As forces clash in Tripoli amidst conflicting proclamations and general confusion, it seems an opportune moment to review my friend Raoul de Lange’s photo-journalism instillation, entitled Mug Shots. Raoul’s  project, completed as the exam exhibition portion of his photojournalism degree from the Royal Art Academy in The Hague, is noteworthy for its uncompromising and provocative iconoclasm: Raoul did not himself take a single photograph for this, his graduation project in photojournalism. Despite or because of this, Raoul’s exhibition was awarded the Paul Schuitema Prijs for photography and graphic design, and has now been nominated for the Steenbergen Stipendium, awarded annually to a student from one of the five accredited photography programs in the Netherlands for general excellence. The work has undeniably hit a live nerve, and rightfully so.

Mug Shots is simple in its conception and complex in its ramifications, both aesthetic and political. Raoul co-opted images of violence from the various revolutionary uprisings of the “Arab Spring,” most of them appropriated from new technology sites such as YouTube and Twitter, and reduced these images to pixels before blowing the new, tweaked images back up. The result is a highly abstract -and strangely beautiful- grid of color blocks with no discernible relation to the original images of atrocity from which they sprung. Raoul then transferred these abstract images to t-shirts, pillow cases and coffee mugs, creating a sort of boutique emporium within the gallery in which these various commodities could be bought and sold. (Quite literally: the mugs were sold for six euros, the shirts for seventeen, and the pillowcases for fifteen.) Small tags on the commodities displayed the original, gruesome picture from which each image sprung; additionally, a video display of shifting colors could be transformed, by pushing a prominent red button, into video footage of streetside carnage in Libya and elsewhere. The result is a shockingly literal enactment of the means through which revolutionary violence from “somewhere else” is mediatized and disseminated on a global scale as, essentially, a shock commodity.

The original run of Raoul’s show has now closed, but the exhibition will be repeated from September 3rd through October 30th at the Netherlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam. Meanwhile, the video portion of the instillation will be included in an exhibition at the Vrije Academia in the Hague, on the subject of “War photography and conflict ten years after 9/11,” which will run from September 10th through October 30th. I encourage anyone in the Netherlands to check it out. Meanwhile, further stills from Raoul’s show, along with the text of a short review article which I composed about it, are available after the jump.

Still Shot: Mug Shots

Mug Shots: A User’s Manual

People look, and take sight, take seeing, for life itself. We build on the basis of papers and plans. We buy on the basis of images.

                        -Henri Lefebvre

What place for art in a world which feeds off image consumption as commodity spectacle? This question, which has occupied artists and thinkers since the beginning of the twentieth century, is of particular relevance to photojournalism. In a hyper-mediatized culture which is always already transforming event into sign, sign into spectacle, and society into a collection of passive, alienated spectators, in what way can the artist still draw attention to real events without transforming these into the merely ‘hyperreal’ of endless simulation?

Mug Shots responds to this question with two paradoxical yet profoundly accurate suggestions: intimacy and iconoclasm. Intimacy, through a denial of the illusory distance between lens and event, audience and art object; iconoclasm, through the simultaneous participation in, and rejection of, the frenzied dissemination of images as immersive hypermediality. In the process, the instillation formulates both critique and auto-critique: drawing attention to the spectacularization of violence by reproducing the violence of spectacle, as spectacle.

There is no outside space. Documentary photography traditionally assumes the existence of a critical distance between camera and object, gallery-goer and documentary ‘trace.’ Mug Shots rejects this rhetorical distance as illusory, asserting our participation in the object or event under consideration, our implication as viewers. This is to deny the very notion of an objective ‘outside.’ Our consumption of the image effects the image.

Paradoxically, the greatest effect is an eradication of affect. The ever-accelerating proliferation of data, image and stimuli short-circuits our ability to process what we observe; the hyper-expansion of digital networks overloads our neural networks. As a result, both cognitive and sensible faculties shut down: we are no longer able to ‘make sense’ of images, nor to authentically sense them.

