Pablo adds: He is also an incisive and funny responder to student criticism.

Too often my eyes glaze over when I am reading the theory section of our professional papers. At conferences and workshops, my ears search for other frequencies when I hear theory speak. But not always. When “my theorists” are engaged, I can filter out and hone in. Otherwise, though, I glide away. When I do so, I discipline myself into attention by mocking my hubris. I don’t wish to take that posture here. Instead, I want to use this space to defend and substantiate my drift. I am not sure I will do so, however, with an explicit argument.

Our discipline is faddish, no? Product differentiation requires graduate students and established scholars to move from theorist to theorist – searching for profit from all the pores of the earth.[1] And yet, new debates seem like old debates. Things, times, and theorists change but our foundational questions probably remain less than a dozen. My favorite theorists – dead and alive – negotiate these questions. As do yours. I no longer have it in me to sift through the jargon and make the translations.

And yet, there is always something to be had in these workshops and conference papers. Something buried in the theory speak but which the author/speaker hides in plain view. She/he is speaking now. A mind/body configured uniquely by the particular path of this particular life. But structured by forces mundane, ubiquitous, and universal. Such bodies speak and write. They hide what they try to learn. But they also reveal bits of the real. I am trying to pay attention.

—–

Claire Turenne-Sjolander relates her husband’s sudden death. She conveys what forced her to write her grief and to rage against the medical profession. She describes her negotiation with the editor of a journal over what needs to be added. She marvels at the outpouring of responses she receives from readers. Her story contains a universal equivalent. It presses others to reveal their own particular grief and anger. She sketches the stakes in all this. Writing is grief work, a kind of mourning — I take her to imply.

Jennifer Riggan says, “I fell in love with a man from Eritrea.” My mind races. Only one of my ears is attuned to her speaking now. I recall reading her work from a prior conference. She traveled to the horn of Africa. Why? She is talking about her work there but what is important to me is prior.[2] I want to ask her: Why did you travel to Eritrea? What did you imagine discovering there that you didn’t find at home? And love! Doesn’t one decide to fall in love? She is at work on a theory of travel and on a theory of desire. But her subject matter gets in the way, I think. She is removing those obstacles — but surreptitiously. Is she waiting for someone to ask her questions about love and travel? I want to ask her about the “prior.” I need her collaboration with my own prior story.

Tony Burke asks this about the workshop participants: “Are we doing social science as fiction?” He introduces the concept “ficto-criticism.” My mind has to expand towards the space he creates with this language. I don’t experience it as jargon but as play that works. How did he get to all this I wonder. I must ask him to trace out the path.

Richard Jackson gives us a list of ten ways in which narrative writing excels. The list is precise and useful, I think. But what else is going on? At some point he confesses to having written a novel. I will read the novel. What will he say in his novel that eludes him in his long publication list? How did he decide to write a novel? I want to know the precise details of this process.

Melissa Finn engages Jihadis on their own terms. She aims to understand their political theory and criticize it from within. She reveals she wrote a novel alongside writing her dissertation. How many novelists in the room so far? The count is up to four. Again, I have questions for Melissa: Why the novel? Where is it now? Why the simultaneous double tracts? What does she make of the wall that separates them? Is the false dichotomy “agent-structure” replicated by the dichotomy “novel-dissertation”? So much to uncover, so little time.

Oded Löwenhiem is troubled by this question: why is his book on biking through Jerusalem is written in English and not Hebrew. Pained contortions deliver his response. Writing in Hebrew takes him to the core of the problem and he cannot glare into that sun without losing all sight. English gives him distance, allowing him to look awry, he says. He can orbit his love and hate without crossing the event horizon and being submerged into the singularity. There is much more to him, I think, than the optimism he portrays about our workshop. The workshop space allows him to “breathe,” he says. I begin to sense how dire is his suffocation as he pedals on the hills of the city he loves but in which he cannot breathe. There is a deeper story here, I think.

—–

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner provide opportunities to probe what is hidden but left in plain view. Body to body as we nourish ourselves. This nourishment is what awaits beyond the boredom that veil us — boredom’s telos. The bits that give us away wait for someone to ask us the question – the question we fear and desire in equal proportion. And so we come to know bits of the world that produce these impossible bodies.

Our writing takes us away but also towards. We are learning how to make it worth our while to write it, read it, and speak it. Not a lack of theory. But an acknowledgment of the real. An awareness of what we know is absent from our work; what we are trying to say but cannot.[3] Something worth learning, worth writing, worth traveling across oceans to hear.

[1] Himadeep Muppidi comments: “Not really. This is too generous. More like: “from every pore of Europe, every obscure, second, third rate theorist in the West will be engaged before we dare leave its shores for a thinker/theorist outside….”

[2] Himadeep Muppidi comments: “Yes…you see the beginnings of a world in that “prior” and that’s exciting as IR.

[3] Himadeep Muppidi comments: The core, I think: “…what we know is absent from our work.” Absent from what we present, talk, theorize, discuss, and publish, as a contribution to the study of IR. Forget the rest of the larger world—our work doesn’t even do justice to us; our fuller knowledge (with all its limits and distortions) is absent from what we learn to write professionally.

So we have learnt to keep our eyes and ears open to what reveals itself otherwise when we stage our perfect formal writing; that’s where we locate good stories about the world; and those are the stories that are worth re-introducing into IR. The rest is fluff, window-dressing, a cover-up that bores you and me and everyone else.

It is rare to be in a space uncluttered by social messages, but you suddenly find even your modern sensibilities assaulted as you make your way through contemporary America. There are the expected advertisements, but they cover more of the physical surface of the world than you remember. There are the expected automated announcements, but they pierce the air and reverberate more loudly than you remember. You watch as everyone else moves through this cloud of demands, warnings, enticements, and you wonder: “does their head spin as mine does?”

Advertisement on escalator railing.

The cab you take across Manhattan has a television screen constantly playing commercials – you can silence it but you cannot turn off the scrolling images. The roads you drive down in New York, Chicago and Denver have their negative space filled by an uncountable number of signs, billboards, words – every surface a text. Even tucked away from the public stream of communication, in your home or in your car, the words and pictures crash over you: television is ubiquitous and its light flashes on you wherever you go, the radio blares at you in the coffee shop and the eye doctor’s waiting room, the ads flash on your computer screen as you write emails to friends, and the messages and updates ding and chime on your phone as you sit down to eat a family meal.

The frenetic quality of the day only appears once you are lying in an unfamiliar bed, in a quiet dark room, when you can hear your parents breathing as they sleep down the hall from you, when you can hear the geese who have come south from Canada honking in the distance, when your mind stops receiving, blocking, dodging, collecting words and is able to put its own thoughts together. Being out of place and out of rhythm, you feel the importance of this moment. Slowness. Quiet. Rest.

Today, like everyday, your spirit’s agenda is set from the moment you wake by the stimulus of the world, which demands your reaction.

You start your day again surrounded by messages. The sink is branded by your toothpaste, your soap, your face cleanser. Each of these items also conjure memories and emotions, some your own, but mostly they are those placed there by advertising campaigns. This point seems banal, obvious. Your body demands care and sustenance. How important are these silent messages, silently received?

The quiet barrage continues at the breakfast table as you surround yourself with more brands, while checking your email and turning on the morning news. It will continue throughout the day. The hum of advertising, created by the constant cycle of sales pitch and brand recognition, is only the base layer.

You watch the news, hoping to be informed, finding yourself formed. The pretty faces repeat basic facts you already know on a 15-minute loop. You eat your cereal; you drink your coffee. Editing decisions decide not only the content of the day but your default emotional reaction to it. The newsreader expresses the resentment you’re expected to share. Resistance to this is futile because you only resist, and therefore confirm, the primacy of what they are giving you. Yelling at the television is impotency as ironic poetry.

Talkingheads in a decabox of commentary

You do not realise how easily the spirit’s agenda is set by external demands until something interrupts your own patterned behaviour. You find yourself out of sync in your former homeland – a moment of disruption like a tear in the skin on your index finger, a crack in the dermis brought on by dry weather, the moment of disruption is a mental siren. Each brush of your finger – against a bootlace, into your pocket, in the grasp of a new acquaintance – fires a signal through the nervous system to stop. To stop whatever you are doing because it is painful.

