Editorial

^‘The world', writes Deleuze, ‘does not exist outside its expressions'. This pivotal quote in M. Beatrice Fazi's piece, ‘The Simple Expression of Complex Thought'(p.94), helps her to assert a ‘realist metaphysics' of expression critical of postmodernism and its readings of the expressive subject. In a rather large nutshell, Fazi is arguing that ‘constructivist' readings of phenomena - socio-technical systems, aesthetics, culture - are still mired in a logic of causality. While acknowledging that the subject is contingent and produced, postmodernism nevertheless sees expression as the registering of a prior, inner experience. But expression, argues Fazi in line with Deleuze, is not the transposition of an inner life to an external symbolic system or material, but rather an immanent and differential activity by which the world speaks itself through the interactions of its parts. If we take expression to be the effect of differential sets of relations which do not necessarily entail willed communication, then we should try to see the recent outbreak of the A/HINI virus, or swine fever, as a form of expression and not just a mechanistic, viral event.

The contemporary, industrialised world, we could say, does not exist outside its pathological expressions - global warming, species extinction, avian and now swine flu. Thinking about such events in expressive terms can be helpful to understanding the deep continuities between abstract and real phenomena, capital and its physical expressions. In this sense, that the potential pandemic follows hard on the heels of the deepest financial crisis the world has seen since the '20s/'30s cannot be shrugged off as coincidence. This idea becomes more striking when we consider, as a homeopath friend once pointed out, the highly related historical sequence of WWI with its huge mobilisation, compression and suffering of bodies, followed by the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 and then the Wall St. Crash of 1929. As Fazi might agree, this is no Gaia-like expression of the world's internal suffering, but the proliferating iteration of myriad systems of social production and destruction in the age of industrial capitalism.

On the subject of DNA, Fazi says, ‘it is abstract yet real, having concrete effects and emerging physicality.' It is not that a code imposes itself onto an inert, available form, but that it is capable of generating form - it is ‘morphogenetically pregnant'. Similarly, the immanent activity of abstract capital - its infinite need to accumulate, drive down productive costs, intensify the forces of production and expel labour from the system, etc. - has an emergent physical form. The drive to provide competitively priced meat on a mass scale to satisfy (and stimulate) the new dietary needs of the world's urban majority demands ‘the scientific management of poultry and livestock based on principles of industrialized production', Will Barnes has written recently on the Meltdown mailinglist. This, he continues, is ‘generating a qualitative amplification of the incidence and scope of disease by massing literally thousands of millions of birds or mammals, respectively, in tightly enclosed quarters ... where naturally occurring disease can run, uninhibited, through these populations at frighteningly rapid speeds creating virally mutating highly pathogenic, potentially pandemic viruses.'

Barnes also states that Mexico City, the place where the swine flu first broke out on a large scale, constitutes the ‘classical locus' of a pandemic. The conditions of overcrowding and lack of hygiene in the city's slums are equivalent, in virological terms, to contemporary, industrialised animal farms, slaughter houses and the trenches of WWI. Expressive as the virus is of the widespread capture of human beings and animals into squalid and life threatening conditions under the percussive waves of late capitalist land clearance and enclosures, it is ironic to hear some describe the outbreak as a state-media orchestrated distraction from the financial crisis. While pundits refer to a real economy underlying the financial sector, there is no equivalent acknowledgement of real bodies and life forms registering the affects of out-of-control financialisation and over accumulation. Given the refusal of ‘consensus reality' to take seriously the expressive content of the pandemics and ecological disasters that are breaking out with breathtaking regularity, it is a further irony that expressivity and creativity are fetishised as never before by post-Fordist state planners and the entrepreneuriat.

As well we know, this creative expressivity is so narrowly defined as to be utterly meaningless. In this regime of instrumentalised aesthetics, the inflated sensibilities of the creative few are draped, fig-leaf like, over the narrowing creative possibilities of the dehumanised majority. In his article on the regeneration of Glasgow (p.24), Neil Gray reveals the depth of planners', policy drafters' and their media allies' scorn for that majority, with East End inhabitants described with undisguised class hatred: ‘The people do not look good here. Often it is difficult to tell men from women, old men from older men [...] the locals have the blotchy pallor of cave-dwelling consumptives.' Any notion that the creative city might entail some trace of redistributive aspiration should be put to rest by statements such as these - as if we really needed such evidence to see through this urban strategic sham of public subsidy and private looting. Nils Normans' picture story (p.38) conflates the vampirism of the creative city model with that of a decadent art market, as creativity and living labour are sucked dry by the sickly parasite of capital. The jumble of tents running across these images are both apocalyptic - the overcrowding of slums and meat factories erupting in the heart of the Western metropolis - and amusing. These tents are the slick, new purchases of home-counties festival goers and Halfords shoppers. The suburbanites have been deprived of their luxurious space and are compressed into a camp-like jumble; the evacuees from paradise in new, proximate relations to the Creative City's excluded. A new distribution with new, expressive potentials perhaps?

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