Frantz Fanon: Contemporary Perspectives

Brian McCarthy

Reinhold Martin

May 11, 2010

I.

“. . .an inchoate resentment starts in people who cannot combat this palpable

transformation at the ground level. . . multicultural democracy and international civil

society both applaud only the social productivity of capital - and all structural constraints

are lifted as obstacles. The needy are seen as individual occasions. Needy, or groups of

needy. Whether Foucault is right or wrong, violence and alibis (for intervention) are now

turned into chiasmus – remember what Foucault says: that in the subindividual field,

which is almost like an electric force-field, there are these irreducible vis-a vis’s, they’re

irreducible face-to-faces, which get inhabited by certain kinds of pairs, whatever is at

hand, and you have a power situation. . .well, that’s what’s happened. . . whether he’s right

or wrong it serves as a form . . .

Violence and alibi have become a chiasmus rather than a critical pair, which would have

been an asymmetrical riddle, that must leave space for an intuition of the

“transcendental”: the dying old woman says “humanity, humanity”. That’s the intuition of

the transcendental, you cannot mourn nor judge without that one. . . below the radar, and

which radar we will see, you cannot chose only to “empower women”, violence will not be

undone that way. . .”1

Gayatri Spivak, 2010, Berkeley

II.

“. . .the contingent statute that characterizes artistic labour . . . doesn’t have to give

primary importance to being recognized as such in accordance with the primacy of

current legibility criteria sanctioned by the corresponding institutional fields. . . in

1 excerpt from BBRG lecture at UC Berkeley, “Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on Situating Feminism”, April 1, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=garPdV7U3fQ.

particular when the formalisation of the work or its processes shift in and outside a

particular institutional field. . .

In this order of things, labour in art is no different to the way in which post-Fordist labour

in general oscillates between self-valorization and control (subjugation), and it’s often

paradoxical because it operates under the conditions of autonomy and subjugation

simultaneously. . .This critique of institutions doesn’t refer to an essential freedom,

because attempts at constructing freedom could only take place inside given power

relations. . .

Nevertheless I think that the operations carried out within the institutional field should

seek to go beyond it, and above all valorize what is produced, at least partly outside of it.” 2

Marcel Exposito, 2007, Barcelona

III.

In 1974 Martha Rosler produced a series of photographs which were eventually

organized under the title of “The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems”:

depicting scenes from the Bowery section of New York City – abandoned storefronts,

street corners, alleyways – in which the images are entirely devoid of human subjects,

Rosler counterposes these black and white photographs with a second “descriptive

2 Marcel Exposito, “Inside and Outside the Art Institution: Self-Valorisation and Montage in Contemporary Art”, October 2006, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0407/exposito/en, 4-10.

system” – words, colloquial euphemisms for drunkenness, sporadically placed against the

white background of the page.

Each of the two modes of depiction is meant to metonymize the (ecstatic) experience of

“life on the bowery”, or at least how it attains reification through elements of image and

descriptive language (each, in Rosler’s words, ultimately “inadequate”).

In Rosler’s own analysis of this piece in an essay entitled “in, around, and afterthoughts

(on documentary photography)” from 19813 she offers a politically- (and polemically-)

nuanced figuration of this “appropriation” (her term) of sanctioned systems of legibility to

depict the “real” of neighborhood life and “impoverishment”, verging into a poetic

figuration of urban experience toward the end of the essay which is reminiscent of Arjun

Appadurai’s “Spectral Housing – Notes on Millenial Mumbai”. Both essays are

predicated on a curious space of void at the heart of their respective cities: (in Appadurai’s

example, tantalizing yet inaccessible unutilized real-estate which impel the housing

market, eo ipso, in Mumbai, and in Rosler’s on both the emphatic lack of a human subject

in each of the photographs, where absence signifies an eerie mode of presence, and the

ultimate “inadequacy” of a single descriptive system for this experience of the urban, which

necessitates her use of paratactic juxtaposition – text and image, the “real” of the urban

experience emerging, in a space between).

Though the sites and specific historical fields (the Bowery in the mid-1970s and Mumbai

during the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1992-93) are vastly different, with a different set of

historical, material and “cultural” matrices, what I would like to emphasize is a form of

trans-historical continuity in this vision of urban life as presented in each of the texts, as a

way in, we could say, to Frantz Fanon.

3 Rosler, Martha. "In, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography)." In The Contest of Meaning, edited by Richard Bolton, 303-341. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989.

IV.

All politics are irreducibly local; or, as Fred Moten claims, politics are what lies “below

the radar”. There is, in what J.K. Gibson-Graham referred to in the work before one of

this writing teams’ death from cancer emphatically as “place-based globalism”4, only the

here and now – that the ultimate political horizon is located, intrinsically and irreducibly,

in the (inexhaustibly) immanent, relational moment, and that all successive abstractions

(capital, fetish, state, etc.) from this irreducible potentiality of site merely serve to blur,

defer, and generate (spontaneous) hierarchies of power.