Mug Shots reacts to this dilemma, first, by rejecting visuality: obscuring immediate access to the image in order to draw attention to the processes underlying image consumption. Secondly, it responds to the rapid transformation and distribution of event as icon by itself partaking of this commodifying process. This is itself a natural consequence of the lack of an ‘outside.’ With no exterior space from which to stage critique, Mug Shots instead enacts critique by entering into and intensifying the processes it seeks to criticize–in effect, a form of mimicry.

The sensory unease with which one confronts the installation has to do with the success of this mimetic tactic. Mug Shots perfectly simulates the means through which late capitalism transforms every event into a sign to be distributed–itself already a form of simulation. By redoubling this (dis)similitude, it brings to light the ironic tension underlying the logic of commodification, becoming more real than what it real. If the current age is one of intensive hyperreality, this is intensification on steroids: hyper-hyperreal.

Mug Shots is both confrontational and claustrophobic; it does not leave us with many choices as to how to act. In effect, there are two: refusal, or complicity. Faced with the shock-tactic of violence marketed as literal commodity, the viewer can either embrace the new ‘hot’ product, or else retreat into passive isolation. But the transformation of real atrocity into a boutique emporium for consumers in search of distraction is no more than the literal enactment of what is actually already the case. And this, again, perfectly simulates the logic of late capitalism, in which ‘freedom’ is only ever the choice of what to buy.

Mug: Mug Shots

As I happened to be in England this past weekend, a lot of people have been asking for my perspective on the recent U.K. riots, which seem now to be winding down. Actually, I was hiking in the Peak District in the north of Derbyshire, about as far from civilization as you can get within Great Britain, and thus have nothing like a streetside perspective on the events. (Although, if the riots really represent the societal breakdown which many English folk seem to be taking them for, I can think of few better places to wait out the end of the world than the dales and glens of Derbyshire.) Like most of us, I witnessed the unfolding drama through the 24-hour circus spectacle that is the modern mass media – an illusion of immediate access concealing all sorts of hidden filters. Nevertheless, I do have a few thoughts to offer.

First, I was genuinely shocked. Not by the riots themselves (which seem to me, indeed, entirely predictable), but by the blatantly ideological coverage of the mainstream media. The morning after the riots first hit London, I watched the intensive coverage on the BBC. In a twenty-minute special report, about three quarters of the time was spent decrying the historic loss of a 1930s Art Deco monument in highly elegiac terms. Although this loss is no doubt genuine, it seemed indicative that the BBC would focus their coverage not on the people in the streets and their feelings of anger or powerlessness, but instead on precious landmark heritage sites. This feels analogous to covering the fall of the Bastille with an in-depth report on its unique architectural features. In other words, by focusing solely on the loss of and damage to property, the BBC was already implicitly siding with the property owners against the rioters.

This partisanship was only heightened in the few moments the BBC spared for speculation about the riots themselves. Actually, “speculation” is too polite a term: the BBC spent zero air-time analyzing the rioters’ motives, nor even talking to anyone who might represent the voice of disenfranchised youth; instead, they quoted a soundbite from the Deputy Prime Minister condemning the violence as “needless and opportunistic” and then simply continued, in a pattern long-familiar to the media, to repeat and trumpet the government’s claim as if this were the voice of objective truth. If I had drank a shot of whiskey for every mention of the word “opportunism,” I would have been passed out drunk within ten minutes. Meanwhile the only person they managed to interview from the actual community, an elderly school board councilor for Tottenham, wasted no time reassuring viewers that these events had nothing in common with the infamous riots of 1985. That event was, he said, a political one; while this, apparently, was not.

As should by now be apparent, I disagree strongly with the BBC’s angle of coverage. My analysis is as equally partisan, although unlike the BBC I won’t attempt to conceal that bias beneath a veneer of neutrality. So let me come out first and say it: my reflexive tendency is, if not to side with the rioters, then at least to sympathize with them.

