Diagonal Thoughts

“Russell Brand may have started a revolution”, a headline reads. “Brand nails the political zeitgeist”, says another. Why is it that Brand’s recent interview on BBC’s Newsnight sparked so much attention? A video of his discussion with Jeremy Paxman went viral overnight, popping up all over the global infosphere. Why is it that so many who otherwise would not even think of striking up a conversation about the necessity or possibility of change, seem to get all worked up when seeing a “trivial man” like Brand call for revolution? After all, he is not saying anything we don’t already know: indeed, the world is full of dark shadows, terrible injustices, growing social and economic inequalities; yes, in the name of the crisis, all aspects of life have increasingly been submitted to the laws of the market; yes, the notion of liberal democracy is hollowed out by an excessive diet of cynicism, corruption and indifference; surely, many of us feel afflicted with a wearying syndrome of apathy, impotence and nihilism; and yes, this sense of political disappointment has been appropriated equally by right-wing and left-wing discourse, the first driven by outright rage, the latter steeped in dreary melancholy. These are not trivial matters, nor, by any means, should they be trivialized. But isn’t this just what is happening, Paxman seems to suggest, when they are being taken up by a buffoon – he who can never resist a joke, he who lacks good taste and refinement – who is really “out of place” and “out of line” when trying to voice political concerns? But perhaps what strikes us is not what the celebrity fool is “inexpertly” saying for our own amusement, but precisely the out-of-placeness of his voicing, and the condescending attitude with which it is being condemned.

Perhaps, we too, are tired of hearing how unrealistic and utterly naive it is to try to think about change without being able to put forward a well-defined alternative. Perhaps we are just affected by the proclamation that this man, however vain he may be, just doesn’t know either. And perhaps we are slightly tantalized by the thought that it is not the point of knowing where to go, as long as we dare to take a leap of faith, led us lead by what the act itself holds as possibility. For how long now have we been hearing the rhetoric of illusion and incapacity coming from the mouths of the so-called specialists? “Forgive them, for they don’t don’t know what they do” is the never ending mantra preached by those who, yesteryear, claimed to know what was needed to break with the dominant ideological illusions, and today, complain that there are no ideologies left to guide the quest for change. To take action, so the argument goes, only makes sense when there is a sense of direction. If there is no direction, there is no point in mobilizing for change. It implies that “realistic” and “democratic” politics can only be a matter of creating alliances, setting out strategies and managing common economic interests, all univocally in the name of a non-conflictual principle of community or identity. That is what the political horizon of the thinkable is today, defined by the logics of what is called capitalism and liberal democracy. Without a view on another future, we can only keep circulating, or as the police always says in case of disturbances: “move along!” It really means that change can be nothing else but moving in place.

But do we really need what Badiou has called “the existence of the inexistent” to give sense to political processes? Is framing a future not part of (political) invention itself rather than being its condition of possibility? In the words of Rancière: “if people are moving today we don’t quite know what we are moving towards, which perhaps obliges us to shift the question into the logic of what we said earlier about the fact of ‘coming after’ – namely that, perhaps now more than ever, the meaning or direction [sens] of the action is given by the potentialities of the action itself.” We have seen in recent years how sentiments that were deemed useless and senseless have led to a renewed trust in political action. What was important in these cases was not so much the attempt to unveil the illusions and laws of the system in name of a better future, but precisely the emergence of a new collective sentiment, based on a certain intolerance with the dominant order and, at the same time, of a communal trust amongst those who are searching for a way out, unsure of their orientation. Perhaps this is what is appealing in Brand’s plea for “revolution”: not the spectacle of a clown whose only concern should be to amuse others, deliriously ranting about what is obviously not his to talk about, but the recognition of a “trivial man” who speaks out about what is, more than anything else, ours to say and do. Perhaps the court’s jester is, after all, not betraying our grievances, but urging us to all play the fools at the king’s table.

