“The Peace Prize laureates represent civil society in their home countries. They have for many years promoted the right to criticize power and protect the fundamental rights of citizens. They have made an outstanding effort to document war crimes, human right abuses and the abuse of power. Together they demonstrate the significance of civil society for peace and democracy.”
(The Nobel Peace Prize 2022 Announcement, October 7, 2022)
In January 2020, boundary2 ran an interview with Ales Bialiatski, the Belarusian human rights activist. The interview was recorded during the 2019 University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium workshop “Cultures of Protest in Contemporary Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.” Back then, the goal was to raise awareness of the democratic aspirations among Belarusian activists and their long history of grassroots organizing for human and civil rights, a struggle largely unknown beyond the country’s borders. At the Neubauer, with help from the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, we strove to show that these aspirations were shared by citizens of the three East Slavic countries; were connected to the recovery and rethinking of the past; and pointed toward the future. Building upon these commonalities, we also wanted to highlight the differences in the trajectories and forms this struggle has taken throughout the region. We sought to forge collaborative relations among Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian pro-democratic intellectuals in expectation that all three groups would cooperate and learn from each other. Not a shared identity but a common history, filtered through divergent interpretations and experiences, framed the project’s comparative perspective.
Much changed in the following two years: In the spring and summer of 2020, Belarus saw unprecedented organizing and turnout in the presidential elections, expressing the will of the people to transition to a democratic form of government by peaceful means. The results, manipulated, reasserted the power of the generally despised dictator Alexander Lukashenko for the sixth time since 1994. And in February 2022, the war in Ukraine which Russia had led since March 2014, escalated and expanded to a full-scale invasion. Oppression within Russia and Belarus rose to unimaginable proportions. Ales is now once again a prisoner of conscience. After receiving the 2020 Right Livelihood Award from the Swedish government and the Sakharov Prize from the European Parliament, he is finally also the laureate of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, together…
***
The solemn protocol of the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony on December 10, 2022 was emotionally wracking for those who keep close watch on Eastern Europe. The prize came at too high a price, and this price hasn’t even been paid in full. Ales Bialiatski has been in prison since July 14, 2021 because his human rights organization Viasna provided legal aid to victims of police violence during the peaceful democratic protests that followed the fraudulent presidential elections on August 9, 2020. In his absence he was represented by his wife Natalia Pinchuk. She combined some quotations from his previous speeches and conveyed some thoughts he shared with her while in prison in an acceptance speech that struck an uncanny und uncharacteristically metaphysical tone: The references to “the duel of Good and Evil” and to his “soul,” hovering freely over his dungeon and the land of Belarus, exuded an eerily funerary aura. (The Nobel Lecture, Bialiatski, 5-6) For anyone aware of unendurable conditions and torture in Belarusian prisons, it was difficult to ward off a sinister sense of desperation where liberation can be imagined only via a metaphysical escape. But Bialiatski’s fragmented, mediated voice resounded in the speeches of his co-laureates.
Jan Rachinsky accepted the prize on behalf of the organization, Memorial. This organization documented Soviet and post-Soviet crimes against humanity for over thirty years. It was ordered to shut down by the Russian government as a “foreign agent” in December 2021, and liquidated the following April. Rachinsky was pressured to reject the prize. In a direct affront to the Russian government, he accepted it. The Russian ambassador to Norway was not present at the ceremony. Rachinsky’s speech was overwhelming in its honesty, intellectual integrity, and courage. His condemnation of the war and of its ideological underpinnings in the history of Soviet state-worship will be long remembered. Rachinsky voiced the conscience of Russian intellectuals at a time when they lack any other voice. In the City Hall of Oslo, this voice got an international hearing for the first time since February 2022. This was chilling and almost unbearable to observe, as Putin is known not to forgive those who criticize his wars. Rachinsky spoke as one for whom truth—historical truth in this case—is more valuable than life. The world was watching a man in an utterly unsentimental, matter-of-fact fashion offering his life for his country’s chance at moral survival. Ales’s career had begun in the same endeavor, organizing commemoration of the victims of Stalinist repression at the execution site in Kurapaty. It is from Kurapaty that Ales’ journey toward advocacy for human rights began.
The Center for Civil Rights, the third recipient of the prize, was represented by Oleksandra Matviichuk. This Center was born out of the new democratic sensibility of the Maidan demonstrations in winter 2013-14. Ever since, the Center has been recording human rights violations in Ukraine in order to safeguard the legal basis of Ukraine’s democratic aspirations. Today, the Center documents the crimes against humanity committed by the Russian and Russia-affiliated troops in Ukraine. Like other recipients of the prize, its members are mortally endangered, but by external threat: it operates right now under conditions of a devastating war, under bombs and gunfire, surrounded by destroyed infrastructure and lack of resources basic to survival. It continues its work demanding justice and accountability in international venues, seeking to prevent the erasure of Ukraine from the surface of the Earth. Matviichuk called the international community to account for its complicity with the invasion of Ukraine, for its failure to intervene in the annexation of Crimea and the destabilization of the Donbass region. The international community’s insouciance—and its interest in Russian gas—enabled Putin’s invasion in February, an escalation of a war that has gone on for over nine years without attracting significant attention from the West. Matviichuk’s call for help to Ukraine echoed the bravery and perseverance of the other two speeches pitted against the grim reality of existential doom. “It’s time to assume responsibility. We don’t know how much time we still have.” (The Nobel Prize Lecture, The Center for Civil Rights, 6) A determination born of despair is shared by all of the laureates in their refusal to give up.
What is a peace prize in time of war? A wishful projection? An unshakable belief in a common peaceful future against all odds? A lifebuoy thrown to a drowning world of East Slavic democracy couldn’t but be a requiem for a dream. In fact, the solemn, austere, restrained musical intermissions in the ceremony tactfully expressed the mourning at the heart of celebration. But the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee recognized something that most outsiders to the tragedy in Eastern Europe do not recognize: the East Slavic togetherness in this political predicament. Without Maidan there would have been no Belarusian protests; without Belarusian protests there would have been no invasion of Ukraine; and without the Russian White Revolution, the massive anti-Putin protests of 2013, there would have been no Maidan. Since the Ukrainians successfully ousted their corrupt Putinist dictator Yanukovich and Ukraine de facto ceased to be a puppet state, Ukraine became the refuge of the Russian and Belarusian oppositions. Kiev meant a free place to emigrate to, second to London but preferable because of geographical and cultural proximity. Then the Belarusian and Russian authorities assassinated the exiled members of opposition one by one; but soon they had become too numerous to be targeted individually. The Norwegians understood: “Together they demonstrate…”—what? That the war on Ukraine is a war on civil society and democracy throughout the region, launched by a dictator on a pretense of popular consensus wrenched at gunpoint from his own population. The war against Ukraine is a war against democratic Europe and a consequence of the suppression of civil society in Russia and Belarus, that civil society which Memorial and Ales Bialiatski have been working to build. The most important aspect of the geo-political tragedy unfolding in the East Slavic region today is our divisions. The prize stands for, not peace that we won’t find for a long time, but our togetherness, the recognition that civil and human-rights activists in the region look forward to a common goal. This notion of solidarity permeated all the speeches.
Ales summoned us to fight “international dictatorship.” This call especially resonates in the United States today when a former American president is forwarded to the Justice Department to face criminal charges for leading an insurrection to reverse the outcome of a democratic election. Matviichuk pointed out, unsparingly, Western complicity with the invasion; the necessity of transnational solidarity among peoples; the need of pressure from below on governments; the urgency to reform the international order that has failed to stand up properly for Ukraine. Her call should be heard globally, as we talk about the relevance of the war in Ukraine for the future of other young democracies. Martin Luther King’s words that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” couldn’t be more concretely topical today. Among signs of the current turn away from democratic norms, one might mention the overturning of Roe vs. Wade—a typical totalitarian move asserting state control over human bodies and abolishing the democratic right to privacy. The past of the East European dictatorships and the future of the United States converge in this uncanny present.
Rachinsky’s talk connected the dots of history and its inversion. Speaking about the current war, he observed:
One of the first victims of this madness was the historical memory of Russia itself. Indeed, in order to pass off aggression against a neighbouring country as “fighting fascism,” it was necessary to twist the minds of Russian citizens by swapping the concepts of “fascism” and “anti-fascism.” Now, the Russian mass media refer to the unprovoked armed invasion of a neighbouring country, the annexation of territories, terror against civilians in the occupied areas, and war crimes as justified by the need to fight fascism.