First off, I think we need to define what we mean by “the political.” Every major public figure in Great Britain is hastening to define the riots as apolitical, to deny them any sort of political relevance whatsoever, and this should be the first indication for extreme caution. Indeed, I would argue that this urge to strip the riots of political agency is itself a highly politicized tactic, designed to allow the police to intervene in the events with little or no public outcry. Keep in mind that the U.K. Government was the first to defend the rights of the Egyptian rioters to occupy Tahrir Square and other public areas, and to condemn Mubarak’s crackdown as totalitarian. This now places them in an uneasy position in relation to their own rioters: a police crackdown might risk too clearly exposing the glaring hypocrisy of their position. Thus the attempt to paint the rioters as merely “opportunistic looters” allows them to deny the analogy between political discontent in Egypt and England –East and West– which would otherwise be all too apparent.

By this I do not mean to suggest that the events are identical; the situations are of course different, and they demand differing analyses. But we should bear in mind that the attempt to paint the rioters as “opportunistic looters” was the exact same tactic used by Mubarak himself, in virtually identical language, to de-legitimize his political opponents. This, again, should give us pause for thought.

If we define “the political” in terms of its etymological roots in the Greek politika, it would refer in the broadest sense to things concerning “the affairs of the city,” or polis. In that sense, the London riots are undeniably political. What the U.K. government seems to be doing is defining the political much more narrowly, in terms of the established procedures of the existing British State: legal tribunals, national elections, protests authorized by state permits, etc etc. Certainly these recent events deny this form of categorization. But it would then seem as if the first task of the State is to assert a monopoly on “legitimate” political tactics, if not on politics tout court, so as to de-legitamize the actions of those who reject this monopoly. This would be analogous to the way in which the law asserts a monopoly on violence, stating: you have no right to murder someone; if you do murder someone, the law may (legitimately) murder you. That is, the legal system does not eradicate violence but merely transfers its legitimation to the the State. In like manner, the State defines “the political” as the legitimizing tactics of the State itself, in a closed loop which permits no outside entry. It’s a sleight-of-hand trick, but no less powerful for all that.

There is an extreme irony in all of this. I have no doubt that the simmering anger which fueled the sudden explosion of mass rioting had something to do with a sense of powerlessness, of feeling incapable of exerting any effect on the political system in place. The areas which exploded over the last nights were among the most marginalized in Britain; while youth unemployment stands at a shocking 20% nationwide, rough statistics place that figure at closer to 70% in many of these poorer neighborhoods. The austerity measures passed by the government over the past years will only exacerbate those figures, cutting off access to education and other social services which might allow the disenfranchized to achieve some level of success, or at least normality. The result is a large swathe of the population with no work, no hope for future work (or indeed for the future), and no sense of representation in the current political process. When this population explodes (understandably), their actions are immediately decried as “opportunistic” and “apolitical,” and both Tory and Labor leaders rush in to condemn the events. Ironically, this only further illustrates their absolute exclusion from the existing political process, in which no one appears to be on their side, whether fighting for their interests or even simply trying to understand their anger and despair.

A great deal of the criticism lodged at the rioters (as “apolitical”) has to do with their unwillingness to act through official channels. Protests are accepted so long as they meet with state approval: acquiring permits, organizing marches, establishing a spokesperson or leader, and (say) involving the unions in official negotiation. But this is precisely the point: the rioters belong to a population which (or so I imagine) feels powerless, leaderless, and betrayed by all existing institutions. Their unwillingness to act through “establishment channels” is a clear condemnation of the establishment. Should one be shocked that a group who feel so utterly unrepresented by organized politics fail to organize their political actions?

And, of course, these events are in a sense organized; we are simply dealing with a new and different form of organization, or even (I would argue) a new organism. A great deal of attention has already been given to the way in which the rioters utilized Twitter and other social networking technology to coordinate action, establish contact zones, and communicate the movements of the police. The U.K. government has been rushing in to deal with this problem by subpoenaing digital records and threatening to shut down the technological grid. Again, both the rioters’ actions and the government’s response are here identical to what had happened in Egypt a few months back. This, again, should give us pause for thought.

