAmerican) categories to the role of absolutes. Fortunately, criticisms and remedies of this extreme position are already present in The Speculative Turn. In his contribution, Adrian Johnston notices the risk that leading this turn in the direction of speculation entails: ‘There is a big difference between arguing for materialism/realism versus actually pursuing the positive construction of materialist/realist projects dirtying their hands with real empirical data’ (112). To avoid the paradox of materialisms and realisms based on idealist speculation, he suggests, ‘Alert, sober vigilance is called for against the danger of dozing off into a speculative, but no less dogmatic, slumber’ (113). Such ‘sober vigilance’ can be found, for example, in the extremely creative interaction between philosophy and science represented in the collection. Indeed, some of the thinkers in this volume, often coming from outside the very fabric of speculative realism, attempt to take materialism seriously by looking at science.8 Paradigmatic of this trend is Stengers’ contribution, which stresses, by means of a commentary on the famous Conversation between Diderot and D’Alembert, the importance of wondering involved in understanding materialism as embedded in practices and, thus, being involved in a constant (political) struggle. In doing so, she not only outlines a healthy and empirical philosophy of practices, but she also raises some concerns about how to do ‘good science’. It is clear that The Speculative Turn fails to map a speculative turning point in philosophy. In fact, speculation emerges more as a polemical agenda of some of the contributors. Nevertheless, the collection does raise a number of excellent and urgent questions for contemporary thinkers. 76
Philippo Bertoni – Turning to speculation? The starting point of the collection, the opposition with what Meillassoux called ‘correlationism’, signals an uneasiness towards the extremes of deconstructionism and those philosophies that completely dissolved reality within a problem of epistemology, dubbed ‘philosophies of access’ by Lee Braver (2007). Clearly related to an increasing interest in materialism that philosophical and social thought are witnessing, this question suggests a growing concern with a more realist and concrete philosophy. The questions of ontology that the collection raises originated from critiques of the primacy granted to the human subject. What the pieces in this collection share is this critique of the post-Kantian human knower and of his privileges. Rather than a speculative turn, this book offers an insight into some of the ways in which contemporary thinkers have been trying to move beyond the humanist core of phenomenology, and signals a strong desire to move away from human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism.9 But is Speculative Realism really moving beyond this by means of such wild systematizations? Can the proposal to avoid idealism and return to materialism through metaphysical speculation bring us any further? The answer that Bryant, Srnicek and Harman offer ignores the contributions of empirical disciplines and falls short of realism and materialism. To the extent that it is possible to synthesize a book review in an image, The Speculative Turn is well represented by the cover painting of a pair of gardening tools against a black background. These are exactly the kind of ‘objects’ that most of the collection deals with: ideal objects ‘artificially’ isolated in-themselves. By ignoring the importance of the empirical and its situatedness, this proposal fails to grasp the complexity of material and real objects and falls for an idealistic speculation. Moving beyond anthropocentrism requires us, first of all, to acknowledge its importance and its multiplicity, to move beyond systematic categories to more nuanced and situated understandings of reality. This means learning from empirical philosophy, material semiotics, science and technology studies, and anthropology, that epistemologies are also critical to ontologies. Knowledge, perception, imagination, being and becoming are not linear and neatly demarcated processes, they are messy, and delimiting them requires us to be able to constantly adjust our definitions and situate ourselves accordingly. To do so, we need to attend to the empirical in all its relational entanglements. We should counter anthropocentrism with a careful cri-
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy tique, a constant reflexivity, an attention to multiplicity and practices, tinkering with and adjusting to alternatives. Deluding ourselves by pretending that anthropocentrism can disappear by just bringing quixotic ‘objects in-themselves’ into our analysis is neither a realist nor a materialist solution. Instead of turning to speculation, to universalist systems, we need to engage and mess with more situated and material semiotic realities.
Filippo Bertoni is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam. His research project is informed by empirical philosophy and anthropology of science, and it maps the practices of ecology to suggest how they can reorient the notions of eating and the body in Western thought.
References Boltanski, L. (1990) L’amour et la justice comme compétences: trois essais de sociologie de l’action. Paris: Editions Métailié. Brassier, R. (2011) ‘I am a nihilist because I still believe in truth’, Interview by Marcin Rychter, available at: http://www.kronos.org.pl/index.php?23151,896.