Hatred is incited against Ukraine, its culture and language are publicly declared “inferior,” and the Ukrainian people are deemed not to have a separate identity from Russians. Resistance to Russia is called “fascism”. Such propaganda absolutely contradicts the historical experience of Russia and devalues and distorts the memory of the truly anti-fascist war of 1941-1945 and the Soviet soldiers who fought against Hitler. The words “Russian soldier” in the minds of many people will now be associated not with those who fought against Hitler, but with those who sow death and destruction on Ukrainian soil. (The Nobel Lecture, Memorial, 4-5)
This open confrontation with a monstrous regime and its system of oppression is a matter of colossal risk. “Don’t be afraid!” was Ales’s message. Rachinsky and Matviichuk definitely aren’t afraid. “Through their consistent efforts in favour of humanist values, anti-militarism and principles of law, this year’s laureates have revitalised and honoured Alfred Nobel’s vision of peace and fraternity between nations – a vision most needed in the world today,” according to the Nobel Peace Prize 2022 Announcement.
It is the first time that I see a Western institution demonstrate in a powerful way that they understand our solidarity, our common work, and our shared vision of a democratic future in the East Slavic region.
Back in 2019 in Chicago, when Ales, the members of Memorial, and Vasyl Cherepanyn’s Visual Culture Research Center came together to enunciate the commonalities among East Slavic cultures of protest, our goal was to create a productive dialogue among Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian intellectuals and artists who share the values of democratic governance, human and civil rights, and freedom of artistic expression, as well as among scholars of the recent history and culture of these three countries. Establishing this dialogue remains crucial to a better understanding of the complex interconnection of culture and politics in the region. Such a dialogue should be especially fruitful because these three countries have much political and cultural history in common, but interpret this cultural heritage differently. The fight for democracy, human rights and independence coincides in Belarus and Ukraine with the cultivation of national language, literature, and culture. It started like this in Russia too. At what point and why does the liberation of national consciousness turn into a suffocating chauvinism? When does it promote democracy and the embrace of the community of nations, and when does it lead to oppression, persecution of others, and political isolation? How do forms of cultivation of national identity come to differ in these three countries? What features of their historical backgrounds are most relevant? Are there cultural and political safeguards against the dangers of nationalism? This year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipients answered these questions by appeal to the universal, transnational nature of human rights. The recognition of one’s right to one’s own language and one’s own national narrative for yourself, as for others, is part of it, as Rachinsky pointed out:
Every country and every society develop their own historical narratives, their own “national images of the past,” which often contradict those of their neighbours. The cause of disputes is usually not one fact or another, but different interpretations of the same events. Differences in the understanding and assessment of the same historical events by different peoples are inevitable, if only because their insights and assessments are born in the context of different national histories. We need to learn to recognize the reasons for these differences and to respect each people’s right to their own understanding of the past. (The Nobel Lecture, Memorial, 5)
The three East Slavic cultures are conjoined by history and tradition, with Ukraine and Belarus having been for long stretches of time parts of the Russian and then Soviet empires. They also show many differences, conditioned by these countries’ peculiar political experience and geographical locations. Both contemporary Belarus and Ukraine belonged to the Duchy of Lithuania between the 13th and 16th centuries. Then part of Belarus and right-bank Ukraine belonged to the Polish Commonwealth. In the 18th century, the Austro-Hungarian empire claimed the Galician part of Ukraine. After a short episode of independence in 1918, both Belarus and Ukraine were reabsorbed as republics within the Soviet Union until they gained legal sovereignty in 1991. While sharing the common denominator of the traumatic Soviet past and the sense of liberation and new beginning at the time of democratic reforms in 1991, the three countries have taken different paths ever since: Belarus’s government continued as a Soviet-type authoritarian dictatorship, choosing to remain a protectorate of the Russian patron; Russia and Ukraine attempted neoliberal and democratic reforms but were swamped in the chaos of corruption and the return of totalitarianism. Although both Russia and Ukraine experienced a new awakening of democratic resistance to authoritarian corruption in 2013-14, their paths have radically diverged since. Ukraine managed to consolidate popular resistance to its regime and acquire a new independence from the kleptocratic interest, whereas Russia failed in a similar endeavor and was pulled back under a now explicitly nationalistic dictatorship. The triangulation of the political relationships among the three countries and their cultural development is complex. Nonetheless, the most productive way to understand the problems of democratization in each of them—problems that have led to the current war—would be through their togetherness, as this year’s Nobel Peace Prize challenges us to do.
Interpretations and usages of historical memory are carried by cultural institutions and actors in various ways. The 2017 make-shift monument, raised by the people to the victims of Stalinist extralegal execution at Butovo—constituted an act of protest,an especially courageous act when one considers that sites formerly dedicated to the victims, like the former Gulag site Perm-36, have been refurbished to acknowledge the “patriotism” of their persecutors. Or in Ukraine, the holodomor, the famine resulting from the so-called collectivization of farmland, is often interpreted for local political purposes as a Russian genocide against Ukrainians in particular, rather than as a part of the Soviet regime’s sweeping extermination of its population across the whole country. The discovery of the major NKVD execution site in Kurapaty in 1988 gave momentum to the pro-democratic movement in Belarus and has ever since continued to inspire resistance against the continuation of Soviet-style dictatorship. While Belarus has never opened its KGB archives, they have been opened in Russia and Ukraine. Memorial and the Sakharov Center, founded as historical archives and research centers that collect documents and conduct research on the history of political persecutions in Soviet Russia, now find themselves at odds with a regime that glorifies and repeats Stalinist crimes against humanity. While the Belarusian government tried to deny and then refused to take a stance on the Soviet regime’s crimes against humanity at Kurapaty, the powerful popular movement resulted in thousands of memorial crosses erected by ordinary people. The recovery and preservation of collective memory was a humanist movement that fed into political activism and a culture of protest. Bringing together activists who participate in understanding the past, preserving the evidence, and demanding justice for the victims in the three countries, the Nobel Peace Prize brings out the complexity and the differences among various ideologies of memory, ranging from governmental suppression to various forms of preservation and different registers of memorialization, interpretation, and reinterpretation. These forms should not cancel each other out because, as Rachinsky observed, it is in their coexistence that they allow collective memory to persist.
In 2019, when we came together at the Neubauer Collegium to share our experiences with the East Slavic cultures of protest—Ales Bialiatski of the organization Viasna (Belarus), Seguei Parkhomenko of The Last Address (Russia), and Vasyl Cherepanyn of the Visual Culture Research Center (Ukraine)—that was our plan. Much has changed since, and not in the way we expected. Today, we can ask ourselves with Rachinsky: “But did our work prevent the catastrophe of 24 February?” His response connects us all in the current predicament:
The responsibility of a person for everything that happens to their country, and to the whole of humanity, is based, as Karl Jaspers also noted, on solidarity, civil and universal. The same applies to the sense of responsibility for the events of the past. It grows out of a person’s sense of his connection with previous generations, from the ability to realize himself as a link in the chain of these generations – that is, from the awareness of his belonging to a community that did not arise yesterday and, hopefully, will not disappear tomorrow. Readiness for responsibility is an exclusively personal quality: a person voluntarily assumes responsibility for what happened once or for something that is happening now, but in which he or she is not directly involved; no one else can put this burden on him. And most importantly, a sense of civic responsibility, unlike a sense of guilt, requires not “repentance,” but work. Its vector is directed not to the past, but to the future. (The Nobel Prize Lecture, Memorial, 5-6)
Ales has been in prison for over a year now; my Ukrainian colleagues are being bombed, my Russian friends are underground, whether at home or abroad. This prize won’t help them right now, but it is a much-needed expression of understanding that we are in this together, and Putin and his foreign enablers will not prevail in their efforts to separate us, turn us against each other, and make us hate each other. Though speaking in different languages, all three laureates spoke of one thing: transnational solidarity. To quote Ales’s unassuming, quiet, simple words in response to my question in 2019, “What to do?”— “We’ll continue working…” These words, pronounced back then, resonate today with the final words of Rachinsky’s speech, “We are not giving up and continue to work…” I can only add: “Together.”
_____
Olga V. Solovieva is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. She is interested in comparative history of democratic thought and practice and intersection of culture and politics in East Slavic countries. She was a co-organizer of the 2019 workshop “Cultures of Protest in Contemporary Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia” at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago.