Commentators will rush in to assert the many obvious differences between Tottenham and Tahrir Square, but the primary difference  seems to me that the Egyptian protesters largely eschewed both violence and vandalism. Yet here again the actions of the London rioters seem to me understandable, and even (in a certain sense) logical. First, peaceful protests in Western democracies simply no longer garner media attention, without which they lose virtually all effectiveness. This was already apparent in the run-up to the Iraq war almost a decade ago, in which, after the first few events, the mainstream media lost all interest in peaceful protest. In a spectacularized society, the only means to make your resistance heard and seen is by making it in some sense spectacular. Like it or not, the violence and looting of the last days has drawn widespread (indeed, global) attention in a way that even a thousand peaceful, organized protests would not.

Second, the looting of high-end retail outlets seems to me an entirely logical correlate of the message given to young perople by our consumer society, in which success (and happiness) is utterly equated with possession of commodity goods. If the message of the society, the media, and the advertising industry is that true happiness is synonymous with the possession of the most recently-released Blackberry, and if a generation of under-employed youth have no sanctioned access to these goods, it seems to me entirely logical to resort to theft.

Third, there is an extreme hypocrisy between the treatment of so-called criminal behavior in the upper and lower classes. That is to say, through their sheer greed for profit, the upper echelons of the social order, the bankers and investors, the “one percent,” came very close to destroying an entire economy and, indeed, society; in response to which the government rushed in to give them massive bailouts and million-dollar bonuses, while cutting virtually all funding to the lower and middle classes in the name of “austerity.” Great Britain was among the first to act in this manner, and their actions were among the most extreme; it is thus no surprise that the violence would hit London first. (Keeping in mind that London has the greatest income inequality of any first-world metropolis.) This is just a variant on the old axiom, “the best way to rob a bank is to buy one.” The investors who vandalized the global economy were rewarded for their mindless pillaging; meanwhile, if you raid Foot Locker for a pair of Nikes you’re carted off to prison. As always, we need to examine which violence we condone as “natural,” and which is automatically placed beyond the pale. (Hint: the violence of the rich is naturalized as the “workings of the market”; the violence of the poor is decried as evil and “opportunistic.”)

These points were hit upon in an editorial by Umair Haque in the Harvard Business Review, of all places:

Underneath the surface chatter about police brutality and parental responsibility is a deeper fear, and a not unfounded one: that a social contract’s been torn up. If you accept the possibility that there are many kinds of violence — not merely physical, but emotional, economic, financial, and social, to name just a few, then perhaps the social contract being offered by today’s polities goes something like this: “Some kinds of violence are more punishable than others. Blow up the financial system? Here’s a state-subsidized bonus. Steal a video game? You’re toast.” (To be painfully clear, I don’t think any form of violence is justifiable, excusable, or acceptable.)

Haque’s hasty reassurance that he does not consider any form of violence “justifiable” is highly interesting. In principle of course I would agree, but the key point is that capitalism by its very nature works upon violence. That is, it’s an inherently violent system. To say one opposes all forms of violence is the same as to say one opposes capitalism; I don’t disagree with that statement, even as I recognize that it is a highly utopian one. But, for the moment at least, in which capitalism does not seem anywhere close to its end, the question becomes which violence do we choose to support. For the moment, the choice seems to be between the extreme violence committed by the State, the banks, the corporations and the financial system, and the violence committed by the marginalized victims of this system, the multitudes of the poor and working classes whose quality of life is ever-increasingly devolving. Here, in response to the U.K. riots, this violence has been decried as “sheer opportunism.” But faced with the binary choice between state violence and the so-called opportunistic violence of the disenfranchised, I will side with the “opportunists” every time.

By choosing to govern through threat of disaster the House Republicans have turned against the entire intent of our founding document. No longer does change need the broad agreement of the separate branches. No longer is winning all the political offices necessary. All that is needed now is one chamber to threaten economic destruction and the others to fear it enough to give into the hostage taking.