There are other experiences that disrupt our habit and awaken us to the quality of the rhythm of our thoughts and actions. The new acquaintance who becomes a new love, who fills your inbox, who calls at unexpected times, who asks you to present yourself and who in turn presents herself to you. Each interaction sends a complex wave of signals to refocus on this person because she is pleasurable. But these experiences of mindfulness are not normal, whether painful or pleasurable they are disruptions.

There is good reason for the mind to run on habit. We need mental fluidity to make our way in the world, but when you attend to the habitual you discover the constant intrusion of external demands that shape your consciousness in every minute of the day. It is as if a sliver has slipped beneath the skin, stuck fast – the agenda your spirit follows is not your own. This means that over the course of a day, a year, a life our spirit is not our own, it is also the quality and the character of the social environment we live in. The insight is not how to avoid this but what you can do with such a thought.

Any potential void in the day, in you spirit, is filled. Driving your car, thinking about the demands at work today, responding to texts – the mind is occupied. The spirit’s agenda, little by little, is set by everything around it. Even away from the demands of work or the stress of traffic you fill your ears and eyes like a glutton: magazine in one hand, phone in the other, headphones in your ears.

Everything human is made of thoughts that we must ourselves think in the act of receiving them – to understand those thoughts or respond to them requires action from us. To be surrounded by all these un-thought thoughts is by its nature oppressive. The fact that the spirit is directed by the inputs it receives, which are deeply social and always historically situated, is only to be noted – what is of concern is the content and ethos of the agenda we come to embody.

You are told to be afraid. “We’re about to fall off a fiscal cliff?” You are told that you are inadequate. “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”  You are told that you need to be made safe. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with gun. You are told that things will make you happy. “Koke adds life where there isn’t any.”

Any single moment of input is benign, but like a sandstorm these moments begin to blind us.

In The Central Park Five, a documentary about the infamous rape of a jogger in Central Park in New York City in 1989, this sort of blindness is at the centre of the tragedy that unfolds. After the assault on the jogger, the New York Police Department arrested five boys from Harlem. The boys were lost in the grown up world of the police station, overwhelmed by the threats, promises, accusations and deprivation of interrogations that exceeded 24 hours. We can see the boys so overwhelmed that they admit to things they know they did not do – accepting the thoughts that have been hurled at them as children do, by believing authority and telling lies they do not themselves understand.

The film also shows the boys’ parents in the same situation – weakened by the threat against their children they do not demand lawyers for their boys, they do not ask obvious questions that would show that the police case does not stand up, they think the thoughts of the police as the police think them, and then try to escape the terrible consequences their families face by doing as they are told. Watching these poor, disempowered families go through this is harrowing – the miscarriage of justice goes deeper than locking away innocent boys because it also taught the families and the boys caught up in the case to doubt themselves, to succumb to the imperatives of the world. This is ideology being installed in real time, written into the helpless faces of scared boys from Harlem.

But of course the police and prosecutors are themselves acting out imperatives given to them not only by those they answer to – politicians worried about re-election, wealthy (and mostly white) New Yorkers tired of having the safety they feel entitled to eroded – but also the wider messages that young, poor, black and Latino boys are violent, predatory, dangerous – “wilding” as the newspaper headlines called out.

Central Park Five described as “Wolf Pack”

The film is valuable because it shows you the spirit of a city, a police force, a scared teenage boy set by the spirit of our social environment. It reminds you of how important it is to notice when one feels oneself being swallowed up by this mental sandstorm. But noticing that your spirit is being formed is not enough, you can survive in these conditions, but you will always be reacting.

It is difficult to open one’s self and senses in such an environment – to listen or touch or speak. Without that space it is nearly impossibly to act with care, with any semblance of true freedom and control. This lack of control is an important part of human consciousness, we are not free choosers most of the time, but this condition of dependence creates its own demand for a space in which we can reflect, choose and claim our freedom, which is – in essence – to claim some authority over your social environment, to have a place in setting the social spirit in which you find your own individual spirit unavoidably situated. 

You feel this insight as a moment of release, but wonder: is there hope beyond the power of pain and pleasure to interrupt the stream of experience, beyond our ability to become aware of our environment? Can we act with freedom and care?

You want very badly to say, “Yes!” And the space of resistance is surprisingly fertile once we realize that the agenda that dictates our spirit is not a singular imperative backed by any coherent or sinister social force, it is a milieu that is itself often unthought, unintentional, and messy, such that the challenge is to give attention and begin to think and act in a countervailing way. You start to hope change might be easier than we are taught to believe because in its smallness influencing and responding to the social environment is something that we all do everyday. The challenge is one of revaluation, pausing to judge which message, thought, impulse wins out in the clamor for our attention, and which messages we ourselves send out.

In the film Brief Encounters the photography of Gregory Crewdson is revealed as source of inspiration and also resistance to the imperatives of the world. His enormous photos are carefully staged moments that are designed to look perfectly real, and in this they reveal that the real itself is designed, staged and every bit the performance that Crewdson’s photographs are. In their detail, depth and scope, which are only made possible by the careful work of the artist and a massive team, the photos are in their way more real than the world because their artificiality and their perfection bring to the surface the intention, construction and meaning that the world of our experience is built from.

One of Crewdson’s photos

Sitting in the dark theatre, Crewdson’s photos – projected on to the massive screen – provide you a moment in a world with a God, a figure in control, but that’s not why you feel comforted. Rather, in lingering on a scene and its construction, you feel comforted because you are able to respond, to talk back to God in that moment and in that world, you are able to respond to Crewdson’s world because it is still and because its intention is on the surface. Rushing back into the over-saturated world of daily experience you face the question: how do you pause and begin to alter the spirit of the world through your contribution to it? You worry in this moment that you are sounding mystical, and maybe even feeling religious – but perhaps that is the feeling that you need if you have world making on your agenda. And every democrat spirit must begin with the desire to remake the world in common each day, with a spirit of equality.

The third post in our mini-forum on critical methodologies and narrative in IR, now from Anthony Burke. Anthony is Associate Professor of International Politics at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia. His works include Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War Against the Other (Routledge 2007), a recent essay in Angelaki, ‘Humanity After Biopolitics’ (December 2011), and the narrative essay ‘Life in the Hall of Smashed Mirrrors’, in Borderlands and Meanjin.

I

I have long been concerned by the way that language has two potentials with relevance to the study and practice of politics. On one hand, when combined with systems of logic and categorisation, language can construct, imagine, and fix powerful images of the real, and enable their deployment into material formations of industry, political organisation and human action. Language does not translate directly into power or constitute successful actions; it may indeed find contest and frustration. But we should hold this power in awe and watch it carefully, much as we may watch a dangerous animal that comes into our presence — after all, what more dangerous animal is there than the human, given its collective social powers of organisation and rationalisation, powers deployed through and within language?

On the other hand, particular forms and strategies of language have the power to undo and challenge this ontologizing potential: to see meaning defer and slip away, to see truths appear and shimmer into mist, to see its own strategies revealed even as it pursues them, to find itself haunted by thoughts and signs it did not intend. As Michel Foucault describes it in The Thought From Outside, this is language arriving ‘at its own edge…toward an outer bound where it must continually contest itself’. When this takes on the form of fiction, he argues, language is “no longer a power that tirelessly produces images and makes them shine, but rather a power that undoes them, that lessens their overload, that infuses them with an inner transparency that illuminates them little by little until they burst and scatter in the lightness of the unimaginable”.

This points to two strategies: one taking the form of social science, the other, the form of fiction.

I have pursed this project of deconstruction and unmasking in the form of social science, in way that both affirms and challenges its rules: to question ontologies of war and national security, the rationalist pretentions of nuclear strategy, the narrative confidence of American exceptionalism or the ‘good state’. To explore the dangers of all these things, of narrations and categories taken as truth, of choice masquerading as truth.

Yet I was also driven to literature as a possibility…of what, exactly? A mode of analysis that might enable me to see how narrative and metaphor structured particular forms of political power, and in turn light a route out of the fixity and inevitability of such metaphors and their politics. In this light, poetry might chart routes beyond the fixed ontologies and parental claims of the national security state, and its psychic power be disturbed; a conflict in Palestine that seemed to hinge on narrative incommensurability, could be rethought; or the narrative certainties of national destiny be wrecked on the shores of its own constitutive violences, otherings, and deceptions.

Yet that too was recognisable as social science, where critical reflection joined with normative, political and ontological polemics of my own. This too seems a kind of deception, where the strategies of narrative truth are unmasked, only to be replaced with new masks, with new implications.

