Mute Vol 2 #9

The ubiquitous injunction to consume ‘Your 5 a Day’ quota of fruit and vegetables seems to stand in for a whole governmental ideology of population management in contemporary Britain and beyond. As Madame Tlank explains in her article ‘The Battle of All Mothers’, (p.72), which explores the UK’s neoliberalised welfare system and its corralling of working class women:

In the [NHS], illness-risk and its management are personalised, even though accounting norms for staying healthy are rigid – ‘your 5 a day’, pedometer quotas, etc. – and conflicting ideas about who is at risk of what keep proliferating. Likewise, in social services, responsibility is devolved downward from the institution to the individual, and the point of intervention has moved as far ‘into’ the subject as possible.

Where once welfare was handed out in a relatively standardised form, it is now highly individualised, with far more intrusive assessments, data gathering and heavy conditions imposed on the recipient than ever before. ‘Your 5 a Day’ stands for the third-way New Labour ethics of personal responsibility, whose background is the relentless consumption of social wealth and destruction of public resources. Keep eating ‘Your 5 a Day’ because we’ve just shut your local A&E ward; keep those bananas coming because we’re cutting your Incapacity Benefit; go on, gobble up those grapes, they really help when your pension has just been wiped out. It’s not just the case that, as per Foucault’s formulation of biopolitics, life itself has become the object of power, but also that the body is being reconfigured as an asset – one that offsets the high personal risks of life in capitalism. Invest in your body today and it will pay dividends tomorrow (and if you don’t, we’ll write you down!)

It is ironic, but not accidental, that this health-obsessed, risk averse ideology forms the background to a global food crisis – which now looks like the razor-sharp tip of a general stagflationary crisis. Isn’t it the case that our ability, if not willingness, to consume ‘5 a Day’ is premised on the globalisation and commercialisation of food production which makes fresh fruit and vegetables available to rich nations around the year? And yet, this same process of converting food into an export commodity is responsible for the unaffordability of basic foods in some of the world’s top food producing nations. As investors, post sub-prime crash, pile into basic commodities like food and oil these commodity markets are spiralling. The ‘5 a day’ injunction would read even more clearly as the insult it is in countries like Bangladesh and Haiti where food inflation has been so great that many can only afford one meal a day – often a staple like rice unembellished by meat or vegetables.

The precariousness of the UK’s citizen-‘stakeholders’, whose forms of social life are relentlessly subjected to marketisation, rests upon the still greater vulnerability of the world’s ‘surplus population’ to this same logic. But with tanker drivers protesting the cost of fuel with go-slows and road blockades across Europe, food riots breaking out in Haiti, Cameroon and Bangladesh, and an emergency UN summit on ‘food security’ in Rome this June, these global lines of connection are daily becoming more starkly apparent. Of course bullish free marketeers see the interconnectedness produced by the free market as the only way out of the crisis: the Rome summit ended in a commitment to ‘minimise the use of restrictive measures that could increase the volatility of international prices’ and backed the rapid conclusion of the Doha round of WTO orchestrated negotiations over trade liberalisation. If you’re in a hole, as they say, keep digging. Clearly some more G8 orchestrated aid packages are never going to offset the underlying causes of the food crisis, and neither is their twin, the ‘free market’. It is important to remember that one of the motivations behind the ‘green revolution’ (the improbable term for the industrialisation of global food production devised in the 1960s), was the fear of a Maoist-type revolution across the developing world sparked by famine. Could this be on the cards again, but this time without the possibility of producing more food as a counter-revolutionary deflection? The homeopathic effects of the market itself is successfully blocking any such ‘cure’.

A parallel can be drawn between the treatment of developing countries and the subjection of welfare recipients in the UK to a sandwich of standardised advice and personalised control/responsibility. For is not the same logic at work when countries forced to open up their internal markets in return for aid are then held responsible for the repercussions? In both cases, help is adulterated by the imposition of rules and the beneficiary is left to deal with the consequences. The hope is that somehow these universal injunctions and ‘cures’ can be turned on their heads, transforming the insistence on Your 5 a Day into the radical demand to be freely fed, and the globalisation of supply chains into co-ordinated networks of resistant logistics.

Josephine Berry Slater <josie@metamute.org> is Editor of Mute

The computer inspired a wave of post-war 'imaginary futures', from ecstatic fantasies of time and space travel to fears of mankind's extinction. Iain Boal brings three critical histories of modernity's futuramas back down to earth

Digital utopianism has been awaiting its historian. The phenomenon is important, even central, to any adequate account of late modernity. When a strain of technological pessimism turned apocalyptic after the US defeat in Indochina and the capital crisis of the early ’70s, it was the personal computer that allowed the bourgeoisie to fall in love once again with the future.

But this development contains several historical puzzles. Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture begins with the intriguing question: how can one account for the remarkable transvaluation of the computer from a Cold War accessory to omnicide and ‘soul murder’ into a convivial tool of personal liberation, all within 30 years? Specifically, in Berkeley in 1964, ‘disembodiment – that is, the transformation of the self into data on an IBM card – marked the height of dehumanization’, while for the digital utopians of the 1990s, ‘it marked the route to new forms of equality and transformation.’

Rummaging through the history of the future has a kind of absurdist pleasure, and there is fun to be had condescending to antiquated predictions, to ‘yesterday’s tomorrows’ in the happy phrase of Joseph Corn, Smithsonian curator of techno-utopias past. Futures, however, are a serious business.

In the summer of 1997, towards the high noon of cyberhype, it is estimated that 20 million dollars of venture capital flowed into Silicon Valley every day, followed closely by half the entire graduating class of Harvard MBAs, who normally come to ‘everyone’s favorite city’ only for recreation. They were drawn to San Francisco by the Niagara of speculative finance, in the knowledge that rich pickings were to be had, for the price of a business plan on the back of a napkin containing the magic words ‘start-up’, ‘IPO’ and ‘stock options’, in any combination.

Image: Think Tank by Alex Veness. A college of the Beinecke Library at Yale University, New Haven (bellow) and one of Buckminster Fuller's goedesic domes (above)

Richard Barbrook, on the other side of the Atlantic and labouring in the virtual ateliers of old Europe, apparently felt the tug of the silicon force-field. ‘If we are talented workers in the “cutting-edge” industries like hypermedia and computing’, he wrote,

we are promised the possibility of becoming hip and rich entrepreneurs by the Californian ideologues. They want to recruit us as members of the ‘virtual class’ which seeks to dominate the hypermedia and computing industries.[1]

Barbrook’s labourist instincts must have been offended, because he responded on behalf of all the virtual craft workers of the continent. He composed The Digital Artisans Manifesto with Pit Schultz, which begins by announcing:

We are the digital artisans. We celebrate the Promethean power of our labour and imagination to shape the virtual world. By hacking, coding, designing and mixing, we build the wired future … We are the only subjects of history.

This matches any effusion from the Californian barkers of the virtual. The manifesto went on to conjure William Morris’s utopia of utility and beauty, upgraded for the new millennium: in order to

express ourselves directly by constructing useful and beautiful virtual artifacts … [w]e rejoice in the privilege of becoming digitial artisans … We are the pioneers of the modern.

It seems to be Nikolaus Pevsner’s proto-modernist Morris they had in mind. After talk of DIY culture and the gift economy of the Net, there’s a segue into a clarion call for a trade organisation of hypermedia and computer artisans, tasked with

building the information society of the future … We are not petit-bourgeois egotists … We proclaim that the collective expression of our trade will be: the European Digital Artisans Network (EDAN).

The manifesto is an honourable form. To jeer at the pronunciamentos of the past, not least cyber-manifestos dragged from the lumber room of history, is a one finger exercise, and it is not our purpose here. In any case, the hyperventilating prose of The Digital Artisans Manifesto is hardly distinguishable from a thousand similar fin de siècle productions coming from the hi-tech PR machines geared to Wall Street or the hacks at Wired magazine. EDAN may have been stillborn, but there is no shame in that. The question before us however, is this: ten years after The Digital Artisans Manifesto, what should one make of Imaginary Futures, Barbrook’s reflections on the history and prospects of the ‘information society’. Judged in the millennial light of another decade of globaloney; the NASDAQ implosion, the onslaught of military neoliberalism, and the rise of digital hives in Gurgaon and the neo-cities of the planet, whither the digital artisan?

The cover of Imaginary Futures shows the author as a seven-year old in front of the Unisphere, icon of the 1964 New York World’s Fair (and lately featured as backdrop for the climax of Men in Black.) The massive graticulated sphere, expressing the theme of ‘man’s achievement on a shrinking globe in an expanding universe’, was erected on an ancient tidal marsh destroyed by Robert Moses, New York’s modernising commissar, in preparation for the 1939 World’s Fair. His team of New Deal ‘creatives’ baptised the paved-over wetland, in a flight of Orwellian onomastics typical of (sub)urban development everywhere, Flushing Meadows.

Despite the attractions of the Christian Science and Vatican pavilions, the Johnson Wax theatre, and the world’s largest cheese (from Wisconsin), the 1964 Fair effectively went bankrupt by falling 20 million visitors short of projections, and had to be bailed out from the public purse.

The young Barbrook was quite unaware of the dodgy finances or the boondoggles behind international expositions as he gazed at the giant rockets in the Space Park, en route to Boston for a year during which he recited the loyalty oath to the US flag and watched a lot of American TV – ‘seminal events in my life’. Only later did he figure out why he was in the New World; his father, an English political scientist and Labour Party apparatchik, was on a CIA-sponsored Cold War exchange visit. God Save the Commonwealth is the title, not of a lost Alan Bennett play, but of Barbrook père’s electoral history of Massachusetts, based on research conducted during the year at MIT, doing his bit to cement the special relationship. Tony Blair’s recent appointment to the schools of management and divinity at Yale, to lecture on faith and globalisation, continues the tradition.

From Camelot to Canary Wharf

Barbrook frames Imaginary Futures – billed as the (oneiric) history of artificial intelligence, the information society, and their confluence in the Net – within his own personal trajectory, from Cold War America to post-Big Bang London. At the same time, he constructs it by means of an interesting visual conceit as a kind of return, thanks to the collage artistry of Alex Veness, whose ‘retro-fabulous’ illustrations interlard each chapter. That is to say, the last image in Imaginary Futures has Barbrook once again standing in front of the Unisphere. Not in holiday shorts and sandals this time, but, forty odd years on, in working denim (or is it serge?). The checkered shirt and proletarian cap seem intended to draw our attention away from his occupation as a lecturer in Hypermedia Studies and suggest a workerist identification with Europe’s traditional artisanate, albeit with arms folded in a gesture of repose or supervision.[2]

Imaginary Futures endorses the position taken in the 1997 manifesto by asserting that the internet, despite being implicated in the apparatus of geopolitical domination, is a liberatory medium. Therefore, the net is truly a revolutionary instrument of general emancipation, and should be reclaimed as such by the makers of history (‘digital artisans’) emerging from the networked workplace. The book elaborates upon a print-on-demand pamphlet entitled The Class of the New, published in 2006, and billed as a ‘Creative Workers in a World City’ project. Apparently intended as an intervention in the cultural politics of the administration of Ken Livingstone, London’s then new mayor, and his plans for a city congenial to the ‘creative industries’. The pamphlet traces what Barbrook describes as the ‘intermediate’ class of wage earners, those without capital but in possession of ‘other potent sources of economic power: educational qualifications and cultural knowledge’, in their various guises as ‘creatives’, ‘digerati’, ‘symbolic analysts’… all the way back to Hegel’s ‘civil servants’ and Saint-Simon’s ‘industrials’.

Image: Material Labour by Alex Veness. Richard Barbrook at Alex Veness' studio, England 2006 at the Unisphere

Barbrook describes his modus operandi as ‘data-mining’, and that sounds about right. The result indeed bears the marks of extractive industry, but it is hardly adequate as history. Arguing that like Walter Benjamin he ‘discovered that his collection of research notes was turning into a book in its own right’, Barbrook only embarrasses himself in claiming The Class of the New as a kind of Arcades Project for the digital epoch.

Nevertheless, the pile of quotations gathered by Barbrook about the historical ‘intermediate’ class does vividly reveal a sectoral continuity. To believe, however, that the current batch of ‘privileged creatives’ working in the re-purposed warehouses of neoliberalised cities is the bearer of a special historical destiny requires some imaginative overtime. When Barbrook declares, ‘Our utopias provide the direction for the path of human progress’, he could have been channelling the telegraphy-struck disciple of Saint Simon who in 1852 predicted an imminent utopia thanks to ‘a perfect network of electric filaments’. Communication as blessed community. In fact, far from suggesting that his network of digital artisans are the makers of universal history – the grave-diggers this time around – The Class of the New attests only to the recurrent sameness of modernity’s clerisy, and to the technical recomposition of labour under capitalism. Instead of retro-fabulous melodrama, Barbrook’s time would have been better employed doing some critical historical semantics on the abuse of terms such as ‘creative’ and ‘artisan’.

Barbrook is not unaware that the most spectacular objects on display at the 1964 World’s Fair – rockets, computers, atomic reactors – were primarily state-funded instruments of globalised warfare. However, he has no way to ask himself Turner’s generative question animated by events taking place, in the same year of 1964, not in Flushing Meadows, but on the Berkeley campus. Turner reproduces a quirky photograph of striking Free Speech activists wearing IBM computer cards around their necks as signs of protest. (There was, as it happens, another face to Flushing Meadows in 1964, quite invisible from Barbrook’s optic, namely, the motorised Critical Mass, or ‘stall-in’, blockading local roads at the opening of the World’s Fair, organised by black radicals from the Brooklyn branch of Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) protesting urban poverty and racism. Flyers urged New Yorkers to ‘drive awhile for freedom.’)

Image: Free Speech marchers at Berkeley wear computer cards as signs of protest, December 1964. Photograph by Helen Nestor. Used by permission of the photographer and courtesy of Helen Nestor Collection, the Oakland Museum of California

Barbrook could not entertain Turner’s question because he is committed to the premise that post-war ‘imaginary futures’ present an essentially unchanging vision, or in the words of his opening chapter, ‘The Future Is What It Used To Be’. He attempts to buttress this assumption by a striking – and ahistorical – legerdemain, and by shifting our focus again to the Unisphere. Veness’s image of Barbrook in front of the unisphere posits the desired historical immutability – ‘[t]he frozen time of the 1960s past is almost indistinguishable from our imaginary futures in the 2000s.’

But, in reality, the semiotics of the Unisphere have changed radically since 1964. It had come to connote a world shrunk by fibre optics rather than ICBMs, the domain of Tim Berners-Lee rather than Werner von Braun. This is not to deny some enduring affinities, of the kind that Marshall McLuhan trades on for his ‘global village’ notion. The Unisphere and, one could say, globes in general appeal to universalists of various stripes – neo-Kantians, humanitarian liberals, expo bureaucrats, UN one-worlders, transnational corporations, Earth First!ers and, evidently, cyberhucksters. We are fortunate that in Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination the cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove has clarified the attraction of images of the planet which show no borders. Globes were from the beginning ‘emblems of sovereignty’ (it comes into the language in this sense in 1614). They became the playthings of monarchs and navigators, familiar as props in Renaissance portraiture.

Given the centrality of the globe to Barbrook’s project, it would have served his purpose to explore globalism as a set of material practices and representations, as well as conceptual and 3D models. Cosgrove further reveals how globalism’s force, with roots deep in Western imperial history,

derives from the arresting concept of the earth as a single space made up of interconnected life systems and a surface over which modern technological, communications, and financial systems increasingly overcome the frictions of distance and time to achieve coordinated simultaneity.

Cosgrove concludes his study with a meditation on cultural appropriations of the famous NASA photograph AS17–148-22727, taken during the final Apollo mission in 1972. The NASA earthscape as image and icon was quickly staked out by both environmentalists (to promote Earth Day) and by capital – for example, Mobil’s advertising campaign showing a miniature and vulnerable globe resting in the open hand of a white-coated scientist.

Weary Giants of Flesh and Steel

Among the first to exploit this representation of globalism was an environmentalist and a capitalist, both. Stewart Brand used the NASA photograph as logo for the Whole Earth Catalog, which became the bible of rusticating hippies and back-to-the-landers, who imagined an alternative green world powered by appropriate technics, available for purchase by mail order. The miniaturised computer – Mac, not HAL – lay some distance ahead. Turner tells the fascinating story of the transition from counter- to cyber-culture by focusing on the life, a fully contextualised biography, of Steward Brand – infantryman, photographer, student of Buckminster Fuller, cybernetician, romancer of the Red Man, new communalist, networker extraordinaire, and, from the get-go, entrepreneur. He didn’t call it a ‘catalog’ for nothing!

For a brief moment, in the doldrums following the demise of his Whole Earth Catalog, the man who had once announced ‘We are as gods and we might as well get good at it’, managed a certain perspective on his situation: ‘I’m a small business man’, said Stewart Brand. Later, in the mid-1970s, he became enthused by plans for terraforming and the construction of massive colonies in space; Turner insightfully suggests that

these dreams would reappear in the rhetoric of cyberspace and the electronic frontier. Unlike cosmonauts, these are phantasms that never have to touch the earth. More recently, however, in keeping with his digital hucksterism and circumglobal summitry, his focus has once again expanded – he aims to build a perfectly accurate ten thousand year clock.

Using primary source material and extensive oral histories, Turner brilliantly excavates the strange contradictory career of key computational and cybernetic metaphors and their material conditions of possibility. Turner tracks the trickle-down of Operational Research and small group work pioneered by Kurt Lewin during World War II, as well as the popularisation of cybernetics by Norbert Wiener, who also looms large in Barbrook’s account. On this topic I would suggest going directly to the pioneering studies, Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death and The Cybernetics Group, by Steve Heims, to whom both authors are indebted. The informal collaborative counter-cultural style that, as Turner shows, was paradoxically spawned within the military-industrial-academic complex finds its echo eventually in the Friday dress code of corporations everywhere. Cold War executives whose ‘hands ached from years on the corporate ladder, and [whose] souls had begun to wither beneath their suits’, traded worsted for denim. Turner describes how, by the end of the 20th century,

bureaucratic organizations had begun to lose their shape … hierarchies have been replaced by flattened structures, long-term employment by short-term, project-based contracting, and professional positions by complex, networked forms of sociability.

The current state of the art can be found at Google headquarters.