Gayatri Spivak’s theoretical work of “situating feminism” (evident I think most clearly in

the BBRG lecture held at Berkeley on April 1, 2010 entitled “BBRG Presents Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak on “Situating Feminism”), with which I opened this analysis,

provides a fairly precise point of congruence with Graham’s fundamental insight (one

which, I think, is central to postcolonial discourses following Fanon such as Spivak

herself, Fred Moten, and most recently Leela Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi’s great-

granddaughter). Spivak articulates a notion of feminism which hinges on the critical

figuration of the self-other distinction, and its corresponding power relation, very

reminiscent of Fanon, saying that “harsh abstractions” , such as democracy (and by

extension, again, fetish, state, nationalism, institution) must be clearly nuanced or

disambiguated, dissolved, in order to negotiate the problematic of violence. Spivak’s

analysis is “post-Fanonian” in the sense that it is through the “critical chiasmus” of self and

other opening onto a critical, relational field, abstract, affective, predicated on what she

calls this “irreducible vis-à-vis”, that the emergence of a figure of sublaternity (in a sense,

both sides of a structurally ambivalent divide of either power or powerlessness) arises,

“spontaneously”.

4 J.K. Gibson-Graham, 2008 “’Place-based globalism’: a new imaginary of revolution” Rethinking Marxism 20, 4: 659-664.

Spivak’s notion of feminism - in contrast to Fanon’s own gender-specific call for the

creation of decolonized “new men”, as a critical stand-in perhaps for a new humanity -

though this gendered figure (and its implication of a “post-human” subject) must itself be

strenuously nuanced through the legibility criteria of Fanon’s historical moment of

writing, and his own political imperatives for local “liberation”= nevertheless derives its

theoretical potency from a critical figure of subaltern consciousness which is essentially

Fanonian. Chiasmus of self and other. Below the radar. Or (and to this I shall return):

“voiceless”.

Articulating a notion of inter-cultural translatability (in which, we could say, in its most

irreducible element the “subindividual” field of self, as a matrix of legibility, is

counterposed with the sub-individual field of the other, mediated by complex cultural

modes of interdiction, to form this “chiasmus”) which stems from the interface between

these two fields, Spivak’s ultimate interest is to provide modalities of representation for

tribal/communal culture (a very politically committed, Bengali aim), a consciousness

“below the radar”, and, in corresponding terms, the critical subjectivity of feminism.

V.

I would like to invoke two figures that implicitly contemporize Fanon’s model: first, the

Naxalite Maoist “insurgency” that has been proceeding for more than a decade in the so-

called “Red Corridor” of India’s south, where peasants, largely in conditions of extreme

poverty, have been coded through political criminalization and whose experience has

been largely underrepresented, both by India’s media and by media in the West. We could

say, in one system of description, that the Naxalite peasants live a form of “bare life”: and

yet “bare life”, in Agamben’s sense, could be seen to fall into the category, as a conceptual

figure, of what Spivak calls merely “northern Radical Chic”5: an abstraction in a

preexisting system of abstractions, as a depiction of “subaltern” or peasant experience.

Following Spivak, articulating the need of the “illiterate” peasant is a dangerous

reification – rather, we must realize that these are desiring subjects, equivalent in their

impulses as any other.

Desire is a critical figure in Fanon’s model of decolonization: the “native” or subaltern

subject is constituted in a sense by his or her desire (for possession, for emancipation, for

power, etc.) – a desire that is the reciprocal product of the imposition or presence of

commandement, which in a sense stems not only from the “colonizers” own desire for

property but also from a kind of structural blindness intrinsic to the settler’s worldview.

“Your presence creates a demand in me” – and yet the “settler” is unaware of the intricate

systems of subjugation that his or her blindness to this fact generates, a “structural

ambivalence” manifest, in Spivak’s language, through the complex mechanisms of alibi.

Curiously, in Fanon’s figuration of Algerian metropolitan experience, the native – who

“never stops achieving his freedom, from 9 in the evening until 6 in the morning”6 – enacts

a kind of “subaltern neurosis”, in which ecstatic cathexis is achieved or redirected through

sites of neurotic ritual and forms of ecstatic experience – again experiencing the potentials

for site, but in an apolitical, critically unmediated way7.

5 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Megacity," Grey Room 01 (Fall 2000), 23. 6 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), Chap. 1, "Concerning Violence," 52. 7 The second figure I would like to invoke, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Mouth to Mouth (1975) begins with scrolling text, in an artificially constructed script: slowly the sound of static begins to build, and the figure of a half-open mouth becomes visible through the image. Cha’s use of script at the beginning of the piece raises the issue of legibility and making visible/iterable, through the inscription of a constructed text vaguely reminiscent of Sanskrit.

VI.