So this is my question: Does social science as fiction allow us to escape this dilemma, or not? Does it undo images or make them shine, so brightly that we cannot see what lies behind, within or beyond them?

II

Social science as fiction seems to me to take two forms.

One is the novel and the short story, which pursues socio-political themes within a narrative framework of more of less naturalistic prose and humanist character study that deliberately effaces its own artifice and draws the reader powerfully into its world, emotionally, affectively. I think here of works such as Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Don Delillo’s Libra, Joan Didion’s Democracy, Max Frisch’s Homo Faber, the speculative science fiction of Margaret Atwood or Peter Carey, or Elizabeth Dauphinee’s marvellous new novel about Bosnia, The Politics of Exile.

One might fault them for their concealment of artifice, except that all these works do something else. They undo and challenge subjectivity, the self-presence and control of the subject, its mastery of its own nature and world, its mastery over events or history, whether this be in running the Cold War, spycraft and counterinsurgency, engineering third world development, or joining ethnos and nation with the blood of confused and troubled young men. Instead, such subjects find themselves trapped in absurdity and tragedy, confronting truths, and futures, which they had not imagined or prepared for. This is the power of the modernist novel: even if the art was not forced to confront its own artifice, its troubled souls were. That is the birth of a kind of ethics.

The other form of fiction as social science I saw developing as I studied cultural theory and writing at the University of Technology in Sydney; our teachers, like Stephen Muecke, called its ficto-criticism, a form that combined naturalistic and self-reflexive modes of fiction with more transparently theoretical work. This kind of work can be seen in Muecke’s No Road: Bitumen All the Way, in the book, Dispositions, by the New School cultural theorist McKenzie Wark, and my own ‘Life in the Hall of Smashed Mirrors’.

Fictocriticism seems to open up some intriguing potentials: it can use the suggestive and allusive modes of fiction and narrative to sneak up on theoretical insights, rather than use the logical and argumentative modes of social science or philosophy; it can use them to open space for insights that one does not yet have, that might surprise or shock or disturb, that bubble up from the subconscious or from sudden juxtapositions or out of the narrative blur of the world and its texts. It can use narrative to blend and question both subject and world; to introduce other voices and points of view; to search for places where the imaginative power of discourse confronts the materiality of the body or matter or events.

But this critical potential seems equally matched by a more conservative one. Does the resort to narrative allow one to conceal theoretical reasoning behind narrative flow and affect, the seamlessness where words and significations bind together beautifully, into the slippage between text and real? Does it allow us to conceal our polemic and our claims? Is there a secret rhetorical power to persuade being mobilised here? Or does it simply expose truth to light, make it shine, fix it where it needs to be found? Is there virtue in such concealment? Is that always a danger, or could it also be a kind of ethics?

III

The Critical Methodologies symposium I was honoured to attend last Autumn at York University made me ponder these dilemmas more deeply, and made me realise that they are in many ways insoluble, and should remain so. Listening to its speakers talk about indigenous struggles and histories in Hawaii, the seamlines of conflict and identity in Israel/Palestine, the s(p)eeking of Inuit experiences of violence and oppression and silence, it became clear that questions about the ethical relationship between narrative, identity, and power were never eradicable; that speaking for oneself was often empowering—both in a way that was critical and reconstructive of the self—but that speaking for or with others was doubly fraught. That seizing the powers of narrative could break up ossified knowledges and strategies in IR, but could open onto new dangers. Which narrative was right, which true, which ethical? What honours rather than exploits? What line of approach to a reticent and private other, however based in sympathy, would be justifiable? Could a different social scientific demand and economy (ethnographic or sociological, for example) create injustice in its institutionalised demand for stories, made into commodified and verified structures of information? What to do in the face of silence, what to speak then?

Words can be shelters, or bullets, and our stories multiply them into glowing chains, replete with beauty and terror. Where, we might ask, will such stories end…and how? For whom?

Omar El-Khairy’s Sour Lips deftly weaves together the impulses of benevolence, ventriloquism and celebrity that are the principal lineaments of this troubling story. El-Khairy’s MacMaster (played by Simon Darwen) is a complex figure, driven by a desire to counter Orientalist stereotypes of Arabs, a desperate need to occupy the positionality and authenticity of the native so as to be taken seriously in the online communities in which he seems to spend most of his life, and a more prosaic hunger for fame, book deals and everything else a PhD candidate might want. Yet in some ways, true life was stranger than the narrative that El-Khairy conjures up. MacMaster’s elaborate hoax was uncovered, in part, through information provided by a Paula Brooks, executive editor of the US-based lesbian and gay news site LezGetReal, with whom ‘Amina’ had been in contact. Thank fuck, I hear you say, except that Brooks was herself a fake identity created by Bill Graber, a 58-year old former air force pilot and retired construction worker based in Dayton, Ohio, who claimed to have been inspired to create his online avatar after a lesbian couple with whom he was friendly had been mistreated by an Ohio hospital. Convinced that the mainstream media did a poor job of representing LGBT folks, Graber created Brooks because he felt that ‘the best way to do it was to have people who were in the life, living the life, tell the story.’ Clearly more than lone eccentrics, the uncanny simultaneity of MacMaster and Graber’s performance as putatively liberal straight men getting off on playing spunky lesbians speaking truth to power begs a gigantic WTF?!

There is something slightly discomfiting about El-Khairy’s portrayal of Arraf. The ‘real’ Amina was an empty signifier—a vessel into whom everyone poured their desires for intersectional harmony. On stage, Amina is an active subject, speaking back to Tom, troubling his authorial sovereignty. Eschewing a possible Spivakian move in which the silenced subaltern might have been placed centre stage with no words of her own, this device in effect sets up a battle between two Aminas—MacMaster’s hoax and El Khairy’s desire for an authentic subject who emancipates herself—leaving this member of the audience wondering whether the playwright was complicit with MacMaster in writing his preferred version of Amina. (I wonder if George Bernard Shaw contemplated possibilities other than having Eliza Doolittle storm off or live happily ever after with Henry Higgins; in a postmodern time in which character development takes place through mass viral endorsement, there were a million Aminas floating around in the ether: she was everything we wanted her to be.) But perhaps I am being reductionist and too literal, for the violent eroticism of the interaction between Tom and Amina performs all sorts of other representational work: in these most dramatic scenes, we see the inner conflict that one supposes MacMaster experienced in the course of perpetrating his extraordinary fraud, and, more fundamentally, the always fraught relationship between author and character.

Most compelling and disturbing about the staging of Sour Lips is its three-member chorus (Takunda ‘TK’ Kramer, Celine Rosa Tan, Eden Vik) whose herd-like, frenzied canonization of Amina and equally frenzied demonization of Tom—‘share to Twitter, share to Facebook, share to Google plus’—are the motor driving the plot. Who were these people in real life? The sorts who would trek to a fringe theatre in south London to watch plays about the Arab Spring. If this is what civil society looks like, it’s enough to make you shudder.

Sour Lips is showing at the Ovalhouse Theatre 29 Jan – 16 February.

Hip-Hop Head

When you look at it head on, from just the right distance, the world seems solid. The order of things presents itself as impenetrable. Yet a change in the angle of vision reveals fissures, fusions, flukes – a world of pieces shifting ceaselessly. One vision of the world promises stability and order, the other freedom and creativity. Which of these is more attractive depends on where one finds oneself: pressed upon by the weight of the world, or abraded by the shifting fragments.

Which of these worlds is real? This is the metaphysician’s diagnosis: “If you want to calm your nerves, then find the arrangement of the world as it really is.” But the physician can only prescribe convalescence or catharsis: “Accept the reality of the given world or realise the subliminal essence of the immanent world.” This regiment exhausts us rather than making us well. It lacks the vigour of creative activity. We don’t need to know; we need to make.

William Connolly suggests that the political condition of late-modernity is to experience this impasse without means to bridge the gap.

In our times we can neither endure our thoughts nor the task of rethinking them. We think restlessly within familiar frameworks to avoid thought about how our thinking is framed. Perhaps that is the ground of modern thoughtlessness.

Creativity requires us to leave the metaphysician behind – the making of the world requires dreams, contradictions, promises, lies, empty space, messy abundance. Turning away from knowing does not force us to apologise for the durable architecture of the world – this is the vice of Richard Rorty’s ironic liberalism. He calls on poets of the self to write their lines on the walls of the world as if they were solid, so not to upset things too much – a consolation of the comfortable, irony in the face of human disaster.