When Tursun decided to become a police officer in 1992, it seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime.[1] The state had just opened up a pathway for Uyghur high school students who excelled in Mandarin and political theory to study in elite policing academies and other schools in Eastern China (Grose 2019). At the end of the 6 years of training, a secure posting in an urban police department was virtually guaranteed. For someone who came from a village near China’s border with Kazakhstan, it promised a way out of rural poverty and, Tursun believed, a way of creating a more just society. But at the time Tursun was not yet fully aware of the fact that resource disputes between native Uyghurs and newly arrived Han settlers in the desert oases of Southern Xinjiang was one of the reasons why he was being trained to join the Xinjiang police force.
As I write in my book Terror Capitalism (2022), the intensification of policing in Northwest China, coincided with a development of a Han migrant settlement campaign to “Open up the Northwest.” This campaign which centered on natural resource extraction and industrial farming in the ancestral lands of the Uyghurs in the Southern part of the region precipitated flashes of violence related to land theft, systemic ethnic discrimination and new restrictions on Uyghur autonomy. In April 1990, in the community of Barin, a village near the city of Kashgar, tension over access to irrigation and land, boiled over into a brief farmer-led Uyghur insurgency (Roberts 2020). A detachment of armed police and military arrived within several days and opened fire on the farmers who occupied a community government building armed primarily with hunting rifles and farming tools. Those who I interviewed who were in the surrounding communities at the time said that bodies of the insurgents were loaded in trucks and taken away.
But there was a more fundamental change in the community beyond the disappearance of those directly involved in the uprising. Now, it appeared, that state authorities viewed the majority of Uyghur villagers in the surrounding communities as “troublemakers” simply because of their ethnicity and their proximity to the farmer uprising. Over the next several months nearly 8000 people were officially arrested (Roberts 2020). Vast numbers of people in the prefecture were forced to attend self-criticism sessions and study political ideology. They were asked to search their hearts and consider how they might have contributed to a lack of loyalty to the Party’s mission to develop and extract regional economic resources for the benefit of “the masses.” Did they consider Uyghur possession of their own lands more important than contributing to the wealth of the county? Didn’t they know that when they questioned the settlement and land distribution policies they were challenging the correctness of the Party?
Uyghurs in this community said that it felt like the Maoist ideological campaigns that had ended with the Cultural Revolution in 1976 were returning, but that this time they were pointed not at “counterrevolutionary” enemies who supported the “capitalist road,” but rather at Uyghurs who opposed the preferential treatment for Han settlers in the new state-directed export-oriented capitalist economy. They came to understand that they were seen as impediments to the development of what was now becoming an internal settler colony in China’s post-Cold War economic rise. In the new social order, civilization itself was equated with state-led market development. Over the next two decades Uyghurs came to see how a discourse of terrorism could be used to deem them both an internal enemy of the state and of the civilized world in general if they opposed this disempowering form of development (see also Fischer 2013). As always-already potentially terrorists Uyghurs could be framed by an internal otherness that justified drastic policing measures and eventually led to mass internment and imprisonment. Over time, the specter of the terrorist produced a fear-driven economic and political logic for the state, and the corporations it partnered with, that resulted in billions of dollars of investment in counter-terrorism surveillance in Uyghur communities.
As social theorist Michael Dutton has argued (2005), since policing in China emerged out of this revolutionary context of the 1950s, rather than, for example, the hunting of slaves as in the United States or the pacification of the working class in Britain, Chinese policing was organized primarily around a friend or enemy distinction—with “friend” (pengyou) figured as the revolutionary masses, or the people, and the enemy figured as foreign imperialists and domestic counterrevolutionaries. Importantly, because of the revolutionary impulse of Chinese policing the latter category of enemies could at times be rehabilitated through education and carceral punishment if they were able to recognize the liberatory potential of socialist mass struggle.[2] They were, regardless of their ethnicity, still potential “compatriots” (tongbao) in the multi-national Chinese revolutionary project. But what happens when such compatriots are deemed “separatists” or “terrorists”? This is the central question this essay will explore.
Mao’s 1957 essay on the “Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” supplies a rationale for making fine distinctions between enemies and wayward friends. This sorting and productive capacity of policing as a tool of educating and persuading provided an opening for “thought work” (sixiang gongzuo)—communal struggle sessions where those deemed out-of-line proclaimed self-criticisms and professed their new understandings of Maoist thought. Such targeted individuals were often placed under concentrated surveillance in reeducation and labor camps as internal enemies, or at a minimum, they were stigmatized in their home communities and they were viewed as compatriots who had failed in their revolutionary resolve. Their fellow community members were tasked with observing their progress, looking for any slip-up in submissive attitudes. At the end of the Maoist campaigns in 1976, the spectrum of what counted as friend was expanded to include former political prisoners and these “wayward friends” were reunited with the masses through a process called “rehabilitation” (pingfan). This process was organized by “rehabilitation committees” (pingfan weiyuanhui) who considered formal appeals those on watchlists and petitions of family members on their behalf, and organized periods of close surveillance in the communities where the wayward friends returned.
Throughout the 1980s democracy movements, particularly on college campuses, accompanied an emergence of capitalist production and export-oriented economy. And for a time, it appeared as though the category of the internal enemy was on the verge of disappearing. Then in 1989 that prospect collapsed with the mass killing in Tiananmen Square and subsequent disappearances of thousands of democracy activists—mostly Han college students, but also Uyghur and other ethnic minority young people—all of whom were deemed internal enemies of the state.
With the violence in Barin in 1990, as noted at the beginning of this essay, a further reorientation of “enemies” and “friends” distinctions toward Muslims in Xinjiang demanded a new police force that was equipped to decode Uyghur opposition to the state—elaborating a new sub-category in the friend-enemy continuum—“separatists” (Ch: fenlie zhuyi zhe; Uy: bölgünchi)—and the threat it posed toward settler claims to possession of Uyghur lands (Tynen 2020). Over the next decade, teams of state workers, would be tasked with surveilling families in communities where discontentment was most pronounced. As one of these surveillance workers put it, “We worked for months on end without any days off, rummaging through the villages and homes of Uyghur farmers, making lists of names of so called ‘separatists’ and reporting their names to the upper-level officials. As human surveillance workers we searched people’s homes, sometimes even at late night hours, looking for any suspicious books that might be spreading a ‘separatist” ideology’” (Ayup 2022, 27).
In Xinjiang the term separatist, which emerged in Chinese state discourse in relation to Taiwan’s autonomy in the 1950s, rose to replace the Maoist term “counterrevolutionary” in the 1980s as changing cold war dynamics and the turn toward a market economy following Mao’s death made “national unification” (Ch: guojia tongyi) with Taiwan appear to be more of a possibility. The term was extended by Chinese state discourse beyond Taiwan to discussions in Tibet and Xinjiang in the 1990s in response to the rise to international prominence of the Dali Lama and Tibetan government in exile. As the Dali Lama garnered support in India and the endorsement of international celebrities, the Chinese authorities worried that the Free Tibet movement might spark a “ethnic separatist” revolt within China’s borders. This fear was given more force with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and the independence of the Central Asian republics. In Xinjiang these factors solidified a shift toward policing the perceived Muslim “separatist” threat (Becquelin 2000).
Chinese leaders viewed the Barin Uprising as a sign of Uyghur desires for greater self-determination. Increasing Han settlements in Uyghur majority areas had the benefit of both gaining access to natural resources, but also, as a result of the fracturing of the Soviet Union—China’s long-term rival—building new avenues for Chinese markets in Central Asia and attending to the resource needs of Chinese manufacturers. These economic and geopolitical factors precipitated a change in policing in Xinjiang—a change that Tursun, the Uyghur police officer whose story begins this essay, would be a part of.
But, of course, historical changes are difficult to recognize at first, especially when they are orchestrated behind closed doors in the headquarters of the Ministry of State Security. About the time Tursun graduated from the police academy another major incident occurred. In 1997, near his home village in Ghulja, Uyghurs protested the breakup and arrest of a youth organization that taught Islamic and Uyghur moral behavior and traditions (Roberts 2020). Although the state denies this figure, it is likely that more than 100 Uyghurs were shot in the streets and more than a thousand more were taken away, arbitrarily detained in an opaque process that ranged from “reeducation through hard labor” in camps to more formal imprisonment. Some Uyghurs fled across the border to Central Asia, eventually fleeing to Afghanistan to escape extradition back to China only to be turned over to the U.S. military and sent to Guantanamo Bay where they were eventually released without charge.