Philippo Bertoni – Turning to speculation? Hinchliffe, S. (2007) Geographies of nature: societies, environments, ecologies. London: SAGE. Kirksey, S. Eben, and S. Helmreich (2010) ‘The emergence of multispecies ethnography’, Cultural Anthropology 25, (4): 545–576. Lovelock, J. (2006) The Revenge of Gaia: why the Earth is fighting back – and how we can still save humanity. London: Allen Lane. Mackay, R. (2007) Collapse vol. III: Unknown Deleuze [+Speculative Realism]. Falmouth: Urbanomic. Meillassoux, Q. (2008) After finitude: an essay on the necessity of contingency. Trans. A. Badiou and R. Brassier. London/New York: Continuum. Whatmore, S. (2002) Hybrid geographies: natures, cultures, spaces. London: SAGE. Wolfe, Ross (2011) ‘The Manifesto of Speculative Realist/Object-Oriented Ontological Blogging’, The Charnel-House, available at: http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/the-manifesto-of-speculativerealistobject-oriented-ontological-blogging/. Wu Ming (2009) New Italian Epic: letteratura, sguardo obliquo, ritorno al futuro. Torino: Einaudi.
Braver, L. (2007) A thing of this world: a history of continental antirealism. Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
Žižek, S. (2002) Welcome to the desert of the real. Five essays on September 11 and related dates. London: Verso Books.
Diamond, J. (2005) Collapse: How societies choose to succeed or fail. London: Allen Lane.
Zournazi, M. (2003) Hope: New Philosophies for Change. London: l-w books.
Haraway, D. (2008) When species meet. Minneapolis/London: Univ. of Minnesota Press. Harman, G. (2009) Prince of networks: Bruno Latour and metaphysics. Melbourne: re.press. 77
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Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy
1
Cf. http://multitude.tv/content/view/472/60/ accessed on 20-11-2011.
2
From Žižek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002) and Zournazi’s Hope: New Philosophies for Change (2003), to Lovelock’s The Revenge of Gaia (2006) and Diamond’s Collapse (2005), to Wu Ming’s New Italian Epic: Literatures, oblique gazes, returns to the future (2009), from the voices of those taking part in the ‘Arab Spring’, to those of the Occupy movement’s protesters, a need for change, an attempt to find a way out of the Fukuyamean ‘end of history’ is seen more and more in the ‘Zeitgeist’ of our times. 3
A case in point is the angry schism between Ray Brassier and the rest of the speculative realism original group. In a recent interview for the Polish philosophy journal Kronos, Brassier disregarded the movement as ‘an online orgy of stupidity’ (Brassier 2011). 4
As this quotation makes clear, one way in which relationality is criticized by speculative realists such as Harman is often by relying on a misreading of its proponents. They suggest that relational thinkers believe in a world in which the object is ‘nothing more than its effects on other things’ (23), but this understanding of relationality appears as a straw-man. This becomes clearer in Harman’s reading of Latour as a philosopher sensu stricto (2009), which indulges him with his more daring (and yet inspiring) generalizations, often eschewing his crucial empirical material. 5
Although inspiring, this position risks crystallizing in a formalized mathematicocomputational logic which favors ‘long-term historical structures over events’ (from http://www.egs.edu/faculty/manuel-de-landa/biography/ accessed on 20-11-2011). 6
This vision appeals especially to younger audiences. More than telling us about the branding strategies of the authors of this volume (as many shallow criticisms argue), this shows how philosophy students are looking for alternatives to traditional philosophy. 7
For ideas about a philosophy more passionate than aggressive, the use of the notion of agape made by Boltanski (1990) is interesting. 8
Also from the field of politics, following Žižek’s illuminating footsteps, comes a corrective to such dogmatic holism: Srnicek, the youngest of all contributors, employs Laruellian non-philosophy to try to push the subject of Negri’s and Hardt’s multitude
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beyond the limits of capitalism into a seemingly new and open space. Negarestani, instead, mobilizes Freud’s death drive to sketch what he calls ‘necrocracy’, which is ‘the organism’s affordable economy of dissipation’ (192), and employs this in his understanding of capitalism. Unfortunately, while a closer analysis of these articles is beyond the scope of this review, I am curious to see how these ideas will inform speculative thought. 9
A desire made evident also by the increasing interest in nonhumans, be they objects or other living critters; cf. Whatmore 2002, Hinchliffe 2007, Haraway 2008, Kirksey & Helmreich 2010.