“There is a whole history of idiocy as a figure apt to blur the game of explanations and strategies. Of course Dostoyevsky comes to mind and there is something of Myshkin in the Valuska of Wreckmeister Harmonies. Dostoyevsky constructed the figure of the idiot as an antidote to the progressivist-socialist view of history that he saw emerging. In contrast to Béla Tarr, who arrived after the historical sequence of ‘real socialism’, he sought in the figure of the idiot to preserve a figure of refusal, to save it from the disaster of the system. The question that traverses Béla Tarr films and is emblematized in these figures of idiocy is to know whether one draws from the communist failure a simple lesson of the nihilist equivalence of everything with everything else or whether one extracts figures of refusal out of nihilism. What appeared clearly at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc is that the supposed ‘ideological cement’ linking individuals to a system of domination was nothing other than people consenting to pay lip service to the official lie. Against this consent to the lie, Béla Tarr sets figures of idiocy that do not accept that the promise of words is only consent to lying and the madman that does not renounce the promise of harmony present in the celestial system. This attitude can be defined as proto-political, in the sense that through their stubbornness these characters radicalize a decision prior to all political action – the decision to verify through one’s own actions that not everything is a lie. But it scarcely makes sense to oppose this ‘stupid’ stubbornness to the intelligence of a strategic aim. Only things that actually stand opposed really ought to be set against one another. And the complement that Valuska lacks that would allow a real political subject to emerge is not some strategic aim. All that he stands opposed to is general cowardice and petty individual arrangements.”

“If we leave the context of Béla Tarr’s films, we come across an analogy in the arguments used by strategists of anticapitalist combat against the ‘indignant’, who are ‘without project’. The problem is that these strategists don’t have any project either. What they do have is imply the ability to explain endlessly that a project is required. The opposition is in fact an opposition between two sorts of obstinacy: the obstinacy to turn around in the circle of explanation, which is part and parcel of the consensus: and the obstinacy to mark a distance that at least conserves the possibility of dissensus.”
– Jacques Rancière in conversation with Oliver Davis, 2013

“The police are not the law that interpellates the individual (the “hey, you there” of Louis Althusser) unless we confuse the law with religious subjection. The police are above all a certitude about what is there, or rather, about what is not there: “Move along, there’s nothing to see.” The police say there is nothing to see, nothing happening, nothing to be done but to keep moving, circulating; they say that the space of circulation is nothing but the space of circulation. Politics consists in transforming that space of circulation into the space of the manifestation of a subject: be it the people, workers, citizens. It consists in refiguring that space, what there is to do there, what there is to see, or to name. It is a dispute about the division of what is perceptible to the senses.”
– Jacques Rancière, Aux bords du politique (1998)

“We would do better to ask what is a subjective or implicit presupposition: it has the form of ‘Everybody knows .. .’. Everybody knows, in a pre philosophical and pre-conceptual manner … everybody knows what it means to think and to be. … As a result, when the philosopher says ‘I think therefore I am’, he can assume that the universality of his premisses – namely, what it means to be and to think … – will be implicitly understood, and that no one can deny that to doubt is to think, and to think is to be …. Everybody knows, no one can deny, is the form of representation and the discourse of the representative. When philosophy rests its beginning upon such implicit or subjective presuppositions, it can claim innocence, since it has kept nothing back – except, of course, the essential – namely, the form of this discourse. It then opposes the ‘idiot’ to the pedant, Eudoxus to Epistemon, good will to the overfull understanding, the individual man endowed only with his natural capacity for thought to the man perverted by the generalities of his time. The philosopher takes the side of the idiot as though of a man without presuppositions.
(…) At the risk of playing the idiot, do so in the Russian manner: that of an underground man who recognises himself no more in the subjective presuppositions of a natural capacity for thought than in the objective presuppositions of a culture of the times, and lacks the compass with which to make a circle.”
– Gilles Deleuze, Difference and repetition (1968)

“Inscribed in the militant and nationalist pretensions of the term ‘third cinema’ is a certainty which simply cannot be spoken anymore. A certainty of place, location and subjectivity. What now characterizes the ‘truths’ of cinema, politics and theory is uncertainty.“
– John Akomfrah, Black Audio Film Collective (1988)

Uncertainty. Radical uncertainty. In economic theory the term refers to a lack of knowledge concerning the set of alternative outcomes of a choice and of alternative options for choice. It indicates a situation in which the possible states of the world cannot be imagined. Is this what we are experiencing right now? A predicament based on the idea that there is only one viable option left, that the choice has already been made, that the outcome is out of our hands? Is this a time for dreaming, dreaming the impossible, refusing what is refused, so to reshape desire and reorient hope?