From quite different perspectives, the liberal Turner and the Marxist-McLuhanist Barbrook misconstrue the Californian counter-culture, both of them blind to significant anti-authoritarian and radical strands in the ’60s milieu. Barbrook makes a much more comprehensive mess of it, by viewing post-war America through the pinhole of a Trotskyist camera obscura. Accordingly, the landscape is upside down, and bizarre to say the least: the central figures of what Barbrook calls ‘the Cold War Left’ turn out to be … Daniel Bell and Walt Rostow. Perhaps the radical apotheosis of a Harvard sociologist and an MIT technocrat is part of an attempt to recuperate Barbrook’s father, the CIA-funded Cold Warrior.

Image: Cosmonaut Valentia Tereshkova, first woman in space, beside Vostok 6, Russia/Kazakhstan border, June 19, 1963. Photograph Courtesy of Lina Kohonen, Russian State Archive (RGANTD), Moscow

Apart from the historiography and its framing, there are some important epistemological stakes in the matter of digital utopianism that neither Barbrook nor Turner come close to grappling with, since they tacitly agree, in the manner of Marxists and liberals, about the neutrality of technics. Neutrality in the sense that technologies are presumed to have good or bad uses, correct or incorrect ‘interpretations’, free or fettered ownership – in other words, a functionalist metaphysics. But artefacts and technical systems, without being self-determining, do have a value-slope; they conduce to certain forms of life and consciousness, and against others. On the other hand, the value-slope of a technology is far from easy to estimate, and in any case there is never closure with respect to consequences or reception. This is not to say that Armand Mattelard, the historian of semaphore and electric telegraphy, was wrong to assert: ‘Communication serves first of all to make war.’[3] Or, analogously, that Barbrook is beside the point in claiming that the internet was an integral legacy of the Cold War fostered by the CIA in response to the perceived threat of Soviet scientists and engineers’ invention of horizontal networks. Nevertheless it should be salutary for prophets of the net to recall that Adorno and Benjamin could so fundamentally disagree about the popular revolutionary potential of cinema as a medium. What then of the internet as an instrument of general emancipation, if, as it now seems, the technics of the virtual conduce to the production of monstrous subjects who are incomplete, lacking, overwhelmed inside. The corollary is a politics of resentment, and a paranoia that flourishes on the cusp of a plenitude always under threat of social death and incorporation into the machine.

The contrasting codas to these two books reflect quite different epistemic stances, not so much toward the potential of the internet as a medium, but to the past and to the future. Turner deploys the methods and tools – evidential and archival – of the historian, and closes From Counterculture to Cyberculture on a modest and conditionally prognostic note:

we remain confronted by the need to build egalitarian, ecologically sound communities. Only by helping us meet that fundamentallypolitical challenge can information technology fulfil its counter-cultural promise

Barbrook, by contrast, data-mines the past – mostly secondary literature – in pursuit of his own imaginary future, which he pulls out of the hat on the last page. A strange hybrid from the political bestiary, called ‘libertarian social democracy’.

Image: Fall 1969 cover, Whole Earth Catalog. Reproduced under the GNU Free Documentation License

This fabulous creature aside, it is significant that in both Barbrook’s and Turner’s accounts of digital utopianism lurks the threat of catastrophe. Barbrook registers the fact that beneath the PR surrounding the rockets and computers at the World’s Fair lay technologies ‘invented for a diabolic purpose: murdering millions of people.’ Turner similarly notes that ‘Brand suffered from a deep fear of technological Armageddon,’ and that as a child he had nightmares because

somebody compiled a list of prime targets for Soviet nuclear attack and we [Rockford, Illinois] were [number] 7, because of the machine tools.

Digital utopianism, then, could be said to have two aspects: pragmatically, in the circuits of capital, it constitutes a discourse directed at investors, but turned inwards it represents a kind of redemptive sublimation in the face of fresh apocalyptic forebodings. Not Carl Sagan’s nuclear winter this time around, but a sense of global, ecological doom.

For the doom merchants and the utopians I have a couple of forecasts of my own. I predict that the new clerisy – call them ‘creatives’ or whatever you like – will continue to do the bidding of those who own the world. The intermediates and their masters will all be dressed in denim. The men in black will mainly be pallbearers at the 21st century’s entirely predictable varieties of apocalypse. For a start, the billion victims of the cigarette, that miniature hi-tech killing machine, Big Tobacco’s digital utopia.

Footnotes

[1] Richard Barbrook and Pit Schultz, The Digital Artisans Manifesto, http://www.b2u2.net/manifesto.html

[2] Artisanate – ‘This was a class in possession of its own means of production – tools and skills; which enjoyed high levels of literacy; was typically located close to the centre of capital cities; and, last but not least, was geographically mobile – a mobility symbolized by the famous tours of young apprentices within or beyond their own countries.’ Perry Anderson, ‘Internationalism: A Breviary’ New Left Review, 14, March-April 2002.

[3] Armand Mattelard, Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. p.xi.

Info

Richard Barbrook, Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village, London: Pluto Press. 2007.

Richard Barbrook, The Class of the New, London: Openmute. 2006.

Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, University of Chicago Press. 2006.

Iain A. Boal <boal AT sonic.net> is a social historian of science and technics, associated with Retort, collective authors of Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, London:Verso, 2006

Is a rabble run media becoming a possibility? And are artists in the vanguard or blocking the way? The AV media arts festival in the North-East of England last month suggested the ambivalence of artistic interventions into state and corporate broadcasting. Report by Anthony Iles and Josephine Berry Slater

This year’s AV festival, the third since its inception in 2003, had the subtitle ‘Broadcast’. Such a large and undifferentiated theme might seem to run the risk of courting meaninglessness, especially in the context of a media arts festival. In fact, AV’s engagement with radio and television in the age of Web 2.0 and digital switch-overs was unexpectedly productive.

Broadcast is a technique by which mass entertainment, amateur activity and artistic production, as well as disparate locations, can be united. Something which its deployment as a curatorial device at the AV festival, curated for the second time by Honor Harger, played with interestingly. There were amateur radio rallies, screenings in mainstream cinemas, a mobile radio-bus, and across Newcastle, Middlesborough and Sunderland, FM radio stations were set up. Diversity of format helped adulterate the space of art and blur the boundaries that still separate high from low culture. The festival’s programme seeped into the existing media landscape, inadvertently exposing local radio listeners to temporary stations of sound art, avant-garde music and the history of broadcast culture. The interrogation of broadcast technology’s conventions and exploration of its materiality imparted a spirit of enquiry and education to the events, opening up the black box of broadcasting.

Artists and producers seemed to be simultaneously involved in critiquing, celebrating and mourning analogue TV broadcast on the eve of its national ‘switch off’ to be completed by 2012 (radio is, for the moment at least, a more complicated story, with no definitive switch-off planned). But the ways of registering broadcast culture and its (vanishing) potential were dizzyingly diverse. The Waygood Radio Rally at Newcastle’s Grainger Market was attended by amateur radio clubs from Northumbria, Tyneside and Tynemouth, and yielded a half-hour crash course in the basics of radio broadcasting and its global culture. Ironically, as one radio enthusiast explained, the old iron marketplace acted as a ‘Faraday Cage’ preventing all transmission and reception of radio waves. A frustrating experience for the wealth of enthusiasts who turned up keen to show off their skills and home-built kit, but an amusing one for the disengaged art flâneur. A laptop slideshow displayed pictures of ‘sport radio’ events in which single or double operator teams attempt to make radio contact with as many stations around the world as possible in 24 hours. There were also pictures of club members on solo missions to the far flung reaches of the earth, camping out on wind swept islands with disconsolate sheep, radio packs and vast antennae, attempting to transmit signals as far around the world as possible. In light of such touching commitment to the crackle and whistle of wireless, Northumbria Amateur Radio Club secretary David’s rather sanguine response to our questions about the rise of digital radio was disconcerting.

Image: David (G0EVV) at the Waygood Radio Rally, Grainger Market, Newcastle

David (call sign G0EVV), whose club members will not be affected by the advent of digital radio one way or another, did not know what the State has planned for FM and AM spectra freed up by the shift to digital. Conceding that digital audio radio (DAB) does not offer any significant technical improvements on analogue, he seemed unconcerned by the implications of DAB for smaller, commercially less successful stations. When asked about the activity of radio pirates, David was somewhat squeamish. Dissociating himself from pirate activity he declared that anyone in his club engaging in pirate broadcasting would be ejected forthwith for putting the club’s integrity and license into jeopardy.

The contrast with the relatively recent history of ham radio is striking. Up until 1989 severe restrictions on amateur licenses and access to broadcast technology forced radio hams in the former Eastern Bloc to broadcast secretly, running extreme risks in order to maintain contact with their peers. The cultural content of amateur transmissions tends to be minimal, with most messages consisting solely of the operator’s call sign, the date and the frequency; here the medium simply is the message. In ham culture, legal and technical limitations are continually present; contact is made through a low-intensity battle for space in the spectrum, channels are kept open. While some argue that radio’s combination of isolation and communicatin can constitute a space for critical reflection and the development of social relations beyond the constraints of the spectacle (see Marko Peljhan, http://linkme2.net/dy) in practice criticality appears to be largely absent from amateur radio. On the other hand, its practitioners’ tenacity and formalism has a structured reciprocity evidently absent from the actor/audience framework of art.

Moving from the encounter with David (G0EVV) to Chris Burden’s Four TV Commercials (1973/77) at the Broadcast Yourself exhibition in Newcastle’s Hatton Gallery produced a real sense of vertigo. For Burden to make these pieces he needed to form a non-profit organisation, since in this period American TV did not allow individuals to buy air-time. In his piece Chris Burden Promo (1976), Burden inserts his name at the end of a canonical sequence of artists from Michelangelo to Picasso. The names are simultaneously spoken and spelt out in brash yellow lettering on a blue background. In order to persuade the TV companies to let him screen the piece, he had to convince them that Chris Burden was an art company. Another Burden ad, Full Financial Disclosure (1977), made post-Watergate, consists of a breakdown of the artist’s accounts for the year 1976. Burden’s small net profit of $1,054 reveals how big an investment making the ads was for him, a form of economic self-mutilation that unites these works with his better known physical endurance pieces. For radio hams like David, gaining access to the fortress of broadcasting entails an acceptance of and even reverence toward its laws and codes of conduct because they maintain radio as a rational sphere premised on the formalist beauty of engineering. For Burden, in both of these works, it is about challenging the economic preconditions of broadcasting by producing something anomalously individualist within its own homogenous language and self-normalising continuum.

Burden’s détournement of blockbuster visuals and the political ruse of ‘transparency’ is all a far cry from Ian Breakwell’s self-consciously arty Continuous Diary made for Channel Four in 1982. The climate of tolerance produced by the State’s short-lived support for alternative programming is immediately apparent in the relative leisureliness of these episodes. Indeed, we later learned that Breakwell was allowed to specify not only their length, but the time of day they would be broadcast. In one episode, the artist is filmed on a bike cycling to work from London’s Smithfield Market to Wapping, dressed in a flat cap, green jacket and carrying a fishing bag. The eccentric figure of Breakwell cautiously cycling along his route, accompanied by his own voice-over narration, wavers between conceptualist farce and earnest Jackanory-style educational TV. As he cycles through the City financial district and past its landmarks, reportage of his daily journey cuts to news footage of a public celebration of the victory in the Falklands War. The pat poetry kicks in as he describes the assembled dignitaries and their ‘Grey, mean, stupid, faces’, or old soldiers and city workers ‘waving their little flags – enough to turn the stomach.’ ‘Either you die a hero,’ he concludes, ‘or Johnny comes home again.’ It all feels as distant and quaint as his flat cap. Surprisingly, the discipline imposed by American TV’s hostile commercial environment yielded a comparative terseness and medium specificity in Burden’s work that seems lacking in Breakwell’s over-extended and politically rather feeble pieces. Like a poet laureate licensed to break up the mundane code of national culture, Breakwell’s romanticist assault on televisual state propaganda ultimately reinforces its psychic regime by leaving the authority figure of the didact-presenter (artist) intact.

It is this domination of the media space by talking heads and the semantic regime they preside over that Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway aimed to upset in their 1980 project Hole in Space. This piece connected the East and West coasts of America, with people outside New York’s Lincoln Centre and The Broadway department store in LA, speaking via a live satellite TV link up, and without any kind of censorship, pre-defined formatting or intervention. The artists insisted on having no prior publicity for the project, and allowed the situation to develop of its own accord over three evenings. During each two-hour transmission, live film of passers-by was projected on storefront windows in the corresponding cities. For Broadcast Yourself this footage has been edited down to an hour, synced up and projected onto two facing screens in the Hatton Gallery. The viewer stands in the middle and experiences the delirium of the growing crowds as they talk, sing, cheer and flirt with one another across thousands of miles, and without the inhibitions of embodied encounter or the dictats of broadcasting. The narrowcast and democratising dimensions of this project certainly preempts aspects of today’s social networking. But where Web 2.0 is defined by the solitary transmission and reception of pre-recorded or written material, Hole in Space coordinates mass participation into an unscripted exchange.

Image: Ian Breakwell, still from an episode of Ian Breakwell's Continuous Diary, 1984

Van Gogh TV’s Piazza Virtuale (1992), was a more sustained and distributed version of Hole in Space. An interactive TV experiment lasting 100 days, it was scheduled as part of Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany. The project used satellite network technology, with participants able to cut into a continuous TV programme through a series of Piazettas (blue ‘voxpop style’ public booths equipped with keyboards, slow-scan picture phones and ISDN lines) located across the city, or any touch-tone telephone. The keyboards and hand-sets functioned as typewriters, interactive orchestras and triggers for video games and painting programs. It was also possible to enter the Piazza via the internet, videophone or telefax and, beyond the Piazettas, there were live feeds from a host of other European cities. The screen was split into four, and the effect was a multimedia, dialogic, compound interface screened live on German cable TV, as well as the 3SAT TV network and the Olympus Satellite, with up to a million viewers. The edited down version shown at Broadcast Yourself conveyed a sense of a kind of ‘art glasnost’ with artists emerging from behind the iron curtain into the dazzling futurity of global interactive TV. It also produced some surreal solutions to live broadcast, with a Moscow art collective improvising a new ‘pocket art’ genre, by emptying out their pockets on air and encouraging others to do so.

As Karel Dudesek, former Van Gogh TV member, explained at a brunch at Newcastle’s Star and Shadow Cinema convened by Broadcast Yourself curators Sarah Cook and Kathy Rae Huffman, ‘the motivation was not just to get on TV but to change things’. The timing, he continued, was also fortuitous since the web had ‘just arrived’. ‘Nowadays,’ he lamented, ‘you’d need a whole floor of lawyers to produce mass live TV.’ Holding out for the importance of artists and ordinary people ‘hacking’ into mainstream TV and radio, he dismissed the impact of net based citizen journalism and artists’ broadcasts:

Radio and TV can change lives in a way that the net can’t ... TV is a group experience ... and people should be provoked to work with it.

If Broadcast Yourself rendered the golden age of artists’ TV interventions nostalgic through their presentation in a mock-up of a crummy ’70s English lounge (complete with sofa, electric fire, and wood-veneer panelled TV set), this feeling of ‘time regained’ was also applied to the recent past. Two late ’90s online curatorial projects, Bastard56kTV and TV swansong, related the advent of video streaming on the web (one of many new distribution strategies for artists’ work), and were displayed on Apple iMacs using 56k modems. This all brought back memories of the go-and-make-a-cup-of-tea speeds of early webcasting, and highlighted the commitment of these early pioneers to the ideal of many-to-many media casting in the face of extreme technical inconvenience.

Miranda July’s video collection from 1995, Big Miss Moviola (aka Joanie 4 Jackie), was a contemporary lo-fi experiment in the alternative distribution of artists’ video work. Described as a video chainletter, Big Miss Moviola started as an invitation from Miranda July to female video artists to make a film (no more than 20 minutes long), record it onto VHS tape and send it back to her. July then compiled the films onto tapes and redistributed them. In a sense, the tape makes tangible the bridge between mail art and Web 2.0 style social networking, whereby the pursuit of a like-minded audience for one’s work through alternative distribution methods actually produces a small well-connected milieu. In the case of July’s project, the tape’s inclusion in this show augments the cultural credentials of its contributors. The by-product of such networks then, is a cultural artefact with a rarity value readily sought by today’s cultural institutions.

One of the less familiar projects on display at the Hatton Gallery was Mumbai-based film-maker Shaina Anand’s open-circuit TV project KhirkeeYaan (Khirkee – window, Yaan – vehicle), which drew on relations and ways of being together unfamiliar to the Western media arts trajectory. Documentation from this project entailed episodes edited down from seven different installations of four open-circuit televisions, mics and cameras located in an area called Khirkee Extension in New Delhi. Through this basic network of cameras, a local, live and interactive TV programme was created. The episodes ranged from mob conversations between groups of young men featuring up to 20 people, to more sustained conversations between women of different castes from the privacy of their own homes. As with Hole in Space, the ability of narrowcast TV to connect geographically disparate spaces unleashed the thrill of tele-flirting – the virtual social encounter emboldening the participants. In her talk at the above mentioned brunch, however, Anand also underlined a more serious testing of social relations, as the strict codes of inter-caste and cross gender behaviour melted briefly away within this new, virtual space.

Although the documentation of Anand’s collaborative work parcelled the real-time, networked interactions into more manageble chunks, the original project was not conceived to fit the temporal framework of traditional broadcasting. This temporality has been described as the ‘monoform’ and the ‘universal clock’ by another important televisual dissident represented at AV, the maverick film-maker Peter Watkins. The monoform, he says,

is the internal language-form (editing, narrative structure, etc.) used by TV and the commercial cinema to present their messages. It is the densely packed and rapidly edited barrage of images and sounds, the ‘seamless’ yet fragmented modular structure which we all know so well [...] they are repetitive, predictable, and closed vis-à-vis their relationship to the audience.