I would like to argue that these forms of “unmediated experience” create a figure of what I

would refer to as the spectral city. It is this notion of a “spectral city” and the legibility

criteria for this spectral city, similar to Rosler’s work, predicated on the “irreducible vis-à-

vis” – with the vis-à-vis as its irreducible moment, that is, in a sense, the city, a product of

all local interactions – that I would like to emphasize in relation to Fanon’s text. All

abstractions which proceed from this moment – where Fanon’s nuanced analysis of

nationalism and native collaboration as forming a symmetrical (uncritical) pair with

commandement, one which resonates with Rosler’s own critique of institutions through

feminist strategies and styles of appropriation8 – are sites of the sort of “harsh abstraction”

that Spivak, following Fanon, wishes to criticize. A spatial void. Sites or residues of

8 Jesal Kepadia (a video artist and educator at the New School for Social Research, born in Mumbai, who is primarily affiliated with the 16Beaver collective in New York City) offered that we can trace this notion of institutional critique back to Buddha – a prince, whose teachings were in a tribal language (Pali ) with no script – In an upcoming course for the New School, Kepadia describes it this way: “What, how, who, when and where. Cinema, diaries, pictures, videos and maps. By beginning with these questions and objects, one hope of this seminar is to detect the intricate workings of certain ideologies which have previously been and are still in effect, and trace their emergence through inter-disciplinary media. For example, how have women, migrants, exiles, refugees, people of color, lesbians and gays, grassroots activists, minority populations and communities of dissent participated in the public debate throughout history, and how are their voices and struggles represented and documented? Could we interpret media in ways that would challenge the established perceptions, and question easy assumptions about the past and the present, about us? Combining cultural studies, feminism, and postcolonial investigations this seminar will address alternative and critical media practices. It is organized so as to locate other openings in art and culture, meaning we will focus primarily on the process and conditions of the subject who is making the media rather than the object that is made and consumed in the contemporary capitalist economy. Together we will explore ways of resisting neoliberal definitions of subjectivity, and will seek to abolish the separation between poetry and mass communication by reclaiming the power of media from the merchants and returning it to the poets and artists. Specifically, we will investigate the social and artistic aspects of documentary practice in photography, film and video, among other forms of technology-enabled collective actions from different cultural perspectives. Examples will include works by Trihn T Minha, Martha Rosler, Harun Farocki, Renee Green, Helke Sander, Adrian Piper, Anand Patwardhan, Mona Hatoum, Hollis Frampton, Yvonne Rainer, Lygia Clark and Helio Otitica, Yomango, Fred Moten, Ultra Red, amongst others. Readings will be assigned each week, including texts by Arjun Appadurai, Michel de Certeau, Gerald Raunig, Guy Debord, Leela Gandhi, Gayatri Spivak, J.K. Gibson-Graham, amongst other writings and projects that highlight contemporary stories of globalization in feminist, socialist, and non-capitalist politics.”

capitalist abstraction. A western hallucination, or at least, nothing on which to base a

notion of “civil society”.

Whereas we might globalize this process under the rubric of the progressive

displacements produced by the capital fetish (with the leaf of money being the ultimate

machine – a form of “poise” - for this forgetting, invoking Anita Dube’s work), what Anna

Gibbs refers to as mimetic communication (mimesis or “mimicry”) and relationality of the

stripe in Gibbs’ and Leela Gandhi’s model recapitulates and sites this process locally (in

Gibb’s analysis in a kind of visceral affect contagion, in Gandhi’s in affective community),

literalizing itself in affect. Nothing is possible (because of an unsynthesizable negativity)

but one can see what is possible together. In this paradigm, as I have argued, all politics

become irreducibly local (Spivak’s “irredicble vis-vis’s, a site of “intimacy”, or relation),

disambiguating the “harsh abstractions” (Spivak’s term) of fetish, state, and

imaginary/administrative forms of political representation (her example is “democracy”),

and opening onto to the true particular micropolitical/affective potentials of the “field” of

each individual place.

All politics are based on this irreducible vis-à-vis (the recurrence of which defines, in its

largest level, the metropolitan figure, at a contemporary level of metropolitan

“abstraction”, the only site of real exchange). It is, we could say, the second-wave feminist

rubric – that all politics are personal – and yet the personal, or we might even say the post-

human – is implicated through a complex series of aesthetic and metaphysical

“abstractions” – qua the “machine” of Marx writings on technology and more recently

Gerald Raunig’s 2011 book A Thousand Machines9 – where local structures irreducibly

reproduce the power dynamics of all higher orders: democracy, as a harsh abstraction,

embodies a level of local interpersonal violence (in a sense it’s “alibi” ) to the point where,

aided by the abstractions of capital, it becomes invisible, untouchable, where there is no

longer an enemy to be touched. In a sense, one could argue, we live in this generalized

9 Gerald Raunig, A Thousand Machines (L.A.: Semiotext(e), 2010).

field - of violence - or that merely the commandement has become an internalized

commandement for politically unreflective “enjoyment”. What is this figure? From a

certain perspective (aesthetic, metaphysical, affective) this is the city. Thus, all cities,

including New York, not just Algiers, are post colonies par excellance: or, in effect,we live

in a postcolony.