The condition of the world impels those caught between the monuments of the given to return to the fissures, fusions and flukes, in hopes of exercising our creativity on the social architecture. We need world makers. We need lovers.

It is with these thoughts in mind that I return to The Roots. Phrenology, the follow-up to Things Fall Apart, explores the creative challenge the band faced after producing an album that reconstructed hip-hop – trying to avoid becoming a parody of themselves or reducing their message to braying didactic verses. The difficulty of achieving real creativity is political as well as artistic and it demands not knowledge but love, desire and risk; it is the Roots’ exploration of how to make worlds anew that offers up lessons of wider import.

Phrenology is a messy, transgressive, excessive, lustful album. It loses itself in the new rather than finding itself in what came before. Like all new worlds, the one the Roots are making grows out of love – that delicate interweaving of desire, need, hope, and vulnerability.

The album begins with the voice of a female deity declaring:

In the beginning, there was me. I was rhythm, life, two turntables, one mike.

This is not only the sound of a world creator looking down upon her work, it also returns us to a central motif of Things Fall Apart – the relationship between the artist and hip-hop culture as romantic bond. Black Thought declared on “Act Too… The Love My Life”:

Sometimes I wouldn’ta made it if it wasn’t for you. / Hip-Hop, you the love of my life and that’s true. / When I was handlin’ the shit I had to do, / It was all for you, from the door for you. / Speak through you, gettin’ paper on tour for you. / From the start, Thought was down by law for you.

This motif runs throughout the Roots’ music and it provides a way to explore the complex relationship between an artist and their context. At the end of Things Fall Apart, for example, “Return to Innocence Lost” explores the effects of domestic violence on its victims – and for that alone its an important statement in a genre of music all too often profiting from the denigration of women. Yet, the spoken word performed by Ursala Rucker also extends the motif of hip-hop as lover. The father in the narrative represents a self-hating, destructive and abusive masculinity that has marred hip-hop as a form of music. The motif continues to inform, as it confronts us with the violence that emerges among oppressed peoples, within impoverished communities and between unequal persons defined by gender.

The fear that haunts Things Fall Apart is that hip-hop culture, the lover (but also mother) to Black Thought and the Roots, had been abused and defamed by forces inside and outside that culture to the extent that its innocence and goodness were lost – only to be returned by death. It’s a profound statement to speculate on the necessity of death as the only salvation of hip-hop culture at the end of a record that aspired to redeem it as an act of devotional love.

The script of the Roots’ hip-hop romance gets re-written on Phrenology – the band has started to stray. They are no longer the devoted suitor to hip-hop; they have become wanton and promiscuous. So the female voice of hip-hop opens the album, not only looking upon the state of her creation, but also wistfully reflecting on her erstwhile lover. The tension that infuses the entire album is whether the desire for newness that feeds creativity is a betrayal – of one’s self as it is defined by the relationships that make up our identity – or whether the pursuit of love as excess can lead to the creation of something new. And if that creation of something new can be done with out losing the self, hence the need to describe such a transgressive album as a return to the roots of hip-hop. The self is a transgression of itself so long as it continues to love, to have a creative spark.

Does our love allows us to find something in the way of things that is our own, made new though desire and devotion? Can we still find a place for ourselves while engaged in the work of world making? Is there space in love to be both safe and free?

It is this examination of creativity (of world making) that brings love into politics, particularly the difficulty of thinking and acting creatively in our contemporary condition – its intolerable cruelties and its potential for transformation. In their own way the Roots are exemplary world makers, not only for their skill, but also as a black hip-hop band, as men who have been presumed to lack worldliness. Historically, cultures of white supremacy have operated on the axiom that other peoples lacked the ability to make the world meaningful – with their thought, with their art, with their science and even with their bodies. More recently, cultural critics of limited aural capacity have presumed that hip-hop is not meaningful music; it is parasitic on true (read “white”) creativity. The ideas that motivate Phrenology put the lie to any such mythologies.

This is seen in the allusion to the pseudo-science of phrenology in the album’s title and art work. Phrenology was one of many “scientific” discourses that cultures of white supremacy used to establish the inferiority of non-European peoples through their biological characteristics. Phrenology held that the heads of black Africans were underdeveloped and malformed, and they were most certainly not like white European heads.

The Roots play on this legacy. Phrenology’s cover (see above) depicts a “hip-hop head”, both as the slang for fan/aficionado of the genre and a black African-American mind, which is distinctive and unique, rather than a degraded copy. Phrenology, at least in this context, is transformed into a study of the hip-hop mind/culture and an exploration of its creative possibilities. The record is the documentation of the creative potency of a band entering new territory and reaching artistic maturity. In that maturity the Roots also become more politically aware, their horizons begin to expand beyond the Philadelphia ghettos they know and the racist oppression of America they chaffed against from the beginning. They present an underlying political question alongside their artistic pursuit of newness: how does one live well (live creatively and with love) in a world built upon the human tragedies of racism, sexism and poverty?

The Threat of Miscegenation

You ready for the freakiest things you done in ya life?

Miscegenation and the fears it generates are at the root of all love. At the physical level the creation of new life involves pulling apart two genomes in the uncertain hope that the mixing of materials can form a new organism. Falling in love puts our selves at risk by incorporating another in our self, while allowing our lover to take something from us. The need to control that act of transgression generates social norms infused with intense energies, as the love of individuals implicates the wider social worlds we move in. Crossing racial boundaries in the name of love undermines the hierarchies that make cultures of white supremacy possible – it unmakes one world even as it makes another. This dynamic is always present in relationships of desire and love, and the Roots grab this electrified cultural wire with both hands. Miscegenation as the desire for impurity at the core of love reveals that love as a social bond is a paradox we attempt to live. Fidelity cuts off the fertility of the self; miscegenation promises unknown newness. The only hope of holding the paradox together is if both lovers can be selves in constant flux – hip-hop as an art is perhaps uniquely capable of this. Part stolen, part inherited, part created, hip-hop is a culture without purity but defined by devotion.

More than on any other Roots album, on Phrenology Black Thought plays the role of hip-hop Lothario. To inattentive ears this may seem a regress, but I want to suggest something much more complex underlies the sexual themes that recur throughout the album. In the past, Black Thought was always the loyal suitor to his respected lover (hip-hop), his advances and promises moral braggadocio – in his verses here he’s unleashed a more wild spirit that is seeking not just new erotic encounters but to cross lines of identity.

From the first track (“Rock You“) Black Thought is boasting that hip-hop can no longer contain him, his powers exceed it; he is breaking frames, disintegrating syllables, evolving – and he “will rock you!” Itself a telling refrain from a band that reminded their listeners in the liner notes of Things Fall Apart that Rock n’ Roll was an African American invention. The Roots are quite literally intending to “rock” hip-hop music – in the sense of causing “great shock or distress to (someone or something), esp. so as to weaken or destabilize them or it” (Oxford Dictionary) – never more directly than in the sudden hard-core punk blast of “!!!!!!!!”, which is the second track on the album.

“Seed 2.0” is the centrepiece of the album and Cody Chestnutt’s chorus, which celebrates infidelity and the blurring of artistic (and racial) boundaries, declares:

I push my seed in her bush for life, / Its gonna work because I’m pushing it right. / If Mary drops my baby girl tonight / I would name her “Rock-n-roll.”

– Cody Chestnutt, “Seed 2.0”

This is no simple untamed black masculinity celebrated in song; the lyrics reflect the band’s effort to discover new musical worlds, as well as a more general truth. Fidelity and commitment are virtues that constrain; they tie the world together rather than opening it up. For the Roots, who ended their previous album pondering the question of whether hip-hop music and culture could only be saved (returned to innocence) in death, taking the risk of crossing identities is a matter of artistic survival.

In “Seed 2.0″, the unfaithful lover seeks out the “opposition” – his own lover’s enemy – because she doesn’t use contraception, she’s able to bear the transgressive offspring, the babygirl named “Rock ‘n Roll”. This act not only returns hip-hop its innocence, it recreates the act of miscegenation that made hip-hop possible. And this is the two-way current of energy that miscegenation unleashes, in the traditional American fear of racial mixing it is not only the white woman who is at risk, the black man risks more than violent social approbation being acted upon his body, he risks his own identity, mixing it with his oppressor.