The Universal Clock:

springs from the contemporary practice of rigidly formatting all TV programmes into standardised time slots (a total of 47 or 52 minutes for ‘longer’ films, and 26 minutes for shorter ones), in order to comply with a regulated amount of commercial advertising in each clock hour or half-hour.[1]

One of Watkins earliest films was on show at AV, The War Game (1965), his first and last BBC commission. Developing the then novel form of re-enacting fictionalised historical events which he had experimented with as an amateur film-maker, Watkins proceeded to make a film with a cast of non-actors about the consequences of a nuclear attack on the UK. Mimicking the starchy form of the public information films of the period, The War Game presents the public broadcasting voice-over as something entirely sinister, its objectivity complicit with the homicidal population management of the authorities and the public service workers who attempt to control the repercussions of a nuclear attack. This questioning of the BBC’s authority within the context of one of its commissions, the attempt to confront the public with the blunt facts of nuclear attack and ‘involve “ordinary people” in an extended study of their own history’ predictably resulted in the cabinet banning the film.[2]

Similarly to Watkins, film-maker Harun Farocki has gained a reputation for making films which strain the definitions of documentary or art house genres. His films have never gained adequate film distribution, relying instead on informal screenings in art spaces and museum film programmes for exposure. So, it is no great surprise that Farocki’s practice has shifted in recent years to accommodate itself to the defining terms of large-scale art installations.

Deep Play, installed at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in Sunderland, is a 12 screen study of the 2006 football World Cup final between France and Italy. Farocki assembles the various forms and interfaces through which the ‘beautiful game’ and its players are analysed, quantified and dissected as data. The installation explores how the spontaneity of a huge footballing event is subjected to manifold specular and analytical regimes in the act of its live broadcast and subsequent commodification. Two screens are reserved for a continuous shot of star players lasting half the game’s duration. One isolates French striker Thierry Henry from the games’ action, largely appearing in space on his own. In contrast to the constant dynamism of the televised match, this study captures the solitude of one player and his apparent frustration and boredom during the game. Here we are shown the atomised individual hero carrying out actions (a dance?) which seems absurd, more like the wandering lament of a prima donna removed from the supporting choreography of the team.

Deep Play continues Farocki’s study of technologies of vision and the militarisation of everyday life, transposed here from the obscure (grey media: training tapes, military and corporate propaganda) to the popular (televised sport). Another Farocki film screened during AV, Videogrammes of a Revolution (Farocki/Ujica, 1992), takes a more documentary approach to broadcast footage. In this case it is a study of the Romanian Revolution compiled through an editing together of intermittent public TV broadcasts and amateur footage over the course of three days. Here we see both the centrality of the TV station as a site of power and the vital role of national broadcasting in the projection and re-making of coherent power/authority. Protests throughout the three days shuttle between Nicolae Ceau?escu’s palace and the TV station as if unsure in which of the two institutions the power of the regime actually resided. Yet, as well as the machinations of turncoat generals and national hero-poets attempting to restore order behind the scenes, Farocki and Ujica direct our attention towards the apparently unrepresentable; the disturbances and undirected actions (in earshot but out of the camera’s view) which somehow tipped the balance of power, and remain mysteriously unattributable, unseen events.

A performance of John Cage’s Variations VII (1966) by :zoviet*france:, Atau Tanaka and Matt Wand was part of the Festival’s opening gala. Cage described the work as

a piece of music, indeterminate in form and detail, using as sound sources only those sounds which are in the air at the moment of performance, picked up via the communication bands, telephone lines, microphones together with, instead of musical instruments, a variety of household appliances and frequency generators...

The performance attempts to produce an aural picture of the metropolis, an aesthetic pursuit familiar from a long line of avant-garde writers, artists and music concrète musicians down to today’s sound cultures such as ambient and dubstep. In its AV iteration, the performers’ palette of sound sources included FM and ham radio, TV stations, feeds from scanners and mics in industrial spaces around the area, mobile phones and the internet. Unsurprisingly, the performance was marked by a tension between observing the rules of Cage’s original musical experiment, managing the noise of a plethora of channels, and the need to sculpt a recognisably authentic sonic experience for the audience.

In a sense this tension is built into the original work. Cage’s experimentalism revolves around the erosion of musicians’ agency in favour of his own semi-mystical conception of ‘chance’. It is not that Cage wasn’t making music, but rather he was trying to make music without musicians, and this is reflected in some of the documentation of the original performance. In their suits and horn-rimmed spectacles the performers look more like Harvard engineering professors. Indeed lab coats would not have been out of place. This is in stark contrast to the casual dress code of the latterday ‘technicians’ performing Cage’s piece at AV. Tanaka, Wand and :zoviet*france: operated a vast network of kit arranged over four large desks in the centre of the Baltic gallery. Where it seemed crucial for the original 1966 performance to be framed as ‘science’, this time around, with a good 30 years of computer music behind us, the shock of the technical array was not nearly so great. Without wishing to diminish the richness and quality of the sound collage produced, there seemed something not quite risky enough about the way Variations VII was staged and the ‘live’ performance itself.

Perhaps Variations’ careful and poetic collaging of the city’s ‘noise’ is an apt metaphor for the role of artists in mediating between the spectacle and its excluded. In order for the genteel audience of the Baltic to be exposed to the dirty, industrial sounds of North Shields Fish Quay or the hum of the city’s water treatment plants, a whole invisible web of professional liaisons and negotiation had to occur. These audio feeds, already bureaucratically and technically culled from Newcastle’s aural din, are then further refined by the performers, with no jarring noise ever allowed to sound beyond a comfortable degree. Artists act as the safe conduit through which the rabble can be admitted to the broadcast media space. Is it cynical to understand these kinds of state sponsored interventions as licensed dissent? The tasteful dose of noise that reassures us that we live in a (spectacularised) democracy? If inclusion is always a form of neutralisation, then under what conditions would it be possible to admit the mob into the national spectacle, and what would this rabble run media look like? If the emergence of ‘citizen journalism’ purportedly answers this question, enabling ‘anyone’ to publish their own material, the fact that encountering this material is often like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack still leaves the problem of mass participation and collective reception unresolved. If artists’ broadcasts seem often to revolve around the desire for such a take-over of media from below, the radical levelling of power structures during events like the Romanian Revolution ironically seems to demand the artistic voice of the poet. A special voice was required to announce and make sensible, hence safe, the extraordinary events that were unfolding. But no matter how problematic the artist’s role as mediator, in the absence of any radical democratic access to the TV power-tower, their marginalisation within the current proliferation of media channels is symptomatic of the triumph of the state-commercial media apparatus, albeit as polyform not monoform. In the words of Dudesek, ‘Today we are living in one global advertisement for “shiny lips stay young forever”.’ Events like AV, apart from bringing together a wealth of thought provoking material, are certainly good at reminding us that lip gloss is no cure for psychic entrainment.

Image: Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, still from Videogrammes of a Revolution, 1992

Josephine Slater is Editor of Mute

Anthony Iles is Assistant Editor of Mute


Info

The AV Festival 08 took place in various venues across Newcastle, Gateshead, Middlesborough and Sunderland, 28 February – 8 March, 2008, http://www.avfest.co.uk/

Broadcast Yourself was at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, 28 February - 5 April, and will be on show at Cornerhouse, Manchester, 13 June - 10 August, http://www.broadcastyourself.net/

Footnotes

[1] Quotes from Peter Watkins 'The role of the American MAVM, Hollywood and the Monoform', http://www.mnsi.net/~pwatkins/hollywood.htm

[2] http://www.mnsi.net/~pwatkins/warGame.htm

Declaring the economic off-limits to politics, the art world’s favourite philosopher, Jacques Rancière, does have something to hide, argues Paul Helliwell

 

‘There is no science… but of the hidden’ – a phrase by Bachelard taken up by the Althusserians.

– Jacques Rancière from ‘The Janus-Face of Politicized Art’[1]

The god Janus has two faces each looking in opposite directions, he looks at origins and ends, past and future, cause and effect, and for both Theodor Adorno and Jacques Rancière he makes the connection between art and something ‘forbidden’, whether commerce or politics.[2] Janus is fortunate in having two pairs of eyes for it means he could look at the ‘two faces or a vase’ visual paradox or duck-rabbit (the drawing of a rabbit that looked at another way becomes a duck) and see both at the same time but, E.H. Gombrich argues in his Art and Illusion, we cannot. There are no perceptions without theories first – and perceptually we cannot hold two theories at the same time. We’ve only got one pair of eyes. On the other hand Anton Ehrenzweig holds (in The Hidden Order of Art), that our readings of art are always ‘polyphonic’ – we are always shifting our attention between details and the totality. Indeed, according to Rancière, collage/montage, creating relationships between things, images, image-sentences, has become the key artistic strategy. Moreover, this relation, these metaphors of visibility, are the means by which aesthetics and politics can themselves be thought in common again.

Rancière’s supporters argue his is the radical programme of May ’68 alive and still with us, something that can leapfrog the diminishing returns of the intervening 40 years of the new left and theory and put us once again in that blissful dawn.

Image: Nick Brooks

All theories, suggests Gaston Bachelard, render some things visible (that are first hidden), but conversely, they also render some things, questions important to the previous regime, hidden (invisible). Rancière seeks to reveal the ‘impossibilities and prohibitions … lodged at the very heart of thought that considers itself radical’ – but what are the ‘impossibilities and prohibitions’ of Rancière’s own thought.[3]

Aesthetic Regime Change

This, at first glance, would not seem a fruitful line of inquiry. Rancière visualises a relationship between art and politics that is a sunny upland of possibilities and exhortations, where all are visible or can become so and all relationships are transparent. What can be seen, thought or said is divided and shared among us all, a partage du sensible, and this division (e.g. who gets to say what) is inherently political. Where Rancière would rather talk about dissensus than resistance (as do his supporters), it is clear they are equivalent. With dissensus there’s a new partage, new social actors enter into society’s discussions against the police order, the invisibles in society – refugees, the unemployed, part-time workers etc. – become visible and speak. For to speak in a society is to have a part in governing it. Each work of art makes a partage, as does art as a whole, as does real political activity.

It is the symmetry of these metaphors that makes them so compelling – as above so below. The equality of language use becomes the equality of intellect propounded by the French educator Jacotot becomes the equality of aesthetic perception of each person becomes the principle of a radical political equality.

Yet, is there a fly in this ointment? A blind spot in this vision? For Rancière cautions that ‘when one searches for the hidden beneath the apparent, a position of mastery is established’, the apparent becomes a puppet, the slave of the hidden, and a teacher interposes himself between us and knowledge.[4]

Rancière resists determination of the meanings of art from without not by the usual means of granting it aesthetic ‘autonomy’, its own realm, its own rules, thus giving art a problematic and an ideology of separation from life, but by arguing aesthetics is inherently social and political and should not be made the slave of some hidden. But determination of an economic character, even if it occurs only ‘in the last instance’ (the hidden base – the apparent cultural superstructure), ultimately animates Marxism.[5] For Rancière this has become paralysing, not just of art but of politics also, the ‘dogmatism of the hidden truth has become the nihilism of the ubiquitous lie of the market’.

One would expect this good news of art’s radical potential to be well received, and yet the inaugural interview of Rancière by Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey in the March 2007 edition of Artforum became difficult. Instead of heralding, as the section promised, a ‘Regime Change’, the ‘return’ of the aesthetic regime to art that Rancière in fact argues hadn’t been away, it revealed the problems faced by the art world in fully accepting his theses. Rancière doesn’t want to teach or preach, yet despite all parties’ best intentions, the tenor of the interview was close to a bad tempered tutorial. It is hard to remain patient with people who will persistently argue that they are not free – and Rancière was forced to wheel on the poor (and the much more harshly structured nature of their existences) in defence of his theories in an uncharacteristic appreciation of Santiago Sierra, and a deprecation of Zygmunt Bauman. What was neatly tidied away in The Politics of Aesthetics came unravelled.

Disinterring Althusser

To fully understand Rancière’s positions and the art world’s attitudes to them, we must ignore at least one of his prohibitions, and search for the hidden beneath the apparent. We must disinter the thrice dead, excommunicated and buried at the crossroads body of le grand Althusser.

There is the creation myth about Rancière that, after the events of May ’68, and beginning with La Leçon D’Althusser, he has been engaged in a radical repudiation of his teacher Louis Althusser – now safely marginalised as a pantomime villain. Yet it is important not only to understand the huge impact of Althusser’s 1965 Pour Marx on French intellectual life, but also to understand it as an intervention at a definite conjuncture for the French communist party (the PCF).[6] Althusser aimed to create a party to face Janus-like towards both history and philosophical truth by ways of a Marxist (revolutionary) science and a Marxist philosophy, disciplines created by Marx’s epistemological break with his early reliance on Hegel and Feuerbach – or so Althusser argued. This concept, the movement from pre-scientific ideas to scientific ones, comes from Bachelard’s work on the history of science (and Althusser’s teacher Canguilhem)[7] which, together with Jacques Martin’s concept of the problematic, open up a reading of Marx that does not stop reverentially at the surface of the text (nor at its last word).[8]

Rancière’s thought is formed in this precise era – he took the lead in the reading group for Lire le Capital (Reading Capital), which was to become a who’s who of French philosophy, psychology and literary theory – Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Pierre Macherey, Roger Establet, François Regnault, Jacques Alain-Miller. One quote from Marx became critical:

The anatomy of the ape does not explain that of man, rather human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape.

In Capital, pp.25-6 the quote continues:

The pointers to higher species of animals in the lower species can only be understood if the higher species itself is already known. Thus the bourgeois economy provides the key to the economy of antiquity, etc.

This is an attempt to encourage a definite engagement with the past conjuncture from an epistemologically privileged present. Althusser himself later used this to argue that the general strikes in French labour following the student revolt of ’68 were more significant than the initiatory revolt itself. Is it any wonder that Rancière came to modify Althusser’s example of the police (from his most quoted essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’) to have them say ‘move along there is nothing to see’ – just as Althusser did in ’68, closing off revolutionary avenues of investigation by means of the hidden.[10]

For French historian of philosophy Francois Chatelet, the model of the intellectual as Janus fell with Althusser in ’68. To speak for another became shameful. Rancière and Foucault were among the first to question what the intellectual’s new role would be.[11]

In 1965 Althusser claimed Foucault as a pupil, but Foucault describes himself as only being ‘somewhat under his influence’.[12] Like Althusser, Foucault rejected the humanist interpretations of Marxism popular with the PCF that focused on the alienation of the subject. Similarly Foucault owes a lot to science, the subject that held a ‘strategic position’ in debates within ’60s French Marxism, and he shares Althusser’s distrust of Hegel.[13] But Foucault used Bachelard and Canguilhem’s[14] work differently, historically examining the limits to science’s claims on rationality by making small-scale studies of ‘determinate subjects and a determinate field of objects’, an archaeology of discourse, to render what seemed fixed by the history of a particular science (or a social science) open to question again, to render the unthinkable (in the science as it is currently understood) thinkable again – to open up its ‘episteme’ and founding concepts.[15] Yet, claims Rancière, ‘from one episteme to the other, there is for Foucault, neither any common question, nor any common answer’, the old episteme remains irretrievable as a project, lost to history, the hidden from within the new regime.[16]

Foucault and Rancière have ‘met’, Foucault improvising written responses to questions from the Révoltes Logiques collective when Rancière was a member.[17] As Foucault said at the time, each question is posed ‘in such a way that it cannot be analysed’ and this criticism was clearly taken to heart by Rancière. In his Artforum interview 30 years later he says that questions whose ‘principle virtue is one’s pleasure in declaring it insoluble’ are to be shunned. But when he declares the question ‘How can one escape the market?’ insoluble, aren’t investigations of the connections between art and capitalism being blocked?

Révoltes Logiques wanted to invoke a pleb – a plebeian revolutionary subject, ‘the constant and constantly silent target for the apparatuses of power’. Foucault cautioned them against this saying it had no sociological reality, ‘plebness’ was not outside of relations of power, of subjectification, but their limit and underside; not even inside ourselves is free of power. Rancière has taken this less to heart – merely leaving the role structurally empty, a point that can only be temporarily occupied as part of a dissensus, a claim to speak, to be visible.

Arguably Rancière inverts the disciplinary nature of visibility in Foucault to stand it on its feet, uniting who speaks and who is seen, providing a means for new social subjects to claim these very rights to representation, to be heard and seen. But from Althusser and Balibar’s reading of Marx we know that these inversions are never as theoretically simple as they are rhetorically portrayed. In moving from Foucault’s structured subjectivities to subjectivising equalities, this point of dissensus becomes not just structurally empty but structured only by the equality of language use of the members of the community. Alain Badiou argues Rancière is an heir to Foucault but in ‘reactivating the sediments’ he does not discover a phenomenological ground but ‘a discourse plotted and held in the aftermath of an event’, a frozen moment of dissensus and its incorporation. There is a risk that the theory becomes an endlessly applicable ‘just-so’ story, an only slightly more structured version of the expanding circle of ethical concern. There is no script here to guide would be actors politically, nor artistically – as both Badiou and Liam Gillick have noted.[18]

It is time to look at the source of Rancière’s refusal of the hidden and to see what its effects are likely to be.

History’s Stage

Rancière is haunted by a restaging, one he has returned to again and again – the ending of Althusser’s ‘The “Piccolo Teatro”: Bertolazzi and Brecht’. This text, the key to both philosophers’ thinking, is a meditation on Bertolazzi’s little known play:[19]

I look back, and I am suddenly and irresistibly assailed by the question: are not these few pages, in their maladroit and groping way, simply that unfamiliar play El Nost Milan, performed on a June evening, pursuing in me its incomplete meaning, searching in me, despite myself, now that all the actors and sets have been cleared away, for the advent of its silent discourse?[20]

Director Jean-Luc Godard has also made use of this quote; in his La Chinoise a ’68-era Maoist begins to speak and enact it. Rancière says of Bertolazzi’s play, ‘reality wins in one blow by killing ideology’. The blow is struck by Nina, a daughter who repudiates her father, leaving him to the police (he has killed her would-be seducer for the ideology of honour), and she exits the play to enter the world of social relationships. This is the ‘action’ of the play – but it is sidelined. Instead, the stage is mainly occupied by the desultory inaction of the Milan lumpen-proletariat, a term criticised by Rancière as a ‘phantasmagoric stage name for unmeaning’. For Marxists their activity is meaningless, they can never enter into (hi)story and be produced by it. Yet, how is Althusserian revolution to be made if the masses (or even the party) stay sunk in ideology and cannot be lifted out of it (or at least, in social worker’s terms, moved on)?

Rancière argues, that in sharing that stage, meaning and the lumpen’s unmeaning can be brought into a relationship by means of their very non-relationship, just as a montage of any two images together produces a third meaning: and that this is Althusser’s method. Both Nina and we the audience – the one standing for the many – are produced by the play as new social actors. However, this is not because Nina embodies real praxis as an act of will against the inertia of the lumpen-proles or her reactionary father (Althusser is not an Italian autonomist and neither is Rancière) but because the relationship between the parts of the ensemble, between Nina and the lumpen or Nina and her father, is productive of meaning.