What we see at work we could term a fundamental “postcolonial” (and in a precise way

this term – “postcoloniality” - must be voided and transfigured) dialectic: the imposition of

otherness (from which “originary” site?) causes a displacement to the “natural” terrain of

the territory, which creates or highlights not only new boundaries and mechanisms of

inclusion/exclusion but also a new zone of possibility: one, according to Fanon, that can

only be seized, literally, through the creation of new human beings.

Fanon, perhaps hyperbolically, refers to this process (of the revolutionary/emancipatory

creation of this new human being – the “decolonized”) as one which necessitates “absolute

violence” (literally). The decolonized subject, in a sense which Fanon is careful to

articulate, only exists because of this imposition (what he calls the “Manichean” aspect of

colonial rule). Similar to a notion of autonomy and capacity, as evidenced above by

Marcel Exposito’s quote (whose work is inflected by similar concerns in the literature

emerging from the Autonomia movement of Italy in the 60s and 70s) – where the

intensities (and intensive insinuation) of capital simultaneously liberate and expropriate

human affective capacities (necessitating what Negri and following him Jacques Ranciere

call a critical notion of separation – exile, autonomy, and its activist parallels – strike,

occupation, refusal to work).

VII.

Is this what we’re after though?

Achille Mbembe in his essay “The Aesthetics of Vulgarity”, has pointed out that this kind

of mutually reenforcing intimacy with power, of which violence - in the form of banal

humor, parody/irony, and vulgarization of the figures of commandement - merely (re)

constitutes a symmetrical and self-defeating response to the field of power. The “familial”

intimacy of colonial rule, again, unreflective.

We can say that in distinction to a colonial situation where there is an enemy (the settler),

in a post-colonial (post-human?) situation the originary a priori source of this

expropriation is sited, in effect, nowhere – it is a merely a kind of natural balancing act in

which capacities are controlled. An “equivalence”, of the void of power. We can say on the

one hand that this affective void is created through the incessant degrees of abstraction

created by capital, but we can also say that the originary site of this “distance” comes from

nature itself. In this situation, following Simmel in the Philosophy of Money, and Spivak

herself in her work on communalism and the Megacity, how do we assign values to new

economic and relational forms emergent in this (new) “space”?

In Fanon’s case the dialectical tension of commandement opens up this possibility of a

new form, a relational form, one that can only be actualized first through a shared form

of revolutionary consciousness – the creation of a new man (the post-human subject). And

yet his ultimate proscription for action is violence.

It is only because of this displacement that the figure of a decolonized “Algiers” becomes

possible, as a (conceptual) threshold or border – thus the effort here to actualize the

(utopian, post-human, futuristic) possibility of a decolonized city is congruent to the effort

to create a disalienated city, an urban space of politically aware play and contingent affect

a la Guy Debord and Henri Lefebvre.

Fanon’s invocation of the natural terrain as silent justification for colonial rule is thus

highly interesting:

“. . .this process which moves uninterruptedly from the banks of the colonial territory to

the palaces and the docks of the mother country. In this becalmed zone the sea has a

smooth surface, the palm tree stirs gently in the breeze, the waves lap against the pebbles,

and raw materials are ceaselessly transported, justifying the presence of the settler

[emphasis mine]. . .

Over against him torpid creatures, wasted by fevers, obsessed by ancestral customs, form

an almost inorganic background for the innovating dynamism of colonial mercantilism.”10

On one end of the continuum (where on the other end the tautologically self-justifying

“poise” of commandement, existing as a naturalization of the always-already negated

potentials of a decolonialized, post-human revolutionary subject) nature itself seems to

justify the process, ground to the figure of expropriation. Similar to Kracauer, this ground

and its silent implication of legitimacy necessitates the creation of a post-human

subjectivity, more natural than nature, which Fanon sees as possible only through

revolutionary violence.

If the imaginary of an “originary” Algiers – whose “natural” integrity as an entity has been

disturbed or displaced by the imposition of a colonial rule, it is from this point of

differential – between the “originary” Algiers and its colonial formation – that the

imaginary of a metropole itself emerges. This is only possible because of this originary

displacement. To create this however requires vision. Unalienated “decolonialized”

10 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), Chap. 1, "Concerning Violence," 51.

activity still exists - spontaneously – emerging from this point of “differential” (a local,

affective relation), but again, this spontaneous activity is possible only because of the

imposition of the reciprocally determining hegemony of colonial rule.

In this way, the colonial city becomes a metonym (as in Rosler’s metonymic

displacements) of all metropolitan environments – where “commandement” as the

imposition of control sourcing from nature itself is homologous to similar displacements

to which we would ascribe the designations of “capital”, the “state”, the “institution”, the

“machine” - on and on down to a fundamental structural ambivalence in human

consciousness itself11: (the abyme, which, through a principle of all relations being local,

emerges in the dissatisfaction of the Fanonian native, his (or her) passional frustrations).