The risks we take with dangerous love are centre stage in the come-on track “Break You Off”. Black Thought is messing with his Bad Misses, who herself is risking her relationship and her morals, as is Black Thought – and both of the unfaithful lovers are hurting the man back home. The reward? Beyond the obvious pleasure, a form of transcendence and renewal.

Bad Misses throwing raspberry kisses on me. / You looking for direction? Girl, I feel your vision on me. / Just don’t let him see you sweatin’; we ain’t suppose to be involved. / Knowing when we get it off, girl, I mean it all. / Keeping you fiending ’til you taking it tossed / And when I’m breaking it off, its no denying the fact it’s wrong, / Cause you got a man who’s probably playing his part, / You probably breaking his heart, he trying to figure the reason you gone. / Is it because he’s superficial, or is he too submissive? / Or did I come along and hit you with the futuristic? / Or is it cause you really couldn’t see a future with him? / All he about is paper, never took the time with you to listen, / You want it gripped up, flipped, and thrown / And get stripped and shown the way to get in the zone. / The cost? Dealing with this you won’t be takin’ a loss. / You need to leave him alone and roll with the one who’s breaking you off.

– Black Thought, “Break You Off”

Potency and the Loss of Self

My microphone will make a man a newborn infant.

What is preserved by trying to bring together urges for fidelity and miscegenation is the potency of creativity – the ability to put oneself into the world and find new spaces, make new noises, touch new bodies. Unbridled creativity, potency, risks the loss of identity – creativity as the negation of the self. In “Sacrifice“, Black Thought brags that he is

The catalyst, Thought with the knack for splashin’. / I’m dashin’, I mastered the craft of mashin’, / the level-headed thoroughbred, the female’s passion. / Magnetic attraction be keepin’ them askin’. / The crews in the Cadillac with the Pendergrass in./ Swerve half-naked, won’t come near crashin’, / But if I go to heaven, would y’all know my name, / Or would it be the same for you like I was Eric Clapton, huh?

He’s courting disaster but finding ways to redirect the energy of potency by reaffirming a remade identity – not a new final identity, but one to be constantly remade. The self constantly sacrificed to creativity but reaffirmed by commitment.

Clap for your freedom dog, that’s what’s happening.  My spit take critical political action. /  The hustle is a puzzle each piece is a fraction and every word that’s understood is a transaction. / I’m an SP soldier, microphone holder, rep Philly’s set from Bolivia to Boulder, / Paris, France to Tif and Tioga, how we gonna make it through the dark? I show ya.”

When we are filled with desire we become shape-shifters, taking on any form that connects us to the object of our desire. For the Roots this involves an expansion beyond traditional hip-hop identities and desires. Black Thought is a comic book hero, an Egyptian polymath, an actor, a travelling superstar seeking and achieving freedom.

I’m like Aquaman and Brown Hornet. / I’m like Imhotep but don’t flaunt it. / Dog, reintroducing master thespian / Ho-telling-est, illin-est, emceein. / Fuck getting money, for real, get freedom.

– Black Thought, “Thought @ Work”

Newly empowered by ceasing to be himself, Black Thought renegotiates his marriage to hip-hop. In “Seed 2.0″ he speculates on what hip-hop wants from the child she’s expecting. He doesn’t ridicule the desire for material reward but contrasts it with self-realisation.

Knocked up 9 months ago / And what she finna have, she don’t know. / She want neo-soul, this hip-hop is old, / She don’t want no rock-n-roll. / She want platinum or ice or gold. / She want a whole lot of something to fold. / If you an obstacle she just drop you cold / Cause one monkey don’t stop the show. / Little Mary is bad. / In these streets she done ran / Ever since when the heat began. / I told the girl: “look here / Calm down, I’m ‘a hold your hand / To enable you to peep the plan / Cause you is quick to learn / And we can make money to burn / If you allow me to lay this game.” / I don’t ask for much but enough room to spread my wings / And the world finna know my name

What results is a new creation, a new style, because we’ve found enough room to spread our wings and this newness will be announced to the world.

Give birth to a style and won’t give it a name. / Talk ’bout consciousness, it’s a different thang. / Envision again, the honorable ‘Riq, general Hannibal speak / The understandable diabolique, animal style / Out of your dreams, kid. You proud that you seen this / Fifth supreme linguist, a lyrical genius, / Inject you with the broke down English.

– Black Though, “Quills”

But the newness, the child without a name, that is announced is transgressive, both animal and diabolic. Black Thoughts offspring, however, is a product of his superior and awe inspiring lyrical genius with broke down English. The potency of this genius is not broken but rather his genius is to break down the language so as to make it fit for purpose – as any given identity (totality) must be if its potential is to be realised.

Finding Your Way in the Way of Things

Weighted by the gravity law, you’d know it if you came up poor.

Every creator has a fear of how their creation will be received; every parent worries what the world will do to their loved offspring. What does the order of things do to the new, including the new selves, lovers, friends, children and worlds we learn to cherish? In the monumental “Water” the Roots reflect on former member Malik B’s struggle with drug addiction. There’s no condemnation of his choices but an awareness of the harsh realities of the world, the way a creative life exposes you to risks and the difficulty of overcoming our fears, which then form into dependencies.

You know we made of everything outlaws are made of – I’m far from a hater. / And I don’t say I love you cause the way I feel is greater. / And Mila’, you a poet, son, you a born creator. / And this’ll probably dawn on you later, / it’s in your nature, lyrics all on your walls like they made of paper.

– Black Thought, “Water”

The initial track, addressing Malik’s dependence, focuses on the difficult of getting over the water, which is a metaphor for madness and exploration. The challenge is how to preserve the self through the breaking down that’s a consequence of potency, miscegenation, love – this vulnerability can lead to breakdown, especially in a world that’s so unkind and unjust. Injustice isn’t even a condition that needs to be proved anymore, we accept its existence and in so doing accept it as a condition, but how do we overcome this? The second half of “Water” is an abstract sound poem, starting with a heartbeat and the sounds of moving liquid, it is by turns ambient, dissonant, repetitive and hypnotic – the sound of struggle, perhaps.

This morning when you got there and it was quiet / And the machines were yearning soft behind you. / Yearning for that nigga to come and give up his life. / Standin’ there bein’ dissed and broke and troubled. / But I see something in the way of things. / Something to make us stumble, / Something get us drunk from noise and addicted to sadness. / I see something and feel something stalking us / Like an ugly thing floating at our back calling us names. / You see it and hear it too.

-Amiri Baraka, “Something in the Way of Things (In Town)”

The world and the self seem completely separate as the way of things presses against us, but it also feels like an extension of our will in the moment of creativity. Amiri Baraka’s poem reveals the way in which the way of things is partly our own creation, even if we create it by disavowing it, refusing to look at it and name it. He calls for confrontation, with our capitulation to the way of things and with the capitulation of others. The Roots in the end offer a kind of radicalised love, an assertive love willing to fight, to defend itself – even if that requires transgressive and illegal means.

In “Quills” Black Thought conceives his art as a bomb to be thrown into the order of things – he returns to the motif of dynamite and idols from Things Fall Apart.

Yo, I hold the mic that could be thrown as a pipe bomb. / Bring it just to sling it at your favorite icon. / Thing about my music is it ain’t shit like y’all’s.

And again, in “Seed 2.0″, Cody Chestnutt refuses to wallow and instead admits his skill at taking what he needs to preserve himself.

I don’t beg from no rich man, / And I don’t scream and kick / When his shit don’t fall in my hands, man, / Cause I know how to steal. / Fertilize another against my lover’s will. / I lick the opposition cause she don’t take no pill. / Oh, oh, oh no, dear. / You’ll be keeping my legend alive.

So, the transgressive nature of creativity and love, of desire and potency, may take us all the way to violence and criminality. This turn to the unethical, however, reveals the duality of such notions, if the way of things is unjust and violent, as the world cannot be remade without a new moment of violence and injustice, violent and unjust for those currently privileged. Yet this creative resistance, motivated by desire and love, needs to be conducted in community with others, which is why for all his wayward behaviour, Black Thought finds himself tied to hip-hop still, but trying to find a way for their love to be a space of freedom and safety at the same time.