Whether the situation is as clear-cut as Walker suggests remains something of an open question. While it is clear that the Republicans are indeed playing at hostage taking, the alacrity with which Senate Democrats, and in particular the White House, have entered into the logic of abductive extortion leaves many of us wondering whether the response of the Democratic leadership is not in itself a form of kabuki theater. In other words, one would have to wonder whether Obama, in so easily acceeding to the demands of Boehner et al., is not making a show of “compromise” only in order to offer what he was all along prepared to enact. (A sort of reverse, corporatist form of Roosevelt’s “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.”)

Certainly it is shocking to see a Democratic president proposing potentially drastic cuts to Medicare and Social Security, far beyond anything for which the Republicans had dared to ask. (Even more shocking, of course, is that the Republicans turned him down; the whole political process has turned into some kind of dystopian science-fiction scenario.) From a progressive perspective, the demand that any increase in the debt ceiling be matched by a corresponding cut in government spending seems patently absurd; and it is dismaying –to say the least– to see the Democrats enter into this blatantly false logic without so much as a peep of protest.

The question then would seem to become whether this is simply a case of cowardice (or confusion), or whether the Democratic establishment is in reality as eager to cut social spending as their counterparts across the aisle.¹ Yet such speculation about motive, while irresistible, is ultimately fruitless. It’s a variation on Jon Stewart’s famous “evil or stupid?” question, whose logic must now be extended, unfortunately, onto the White House itself. Whether Obama is placing the entire welfare system on the table as a misguided if well-intentioned gesture of compromise, or whether he himself is truly eager to undermine the last remnants of a social welfare system, is ultimately beside the point.

The point is that we must judge the political classes on the basis not of presumed motivation but of substantial action. And in terms of action, the two parties are now competing to see who can come up with the more extensive and extreme cuts to the government budget, in the midst of a prolonged employment slump with (already) little hope of recovery. A rudimentary knowledge of Keynesian economics shows this policy to be disastrous; slashing government spending in the amount of trillions will simply send the economy into a further tailspin. (What we need is a jobs program, aid to troubled homeowners, etc. etc… i.e., more spending, not less.) The reality is that Reid’s proposal is no more “progressive” than that of Boehner, and by any measure both will prove to be catastrophic – with the only question being how great and how deep the catastrophe. (Indeed, at this point, I’m genuinely unsure whether a budget default would be more or less catastrophic than four trillion in cuts.) It’s a hard time for the left.

In any case, while questioning aspects of Walker’s “hostage” analysis, I think his concept of “disaster legislation” merits holding onto, or holding up. This is because one of the prime places that the current crisis is playing out –the real crisis, as opposed to the utterly fabricated debt “crisis”– is on the level of ideology, and in particular on the level of language. This political process of ours is utterly spectacular, in the Debordian sense, and as Debord has shown the spectacle is won or lost, for better or worse, on the level of sign. The extreme right, while possessing no truly coherent policy platform, has been extremely successful over the last 20+ years on the rhetorical level (c.f. talk radio, et al.) and this is precisely the area where the Left has failed abysmally. Actually, progressive policy proscriptions (vis Social Security, etc.) have been proved over and over to be in keeping with what a substantial majority of Americans wants. But we’ve failed to convince them of that, because we’ve failed to develop a coherent, engaging, and consciousness-rousing rhetoric. As a result, I think one of the primary tasks of progressive activists today is to come up with a compelling language in which for us to speak, and to act.