This structure is reproduced on all levels of imaginary designation, and the “harsh

abstractions” which impel the process (of which globalized imperial democracy is the

ultimate form) eventually begin to reflect an absence or distance - at the heart of things.

From a post-human perspective, all cities are thus postcolonies, including New York: it is

their fundamental future and their imaginary: or at least we can, from a politically aware

standpoint, begin to make this claim.

VIII.

“That is why we must put the DDT which destroys parasites, the bearers of disease, on

the same level as the Christian religion which wages war on embryonic heresies and

11 As Spivak argues: “Here, then, are the Derridean reminders, digested in my own fashion: First, that the structures of [telecommunication] are already present as residual elements in the cultural process, for all communication is structurally [telecommunication], however slow. Second, if one allows that the work of the psyche produces the “I”, one may be able to grasp that that work can be described by more and more complex manifestations of the machinic potential of the silicon chip, producing newer and newer kinds of “communication machines” inaccessible to the theater of the human mind, and that this metapsychological work blurs the distinction between “natural” and “artificial”.”

instincts, and on evil as yet unborn. The recession of yellow fever and the advance of

evangelization form part of the same balance sheet.” 12 (Fanon’s use of the term “balance

sheet” is apposite. Or, we could add, more “destructive” (and subtle) forms of “advanced”

financialized capital such as Black-Scholes-inspired derivatives, which are just as much a

product of “subaltern neurosis” and its abreactive forms as ecstatic ritual was in Fanon’s

Algiers, cathexes for a rampant process of financialization that mirror (or mirrored) the

affective excesses liberated by globalised capital.13)

Fanon argues that this originary psychic/affective/material double-bind (in its largest,

most expansive sense, really only touched upon here under the rubric of capitalism) can

only be resolved through what he calls “absolute violence”, which must be given, in a

sense, an iterable, relational form.

I would like to nuance the emphasis that Fanon places on this figure of “violence” as a

proscription. Again, not only on a local, affective, micropolitical level in the psyche of the

colonized subject (sited as it were in a micropolitics of affect), but through its various

iterations in the successive forms of administration and organization (all, ultimately,

“harsh abstractions”) that would emerge or emanate as a response to this structural

impasse (of which, historically, nationalism was a privileged form). Fanon is very skeptical

of forms of nationalism, seeing them as essentially and structurally symmetrical to

commandement.

To counter this model, I would like to cite the work of Leela Gandhi, whose research into

what she calls “affective communities” resituates the potentials for anti-imperial

12 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), Chap. 1, "Concerning Violence," 42. 13 To cite a contemporary example that reproduces the structure perfectly, the ANDI scores assigned to vegetables at Whole Foods – where the concentration and density of nutrients in each vegetable are given “scores”. Thus the “natural” properties of the vegetable are quantified, and through this very quantification make them more attractive for purchase. Nutritive value is fetishized – this is very Spivakian, where the natural world itself becomes data (in Megacity: “The rural is not trees and fields anymore. It is on the way to data.”)

spontaneity into the relational form itself. All interactions are local, intimate interactions –

there is in effect, no mediation, and the revolutionary potential of this she sees as vast.

If we are to take away this figure of “the enemy” – the colonizer, or the issuant of the

demands of colonialization – where is this process ultimately sited? This is the post-

millenial situation – there is no enemy, no one to exercise violence against – the

naturalized, abstract workings of the machine are sited nowhere (similar to Fanon’s

invocation of the “natural” setting of Algiers).

Thus the potential for revolution can only be sited in a self-emancipatory form of

consciousness, a modality of perception, or in effect, a sublimation. Spivak refers to this as

“training for epistemological performance”. The irreducible vis-à-vis, turned into an

awareness. In a sense, a local, psychic maneuver.

IX.

Debord’s analysis in the last two chapters of Society of the Spectacle concurs that we live

in a generalized field of violence, based on the various alienating mediations of what he

calls “spectacle” and the defense of a certain (repressive) form of “subcommunication”14 –

where the substructural, affective “violence” that Fanon refers to has been generalized so

thoroughly through the mediation of the image – and here we could adopt whichever of

the alternate, homologous mediations that have been figured critically to describe this

process of “global” generality – spectacle, commandement, the progressive “abstraction” of

capital, “control”, globalization, “empire” – to a point where the abreaction (enemyless)

14 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994) 138.

becomes wholely naturalized, and seamlessly integrated into a generalized form: of

precarious virtuousity.

At various progressive levels, from the dyadic pair (intimate violence, a source of sexual

violence) up through a series of abstractions – capital, state, “democracy”, media

representation – the structure is reiterated and remains uncritical, foundering on the

material conditions which we constantly have to negotiate (perhaps – most basically - our

“need”).