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy
LONNEKE VAN DER VELDEN LAW INTERRUPTED ? LATOUR SNOOPING AROUND LE CONSEIL D ’ ETAT 1 Review of: Bruno Latour (2010 [2002]) The Making of Law. Translated by Marina Brilman and Alain Pottage. Revised by the author. Cambridge: Polity Press, 297 p.
Krisis, 2011, Issue 3 www.krisis.eu
Lawsuits can be controversial in many ways, but in recent high-profile courtcases the relationship between science and law often takes centre stage. Conflicting scientific evidence, translation problems between judges and scientists, and expert monopolies are some examples of problems that seem to come with the increasing contribution of scientists to legal procedures.2 Bruno Latour’s book The Making of Law (2010), originally published as La fabrique du droit (2002), contains an ethnographic study that compares legal practices to scientific practices.3 Not only does Latour scrutinize existing models of law and offer an alternative understanding; his comparison of legal and scientific knowledge production also invites us to think about the way scientists and lawyers are increasingly expected to meet in courts. Latour enjoyed the rare privilege of silently sitting in the French ‘Conseil d'Etat’ (Council of State) for a period of fifteen months. The Council of 79
State, comparable to the Dutch ‘Raad van State’, advises the government on legislative proposals and as the highest authority makes decisions in administrative matters. Unlike French civil and criminal proceedings, which are based on statutory law, The Council of State produces case law. Latour treats The Council of State as a laboratory which offers the researcher the possibility to study law in a ‘purified’ form: no overheated courtroom settings with barristers, blood and other distractions, but purely juridical problems, written down and accessible for the anthropologist (253). Latour gives the reader a few warnings in advance about his anthropological journey: you will get confused, bored, and perhaps desperate – the transcripts of legal activities get longer and longer – but you will be rewarded eventually. In the end you will be made familiar with ‘the hesitant path’, that, as he states ‘characterizes the movement of law’ (171). We should situate this book as a part of Latour’s broader undertaking of comparative studies of different regimes of truth production in modern Western institutions. Law is understood by Latour as a specific regime of enunciation that ‘draws together’ loose statements: ‘it keeps track of all disengagements, to tirelessly reconnect to their statements to their enunciators, via perilous routes of signatures, archives, texts and files’ (276). It has no domain of its own but can relate to all aspects of society; it is a form of ‘association’ in itself.
The key actors and their steps In the beginning of the book we are introduced to some of the key actors in the Council of State through a specific legal case, in which the question is discussed of whether the municipality of La Rochefoucauld can be held accountable for the fact that pigeons devastated M. Delavallade’s sunflower crops. The judges deliberate during review meetings that are closed off to the general public. We also meet the ‘commissioner of law’, who, more akin to an independent consultant than a judge, is the only one who speaks in public. Other actors include the reporter who makes a summary note of the case, the reviser, and the president. We get ac-
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy quainted with the complexity of the important term ‘moyen’ (translated as ‘the means’)4 which refers to the legal grounds that should – with some effort – be deduced from the file under review. We also get to understand the subtle differences between various types of judgments. For instance, decisions of lower courts can be ‘annulled’ whilst a claimant’s demands can still be ‘rejected’ when the judges find ‘the means’ for that. In How to make a file ripe for use Latour explains how documents – often produced by (government) agencies – are already prepared (‘profiled’) for legal use. The case of a man trying to get financial compensation because of the death of his son on a ski run shows how documents in the file need to be translated: they must not only refer to the world outside the file, but, in a less direct manner, they already have to ‘transport quasi-legal forms or trust’ (certified copies, witness statements, etc.) before making it into the file (75). Law cannot be understood without these preparations. But the process of translation does not stop here. The files undergo various stages of modification: they are labeled according to urgency, formatted in such a way so as to meet the principle of due process, and prepared for the final stage. Judges never just simply apply rules, as is repeatedly demonstrated. Take for instance the case of the expulsion of a criminal asylum seeker (144). Does he risk the death penalty if he would be sent back to Iraq? How can judges acquire more information on this issue? The president is not fond of formalism, but an informal request for information (for example at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) is undoubtedly in conflict with the principle of due process. The judges try to balance this issue by giving the opposing party more leeway to research into certain issues. Common sense is by no means absent, but is a constant reference point as long as the arguments can be translated into a legal form. Most judges have had positions in the government and have sometimes even been involved in crafting the decrees under review of the Council of State. Therefore, ‘fragile connections’ between the judges and the outside world play a role as well. In A body in a palace Latour traces and maps out the Council’s members and their positions.