Rancière argues that Althusser makes use of this montage in Reading Capital: Adam Smith cannot see the surplus labour robbed from the workers in his own writings, Marx can, but, if these are different epistemes à la Foucault, Marx should not be able to. Rancière says Althusser needs precisely this seeing of the hidden as the necessary epistemological break to make Marxism a science. From the shared stage of El Nost Milan, says Rancière, Althusser brings unmeaning into a relation with meaning, drags the hidden into visibility, and thus Marxist science out of classical economics by means of an extension of Marxist notions of contradiction. This is a profoundly Maoist notion of the dialectic as the one split in two, as opposed to the revisionist formula – the two becoming one.[21]

Autonomy Undone

If Althusser is concerned with teaching us to read again, Rancière wants us to see. Rancière takes this method and applies it methodically. The stage is the one, what is common to all, it is the all of a montage. The partage divides the social world as it divides the stage, dividing the montage into its parts which share the montage. What determines the meaning of the relationship between these parts, of the social whole or of any montage, is both political and aesthetic. These metaphors of visibility and of speech, the one standing for the many (‘the part of no part’), have become his theory. For Rancière this method has no need of its Althusserian hidden and he casts doubt on the example from Reading Capital to show this. What Althusser claims as hidden is revealed as having been in the light all along and we are returned to a society that is simply the aggregate of (individual) choices and actions.[22] Like Hegel in 1820, Rancière laments the loss of thinking in common but unlike Hegel he has a means to visualise an undoing of this work – by the undoing of the concept of autonomy.[23]

We can see this undoing of autonomy in Rancière’s recent book The Future of the Image in chapter 2, ‘Sentence, Image, History.’ This is structured round an analysis of a sequence from Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema over or in which Godard re-voices Foucault’s acceptance speech upon becoming director of the Collège de France. (What is quotation if not restaging?) In this sequence we are shown four images – two are inescapable in the history of the 20th century, a Jewish boy emerges hands-up from the Warsaw Ghetto, Murnau’s Nosferatu – two are not, a cinema audience laughing (from King Vidor’s The Crowd), a woman with a candle descending (from Richard Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase). Rancière identifies all four and Godard’s method and intended meaning – in separating images from their narrative arrangement he aims to make them pure presence and use them to show a cinema that sold itself and its audiences out to Hollywood (the exiled Siodmak representing the link between German expressionism and US film noir) and thus ‘betrayed its ability to prophesise by betraying being present.’

Rancière finds this argument weak, he resists it as dialectical montage – a ‘revealing of one world behind another’, familiar from Adorno, where art’s autonomy is constitutive but dialectical, art’s very separation from damaged life allowing it to comment. Rancière refuses to ‘blame’ cinema or art for Auschwitz (the mechanism of ‘cause’ and thus ‘guilt’ cannot be established, From Caligari to Hitler – the ‘prophecy’ is retroactive). Instead, Rancière argues for the reading of Godard’s film as a symbolic montage, one, like Althusser’s reading of El Nost Milan (and Foucault’s acceptance speech) where everything speaks (cinema, art) of and through what is common to it – history.

Over the last 20 years Rancière has noted a movement towards an understanding of montage as symbolic montage only, and he is not alone in this. On the front cover of Johanna M. Drucker’s Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity a high gloss Ophelia floats in dark water that has mysteriously flooded a kitsch ’70s living room. Drucker asks us to try to imagine that the ‘beauty’ of the image is being used ‘against itself’, dialectically, ‘to produce an edgy commentary on our addiction to illusion’.[24] But in fact, Drucker suggests, it’s more about the gloss; ‘a way of incorporating the techniques of industry production into (the) work as subject matter’.[25] Now that she has said it, try as we might, we can see it no other way – the dialectical montage is fading into the new visibility. Rancière swims with this tide but does not account for it beyond saying that the presence of mass social movements hid the fact that the mediation between art and politics of ‘consciousness raising’ was always incorrect.

How are we to respond to restagings of Hegel? In Marx’s The German Ideology, we find more metaphors of visibility:

If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.[26]

What is our current historical life-process? As material production vanishes from the West and the word worker loses ‘currency’, we are trapped in an imaginary relation to our (immaterial) labour, a dark water of art’s own ideology that our Nina can no longer escape, ‘In the ideological domain, all production is denied or sublimated and becomes free “creation”’.[27] We have entered a floating world and a new subjectivisation as our creativity. It is no surprise that sections of the art world experience Rancière’s formations as a liberation – from the spectres of autonomy, economic determination, from the frustration of the cadaver with its autopsy, and into a pedagogic visualisation as familiar from their own practice as their own idealised reflection. But it should also be recognised that there are costs.

History Will Repeat Itself

Is it a sense of frustration with the present when art world performances, panel discussions and interviews of yesteryear are restaged? As Melanie Gilligan has asked, what is the art world’s fascination with this?[28] In a review of a recent show at Kunstwerke Berlin, History Will Repeat Itself, Richard Grayson views it as sympathetic magic, a search for foundation myths, mystery and miracle plays, a cyclical revisiting of origins to recover control.[29] Shorn of its autonomy, art’s ritual function returns but as anthropology, as the ghost of social bond past. And yet for me the re-staging of things from the past that seems a suppression of the potential of the present moment is in fact its realisation in a Foucauldian archeology. Is it not that the past can never be exactly repeated? That what was conditional in that moment will be revealed? That the possibilities for other things that existed before they were sacrificed to history may become visible again? Or if they do not, that at least their loss will be visible. As if to say, it is the business of the past to be dangerous, if only, as with the celebrations of May ’68, as a farce that makes tragedy known.

The history that repeats itself in Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, a restaging of Hegel, theatrical and pedagogical, is also, as Derrida points out, necromantic, a summoning of the dead. An invocation made possible by the possession of the body of Marx by an inverted Hegel and one that is mounting despite Althusser’s attempted exorcism.[30] Althusser sought to extract what was eschatological and teleological from Marxism – all that aimed at another ‘end of history’ to the ideological Kojèvian/Hegelian one we now inhabit, but the result has been to channel more philosophy into it.[31]

Montage: The structure of El Nost Milan, by Horsemouth

Forty years on, we await the danse macabre of the French political class celebrating their youth in the heady days of May ’68 for the umpteenth time, Jacobins and Thermidoreans embrace – it is a feast in need of a skeleton. From Godard’s Maoist students in La Chinoise to Denys Arcand’s ageing Montreal ex-Maoist, ex-structuralist university lecturer in The Barbarian Invasion (prepared for death with heroin provided by his stockbroker son), we see these ideas and ideals of ’68 have grown so faint as to be laughable. Post ’68, Althusser’s orientation towards the Party (as necessity for the continued development of Marxist science and philosophy) and away from a humanist interpretation of a young Marx (as arrested a development Althusser says as ‘the skull of the child Voltaire’), no longer seems comprehensible.[32] Many reasons can retroactively be given as to how it has become hidden: science, history and indeed philosophy are no longer the motive forces they once were; Althusser’s failure to shift the PCF; their and his (too late) reaction to the events of May ’68, his own subsequent developments, revisions, recantations due to personal tragedy… ‘On a celebrated occasion in 1961 he orchestrated a debate with Sartre, and to the delight of his students, he devastated him’.[33] But Althusser’s battle with and for the Party and against a humanism of the ‘Young Marx’ foisted on Marxism (and not just by its opponents) has been lost. A ‘Young Marx’ has also been victorious over the left communist current from the Situationist Internationale to Jacques Camatte, the children of ’68 have remained infantilised or grown old before their time. History has closed over this moment and Althusserian Marxism hiding both their conditions of intelligibility and their possibilities.

In The Flesh of Words we see Rancière reach out a hand to his dead teacher and attempt to smuggle him out of purgatory dressed as the murdered poet Osip Mandelstam. It is a touching and generous gesture. Rancière wishes Althusser’s words to become those of poets, ‘orphan words’ that do not create a community nor cause action, to free Althusser from the need that drove him mad. But there are better ways for Althusser’s unquiet shade to ‘come back’ and begin to speak to us.[34]

What Do Other Thinkers Make of Rancière?

In his afterword to The Politics of Aesthetics Slavoj Žižek seems indulgent, noting the degradation of the sphere of the economy from ‘a socio-transcendental a priori, the matrix which generates the totality of social and political relations’ (in Marx) to a merely positive social sphere, to ‘an “ontic” sphere deprived of “ontological” dignity’ (in Rancière).[35] Žižek holds it a ‘critical point’ that there is no possibility of a ‘critique of political economy’ in Rancière, and yet is prepared to sacrifice this for the ‘political’ gains of the theory – either as pure politics or the aestheticisation of politics, for example. For Žižek the relationship between politics and the economy is

ultimately that of the ‘two faces or a vase’ visual paradox – you can either chose to see the two faces or the vase – but not both.[36]

The two faces of Janus have been turned inwards to stare sightlessly at each other – they have become a vase, a funerary urn:

The trap to be avoided here, of course, is the naïve idea that one should keep in view the social totality … if one tries to keep all these in view simultaneously, one ends up seeing nothing … [37]

This position is strangely close, though admittedly opposite in emphasis, to Anton Ehrenzweig’s The Hidden Order of Art and (though it may not look like it) this is a salvaging of economy, it’s still there, even though we can’t see it.

Žižek argues you can’t see it all… (simultaneously), Ehrenzweig that you can see all (just not simultaneously), Marx’s achievement was to see not just the real abstractions of economic and political ‘life’ but beyond to a critique of political economy, even though Rancière argues he shouldn’t have been able to see it (based on Foucault) but did, whereas Althusser argues he could (and indeed must). But ironically, given Rancière’s critique of Plato’s conception of artisans as too busy doing their work to take part in the governing of the city, we are being told we do not have the time to look ourselves.

‘Move along! There is nothing to see!’ say the policemen as they shepherd us past the striking Tate cleaners and direct our attention towards an art exhibit. There is a hidden world – and it is all around us.

Rancière’s gains are losses. I hope I’ve made that clear enough.

FOOTNOTES

[1] ‘The Janus-Face of Politicized Art’, interview conducted in French with Gabriel Rockhill, 18 October 2003, in The Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière, Continuum, 2004, http://books.google.com/books?id=hzdyW_an6gUC
[2] Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, Palace of Janus, Verso 1974, pp.146-8.
[3] 'Art of the Possible', Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey in conversation with Jacques Rancière, Artforum, March 2007, p.269.
[4] Gabriel Rockhill and Jacques Ranciere, op. cit.
[5] From Althusser’s ‘the lonely hour of "the last instance" never comes’ (the real world is simply too complex for such a ‘calculation’ ever to be performed), to Zhdanov’s insistence that art(ists) obey orders – ‘Socialist literature … is one flesh and one blood with our socialist construction’ – we have an ? and ? of the nature of this relationship and the consequences that flow from it. See the Appendix to Contradiction and Overdetermination in For Marx, Louis Althusser, translated by Ben Brewster, Verso 1969, pp.117-128 and A.A. Zhdanov, On Literature, Music and Philosophy, Lawrence and Wishart, 1950, p.12.
[6] For Marx and Reading Capital are available online, http://www.marx2mao.net/Other/
See 'Recit', by Francois Chatelet in Michel Foucault; Power, Truth, Strategy, eds. Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton, Feral Publications, 1979.
[7] On Canguilhem’s influence; The Future Lasts Forever, Louis Althusser, translated by Richard Veasey, The New Press, 1993, pp.183-4, and 'Remarks on Marx', Michel Foucault interviewed by Duccio Trombadori 1978, English translation, Semiotext(e), 1991, pp.67-8.
[8] Louis Althusser, For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster, Verso 1969, pp.66-7.
[9] The Future Lasts Forever, Louis Althusser, op. cit p.208, Reading Capital, Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, translated 1970, Ben Brewster, p.125.
[10] In On Ideology, Louis Althusser, Verso, 2008, p.48. On the paradoxical nature, uncharacteristically Hegelian problematic, and tar-baby stickiness of this, see Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, Verso 1995, p.78.
[11] See 'Recit', by Francois Chatelet in Michel Foucault; Power, Truth, Strategy, eds. Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton, Feral Publications, 1979, p.25.
[12] In respectively 'A letter to the translator' in For Marx, Louis Althusser, translated by Ben Brewster, Verso 1969, p.257 and Michel Foucault, Duccio Trombadori, op. cit., pp.60-1.
[13] Michel Foucault, Duccio Trombadori, op. cit., pp.55-8. Also Francois Chatelet, op.cit.,p.21.
[14] Canguilhem on his own influence on Foucault, 'The Death of Man or the Exhaustion of the Cogito', translated by Catherine Porter, in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting, CUP 1994, pp.71-92.
[15] Michel Foucault, Duccio Trombadori, op. cit., pp.59-69. ‘The episteme is the “apparatus” which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be characterised as scientific.’ – from Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episteme
[16] The Flesh of Words, Jacques Rancière, trans. Charlotte Marbell, SUP, p.135.
[17] Interview first published in Les Révoltes Logiques, 4 , Winter 1977, collected in Michel Foucault, eds. Morris, Patton, op. cit.
[18] Metapolitics, Alain Badiou, translated Jason Barker, Verso 2005, chapters 7 and 8, pp.107-123 has the best critique of Rancière’s method I’ve read to date. 'Vegetables', by Liam Gillick in Artforum March 2007, has the faintest praise for it collaged with the most damning caveats.
[19] The following argument is constructed from Film Fables, Jacques Rancière, translated by Emiliano Battista, 2001, pp.143-53, 'Future of the Image', p.37, The Flesh of Words, Jacques Rancière, pp.135-8.
[20] For Marx, Louis Althusser, translated by Ben Brewster, Verso 1969, p.151.
[21] The Flesh of Words, op. cit., pp.135-8. This extension is sourced from Mao’s 'On Contradiction' (1937) – see Louis Althusser, For Marx, 'Contradiction and Overdetermination', op.cit., p.94, to see how this looked from a Chinese aesthetic Marxist perspective see Aesthetics and Marxism, Liu Kang, DUP 2000, pp.79-81.
[22] 'The Politics of Beauty', Dave Beech, Art Review, May 07, p.5.
[23] Future of the Image, Jacques Rancière, pp.43-5.
[24] From the Twilight series of Gregory Crewdson, http://korkos.club.fr/crewdson-06grand.jpg
[25] Johanna M. Drucker, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity, University of Chicago press, 2005, pp.1-11.
[26] Karl Marx, The German Ideology, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm The metaphor is first mechanical when critical and then organic when it seeks to support its own argument by naturalising it, seeking the cloak of science.
[27] Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, Verso 1995, p.77.
[28] Melanie Gilligan, 'The Beggar’s Pantomime: Performance and its Appropriations', Artforum, Summer 2007, XLV, No. 10, and her interview with Rancièreb online, http://www.metamute.org/en/Re-distributing-the-Re-distribution-of-the-Sensible
[29] Richard Grayson, 'History Will Be Repeated', Art Monthly, February 08.
[30] Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, translated Peggy Kamuf, Routledge 1994, p.107 onwards.
[31] Ibid, pp.89-90.
[32] ‘… for, from the Hegelian viewpoint, Early Works are as inevitable and as impossible as the singular object displayed by Jarry: "the skull of the child Voltaire"'. For Marx, Louis Althusser, op. cit., p.64. This ‘Young Marx’ is something of a poor answer to bad questions lashed together by the PCF out of soviet ideology and local conditions to deal with their ‘crisis of de-stalinisation’. Other ‘Young Marx’’s have also not been entirely themselves – like ‘Young Frankenstein’ we must ask – was the monster ever young? Althusser wants to produce a single unitary Marxism from Marx’s many and varied texts, but it seems to me a full application of Althusser’s arsenal of methods runs perilously close to a deconstruction of Marx. It can just as easily lead to an army of spectres (reason produces one text but the sleep of reason produces monsters plural). It’s a mercy he’s dead, Spectres of Marx would drive him crazy.
[33] Introduction by Douglas Johnson, The Future Lasts Forever, Louis Althusser, op. cit., p.xi.
[34] Mandelstam himself would disagree with the very premise of the escape, of poetry’s harmlessness, as he says to us, ‘Poetry is respected only in this country – people are killed for it.’ And they killed him for it – he did not live after the fall of Stalin, as his wife did, to see the return of those forgotten as ‘prison dust’ to reclaim their names. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, trans. Max Hayward, Penguin 1975, p.190 and p.55.
[35] Gabriel Rockhill and Jacques Ranciere, op. cit., pp. 69-73 and http://www.lacan.com/zizek-leftist.htm Slavoj Žižek's 'A Leftist Appropriation of the European Legacy' in Journal of Political Ideologies, Abingdon, February 1998, is instructive, as is the shift in Rancière’s work from politics to aesthetics.
[36] Not only Gabriel Rockhill and Jacques Ranciere, op. cit., p.7 but also… http://libcom.org/library/the-parallax-view-karatani-s-transcritique-on-kant-and-marx-zizek
[37] Ibid.

Paul Helliwell <phelliwell2000@yahoo.co.uk> would like to direct people to the MySpace site of his ‘brother ass’ horsemouth, www.myspace.com/horsemouthfolk

Angela Mitropoulos and Bryan Finoki present an incursion, in text and image, into the contemporary borderlands

Arrayed beyond and around the obvious walls of migration control, the architectures and technologies of the border proliferate. These technologies seek to sort, expunge, confine and delay; to sift potential value from non-value; to fix the border inside and round both states and selves; to foreclose the future to versions of an infinitely stuttering present. Just as new instruments of financial debt and the offshore internment facility were exported from their post-colonial laboratories situated beyond Europe and the United States, so ‘civil’, metropolitan spaces have, in turn, been restructured by devices once reserved for those declared to be ‘uncivil’. The partitioning of ‘third’ and ‘first’ worlds, colony and empire, the zoning of regular, waged work and that of precariousness and slavery – these are some of the divisions that have been shaken by the unprecedented movements of people around the world since the late 20th century. Flows shifted course, reversed, the (ex-)colonised moved toward the colonisers. And so there is the militarisation of policing, the amplification of the prison lockdown as urban crowd control, preemptive surveillance and simulated warfare; a diffused fear and suspicion no longer confined to the ‘margins’. To be sure, these expanding technologies often multiply death and suffering in an attempt to re-impose the ways in which misery was previously displaced to others, elsewhere – that is, the marginalised. They aim to reinstall the borders, to fine tune the ramparts of wealth and its extraction, sometimes by new means, often as retrofits. Yet, as such, this expansion indicates the failure of the walls to hold firm against a future which is contingent upon movements that cannot be identified before they occur.