In order to counter this harsh series of abstractions as uncritical chiasmus (ultimately

generating its own inclusions and exclusions, material manifestations, and systems of

control – “property”or possession taken to higher levels,or even on its most base levels as

manifestations of “subaltern” (powerless, voiceless) neurosis – liminal forms of

redistribution and subjugation from the black-scholes equation to pharmaceutical

interventions into the human subject - the relational form (as all level interactions are

irreducibly local, and any attempt to exceed this locality is a form of violence, a form of

abstraction, which recapitulates or mimics a basic form of abstraction such as the capital

fetish) the relational form – intimacy - thus becomes inherently critical to capital.

X.

In order to begin to nuance and expand Fanon’s analysis from a cross-cultural perspective

(from the other side of the divide as it were) I would like to invoke Ranciere’s own critical

model in the Emancipated Spectator (2009), as a “Western” model for politically informed

art production. Regarding aesthetic responses to frameworks such as war, forced

migration, trauma, catastrophe, and sexual violence, Ranciere in his analysis privileges,

rather than what he calls an explicit “dialectical” or pedagogical response, which in self-

negating fashion employs the very forms of signification it wishes to critique (and which

he sees ultimately, similar to Fanon, as a strategic impasse), privileges rather the

production of more subtle or contingent affects through the use of images as a critical

mediation. In effect this “affective” dimension of the image registers that which is always

in excess of whatever discursive frameworks which would be imposed upon them by the

political realities surrounding their production, and is essentially congruent with both

Fanon but also contemporary discourses on autonomy and radical collectivity, which I

will examine briefly. I would like at the outset to examine image practices in Ranciere’s

model which effect a similar metonymic displacement and provide concretely a “new

regime of visibility” for the realities and responses depicted: whether they be curiosity,

contemplation, vulnerability, drift, trauma, anger (and yet, we could say, a transfigured

anger, one that doesn’t necessitate violence as a form), attention, etc.

Critically, this model emphasizes and privileges a mode of “translation” – the translation of

intimate or aesthetic experience through the image as a way of “blurring” or disturbing a

register of indignation or explicit political critique. Often by creating an immersive, multi-

layered sensory environment in which political realities and experiences of catastrophe

and political domination are effectively singularized and displaced onto more

contemplative modes, works that reconfigure our idea of “the political” (an aesthetic,

personal or intimate response which simultaneously expands a larger political framework

based on mastery, “virtuosity” (employing Virno’s term), competence, or the excesses of

domination) onto different discursive registers (slowness, the empathetic, the

vulnerability of the body, memory, an expanded or poetic field for the biological).

According to Ranciere, works that effect this transformation (and here I would argue that

projected image is the most powerful form) provide a reconfigured paradigm and an

alternate signifying register – a “new regime of visibility” - for simple discursive

frameworks such as, say, “capital”, “violence”, “catastrophe”, “sexual violence”, or “war”

(with each of these always already occupying an abstract, mediatized, and endlessly

deferred form in a system predicated on capital); thus allowing for more poetic, intimate

and polyvalent approaches and highlighting an altered continuum between what we

would define as “aesthetics” and “the political”.

As a response to contemporary discursive practices which seek to provide “aesthetic”

paradigms for human rights, a la Spivak (and the capacity of images to provide this

critical mediation, both through testimony, evidence, and narrative, but also through

more abstract modes, the intervention of a superstructural mediation that “vocalizes” the

base), this paradigm critically invokes the idea of “capacity” which is central to Ranciere’s

model – human capacities for the empathetic as a counter-political response. The

autonomy of individual perception (and the “autonomy” of artistic practice configured as

critique) is thus integrated into a larger framework for the political.

In this way, “militancy” (or to borrow Emily Apter’s phrase, an “ethical militancy”15) takes

on the possibility of a new form – the militancy of preserving individual experience, a

critical formation of the subject - in the face of the massive excesses of violence, capital, its

institutional instantiations, war, exploitation, and catastrophe.

XI.

Implicit to the structure of autonomy as a political framework theorized by the writers

and activists of the Italian Autonomia movement is this notion of capacity, which (as an

excess) escapes or eludes hierarchical institutional constraints. Desire, but also

productive capacity, are seen to be limitless (are limitless), and yet are expropriated, 15 Emily Apter, “Thinking Red: Ethical Militance and the Group Subject”, in Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Beth Hinderliner, et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 194 ff.

paradoxically, by the very intensities or mediations which serve to produce them. This is

the parallax of European styles of autonomy. Guided by Marx’s notion of a “general

intellect” from the Grundrisse, affective or “informal” capacities, even a sort of nascent

form of sovereignty, are liberated, paradoxically, through the very “abstract” or material

systems of constraint, affective attenuation, and intensification against which they must

react.