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Lonneke van der Velden – Law interrupted? Through such examples Latour leads the reader through the various sections of the Council of State while describing how the council members are seated (at the same desks full of papers), what their offices look like (non-hierarchical), and by sharing his thoughts with us while secretly mimicking the walk of the counselors on the grand staircases of the PalaisRoyal.
Case-law and scientific objects The challenge for legal practice lies ultimately in how the particular case and the law weave into each other (the ‘dispositif’). Latour gets to the heart of that matter in The passage of law. Here he wants to devise a method of defining the process of translation between the case and the law, which allows the judges to qualify their own practices; or, borrowed from speech act theory, he wants to investigate the ‘conditions of felicity or infelicity’ of their statements (129). Through a close listening/reading of their practice he tries to grasp their subject matter. What sort of things do they refer to? What causes them to reposition themselves in particular cases and to bring them to a close? In this way Latour traces ten ‘value objects’ against which judges assess their work, and which, by being subtlety modified throughout the whole process, help the law to move on.5 Some examples of such value objects are the ‘means’ and ‘hesitation’.6 But he also mentions less familiar things as for instance the ‘interest of cases’, which is a measure of difficulty, and ‘the organization of cases’ which refers to the logistics of claims (194). Latour gathers pace in chapter five, Scientific objects and legal objectivity, when he compares the Council of State with another laboratory, a scientific laboratory at the Paris School of Physics. The buildings themselves are already different in their spatial arrangement: Contrary to the Palais Royal, the rooms in the Paris School of Physics are differentiated according to the scientific instruments required. There are also different requirements with regards to the knowledge the two types of lab workers should have in advance, produced by different kinds of ‘microprocedures’. Judges should know as little as possible about the case they
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy judge, which gives their verdicts an air of impartiality and makes them relatively easy to replace. Scientific researchers, on the other hand, should be as close as possible to their research objects. In the scientific lab there is no ritual where texts are carefully read out loud, but there are passionate cries and energetic body language. While interruptions are exceptional in the Palais-Royal, they seem to be part of everyday life at the science lab. Latour's own presence is also approached differently in the two places. In the Palais-Royal he is a silent witness, but in the Paris School of Physics he is part of the impatient crowd standing around the phenomena under investigation. Differences are also noticed in the laboratories’ productions: Scientific articles contain claims, not decisions, and they are directed at different addressees. Whereas judges produce the final chapter for the participants in the case and as an affirmation of the slowly evolving practice of legal doctrine, researchers write for other scientists that potentially can develop, criticize or open up their claims in future: ‘[S]cientific articles […] are quite unlike a legal decision, which the French, remember, call ‘arrêts’, that is, ‘stops’. Rather than ‘stops’, researchers write, if we may say, ‘please-go-ons’; in fact, it is they, to borrow a legal term, who produce claims in which the scientific author figures more as a claimant than as a judge. That is, each scientific article functions as a judgment on claims made by colleagues, or as a ‘plaint’ made to those colleagues on behalf of a phenomenon whose existence is claimed by an article’ (204-5). Science and law work with different regimes of enunciation and different truth criteria: whereas science operates through numerous referential chains through which statements can be traced back and forth producing new knowledge, law’s movement is ‘one-way only’ (235); knowledge is tied to existing articles and decisions, a linking practice that re-attaches the world to the body of law. Towards the end of the book, in Talking of Law, Latour takes issue with various models of law. In the same way as he opposed the reduction of science to a method or a set of concepts in previous work of ‘science in 81
Lonneke van der Velden – Law interrupted? action’ (1987), he opposes the reduction of law to the application of rules. He also opposes a reading of law in terms of ‘invisible’ power structures. Latour rather prefers to describe the references that he can trace. In a similar manner, Latour opposes a (Luhmannian) conception of law as a subsystem of society with its own domain (263). On the contrary, he argues, the law is a form of ‘association’ in itself. Hence, contrary to seeking definitions and explanations for law somewhere else – in social contexts, systems, power structures, political interests, or morality – he sticks to law practices themselves. As he states: ‘There is no stronger metalanguage to explain law than the language of law itself. Or, more precisely, law is itself its own metalanguage’ (260). Latour understands law as a specific way of making connections and it is by offering this relational understanding that he adds to existing meta-juridical scholarship.