[Superfluidity]

Superfluidity is surplus motion at the limit of recognition. It prompts the legal limbo of the detention facility, shapes the condition of the stateless, of those who indefinitely dwell in airports and border camps managed by the UN, squatter camps and those who are homeless, those evacuated under the emergency edicts of the naturalised disaster, those who labour under the constant threat of deportation and its growing collection of visa classifications and bonded-labour stipulations. Superfluidity is movement contained and channelled at the same time, excess suspended and made captive for selection. It is the horizon of surplus value and its derivation. And, between those described as ‘floating populations’ (such as the vast numbers of ‘internal migrants’ in China) and those rendered superfluous through calculations of their possible cash redemption and regeneration, there is the internment ship, anchored just off the coastline of citizenship.

[Extraterritory]

As with the return of the prison hulk, so with the recourse to shifting, just-in-time legal and economic boundaries. Extraterritoriality is neither wholly legal nor quite illegal. It is the legally established non-space in which anything becomes possible; constituted by law and selectively applicable of its clauses. It is the architecture of moral ambiguity and an overpowering righteousness, a spatial camouflage; the typology of the technically non-existent and the minutely surveilled. It is what programmes superfluidity, codes it into landscape – fragments of territorialism de-territorialised so as to reinstate territorial limits and proper passages. It is the offshore migrant processing facility trialled by the Australian Government in the Pacific and exported to Libya via the EU, the shadow state and private armies, the practices of rendition and subcontracting of torture, the export processing zone and maquiladora regions, the USA’s Guantanamo Bay positioned on the edge of Cuba, the excision of ‘migration territories’ which retrospectively cancels refugee and migrant laws and conventions after borders have been crossed, the DMZ’s (demilitarised zones) and the growing number of ‘airport liaison officers’ from Europe, Australia and Canada situated around the globe who conduct preemptive passport checks. Extraterritoriality is the border made transportable because the significant variable to be contained and harnessed is the movements of bodies.

[Thresh/hold]

Where extraterritoriality took shape around migratory movements and discovered a magnifying capacity in 9/11, the technologies of the protest zone have been directed toward movements as these have been more conventionally defined. Their use signals a concurrent faltering and persistence of the very definition of what a movement is. The series of anti-summit and no border protests that began at the close of the 20th century precipitated a series of innovations in crowd control; the cordoning off of cities and regions, making them minutely available to combined police-military operations of surveillance, management, and ongoing research in civil policing/warfare exercises. Distinguishing ‘good’ from ‘bad’ protesters, legitimated protest has increasingly meant dissent at an inconsequential distance and in disciplined corridors. These threshold measures echo and deploy the mechanics of superfluidity and extraterritoriality, as well as recalling the jail and passport check, cattle corral and traffic management, all designed to work from vantages of detachment that can be plugged into the larger legal infrastructure as required. They sieve, steward, and preemptively intern, for the length of declared protests. They arrest (social) movements by becoming as moving and fleeting as they are. They are as internalised to the sense of proper political action as they are brought to bear from the outside as police directive. They rise up around areas transformed into gated communities for business executives and government representatives; supplement the offshoring of migrant internment facilities with buffer zones that divide no border movements from migratory movements. Threshold technologies are, above all, about reassembling the border of what will pass for politics as such. What activates and distributes these particular sets of measures is the conventional announcement of a protest action, its punctuated duration and specific location, that part of politics which adheres to the politically customary rather than the experimental.

[Recognition]

Biometric and surveillance technologies make everyone a suspect of no specific charge. They are the principles of measure and classification applied to skin contours, eye, bone, gait, voice, affect, comportment. They are the border guard’s question of ‘Halt, who goes there?’ – the interrogative which seeks identification as the condition of crossing – multiplied and (post)industrialised. Recognition technologies surmount Orwell’s cherished distinction between public and private spaces, all the way down into the body, internalising the citizen’s yearning for that distinction’s resurrection, as the re-privatisation of dissent and difference. They are supposed to make one long to pass, to belong, as a good citizen might. Even so, as the high-tech offspring of phrenology and eugenics, bundled as security doctrine, the most notable features of biometrics and surveillance are the scandals of (sometimes lethal) misrecognition, their cost, and their remarkable failure. Certain identification is recurrently disoriented by movement. Someone grimaces, another turns around, or moves just a little, runs too fast, speaks through the fog of a blocked nose, fidgets nervously, walks on. Racial profiling, for all its aggressive materiality, remains a discretionary and actuarial operation. Movements can only be captured as data or image after they occur. What makes bodies unlike things is where the technologies of recognition falter.

[Preemption]

The world’s largest police training ground is situated among the green and pleasantries of Gravesend, Kent. Around 1000 square miles of the Californian desert is given over to modelling the warzones of the Middle East. Here, as with other police/military training environments, they tackle calamity in an amusement park of unrest, insurgency and its abatement; architectures both detailed and artful, designed solely for the purposes of being conquered and reconquered. As the accessories of the doctrine of preemption, these spaces are accompanied by a growing number of university research laboratories which engineer preliminary superstructures suspended in conjectural disaster, or simulate emergency landings and training flight paths under fake duress, or teach of non-linear dynamics and Deleuzo-Guattarian war machines. These arcade-labs of war prepare for conflict under the principle of continuous adaptation, train flexible military units moving not only to protect boundary lines but through terrains marked by the threat of catastrophe. These are instructional handbooks of preemption made manifest as simulated cities, malls and oilfields, aiming to transform soldiers from grunts to self-managed risk-assessors, to move the border with them through chaotic environments. Seeking to relocate warfare within the paradoxical condition of preempting the emergence of the unpredictable, they, as with recognition technologies, are elaborately armed and lethal signals of failure.

[Futureclosure]

Debt seeks to preempt the future, to make of it an impregnable variation of the present, unperturbed by the threat that the future might be otherwise. The securing of this world is accomplished not by military action and walls alone but by instruments of indebtedness that seek to reshape space, time and selves, through proliferating borders of a more intimate kind. The risk that the future might be different from the present is, with debt, transformed into a question of the measurable. Difference becomes reduced to quantitative difference, risk becomes calculable speculation – the present indifferent, or so it is wagered, to the incomparable difference of the future. IMF loans and micro-credit, student loans and mortgages, credit ratings both personal and national induce whole moral economies of success, failure and their demarcations, geographies and self-assessments of value and superfluity. The ostensible normality of ‘first’ world, Fordist regularity was built upon the possibility of seemingly endless debt renewal, leveraged by the gendered, racialised boundaries of ‘third’ world and unpaid labours. Now, tweaked by sub-prime loans and derivatives tested in Latin America, these geographies of impoverishment and the ‘at risk’, in both metropolitan and postcolonial spaces, have become revisioned as the prospect of new frontiers, spaces that might be re-conquered for capital’s theoretically boundless expansion. It is debt which splices together an increasingly correctional welfare system with humanitarian warfare to arrive at regeneration and reconstruction projects; new rounds for the extraction of money and labour from the world’s poor. Through debt, everyone can aspire to be a property owner, at the very least by looking upon one’s self as an asset. Debt unfolds as the imaginary utopia of a citizen-calculator, who carries this barrier against a qualitatively different future with them across an eternalised present and through smoothed out spaces. Less utopically, the increasing personalisation of debt promotes the internalisation of command and self-management, alongside the socialisation of risk and the dissemination of anxiety over exchange and interest rates.

[Underneath]

Over the last twenty years, tunnels have been carved out under the two most prominent of the world’s borders. Since the launch of Operation Gatekeeper in the US, around seventy tunnels have been discovered along the US/Mexico border, one a mile long. Underneath Gaza there are hundreds of separate tunnels along the borders with Israel and Egypt, new ones revealed on an almost weekly basis. Where there have been borders, people have found ways to go around, over, through and under them. What is in excess of measure overflows, seeps down through cracks, makes them wider, creates new ones. Here, experiment is key. In border crossing, what is effective outflanks that which is established, and the most effective overall strategy is that which is circumstantially tactical. Neither seeking to claim territory as with the counter-hegemonial, nor hinged around visibility and recognition as with citizenship and value, the very act of border crossing occurs as it is able to. Borders 2.0 are to politically subsurface movements what web 2.0 is to the undercommons. The transformations and proliferations of border technologies are attempts to become adequate to this experimentation, to preempt it by miming its inclination, to circumscribe and re-route it. Seeking to reimpose the present retrospectively and indefinitely, they are the architectural, technological tracings of movements already underway and often long gone. One can stand in awe of their complexity or be enraged by their enthusiastic attachment to suffering and fear. But simply because what gives rise to them is not always recognisable – often taking place literally underground – does not mean they are where power, or the future, is. The future, then, remains tense. Neither hope nor despair; but experiment.

Bryan Finoki is the author of the blog Subtopia: A Field Guide to Military Urbanism (http://subtopia.blogspot.com/ ), featured in the popular New York City gallery event Postopolis! at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in ‘07. Living in San Francisco, he is a senior editor for Archinect and contributes his writing on borders and the politics of space to various publications

Angela Mitropoulos lives in London. Some of her more recent writings are 'The Materialisation of Race in Multiculture', in Darkmatter – Race/Matter, 2, February 2008 http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2008/02/23/the-materialisation-of-race-in-multiculture ; 'Notes on the Frontiers and Borders of the Postcolony', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/07-frontiers/372-379_angela.pdf ; and 'The Social Softwar', Mute, http://www.metamute.org/en/The-Social-SoftWar

'Green capitalism': a new paradigm of sustainable production or a licence to shut down plants and print money? Basing this article on excerpts from his recent book, James Heartfield looks at the case of Enron, an influential pioneer in increasing profits by cutting output

Of course companies that sell climate change solutions stand to benefit as greenhouse gas emissions come to bear a price tag.

– Daniel Esty Hillhouse, Professor of Environmental Law, Harvard University[1]

The corporate raiders of the 1980s first worked out that you might be able to make more money downsizing, or even breaking up industry than building it up. It is a perverse result of the profit motive that private gain should grow out of public decay. But even the corporate raiders never dreamt of making deindustrialisation into an avowed policy goal which the rest of us would pay for.

What some of the cannier Green Capitalists realised is that scarcity increases price, and manufacturing scarcity can increase returns. What could be more old hat, they said, than trying to make money by making things cheaper? Entrepreneurs disdained the ‘fast moving consumer goods’ market.

Of course there is a point to all this. If labour gets too efficient the chances of wringing more profits from industry get less. The more productive labour is, the lower, in the end, will be the rate of return on investments. That is because the source of new value is living labour; but greater investment in new technologies tends to replace living labour with machines, which produce no additional value of their own.[2] Over time the rate of return must fall. Business theory calls this the diminishing rate of return.[3] Businessmen know it as the ‘race for the bottom’ – the competitive pressure to make goods cheaper and cheaper, making it that much harder to sell enough to make a profit. Super efficient labour would make the capitalistic organisation of industry redundant. Manufacturing scarcity, restricting output and so driving up prices is one short-term way to secure profits and maybe even the profit-system. Of course that would also mean abandoning the historic justification for capitalism, that it increased output and living standards. Environmentalism might turn out to be the way to save capitalism, just at the point when industrial development had shown it to be redundant.

From Megawatts to Negawatts

One of the most destructive examples of manufactured scarcity is ‘clean energy’ and California’s ‘Negawatt Revolution’.

In 1997 the Club of Rome collaborated with Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute to launch a new report ‘Factor Four’ that promised to ‘halve resource use’ while doubling wealth. The message was that you could get rich saving the planet. A privileged few did indeed double their wealth; but for the rest it was just a case of halving resources.

Immodestly, Lovins made his own California energy scheme the main example of savings in ‘Factor Four’. His well-paid advice to the State of California was that it was a big mistake to adopt a system that rewarded increased electricity output with increased profits. Such a system would naturally tend to boost output. Instead, rewards for cutting energy use were needed. Rather than getting paid for additional megawatts the utility companies should be rewarded for saving power use: negawatts.

The impact of Lovins’ model on energy generation in California was decisive. ‘Around 1980, Pacific Gas and Electricity Company was planning to build some 10-20 power stations’, according to Lovins.

But by 1992, PG&E was planning to build no more power stations, and in 1993, it permanently dissolved its engineering and construction division. Instead as its 1992 Annual Report pronounced, it planned to get at least three quarters of its new power needs in the 1990s from more efficient use by its customers.[4]

Of course the PG&E was not getting three quarters of its new power needs from anywhere: it had just reduced its output. But manufacturing energy scarcity did indeed grow somebody’s cash wealth: Enron’s. With these artificial caps on energy production the generating companies could start to hike up the charges to utility companies, including PG&E, now unable to meet its own customers’ demands. Those energy companies were owned by Enron.

Chief Executive Kenneth Lay turned Enron from a company that made its money generating power into one that made its money trading finance. Whatever else it was doing, there was no denying that Enron was cutting back its own CO2 emissions and getting rich doing it. One company memo stated that the Kyoto treaty ‘would do more to promote Enron’s business than will almost any other regulatory initiative’.[5]

Amory Lovins’ negawatt revolution in California was Enron’s wet dream. Having shut down its own generation capacity, PG&E was at the mercy of Enron’s market manipulation. Buying surplus electricity on the open market PG&E was royally fleeced, losing $12 billion. Utility bills rose by nine times between May 2000 and May 2001. Enron took advantage of the restricted market and cut electricity to California. They even invented reasons to take power plants offline while California was blacked out. Enron officials joked that they were stealing one million dollars a day from California.[6| The PG&E that Lovins held up as a model went bankrupt and had to be bailed out by the State of California.

Image: Nick Brooks

The negawatt revolution in California was supposed to reward savings and alternative energy generation. In the event manufacturing scarcity only rewarded Enron’s crooked speculators, while penalising consumers.

Sadly, the lessons of the ‘negawatt revolution’ have been buried in the outrage about Enron’s fraudulent market manipulation. Few people noticed that Enron’s executives were taking advantage of an artificial scarcity in energy supply engineered by Amory Lovins and the PG&E working in close association with Enron’s favourite green lobby, the National Resources Defence Council.[7]

Few of Enron’s critics noticed that it was the very model of an environmentally friendly, post-industrial company and one that had taken Amory Lovins’ goal of doubling wealth by halving resource use to heart. Saving energy is of course good sense ? as long as that is done by resource efficiency. The Club of Rome’s claim that manipulating market prices to create incentives for reducing energy output which, in turn, can create efficiency is confused. All that achieved was an artificial shortage ? the condition for ramping up utility bills. The old-fashioned market incentive for energy efficiency is the savings people make on their bills when they insulate their homes, or turn down the air conditioning. Businesses, too, have every interest in keeping overheads low by using the energy they pay for wisely. Normal prices would give customers the incentive to reduce their electricity consumption.

But amazingly the Enron-Lovins model of restricting supply is the one that is being adopted around the world. Utility companies are rewarding consumers for reducing their consumption from central power stations and encouraging domestic-sited energy generation, through windmills and solar panels. Playing on Californians’ distrust of the power companies, the Environmental Protection Agency is planning to add solar power to one million new homes – paid for by another surcharge on utility bills.[8] In Britain, the government is introducing regulations to make all new homes carbon-neutral. The current goal of carbon-neutral homes reverses the division of labour that saw specialised energy producers distribute electricity, turning it into an 18th century cottage industry. The simple economic lesson that mass production avoids reproduction of effort has been lost. Nothing could be more wasteful, or more certain to create new scarcity.

California’s ‘negawatt revolution’ is only one of the more extreme versions of the way that green priorities work in tandem with profiting by manufacturing scarcity. South African radical Dominic Tweedie argues that recent electricity blackouts there happened because of ‘a campaign to impose artificial scarcity’. The failure to build power stations to meet the growing demand from South Africa’s black townships was not recognised as a problem by activists there because they bought into the green prejudice that social aspirations could be met by redistribution alone, at the expense of increased output. Now supply companies are hiking up prices to the people who can least afford them.

From Negawatts to Nega-Nosh

Elsewhere, food supplies are failing because the European Union and the United Nations have pursued a 20-year policy of retiring land from production to arrest the fall in farm prices.

Engineering the retirement of farmland is largely a way of easing small farmers (who had been protected under the old Common Agricultural Policy) out of farming altogether. It has not hurt the larger agribusinesses, which are thriving. Not surprisingly, farm goods are a target for speculators, like ’70s corporate raider, Jim Slater, whose new Agra Firma was started up to take advantage of booming prices. The reduction in excess output has in the last few years pushed prices up again, after long decades of falling food prices. In Italy, consumers boycotted pasta because prices rose so high; in Mexico, Tortilla Rallies protested against price rises, and in India there have been onion demonstrations.[9] The Economist estimates that food prices rose by one third in the year to December 2007 (having fallen by three quarters between 1975 and 2005).[10] According to the mainstream media, the pressure of biofuels and global warming are to blame for the shortfall in crops – as if governments had not been involved in a twenty-year programme of retiring land from production. Today’s scarcities have been engineered, in the name of saving the environment, but in fact to defend the livelihoods of big agriculture.

Setting caps on energy production, industrial output, car transport and house-building in the name of saving the environment all have the effect of damaging people’s standard of living. But as we have seen, that does not stop individual businesses from making big profits out of those caps. Trading in carbon rights, making windmills, carbon offsetting schemes, and organic food are all ways of making profits out of artificial limits set upon growth.

Info

James Heartfield’s Green Capitalism: Manufacturing Scarcity in an Age of Abundance is published by Openmute. This article is based on excerpts from the book

Footnotes

[1] The Green List, The Guardian supplement, p.29, 5 November 2007.
[2] See Karl Marx, Capital, Volume Three, ‘The law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1959, pp.211-240.
[3] 'The Origin Of The Law Of Diminishing Returns', Edwin Cannan, 1813-15, Economic Journal, vol. 2, 1892.
[4] Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins and Ernst von Wiezsacker, Factor Four: Doubling wealth, halving resource use, London, Earthscan, p.160.
[5] How Environmentalists Sold Out to Help Enron, PR Watch Newsletter, Third Quarter 2003, Volume 10, No. 3.
[6] 'Tapes Show Enron Arranged Plant Shutdown', The New York Times, 4 February 2005.
[7] PR Watch Newsletter, op.cit.
[8] The Guardian, 6 August 2004.
[9] Jonathan Watts, ‘Riots and hunger feared as demand for grain sends food costs soaring,’ The Guardian, 4 December 2007.
[10] ‘Cheap no more’, The Economist, 6 December 2007.

