<underfire> Retort's Opening Salvo

[Retort]

To: Under Fire
From: Retort

Opening Salvo
Week of November 26th

Retort's installation at the Seville Biennial (about which more in a 
later posting) had its origins in a broadsheet, Neither Their War Nor 
Their Peace, that we produced for the manifestations of Spring 2003 on 
the eve of the invasion of Iraq.  We well recall how many felt our 
prologue to be hyperbolic, even hysterical: "We have no words for the 
horrors to come, for the screams and carnage of the first days of 
battle, the fear and brutality of the long night of occupation that 
will follow, the truck bombs and slit throats and unstoppable cycle of 
revenge, the puppets in the palaces chattering about 'democracy', the 
exultation of the anti-Crusaders, Baghdad descending into the shambles 
of a new, more dreadful Beirut, and the inevitable retreat (thousands 
of bodybags later) from the failed McJerusalem." Who would now call 
this hyperbole?

We produced the broadsheet because we were unwilling to go into the 
streets under either of the banners we knew would dominate the marches 
- "Peace" and "No Blood for Oil".  To the opponents of the war, we 
wished to say that a deeply militarized US state, and indeed the 
reality of permanent war, rendered inadequate the notion of "peace" as 
a rallying cry and a strategy.  We had in mind the indelible line of 
Tacitus, "They make a desert and call it peace", which speaks to us 
across the centuries. These were words he put in the mouth of a Gaelic 
chieftain on the eve of battle against a Roman legion in the Scottish 
highlands, at the far north-western edge of the empire. Tacitus reminds 
us what kind of peace is delivered by the masters of war  – it is the 
peace of the "peace process" , the peace of cemeteries. The anti-war 
movement, if it was not to evaporate again, had to recognize the full 
dynamics of US militarism – to understand that peace, under current 
arrangements, is war by other means.

Nor was it lost on us that the kind of planes which Atta and his crews 
refunctioned as missile-bombers to strike at the World Trade Center and 
the Pentagon actually originated as weapons of mass destruction. The 
Boeing Corporation took the old bombers used to create firestorms over 
European and Japanese cities during the Second World War and redesigned 
them for purposes of mass tourism and corporate air travel in the 
1960s.  Atta himself was an urban planner (in Cairo and Aleppo) 
disgusted with the disneyfication he saw coming in the wake of the 
failure of secular national development in Egypt and the Third World. 
He was right; Dubai is one face of neoliberal globalization, megaslums 
the other.  At the same time it is necessary to acknowledge al-Qaida's 
love affair with image-politics. Even in its rejection of the West, the 
Islamic vanguard displays a mastery of the virtual and of the new 
technics of dissemination. This is one aspect of the current moment 
that those in opposition to both Empire and Jihad, two virulent 
mutations of the Right, must take very seriously.

We intended to expand the broadside into a pamphlet, but it bloated 
into the book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of 
War.  Essentially we aimed to confront the strange doubleness of the 
new world situation – a seeming brute return to the 17th century Wars 
of Religion familiar to Milton, from whose Paradise Lost we took our 
title, twinned with an intensified deployment of the apparatus of the 
production of appearances. The U.S. in particular feels a dual threat, 
first, to the monopoly of the means of mass destruction, and second, to 
its management of the image-world – in both cases from non-state actors 
of various kinds. The events of September 11th 2001 were, we believe, a 
defeat for the imperial state at the level of spectacle (to which, by 
the way, its managers have been unable to stage an answer – not that 
they haven't tried.) Likewise, if the recorded collapse of the World 
Trade Center wordlessly proposed – revealed, actually – the 
vulnerability of the US heimat, then the global circulation of the Abu 
Ghraib snapshot struck a parallel blow at the ideological claim of the 
United States to be the guarantor of “human rights”, “freedom”, and so 
on. Now, we further insist that the attack on the towers by a 
neo-Leninist vanguard of Islamic militants was a symbolic but none the 
less real defeat not only for the capitalist hegemon but also for those 
who count themselves (Retort included) enemies of capitalist 
globalization  – for the "movement of movements" such as it is. In that 
sense, we intend "afflicted powers" to refer ambiguously to this 
Janus-faced defeat. We appreciate that, in identifying with Milton's 
resonant phrase, we belong to the party of Satan, as he is summoning 
the rebel angels to storm heaven.

Our intention was to turn the two notions – "the society of the 
spectacle" and "the colonization of everyday life" – back to the task 
for which they were originally deployed, namely, to understand the 
powers and vulnerabilities of the capitalist state. We set out to grasp 
the logic of the present moment, in the aftermath of the events of 
September 11, 2001 and the seeming historical regression of US 
statecraft. Specifically, we asked ourselves about the possibility of 
real interaction between the political economy of neoliberalism, the 
warfare state, and new developments in the realm of the image. To put 
it in a single phrase – a dense phrase but one which captures the 
analytic linkages – we aimed to explore "the contradictions of military 
neoliberalism under conditions of spectacle". We remain agnostic about 
the possibilities of destabilization in a system that increasingly 
depends on image-management. The spectacle accelerates as a result of 
the falling rate of illusion; the disenchantment of the image-world may 
follow. In any case, we take spectacle in a minimal, matter-of-fact way 
to characterize this new stage of accumulation of capital. By no means 
just a piling up of images, as media studies would have it, but in 
Debord's sense of a social relationship between people that is mediated 
by representations. Crucially, our analysis depends on the 
complementary notion of the colonization of everyday life, and of 
subjection to an endless bombardment of brands, logos, slogans, 
consumption-motifs, invitations to feel happy. Globalization turned 
inward, as it were.  And, by the way, the universal (that is, from all 
points on the political/cultural compass) opinion that image has 
somehow trumped or superseded word in the brave new media world strikes 
us as nonsense. To the contrary, never has the image-array been so much 
auxiliary to scripts of one kind or another, typically written by 
modernity's specialists in solitication – copywriters, public relations 
hacks, human resources officers, soundbite artists, poets of the 
advertisement – and delivered into a mediascape in which language 
itself has been flattened and truncated.

We argue in Afflicted Powers that globalization is producing "weak 
states" across the world economy, and "weak citizenship" at the 
spectacular centre, the result of the thinning of the texture of daily 
life. Weak citizenship may be optimal for the demands of the market, 
but not when the state has to embark on a major round of primitive 
accumulation, as we argue the US imperial state attempted in Iraq. 
Never before has politics been conducted in the shadow of defeat both 
on the ground and at the level of the spectacle. However, although Paul 
Bremer's dreams of a neoliberal paradise in Iraq lie in ruins, the 
context of resistance to capitalist globablization is the continuing 
assault on the commoners of the South, the further disembedding of 
basic elements of the life-world from the matrix of social relations, 
and generalized commodification whose end-point is reached only when 
property and price come to mediate all relations with nature and 
humanity.  The situation is dire but that is precisely why we recurred 
to Milton, who himself was writing in the face of defeat.  "And 
reassembling our afflicted Powers,/ Consult how we may henceforth most 
offend/Our enemy…"

Retort is a gathering of antagonists of the present - writers, artists, 
artisans, and activists - based for the last two decades in the San 
Francisco Bay Area.  Their new broadside, All Quiet on the Eastern 
Front, forms part of Retort's installation at the Seville Biennial.
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