AFFLICTED POWERS:
An Interview with Retort
David Evans
Introduction: Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Verso, 2006, new edition) is collaborative writing by four members of Retort, a group of forty or so dissidents who regularly meet for political discussions in the San Francisco Bay area. The book began life as an agitational pamphlet called Neither Their War Nor Their Peace, produced in 2003 for anti-war demonstrators in San Francisco. The provenance is an important reminder that Afflicted Powers aims to be a user’s manual for those practically involved in opposing the so-called ‘War on Terror’.
Retort has created a heady cocktail of concrete political analysis and theoretical speculation. The basic ingredient is Marxism, but expansively defined: Lenin and Luxemburg, but also Debord. Indeed, Debord permeates Afflicted Powers. An essay like ‘The Decline and Fall of the Spectacular Commodity Economy’ (about the Watts Riots of 1965) is treated as exemplary polemical writing, ranking with the greatest achievements in the Marxist pamphleteering tradition. Such writing, Retort reminds readers, was the original context for a concept like ‘the society of the spectacle’ that has now been crudely appropriated and usually rendered apolitical by the postmodernist academy. In contrast, Retort seeks to deploy the concept in a manner that Debord would have appreciated. ‘Spectacle’ is associated with the complex of tactics that continuously generates advanced consumers. The processes are market led, but are anxiously monitored by a state that has a vested interest in consumer obedience and its complement, weak citizenship. For Retort, the perpetrators of the September attacks had a profound understanding of spectacular politics and consciously sought to defeat the United States in the realm of images. In this sense, the collapsing Twin Towers was a victory: a carnivalesque moment when the world appeared to be turned upside down.
My questions focussed on Retort’s creative engagement with the legacy of Debord and the Situationists. I was certainly interested in the ways in which this legacy appears in the text, but I also wanted to tease out the thinking behind their selection and deployment of accompanying photographs. For here, too, I sensed the presence of Debord.
PS
New Left Review 41 (Sept/Oct 2006) contains a new broadside from Retort called ‘All Quiet on the Eastern Front’. Written in July 2006 in the early days of Israel’s war on Lebanon, it offers further acerbic commentary on the ‘War on Terror’. The text is part of an installation called Afflicted Powers that is being shown at the Second International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Seville, October 2006 – January 2007.
David Evans: Probably the most infamous image to emerge so far from the current war in Iraq was taken in Abu Ghraib prison in 2003 - a hooded prisoner on a ‘plinth’ seems to be the recipient of electric shock torture by US forces. This amateur photograph has now been reproduced globally in many contexts. The Economist used it on a front cover with the imperative caption ‘Rumsfeld must resign’. On anti-war posters it was combined with the question ‘Is this your freedom?’ And you have selected it for your frontispiece, accompanied by an extended quotation from the 17th Century English poet John Milton:
And reassembling our afflicted Powers Consult how we may henceforth most offend Our Enemy, our own loss how repair, How overcome this dire calamity, What reinforcements we may gain from Hope, If not what resolution from despare.
Paradise Lost, Book 1
Could you explain the significance of this pairing?
Retort: Our pairing of Paradise Lost with the "wired Christ" in Abu Ghraib reflects the central claim of the book, that the essential task of political thinking and writing at this moment is to confront the strange atavism of the new world situation – a seeming brute return to the 17th century Wars of Religion familiar to Milton, twinned with an intensified deployment of the apparatus of the production of appearances. The U.S. in particular feels a double threat, first, to the monopoly of the means of mass destruction, and second, to its management of the image-world – in both cases from non-state actors of various kinds. The events of September 11th 2001 were, we believe, a defeat for the imperial state at the level of spectacle (to which, by the way, its managers have been unable to stage an answer – not that they haven't tried.) Likewise, if the recorded collapse of the World Trade Center wordlessly proposed – revealed, actually – the vulnerability of the US heimat, then the global circulation of the Abu Ghraib snapshot struck a parallel blow at the ideological claim of the United States to be the guarantor of “human rights”, “freedom”, and so on. Now, we further insist that the attack on the towers by a neo-Leninist vanguard of Islamic militants was a symbolic (but nonetheless real) defeat not only for the capitalist hegemon but also for those who count themselves (Retort included) enemies of capitalist globalization ¬ – for the "movement of movements" such as it is. In that sense, we intend "afflicted powers" to refer ambiguously to this Janus-faced defeat. We appreciate that, in identifying with Milton's resonant phrase, we belong to the party of Satan, as he is summoning the rebel angels to storm heaven.