I used to come into the party and stand around / Cuz I was kinda too shy to really get down. / I used to play the corner and watch the scene, / Deep down knowing I wanted to find me a queen / And I could feel that in my stomach and up in my chest / Because I knew a lot of women, and some was fresh . But then I found you girl, and just like me / You had a heart that was yearning to be set free. / Now listen, see you and me we need to take the time / To erase any doubt that’s inside your mind / It’s not a mountain that I’m ever too tired to climb / And who’s counting, but I know at least a thousand times / I let you know I’m here for you, care for you, and confide in you / Break bread, share with you, and provide for you. / And that’s full time, it’s no 9 to 5 with you. / That’s why I’m trying to work it out with you, it’s gonna work.

It’s often been said that this is not only a socio-economic crisis of systemic proportions, but also a crisis of the imagination. And how could this be otherwise? Decades of being told There Is No Alternative, that liberal capitalism is the only rational way of organizing society, has atrophied our ability to imagine social forms of life that defy the bottom line. Yet positive affirmations of another world do exist here and there, in neighbourhood assemblies, community organizations, art collectives and collective practices, the Occupy camps… It is only difficult to tell what exactly the notion of progress is that ties these disparate small-is-beautiful alternatives together: What type of utopias can we imagine today? And how do concrete representations or prefigurations of utopia incite transformative action?

Javier Lozano Jaén

First thing one has to notice about utopia is its paradoxical position: grave anxiety about having lost sight of utopia (see Jameson’s famous quote: “it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”) meets great scepticism about all efforts to represent utopia. The so-called “Jewish tradition of utopianism,” featuring Adorno, Bloch, and later on Jameson, for instance, welcomes utopianism as an immanent critique of the dominant order, but warns against the authoritarian tendencies inherent in concrete representations of utopia. Excessively detailed pictures of fulfilment or positive affirmations of radiance reek of “bourgeois comfort.” With one sweep, these luminaries rid utopianism of utopia, reducing it to a solipsistic exercise of wishing another world were possible without the faintest suggestion of what that world might look like.

But doing away with the positive dimension of utopia, treating utopia only as a negative impulse is to lose the specificity of utopia, namely, its distinctive affective value. The merit of concrete representations of utopia, no matter how imperfect or implausible, is to allow us to become emotionally and corporeally invested in the promise of a better future. As zones of sentience, utopias rouse the desire for another world that might seem ridiculous or illusory when set against the present, but which is indispensable for turning radical politics into something more than just a thought exercise. Even a classic like “Workers of the World Unite!” has an undeniable erotic (embodied) quality to it, which, if denied, banishes politics to the space of boredom and bureaucracy. It is one thing to tell people that another world is possible and another entirely to let them experience this, for however shortly.

Most concrete representations and prefigurations of utopia from the past half century or so have been of the anti-authoritarian sort. Whether we look at the literary utopias of the ‘70s (Ursula le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Sally Miller Gaerhart’s Wanderground (1984)) or the concrete utopias of intentional communities and anti-war affinity groups from the same period, the soup kitchens and street parties of the anti-globalization movement, Argentina’s occupied factories, or the Occupy camps from last year, all of these examples bring into relief an egalitarian, bottom-up, democratic socialist vision very different from the socialist realist aesthetics that preceded it. The strong emphasis on cooperation, equality, mutual aid, liberation, ecological wisdom, feminism, and creative living informing them is traceable to the New Left counterculture, but even more so to its anarcho-communist and ecofeminist declinations present in the work of people like André Gorz, Ivan Illich, Murray Bookchin, Paolo Freire, Silvia Federici, Maria Mies, Vandana Shiva, and in a host of anti-hegemonic social movements like the Italian Autonomia, the MST, Via Campesina, the Zapatista, etc.

1 Soil-Erg bill by Claire Pentecost, Documenta 13

This intersection is not coincidental. The prefigurative bent in anti-authoritarian politics makes it ripe for utopian exploration. Unlike mass political utopias, like liberalism or socialism (whose utopian elements serve as ideological cover for various models of organization and representation), anti-authoritarian politics is not interested in seizing power or implementing a specific political program with mass support. This doesn’t mean that it shies away from engaging power, only that it is not interested in conquering or reforming it. The goal of anti-authoritarian politics is rather to relax the grip of power for people to determine their own conditions of existence in more inclusive and egalitarian ways. This rather modest concern allows anti-authoritarians to dispense with many of the distinctions and considerations typical of instrumental politics: the separation between strategy and utopia, present and future, means and ends, the ascetic postponement of the good life until “after the revolution,” or getting political representation right. Even the class antagonism found at the root of all revolutionary politics can be put aside since building a counter-hegemonic bloc is not an immediate priority.

This is no easy position to take. The courage to act as if we already lived under conditions of freedom, as if our dreams were not threatened by domination or repression, and, therefore, did not require the careful choosing of an appropriate strategy for long-term success, invites more scorn than applause. Utopia is for fools! Without a way to generalize and democratize utopia, its radical content will sooner or later become a lifestyle choice only a handful of people (activists) can embrace and enjoy. There is some truth to this indictment, but it misses entirely the function of utopian representation, which should be judged less in terms of its strategic, long-term efficacy than in terms of its equally strategic and long-term affective resonance.

Banned from “mature” politics, the task of representing utopia has generally been women’s work. As feminists distanced themselves from the ’68 macho revolutionary culture (be it party politics or guerilla tactics), they turned to the politics of everyday life. Whether in literature or in intentional communities and affinity groups, women risked the cardinal sin of politics – being unrealistic and impractical, by building utopias from the ground up around activities they were told did not have a proper place in politics: eating, cleaning, housing, care and education. If the material foundation of capitalist domination was to be found in the home, utopia would also have to start at home, from the basic activities that reproduce the body in all its difference and social relationality. Science fiction turned out to be the most comfortable home for this exercise, with most critical utopias of the 70s being written by women. (The genre is, after all, by definition, concerned with dramatizing what dress, work, food, personal relations, and social institutions might look like under different social conditions and intentional communities.)

In the most famous example, The Dispossessed (1974), Ursula Le Guin’s writes about a resource-scarce planet, Anarres, where a syndicalist economy ensures the satisfaction of basic needs with the help of highly sophisticated technology. Its inhabitants (Odonians) live modest, communal yet highly self-directed lives. They work out of passion and conviction, consume goods only for their use value and do away with luxuries. They live and take meals communally, education and health care are universal, energy is renewable and used with great care, and art, celebrations and rituals are integrated into the everyday. Le Guin borrows generously from Murray Bookchin’s radical libertarianism, Kropotkin’s principles of mutual aid, voluntarism and individual freedom, anarcho-syndicalist practices of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and various elements from the civil rights movement, the ‘68 student revolts as well as socialist China, Cuba and Yugoslavia to offer an alien of a counter-image as possible to the Cold War America of her time.

An even better example is Marge Piercy’s equally famous Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), which blends together elements from peasant societies, creole and indigenous cultures, and the American counter-culture into a profoundly anti-sexist, anti-racist and anti-ageist utopia. Piercy’s strength is that, rather than basing female liberation on the elimination of domestic work, as many feminists have done, she makes female forms of action and knowledge into the formative element of her social vision. Parenting and farming are the most esteemed and valorised types of work, everything else being mechanized; everyone is involved in child rearing and is technically a “mother”; and there are dozens of festivities celebrating women’s roles. This utopia starts not with grand ambitions of liberation, equality and justice, but ends up there, nonetheless, by having the patience to first attend to the unrecognised and unrewarded work that makes life possible in the first place.

The concrete utopia of the OWS camps was, of course, never as detailed or complex. The camps did, however, take the anti-authoritarian sensibility seen in Le Guin and Piercy out into the streets, where it acquired concrete social and spatial dimensions. The camps were probably the most heavily disputed and criticized part of Occupy. Accused of breeding power differentials and exclusions, cultivating a cliquish and alienating activist aesthetics, and becoming ends-in-themselves that diverted attention from important questions of strategy and organization, they were also considered a threat to rational discourse and, not least, “health and safety.” Had these camps not existed, however, as sentience zones where people could experience first-hand the lessons of direct democracy, the joys of being together, and the advantages of a post-capitalist utopia where communication was open, work was shared, and goods were exchanged freely, the critique informing them would have remained a purely theoretical exercise without the kind of mass resonance we’ve witnessed.