When Tursun graduated with a degree in policing science in a Chinese-language policing academy the next year, he found himself thrust almost immediately into a hunt for phantom “separatist gangs” like the protestors who organized the marches. Throughout the Xinjiang police force, officers were tasked with implementing a “hard strike campaign”—part of a series of campaigns that would culminate, as I will explain below, in the “People’s War on Terror.” One of Tursun’s roles was to act as interpreter and translator, turning Chinese language policing science and directives into action in Uyghur communities by interpreting Uyghur confessions for Han police commanders. His beat was nearly exclusively in Uyghur neighborhoods and villages where he was often accompanied by a non-Muslim partner. He was to be the eyes, ears, and voice of the state.
Then, almost immediately after September 11, 2001, a new category in the friend-enemy continuum was introduced in Chinese policing rhetoric and theory. “Now we were supposed to call them ‘terrorists,’” Tursun told me in Uyghur, interjecting the Chinese word for “terrorist” (Ch: kongbu fenzi). “The vast majority of the groups we found were not separatists or terrorists at all. These were labels we gave to people who committed other crimes, or didn’t commit any crime at all, but who had no one to defend them.” As Gardner Bovingdon (2010) shows in an encyclopedic index of state documents from this period, terrorism charges proliferated in the 2000s with crimes as minor as a Uyghur neighbor accused of stealing a cow from a Han settler being labeled a terrorist activity. Eager to associate the “Uyghur problem” with the Global War on Terror, Chinese officials removed most instances of the term “separatist” from official histories of the 1990s and replaced them with the term “terrorist.” The new term had a different utility. In the post-9/11 context “terrorism” allowed the Chinese state to position itself as an ally to the West and Central Asian republics in the global war against so-called Islamic “extremism” and terrorism. By offering Central Asian republics policing technology, training, and intelligence in addition to infrastructure development projects and trade incentives, Chinese authorities used a security framework to build strategic economic and political relationships that would eventually turn into its ambitious Belt and Road Development Initiative.
Even more importantly, back in Xinjiang the terrorism label also hardened the “enemy” categorization of Muslims who opposed state-directed development and settlement of their land. No longer were “enemies” viewed simply as counterrevolutionaries or separatists, that is, those who were nevertheless compatriots and who could potentially be rehabilitated.
For Tursun, “discovering” hidden terrorists became a primary objective. Police units that identified such “gangs” were given large rewards. From Tursun’s perspective, it was as though the policing came to serve a larger disinformation campaign. By “discovering” terrorists, the police units fulfilled their obligation in the crackdown and concealed the structural factors that caused Uyghur protest in the first place. Over and over again Tursun observed or participated in turning informants, forcing them to identify “terrorists,” and using them to break up community networks:
We had a policy which encouraged people to spy on each other. Often they did this for money, or because we threatened them or their families. Of course we knew that a lot of our tips were just false accusations. Some people did that for money, while some people did that to take revenge on others. But we would arrest people regardless of the truth of information. For example, if four or five people gathered together for activities such as visiting a friend or attending a funeral and someone said it was an illegal gathering to teach Islam or plan violence we would arrest everyone who attended and label the host the ringleader. Everyone knew that at a funeral, people are required to conduct religious rituals. This is normal since Uyghurs are Muslim. But the spy would exaggerate and say it was extremist or terrorist. People who were being accused have no way to prove that they are innocent. Often they ended up being sentenced to 4 or 5 years in prison or “education through hard labor” camps. The informant was given money and we received our commendation. This was so common.
Tursun found this form of state violence morally repugnant. “Most Uyghurs I met were disgusted by the very idea of terrorism,” he said, “They wanted a peaceful life, a better world for their children.” But he worried that a generation of Uyghur young people who grew up in this atmosphere, where disappearances of Uyghur community leaders became so common, would lash out. Indeed, as Sean Roberts has shown, in some instances the “terrorism” label became a self-fulfilling prophecy (Roberts 2020). While not the norm in Uyghur crimes labelled as terrorism, in a handful of cases in 2013 and 2014, Uyghurs did attack Han civilians in organized suicide attacks. These specific attacks did appear to meet international standards of what constitutes a terrorism crime—though even they may be more appropriately understood to be horrific incidents of mass murder that arise from colonial circumstances. Soon after the terrorism label arrived, Tursun tried to quit his job as an officer. He was told that he needed to serve at least 10 years before he could even begin to consider early retirement. Because he had been granted access to state secrets, quitting would be a slow process. He was told he could be arrested if he quit without a justifiable excuse.
Over time it became clear that the hopes Tursun had for criminal justice reform would never happen. When he first joined the Public Security Bureau he thought that the presence of college-educated Uyghur officers would help improve the situation. Instead, he saw his fellow Uyghur officers, many of them who he had known for over a decade be worn down by the system. He saw many turn toward alcoholism and become withdrawn from their families. Uyghur police officers were treated with deference and fear by other members of the Uyghur community. It was good to have a friend who was a police officer, since the officer might be able to protect them from the counter-terrorism system by vouching for them. But this friendship was a guarded, political relationship. After all it was a relationship with the eyes and ears of the state, and what stood between being deemed a terrorist-enemy and a friend.
Even though Tursun was eventually able to leave the Bureau and, through a loophole in the system, escape to Europe, he knows that had he stayed he would have been pressed into service of the mass internment camp system that was put in place in the mid-2010s. “At this point I can’t say that every Uyghur retains some aspect of their humanity,” he said quietly. “Some Uyghur officers will do anything to show their loyalty to the government, no matter what kind of suffering they cause. All they care about are the benefits and power they get from their position. I know there are some Uyghur police who feel bad about the torture that Uyghur detainees are going through now in the camps, but the percentage of those who care are not that high. At this point they are numb.”
Although policing in China began in a revolutionary moment and was driven at first by Maoist “counterrevolutionary” politics, in the 1990s and 2000s in Northwest China it gave way to colonial-capitalist and counter-terrorism logics that participate in familiar forms of ethno-racialization and dehumanization found in post-9/11 policing systems and counter-terrorism around the world in which Muslims are racialized as deviant others. Although, they emerge from different histories, extrajudicial detention and surveillance of refugees and other unwanted populations from Kashmir, to Palestine, to France and the United States produce similar effects at differential scales (Byler 2022). As China was pulled into a global capitalist economy and the logic of developmentalism settled on a Han-centric mythos of China’s reemergence as a global power, the revolutionary multi-national inclusiveness of China’s framing of political struggle was deeply diminished.
In 1990s China the Maoist frame of friends and enemies was folded into a concern with “unifying” the country to benefit the masses—understood as the Han majority to the East and the Han settlers who came to the frontier to claim resources for them. Here “friends” came to be those who supported this project, and “enemies” became Uyghur “separatists” who protested these settler claims. Then, in the 2000s, the discourse of Uyghur “separatist” enemies hardened into “terrorists.” Over time, the possibility of full citizenship as “friends” has severely narrowed for Uyghurs. Since 2017, hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs have been warehoused in an expansive prison system for alleged terrorism crimes (Byler 2022). Hundreds of thousands more whose “extremism and terrorism activities are not serious” have been placed in internment camps for reeducation (United Nations 2019). After an intensive period of Chinese language assimilation, ideological indoctrination, and brutal punishment, they are placed in securitized factories where they labor apart from their families and under intensive forms of technological and human surveillance. Together these carceral systems result in the largest internment of a religious minority since World War II. Uyghurs, as always-already “enemy” terrorists have become internal others, marking a turn from compatriot rehabilitation to new policing technologies of control and incarceration derived from global models of the war on terror.
Darren Byler is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the author of Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City and In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony. His current research is focused on policing and carceral theory, infrastructure development and global China.
Works Cited
Ayup, Abduweli. 2022. The Detainment Factory: A Memoir. Manuscript.
Becquelin, Nicolas. 2000. “Xinjiang in the Nineties.” The China Journal 44: 65-90.
Bovingdon, Gardner. 2010. The Uyghurs: Strangers in their own land. Columbia University Press.
Byler, Darren. 2022. Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Dutton, Michael. 2005. Policing Chinese Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Fischer, Andrew Martin. 2013. The disempowered development of Tibet in China: A study in the economics of marginalization. Lexington Books.