In this regard, I think Walker’s “disaster legislation” coinage is extremely apt, and in ways beyond what he might himself have imagined. In fact, I think the contemporary political and legislative process can in large part be defined as the attempt to manage continually-succeeding disasters, or “crises,” as opposed to any kind of coherent, long-term policy prescription.²

What do I mean by suggesting governance is now a process of “legislating” disaster? I mean that it is retroactive rather than prospective, and reactive rather than prescriptive. The substantive policy of the American government over the past decade –aside, arguably, from a few dozen or so wars– has been largely a process of reacting to “unforeseen” disasters, whether we think of Hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill, the mortgage and credit crisis of 2008, or even the fictitious debt crisis we are experiencing now. In each case, the government has come rushing in after the event; rather than enacting policies to prevent undesirable outcomes, we are always already “too late,” in a permanent state of continual crisis management.

One important aspect of this is has to do with how these events are inevitable passed off as “natural.” This was particularly egregious in the case of the 2008 economic crisis, with all the faux-naïf calls of wonderment from the policy makers. (“No one could have predicted!” “How could it have happened?!”) The logical result of a series of concrete policy decisions and business practices is passed off, by sleight of hand, as some sort of “natural event,” as unpredictable and uncontrollable as the movement of clouds.

But this is equally true of the actual natural disasters. True, no one could have predicted Hurricane Katrina or the Gulf oil spill in terms of the actual date and scene of the catastrophe. But the weaknesses of New Orleans’ levee system and the erosion of the gulf’s natural barriers were already apparent to anyone paying attention, and the decision not to reinforce these through increased spending and improved infrastructure was a clear (and damnable) political choice. Likewise, the oil spill was itself the logical outcome of the decision to open the gulf to extreme forms of oil exploration and exploitation, and of the U.S. government’s decision not to mandate (for example) an alarm mechanism legally required in every other country in the world with oceanic oil reserves.  Thus these disasters were not “unforeseeable” natural events but in reality the direct outcome of all kinds of political and economic choices.³

The disingenuous transformation of government policy into continual, retroactive “crisis management” accomplishes two things – both of them extremely cynical. First, it obscures and distorts responsibility; if an event is passed off as “natural,” this allows the parties actually responsible to get away scotch-free. Secondly, and even more dangerously, it transforms every governmental policy decision into a hostage situation. That is, if legislation is always passed in response to an immanent or actually existing crisis, we’re in the rhetorical position of being backed up against the wall, with nowhere to go. That is, the constant threat of disaster forces the public to swallow policy choices they would otherwise find totally unpalatable. Thus, the bank bailout took place against the looming backdrop of the collapse of the economic system; likewise, the potential devastating cuts to Medicare and Social Security are now being framed beneath the looming threat of a debt default, so that the choice would seem 4 trillion in cuts or a disastrous default. The American political system has always been defined by the false “choice” of two undesirable options. But this, now, is not even the illusion of choice; it is no choice at all.

And this lack of choice, I want to argue, is the truly pernicious effect of “disaster legislating.” Unlike Walker, however, I don’t really see this development as something new; the Republican party’s current rhetorical tactics are merely the extension of a logic developed on both sides of the aisle across the past decade, in which policy changes are enacted only in the face of some looming menace – whether this be defined in terms of economics, environment, Islamic terrorism, or what have you.  (This phenomenon is operative even within the electoral process, where the “threat” is always the reflexive fear of the other party.) It is as if the government had lost the ability to actually govern, in the sense of formulating a coherent list of policy goals to be achieved; in place of which it can only ever reflexively react.

I would like to term this phenomenon “crisis managance,” in opposition to crisis management. In doing so I am following a distinction propounded by certain Italian autonomist thinkers between government and governance. Franco Berardi (“Bifo”) describes it thus:

Governance is the management of a system that is too complex to be governed. The word “government” means the understanding (as a reduction to a rational model) of the social world, and the ability of the human will (despotic, democratic, and so forth) to control a flow of information sufficient for the control of a relevant part of the social whole. The possibility of government requires a low degree of complexity with regard to social information. Information complexity grew throughout the late modern age, and exploded in the age of the digital network. Therefore, the reduction of social information to comprehensive knowledge and political control becomes an impossible task: control becomes aleatory, uncertain, almost impossible, and an increasing number of events escape the organized will.