The camps brought together people formerly disillusioned with (parliamentary) politics as well as people who had only known each other via social networks. They brought back the body to the public sphere of politics – not the smooth body from billboard ads or the criminalized body of the homeless, not the broken body of the worker or the isolated body of the consumer, but the collective body of unalienated cooperation and public enjoyment. Organized around activities deemed tasteless (cooking, sleeping, child care) or dangerous (assembling, celebrating) in public, the camps infused politics with a corporeal and even sensuous (non-rational) dimension shunned in modern politics, even in its anti-capitalist form. For many people this was a restorative experience. Isolated, depressed and discouraged by the ethos of personal responsibility, rediscovering the pleasure of being (effective) together offered immediate psychological relief and was perhaps the most important political lesson of the camps. Feminists have been saying this for years, that we should move the basic activities of social reproduction to the centre of anti-capitalist struggle, and put an end to the separation between the personal and the political, between political activism and the reproduction of everyday life. Turning protest into a way of living-in-common, turning the camps into self-reproducing “round-the-clock bodily presence,” was a far more effective strategy than anything one-off demos and strikes could have achieved. The camps practically became a vision of life after austerity.

The question, of course, is how to turn countercultural practices such as these into enduring counter-institutions. How exactly do concrete representations of utopia incite transformative action? Radical events, like the Occupy camps, where the normal order of things dissolves, divisions of labour and hierarchies get suspended, time moves faster, events seems more real, experiences arrive unmediated, and people live beyond their usual emotional, intellectual and sensorial limits are, by definition, impatient with time. When politics becomes sensuous there is not a lot of room for pragmatic questions of strategy and organization. Instead of waiting for some blueprint version of “revolution” or paving its way with ascetic and sacrificial struggles, radical events rush to live the future we desire now. Foolish as this may seem, it is not incorrect to say that change has never come from the “realists” (rationality is the language of liberal capitalism) or that for change to be effective it must be affective.

Radical politics cannot just offer a critique of the present, no matter how correct or convincing, but must also substantiate this critique with an affirmative experience people can relate to and have a stake in. Of course, there is always the danger for the utopian feeling to eclipse the difficult work needed to generalize and normalize utopia. But the solution is not to erase or deny the contribution of the camps. When the forces of reaction are engaged in a systemic campaign of erasing any collective memory of victories past, it is up to us to remember that other forms of living and cooperating are possible (or were possible for a brief period of time). It is not by the amount of change but by the courage to act for change that we should judge instances of concrete utopia.

One of the more interesting interventions made at Friday’s Gender, Militarism and Violence roundtable came from Vron Ware on the topic of a photo exhibit about the British Army’s Female Engagement Officers. The exhibit is funded by the Poppy Appeal, which was itself subject to some debate as a sentimental memorialism allocating funds in the service of a imperial-nostalgic self-image. The pictures, collected by a female former RAF Sergeant, are presumably understood by military and civilian leaders to be a significant public relations resource in illustrating the flexibility, equity and decentness of Anglo-American-Western ‘involvement’ in Afghanistan. Manifestations of cultural sensitivity, postfeminist integration and armies as state-building reconciliation services. And yet someone decided, both on the Army website and Twitter account, that the best image to lead with was that of knickers on a washing line. A puerile social media engagement.

The rest of the images, and the media coverage of them, focus heavily on assorted ‘personal’ issues experienced by the women. Gaze on their beauty products! See how they control their lustrous hair! Peak in on their need for mementos of home! Marks of difference indeed, although none of the coverage I have seen broaches the possibility that men too might stash deodorant in their tents, or manage their body hair to maintain professional standards, or display reminders of loved ones waiting at home. Instead, as any gender-sensitive observer might expect, the specially femininity of these troops displaces all other dimensions of war/peace/development/security (an impression encouraged by some of the subjects themselves). The BBC even recently juxtaposed the death of a female army medic with an image of another woman coming out of the shower tent. A soft voyeurism on military women as leaky bodies and as somehow out of place. But not just that. The juvenilia comes packaged together with the idea of the Female Engagement Officers as crucial to a kind of military effectiveness:

Captain Crossly told the London Evening Standard that one of the highlights of the tour was ‘seeing the absolute fascination of women in the compound when I removed my helmet and protective glasses to speak to them in their own language’.

She added: ‘Women are known throughout the world to bring people together, to focus on family and community. Just by being female, even in military uniform, you are seen to promote such things and are therefore more accepted.’

Lieutenant French said: ‘The photographs demonstrate the more feminine traits of female soldiers can be used as a strength on operations.’

So, alongside the spectre of menstrual bloody and scandalous nipples, we begin to see soft/smart power at work, a new way of managing global insecurity set against past machismos. Female Engagement Officers as so many Montgomery McFates. As clear an illustration as one could imagine of what Laleh Khalili has analysed as the gendered practices of counterinsurgency:

At one level, counterinsurgency itself is presented as the opposite of a more mechanised, technologically advanced, higher-fire-power form of warfare. Given that the latter is often coded as hyper-masculine, the former is considered feminine. Second, the very object of population-centric counterinsurgency would be perceived as feminine, since the focus of counterinsurgency is the transformation of civilian allegiances and remaking of their social world. On the one hand, in the binary categorisation which forms the basis of mainstream discourses about war, civilian (feminine) is the opposite of combatant (masculine). On the other hand those spaces and subjectivities which regular warfare destroys as a matter of side-effect rather than intent, or which are considered ‘collateral’ to the main job of war-fighting in conventional warfare, are demarginalised, brought into focus, and, in some senses, made central to the work of military and civilian counterinsurgents. These spaces and subjectivities are perceived by both the military and the civilians as gendered in particular and specific sorts of ways. Finally, the practice of counterinsurgency itself is predicated on ‘telling’ (combatants from civilians, hostiles from friendlies etc.), invading, organising, fighting, detaining, transforming, and destroying on the basis of gender (cross-hatched with class and race).

Borrowing from Anne McClintock, this is what Khalili identifies as a colonial context in which, although power is shaped primarily in the interests of (white) Western men, white women are, in relation to the ‘local’ populations, placed in “positions of decided – if borrowed – power”. Past the intimate titillations lies the imagined capacity of the feminine to negotiate and coopt the ‘private’ spaces that imperial grunts cannot otherwise reach. The close co-existence of a mockery of the engagement officers as flawed or impossible soldiers with a view of them as capable and crucial is instructive. It reflects the continuing ambiguity of the counterinsurgent soldier-scholar: that military subject that both retains the characteristics of power, dominance and force usually coded as masculine but also continually keeps them in check through the sensitivity, understanding and communal intelligence more often thought of as feminine. At the level of doctrine, this has been a constant pre-occupation of planners and advisers. Just ask David Kilcullen (also cited by Khalili):

Most insurgent fighters are men. But in traditional societies, women are hugely influential in forming the social networks that insurgents use for support. Coopting neutral or friendly women, through targeted social and economic programs, builds networks of enlightened self-interest that eventually undermine the insurgents. You need your own female counterinsurgents, including interagency people, to do this effectively. Win the women, and you own the family unit. Own the family, and you take a big step forward in mobilizing the population.

Compare that with the views of famed military historian Martin Von Creveld, who wrote the following more than a decade ago on the feminisation and attendant decline of Western militaries:

police forces that specialise in crowd-control now often include a handful of helmeted, baton-carrying, women not because they are really needed – when hard comes to hard they are nowhere to be seen – but because they may be used against other women. In a world where any man who so much as touches a woman is likely to be accused of ‘sexual harassment’, it is helpful to have a few of them around.

The tension, then, is not just one found in media narratives, but also in the internally varied projects for military transformation themselves. An internal othering, in which militaristic ideologies distinguish themselves from an antiquated past or a feminised future, here seeking to preserve the idea of real men doing real fighting, there enacting a progressivism which sees in armed collectives a real equality and a greater ability to understand and intervene in the world than fragmented and egotistical civilian society is capable of. It is an ambiguity that extends beyond this instantiation of gender to the nature of counterinsurgency itself, as Alan Cromartie has recently argued so persuasively.

The original counterinsurgency theorists (like David Galula) reclaimed in the updates of Kilcullen et al. were concerned with the guarding of an imperial order (Galula’s experience was in Algeria, and contemporaries like Robert Thompson were dealing with the problem of rebels in colonial Malaya). Today’s manuals cannot acknowledge that heritage, but terms like ‘legitimacy’ and ‘development’ cannot erase the underlying reliance on violence, displacement and the assassination of political opponents. The ‘culturally sensitive general’ is thus faced again and again with the demands of direct control. A rather fraught internal tension, transposed via gender codings into a contradictory dismissal/valourisation of the feminine at war, and its promise of imperial nurture: coaxing subjected communities into acceptance and usefulness, and saving shock-and-awe masculinity from its own delusions of victory through firepower. But with silly knickers.