Grose, Timothy. 2019. Negotiating Inseparability in China: The Xinjiang Class and the Dynamics of Uyghur Identity. Hong Kong University Press.
Roberts, Sean R. 2020. The War on the Uyghurs. Princeton University Press.
Tynen, Sarah. 2020. “Dispossession and displacement of migrant workers: the impact of state terror and economic development on Uyghurs in urban Xinjiang.” Central Asian Survey 39.3: 303-323.
United Nations (UN). 2019. Information Received from China on Follow-Up to the Concluding Observations on its Combined Fourteenth to Seventeenth Periodic Reports. 8 October. Geneva: Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Available from: undocs.org/CERD/C/CHN/FCO/14-17.
References
[1] Although “Tursun” is now living in Europe, he has asked me to use a pseudonym to protect his identity from Chinese authorities and the stigma associated with his past work as Xinjiang police officer.
[2] Dutton (2005) relies quite heavily on Carl Schmitt’s theorization of political struggle in his analysis of Chinese policing. Scholarship on Maoist intellectual and grassroots history since Dutton’s important contribution to Chinese political theory shows that the generative potential of Maoist framings of revolutionary struggle demands a re-examination of Schmitt’s work and the fascist context it reflects.
Russian anti-government protest has never been weaker. Decades of repressive policing have had the desired effect, successfully reducing the range of actions that protesters are willing to undertake. A new form of protest against Russia’s war on Ukraine, for example, consists of a lone picketer holding up a blank sheet of paper on a public street. The war has dramatically limited artistic range, and shifted the terms of public discourse away from visionary proposals such as the elimination of police. Before the war, though, artists were sounding the alarm about Putin’s expansion of policing, and resisting it through playful appropriation, by “playing the policeman,” repurposing police uniforms and weapons. This essay explores the potentialities and limitations of this artistic device.
In 2018, the estimated one billion people who tuned into the World Cup final match—the largest live audience of any single event on earth—became unsuspecting witnesses to what may well be the most-viewed direct action in history. Four members of the group Pussy Riot, disguised as police officers, snuck onto the pitch. Evading referees and security forces, they turned the tense global event, highly choreographed by the Russian state, into a live-action farce. Eventually the members of Pussy Riot were caught and dragged off the field, and into prison. But not before the striking images of cops chasing cops were broadcast by media around the world. Meanwhile, Pussy Riot’s social media accounts released a list of demands: the liberation of all Russian political prisoners, an end to false court cases against regime critics, and, striking an absurdist note, the transformation “of the earthly policeman into the heavenly policeman” (Pussy Riot).
This was an erudite allusion to the late Soviet conceptualist writer and artist Dmitry Prigov––in fact the entire action was called The Policeman Enters the Game. Up until the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine, in the 2010s, artistic representations of the police frequently cited late Soviet art in order to reflect on the ways in which Putin redeployed the police tactics of the Brezhnev era. The Brezhnev regime had indeed expanded the existing surveillance of students and members of the intelligentsia, broadly encouraging self-censorship and developing a strategy of imprisoning potential leaders before they criticized the regime in public or organized a demonstration. Thus “eliminating public acts of challenge without the use of severe force against crowds,” the Brezhnev regime sought to avoid Stalin and Khrushchev’s reputations for mass repressions (Beissinger 32). Prigov’s late 1970s poems about the “Militsaner” (Police-a-man) portrayed the Militsaner as a figure of “quasi-mythological” and “heavenly” authority, an abstract “principle of governmentality” and, simultaneously, of “earthly” mediocre, bureaucratic tastes and a penchant for casual brutality (Kukulin). Sporting a militiaman cap and reciting his poems in the tone of a pedantic Russian schoolteacher, Prigov satirized the hero of Soviet children’s books, Uncle Styopa the Policeman, popularized during the Brezhnev era (Callen). Like Uncle Styopa the Policeman, the Militsaner of Prigov’s poems is a giant who sees into the horizon––and, simultaneously, blocks it from view, denying the existence of anything beyond his authority.
Casting themselves as inheritors of Prigov, Pussy Riot also reinterpreted him: in their view, the “heavenly policeman” was useful as a concept or symbol, but his manifestation in reality, with its censorship and brutality, ought to be abolished. Unlike Prigov, they made explicit demands for the end of policing. Prigov, by contrast, hardly conducted direct political protest. On the contrary, because his performances were confined to the private apartment and the informal gallery space, they were basically compatible with Brezhnevite policies of concealing government criticism. Direct political critique was far from his goal: he declared that he wanted to “disappear” inside of authoritarian discourses rather than “rationalize” them or “extract anything real” (Shapoval 32). The scholar of Soviet art Gerald Janecek concluded that Prigov felt “genuine admiration for his policemen” and “loving nostalgia…for the culture of [his] ‘happy childhood.’” Prigov’s Soviet audiences, members of private countercultural circles, experienced the mere pleasure of laughing at Soviet bureaucratic language as politically provocative. But Prigov admitted that policemen, too, have enjoyed his work (Lipovetsky 253). By contrast, critique was explicit in Pussy Riot’s reinterpretation of the Militsaner.
Other contemporary Russian artists, too, adapted the tools of their Brezhnev-era predecessors to expose the hypocrisy of policing while simultaneously rejecting their predecessors’ ambivalent irony and political neutrality. For example, the late 2010s performance art group Party of the Dead borrowed the black-and-white, zombie aesthetic of 1980s necrorealist cinema but dispensed with the necrorealists’ reenactments of assaults and crowd fights. The 80s necrorealists had been inspired by rumors that Brezhnev and other geriatric political elites were dead or near death and that their public appearances were elaborate faked. Dressed in zombie makeup and bloody bandages, the necrorealists engaged in various forms of senseless violence, including beating an actor dressed in a police uniform, and recorded these displays in 8mm and 16mm short, silent, black-and-white films. In this way, they “did not attempt to contest the system’s representations of reality” but rather to insist on a “zone of indistinction” between conformity and resistance (Alsavi 78). The 2010s Party of the Dead, by contrast, dispensed with political indistinction. To announce their opposition to the regime, they relied text, displaying copious banners and posters, and on context, demonstrating during patriotic holidays or in the aftermath of police suppression of demonstrations. At the same time, they eschewed militancy, and, like Pussy Riot in their absurdist 2018 action, opted for multivalent expression. Party of the Dead slogans such as “The dead are for peace,” “There are more of us, dead ones,” and “The dead don’t fight” can be read variously as foreboding, mournful, or ironic (see examples in Evstropov). In all these readings, though, the Party’s artists appear to identify with the victims of state violence in a relation of solidarity, acknowledging shared vulnerability––and discursive potential. Likewise, the graffiti artist Philippenzo’s mural Kisses explored “art therapy for working through fear,” portraying a SWAT officer’s ID badge that says “KISSES” against a camouflage pattern that reveals itself as a lipstick kiss print. The work cited a famous Brezhnev-themed mural: Dmitry Vrubel’s 1990 close-up of a kiss that Brezhnev shared with GDR leader Erich Honecker in 1979. Vrubel’s title God Help Me Survive this Mortal Love suggested that the viewers ought to feel disgust at the larger-than-life image of two old men kissing on the lips. Philippenzo, by contrast, dispensed with Vrubel’s homophobic and ageist gaze, proposing abstraction.
These artistic references to Brezhnev himself and the Brezhnev era responded to profound similarities in policing styles. Before the war on Ukraine, the Putin administration’s approach to policing Russian citizens was informed by Brezhnev-era preemptive censorship, in which authorities repressed potential dissent in advance, controlling domestic and international perception, partly through extensive spying. Like Brezhnev, Putin deployed censorship out of public view––in small ways (for example by denying event permits to opposition groups) as well as large ones (framing activists with drug charges, staging the seemingly random assaults or murders of independent journalists). Putin’s own professional trajectory, begun at the height of the Brezhnev “Stagnation” era, is illuminating here. A former KGB/FSB agent, he brought covert intelligence tactics to the presidency. In one memorable comment in 1999, just as he had risen to immense power from a relatively obscure position, he joked that his ascent was a secret power grab: “I would like to report that the group of FSB officers dispatched to work secretly in the federal government has been successful in its first set of assignments” (Wood).