The UK’s health and social services have become tools of surveillance and control, with working class women the most vulnerable to state intervention. Madame Tlank reviews the State’s policies, targets and projects and uncovers the warped logic and fragmenting effects of marketised welfare

Well Jeff, ... the fact is that you have the luxury of knowing that you will never ever ever ever EVER be faced with the government bossing you around like a child, simply because you have a parasite living in your body.

– The Law Fairy, Feministing.com

By now people have forgotten what history has proven: that ‘raising’ a child is tantamount to retarding his development. The best way to raise a child is to LAY OFF.

– Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, 1970

In what follows I wish to consider the effects of recent UK health and social policies on women and their children who are labelled ‘at risk’.[1]

The ‘difficult’ (i.e. poor) parts of the population have often served as the playground for experiments in socio-biological control by the state and its affiliates. Historically, these experiments have affected women differently from men, whether because of the role ascribed to them, (e.g., their exploitation in wartime industries, or the use of rape as a strategy of warfare) or because of their physical make-up (as in the testing and developing of modern methods of contraception on women in occupied territories, in prison or on social benefits).

State intervention tends to concentrate on those women who cannot afford invisibility, i.e. those who cannot buy their way out of dependence on state administered medical and social ‘services’.[2] Women are often more visible than men to government agencies because of their physical capacity to reproduce. Professional medical involvement is required for, amongst other things, contraception, prescriptions, abortions, sterilisations, antenatal check-ups, giving birth, postnatal treatment, hysterectomies, and menopausal issues, smears and breast-cancer checks, etc. Thus most women’s physical reproductive capacity remains under medical control throughout their lives.[3]

Images: Adam Vass

In most countries with a semblance of a social-democratic welfare system, many women register with some form of state agency if they are about to have or have had children, in order to get at least some financial support in the form of child benefits. In the UK 94 percent of lone parents claim benefits; most lone parents are women.[4] Once registered with the state as a ‘claimant’ for survival purposes, many mothers are obliged to sign up for training or ‘support’ programmes (i.e. social experiments) of one kind or another, as proof of their willingness to ‘integrate’ into ‘economic activity’ and to make sure their children do likewise, miserable dependency notwithstanding. Those who refuse risk losing financial support. ‘Social integration’ services in the UK target ‘hard-to-reach’ families, requiring that those who would prefer to remain as invisible as possible be identified and made available to state and private institutions. Arm’s length private charity initiatives ‘help’ mothers back to work, while youth teams monitor their children to make sure they don’t offend, and blame the mother if the kids turn delinquent anyway.

Under recent UK policies – the new GP’s contract (2004), the Children Act (2004), Every Child Matters (2004), the gradual privatisation of the NHS and social services – frontline services have been cut while a general patient/‘client’ database is built up. The cuts, which limit the availability of services, effectively force patients to assent to the data-sharing, lest (already scarce) treatment be withheld.[5] The claimant’s claim is turned against her ever more directly, making her responsible for conditions imposed by economic factors and by the institutions themselves, which attempt to ‘cure’ the problem by ‘educating’ her to change her behaviour so she no longer fits the ‘claimant’ profile. The criteria used for such profiling are often discretionary, with ever-changing parameters used to measure each ‘case’ as if it were self-contained. Such an approach systematically refuses to acknowledge the socially structural, institutional reasons for the deterioration of lives within the non-asset owning, working and claimant class (henceforth ‘dependent class’).[6]

Mechanisms of this kind exist to varying degrees, always complicated and qualified by local factors, in most of the ‘developed’ world. As the examples already mentioned suggest, the process is at an advanced stage in the UK, where medical and social ‘services’ have undergone continuous transformation under the Labour governments since 1997. Here the rhetorical signposts along the way are ‘risk’, ‘responsibility/empowerment’ and ‘prevention’. In practice, the key elements are computerised control and data collection, along with funds poured into training the poor to ‘help themselves’. In what follows I will use a few examples from UK institutions to consider the effects of these policies on the women and children directly concerned, with particular attention given to encroachments upon the ‘unofficial’, independent and increasingly illegalised reproduction strategies of the dependent class. The result will not be an exhaustive or systematic survey, but an exposure of the perverse logic running through the cases described which seems to be taking hold ever more widely as capital attempts to transfer the cost of reproducing labour power downwards onto labourers.[7]

Women and the NHS

Let’s start by looking at some of the things that directly affect women’s control over their own bodies.

Women seeking treatment in relation to reproductive health are subject to the laws of whichever state they so happen to be in at the time. Of course the treatment they receive depends on the financial situation and organisational structure of the given health system. If a woman wants to have an abortion in the UK she discovers that, as in most ‘advanced democracies’, abortion has never been fully legalised. The 1967 abortion law granted exceptions, giving the power of decision making not to the women affected but to doctors. Two doctors’ signatures are required for an abortion on the NHS. According to a GP I spoke to, ‘there are still a lot of GPs around who think it’s not right that terminations should be available through the NHS.’[8] There are also far too few abortion facilities available, meaning that a lot of women get referred to Marie Stopes or another private provider, with the operation paid for by the NHS. The waiting time for an NHS operation is often critical and, therefore, those who are able to do so often raise money for a private operation (about £350 - £750, depending on how many weeks into the pregnancy you are). The laws governing sterilisation are shocking: if you want to be sterilised before the age of 30 your doctor has to give his consent, with the rate of refusal much higher than for abortions. The operation does not constitute a health risk, so the doctors decide according to what they think a woman should do with her body, which in many cases is simply: reproduce!

With fertility treatment on the NHS, it is ultimately also the doctor who decides. IVF is only slowly picking up state funding (although it has proved to be very lucrative for the private sector), and is currently only available on a highly restricted basis. There are long waiting lists with set age limits, and the doctor’s subjective judgment decides who may not receive treatment. Usually those excluded in this way are the ‘overweight’, smokers and people who already have children living with them.

Pregnant women are severely affected by a tendency to view the mother’s and child’s health as conjoined. Although it is of course desirable for a woman to know about the relation between her body and the foetus living inside it, the problem is the way such knowledge is imposed and in whose interest. Most women trust what they learn from other women who have had kids; but in relation to a health system embodied in the authority of the (usually male) doctor, the pregnant woman can make few autonomous choices. There are various health check-ups which, though not compulsory, are ‘strongly encouraged’ (foetal scans for example, which can identify disabilities, yet are not without potential harm to the unborn child), a barrage of moralistic lifestyle prescriptions and health advice that can be confusing and contradictory, such as how much wine you may drink, which side to sleep on, which medicines to take or not to take, etc.

Meanwhile, birth services in London hospitals seem to be among the worst in Europe. Post-natal services in particular lack facilities and staff (no check-ups after having given birth, mothers sent home right away, no space for the baby to lie next to the mother, etc.). Birth is one of the most critical and dangerous moments in the mother’s life, and a check-up afterwards seems an obvious necessity. On the other hand, an increasing obsession with risk (and fear of litigation) has led to many practitioners performing caesarians as a matter of routine, just to make sure everything remains in the doctor’s control. Many women do not want a caesarian (they will be incapacitated for longer, it might present complications in the event of any subsequent births, etc.), yet unwanted caesarians are often performed.

Speaking of risk and preventive measures, hysterectomies are among the most commonly performed operations in the western world, very often without any real need for the removal of the organ, on the pretext that some future risk might be slumbering inside it.[9] As is finally coming to be recognised, many conditions that lead to the removal of the uterus can often be treated by other, less drastic means.

Such dismissal of an organ that is part of one’s body and continues to perform certain functions considered ‘useless’ once the woman can no longer reproduce goes hand in hand with the prevailing attitude towards menopausal symptoms, which could be summed up as: ‘We don’t give a shit because you can’t reproduce any more’. There is no funding plan for menopausal treatments, and the new contract for GPs, which introduced bonus pay for the ‘successful management of disease’, actively undermines any interest in dealing with such possibly lengthy and complicated cases.[10] (Meanwhile, private clinics specialising in menopausal symptoms are flourishing.)

NHS and SS

The aim is to achieve effective monitoring of under achievement by specific groups. The matter is technical, and to enable the proper monitoring and evaluation to take place such detail is necessary.

– Stephen Byers, MP[11]

Two tendencies can be seen as central to recent UK health and social services policy. One is partial privatisation on an ‘insurance’ model, in which the state sheds direct responsibility for provision of treatment it continues to pay for, causing overall spending on the NHS to increase drastically even as services atrophy. The second, closely related tendency is expansion of information-sharing across the two departments, which already overlap to a great extent.[12] Witness the current attempt to co-ordinate medical practice and ‘welfare-to-work’ contractors in the attack on Incapacity Benefit. Databases already exist within the NHS (patient registration, drug prescriptions and SUS [Secondary Uses Service – a summary of all secondary care episodes such as terminations, pregnancy and HIV tests]) as well as within the social services (through claims for Child Benefit, Income Support, Incapacity Benefit, Housing Allowance, Working Tax Credits, etc.).[13] One department can easily obtain the other’s data if a concern is expressed: for instance social services may check the health record of a truant child and a hospital can check a patient’s registration with social services (henceforth SS).

Of course perceptions of health and illness are social, they constantly change and are also subject to government targets. Green Papers, White Papers and ‘vision outlines’ alert professionals to the newest problems to be ‘solved’. Thus hyperactivity in children and stress in adults are now things to watch out for; compare this with the emphasis on lower back pain ten years ago. The latter is purely physical, whereas the former imply that the patients might be able to do something about their condition, like eat 5-a-day and think good thoughts or take anti-depressants at least. What back pain and stress have in common, of course, is their successive status as the most popular ‘excuse’ for absenteeism from work.

Women and men who drink, smoke, or are ‘too fat’ or ‘too skinny’ are currently the main target of health action plans. For pregnant women belonging to these ‘risk groups’ means facing much greater scrutiny by the health services and the social services than other women. That is, a pregnant woman’s body is placed under surveillance because behaviour that is otherwise legal and (still) seen as a ‘personal lifestyle choice’ somehow changes status when she becomes pregnant. European liberals are shocked to hear of the ‘fetal rights’ campaigns and legislation in the US, but practice here is not so far off. For instance, when the welfare of a foetus is apparently endangered by conditions in a pregnant woman which are regarded as self-inflicted, a report must be filed by health practitioners and be made available to social services. Women in this ‘risk group’ who are seeking to conceive may be refused IVF treatment. Pregnant women who come to police notice (e.g. for reasons relating to the consumption or sale of drugs, domestic violence incidents, mental health issues etc.) might end up with a police record relating to the welfare of their unborn child. The relevant system, MERLIN CTN, is operated by the Metropolitan Police and records every instance of a child ‘Coming to Notice’ (CTN). ‘Fetal rights’ ahoy![14]

The NHS and SS also work closely together on the ‘problem’ of teenage pregnancies and reducing their occurrence remains a high government priority. The discourse runs something like this: ‘A single mum on benefits forever! Scientific research shows they are more likely to be depressed! She will have no chances in later life!’, etc. If the teenage girls manage to have and keep their babies they’ll have to deal with imposed further training (in motherhood, in getting work) and SS supervision of the child(ren).[15] Such ‘support’ is officially voluntary but you’ll end up on the ‘cause for concern’ list if you don’t participate. Who would not be depressed to find that what state support really means is the social services policing and maintaining the poverty that state benefit levels force you into. And as for ‘no chances in later life’, a couple of statistical studies recently quoted in The Guardian found that the ‘chances in life’ for girls having grown up on the same estate, whether with or without kids, are the same.[16] A glowing example of political discourse on the issue:

We need to educate and instill young girls with [sic] the self esteem to resist the pressures which are clearly placed on them at such young ages, and equip them with the confidence to say no.[17]

Well, maybe they want to say no to the supermarket cashier job and yes to bringing up a child? Telling girls they’re not competent to raise children is of course a great way of giving them ‘self-esteem’.

Teenage mums are in fact the most embattled by current schemes. Social services get involved during pregnancy[18] and the government wants to establish strong links between (the data held by) Teenage Pregnancy Units, Children’s Centres, schools, colleges, Connexions and job centres.[19] With the help of this kind of teamwork, young mothers get checked up on from all sides and ushered back into work ASAP. This way it can be ensured that their ‘at risk’ children are brought up with as little ‘disturbing’ influence as possible.

At Risk

The only children who have the slightest chance of escaping from this supervised nightmare – but less and less so – are the children of the ghettos and the working class where the medieval conception of open community – living on the street – still lingers.

– Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex

We cannot believe that a police force is justified in sharing information without consent about a nine-month-old baby on the grounds that it might grow up to be a villain. Measures that may be justified in the face of specific and identified threats lose their justification when they become statistically-based measures against subpopulations.

– ‘Children’s Databases’ report20

Procedures of this kind are legitimised by the government’s most recent definitions of what it means to be ‘at risk’, with a new emphasis on preventing this terrible condition from spreading. The policing and containment of a large chunk of the population is what it boils down (or up?) to, with agendas such as Every Child Matters (ECM) and cross-departmental special task forces driving social inclusion home for those who remain ‘hard-to-reach’. Reading through the relevant publications, the suspicion grows that this is only the beginning of a much larger attack on the remaining elements of independence within dependent class life.[21]

‘Risk’ has proved a useful category in transferring responsibility downwards from institutions onto the individuals they deal with: if you know you’re at risk then you must do something about it, otherwise you are willfully causing trouble. This logic can be seen at work in the NHS approach to cutting the potential cost of future illness, which once again means targeting the obese, smokers, and the ‘unfit’. GPs have an obligation to hassle whoever they think falls into these categories, and to spell out to them that all they lack is ‘will-power’. (Quite whose ‘will’ is ‘empowered’ by obedience to such top-down orders is another question.)

But this approach blossoms in public propaganda on social services, whether published by the Home Office (and the Social Exclusion Taskforce as its subsidiary), the Department of Work and Pensions or the Department for Children, Schools and Families. The latter has published a list of risk factors to help councils (specifically their Teenage Pregnancy Strategic Management Groups) identify girls who are ‘at high risk of teenage pregnancy’! Among the factors listed are: early onset of sexual activity, conduct disorder, alcohol and substance misuse, being the daughter of a teenage mother, disengagement from school, ethnicity (!), etc. Any subjective intention on the part of the mother is institutionally disregarded, unless it also counts as a ‘pregnancy risk factor’. Of course, keeping an eye on all teenage girls who fit the categories and ‘preventing’ them from becoming pregnant is going to be quite a handful (of data).

Perhaps the most effective definition of ‘at risk’ from the agencies’ point of view – because it is the vaguest, and it targets ‘vulnerable’ children in a way that automatically implicates their families – is the one set out in the Every Child Matters (ECM) agenda. ECM is part of the Children Act (2004) and has the ultimate aim of collecting the data of all children in the country on a single database covering social services, education, crime and health. (Apparently ECM also aims to reduce teenage pregnancies, substance misuse, crime and anti-social behaviour. It’s not just surveillance, you know, there’s some policing in it too!). Of course, data held will also relate to the children’s families and friends:

[I]f a child caused concern by failing to make progress towards state targets, detailed information would be gathered. That would include ‘subjective’ judgment such as ‘Is the parent providing a positive role model?’ as well as sensitive information such as parents’ mental health.[22]

The justification for such crass procedures is ‘prevention’. Preventing children from being neglected and abused, preventing them from turning into criminals. Thus a child’s data will be made available cross-departmentally, with the child and his/her family being made subject to regular checks by various agencies if she/he fits the following categories:

Low income and parental unemployment, homelessness, poor parenting, poor schooling, postnatal depression among mothers [!] and low birth weight [in this way mothers are implicated immediately], substance misuse, individual characteristics such as intelligence [!!], and community factors, such as living in a disadvantaged neighbourhood.[23]

The conditions presented here as ‘causes’ for being at risk are clearly inseparable from the ongoing economic and governmental attack on the dependent class. Homelessness, poor schooling, low income and unemployment are not ‘pre-given’ conditions inherent in certain individuals, they are among the concrete achievements of ‘supply-side’ policy and financial asset-oriented accumulation over almost 30 years.[24] Basically, you ask for housing and you get nothing, but you are registered as homeless, which categorises you as ‘at risk’ and thus liable to be checked up on according to agency whim, simply because you were foolish enough to ask for something in the first place.[25]

Once any of the risk-of-risk factors listed above is ascribed to a child (on the basis of existing files on the parent/s, rather than direct observation of the kid), he/she is presumed to be in danger of ‘abuse, neglect, offending and social exclusion’.[26] (Note the failure to differentiate between things the child might undergo and acts s/he could commit. The logical promiscuity is no accident: the whole drive to hold claimants ‘responsible’ for their ‘exclusion’ from income is founded on this willful confusion of categories.) The threat of these undesirable ‘outcomes’ legitimises interference with the whole family by the cross-departmental state taskforce. Intervention is not a response to the family’s non-professional perception of its own needs: it is strictly preventative. In most cases this means action to prevent family members breaching the boundaries of legal and ‘socially acceptable’ behaviour, even as these semi-codified bounds narrow to the point that life within them becomes impossible in practice.

ECM has vastly expanded the field of targets for prevention, with the formulation of The Five Outcomes designated as necessary for all children. Failure to ‘achieve’ them means automatic ‘at risk’ status for the child and the family, and further increases the pressure on the council to intervene. The extremely vague phrasing of The Five Outcomes leaves ample room for discretionary interpretation – on the professional side only, of course: ‘Being healthy; Staying safe; Enjoying and achieving; Making a positive contribution; Achieving economic well-being.’ These pieties only become concrete, impossible-to-obey instructions[27] in sub-headings such as: ‘live in households free from low income’ (well it’s not like anyone’s doing anything about low income per se... must be the low-incomed’s fault then?!); ‘Parents, carers and families promote healthy choices’ (well, people have different ways of eating. If there are no bloody shops, then yes, the newsagent will be your nutrition centre – try finding any amenities ’round ungentrified areas of the East End such as Homerton or Canning Town); ‘Safe from crime and anti-social behaviour in and out of school’ (with more than 3,000 new criminal offences created under New Labour, ‘safe from crime’ is hardly an option); ‘Attend and enjoy school’ (As Shulamith Firestone put it: ‘The child is forced to go to [school]: the test is that he would never go of his own accord.’)

