[DEBATE] : An Interview with Retort collective

[Andrej Grubacic]

An Interview with Retort
by David Evans


Probably the most infamous image to emerge so far from the current war in
Iraq was taken in Abu Ghraib prison in 2003 - a hooded prisoner on a
'plinth' seems to be the recipient of electric shock torture by US forces.
This amateur photograph has now been reproduced globally in many contexts.
The Economist used it on a front cover with the imperative caption 'Rumsfeld
must resign'. On anti-war posters it was combined with the question 'Is this
your freedom?' And you have selected it for your frontispiece, accompanied
by an extended quotation from the 17th Century English poet John Milton:

And reassembling our afflicted Powers
Consult how we may henceforth most offend
Our Enemy, our own loss how repair,
How overcome this dire calamity,
What reinforcements we may gain from Hope,
If not what resolution from despare.

                                      Paradise Lost, Book 1

Could you explain the significance of this pairing?

RETORT: Our pairing of Paradise Lost with the "wired Christ" in Abu Ghraib
reflects the central claim of the book, that the essential task of
politicalthinking and writing at this moment is to confront the strange
atavism of the new world situation – a seeming brute return to the 17th
century Wars of Religion familiar to Milton, twinned with an intensified
deployment of the apparatus of the production of appearances. The U.S. in
particular feels a double  threat, first, to the monopoly of the means of
mass destruction, and second, to its management of the image-world – in both
cases from non-state actors of various kinds. The events of September 11th
2001 were, we believe, a defeat for the imperial state at the level of
spectacle (to which, by the way, its managers have been unable to stage an
answer – not that they haven't tried.) Likewise, if the recorded collapse of
the World Trade Center wordlessly proposed – revealed, actually – the
vulnerability of the US heimat, then the global circulation of the Abu
Ghraib snapshot struck a parallel blow at the ideological claim of the
United States to be the guarantor of "human rights", "freedom", and so on.
Now, we further insist that the attack on the towers by a neo-Leninist
vanguard of Islamic militants was a symbolic (but nonetheless real) defeat
not only for the capitalist hegemon but also for those who count themselves
(Retort included) enemies of capitalist globalization - – for the "movement
of movements" such as it is. In that sense, we intend "afflicted powers" to
refer ambiguously to this Janus-faced defeat. We appreciate that, in
identifying with Milton's resonant phrase, we belong to the party of Satan,
as he is summoning the rebel angels to storm heaven.



Photographs are used discretely throughout the book. Sometimes you seek
dissonance between image and text - a grim, contemporary photograph of the
Israeli separation wall and a sardonic reference to 'Making the Desert
Bloom', an important motif in Israeli propaganda from the fifties onwards
(in the chapter on US / Israeli relations called 'The Future of an
Illusion'). And sometimes there is a surprising choice of image – a colour
photograph of an Avon lady testing deodorant samples with Indians in Brazil
(in your concluding chapter, 'Modernity and Terror'). But mainly you seem to
be using interesting but unexceptional press photographs, given
straightforward descriptive captions like 'Oil spill, Nembe Creek, Niger
Delta, Nigeria, August, 2004' (in the chapter 'Blood for Oil?). What
thinking informed your picture editing?

RETORT:  The selection and placement and captioning of the photographs was
very important to us, and we thank you for noticing. We had the help of a
photographer friend, Ed Kashi, whose work in Kurdistan and Nigeria some of
your readers will know. He was responsible for the cover as well as the shot
of the Nembe Creek oil spill you mention.
Of course we were alive to the problem of choosing images for a book
critical of the current image-regime, and we are not such fools as to
believe that we could elude utterly the mills of the spectacle. Each image
was chosen to perform a certain kind of work on its own; none was intended
as "illustration". We should also say that the universal (that is, from all
points on the political/cultural compass) opinion that image has somehow
trumped or superseded word in the brave new media world strikes us as
nonsense. To the contrary, never has the image-array been so much auxiliary
to scripts of one kind or another, typically written by modernity's
specialists in solitication – copywriters, public relations hacks, human
resources officers, soundbite artists, poets of the advertisement – and
delivered into a mediascape in which language itself has been flattened and
truncated. One might incidentally mention the very heavy cost of reproducing
images in books these days, thanks to the neoliberal regime of intellectual
property in which image libraries have become major "profit centres". The
fees charged by Corbis, Getty, etc, for the images in Afflicted Powers –
well under a dozen, and some half-page – amounted to several thousand
dollars.


German poet and playwright Heiner Müller wrote that to use Brecht without
changing him was a betrayal. I could imagine Retort saying the same thing
about Guy Debord and the Situationist International – materials to be
continuously reworked rather than revered. How, then, have you adapted the
Situationist notions of the spectacle and the colonization of everyday life
to understand the present conjuncture?