Preemptive censorship worked relatively well during the economic growth of the 2000s but the mass protests of 2012 (themselves partly a response to a stagnating economy) shifted the regime’s approach. On one hand, it continued to conduct its business of policing outside of mainstream attention, while encouraging political apathy in the Russian public (Jones). On the other hand, it increasingly responded to oppositional demonstrations with ruthless displays of violence. In August 2019, police officers beat and mass-arrested students and minors, producing hundreds of images of police brutality. Responding to these events, the artist Artem Loskutov bought a police baton from a retired officer of the Russian National Guard, applied the colors of the Russian flag to it like toothpaste to a toothbrush, and smacked a blank canvass. He announced the invention of a new style of painting called dubinopis’ (a term that recalls the Russian word for icon-painting, ikonopis’ and literally means “police baton-writing”) and proceeded to sell countless canvasses on social media as a fundraiser for the protesters. Loskutov’s dubinopis’ implied a comparison between the protest demonstration and the blank canvas, warning the police that they, too, create interpretable images.
Loskutov’s dubinopis’ joined a genealogy of Russian artists using images of policing to enter a critical dialogue with their predecessors in anti-police art. These artists eschewed authoritarian self-representation. While “playing the policeman,” they used various forms of critical framing without reenacting violence, as in the 2011 action by Voina, in which performers forcibly kissed policewomen. They also rejected the practice of inviting violence, as in Oleg Kulik’s dog performances in the mid-1990s. Lastly, these artists criticized their artistic predecessors, the actionists and the conceptualists of the late- and post-Soviet era. They charged that the actionists conceal their authoritarianism and self-aggrandizement as art, presenting themselves as sages, martyrs, or outcasts, and leading to belated painful revelations of, for instance, reactionary attitudes––as in the support voiced by members of Voina for the annexation of Crimea or domestic violence (as in the case of Petr Pavlensky) (Gerasimenko). And they charged that the playfulness and political ambivalence of late Soviet nonconformist artists like Prigov and the necrorealists left them open for cooptation. Instead, they announced their political position and distributed images of their actions on social media to broadcast their political stance. In this way, they sought to enact a more transparent, public, and collective process of de-policing.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine spurred a mass exodus of the Russian creative class, prominently represented among the nearly four million Russians who have left the country during the war. As police target even the blandest forms of political expression, such as Ukraine-themed social media posts or blue and yellow clothing, the artistic language for de-policing employed before the invasion is rendered meaningless, or transformed beyond recognition. Thus, before the war, the painter Ekaterina Muromtseva’s 2017 cycle of canvasses called More (Of/Than) Us, spoke of the shared bodily experience of Russian protesters. Stood together, as if ordered by the police to raise their arms before a pat-down (or, possibly, execution), Muromtseva’s protesters are painted with a green camouflage pattern that bleeds across their bodies, suggesting that they share wounds, or organs. In their prewar context, these images implied the solidarity and vulnerability of demonstrators––their moral high ground, if not triumph over, police violence. Viewed during the war, however, the green camo print across the bodies of the protestors acquire a different meaning, suggesting the responsibility shared by agents of state violence with those who, in resisting it, capitulate before they have won. As Russian artists grapple with the extent of their own complicity in the war––or, as the Ukrainian artist Alevtina Kakhidze put it in her recent comic, “Russian culture is looking for an alibi that it is not a killer”––the strategy of playing the policeman looks decidedly short of radical protest. A future Russian art, if it is to be oppositional, will have to speak about the crimes committed by perpetrators of war and the trauma of their victims without playing at either.
Ania Aizman is writing a book called Anarchist Currents in Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Pussy Riot. Her writing, translations, and book reviews have appeared with Columbia University Press and in Slavic and East European Journal, Slavic Review, The LA Review of Books, and The New Yorker. She is Assistant Professor of Slavic at the University of Chicago.
Works Cited
Asavi, Marina-Alina. 2017. “Art and ‘Madness’: Weapons of the Marginal during Socialism in Eastern Europe.” In Dropping Out of Socialism edited by Juliane Fürst and Josie McLellan. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Beissinger, Mark. 2002. Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.
Callen, Patrick. 2015. “Street Art Contra Police Abuse.” Area Studies in the Global Age, edited by Edith Clowes and Shelley Jarett Bromberg. Dekalb: NIU Press.
Pussy Riot. 2018. “Pussy Riot at the FIFA-2018 World Cup final match —Policeman enters the Game.” Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zQGV7XBkLE (accessed May 5, 2022).
Shapoval, Sergei and D. A. Prigov. 2014. D.A. Prigov: dvadtsat’ odin razgovor i odno druzheskoe poslanie. Moscow: NLO.
Wood, Tony. 2019 Russia Without Putin: Money, Power, and the Myths of the New Cold War. New York: Verso.
Border studies are somewhat obsessed with issues of fluidity and mobility. This may be the reason why many post-Soviet borders, which have hardened after the collapse of the Soviet Union remain largely understudied (for an important exception, see Reeves 2014). The consolidation of these borders has not always been driven by militaristic claims or state security concerns, but has also been enacted “from below”. In his study of the Turkish-Georgian border, Mathijs Pelkmans (2006) has shown how the Laz people, a population divided by Soviet borders, emphatically embraced the opportunity to reunite with their kinfolk once the border was opened in the wake of the “collapse” of the Soviet Union, only to realize that decades of spatial separation had lead to cultural and social alienation between the two groups. When such experiences of alienation became overwhelming, Pelkmans argues, the Laz on both sides of the borders tried to keep their cross-border neighbors away, thus reinforcing the border by generating cultural and social barriers by transforming taken-for-granted practices of hospitality into thinly-veiled expressions of animosity.
The border between Georgia and the Russian Federation in the Caucasian mountains is another such example, albeit with a different twist. While in the case of the Turkish-Georgian border the locals took an interest in tightening the border as a means of keeping distance from those on the other side, most people living on the Georgian-Russian border had no such interest. A case in point are the Tushetians, a subgroup of the Georgians who speak a dialect of the Georgian language and historically reside in a remote mountainous area bordering Chechnya and Dagestan within the contemporary borders of the Russian Federation. Presently consisting of about 15,000 inhabitants, many Tushetians live in the Georgian capital Tbilisi or abroad as labor migrants. Many still engage in a traditional sheep breeding economy, making use of summer pastures in the Caucasian highlands and winter pastures in the lowlands. These winter pastures are situated on the border with Azerbaijan, but formerly also included lands on the other side of the border in Dagestan. In order to support these traditional economic forms, Tushetians continue to engage in trade across a fluid northern border.
However, when the Soviet Union began to dissolve, they began patrol this border, dressing in Soviet uniforms provided with Georgian state emblems and eventually becoming officially sanctioned as the first official border guards of the Georgian state. How did this come about? The following sketch of the history of the policing of the border between Northeast Georgia and the Russian Federation is meant to illustrate the captivating effect of putting on a uniform and acting in the name of the state.
Mobilisation
Mutual raids have been frequent events for villagers in the alpine regions of the Caucasus, as testified by the numerous defence towers and castles that provided at least temporary shelter for those attacked during such incursions. The attackers were often neighbours, located in adjacent villages, but belonged to different ethnic groups. One such example considers a mountainous region stretching along the northeast range separating the North from the South Caucasus – and the Russian Federation from the republic of Georgia. On the southern side, this region is inhabited by Tushetians; while the residents of the northern side belong to one of the many ethnic groups of Dagestan and are predominantly Muslim. Despite nominal differences in religious affiliation, Tushetians and their neighbours to the north share many cultural practices as well as customary law.
Under the Soviet Union, both sides and their respective populations belonged to the same state. And although it is said that the chopped-off hands of enemies displayed on Tushetian house walls as trophies were not infrequent sights well into the 20th century, at least in the last decades of the Soviet Union, the practice of raiding had practically come to an end. When the Soviet state started to break apart around 1990, the practice of raiding returned. The population most affected were the Tushetians, because most of them resided in the lowlands for much of the year, due to their traditional economic practice of transhumance (a form of mobile pastoralism based on a seasonal movement of livestock). Another decisive factors was a Soviet resettlement program in the 1950s that declared that remote regions in Georgia such as Tusheti had no viable economic prospects (neperspektivnye) and forced the inhabitants to resettle in more “promising” regions for economic development (Pallot 1990: 657–660, Jähnig 1983: 38, 52). By contrast, their northern neighbours in Dagestan, called “Leks” by the Tushetians, lived in the region year long. Tushetians, in turn, blamed the “Leks” for breaking into their houses and stealing valuables, as well as for cattle theft. According to Tushetian contemporary witnesses the raids increased during the following winter of 1991, requiring action to be taken.