This “structure” (or the product of a sort of intensified structural ambivalence, implicit to

institutions - capital, state power, colonial domination, etc.) is reminiscent of Frantz

Fanon’s theoreticization of subaltern neurosis in the chapter On Violence. “Native” (or

subaltern) sovereignty is as well predicated on or structured by the very system of

constraint and domination of colonial administration and its various architectures

(behavioral, physical, economic, even “abstract”), where, according to Fanon, liberation is

achieved only though abreactive or “political” violence. In a certain way, following Cha’s

piece, this “dissatisfaction”, as a negativity, and the possibilities for its ecstatic

complement, possess a kind of visuality.

Anna Gibbs, in her essay on mimetic communication - refers to what she calls “cross-

modal imitation – or translation. . . .[where] similarity is crucial, but so too is the

difference produced in the sensory translation. For it is the difference, or the

correspondence, isomorphism without identity – produced in the translation [emphasis

mine] from one sensory mode to into another that, from within the optic of the formation

of the self, facilitates the … gradual recognition of the interiority of the other.” 16

Here we can say that human capacities for the empathetic (and for autonomous

operation) are effectively entrained - whether we view this positively as a developmental

process of affect regulation that affords the developing individual an eventual measure of

autonomy - or negatively - as a force which, while impelling, also constrains.

16 Anna Gibbs, “After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication”, in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press: 2011), 195.

What I would like to highlight in Gibbs article is the supercession of this dialectic

(though not properly a dialectic, in a sense it is merely the synthesis of the unsynthesizable

as an anticipatory response) in what is essentially a model of reception that she proposes.

This in her mind is the potential (“revolutionary”) essence of mimetic communication.

Ranciere's strategy of what he calls "separation" is thus figured as a primary critical

paradigm for political art production. To separate, and from the space of this separation,

to critically engage. In the context of the present analysis I would like to privilege this

figure of critical autonomy as all you can hope to engage in a spectator. More broadly

than the figure of “emancipation” as theorized by Ranciere which is, arguably, merely a

plurality or polyvalence of meanings activated in the viewer by an artwork, a kind of

spectatorial semiosis, I would like to articulate a different conceptual figure, one more in

line with the tradition of not only Fanon but also its Western modalities (autonomous

Marxism and contemporary anarchism, such as the forms of radical subjectification

figured in Tiqqun’s seminal essay “Introduction to Civil War” ) which is politically

engaged, critical, and most importantly, repeatable.

Psychic revolution.

I would like to argue that as a critical/political strategy, this form of mimesis literalizes the

reversal implicit to institutional and capitalistic forms of constraint and opens up the

space for a truly critical dimension to art practice. It is this unsynthesizable that manifests

itself in the image. It is also the unsynthesizable that creates the possibility for collective

agency.

Mimicry thus appears as a critical mediation that attempts a sort of literal reversal of this:

or, in the words of Toril Moi in her essay on Helene Cixious: an art practice which

“doubles the mimicry back on itself, miming the miming, to the point where it becomes a

strategy.” 17

VI.

If all “European”/Western models - (and America could be said not to have a model,

merely existing on the edge of an inarticulate and abreactive irritability - it’s “poise” or

“void” - similar to Debord’s figuration of a spectacular society, though even the notion of

spectacle, following Fanon, Spivak, and Kracauer, is “pre-decolonization”, where

spectacle is predicated merely on the communication of the incommunicable – think

American television, and the stunted forms of “politics” that America practices) – if all

European models, which include, we could say, even hyper-sophisticated examples such

as Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Agamben’s The Coming Community, and Tiqqun’s

Introduction to Civil War - are merely examples of what Spivak refers to as “Northern

Radical Chic”, or Tafuri-esque forms of alienation a la Dada that don’t amount to much of

a political critique, what is a more politically-informed, alternative form of relationality?

Do we situate this in a form of cross-cultural dialogue a la Spivak? If, as Pavi presented us

in class, the subaltern subject sings “I would give you something I value but I don’t

even know what it is you have given me ” , what form of civil society could

potentially organize a “decolonized” form of urbanism?

17 Toril Moi, New French Feminisms and Sexual/Textual Politics (London: Methuen, 1985), 140, on Irigaray’s textual strategies, in Inside the Visible, an elliptical traverse of twentieth century art in of, and from the feminine, ed. Catherine de Zegher (Boston: The MIT Press, 1996), 25. In this model, as a critical form, production and reception (spectatorship, and its more even complement, participation) are essentially isomorphic: to develop a critical practice which functions articulately on both sides of the “divide” (or ,what Spivak calls in relation to subaltern subjectivity, “the chiasmus”), would be to open a truly political practice and field for politics that goes beyond the institution.

Gandhi’s answer, following Derrida, and, perhaps, apolitically, is friendship, and her

model offers tantalizing aspects of the possibilities of a decolonized relationality not

predicated on an (outmoded?) notion of Fanonian “absolute violence”. The micropolitics

of intimacy (radical forms of intimacy) are seen as inherently threatening to capital. True

to the Spivakian credo that “training for epistemological performance” as a political

principle mitigating interpersonal violence comes from the commensuality of individual

vis-à-vis relationships, and the singularity of self-emancipation , and true to a “place-

based globalism” in which immanent relationality is the site for all true political critique,

Gandhi describes in successive chapters of Affective Communities various forms of anti-

imperial relationality, all of which, critically, involve forms of productive and creative

interface through cross-cultural dialogue.

This shift – from a dialectical positionality of native/settler, where there is no equivalence,

to a form of affective connection opening up into a space, where there is an equivalence –

involves the opening of a relational field. This maneuver does not involve violence, rather,

in fact, its opposite (a critical subjectification). Importing perspectives from theorists such

as Gandhi and Spivak thus reconfigure Fanon’s proscription for violence (itself merely a

self-negating or symmetrical response in itself to commandement) from a “feminist” or

rather a neo-humanist perspective, while not being inconscient of the “harsh” realities of

power, as a way of beginning to open up possibilities of a new theorization for urban

experience.

I invoked Martha Rosler’s artwork at the beginning of this paper because I feel that it is

through site-specific representation – a critical representation, with film, video,

photography, and text – that would make these alternate visions possible: the specialized

states of cognition and ways of life (often ephemeral) given critical form and value. Our

“political” question: How do we make this legible? I also believe that it is through

revolutionary forms of intimacy qua Gandhi, forms of radical visuality, and cross-cultural

dialogue, that this critical practice can and should be articulated: in a way, in its most

powerful dimension, which resists the modes of separation and subconscious hierarchy

that capital, left to its silent justification, would produce.

Jesal’s Addendum (or, the next step):

It is important in this new form of “vision” to see that all productive forms – a yert in

Africa, a threshing machine in Tibet – are works of art as much as and on the order of

Duchamp’s urinal. A critical/visionary detournement involves this re-situation of the

results of productive activity, cross-culturally. The critique of Dada in Tafuri is then

subject to a critical inversion: instead of the intensive “avant-garde” contextualization or

recontextualization of craft and machine objects, objects preexistent in the world –

Farocki’s bricks, to cite a contemporary example – embody the same “avant-garde”

productive energy that art does. Removing or de-situating the institutional mediation

involves extending this frame or vision of productive activity (that would be expropriated

not only as labour but also, perhaps more intrinsically, through the progressive

institutional mediations that would cite this activity as “art”) into the entire world.

From this perspective, even the sound of frogs in a forest in India becomes an instance or

site of this new “avant-garde” mode of vision. This critical perspective is perfectly in line

with Spivak, in a sense the ultimate extension of her theoretical interventions. As, in her

words, the world is on its way to data, productive activity must be critically re-situated as

art practice, in the same way that the aesthetic potentials and energies of this which are

expropriated into the Image (a la Debord) – “naturally”, or under the law of an uncritical

naturalization, where the incommunicable itself is invested into the image as a vehicle for

capitalist expropriation, the “silent justification”. Just turn on your television – the

hypnotic energy invested into the image built from the pixel (following Spivak in

Megacity) captures this “natural” potential which, we might say, as yet has no voice.

In a certain way, this “post-colonialization” of media practice - where “subalternity” in the

same way that “abstraction” in European theoretical models has reached a level of

development/incommunicable investment in the image to where spectacle or empire

becomes universally distributed as this imperial mean – involves finding the productive or

creative energy of mankind in the most minute localities, where its power ultimately

resides. “Image” or “spectacle” or “empire” or “control” – as universal abstractions, are

critically re-situated to give a “voice” to the “voiceless”: power – taken to its highest degree

as capacity, dislocated from its sensory and conceptual imbrication in a hierarchical and

unjust system of capital expropriation: “We would give you something in return, we just

don’t know what it is you have given us.”

This would be the basis for a world-wide and equitable revolution.

Not violence, but something of a subtler order. Art and critical articulations of this mode

of seeing – indebted to the discourses of feminism, post-coloniality, and experimental film

and video – are needed to communicate it. Similar to Rosler’s call for a style of feminist

appropriation/critical juxtaposition which would provide inherent critique to

institutionalism, this revolutionary “datatizing” of the world – following the critical

perspectives outlined above, will be the basis for my future curatorial work.

Bibliography

Arjun Appadurai, "Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial

Mumbai”, Public Culture 12, No. 3, 627-651.

Emily Apter, “Thinking Red: Ethical Militance and the Group Subject”, in Communities

of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Beth Hinderliner, et al. (Durham: Duke

University Press, 2009), 194 ff.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone

Books, 1994).

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), Chap. 1,

"Concerning Violence," 35-106.

Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism,

and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 254 pp.

Siegfried Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament," in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays,

trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 74-86.

Gerald Raunig, A Thousand Machines (L.A.: Semiotext(e), 2010).

Rosler, Martha. "In, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography)." In The

Contest of Meaning, edited by Richard Bolton, 303-341. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,

1989.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Megacity," Grey Room 01 (Fall 2000), 8-23.

Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, trans. Alexander R. Galloway and Jason E. Smith

(L.A.: Semiotext(e), 2010).