The way The Five Outcomes are to be achieved is, unsurprisingly, by ‘engaging’ with the children and their families, rather than actually changing any of the material causes to do with housing or schools etc.. The non-negotiable premise is that the causes of ‘non-achievement’ are located within those who insist on remaining ‘hard to reach’. The Social Exclusion Task Force (SETF, as in Sod ’Em Total Fuckwits) encourages: ‘personalisation, rights and responsibilities’, as in: ‘it is your personal problem, you have the right to identify with it and you are responsible for getting out of the at-risk group’.

As with the NHS, so with SS. In the former, illness-risk and its management are personalised, even though accounting norms for staying healthy are rigid – ‘your 5-a-day’, pedometer quotas, etc. – and conflicting ideas about who is at risk of what keep proliferating. Likewise, in social services, responsibility is devolved downward from the institution to the individual, and the point of intervention has moved as far ‘into’ the subject as possible. The ubiquitous language of ‘choice’ and ‘empowerment’ (as in ‘you can choose which hospital you want to be operated in, a super-bugged non-waiting list one or a non-super-bugged endless waiting-list one’, or, ‘you can choose between welfare-to-work options: go freelance or work on a two week contract’) is the punchline to the bad institutional joke of imposing coercive ‘solutions’ on claimants while retrospectively blaming them for the problem.

In effect, anyone who is financially dependent on the state has to pay for it by being obliged to open up their lives to scrutiny and ‘intervention’.[28] This interference is notoriously random (and increasingly so as the number of ‘services’ involved multiplies) as well as being disruptive, destructive and threatening. As some dissident social workers put it,

[W]orker-client relationships are increasingly characterised by control and supervision rather than care ... Too often today social workers are doing little more than supervising the deterioration of people’s lives.[29]

Might this not be precisely the point? Because if you don’t know who’s dealing with which aspect of your life where basic elements of survival are at stake, you end up depending on an unknowable structure that encompasses you from all sides, with no way of knowing how to ‘disappear’ from its radar or at least to ditch the ‘at risk’ tag. Parameters change non-stop so you have to remain constantly alert. If you mistake them you will be held responsible.[30] If you try to evade them, welcome to overcrowded prisons, mental hospitals, foster homes and so on.

This tendency goes hand in hand with the financing and organisational structure of the social services themselves (as is increasingly the case within the NHS): many functions are outsourced to private companies (even care homes and foster homes have been sold off to private equity outfits), and what remains in state control is increasingly staffed by temporary, underpaid workers:

[O]ur work is shaped by managerialism, by the fragmentation of services, by financial restrictions and lack of resources, by increased bureaucracy and workloads, by the domination of care-management approaches with their associated performance indicators and by the increased use of the private sector.[31]

Under pressure to reach set government targets, which often lead to disjointed and conflicting procedures in relation to a ‘client’, a great deal of social workers’ time is now devoted to reporting potential risk-situations (adding to the database). Often they lack the funding to do anything else. Yet overall spending on SS management and IT has increased, even as frontline services are recklessly cut.

A GP who was worried about the well-being of two mothers in separate incidents says:

quite often in borderline situations, you can’t get social services support. There is only something like Children in Need; you get risk categorisations.[32]

And with it stigmatisation. There is no way out of the child protection register other than ceasing to be a ‘child’.[33]

What Involvement Looks Like

The mother who wants to kill her child for what she has had to sacrifice for it (a common desire) learns to love that same child only when she understands that it is as helpless, as oppressed as she is, and by the same oppressor: then her hate is directed outwards, and ‘motherlove’ is born.

– Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex

The National Service Framework for Children, Young People and Maternity Services (NSF) throws women and their children into one pot for the provision of health and social services.[34] It is of course much cheaper to target kids’ health through mothers’ health, but it implies the presumption that what is beneficial to women’s health is automatically good for children’s health and vice versa. The issue of breastfeeding is a good example: many women suffer pain when breastfeeding their children but are ‘strongly encouraged to continue doing so’ by the relevant health departments. They might also simply not want to be the exclusive feeder of the baby for months on end.

The ‘Action Plan’ for the Social Exclusion Taskforce (SETF, as in, See ’Em TransFormed) had at its heart ten pilot projects engaged in testing intensive health-led parenting support given to first-time mothers from pregnancy up until the baby’s second birthday. Apparently it was a success (i.e. it hit targets, the babies’ neurones presumably grew rapidly) although no response from the targeted mothers has been made publicly available.[35] The programme clearly presupposes the ‘at risk’ mother to be nothing but a birthing and feeding machine, attached to her child as its unwaged carer and at the convenience of state observation. A GP I interviewed was less blunt but regarded this programme as useless because it kept mothers away from community services and isolated them, together with their assigned health workers, for more than two years. To prevent subsequent independent child-rearing by the ‘at-risk’ mothers, the ‘Government bid to reshape childhood’ (The Guardian headline, 8 December, 2007) ‘aims to bring children under state education control from age 2 and get parents involved through “parent support workers”.’

The drive to institutionalise the upbringing of dependent class children, coupled with control of their parents, was also evident in the test phase of the Sure Start project. The scheme was intended to help women from ‘disadvantaged backgrounds’ back into work, while also supervising and training them in proper British motherhood (how to interact with babies ‘to make their brains grow’, how to talk to them and play with them, what to feed them – with breastfeeding, of course, top of the agenda).[36] Unemployed single mothers were specifically targeted. Nursery (the oddly medicalising British name for ‘kindergarten’, the oddly German-Romantic term used elsewhere in the anglophone world), health centre and job centre were to be combined under one Sure Start roof. Participation in supervised mother-child playing sessions was strongly encouraged.

Central government money for the initial phase of the project has now run out and it has been handed over to councils to manage and pay for themselves. The nurseries are now called ‘Children’s Centres’. But whether Sure Start nursery or Children’s Centre, if you want to send your child there you have to sign a paper agreeing to the involvement of social work teams if there seems to be any cause for concern about your child. Thus, in order to be able to use the service at all, one has to give one’s consent to information sharing with social services. Official guidance states that ‘data and information on the most excluded families should be collected and more emphasis be placed on outreach and home visits to support these families.’[37] No wonder, then, that (aside from their unaffordability for those not in work) the services have not been popular among the ‘hard-to-reach’ target group who have good reason to be worried about Sure Start workers watching them and their children, with a direct line to social services should anything seem ‘out of order’. Home visitors and outreach workers attempt to push their way into people’s homes without seemingly realising that keeping your door closed keeps the state out; something that is especially desirable for anyone in any way dependent on state services and aware of the level of surveillance that comes with it. (‘We will track down benefit thieves’ [formerly ‘cheats’, now upgraded] – the posters are all over town!).

Even during the Sure Start test phase,

some surmised that the registration of families by their local Sure Start was simply about gathering information, especially as no services seemed to follow [...]. Participants described encounters with welfare professionals who had information about them from other agencies, for example Sure Start staff revealing information which could only have been sourced from the Social Services department or community nurses. Other participants expressed fear about confidentiality being broken and not having any power to do anything about it [...]. Although none of the participants described being referred to social services by Sure Start, several Sure Start workers admitted doing so.[38]

Now that Sure Start has to get by on what little funding it receives from local authorities, management concerns (or simply trying to keep your job, a pressing issue for many of the workers in former Sure Start centres) have fully taken over.[39] With the high cost of nursery fees (around £200 per week in London), the focus on poor families has largely subsided. You can only get this fee reduced through Working Tax Credit, meaning you’d have to be in work to begin with. One probably unplanned effect of all this has been that middle-class parents who can get by on part-time work or who work from home happily take advantage of the ‘training courses in child care’, the resident psychologists and the health professionals still offered at Children’s Centres. At the same time things have changed for the worse for poor families in Sure Start areas. The perceived improvement in the standard of childcare provision has contributed to the influx of middle-class families as inner-city neighbourhoods are gentrified, making it harder for poorer families to maintain the way they organised their daily lives. Checks are made to prevent childminders working ‘illegally’, behaviour clauses are written into ‘social’ housing contracts, and ‘child protection’ activity by social services is out of all proportion to the actual number of cases ‘uncovered’. (The latter development may have something to do with the fact that councils fund the Children’s Centres according to the number of kids on the protection register.) Overall, funding has been cut for necessary services (including ‘traditional’ nurseries), while surveillance of working class behaviour outside work has constantly increased.

If ‘risk of social exclusion’ continues to be discovered everywhere in the UK, it is largely because the dependent class goes on finding ways to organise life that elude the discipline of the state and its ‘arm’s length’ agencies. These survival strategies are wide-ranging and include: babysitting without Home Office vetting, fare dodging, ‘sick note culture’, squatting, council flat sublets, tricks to thwart bailiffs and debt collectors, various kinds of ‘grey market’ trafficking, and the sharing of knowledge (or secrecy) to beat the benefits, tax and immigration systems. In response, methods of ‘intervention’ refined over years in countless Green and White Papers set ever-more intrusive ‘task forces’ on communities, families, lives and bodies, ‘helping them to be socially included’, so that both task force professionals and ‘clients’ will ‘achieve the targets’.

The very real threat of services being taken away ensures that it becomes the dependent’s personal responsibility to remain within the (ever-changing) boundary drawn by the accountancy of risk, effectively forcing her into her own continuous risk-management operation to minimise the dangers of benefits withdrawal or the confiscation of children. Find yourself labeled ‘hard-to-reach’ and a lot of agencies will start getting involved with you, seeing as they also get in trouble if they don’t. This pressure is there to make survival conditional on responding to labour, consumer and credit market needs.

What ‘Caring’ Feels Like

What we ought to be protesting, rather than that children are being exploited just like adults, is that adults can be so exploited.

– Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex

Women now make up the largest part of the workforce worldwide. Most of this work is low-paid and insecure; traditionally women have been kept out of organised workers’ struggles and have been used as an industrial reserve army to keep wages down (just as immigrants have). This strategy still very much holds true: women are still paid less than men and, more importantly, now occupy whole industries (small part assembly factory work, cleaning, care work, etc.) because the pay is so low only women will accept it. Work that might earn them more, such as prostitution, remains illegal, meaning that prostitutes need keepers (police bribers) who get the biggest chunk of their income. In general, women often work in unstable conditions with, if any, only temporary contracts – they might get pregnant after all. Currently there are more female than male migrants worldwide, yet women’s immigration status is far more precarious. Almost everywhere in the world they are still classified as untrained dependents, that is, they are seen to be following their families. Thus, women migrants often work illegally, which means they are completely exposed and vulnerable to their employer’s whim. Also, in the UK (as elsewhere) a lot of women are employed in so-called ‘care work’, meaning health and social policy affect them both at work and at home. Under constantly changing regulatory regimes, they must frequently renew qualifications in order to work ‘legally’, conform to departmental guidelines regardless of what experience tells them, and above all (unless privately employed) ‘achieve the targets’.

Women are under scrutiny both as workers and as (potential) mothers. ‘Parenting’ as unpaid ‘care work’ is increasingly subject to the same measures, targets and supervision devised in the professional sector. In their double-loser role (either dependent on boss and their husband, or on boss and the state, or on all of them), low-income and unemployed mothers, along with their children (whose loser status is assured by their absolute economic dependence), are uniquely exposed to the way capital shapes our lives.

Recent state moves to ensure women’s active participation in adjusting themselves and their lives to capital’s needs are no more than a pioneering experiment in what is shaping up to be a full frontal assault on the dependent class. The disjointed forms of health and social services intervention I have tried to identify seem to be regarded by policy makers as the ‘cheap route’ to one of the main aims of ‘supply-side’ social policy everywhere: maintaining and extending stratification and competition between and within classes. Thus, while neighbours are encouraged to inform on one another and families and individuals who are singled out for ‘help’ take on personal responsibility for their deteriorating circumstances, transformation of the essential, underlying conditions is experienced in contradictory ways by various class sub-groups, with some people even able to imagine that certain initiatives make them better-off.[40] Cut-throat individual labour-market competition, transfer to the market of formerly subsidised housing, asymmetrical attacks on benefits and partial or full criminalisation of previously legal activities will no doubt look like ‘opportunity’ to some of those affected, even as they dilute the income and undermine the freedom of their class in general.[41] The common interest of people vulnerable to market blackmail and state coercion is obscured by personalised state action to foster individual economic ‘competitiveness’. This inevitably diminishes the prospects of any counter-attack, not only against the material deterioration of lives, against data collection, surveillance and control, but against being turned into a pool of miserably dependent bodies, available whenever and however capital might need it.

Footnotes

[1] This text was mainly researched during 2007 – by now various changes may have been introduced

[2] That such services never are class-neutral is perfectly exemplified by UK legal practice regarding ‘anti-social behaviour’: among the most commonly-threatened sanctions is the loss of your council house, i.e. enforcement applies to the council-housed income bracket only.

[3] This of course was not always the case (cf. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 2004). Several noteworthy attempts to reclaim control of their reproductive capacity were made by women’s groups in the US during the 1960s and ’70s. Most famously Jane (officially known as the Abortion Counseling Service of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union), which performed numerous illegal abortions between 1969-1973. The Black Panthers’ social and health care programmes also eventually included family planning, after the women in the party had overturned the prevailing anti-abortion stance. Until then, abortion was seen as the white man’s attempted genocide of the black people. The pro-life case had been argued on the grounds that African-American women were not only widely used as guinea pigs in contraceptive research, but had, throughout their history as (waged or unwaged) slaves, often been prevented from having the kids they might have wanted, either because they did not want to carry them into slavery or grinding poverty made it absolutely impossible (cf. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class, 1983). The ‘new’ Black Panther Party is now in charge of some family planning clinics.

[4] And how much harder it is if the father is the claimant! Two male single parent friends report that agencies regularly demand to know ‘where is the mother?’, and sometimes threaten to take the child away if the father really goes ahead with, say, an application to be housed.

[5] Because it is becoming increasingly difficult to get real support from health or social services, those who need it only have two options, which both lead to the same result: they can either overstate their case, which will initially lead to a risk report being filed, containing data which will be widely shared, or they’ll be made to wait for ages, then visited by a health and/or social worker, who will take their details and signature consenting to the data being shared. Otherwise no help will be offered. If it’s urgent you won’t refuse. An example on the data sharing policy of social services in the UK can be found here: http://linkme2.net/ec

[6] ‘Dependent class’ as in dependent for survival on selling labour-power to others, and/or on state-administered supplements, whether in the form of benefits or ‘services’. All those, in other words, who are not able to live off the asset price bubbles blown in the Brown/Bush ‘ownership society’.

[7] ‘Reproduction’ as used here refers to sexual reproduction, but is NOT limited to its biological component. By extension, the term also includes all the activity by which individuals and social groups attempt to maintain their physical and socially subjective existence. From the point of view of capital this is restricted to reproducing the ability, along with the need, to sell labour (regardless of whether a corresponding demand for it exists at a given moment). The cost of ‘reproduction’ in this latter sense is theoretically covered by the wage (and its various state supplements), but historically and now, perhaps more than ever, this payment falls short of the minimum necessary leaving the burden of reproduction to fall on dependent workers in general and women in particular.

[8] During my research I interviewed several professionals working in the health- and social services. Their reasons for wishing to remain anonymous are obvious. I also spoke to some women using the services but, presumably for related reasons, I was unable to speak to those women who are most exposed to institutional action. Thus a lot of my material comes from a broad sweep of officially endorsed and dissident UK-published sources.

[9] Cf. Mariarosa dalla Costa, Gynocide: Hysterectomy, Capitalist Patriarchy, and the Medical Abuse of Women, New York: Autonomedia, 2007.

[10] Thus, self-help prevails. I overheard a Jamaican woman in the launderette sharing her treatment method: ‘I just eat ice-cream and pray to Jesus.’

[11] Quoted in ‘Children’s Databases – Safety and Privacy: A Report for the Information Commissioner’, Foundation for Information Policy Research, http://www.fipr.org/childrens_databases.pdf

[12] Cf. Damian Abbott, ‘The Spine’, Mute Vol 2 #7, http://www.metamute.org/en/The-Spine

[13] The government departments comprising the social services in the UK are the Department for Work and Pensions, the Inland Revenue, the Department of Health, the Department of Home and Community, and the Department for Children, Schools and Families. It is important to note, however, that these ministerial allocations change frequently and many of the departmental responsibilities are newfangled, while the tendencies discussed are longer-term.

[14] In the US, the vilification of pregnant women presumed to be living unhealthily has developed yet further: under a fetal protection banner, women can be tested for drugs and, if positive, prosecuted for ‘delivery of drugs to a minor’ or ‘child endangerment’, http://linkme2.net/ed

Many pro-lifers would like to see their moral indignation at pregnant women who drink or smoke turned into a statute. This of course would in effect see women being criminalised for being pregnant (seeing as, when not pregnant, they may smoke and drink with impunity). Incidentally, such additional punishment based on one’s status already exists in the UK when it comes to criminal offences committed by foreigners: nominally the same penalties apply to everyone, yet foreigners are additionally subject to deportation when they get out of prison.

[15] Current tabloid story-telling has it that children are snatched from their mothers by social services because they have to meet government targets for adoption; seeing as no-one seems to want to adopt kids who have already lived in foster care, newly born babies are a safe bet. See: Sue Reid, ‘How social services are paid bonuses to snatch babies for adoption’, The Daily Mail, 31 January 2008, http://linkme2.net/ee

[16] ‘It isn’t babies that blight young lives’, Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian, 27 May, 2005, http://linkme2.net/ef

[17] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4720813.stm

[18] Thus, according to a GP I spoke to, a teenager who was trying to conceal her pregnancy from her parents was contacted by social services at home. The hospital had passed her information on, ignoring the fact that her files had ‘do not contact at home’ written all over them.

[19] Connexions is a ‘service’ targeted at 13-19 year-olds who are ‘at risk of social exclusion’, it aims to encourage participation in education, and deal with personal problems that might present ‘barriers to learning’. The model is of an information-sharing multi-agency team; Connexions introduced a ‘smart-card’ for 16-19 year olds, which was scrapped this February, because the kids were too smart to let themselves be card-traced in return for shop discounts (take-up was 3.7 percent).

[20] ‘Children’s Databases – Safety and Privacy: A Report for the Information Commissioner’, op. cit..