Tushetian men began to patrol the border, yet could not entirely control it, due to a lack of manpower and the roughness of the terrain. In order to address this problem, Tushetian representatives got in touch with the Georgian state ministry of defence. The latter was only gradually re-establishing itself after the civil war of 1991/92, during which criminal gangs had taken control over large portions of the military and police forces. Besides, the security, or even the very existence of the Georgian state was threatened by violent conflicts with the Russian Federation, which took place in the secessionist, self-proclaimed republics Abkhazia and South Ossetia during this period. Within this context, any initiative to control the border was welcomed by the Georgian state authorities. Consequently, the Tushetian brigades got officially sanctioned as the first border guards of post-Soviet Georgia by the Georgian ministry of defence. Their first uniforms still largely stemmed from the Soviet period, but they received some official looking badges and better equipment from the Georgian capital Tbilisi – and, more importantly, the authorisation to represent a state.
In addition to policing the border, however, the Tushetians took another action to improve the situation: the resumption of micro-diplomatic ties with their northern neighbours. For this purpose, the head of the Tushetian council (sabch’o), the local political representative body that derived from its Soviet predecessor and maintained its name, got in touch with representatives from Dagestani villages where he expected the raiders to live. Those representatives were soldiers of higher rank or village administrators (or both), but the crucial factor for their informal political authority was their status as elders. All the elders in a community taken together constituted an institution referred to as jamaat.[1]
Preserved in the archive of the Tushetian village council, two protocols (dated 1991 and 1994) recounted meetings of administrative bodies in Dagestan and eight letters written in Russian, which were exchanged between the council of Tusheti and the jamaat of Xusheti[2] between 1993 and 1995. These protocols and letters document political and legal procedures for criminal cases. The first initiative was taken by a Tushetian delegation sent to the region of Xusheti in order to contact the local jamaat. Acknowledging the complaints of their southern neighbours, the elders promised to punish the raiders and to prevent future criminal acts. For this purpose, they revived a pre-Soviet tradition that required every adult male villager to swear on the Qur’an that they would refrain from attacking the Tushetians and seizing their property. Additionally, they reported 13 names of robbers to the Tushetian council and told the council to get in touch with state representatives in Makhachkala (capital of Dagestan) “in order to punish severely the robbers by the [civil] law.”[3] The cases of cattle theft were also resolved by means of face-to-face negotiations, sometimes with the aid of the Tushetian border guards. As stated in a letter from “the administrator of Xusheti” from 1995, the Tushetian border guards kept two cows from their northern neighbours as a kind of deposit for cattle stolen and held on the other side of the border.
Immobilisation
The events of 11 September 2001 had a profound impact on politics across the world, including in Tusheti. In addition to Russian claims that Chechen fighters were taking refuge in the Georgian mountains during the second Chechen-Russian since 1999 and that the Georgian state was either unwilling or incapable of controlling its borders, now Al Qaida and even Bin Laden personally were suspected of residing on Georgian territory. The hot spot of the day was Pankisi, a valley neighbouring Tusheti and bordering Chechnya. The local population, who go by the name Kists, had fled from Chechnya in the 19th century, and many of them maintained close ties to relatives on the northern side of the Caucasus mountains.
In the second half of the 1990s, the Georgian government effectively lost control over this region. There was widespread corruption involving Georgian state officials, drug trafficking, money laundering, reports of radical Muslim propaganda, and military training for Chechen fighters and their allies. In the years to come, an Arab and an Algerian citizen residing in Pankisi without Georgian visas were imprisoned by Georgian police forces. Some of the foreign trained fighters also fought in the second Chechen war.
The Georgian government at that time attempted to dismiss the accusations, but with limited success. As the Russian government threatened to invade Georgia in order to arrest the Chechen and Muslim fighters, then president Shevardnadze appealed to the US government for support. With its strategic interest in the Caucasus and support for the Georgian political orientation towards the West, the US provided assistance in the form of military aid and training. In spring 2002, approximately 200 Special Operations Forces were sent to train and equip four 300-man Georgian battalions with light weapons, vehicles and communication devices. With this kind of support, the Georgian army was able to invade the Pankisi gorge in summer 2002 and reassert state control.
The Georgian military and its capacity to control its national borders were monitored and fostered by the Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE). Having already started their mission to Georgia in 1992, the OSCE was mandated to observe and report on movement across parts of the border between Georgia and the Russian Federation from late 1999 until the end of 2004. While the area of operation initially only covered the border between Georgia and the Chechen Republic of the Russian Federation, it was extended in subsequent years to the Ingush and Dagestan segments of the Georgian-Russian border.
In the heyday of the OSCE mission to Georgia, plenty of employees from all over Europe had focused their binoculars on the Russian side of the border. The monitors could testify that any kind of border transgression had clearly come to an end. With the beginning of the new millennium, the two sides of the Caucasus had been effectively disconnected. Locals from the Northern Caucasus could no longer go shopping in Omalo, as they had done in the 1990s, and the Georgian shepherds could no longer use pastures in Dagestan, as they had done for centuries. Any kind of trans-boundary diplomacy had to be enacted via state authorities and direct negotiations were no longer possible. Moreover, the Tushetians could no longer decide for themselves whom to allow on their territory and whom to reject.
In the course of an OSCE training program – and possibly related to it – the organisational structure of the border guards underwent significant changes. In 2006, their affiliation was changed from military to police, thus bringing the personnel under control of the Georgian ministry of internal affairs and thus coordinating their actions with other forms of policing. In recent years, the recruiting and placement criteria have also altered. In the beginning, local affiliation was seen as an advantage for border guards because of the local expertise and social embeddedness of the soldiers. After a while, this policy was dismissed as disadvantageous. Consequently, the border guards today come from all parts of Georgia, with Tushetians in the minority. What began as an effort to police the border “from below” ended (and in some ways resulted) in a consolidation of policing authority in state hands.
Conclusion
The Georgian state the Tushetians sought to protect was envisioned as both a presence and an absence: a presence in the performances of physical control over territory, an absence in the practice of regulating the social, religious and legal relations with the neighbours. But the state the Tushetians invoked once they put on Georgian uniforms was a captivating one that, over the course of time, didn’t make any concessions: The intentions of its subjects ended at the borders it defined. The uniform the Tushetians voluntarily assumed in order to strengthen their status, in turn, became a captivating force of their own dispossession. Whereas initially, they hoped to increase their bargaining position in a more structured relationship with their neighbours, they later had to realize that representing a state can take various meanings in various contexts with different, sometimes paralyzing consequences. One such consequence was that Tushetians could no longer attend religious festivals alongside their Muslim neighbours, as they have done for centuries. Another consequence was that they were no longer capable of settling conflicts directly with their counterparts on the other side of the border, and that routinized practices of creating social bonds across lines of ethnic, religious and regional affiliation such as sworn brotherhood could no longer be practiced.
What this case also illustrates is that acting and speaking in the name of the state occasionally causes unanticipated and unwanted consequences. What was initially expected to increase the scope of agency eventually paved the way for its very limitation. One obvious reason for this is that uniforms reproduce chains of command, and thus their use inadvertently stratified and solidified a hierarchical system. In the turmoil that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union and re-making of statehood in post-Soviet Georgia, central authority was rather weak and left much room for non-state actors to take state affairs in their own hands; this was the case for Tushetians. With the consolidation of centralized power, their superiors from the Georgian government based in the Georgian capital prioritized security concerns over local interests. This quest for security, in turn, was supported by Georgia’s Western allies such as the European Union and particularly the Unites States.
Moreover, Tushetians began to invoke a new conception of statehood during this period. For centuries, Tushetians have guarded the northern border to Georgia, alongside other groups who live in the Caucasian mountains such as Khevsurs. In addition to the presence of self-armed forces ready to ward-off incursions, signal towers were erected by the locals, but not least in the interest of the political power holders in the lowlands to communicate the danger of an approaching enemy. Such border guarding, however, consolidated these local populations’ autonomy vis-à-vis the state centre by increasing their bargaining power because they acted outside of a chain of command. The Georgian state which began to consolidate amidst the chaos of the 1990s, however, was unwilling to accept these fluidity borders. In an ironic twist, Tushetians provided the very legibility needed to pave the way for the state apparatus to regulate their lives(cf. Scott 1998).