DE: Photographs are used discretely throughout the book. Sometimes you seek dissonance between image and text - a grim, contemporary photograph of the Israeli separation wall and a sardonic reference to ‘Making the Desert Bloom’, an important motif in Israeli propaganda from the fifties onwards (in the chapter on US / Israel relations called ‘The Future of an Illusion’). And sometimes there is a surprising choice of image – a colour photograph of an Avon lady testing deodorant samples with Indians in Brazil (in your concluding chapter, ‘Modernity and Terror’). But mainly you seem to be using interesting but unexceptional press photographs, given straightforward descriptive captions like ‘Oil spill, Nembe Creek, Niger Delta, Nigeria, August, 2004’ (in the chapter ‘Blood for Oil?). What thinking informed your picture editing?
R: The selection and placement and captioning of the photographs was very important to us, and we thank you for noticing. We had the help of a photographer friend, Ed Kashi, whose work in Kurdistan and Nigeria some of your readers will know. He was responsible for the cover as well as the shot of the Nembe Creek oil spill you mention.
Of course we were alive to the problem of choosing images for a book critical of the current image-regime, and we are not such fools as to believe that we could elude utterly the mills of the spectacle. Each image was chosen to perform a certain kind of work on its own; none was intended as "illustration". We should also say that the universal (that is, from all points on the political/cultural compass) opinion that image has somehow trumped or superseded word in the brave new media world strikes us as nonsense. To the contrary, never has the image-array been so much auxiliary to scripts of one kind or another, typically written by modernity's specialists in solicitation – copywriters, public relations hacks, human resources officers, soundbite artists, poets of the advertisement – and delivered into a mediascape in which language itself has been flattened and truncated. One might incidentally mention the very heavy cost of reproducing images in books these days, thanks to the neoliberal regime of intellectual property in which image libraries have become major "profit centres". The fees charged by Corbis, Getty, etc, for the images in Afflicted Powers – well under a dozen, and some half-page – amounted to several thousand dollars.
DE: German poet and playwright Heiner Müller wrote that to use Brecht without changing him was a betrayal. I could imagine Retort saying the same thing about Guy Debord and the Situationist International – materials to be continuously reworked rather than revered. How, then, have you adapted the Situationist notions of the spectacle and the colonization of everyday life to understand the present conjuncture?
R: We assert in the opening chapter that our intention is to turn the two notions – "the society of the spectacle" and "the colonization of everyday life" – back to the task for which they were originally deployed, namely, to understand the powers and vulnerabilities of the capitalist state. We set out to grasp the logic of the present moment, in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001 and the seeming historical regression of US statecraft. Specifically, we asked ourselves about the possibility of real interaction between the political economy of neoliberalism, the warfare state, and new developments in the realm of the image. To put it in a single phrase – a dense phrase but one which captures the analytic linkages – we aimed to explore "the contradictions of military neoliberalism under conditions of spectacle". We remain agnostic about the possibilities of destabilization in a system that increasingly depends on image-management. The spectacle accelerates as a result of the falling rate of illusion; the disenchantment of the image-world may follow. In any case, we take spectacle in a minimal, matter-of-fact way to characterize this new stage of accumulation of capital. Not just a piling up of images, as media studies would have it, but in Debord's sense of a social relationship between people that is mediated by representations. Crucially, our analysis depends on the complementary notion of the colonization of everyday life, and of subjection to an endless bombardment of brands, logos, slogans, consumption-motifs, invitations to feel happy. Globalization turned inward, as it were. We argue in Afflicted Powers, then, that globalization is producing "weak states" across the world economy, and "weak citizenship" at the spectacular centre, the result of the thinning of the texture of daily life. Weak citizenship may be optimal for the demands of the market, but not when the state has to embark on a major round of primitive accumulation, as we argue the US imperial state attempted in Iraq. Never before have politics been conducted in the shadow of defeat both on the ground and at the level of the spectacle.
DE: Situationist writing and picture captioning frequently involved the use of pre-modern literary quotations for various reasons – to wake up readers, perhaps, or to escape the tyranny of the present. To what extent did this tactic inspire your work?
R: Of the quartet of authors of Afflicted Powers two are historians, and the other two are historically minded. Perhaps it is just the déformation of the historian to raid the lumber-rooms of the past. But frankly we cannot imagine having embarked on such a project without the assistance of Rosa Luxemburg, Randolph Bourne, or Hannah Arendt. And unless Nietzsche were to hand, a critique of modernity would be far more difficult to frame. Edmund Burke and Thomas Hobbes were an essential part of the analytic toolkit. Milton, who helped to forge a radical, political idiom in the revolutionary decades of the 17th century, gave us our title, and was an abiding inspiration, not least because his great poem was written in the face of defeat. And of course the indelible line of Tacitus, "They make a desert and call it peace" speaks to us across the centuries. These were words he put in the mouth of a Gaelic warrior on the eve of battle against a Roman legion in the Scottish highlands, at the far north-western edge of the empire. We need Tacitus to remind us what kind of peace is meant by the masters of war – the peace of the "peace process" , the peace of cemeteries. Much of the work of the late Pierre Vidal-Naquet, the French historian of ancient Greece and tribune of the people, was concerned with state violence and the assassination of memory, which is central to the spectacle. He was inspired by a line of Chateaubriand he found transcribed in his father's diary before deportation to Auschwitz: "Nero triumphs in vain, as elsewhere in the empire Tacitus has already been born."