The ever-excellent Sociological Images offers up this 1940s advert, and others like it, as an example of how images previously taken to be innocent consumer bait for stereotypical homemakers now appear to us as dripping with homoeroticism. They may have added too that this half-ironic, half-nostalgic distance is what endears us to such images, which we then enjoy as vintage objects, for all that we know about the true historical context in which they were produced.

One common idea, which relates nicely to military bathing aesthetics (cannon towels? really?) is that many bonding behaviours in nominally heterosexual, male-dominated groups are in fact homosexual, but in a disavowed or repressed way. The scrum, the shared shower, the bunk-beds, the exclusion of women not only from the fields of play and war, but also from the various celebrations and carnivals that follow, all seem to indicate a desire for intimacy that cannot be named as such.

In the excellent Bring Me Men (which deserves its own dedicated review), Aaron Belkin identifies a more complex relation. In becoming military men, there is a need not only to disavow femininity, but also to become intimate with the ‘unmasculine’ and the ‘queer’. Rather than identifying a direct alignment of the masculine with the military, or seeing gender norms as accidental in their intersection with the military, there is instead a constitutive tension between the masculine and the unmasculine (or, we might say, between the strongly heteronormative and the homosexual). Basic training relies on a traumatic ambiguity, continually casting initiates as by turns masculine and unmasculine, so that no soldier can ever be sure that they were sufficiently on the ‘right side’ of the line. As one Marine put it: “The opposite of feminine? No. To me, what is masculine? I don’t know. [pause] And I’ve worked so hard at being it”. The continual ambiguity – what Belkin calls discipline as collapse – interacts with surveillance and punishment to produce the soldier-subject.

More brutally:

I discovered that in the latter decades of the twentieth century, male American service members penetrated each other’s bodies ‘all of the time’. They forced broom handles, fingers and penises into each other’s anuses. They stuck pins into flesh and bones. They vomited into one another’s mouths and forced rotten food down each other’s throats. They inserted tubes into each other’s anal cavities and then pumped grease through the tubes. And parallel to these literal penetrations, they subjected each other to constant, symbolic penetrations as well. Penetrating and being penetrated have been central to what it means to be a warrior in the U.S. armed forces.

This view of a kind of compelled violation, one overlaid and shot through with ideas about homosexuality, femininity, gender failure and masculine remaking, finds a powerful resonance in Peggy Reeves Sanday’s classic work on male bonding and rape culture in the American frat house. The kinds of experiences reported by those inducted into their new brotherhoods closely track Belkin’s discovery of military initiation culture. ‘Pledges’ were compelled to go through all kinds of ritual humiliations, called  “scum, wimps, fairies, shitheads, worthless”, often made to strip (with pain inflicted on their genitals by their brothers-to-be), forced to drink vomit-inducing concoctions, subjected to both mock-castration and mock-faeces eating, and so on, all in the process of breaking down previous identities to forge new ones. As Sanday summaries:

The ritual inducts pledges into the brotherhood by first producing and then resolving anxiety about masculinity. The ritual produces anxiety by representing the feminine to the pledge as both dirty and as part of his subjectivity. The ritual then resolves the anxiety by cleansing the pledge of his supposed feminine identification and promising him a lifelong position in a purified male social order.

The connection between such a masculine identity and rape then seems vividly obvious. What Sanday calls the mythologies of the polluting woman and the engulfing mother are expelled through ritualised brutality. The fraternity takes on the role of the father and promises some level of control over anxiety, ambiguity and infantile fantasy. And since this security and identity depends so strongly on the silencing of the feminine, women easily become the outlets for sublimated homoerotic desire and group bonding through violence.

But wait! This does not necessarily show that military initiation is either an entirely coercive process of submission or that said submission is somehow substantively homosexual in forging male bonds. Instead, it is liminality and transformation, but also security and identity, that are at stake. Paul Higate in a way develops Belkin’s point about the interplay between the masculine and the unmasculine in his contribution to the International Feminist Journal of Politics special issue on ‘Rethinking Masculinity’ (out soon!). In the unforgettably titled ‘Drinking Vodka from the ‘Butt-Crack”, he advances a view of military fratriarchy (the community of brothers) and the place of hazing rituals within its bounds. Drawing on images from the 2009 Kabul Hazing (including the one above and the one below), he argues that the homoerotic content of the rituals were actually about testing the resilience of the hyper-masculine, heteronormative military culture:

A superficial homoeroticism, then, that guards against homosexuality. The ‘threat’ of actual homosexuals to contemporary western military culture is thus clarified too: what could be more troubling in such a ritualised play-frame, in such a playing-at-transgressive-gayness, than an actual homosexual? So, to return to those towels, yes, a changed interpellation of the male-on-male aesthetic, but not because the fratriarchal dynamics have themselves changed. One element of initiation and bonding (initiation which necessarily alternates pleasure and pain), transposed into a commodity, and yet – in spite of its innocence-and-warmth patina – revealing nonetheless. The homoerotic is still present, and still disavowed, in contemporary military initiation. Far from abandoning an old innocence for a new explicitness, fratriarchies continue to mobilise, to horrify, to blur and to celebrate in ambiguous relation to the danger-pleasures of male-on-male violation and conjoining. A militarised liminality-becoming perhaps less obvious to us now, or maybe just sold through video games rather than shower accessories, but no less efficacious for that.

For those who are interested, here’s a copy of the talk I gave last weekend on the technological sublime, machine perception, and cybernetic economies. Held in the beautiful Treignac area at The Matter of Contradiction: Ungrounding the Object event, it was a lot of fun and filled with some fascinating discussions. Many thanks to the Treignac Projet for inviting me and organizing the event. Check out more of their work here.

By http://www.telekin.co.uk/

The chafing constraints of a thesis prevent any original reflection on our hallowed Olympic moment (not least because Rahul has already said so much, and so well). There was little to better Iain Sinclair’s apt diagnosis of “a wonderful national hallucination: a beautiful conjuring between William Borroughs and Charles Satchi…the combination of paranoia and advertising run wild” (a clip worth watching for Jon Snow’s outraged ignorance at the origins of the Olympic Flame [clue: Nazis]). Reports had filtered through that the economic miracle was not as originally billed, with talk of Central London’s ‘ghost town’, stimulating a description elsewhere of the Olympics as an “economic bomb deployed against world cities”. And now there is the most welcome return of K-Punk. At length:

Welcome to the Hunger Games. The function of the Hunger Games is to suppress antagonism, via spectacle and terror. In the same way, London – 2012 preceded and accompanied by the authoritarian lockdown and militarisation of the city – are being held up as the antidote to all discontent. The feelgood Olympics, we are being assured, will do everything from making good the damage done by last year’s riots to seeing off the “threat” of Scottish independence. Any disquiet about London 2012 is being repositioned as “griping” or “cynicism”. Such “whinging”, it is claimed, assumed its proper place of marginality as the vast majority enjoy the Games, and LOCOG is vindicated…

…But once the Olympic floodlights are turned off, most will switch back from an attitude of mild interest to indifference towards even the most dramatic Olympic sports, never mind those many Olympic sports which plainly have limited specator appeal. This isn’t the point though: disquiet about London 2012 was never necessarily based in any hostility towards the sports. Enjoyment of the sport and loathing for LOCOG and the IOC are perfectly compatible.

Cynicism is just about the only rational response to the doublethink of the McDonalds and Coca Cola sponsorship (one of the most prominent things you see as you pass the Olympic site on the train line up from Liverpool Street is the McDonalds logo). As Paolo Virno argues, cynicism is now an attitude that is simply a requirement for late capitalist subjectivity, a way of navigating a world governed by rules that are groundless and arbitrary. But as Virno also argues, “It is no accident … that the most brazen cynicism is accompanied by unrestrained sentimentalism.” Once the Games started, cynicism could be replaced by a managed sentimentality.

Affective exploitation is crucial to late capitalism. The BBC’s own Caesar Flickerman (the interviewer who extracts maximum sentimental affect from the Hunger Games contestants before they face their deaths in the arena) is the creepily tactile trackside interviewer Phil Jones. Jones’s “interviews” with exhausted athletes, are surely as ritualised as any Chinese state broadcast. Emote. Emote again. Emote differently. Praise the crowd.

And, just in case you somehow missed it, the irrepressible CassetteBoy: