Month: August 2010

“We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master. These are infinite variabilities, the appearing and disappearing of which coincide. They are infinite speeds that blend into the immobility of the colorless and silent nothingness they traverse, without nature or thought.”
– Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?

1977. That year the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181 by four members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, demanding the the release of ten Rote Armee Fraktion prisoners, set in motion a gruesome set of events. Shortly after Operation Feuerzauber put an end to the violent calamity, three RAF members were found dead in Stammheim prison; cause of death unclear. The day after, the lifeless body of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, who had been kidnapped by the RAF five weeks prior to the hijacking, was discovered in the boot of a car. 1977 was also the year Apple introduced the first mass-marketed personal computer and the word ‘telematics’ was brought forward in Alain Minc and Simon Nora’s L’Informatisation de la Société. Around the same time Yuri Andropov, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, wrote a passionate letter to Brezhnev, arguing that the gap with the US in the domain of informatics was urgently to be bridged, if their socialist state was to survive. 1977 saw the death of Charlie Chaplin, the man who had recounted the dehumanization of the industrialization in a heartbreaking plea for warmth and tenderness, but it also saw the immense success of Saturday Night Fever, in which a new working class seemed perfectly happy to be exploited, in exchange for some jivin ‘n’ shakin. In 1977, Jean-François Lyotard wrote the first draft of La Condition Postmoderne, the Sex Pistols gave voice to the “No Future” generation and approximately eight hundred Japanese youngsters commited suicide. 1977, according to Franco “Bifo” Berardi, was the year the twentieth century came to an end. The year of premonition.

1977 also marks a pivotal moment in Bifo’s own history as radical political thinker and activist, and member of the Italian Autonomia movement. In September of that year, following a powerful wave of social conflicts and uprisings, no less than one hundred thousand people convened in Bologna in search for a new future, only to get carried away in a cycle of despair and violence. This faillure, coinciding with the closing off of infinite horizons of possibility, is still haunting Bifo: for him, the way Utopian rebellion collapsed into desperate dystopia signaled the tragic passing of modernity, as well as the dis-empowerment of democracy, taken over by a series of irreversible automatisms. Now, over thirty years later, it is evident that political participation has become an empty ritual, devoid of the ability to provide true alternatives and true choices. Politics can simply not escape the pervasive system of techno-economic automatisms that capitalism has become since its mutation in semio-capitalism. It seems like there is no desire or vitality left outside the economic enterprise, outside productive labor and business activity. What interests Bifo is the question if and how it is possible to wake up from this bad dream. How to reconstruct autonomy within our current conditions of semio-capitalism, characterized by the fusion of media and capital? Look at the state we’re in: ruthless economic competition and digital intensification of informatic stimuli have induced a state of crisis, not only economic but also psychopathic. We’re experiencing a permanent electrocution that flows in the widespread pathology, manifesting itself in panic and attention disorders. The main source of this collapse, writes Bifo, can be found in the organization of time in the digital sphere, in the relation between what he calls “cyberspace” and “cybertime”. For Bifo this distinction is the key for contemporary arrangements of struggle. Of course, the colonization of time has always been a fundamental objective in the development of capitalism in the modern era, but with the spread of digital technologies, time has become the primary battlefield, as it is the space of the mind, of the soul. Cyberspace indicates the sphere of connection between mind and machine, which is unlimited expandable. Cybertime, on the contrary, is limited: we can increase the time of exposure to information, but experience cannot be intensified beyond certain limits. The problem is that, under the influence of the current attention economy, cyberspace is constantly widening, inducing us to exceed these limits, which leads to an impoverishment of experience and a reduction of the capacity for empathy (see also Nicholas Carr and others). The gap between electronic cyberspace and organic cybertime leads to “a loss of intensity which concerns the aesthetic sphere, that of sensibility, and importantly also the the sphere of ethics. The experience of the other is rendered banal; the other becomes part of an uninterrupted and frenetic stimulus, and loses its singularity and intensity – it loses its beauty.”

The effects of the accelerations and intensifications produced by network technologies are amplified by the precariousness of cognitive labor. In the net economy, capital no longer recruits people, but buys packets of time. Work time is fractalized, reduced to fragments that can be endlessly reassembled and recombined. This systemic depersonalization of the cognitariat, as a virtual unorganizable class of mental labor, has led to a new economic system, centered on what Bill Gates once described as “business at the speeds of thought.” Networked digital labor functions as an artificial nervous system, in which, in the words of Gates, “information is our vital fluid.” As the fragmented mosaic of cognitive labor turns into a fluid process within our networks, capital becomes the semiotic flux that runs through the veins of the global economy. But the progressive incorporation of the digital in the organic nervous system inevitably leads to a breakdown. The intense and prolonged investment of mental energies, and the total dependence of emotion and thought on the flow of information, have created the conditions for a psychic collapse, which is now manifesting itself in the form of economic recession, military aggression and suicidal tendencies. For Bifo all of this is connected to the pathological turn of the pyscho-sphere, which is the most important feature of the current anthropological mutation which encompasses social change, politics and violence. If we want to understand something about what is happening in the society of the new millennium, we need to reflect on the transformations of activity and labor, the subsumption of the time of the mind under the competitive realm of productivity, and most of all, we need to understand this mutation of the cognitive and psycho-social system. “It is within the psychospere that the effects of twenty years of info-invasion, nervous overload, mass psychopharmacology, sedatives, stimulants and euphoric substances, of fractalization of working and existential time, of social insecurity which translates in fear, solitude and terror manifest themselves. Time-based psychobombs are exploding in the interconnected global mind. The effect is unpredictable.”

Bifo uses Elephant, Gus van Sant’s captivating account of the Columbine tragedy, to illustrate the spreading psychopathology of the first post-alpha(betic) generations, the ones who “have learned more words from a machine than from their mother” (as the anthropologist Rose Golden wrote in 1975). He writes: “it is with glacial tenderness that Van Sant shows us the neurotic mumbling, the anorexic hystericisms and the relational incompetence of the Columbine generation (…) Bodies that have lost contact with their soul and hence no longer know anything about their corporeality”. In Elephant Bifo sees the cognitive mutation that is unfolding in the context of a communicative transformation: the passage from “conjunction” to “connection” as the predominant mode of interaction. While conjunction is a singular process of “becoming other”, connection is a functional and repeatable interaction between discrete, formatted segments. Connection requires that these segments are compatible and interoperable – which is something digital network technologies dwell on, as they expand by reducing more and more elements to format, standard and code. There’s no room for margins of ambiguity or gradations of nuance here. Central to this shift is the insertion of the electronic into the organic, which has provoked a palpable change in the relation between consciousness and sensibility. As the info-sphere is becoming thick and dense, putting our attention constantly under siege, we are less and less able to react consciously to emotional impulses. There’s just not enough time for empathy, time to experience, to caress, to feel the other as a sensorial body. “Affective attention suffers a kind of contraction, and it is forced to find ways of adaptation: the organism adopts tools for simplification, and it tends to smooth out the living psychic response, to repackage affective behaviour in a frozen and fastened framework.” Reducers of complexity such as money, media clichés, stereotypes or interfaces have simplified the relationship with the other, and when the other appears in flesh and blood, we are unable to deal with its presence, because it hurts our (in)sensibility. It is as if we cannot longer understand or convey that which cannot be verbalized, that which cannot be reduced to simple codified signs.

The dominant pathologies of our times cannot be understood from the standpoint of the Freudian paradigm of repression. In Freudianism, at the basis of pathology lies concealment: something is hidden or removed; we are prevented from something. The basis of pathology today however is no longer concealment but hypervision, an excess of visibility, the explosion of the info-sphere and an overload of info-neural stimuli. What plays itself out it is no longer repression, but an eruption of expression: “just do it”. As Anselm Franke pointed out in a recent essay, subjectivity’s dual organizing principle forbidden/allowed has changed into possible/impossible (related to this, the slogan of another sportswear producer – “Impossible is nothing” – can be read as the neoliberal counterpart to disciplinary threats: “make it real” or you will be cast into nothingness). While the Freudian imperative required a renunciation of instincts, the new social imperative thrusts us towards enjoyment and expression. While Freud identified the dominant social psychopathology with neurosis, today, this is psychosis (which reminds me of Ubermorgen’s Psych|OS project, from which the image on top is taken). Leaving the Freudian framework behind, Bifo instead turns to Baudrillard, who foresaw the expressive excess and indeterminacy swamping the infocratic regime of semio-capitalism. “Overproduction is an immanent character of capitalist production, since the production of goods never corresponds to the logic of human beings’ concrete needs, but to the abstract logic of the production of value. In he domain of semio-capitalism the specific overproduction that occurs is a semiotic one: an infinite excess of signs circulating in the infosphere. Individual and collective attention is saturated.“ In the semiotic regime we all seem to exist in a state of schizophrenia: as the world is moving too fast and too many signs are calling for our attention, we try to grasp meaning through a process of “overinclusion” – the main characteristics of schizophrenic interpretation (as described by Gregory Bateson). “The system of collective cognition loses its critical competence; this amounted to the ability to discern truth value in the statements that were submitted in sequences to relatively alert attention. Amidst the proliferation of fast media, interpretation no longer unfolds along sequential lines; instead, it follows associative spirals and a-signifying connections.”

Is there any remedy to the wave of psychopathologies that seems to have submerged our lives, Bifo asks. Is there a way out of this factory of unhappiness? Drawing from Alain Ehrenberg’s La Fatigue d’être Soi (recently translated as The Weariness of the Self), Bifo points to the infernal spiral of depression, reinforced by the dominant neoliberal ideology, sucking all our energies in the trap of self-enterprise, regulating our libindinal investments according to economic rules, capturing our attention in the precariousess of virtual networks. In the neoliberal phase of capitalism, Bifo writes (Taking cue from Roberto Saviano’s terrifying Gomorra), “all rules of coexistence are abolished, the rules of violence imposed. The regulations that set limits to the invasiveness of the principles of competition are removed, hard-and-fast automatisms are introduced in material relations between people”. But at the same time, there is truth in depression. We shouldn’t consider depression as a mere pathology, but as a form of knowledge. Inspired by the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Bifo argues that the challenge when dealing with a depression is not to bring one back to normality or to reintegrate behavior in the standards of normal social language, but “to change the focus of his/her depressive attention, to re-focalize, to deterritorialize the mind and the expressive flow. Depression is based on the hardening of one’s existential refrain, on its obsessive repetition (…) Overcoming depression implies some simple steps: the deterritorialization of the obsessive refrain, the re-focalization and change of the landscape of desire, but also the creation of a new constellation of shared beliefs, the common perception of a new psychological environment and the constuction of a new model of relationship.” The only way to overcome our depression, according to Bifo, is to apply Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic model as political therapy, to give the possibility of seeing other landscapes, to change focus, to slow down, to open new paths of imagination. “In the days to come, politics and therapy will be one and the same. Our task will be the creation of social zones of resistance, zones of therapeutic contagion. Capitalism will not disappear from the global landscape, but it will lose its pervasive role in our semiotization, it will become one of possible forms of social organization.“

The missed opportunity of 1977 clearly still lingers in Bifo’s mind. The memory of that year has not been erased, because it’s inconceivable to cancel hope for a life autonomous from competition, possession and accumulation, a life in which we can anew share a sense, a view, a rhythm, a common refrain (or ritournelle, in Guattari’s words). That’s why 1977 will always be around the corner: it’s the coming revolution. Any day now. Any day.

“I don’t believe that the world can be governed by reason. The utopia of Enlightenment has failed. But I think that the dissemination of self-organised knowledge can create a social framework containing infinite autonomous and self-reliant worlds. The process of creating the network is so complex that it cannot be governed by human reason. The global mind is too complex to be known and mastered by subsegmented localized minds. We cannot know, we cannot control, we cannot govern the entire force of the global mind. But we can master the singular process of producing a singular world of sociality. This is autonomy today”.

The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents, 2009)
Precarious Rhapsody. Semio-capitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation (Autonomedia, 2009)

“WhateverLife.com is simply put as an ‘inside joke’. It then developed into something else- as ‘For whatever life you lead’- meaning there would be information and fun things for anyone and everyone! (Which is why I’m always expanding in content…er, as much as I can!) [[[Or, for the long story…a night at Bre’s back in 2004 (playing Mario Party 2 or 3…)- we both lost to computer characters (I think DK was on EASY)- So I throw the controller down and walk off. On my way, I say ‘Whatever, Life’- as sarcastically as possible. Then I started thinking about how neat of a website name it would be. Here it is. 🙂 ♥ ]]]”
— Ashley Qualls, founder of Whateverlife.com, a hugely succesful MySpace layouts website.

The quote above was taken from ‘Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive’, the new book by Jodi Dean, arguably one of the most striking voices working today at the crossroads between contemporary radical political thinking and new media technologies. In a breathlessly compelling fashion she expands her earlier explorations of what she calls “communicate capitalism”, a notion indicating the role of networked communication technologies in the advancing convergence of democracy and capitalism. By focussing on blogging and related practices of online disclosure, discussion and surveillance, she tries to access and unravel the current conjuncture of media, subjectivity and politics. The anecdote of whateverlife.com is used to illustrate what she considers as one of the key features of communicative capitalism: the emergence of so-called “whatever beings”. The term, introduced by Giorgio Agamben and further developed by Dominic Pettman in his fascinating book ‘Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age’, points at contemporary modes of belonging unbound by inscriptions of disciplinary identity. In Agamben’s words: “a being whose community is mediated not by any condition of belonging (being red, being Italian, being Communist) …but by belonging itself”. What matters is belonging, not that to which one belongs. Pending in limbo. At the same time, blogs and other personalized “participatory” media say: whatever happens to me matters – if only just for a second. Mattering matters, but only in and of itself. Convenience surpasses commitment – just leave your mark. This is what the popular blank word “whatever” (not coincidentally also the English title of one of Michel Houellebecq’s books) suggests: communication without communicability. In the networks of communicative capitalism, everything can be said, but all that is said merely serves as a contribution to its infinite flows of information and entertainment. What or who is irrelevant, as long as something is said (which is precisely what Pentagon’s “Message force multipliers” rely on). The only thing relevant is circulation itself.

“What could motivate whatever beings? What might move them? As Agamben conceives them, they seek nothing, they lack nothing. They co-belong without struggle or antagonism. It would seem, then, that they are not political beings at all; their being is a-political, beyond politics. They neither attack nor resist; they are neither inside nor outside. Perhaps it makes better sense to think of the politics of whatever beings in terms of their setting. They are moved and propelled; they circuit through contemporary networks”.

Caught in a Trap

The contemporary setting of electronically mediated subjectivity is one of infinite doubt and ultimate reflexivization. Our networks are reflexive, because we create, feed and sustain them. “We are producing the environment we inhabit, the connections that configure us. We provide the feedback that amplifies or ignores. We are configuring the world we inhabit, yet there are ever less what we desire but haven’t reached and ever more what we cannot escape yet still enjoy.“ Networked, participatory media let us stage and perform our own entrapment. Dean links this compulsive complicity to the psychoanalytic concept of “drive”, drawing heavily on the work of Lacan and Žižek. The latter writes, “drive is something in which the subject is caught, a kind of acephalous force which persists in its repetitive movement”. Drive circulates endlessly, round and round, producing satisfaction in the repetitive process of not reaching it. We enjoy our faillure, even if we think we don’t. What we enjoy is the circulation of affect that presents itself as communication – which is exactly what accrues from reflexive communication, from communication for its own sake. As the system draws us in, we become captured in our endless circulation, lost in our repetitive loop. Click. Click. Post. Post. Tweet. Tweet. Drive takes its force and pulsion from loss, the loss of “symbolic efficiency” (aka the collapse of the big Other), the term that Žižek (inspired by Lévi-Strauss) uses to designate the fundamental uncertainty accompanying the impossibility of anchoring and pinning down meaning. “We cannot know certainly; we cannot know adequately. But we can mobilize this loss, googling, checking Wikipedia, mistrusting it immediately, losing track of what we doing, going somewhere else. We are captured because we enjoy”. Now that the gaps of signification and desire are increasingly being filled in and closed off, we find ourselves complying with suffocating injunctions to enjoy, express, be real. And as we try to make sense of it all, go out looking for ourselves, in the brittle hope to pull together our fragmented identity and dispersed consciousness, we only get stuck in the holes around which we circulate. Drawn to these uncertainties, we inscribe ourselves in the images we see, the stories and theories we read. Dean relates this condition to the idea of the gaze – the gaze, however, not as the big Other of the “ego ideal” (the point from which one sees one’s actions as making sense) but precisely as the object of the drive. In this reading, the gaze refers to the subject’s entrapment in the field of the visible: “I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides” (Lacan). What one sees is always incomplete, in need of replenishment. We are aware that all of our actions and disclosures are being watched, followed, remembered – in ways that often exceed our ability to manage or control – but that’s precisely what moves us to keep on posting, confessing and expressing. At the same time the notion of the gaze also reminds us that “what one looks at is what cannot be seen”. In communicative capitalism, the gaze to which we make ourselves visible is a point hidden in an opaque and heterogeneous network (what Lacan calls “objet petit a”), rendering ourselves vulnerable to various forms of exploitation. This gaze refers “not to a specific person whom one imagines being seen by but rather to a more unsettling feeling of an excess disturbing one’s seeing, both in terms of what one sees and in one’s being seen… Lacking answers, ever more uncertain, we become mesmerized by our own looking, entranced by the reversal of looking for an object to looking at ourselves as objects, to becoming objects ourselves”.

“Because one is never sure how one is seen, one is never certain of one’s place in the symbolic order. How, exactly, are we being looked at? One never really knows who one is—despite all the cameras, files, media, and databases. Who one is in the sociosymbolic order is uncertain—and ever changing. The order is never fixed; it is in constant flux. The term for this flux and uncertainty is the decline in symbolic efficiency.”

Driven in circles

Social networks actually provide an effective response to the decline of symbolic efficiency. “Anxious before the gaze, before the disturbing inquiries and intrusions of unknow others, unsure about what to expect, about whether one is succeeding or failing, whether others are friends or foes, we build more reliable, apparently intimate networks”. And so we, the users, the whatever beings, are sucked deeper and deeper into the circuits of drive. Without stable points of symbolic identification, we incessantly oscillate between the imaginary and the Real, “crafting our ever-adaptable, morphing, identities even as they remain threatened and vulnerable to the success, presence, and enjoyment of others. Communicative capitalism commands us to enjoy, at the same time that it reminds us that we aren’t enjoying enough, as much, or as good as others are.” We move from one imaginary identity to another, never sure of how we appear because we don’t really know before whom we appear. Rather than following norms, we cycle through trends. Caught in the reflexive network, we lose the capacity for reflection – our networks are reflexive so that we don’t have to be. “The movement from link to link, the forwarding and storing and commenting, the contributing without expectation of response but still hoping of further movement (why else count page views?) comes down to nothing but circulation for its own sake.” The more we contribute, the more we surrender. As we share our thoughts and upload our videos, there are more opinions to read and images to watch, more responses to write and elements to mix ’n’ blend. So we get lost in our own exuberance: the continuous search for the information we need renders it perpetually out of reach. At the same time the reflexivity of complex networks leads to power law distributions and installs previously unseen dimensions of inequality. But still we believe that our actions can make a difference, infused by fantasies of abundance, inclusion, discussion, and participation (Žižek describes this kind of false activity with the term “interpassivity”). According to Dean, then, this circulation of infostreams is in essence depoliticizing, not because people don’t care or don’t want to be involved, but because we do. The possibilities of access, distribution, sharing and participation that networked communications imply, far from enhancing democratic governance or resistance, result in precisely the opposite: the post-political formation of communicative capitalism. Here Dean’s account differs from the one offered by the likes of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who also consider communication as capitalist production, but do see potential for political change. With Agamben she argues that communication has “detached itself from political ideals of belonging and connection to function today as a primarily economic form. Differently put, communicative exchanges, rather than fundamental to democratic politics, are the basic elements of capitalist production”.

“As multiple-recombinant ideas and images circulate, stimulate, they distract us from the antagonisms constitutive of contemporary society, inviting us to think that each opinion is equally valid, each option is equally liked, and each click is a significant political intervention. The deluge of images and announcements, enjoining us to react, to feel, to forward them to our friends, erodes critical-theoretical capacities – aren’t they really just opinions anyways, Feelings dressed up in jargon? Drowning in plurality, we lose the capacity to grasp anything like a system. React and forward, but don’t by any means think”.

Running on Empty

The loops and repetitions of the circuit of drive characterize the dynamics of the networks of communicative capitalism, the ways its flows capture subjects, energies and aspirations. Accompanying each repetition, each loop or reversal, is a little nugget of enjoyment, a smidgen of attention that attaches to it, making it stand-out from the larger flow before it blends back in. Enjoyment (or jouissance in Lacanian terms) is key here. We keep on contributing to the networks because we enjoy it (in fact, the open architecture of the internet enables and requires the capture of enjoyment insofar as it is premised on users’ contributions). Not that we like to admit to it: at the same time as we’re posting, browsing, skimming, we’re always imagining that we surely have something better to do: read a good book, clean the house, participate in a political rally. While fantasizing out loud, the necessary confrontation with drive is constantly suspended. “Confident in what we would prefer to do, if only we could, we overlook what we are actually doing. The fantasy of enjoyment covers over the fact that we are already enjoying, that we get off, just a little bit, in and through our multiple, repetitive, mediated interactions”. Moreover, the overall multiplicity of these interactions obscures their embeddedness in the communicative capitalism that makes them possible in the first place. That’s how blogs and social network platforms, situated in a logic of drive, function as “displaced mediators”, accessing and amplyfying the key features of communicative capitalism: the intensification of mediality in reflexive networks (communicating about communicating), the emergence and failed subjectivation of whatever beings (beings who belong but not to anything in particular), the circulation of affect (as networks generate and amplify spectacular effects). The very media practices we enjoy, that connect us to others appropriate and reassemble our longings (not for something we want but rather lack) into new forms of exploitation and control. What is too often idealized as the very form of freedom – reflexivity – is unveiled as a mechanism for the generation of inequality and capture, smoothing the paths of neoliberal capitalism. Even as globally networked communications provide tools and terrains of struggle, they make political change more difficult—and at the same time more necessary—than ever before. According to Dean, the blind faith in the transformative power of our networks, the believe that they are capable of changing politics just as they changed our economics, can only be explained if one thinks there is no politics other than the market. “This Lack or absence of the political is the hole around which networked communications circulate. Or, more precisely, this loss of a capacity to think the political circulates as drive.“ The open question Dean leaves us with is if we can develop media politics beyond communicative capitalism. How to break with and through the fantasies attaching us to communicative capitalism? Where to look for strategies that redirect and disrupt the loop of drive?

“Communicative capitalism is a formation that relies on imbalance, on the repeated suspension of narratives, patterns, identities, norms, etc. Under conditions of the decline of symbolic efficiency, drive is not an act; it does not break out of a set of given expectations because such sets no longer persist as coherent enchainments of meaning. On the contrary, the circulation of drive is functional for the prevention of such enchainments, enchainments that might well enable radical political opposition. The contemporary challenge, then, is producing the conditions of possibility for breaking out of or redirecting the loop of drive”.

Image: still taken from ‘Nam June Paik’s Fingerprints’ (Taly & Russ Johnson, 2006)

“Before being a conflict of classes or parties, politics is a conflict concerning the configuration of the sensible world in which the actors and the objects of these conflicts may appear. Politics is then this exceptional practice, which makes visible that which cannot be seen, which makes audible that which cannot be heard, which counts that which cannot be counted.”
– Jacques Rancière

It is not just a matter of “making political films”, but also of “making films politically”. With this dictum Jean-Luc Godard articulated a longstanding tension between politics and cinema. What is considered as problematical here has to do with the position from which one speaks, with speaking and letting speak, and with the medium that conveys it. Most of all, it has to do with the relations – social, cultural, economical – between people, in front and behind the camera, filming and being filmed, viewing and being viewed. Making cinema in a “political” way can never be about “subjecting” or “identification”, but should rather be about “subjectivation”. Likewise it’s never simply about delivering a “message”, but always about shaping new forms of visibility. One recent, powerful film that has the notion of the political at its very heart is Sylvain George’s Qu’ils reposent en révolte (des figures de guerre).

“Art is not political owing to the messages and feelings that it conveys on the state of social and political issues. Nor is it political owing to the way it represents social structures, conflicts or identities. It is political by virtue of the very distance that it takes with respect to those functions. It is political insofar as it frames not only works or monuments, but also a specific space-time sensorium, as this sensorium defines ways of being together or being apart, of being inside or outside, in front of or in the middle of , etc. It is political as its own practices shape forms of visibility that reframe the way in which practices,manners of being and modes of feeling and saying are interwoven in a commonsense , which means a “sense of the common” embodied in a common sensorium.”

The most avid theoretical explorer of the relationship between art and politics today is undoubtedly Jacques Rancière. For him, the politics of art plays itself out in the way in which new forms of visibility enter into politics’ own field of aesthetic possibilities. Indeed, there is an aesthetics at the core of politics: a configuration of times and spaces, of the visible and the invisible, of voice and noise, that defines both the place and the arena of the political as a form of experience. Politics has in itself nothing to do with the exercise of power or the struggle for power, but rather with the framing of a specific sphere of experience, the setting of objects posed as “common” and of subjects to whom the capacity is recognized to designate and discuss these objects. Politics, then, is essentially the conflict about the very existence of that sphere of experience, the reality of those common objects and the capacity of those subjects. The conflict resides mainly in the tension between the structured social body where each part has its place – what Rancière calls the “police” aspect of the political, the rational administration and control of social processes – and ”the part with no part” which unsettles this order on account of the principle of “universality” – what Etienne Balibar has named égaliberté – the principled “equality” of all men. It is precisely where verification of equality (really the condition required for being able to think politics) clashes with the established order of identification and classification, that the political has its terrain. The essence of politics resides in acts of subjectivation that separate society from itself by challenging the natural order of bodies in the name of equality and reconfiguring what Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible”- a system of coordinates defining modes of being, doing, making, and communicating that establishes the borders between the visible and the invisble, the audible and the inaudible, the sayable and the unsayable.

The great danger of our times, according to Rancière, is the contemporary shift in the aesthetics of politics: that what is called “consensus”. Consensus is what reduces politics to police. It does not simply mean the agreement of the political parties or the social partners about the common interests of the community. It means putting a ban on political subjectivation alltogether, by objectivizing the givens of any collective situation in such a way as they can no more lend themselves to a dispute. There is no more contestation over the givens of the situation, over the partition of the sensible, there is only debate over the technologies of management, the arrangements of policing, the configuration of those who already have a place and a stake, whose voice is already recognized as legitimate. There’s no doubt that the political is rapidly loosing ground today, giving way to a post-political, post-democratic arrangement of management and polic(y)ing, occupying the spaces of instituted democracy. Against this consensual order, which squeezes out the political bit by bit, the only way of resisting is staging dissensus. This doesn’t only imply conflicts of interests or ideas, but also that “there is a debate on the sensible givens of a situation, a debate on that which you see and feel, on how it can be told and discussed, who is able to name it and argue about it … It is about the visibilities of the places and abilities of the body in those places, about the partition of private and public spaces, about the very configuration of the visible and the relation of the visible to what can be said about it.”

“The notion of dissensus thus means the following: politics is comprised of a surplus of subjects that introduce, within the saturated order of the police, a surplus of objects. These subjects do not have the consistency of coherent social groups united by a common property or a common birth, etc. They exist entirely within the act, and their actions are manifestations of a dissensus; that is, the making contentious of the givens of a particular situation. The subjects of politics make visible that which is not perceivable, that which, under the optics of a given perceptive field, did not possess a raison d’être, that which did not have a name…. This … constitutes the ground for political action: certain subjects that do not count create a common polemical scene where they put into contention the objective status of what is ‘given’ and impose an examination and discussion of those things that were not ‘visible’, that were not accounted for previously.”

Politics is the struggle for one’s voice to be heard, always setting up dissensus and disrupting the police order by supplementing it with a ”part that has no part”. If police is concerned with the regulation of populations by assigning subjects to their proper place within the social order, seperating those who take part form those who are excluded, politics always involves the subjectivization of those who make a claim to participate in an order in which they have no part. A particular arena in this process of emancipation is taken up by the “sans-papiers”. It is precisely because the logic of police cause these people to exist as an entity – thus clashing with the logic of equality – that politics comes about. In Rancière’s terms, the entity of the sans-papiers is the part that has no part: included, but not belonging. They are the indivisible remainder of the transformation of democratic political struggle into the post-political procedure of constant negotiation and policing. Žižek writes: “Postmodern racism emerges as the ultimate consequence of the post-political suspension of the political in the reduction of the state to a mere police agent servicing the (consensually established) needs of the market forces and multiculturalist tolerant humanitarianism”. When social order is organized in this way, so that constitutive antagonisms and splits within the people are plainly denied, it’s a matter of radically cutting through this order of the visible and sayable. A political moment arises when those “who have no right to be counted as speaking beings make themselves of some account”, at the moment it is shown for all to see hat they “didn’t have the rights that they had” and “had the rights that they didn’t”.

Politics is therefore always disruptive, it emerges with the “refusal to observe the ‘place’ allocated to people and things (or at least, to particular people and things)”. This is why the political is at the heart of Sylvain George’s cinema; a body of work that stems from a refusal to stand by, a will to resist, and, most of all, a drive to turn noise into voice, to make the invisible(s) visible. If the political consists of the demand to be counted, named, and recognized, to receive a place in the order of being, then his films are giving voice to this claim – that of the “nouveaux damnés”, trapped between the rule and the exception: the stateless, the clandestine, the precarious. If politics, as Rancière maintains, is really about “the visibilities of places and abilities of the body in these places, about the partition of public and private spaces, about the very configuration of the visible and the relation of the visible to what can be said about it”, then George’s work is a much-needed intervention in the aesthetics of politics, brimming with urgency and singularity. After having seen Qu’ils reposent en révolte (des figures de guerre), his impressive first feature film portraying the situation of migrants in Calais over a period of three years, it’s hard to believe George only started making films in 2005. Still, the intention must have been there all along, in the back of his mind, all the way through his studies in philosophy and his experiences as a social worker. It’s in this intertwining of philosophical, socio-political and humanistic concerns that his cinematic endeavors are grounded. “The idea”, he says, “is to make films that take a stand and assert a political position, and at the same time not to separate content from form; to be formally demanding and to manage to define an own view and grammar as a filmmaker.”

“The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relation between the visible, the sayable and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle. It is the dream of an art that would transmit meanings in the form of a rupture with the very logic of meaningful situations. As a matter of fact, political art cannot work in the simple form of a meaningful spectacle that would lead to an awareness of the state of the world. Suitable political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification.“

According to Rancière, the effect of political art is always the object of a negotiation between opposites: the readability of the “message”, that threatens to tear apart the sensible form of art, and the radical uncanniness that threatens to destroy all political meaning. This exercise is always present in George’s formal language, which is full of ruptures and displacements, creating multiple games of temporality and spatiality, in his own words “space-time continuums where beings and things are fully restored to what they were, are, will be, could be or could have been”. Beyond the needs of narrative clarity, his focus is rather on an aesthetic of sensation, which tends to play on the material qualities of the medium. Changes in focus, speed, lighting and exposure, use of black & white tints, unusual angles and framing, long shots alternating with close-ups, and (in some of his films) the combination of different media (from Super-8 to DV and mobile phone): all these techniques are subtly put into the service of a certain defamiliarization and poetization, shaping the films as bodies of variating textures and intensities, loaded with intricate energies and arcane regions. While the images often ebb and flow between the figurative and the abstract, it’s the human body that is always present: rough faces, scorched hands, obscure figures. In this way, George’s work inscribes itself in a cinema with, in Nicole Brenez’ words, “a very elevated figural responsibility”; a cinema “capable of refusing physiological fatality, analysing figurative quadrates, discovering other frames and angles to view the body… a series of gestures whereby representation tears itself from itself so that, from a quantitative recording of the trace left by a body, the image becomes a speculative intervention on the body’s presence, its organic life, real needs, screaming and sometimes frenzied desires… As something that is simultaneously a trace, a reconstitution and a flickering, the figurative material appears in the state of a fetish, it is a sample, offering – or not – a hypothesis on being”. The body, after all, is an entirely political organism, craving for survival and recognition.

“Ce qui n’a jamais été vu, n’est pas reconnu”, Serge Daney once wrote. If what Rancière refers to as the police-aspect of the political – the rule governing the appearance of bodies in common space – focuses on the clear categorization of every individual, of every “visible” social unit, recognizing neither lack nor supplement, then the cinema of Sylvain George is an elementary form of resistance. By disturbing the dominant order of the visible and bear testimony to those who remain invisible and inaudible, a true anarchical act of emancipation is undertaken. Surely, we have seen images of “sans-papiers” before – in the news, in reportages that always seem to speak as authority – but never enough, hardly ever “right”. We see too many bodies without a name, too many figures who do not return the gaze we direct at them, who we are spoken about, without them given the chance to speak to us. George’s images make these silent bodies speak for themselves. Far away from any form of didacticism, what these images document is first and foremost an encounter between people, between different realities, in a indeterminant search and constant strive to make images possible that are, as Rancière has noted, “in phase with” the weight of emotions expressed, gestures uttered and words spoken. “For me”, George says, “cinema is a ‘means without an end’ – to paraphrase Agamben. The idea is to privilige the means to arrive at something that I don’t know myself. Starting for there, we are in the ‘demultiplication’ of worlds, rather than in a fixed world that tends to be folded on itself. By world, I mean that what constitutes the singularity of an individual. The objective is to shatter representations, otherwise we’re in the language of the ‘expert’, a language that reifies human beings and relations. There we’re also taking up the question of power. I claim the fact of not having an overhanging position. Yes, I provoke something in the sense that I have a camera and go meet with people, but it’s consideration I give them, in a relation of reciprocity and equality. This is what is eminently political: there we enter a world that opens up, where the borders become nomad.” Here we arrive, perhaps, at what Godard meant with “making films politically”. What is of importance here is installing relations between people other than the ones the dominating information system and police order prescribe, using modes of subjectivation that transform the aesthetic coordinates of the community, by fighting for what is the ultimate presupposition of politics: we are equal.

“Politics is gestures, cries, attitudes. This is what I think one sees in the film. We see in the film a moment in which bodies appear. There are words gushing out. There is a relation with the space which shatters itself. In general, in order to try to think about the relations between politics and aesthetics – not in the sense that it should be in the service of politics – what interests me is precisely the way in which the work of a filmmaker can be in phase with the weight of certain gerstures – be it the gesture of the revolt in the street, or the gesture of burning one’s fingers to prevent police identification. It’s something that is very important for me, the idea that the relation between politics and aesthetics is also the relation between the art form used by the individuals who struggle to change their conditions and the art form an artist applies himself, or tries to apply.”

All quotes (in grey) by Jacques Rancière. The last one is taken from a conversation with Sylvain George (translated from French). See below for video documentation. Also included are some recent interview with George (one featuring Archie Shepp, whose haunting rendition of ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’ closes ‘Qu’ils reposent en révolte’), and a streaming copy of ‘Ils nous tueront tous’, a short film George has made as part of ‘Outrage et rébellion’, a collective film project born as a reaction to the “Joachim Gatti affaire”. On 8 July 2009, Gatti, a young film director, was seriously injured by the police during a peaceful demonstration in Montreuil. A flash ball bullet hit him in the face and ruptured one of his eyes. Other contributors to the project (45 in total) are Lionel Soukaz, Jean-Marie Straub, Ange Leccia, Peter Whitehead, Robert Fenz, Marcel Hanoun, Philippe Garrel and Laura Waddington, amongst others.

— Qu’ils reposent en révolte (des figures de guerre) was part of the International Competition at FID Marseille 2010 —
PERIPHERIE.SYLVAIN GEORGE JACQUES RANCIERE .1
envoyé par soukaz

PERIPHERIE SYLVAIN GEORGE JACQUES RANCIERE.2
envoyé par soukaz

L’impossible / rencontre avec Sylvain George #1 from Independencia on Vimeo.

L’Impossible / Rencontre avec Sylvain George #2 from Independencia on Vimeo.

SYLVAIN GEORGE, ARCHIE SHEPP, ANDRÉ S. LABARTHE
envoyé par le_cent_quatre

Sylvain GEORGE – Réalisateur FID 2010 "QU'ILS REPOSENT.."
envoyé par Mumudemarseille

Sylvain George interviewed by Olivier Pierre (English translation, FID 2010)

The origin of the project?
These are the first images from a film I have been working on for the past four years, about migration policies in Europe and the social mobilizations they may set off. The idea is to try and give an account of the issues which I think are among the most crucial of our times. Indeed, issues related to immigration and the figure of the foreigner are perfect indicators to assess and question the state of our democracies, the building of public policies, the drawing up of their implementation procedures. At first, even though on paper the project already seemed substantial enough, it was supposed to be a two-part short film. Then, as I found myself facing the realities of the field, as I met people in Europe and Africa, the whole project expanded considerably. Now, there will probably be two feature-films. For instance, the film was supposed to start with the situation of migrants transiting in Calais, before showing other circumstances in Africa, Europe, … Initially, I had planned to stay in Calais for three months for that purpose. But because of the situations I discovered and the connections I developed with many people, I ended up staying for three years, through stays of various lengths, between July 2007 and January 2010. The “Calais part” gradually stood out and became independent from the rest of the film. It became a proper feature-film. It features many threads that will be drawn out, exploited and developed later on, in the second feature-film. The shooting of the latter is almost done, and the editing process is about to start.

What about the structure of the film, the editing?
The film is made of autonomous sequences, fragments that refer and correspond to each other, that intermingle, thus creating temporality and spatiality effects. Since the shooting took three years, you can feel the cycle of seasons, without it being necessarily set up in chronological order. The same applies for situations that may or may not be treated chronologically, without time or narration necessarily matching a homogeneous, linear and empty conception of time. Indeed, the correspondence, the poetic and dialectic tension set between situations, events, people or “patterns” philosophically meet the building of some history that is still very much pregnant, linear and marked by the myth of progress, and that tends to foreclose times and issues in some permanent overtaking. Politically speaking, it is about standing up, contesting these grey zones, these spaces or cracks like Calais standing somewhere between the exception and the rule, beyond the scope of law, where law is suspended, where individuals are deprived, stripped off their most fundamental rights. And that while creating, through some dialectic reversal, the “true” exceptional states. Space-time continuums where beings and things are fully restored to what they were, are, will be, could be or could have been. The question of redemption was redefined in the 20th century as a category that was’t religious, but rather political and aesthetical (Rosenzweig, Benjamin). Aesthetically speaking, I try to operate a rereading, and updating of allegory: neither baroque nor modern, but that I would call contemporary.

How was the shooting with migrants in Calais?
As a director, I follow a certain number of rules that are always evolving. First, I take the time to carefully set a frame as clearly as possible. I introduce myself, explain who I am, what I’d like to do, what kind of film it is. I spend time with people. I never film them without their knowing, nor do I steal images, etc. These rules, which are in no way dogmas, may seem simple and obvious. However, given what you see out there, they are simply revolutionary, they have to do with ethics and of course politics, Take Calais, for instance, as the film is set there. The city is a permanent film set. It is a place much exposed politically, where politics are obvious. As a result, there is always a film or still camera somewhere, a notepad… That goes from a student in journalism, to big-budget films like Welcome, or television crews, documentary directors… Generally, as regards prevailing cinematographic or journalistic practices, the end justifies the means. One should stop at nothing to get an image: befriending migrants, paying for interviews, hiding in the bushes.. My own conception of cinema and my position as an individual and a director are completely at odds with that, with such narrow-mindedness and ethnocentrism. Cinema isn’t an end in itself, it cannot just shut down on itself. It is an endless means to build a connection, a relationship to the world, to establish dialectic links with yourself and the world, and thus to assert your singularity. Cinema can introduce mobility with steadiness; break with determinism of all sorts, and set a profound movement of emancipation going. Standing by all these principles, I never had any problem with the migrants. Quite the opposite. When you build a relationship based if not on trust, at least on honesty and respect, you can really connect with people and film them, as well as facts and unexpected situations.

The film is deliberately descriptive, but it also uses some effects that give it its original form.
I think that the technique – and the camera is a technical tool – can allow to explore and develop the potentialities and virtualities within nature and mankind. Therefore you have to use all the resources your chosen medium – here, the camera – has to offer, to actualize those virtualities. They are never used for their own sake then, or as ends in themselves (an image for an image, an effect for an effect), as opposed to a countless number of films, especially those on immigration that have been really common lately, in which the filmed subject only becomes a pretext for symbolic experimentations and aesthetic experiments: an aestheticization of reality. An aestheticization of politics. But is rather according to the situations and subjects that you meet and film, to the way you perceive a context, an atmosphere, the feelings you might feel, that you find it a good idea to make use of such and such “technique”, such and such “effect”: play with the speed of frames, slow motions, accelerations, superimpositions, freeze frames etc.

Why did you choose again to shoot in black and white?
Because this allows me to work and to question the concepts of document, archive, preservation. Because doing so establishes a historical distance from displayed events that are in keeping with what’s very important, what’s indeed very red hot news. A dialectic of near/far therefore unfolds and established itself. The more you move things away, the closer they actually get. Black and white also conjures up an aesthetic and poetic dimension fully relevant to the film. The dimension is akin to elegy, although there are some nuances here awaiting further specification. However cohesive as a whole, you’ll find various types of black and white in the film, allowing to generate shifts and weave metaphors. For instance, you’ll get some overexposed sequences where whites are burnt out and black very deep. This again is consistent with numerous testimonies given by migrants; in these, they repeatedly refer to having felt like survivors, as though burnt out, scorched, consumed from within. Obviously, you also think of the “burning fingers” scene, which graphically shows that those migrants being literally “branded” like cattle by the current immigration policy beyond a mere image or metaphor.

Other choices are obvious as well, like the absence of commentary, the only voices being those of the migrants and that of the State.
Indeed, in no way I want to make a didactic film, or to treat this issue they way a journalist would, by enumerating facts and giving so many explanations. I seek to illustrate, without being comprehensive, some realities which seem crucial to me; this I do via images, sounds, words which spring out with tremendous force. In order to do so, I endeavor to be as available and attentive to what may happen as I can possibly be. I may have a few hunches before getting on the field, but these are swiftly made irrelevant during shooting and then editing. My ambition is primarily to learn and comprehend what’s taking place. So I choose to be on the lookout for persons, situations, places, and to be ready to record and welcome anything coming my way, be it testimonies, actions, objects, feelings… For the first time I have also used voice-over in the film, not so much to bring extra factual info but rather to generate distance, to play on other layers of temporalities, to open up the times and film to anything that may go through it, that may pierce it and shatter it, whether old or new. Thus, two or three times in the film, in some discreet, imperceptible way, you can hear a “voice from outside”, that of Valérice Dréville actually, who, in a murmuring voice, repeats some words actually uttered by migrants. At some other points, she speaks a poetic sentence as an echo to the second quote that concludes the film, inspired by political slogans heard during demonstrations of “sans-papiers” in the U.S. back in 2006.
Lastly, during the final credits, you’ll hear some “singing from the Outside”, in this case Archie Shepp’s voice, humming Strange Fruit. Potential links with bygone times are therefore suggested by the cover of this very eloquent, powerful song, and by the very person that sings it. The fact that this was recorded with the actual camera used for the shooting, like all the other elements present in the film, underlines the free-jazz dimension of the whole film.

more interviews:
www.fragil.org (FR)
www.mouvement.net (FR)