RETORT: We assert in the opening chapter that our intention is to turn the
two notions – "the society of the spectacle" and "the colonization of
everyday life" – back to the task for which they were originally deployed,
namely, to understand the powers and vulnerabilities of the capitalist
state. We set out to grasp the logic of the present moment, in the aftermath
of the events of September 11, 2001 and the seeming historical regression of
US statecraft. Specifically, we asked ourselves about the possibility of
real interaction between the political economy of neoliberalism, the warfare
state, and new developments in the realm of the image. To put it in a single
phrase – a dense phrase but one which captures the analytic linkages – we
aimed to explore "the contradictions of military neoliberalism under
conditions of spectacle". We remain agnostic about the possibilities of
destabilization in a system that increasingly depends on image-management.
The spectacle accelerates as a result of the falling rate of illusion; the
disenchantment of the image-world may follow. In any case, we take spectacle
in a minimal, matter-of-fact way to characterize this new stage of
accumulation of capital. Not just a piling up of images, as media studies
would have it, but in Debord's sense of a social relationship between people
that is mediated by representations. Crucially, our analysis depends on the
complementary notion of the colonization of everyday life, and of subjection
to an endless bombardment of brands, logos, slogans, consumption-motifs,
invitations to feel happy. Globalization turned inward, as it were. We argue
in Afflicted Powers, then, that globalization is producing "weak states"
across the world economy, and "weak citizenship" at the spectacular centre,
the result of the thinning of the texture of daily life. Weak citizenship
may be optimal for the demands of the market, but not when the state has to
embark on a major round of primitive accumulation, as we argue the US
imperial state attempted in Iraq. Never before have politics been conducted
in the shadow of defeat both on the ground and at the level of the
spectacle.


Situationist writing and picture captioning frequently involved the use of
pre-modern literary quotations for various reasons – to wake up readers,
perhaps, or to escape the tyranny of the present. To what extent did this
tactic inspire your work?

RETORT:  Of the quartet of authors of Afflicted Powers two are historians,
and the other two are historically minded. Perhaps it is just the
déformation of the historian to raid the lumber-rooms of the past. But
frankly we cannot imagine having embarked on such a project without the
assistance of Rosa Luxemburg, Randolph Bourne, or Hannah Arendt. And unless
Nietzsche were to hand, a critique of modernity would be far more difficult
to frame. Edmund Burke and Thomas Hobbes were an essential part of the
analytic toolkit. Milton, who helped to forge a radical, political idiom in
the revolutionary decades of the 17th century, gave us our title, and was an
abiding inspiration, not least because his great poem was written in the
face of defeat. And of course the indelible line of Tacitus, "They make a
desert and call it peace" speaks to us across the centuries. These were
words he put in the mouth of a Gaelic warrior on the eve of battle against a
Roman legion in the Scottish highlands, at the far north-western edge of the
empire. We need Tacitus to remind us what kind of peace is meant by the
masters of war  – the peace of the "peace process" , the peace of
cemeteries. Much of the work of the late Pierre Vidal-Naquet, the French
historian of ancient Greece and tribune of the people, was concerned with
state violence and the assassination of memory, which is central to the
spectacle. He was inspired by a line of Chateaubriand he found transcribed
in his father's diary before deportation to Auschwitz: "Nero triumphs in
vain, as elsewhere in the empire Tacitus has already been born."


The Situationist idea of détournement never appears in Afflicted Powers. Yet
the events of September 11th could be considered détournement in at least
two senses. Sense 1: literal détournement, since the hard working French
word can mean, amongst other things, aeroplane hijacking. Sense 2:
reactionary détournement. That is, three elements that have been associated
with Americanism since the 1920s – aeroplanes, skyscrapers and mass
communications – were taken by Atta and his accomplices and re-combined. The
resulting message may not have been anti-Americanist exactly, but it was
certainly anti-American. What do you think?

RETORT:  Détournement, indeed. Remember that the kind of planes which Atta
and his crews refunctioned as missile-bombers to strike at the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon actually originated as weapons of mass destruction.
The Boeing Corporation took the old bombers used to create firestorms over
European and Japanese cities during the Second World War and redesigned them
for purposes of mass tourism and corporate air travel in the 1960s. Atta
himself, as we note in the chapter on revolutionary Islam, was an urban
planner (in Cairo and Aleppo) disgusted with the disneyfication he saw
coming in the wake of the failure of secular national development in Egypt
and the Third World. He was right; Dubai is one face of neoliberal
globalization, megaslums another. At the same time it is necessary to
acknowledge al-Qaida's love affair with image-politics. Even in its
rejection of the West, the Islamic vanguard displays a mastery of the
virtual and of the new technics of dissemination. This is one aspect of the
current moment's mixture of atavism and new-fangledness that those in
opposition to both Empire and Jihad, two virulent mutations of the Right,
must take very seriously. The issue, in fact, is not ultimately America or
Americanism, but modernity itself.



-- 
Andrej Grubacic

http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/andrejgrubacic