[21] See, for example, the research published on the Every Child Matters site, http://www.everychildmatters.gov.uk/publications and on the Social Exclusion Task Force site, http://linkme2.net/eg

[22] Stuart Waiton, ‘The Enemy Within’, TES, 26 September, 2003, http://linkme2.net/eh

In order to collect the relevant personal details, the government’s vision is to be able to browse through a vast array of public services data such as personal medical information (with a diagnosis of hyperactivity being considered a risk), school results, social workers’ case files and information from police and youth-justice systems. Access to the resulting database would be granted to education, early years and childcare services, Connexions, health, social care, Youth Offending Teams, police, probation, prisons, and secure training centres. Some agencies are currently actively collecting data. Connexions, for example, seeks out data from the National Pupil Database and other services to ‘identify vulnerable young people’ (their powers for requesting data extend across educational records, welfare claims, revocation of benefits and attendance at ‘Jobcentre Plus’). The Connexions Customer (!) Information System is the intended database, covering all young people over 13 in the area and their parents, siblings and friends. The assessment document used by Connexions includes information on the parenting skills of parents and on substance abuse amongst the family and friends of the child. Of course no consent is sought in relation to this information. (And, obviously, the data can’t be cross-checked by those it refers to, even for something as ‘basic’ as truth value.)

Other databases involved in the policing of young people ‘at risk of offending’ are Reducing Youth Offending Generic National Solution (RYOGENS), Asset and Onset. All three of these include information on the family and possibly also friends of each risk-subject. Very often, the family has no idea that this data exists since it has been obtained from the child, who may not even know that they have given consent to the collection of family data, or that the data is used to identify whether or not they are ‘at risk’ and to track them over time. Included in the data will be causes for concern such as ‘negative home influence on education’, ‘dangerous behaviour’, ‘social isolation’, ‘non-constructive spare time’, ‘living in high-crime area’, ‘financial and/or housing difficulties’, ‘parenting difficulties’, ‘family and/or peers involved in anti-social behaviour’, etc.

Data is also collected by local spies, so-called YIP (youth inclusion and support programmes) workers. They should ‘assume the role of an identifying agency by collating information about these young people [not yet on their databases] from local contacts, residents, tenancy associations, community groups, street wardens etc.…’ That is, they encourage residents to inform on one another and/or on one another’s children, a project already well underway with ASBOs. Information held on Child Benefit or any other social security system may be passed on to ‘any civil servant or other person’ involved with the provision of protective services. Collected data can be passed around quite freely between the different databases as long as the recipient of the data is somehow involved with child services.

[23] ‘Children’s Databases – Safety and Privacy: A Report for the Information Commissioner’, op. cit..

[24] ‘Supply-side economics is a school of macroeconomic thought that argues that economic growth can be most effectively created using incentives for people to produce (supply) goods and services, such as adjusting income tax and capital gains tax rates. This can be contrasted with Keynesian economics (or ‘demand side economics’), which argues that growth can be most effectively managed by controlling total demand for goods and services, typically by adjusting the level of government spending. Supply-side economics is often conflated with trickle-down economics, now a derogatory term given to right-leaning economists’ views. The term supply-side economics was coined by journalist Jude Wanniski in 1975, and popularised the ideas of economists Robert Mundell and Arthur Laffer.’ A neutrality-disputed gloss from Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply-side_economics

[25] It is an understatement to say that these categories hardly constitute ‘objective’ states: ‘intelligence and community factors’! ‘Poor parenting’! ‘Individual characteristics’! Here as elsewhere in social legislation, the criterion of ‘objectivity’ seems to be that real institutional intervention follows whenever a flimsy concept is invoked.

[26] My personal favourite! ‘At risk of social exclusion’ – as if definitions of this kind didn’t create the risk! In any case it is clear that the child concerned (or, more commonly, its mother) will be held responsible for being ‘hard-to-reach’.

[27] A negative thinker reading a draft of this text wondered whether the dialectic of ’68 utopian radicalism is fully played out when the state demands the impossible of the workers, rather than the other way around.

[28] ‘One of the illustrative examples [of a non-communicative child attending a playgroup] is particularly objectionable. It suggests that the playgroup leader should seek consent to share her concerns with health practitioners and she should indicate in any letter she wrote “that her concerns would increase if this is refused”’, ‘Children’s Databases – Safety and Privacy: A Report for the Information Commissioner’, op. cit.

[29] Chris Jones, Iain Ferguson, et al., ‘Social Work and Social Justice: A Manifesto for a New Engaged Practice’, http://www.liv.ac.uk/ssp/Social-Work-Manifesto.html

[30] This idea is confirmed by a friend who was constantly harassed by a nurse after having visited the hospital with her daughter. She had no idea how to make it stop. Another friend commented on giving birth: ‘on the one hand you’re treated like a birthing machine, on the other hand you are completely held responsible for what happens even though you can’t possibly know the parameters.’

[31] ‘Social Work and Social Justice: A Manifesto for a New Engaged Practice’, op. cit.

[32] A UK child sponsorship charity.

[33] However even this may not be enough: the ContactPoint database, containing regularly updated details of every child born in the UK, promises to converge smoothly with the national ID system, so that no-one would be cut loose from observation even on becoming a nominally independent adult.

[34] There are 21 ‘standards’ in relation to children’s and young people’s well-being, and 203 ‘key actions’ for achieving them. The multi-agency taskforce (PCTs, LEAs and ‘other partners’) responsible for implementing the management programme educates mothers as to how they have to live and how to feed and educate their children.

[35] A wild guess: they might have preferred someone to help them with the cleaning, shopping and nappy changing, rather than someone standing around giving them health advice.

[36] ‘Looks and smiles help the brain to grow. Baby looks at mother; sees dilated pupils (evidence that sympathetic nervous system aroused and happy); own nervous system is aroused – heart rate increases. Lead [sic] to a biochemical response – pleasure neuropeptides (betaendorphin and dopamine) released into brain and helps neurons grow. Negative looks trigger a different biochemical response (cortisol) stops these hormones and related growth.’ From ‘Health-led Parenting Project: Family Nurse Partnership’ – a powerpoint presentation given at primary care trusts nation wide, http://linkme2.net/ei

[37] Mark Gould, ‘Unsure Future’, The Guardian, 24 May 2006, http://linkme2.net/ej

[38] Krysia Canvin, Chris Jones, et al, ‘Can I risk using public services? Perceived consequences of seeking help and health care among households living in poverty: qualitative study’, 2007, http://linkme2.net/ek

[39] From an interview with a Children’s Centre manager: ‘If we don’t meet the figures, no-one can bail us out, we’ll be made redundant.’

[40] ‘... neighbours had referred some participants to social services, and family social workers confirmed that referrals from neighbours were quite common. Participants understood that this aspect of their social and physical location was intensifying and inescapable.’ In, ‘Can I risk using public services?’, op. cit..

[41] ‘Asymmetrical’ in the sense that single adult claimants have been significantly impoverished in real-terms in the UK since 1997, while cumulative family eligibility, if all conditions are fulfilled, has at least kept pace with inflation. Only at first glance could this seem to run contrary to the argument of the article. In fact what has happened is perfectly in keeping with the other trends described: monetary payments have been allowed to rise where accompanied by intensified observation and intervention. What is actively disincentivised is claiming anything while eluding observation and ‘support’: hence single adults, particularly long-term incapacity claimants who only have to sign on once every few months, have to be hounded out of their quasi-hard-to-reach condition.

Madame Tlank’s profile as a suspect non-breeder can be found here: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk

The problem with critiques of curatorship is that they usually end up reinforcing the central importance of the curator. Alberto Duman contemplates a recent addition to the field and suggests ways to break the cycle of self-affirmation

Taking issue with curating ? whether this entails curator-bashing or curator-praising ? seems a very popular pastime in all art and culture related fields. The flurry of public debates over the contemporary form and status of curating provides the context as well as the content for Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance. The defining characteristic that emerges from Judith Rugg and Michele Sedgewick’s collection of texts is that nobody is keener to take issue with curatorship than curators themselves, making self-reflexivity a creed and the dilemma of how to articulate critical intervention within the institution a matter of endless discursive folds. In the process the necessity, potential and authority of both curator and institution within cultural production are legitimated and reinscribed.

With creative insertions, travesties, posturing, relationality and role-playing taking the place of overt confrontation in contemporary critical art practice, it became obvious that the role of the infiltrator in the network had to insistently assume a preeminence at all levels in the production and dissemination of cultural products. Although critique of the system of art and its institutions could suggest the tactical development of a deliberate distance between centre and margins, the emergence of the independent curator has progressively revealed itself to be a key element in healing such rifts and providing a means of reintegration into mainstream circuits. Bridging the gap between nascent tactics and overarching strategies, the curator/artist or artist/curator is the footloose agent of creation and dissemination of knowledge, stretching across previously unestablished axes or exploiting existing ones in the name of a progressive redistribution of governance, and counter-hegemonic positioning.

But when ambiguity is the norm and travesty becomes form, the alleged radical defiance of endless ambiguity leaves little room for antagonism, or the concrete refashioning of relationships across the systems in which we operate. This becomes particularly insidious when such degrees of creativity and mobility ? previously the tools of those forced to conceal their aims to avoid repression ? are internalised to the point that institutions appear more (tactically) creative than anyone else.

Positioning as marketing and homogenisation of strategies at all levels ultimately flattens the territory and leaves power relations unchanged, as J.J. Charlesworth points out in his contribution to the book:

If critical approaches of curating today draw on the legacies of the past … recurrent expressions of reflexive speculation about the nature of curating, the artwork and the institution by those who constitute it become ritual observances, not radical contestation.[1]

So, while we await the emancipatory urge of the slide librarian to rise above his/her limited powers of indexing and subvert the institution from within we are ipso facto deeply involved in the continuous rise, metamorphosis and expansion of the role of the curator. As Paul O’Neill tells us: ‘the separateness of the artistic and curatorial gesture (is) no longer apparent in contemporary exhibition practice.’[2]

Clearly he is right. Witness the practice of Maurizio Cattelan as an example, who repeatedly sent his alter ego Massimiliano Gioni to interviews in his place, delivering stock responses lifted from various texts, curated a non-existent Caribbean Biennale as a holiday opportunity for his friends, opened a mock-franchise of the Gagosian Gallery in his capacity as co-curator of the 2006 Berlin Biennale, and is now resident/squatter of the Tate Modern with his The Wrong Gallery.

Then again, the radicalism of such highly developed forms of mimesis, iconoclasm and parody, might ultimately be just a more spectacular version of what already happens everywhere around us. If we briefly depart from the shores of cultural practice one sees this metamorphosis of roles occurring everywhere, from energy suppliers doubling as telecommunication providers, tyre manufacturers as real estate players or estate agents as independent property evaluators. With the constant appropriation or strategic evacuation of roles, diversification or amalgamation of business areas and brand positioning representing some of the building blocks of our contemporaneity, there should be no reason why cultural production, if intended as ‘an economic avant-garde’, should not lead the way in refashioning labour division.[3]

Lacking the brute force of contemporary capital’s way of doing things by way of more or less overt violence, contemporary art can play the same tricks through cheek, cajolement and Orwellian reversals. But when, as is usually the case, the destabilisation of signs is operated at the level of discursive practices lodged safely within major institutions and voiced through their distributive channels, the work of the curator/artist is immunised from effect by operating in a self-consciously controlled sandbox.

Image: Rivals, Nedko Solakov, 2004, Centre d'Art Santa Monica, Barcelona. Courtesy of the artist and the Centre d'Art Santa Monica, Barcelona, Spain. Solakov resolved a dispute with a curator over what was going to be shown at this institution by insighting a deliberately skewed, childish and pointless series of 'contests' between them

Through their selection of texts, Rugg and Sedgwick repeatedly place the emphasis on the blurring of roles between artist, curators, producers and distributors. This is cast as one of the central and most subversive tenets of the curatorial impulse reshaping art and its modes of presentation. The contemporary creative archivist and/or curator is liberated from the weight of the archive, and released into the fantasy of a ceaselessly shifting identity. A transformation comparable to the contemporary creative manufacturer’s liberation from the weight of the production line.

Of course not everyone has been convinced by the radical promise of the ‘curatorial turn’, particularly when confronted by the evidence that the move beyond a strict antithesis of roles tends to emancipate only the most mobile – namely the managers and administrators. In 2000, some years before he received the Turner Prize, Mark Wallinger wrote:

Shrinking time into space, the here and now, the better to categorise, catalogue and compare, encourages a kind of historical amnesia where curators can pick and choose from a smorgasbord of narcotic sensation, a baseless landscape of outrage.[4]

Whilst going through the various chapters of this publication, I started to have the impression that it bore more than a passing resemblance to the main problematic of its subject of enquiry, and had internalised what J.J. Charlesworth in the same book defines as the ‘preferred orthodoxies of contemporary culture,’ namely, ‘uncertainty, provisionality, open-endedness and deferral’.[5] For as much as the editors have tried their best to breathe some air into the highly specific issues at stake in curating contemporary art and performance, they necessarily adopt the academic preconditions existing in the material they are handling. (The material itself arose ‘out of a series of symposia hosted during 2004 and 2005 by the University College for the Creative Arts at Canterbury on issues of curating as a form of critical intervention into ways of comprehending contemporary culture.’)

Constrained to the output of the symposia, the collection of texts seems to amount to, with a couple of notable exceptions, yet another episode in the very conditions of contemporary culture as described by Charlesworth, rather than a stab at comprehending it. Of course, Issues in Contemporary Curating will clearly be of use to the burgeoning courses in curating perennially in need of material to form their curriculum. But the necessity of providing a shared historiography within a curatorial teaching environment might end up replicating, rather than correcting, existing tendencies. All of which begs the question of whether such courses amount to much more than professional labour provision for an industry in a symbiotic relationship of survival and growth.

But if, as Liam Gillick proposes in the opening paper by Paul O’Neill, ‘the most important essays about art over the last ten years have not been in art magazines but they have been in catalogues and other material produced around galleries, art centres and exhibitions’, the circularity of curating intended to produce and distribute culture as well as its own exegesis, becomes suspiciously close to a tail wagging its dog.

The results of such importance placed by the broker upon itself and its claims to a radical heritage as proof of its pedigree, whilst disjointing a previously stable division of labour in the name of emancipation, are clearly manifested at all levels of the ‘food chain’. Despite attempts by the editors of this volume to lighten the claustrophobic tone set by the overwhelming presence of ‘curators talking about curating’, the insistence on reinstating rather than jolting the reasons for curating occupying such a central position within contemporary culture becomes clear from their introductory blandishments in which they claim ‘the concept of curating is a complex field of enquiry’.

Image: Nick Brooks

And indeed it is, but who is standing to gain from such constant refrains of complexity in the face of the cultural sector’s consistent growth? Would we read about the complexity of industrial relations in corporate practice with the same gusto, unless we were directly involved in their inner workings? Of course, it may be too much to ask from an academic publication so clearly targeted at a field of professional practice, but if ‘issues’ exist within curating contemporary art, then they also exist outside these confines. Unless the next stage in the stretching of curatorial practice into other fields might also incorporate its own epistemology, and notwithstanding the undeniable importance and political agency of a critique of modes of presentation in cultural production, the ambitious program of ‘curating as a form of critical intervention in understanding contemporary culture’ set at the outset of this publication is lacking in some essential elements. First and foremost any reflection on the effects curating’s high status and central role is having on contemporary culture and the social politics it gives on to.

The rise to prominence of any professional category is always based on the interplay between an emancipatory move from its constituents and a set of interlocking social, economic and political conditions which propel that category by integrating and neutralising its demands. As J.J. Charlesworth again notices, ‘during the period in which the self-reflexive discussion on curating has emerged, the power of the institution has grown.’[6]

It seems therefore implicit that in adopting the case of the rise of the curatorial profession and the ensuing mythology as one of the axiomatic cultural events of the last two decades, it would be more effective ? rather than only thinking in terms of historiography ? to explore first and foremost the wider political ecology that hatched its coming into being, to unhinge the self-evident state of affairs that propagates its own discourses. In other words, take away from curators the pre-eminence of discourses on curating and take an approach that starts by considering, for example, how changes in art governance provoked by the curator’s rise, parallel or even pre-empt the rise of the managerial and administrative ranks typical of post-industrial capitalism.

But maybe this is the role of a curatorial research project based on the colliding geographies of cultural and economic capital. It might then take an unsympathetic swipe from an artist to shake the wand from the hands of the curator/magician as when, in 2000, Mark Wallinger wrote:

In the late 1980s … in the absence of any meaningful debate, a new apolitical orthodoxy gave the opportunity of power and influence to a swill of artists/curators who might previously have found employment in PR.[7]

In the end, whilst clearly bracketed by their specific relation to an area of expertise, some of the most enjoyable reading in this publication comes from those papers less reliant on the rhetoric of the importance of the curator in unearthing hidden histories, performing institutional critique or subversively shifting roles in hegemonic cultural hierarchies. Rather, the narration of a case study such as Chris Dorsett, Catherine Elwes or Sophie Phoca’s are straightforward incursions into the hidden aspects of a profession that might in the end have been more harmed than helped by the limelight shone by some eager protagonists. However, for a more sound approach to an overall ‘critical ecology of curating’, read J.J. Charlesworth’s ‘Curating Doubt’ and move along elsewhere.

Image: Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick's The Wrong Gallery

Footnotes

[1] J.J. Charlesworth, ‘Curating Doubt’, in Rugg et al, Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, Intellect Books, 2007, p.98.

[2] Paul O’Neill, ‘The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse’, Rugg et al, ibid., p.14.

[3] Boris Groys, ‘Art as an Economic Avant-Garde’, available online at: http://www.niallflaherty.com/textz/Art_as_an_Economic_Avant-Garde.rtf

[4] J.J. Charlesworth, ‘Curating Doubt’, Rugg et al, op. cit., p.98.

[5] Mark Wallinger, (guest editor), in introduction to Art for All: Their Policies and Our Culture, London: PEER, 2000.

[6] J.J. Charlesworth, op. cit., p.98.

[7] Ibid.

Alberto Duman © 2007

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Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, edited by Judith Rugg and Michele Sedgwick, Intellect Books, 2007

Alberto Duman <albertoduman@yahoo.co.uk> is an artist living and working in London whose practice explores contemporary social ecology through artistic activities in the public realm. His website is: www.albertoduman.me.uk