DE: The Situationist idea of détournement never appears in Afflicted Powers. Yet the events of September 11th could be considered détournement in at least two senses. Sense 1: literal détournement, since the hard working French word can mean, amongst other things, aeroplane hijacking. Sense 2: reactionary détournement. That is, three elements that have been associated with Americanism since the 1920s – aeroplanes, skyscrapers and mass communications – were taken by Atta and his accomplices and re-combined. The resulting message may not have been anti-Americanist exactly, but it was certainly anti-American. What do you think?
R: Détournement, indeed. Remember that the kind of planes which Atta and his crews refunctioned as missile-bombers to strike at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon actually originated as weapons of mass destruction. The Boeing Corporation took the old bombers used to create firestorms over European and Japanese cities during the Second World War and redesigned them for purposes of mass tourism and corporate air travel in the 1960s. Atta himself, as we note in the chapter on revolutionary Islam, was an urban planner (in Cairo and Aleppo) disgusted with the disneyfication he saw coming in the wake of the failure of secular national development in Egypt and the Third World. He was right; Dubai is one face of neoliberal globalization, megaslums another. At the same time it is necessary to acknowledge al-Qaida's love affair with image-politics. Even in its rejection of the West, the Islamic vanguard displays a mastery of the virtual and of the new technics of dissemination. This is one aspect of the current moment's mixture of atavism and new-fangledness that those in opposition to both Empire and Jihad, two virulent mutations of the Right, must take very seriously. The issue, in fact, is not ultimately America or Americanism, but modernity itself.
Retort’s answers were e-mailed to me in mid-November 2006. Many thanks to Iain Boal who coordinated this exchange.
Al Gebra, Drone (Summer 2006)
Flash
Anti-terrorist officers are understood to have found material and documents that could be used to make liquid explosive bombs for smuggling onto aircraft, at houses in east London and High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. There are also unconfirmed reports of one or two "martyrdom videos" – recordings made by would-be suicide bombers – being discovered.
The suspects are accused of planning to use specially adapted sports drinks bottles to smuggle in the explosive material, which could be detonated with a battery, or flash from a disposable camera.
Tourist video
An Iraqi asylum seeker has been cleared of making a video identifying potential terrorist targets in London. Rauf Abdullah Mohammad, 26, was found not guilty at Woolwich crown court of four terrorism charges related to making the tape. The prosecution had alleged the video was made to help Islamist terrorists plot and commit an attack on London. It contained images of tourist sites including Hyde Park, Big Ben and Parliament Square. Religious chants and gunfire can be heard. The jury accepted that the video, made in September 2003, was simply a souvenir of his time in London.
Glamour
The editor of Glamour magazine has apologized after a reporter issued an appeal for "photogenic" modern war widows.
Saddam (1)
Terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay were shown execution photos of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, a US lawyer claimed today. Joshua Dratel, acting for Australian detainee David Hicks, 31, who was captured in Afghanistan in 2001, said the images were used to intimidate and mentally torture prisoners.
Saddam (2)
Mobile phone footage of Saddam Hussein’s execution is being circulated as the latest playground craze.
Mark Bolland - Splitscreens
The ‘return of the real’ in our current cultural climate is a symptom of the ‘hyperreal’, simulated nature of contemporary photo-capitalism. Reality is always a construct of discourse, and never more obviously so than now: ‘Virtual reality’, ‘reality TV’ and the like, could hardly be more unreal, yet they are real in some sense and are experienced as real, and as such they collapse the difference between reality and unreality. As Jean Baudrillard has said, there is now &no ‘objective’ difference” between the real and the simulated. Those who could not tear themselves away from their TV sets for two hours on the morning of September 11th 2001 might well agree. Those events had an uncanny familiarity about them, prompting Slavoj Zizek to suggest that the relevant question is “where have we already seen the same thing over and over again?"
In what seems now to be a remarkably prescient observation Baudrillard, in ‘Simulations’, 1983, said "it is the social itself which, in contemporary discourse, is organised according to a script for a disaster film."
William Forsythe Three Atmospheric Studies
"It’s an examination of various pictures of political killing."
American choreographer William Forsythe brought his Frankfurt-based company to Sadler’s Wells, London, in Autumn 2006. Three Atmospheric Studies alludes to the war in Iraq, inspired by the paintings of Cranach as well as recent war photographs.
"I’m a citizen, and I have the opportunity to speak in public and many people don’t. Dance happens to be the medium I have access to."
(Photographer Dominik Mentzos is a regular collaborator with The Forsythe Company. We thank him for permission to use his work.)
DE