In his talk Akomfrah was not invoking this particular conception of uncertainty. His statement corresponds to a time when notions of subjectivity and location were being thorougly re-examined, leading to the long debates on multiculturalism and identity politics that are still dominating our political landscape today (the “culturalisation of politics” that Slavoj Žižek and others have criticized). What was at stake at the end of the 1980’s, particularly in the discursive practices in the UK and US, was the coming to terms with the rise of so-called new subjectivities, identities and ethnicities, as well as the kinds of racism and xenophobia that had grown in response to them. For those living “diasporic” lives, there was the feeling that what Akomfrah called the certainty of subjectivity that once characterized the discourse around “third cinema”, this wide range of militant film practices mainly associated with the liberation struggles in subaltern regions, had given way to a non-unitary vision of subjectivity, one in constant flux, never complete, always in the process of becoming. The conception of cultural identity in terms of a shared culture and history that informed the various manifestations of “third Cinema” and played a vital role in the post-colonial struggles, was increasingly met with an alternative interpretation, focusing on an identity living with and shaped by, rather than despite of, “difference”. Soon terms such as “hybridization” and “creolisation” teamed up with the jargon that claimed the prefix “post”: postmodernity, postidentity, posthumanity. The notion of “heterogeneous” identity has of course been countered with vigorous critique, especially in view of the Benetton-style commodification of “difference” and the identity-consumerism promoted by the liberal-pluralist version of multiculturalism, but some have also been looking for affirmative interpretations. In a rapidly changing world, so the argument goes, where worldviews are crumbling, bodies circulating, old identities dissolving and new connections arising, the question is no longer to know who we are, but what we want to become. It is no longer solely a matter of living with the past, but also of imagining the future. Or, in Foucault’s terms: we need to refuse what we are, and imagine what we could be.

It is in this discursive context, concerned with the unsettling interplay between being and becoming, past and future, sameness and difference, that the work of Black Audio Film Collective has to be situated. “A diasporic cinema”, as Reece Auguiste has written, “which has a multiplicity of configurations, of identities and histories, of rewriting visual styles.” Kobena Mercer called this form of dialogue a “’syncretic’ dynamic which critically appropriates elements from the master-codes of the dominant culture and ‘creotizes’ them, disarticulating given signs and rearticulating their symbolic meaning. The subversive force of this hybridizing tendency is most apparent at the level of language itself where creoles, patois and black English decentre, destabilize and carnivatize the linguistic domination of ‘English’ – the nation-language of master-discourse – through strategic inflections, reaccentuations and other performative moves in semantic, syntactic and lexical codes”. The interstitial experience of diaspora and hybridity is put forward as a productive and even “subversive” space, in which possibilities still lie open, where awareness is still fully in the making and has not yet become solidified. It is a space of uncertainty, where the relation between sense and sense is unhinged and unsettled, where the dialogue between past and present, between the time of utterance and the space of memory, is unfinished or severed, leaving room for revision and initiation; a space that allows one “to think through and move across established categories and levels of experience: blurring boundaries without burning bridges” (Braidotti). It can also be considered as a space of marginality and minority. Not a minority as a category that is differentiated and defined by the majority, but as a process of becoming, a zone of indiscernibility (Gilles Deleuze). And not a marginality one wishes to loose or surrender as part of moving into the centre, but rather as a site one clings to, because it offers the possibility of radical perspectives from which to imagine new worlds (Bell Hooks). The margins, as the motor of active processes of becoming, taking place in the uncertain space between multiplicities.