At this point, capitalism shifts to the mode of governance. It employs abstract concatenation of technological functions in place of the conscious processing of a flow of information. It connects asignifying segments in place of dialogic elaboration. It automatically adapts in place of forming consensus, using technical language in place of shared meaning resulting from dialogue and conflict. In place of planning, it manages disruption. It assesses the compatibility of agents entering the social game in place of mediating conflicting political interests and projects. And it employs the rhetoric of systemic complexity in place of a rhetoric of historical dialectics.

On one level, I am very ambivalent about this semantic distinction. Rhetorically, I think “the management of a system too complex to be governed” quite accurately describes the current political process as it presents itself. At the same time, and as with the logic of disaster, it would seem to obscure the real culpability of the parties in play: to say that a system escapes understanding is to allow political and economic figures to wash their hands of responsibility, whereas in reality it is the choices they’re making which lead us (directly or indirectly) to the state of crisis. And yet –again, I’m prevaricating– I’ve no doubt that most of the players involved indeed confront the results of their cumulative actions with total bewilderment; the system, a compounded product of our individual actions, is too complex to be grasped by any one figure. To use old-school Marxist terminology, we’re dealing, on some level, with the age-old problem of reification.

But in any case to call this situation “crisis managance” is to suggest something in line with Bifo’s description of neo-liberal governance in the place of government. It is not crisis management, because no one is really managing anything, where “to manage” is defined as “To conduct, carry on, supervise, or control.” (OED) Not even managing in the slightly more pessimistic sense of “To be successful or skillful enough to do something, usually with difficulty or in the face of adversity.” Actually no one really feels able to do anything, in the sense of a coherent platform, and it certainly doesn’t seem a matter of success or skill. Instead we have only the flailing attempts to mitigate a continual series of “disasters” which should have been visible from a long way off by anyone with the slightest degree of acumen (at least where the disasters are not either self-willed or self-fabricated) and yet which have become impossible to accurately sight.

Whether this powerlessness is a rhetorical tool deployed to enact a covertly Machivallean political project, or whether it is an accurate assessment of the real anxiety of the political classes, returns us to the “evil or stupid?” dilemma with which I began. Again, the point would seem to be that it doesn’t really matter. Whether the élite are as helpless and hapless as they present themselves to be, or whether it is some elaborate ruse disguising their intent to (as Bush, Jr said) “bleed the whale dry,” doesn’t really change our outlook or our options. In either case, and in the face of this perpetual “logic of disaster,” it seems to me that the only way out of the trap is to escape this logic entirely. That is, to escape the non-choice of “cake or death” –4 trillion in cuts or a massive debt default– which also means to escape the non-choice between corporatist democrats and corporatist republicans. If the governing officials continue to force their dystopian politics down our throat through perverse manipulation of the language of disaster, it seems to me that we have to be prepared –perversely– to accept the disaster, or else to ignore it. This is to say, echoing a comment of Samir Amin, that we can no longer attempt to find a way out of the crisis, but rather must develop policies to “exit from a capitalism in crisis” itself.

——–

Footnotes.

¹ There’s certainly a strong case to be made that the political spectrum has shifted so far to the right that Obama would now seem a perfectly centrist Reaganite Republican of days of yore, while the Republicans themselves have moved to the fantastic fringe of Randian economics and xenophic nationalism.

² This is itself a reworking of a long line of Marxist thinking about capitalism and crisis, which merits lengthier examination. As a preliminary aside, I would state only that the “crisis” of 2008 was a response to the double movement of capital concentration and globalization which had begun already in the early ‘70s. As such –and despite all the raving about a post-soviet unipolar world order and Fukiyama’s famous “end of history”– the crisis should by no means have come as a surprise.

³ There would be a connection here to the concept of Natural-history [Naturgeschichte] in Adorno’s and Benjamin’s sense: that is, the way in which seemingly “natural” states and events –including capitalism– are in reality entirely historically developed, while the “historical” –the myth of progress, linearity and development– in reality repeats the cyclic inviolability of natural law.