Some hesitations Latour’s chapter on the two laboratories of science and law turns around some of the notions that we tend to attribute to either the scientific or legal domain, which can in a refreshing way add to contemporary debates about how to assess science as ‘good science’ in courts. In fact, Latour claims that some of the things we associate with objectivity, such as the ethos of disinterest, stems from legal practices having no object: Law is ‘object-less’ (236). Differing from Foucault (1975), who described how experts (psychologists, etcetera) and disciplinary practices infiltrated deeper and deeper into the legal domain, Latour seems to suggest there is a change of features in the scientist who engages with legal practice. Those moments when scientists take on the role of experts in courts and in fact ‘testify’ about specific evidence or about the state of affairs in their field, bear the imprint of the law rather than that of the sciences. Latour seems to be alarmed about these confusing intermediate positions: scientists produce new knowledge and open up discussions; they don’t ‘judge’ on the facts (237). The contribution of expertise in courts – at least in The Netherlands – is being more and more codified by rules and qualitative norms; take for
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy instance the Dutch code of behavior for expert witnesses (Coster van Voorhout 2010)7. However, following Latour, we can state that science doesn’t qualify itself through standards. This invites us to explore alternative proposals for organizing scientific expertise in courts. For example, Nico Kwakman (2008) argued that, in complex cases, scientific debate itself should be formalized in the legal procedure. Thus, instead of establishing norms for science, courts should always critically assess scientific practices that produced the evidence, thereby taking the risk that science will bring up new questions – and not be of ‘help’ to close the case.8 Although Latour’s findings add to such issues, critical remarks can be made as well. The study is considered to be valuable for its understanding of legal practices in general, however, commentators have also indicated that in the comparison between the two laboratories Latour sometimes presents unfortunate generalizations that might not hold up when scrutinized by legal scholars (Levi & Valverde 2008: 821). Science scholars might be slightly surprised as well. Latour seems to associate controversy with science and the ‘stability of established connections’ with the practice of law (Latour 2010: 235), but aren’t there examples of expert systems and institutions in science in which stability is carefully balanced out and confirmed? And what about the implicit and explicit techniques of closure in everyday scientific practice, to which Latour devoted so much attention in earlier works? Some readers might feel as if something is missing too. Instead of looking at the intermingling of science and law, as many of his colleagues in the field of Science and Technology Studies have done (Jasanoff 1995; Lynch 1998; Toom 2009), Latour’s approach considers legal practice on its own, compared to scientific practice. The role of expert witnesses and public expert hearings are excluded from Latour’s analysis. In fact, he refers to them as ‘those many hybrids of science and law’ (213, note 19). Whereas these other studies often stress the different procedural formats related to legal cultures, and how these aspects interact with scientific evidence, Latour’s attempt is to actually grasp the essence of Law itself. Latour understands ‘essence’ not as a (stable) definition, but as drawn out by situated material practices: the specific way heterogeneous phenomena are ‘tied together’ (x). 82
Lonneke van der Velden – Law interrupted? Despite this nuanced understanding, Latour did choose a very specific site of research, the Council of State, because it presents law in a purified form, dealing with specific juridical problems. However, American or Dutch laboratories of criminal law have to deal with other problems, and with specific objects that oscillate back and forth between law and science – for instance, camera images, bloodstains, and brain scans. How should we understand these objects in relation to the two regimes of enunciation? Taking them in account could arguably reopen Latour’s differentiation between law and science.
Lonneke van der Velden is a PhD student at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and teaches at the department of Mediastudies. Her research interests lie in the intersection of science and law and in issues of surveillance. Her PhD research focuses on digital surveillance and technologies of activism.
References: Coster van Voorhout, J.A. (2010) ‘Gedragscode gerechtelijk deskundigen (NRGD)’. Expertise en Recht (1). Foucault, M. (1991 [1975]) Discipline and Punish. The birth of the prison. London: Penguin Books. Jasanoff, S. (1995) Science at the Bar: Law, Science, and Technology in America. A Twentieth Century Fund Book, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kwakman. N.J.M. (2008) ‘De derde weg. Naar maximale onzekerheidsreductie in de materiële waarheidsvinding met behulp van deskundigenbewijs.’ Trema 8: 357-362.
Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy Latour, B. (1987) Science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society. Harvard University. Latour, B. (2010) The Making of Law. An Ethnography of the Conseil d'Etat. Cambridge: Polity Press. Levi, R. and Valverde, M. (2008) ‘Studying Law by Association: Bruno Latour Goes to the Conseil d’État.’ Law & Social Inquiry 33(3): 805–825. Lynch, M. (1998) ‘The Discursive Production of Uncertainty: The OJ Simpson ‘Dream Team’ and the Sociology of Knowledge Machine’. Social Studies of Science (Special issue on Contested Identities: Science, Law and Forensic Practice 28(5-6): 829-68. Toom, V. (2009) ‘De wereld achter het DNA-bewijs: Betrouwbaarheid in een Nederlands laboratorium voor DNA-onderzoek’. Nederlands Juristenblad 84 (7): 416-423. Van der Velden, L. (2011) ‘Vragen om onzekerheid: de bijdrage van forensische expertise in het recht’. In: Dijstelbloem H. and R. Hagendijk. Onzekerheid troef: Het betwiste gezag van de wetenschap. Amsterdam, Van Gennep: 191-213.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License (AttributionNoncommercial 3.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nl/deed.en for more information.
1 The author would like to thank Katja de Vries for her kind and critical remarks concerning this piece of writing. 2 Famous cases in The Netherlands that drew attention to the role of expertise in law are ‘The Schiedammer Parkmoord’ (Schiedam Park Murder) and ‘Lucia de B.’ Recently, the ‘Deventer Moordzaak’ (Deventer Murder Case), being controversial for years, was prob-
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Lonneke van der Velden – Law interrupted?
lematized again by philosopher of science Ton Derksen in Leugens over Louwes. Deventer Moordzaak (2011). 3 For those that are familiar with Latour’s work: The Making of Law is Laboratory Life (Latour & Woolgar 1979) in the legal lab. 4 ‘Mean’ is not a word in English, but the translators preferred to use this translation because it keeps its association with ‘middle’, contrary to the term ‘legal ground’ which suggest a more foundational understanding (10). 5 Latour attributes the notion of a ‘value object’ to the work of Greimas and Courtès (129). 6 in Latour’s understanding hesitation ‘produces the freedom of judgment by unlinking things before they are linked up again’ (195). 7 The requirements are formulated in ‘het Nederlands Gerechtelijk Deskundigen Register’ (NGDR) and require for instance that the scientist has published in scientific journals relevant for his field in order te be able to be called an expert in this field. 8
For a more extended discussion of this argument see Van der Velden (2011).
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie
SIGNALEMENTEN
Door de kennis van zeer uiteenlopende wetenschappelijke disciplines op een vernuftige wijze te integreren, weet Van Baar niet alleen een radicaal nieuw licht te werpen op hun situatie, maar ook een onderzoeksvraagstuk te repolitiseren dat voortdurend door een neoliberale vorm van gouvernementele macht wordt gedepolitiseerd.
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Huub van Baar (2011) The European Roma. Minority Representation, Memory and the Limits of Transnational Governmentality. Amsterdam: Eigen Beheer, 400 p. In Europa is recentelijk sprake van een sterke opleving van geweld van overheden en burgers tegen Roma. Zo gooide de Franse overheid in 2010 Roma met veel machtsvertoon het land uit en staken Bulgaarse burgers hun huizen in brand en werden ze in het Hongaarse plaatsje Hajduhadhaz verjaagt. Voor een goed begrip van de benarde situatie van de Roma is deze briljante studie van Huub van Baar onontbeerlijk. Daarin stelt hij de vraag hoe de verschuiving van de representatie van de Roma als een niet-Euorpese mnderheid naar hun representatie als een Europese minderheid moet worden geïnterpreteerd. Zonder Michel Foucault slaafs te volgen weet hij vooral diens begrip ‘gouvernementaliteit’ vruchtbaar te gebruiken voor het beantwoorden van deze vraag. Van Baar laat zien dat na de val van de muur zich een wijzing van de representatie en regulatie van Roma heeft voltrokken. Terecht wijst hij erop dat de representatie en regulatie van de Roma gedepolitiseerd worden door ze eenzijdig als een transnationaal Europees veiligheidsvraagstuk neer te zetten zonder het serieus over hun sociaal-economische deprivatie en uitsluiting te hebben. 84
Alexander Gröschner; Mike Sandbothe (red.) (2011) Pragmatismus als Kulturpolitik. Beiträge zum Werk Richard Rortys. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011, 252 p. ‘De vos weet velen zaken, maar de egel weet één grote zaak’, aldus de Griekse dichter Archilochus. Isaiah Berlin interpreteert deze regel zodanig dat ze een van de grootste verschillen tussen denkers en schrijvers aanduidt. Terwijl de egel staat voor de monist die één centrale visie heeft en daarop alles betrekt, staat de vos voor de pluralist die zich op vele zaken richt waartussen vaak geen enkel verband is. Robert Brandom vraagt zich in deze bundel met beschouwingen over Richard Rorty (1931-2007) af of zijn leermeester een egel of vos is. Hij komt tot de slotsom dat hij een egel is die van zijn vroege tot zijn late werk één centrale visie vertolkt: de structuur waarbinnen aan mensen en dingen autoriteit en verantwoordelijkheid wordt toegekend is contingent en optioneel, waardoor het onder bepaalde omstandigheden mogelijk en zelfs wenselijk is de voorkeur te geven aan een andere structuur. Dat de neopragmatist Rorty daarmee in de voetstappen treedt van radicale verlichtingsfilosofen wordt ook onderstreept in de bijdragen van Jürgen Habermas, Alasdair MacIntyre en Richard Bernstein. Laatstgenoemde wijst erop dat filosofie voor Rorty primair een vorm van cultuurpolitiek (cultural politics) is die vocabulaires die de hoop op een betere wereld frustreren elimineert en nieuwe vocabulaires introduceert. Op geleide van deze visie wordt in andere bijdragen onder meer de aandacht gevestigd op
Krisis Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie het spanningsveld tussen expertocratie en democratie en op het feit dat de autoriteit van een staat contingent en optioneel is. RG
Evert van der Zweerde, George Kwaad en Jeroen Linssen (red.) Dwarse Interventies. Politiek-filosofische opstellen. Amsterdam: Parrèsia, 272 p. Deze bundel politiek-filosofische opstellen, verschenen ter gelegenheid van het afscheid van Machiel Karskens als hoogleraar Sociale en Politieke Wijsbegeerte in Nijmegen, geeft een aardig beeld van de interesses binnen de hedendaagse politieke filosofie in Nederland. Met bijdragen van onder andere René Boomkens, René ten Bos, Annemarie Mol, Marin Terpstra, Paul van Tongeren en Machiel Karskens zelf. Hoewel de auteurs voor hun reflecties zeer uiteenlopende startpunten hebben gekozen – onder andere Janis Joplin, Nelson Mandela, Franz Kafka en de fototentoonstelling The family of man komen voorbij – zijn ze opvallend eensgezind in hun filosofische invloed: Foucaults aanwezigheid waart nog steeds rond in het merendeel van de bijdragen.
Signalementen Bovendien, zo merkt Gido Berns laconiek op, blijft de dode Derrida tot 2051 een hedendaags auteur omdat ieder jaar een van de 43 banden met collegestof wordt uitgegeven. En dat Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) , Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) of de nog levende Julia Kristeva (1941) volgens de redacteuren al hun houdbaarheidsdatum hebben overschreden om nog een plek in het boek te verdienen, is geen enkel probleem. Wie naar volledigheid streeft moet niet beginnen aan het samenstellen van een boek dat beoogt de nieuwe Franse filosofie enigszins te representeren. Als naslagwerk is dit boek zeer geslaagd, omdat het merendeel van de stukken helder en duidelijk de centrale gedachten van een filosoof weergeeft. Het boek is ook boeiend omdat de Franse filosofen aan de hand van acht thema’s aan de lezer worden voorgesteld: speculatieve filosofie, deconstructie, laïcisme en democratie, stad en burger, subjectiviteit en zelf, consumptiemaatschappij en kapitalisme, kunst en de opsplitsing van de natuur. RG
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Bram Ieven, Aukje van Rooden, Marc Schuilenberg en Sjoerd van Tuinen (red.) (2011) De nieuwe Franse filosofie. Denkers en thema’s voor de 21e eeuw. Amsterdam: Boom, 477 p. Filosofie leeft van de iteratie van teksten van oude filosofen. Door deze vorm van reanimatie kunnen filosofen die al een tijdje dood zijn, zoals Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995) en Michel Foucault (1926-1984), met een beetje fantasie tot de nieuwe Franse filosofie worden gerekend Met de thema’s die ze aandragen zijn ze in elk geval voor filosofen uit de 21e eeuw nog enorm inspirerend. 85
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