What shape could an account of this becoming take? “Thinking in movement”, according to Cyrille Offermans, is what characterizes the “essay”, which he sees as a “product of uncertain times”. The essay, he says, is the report of a journey without preconceived maps or goals, a form of inquiry that is not in search for the one and only Truth, but for a sincerity of relative and tentative truths that are bound to a certain location in time and space. But what is the location one is speaking from? Rosi Braidotti has stressed that the process of becoming ought to be grounded in a “politics of location” (a term she borrowed from Adrienne Rich), in a “situated knowledge” (a term coined by Donna Haraway) as opposed to the universalistic nature of statements. “In its political applications the politics of location determines one’s approach to time and history. The sense of location, for me, has to do with countermemory, or the development of alternative genealogies. In other words, it means that it does make a difference to have the historical memory of oppression or exclusion, rather than being the empirical referent for a dominant group… The politics of location functions as a strategy of resistance.” A location then as an embedded and embodied memory, as a set of counter-memories and genealogies activated against the grain of dominant representations, as part of a passage between the no longer and the not yet, between letting go and becoming “other”. It is easy to see why the so-called “essay”, in cinema and elsewhere, is taken up as the ultimate figuration of this space of transformation and uncertainty: as an unclassifiable category that continues to grope for its own position and form, it is well suited to the exploration of dislocated cartographies of location. Writing about the work of Chris Marker, Claude Lanzmann and others, Jacques Rancière proposed another term: “the struggle for the appropriation of forms”, he writes, is what characterizes the “political fictions of the real”, that he opposes to the “real of fiction” which “ensures the mirror recognition between the audience in the theaters and the figures on the screen, and between the figures on the screen and those of the social imaginary”. Rather than attesting to the real, the fictions of the real problematize what is given as such, and in doing so shatter the relations between real and fictional, past and present, History and histories, the individual and the collective. In a time when the “real” goes by largely unchallenged, it is up to politics and art alike to produce “fictions”, undo the connections between signs, images, spaces and times, that frame that existing sense of reality, and instead propose new configurations of the visible and the thinkable.

Memory too is a work of fiction, an arrangement of relations between one time and another, one place and another, between what is seen and said, between what has been done and what can be done. Especially for those whose history has been denied, excluded, silenced, for those whose past is determined by “an absence of ruins”, it is not a matter of preserving memory, but rather of creating it. It is not a matter of claiming a place within the continuity of history, but of evoking its gaps and discontinuities and questioning its dominant representations. Before being able to let go of fixed or forged identities, it is necessary to recreate, “fictionalise” them (in an “act of fabulation”, as Deleuze would say). It does not involve overcoming the past in order to live in the present, but owning the past in order to overcome the present. What memory, in this sense, connects with is not a static holding stock of past experiences, but a continuously recomposing configuration of the past and the present, the present and the absent. Refering to Deleuze’s “minoritarian” interpretation, Braidotti describes how memory, in stringing together these virtual possibilities in an unstable fashion, works to destabilize identity: “Like a choreography of flows or intensities that require adequate framing in order to compose into a form, memories require empathy and cohesion between the constitutive elements. It is like a constantly reshuffling that yearns for the moment of sustainable balance or expression, before they dissolve again and move on.” Identity is always retrospective, according to Braidotti: it is a map of where one has already been, but no longer is. The cartographies need to be redrafted constantly, as a set of steps in an ever changing itinerary, a constant becoming that isn’t going anywhere, at least not anywhere in particular. It is this in-between that the work of John Akomfrah and Black Audio Film Collective engages with: these undetermined spaces of uncertainty and contingency where identities and identifications are unsettled and reordered. In a time of moralistic depolitisation, when politics is increasingly identified with the “self” of a community, when our relation to the “other” can only seemingly be one of contempt or compassion, reviewing their work reminds us that we need to let go of the idea of uncertainty as a liability, and start validating it as a requisite for active imagination and imaginative action, to create spaces of invention and dissension where new forms of visibility of the common can be shaped. Politics, according to Rancière, is always a matter of putting other worlds in the same world: a politics of emancipation which is ultimately a politics of the self as an other.