Florian Mühlfried is full professor for social anthropology at the Ilia State University in Georgia. His publications include the monographs Mistrust: A Global Perspective (2019) and Being a State and States of Being in Highland Georgia (2014) as well as the co-edited volumes Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces: Religious Pluralism in the Post-Soviet Caucasus (2018) and Soviet Era Anthropology in the Caucasus and Central Asia (2012).
Works Cited
Jähnig, Wolfgang. 1983. Die Siedlungsplanung im ländlichen Raum der Sowjetunion mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Konzepts der ‘Agrostadt’. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot.
Mühlfried, Florian. 2014. Being a State and States of Being in Highland Georgia. Oxford, New York: Berghahn.
Pallot, Judith. 1990. „Rural Depopulation and the Restoration of the Russian Village under Gorbachev.“ Soviet Studies 42 (2): 655–674.
Pelkmans, Mathijs. 2006. Defending the Border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Reeves, Madeleine. 2013. Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia. Ithaka, NY: Cornell University Press.
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.
References
[1] For more details on the history and functions of these jamaats, see Mühlfried 2014: 133ff.
[2] Xusheti (also called Iusheti in one letter) is an unofficial name of a region in Dagestan bordering Tusheti. It is used in the letters as a self-designation of the respective jamaat, and by the Tushetians in colloquial conversations. However, it is not testified for in official sources.
[3] It is unknown to me, if this punishment was ever enacted. I also cannot verify if they were punished by the jamaat according to religious law, as stated by the head of the Tushetian council in an interview.
While I have never been one for fieldwork, it does occur to me that I have had several encounters with the post-Soviet police; fortunately, they were all in the 1990s, when the stakes for such incidents were relatively low. Now I see that, when I was sitting in a Moscow militia van in 1999 after failing to produce documents 100 feet from my rented apartment, I should have anticipated that 21 years later, my need for data could have been satisfied if I had just asked the right questions.
Instead, I just passed the time giving unsatisfactory answers to inquiries about my background until the cop finally asked straight out if I was Jewish. This had nothing to do with any legal jeopardy I might have been in, and admitting to being Jewish would not have gotten me into any trouble. Quite the contrary: I was usually stopped by police in their ongoing attempts to round up suspicious “people of Caucasian nationality” (“Do you ever stop blonds?” I asked once, but only after brandishing my boss-level immunity in the form of the magic American passport that I had neglected to carry the day of the police van incident). The Jewish Question (to coin a phrase) was more a matter of satisfying a mutual, if inconsequential need: his to peg my ethnicity, and mine to make him say it. After most likely missing several hints about possible bribes, I was let go, with a stern warning to carry my passport with me at all times.
All of which is to say that, in interacting with the post-Soviet militia, I never was quite sure what sort of institution I was dealing with. Were they supposed to be stopping crime, or were they the Russian equivalent of ICE, keeping the city safe from the threat of undocumented dark hair? Besides doing a poor job of ethnic profiling (they really could have learned a lot from their much more efficiently racist counterparts in the U.S.), and despite doing an even worse job at catching criminals (if the news was any indication), what were they really for?
But the police are only one half of the theme of this collection of essays; the other is prisons. Policing and prisons seem like an obvious pairing, like love and marriage (if only from a post-divorce point of view). But in terms of their symbolic resonance for the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, they are not equal partners. As portrayed by critics and dissidents, the Soviet prison camp system was the country’s master metaphor: the USSR was one vast carceral “zone,” but with less freedom of speech. It worked well with the American Cold War metaphor of the Soviet Union as a penitentiary for “captive nations.” I bring these ideas up not to endorse them; the portion of the non-incarcerated Soviet population that saw themselves as “prisoners” was probably miniscule. The power of these metaphors did not reside in their empirical accuracy, but in their rhetorical force. From an oppositional point of view, they made intuitive sense.
But that metaphorical power rested on the dissident’s familiar distinction between the “political” criminal and the “real” criminal. Well before the Soviet Union ended, a romantic subculture surrounding the thieves’ prison life made its way outside the “zone,” particularly in the form of the blatnaya pesnia, a musical genre glorifying th life of the outlaw. By the 1990s, prison became the source of important segments of popular culture: providing slang, serving as the setting for various flavors of criminal melodrama, and inspiring fashions and behaviors among the gopniki in a rough analog to the prison/hip-hop connection.
It was only in the shift from medium- to high-Putinism that prison started once again to make inroads into the public political consciousness, thanks to high-profile cases (Khodorkovsky, Magnitsky, Pussy Riot). The post-Pussy Riot “Media Zona” project is important not just for the obvious reason (activism on behalf of the incarcerated), but also for the shear linguistic novelty of putting those two words (“Media” and “Zone”) together. As for their other activist endeavor, “Zona prava” (Zone of Law), the irony speaks for itself.
The path of the “police” from the late-Soviet to the post-Soviet is more complicated. I would like to put forward the proposition that the policeas police occupied only a small corner of the country’s psychic real estate; the USSR was relatively short on police, but long on policing.
Technically, there were no police, but rather the militia. The term initially signaled a break with the Tsarist-era police, and carried a whiff of spontaneous self-organization (even if that whiff was deceptive). Favoring a military-style hierarchy to a greater extent than its Western counterparts, the militia exemplified the Soviet tendency to turn the military into the template for an unofficial Table of Ranks: you get to be a general, and you get to be a general–everyone gets to be a general!
In the (technical) absence of police, the USSR had hypertrophied police functions, shared not only by those very same military and militarized bodies (including, but not limited to, the KGB), but also Party structures, enterprises, and medical authorities. The fight against crime (as we would understand the word) was never the cornerstone. If statistics have even minimal validity, crime was not a significant, widespread problem, or at least not framed as such. Instead, these institutions policed the borders of the behaviorally and ideologically permissible. Crossing certain lines led to serious policing of the violators, but by bodies that were not, technically, police. It was not that all cops were bastards, but that all bastards were, in some way or another, cops.
Some, but not all of this changes after 1991. As crime becomes central to the news, it also colonizes popular entertainment: a perceived boom in robbers yields a similar growth in cops. The popularity of crime genres was already apparent in Soviet times, but kept under wraps by limited publication and scant imports of foreign crime film and fiction, and the ideological strictures that limited the ability to represent crime as a home-made phenomenon. Actual cops (that is, militiamen) become heroes and anti-heroes, from the early days of the television series Menty (Ulitsy razbitykh fonarei) (Cops/Broken Streetlights) (1998-2019) down to the more recent series Mazhor (inexplicably plucked out of the Russian linguistic ghetto by Netflix and renamed Silver Spoon) (2014-).
At the same time, the militia (now police) are more recognizable as a problem. It is the various divisions of the police and similar state organizations who are responsible for arresting and beating protesters, for example. The police are now more appropriate as a symbol of state repression, but they still do not have a monopoly on policing. Those same repressive functions exercised by schools, enterprises, and medical establishments still have a policing role. In the case of the first two, it is they who are still responsible for mobilizing their constituencies to vote “correctly,” for example, while medical experts continue to be called upon to declare (or try to declare) inconvenient people “unfit.” If this all sounds Foucauldian, I apologize, because I intend for it to be more along the lines of “Foucault-adjacent.” These institutions do not constitute power/knowledge, but rather enforce it. In other words, they police.
As for the police/militia themselves, post-Soviet conditions require a level of visibility from them that was not as necessary under Late Socialism. The police, and particularly OMON (the Russian equivalent of SWAT) are deployed not just operationally, but operatically, that is, performatively. With a dynamic weirdly inverted later by Pussy Riot, their masked anonymity and displays of overwhelming superior force help constitute the Putinist paradigm of strength and order. And technically, the Russian police, even when local, are the ground-level instantiation of a federal authority (serving within the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD)). In the state imaginary, federal authority replicates itself anywhere and everywhere, a structure that is as much fractal as it is hierarchical.
The police function as both a symbol of state biopower and its most immediate physical manifestation. Their bodies are sacred and untouchable in a way that those of ordinary citizens are not; think of the Bolotnaya Square Trial, where no officer got in trouble for beating protesters, but protesters were prosecuted for the equivalent of hurting the cops’ fists with their faces.[i] In such an unequal contest between differently valued and empowered bodies, what kind of resistance is available?
To address this question, I want to end my talk by bringing in Actionism, and in particular, the collective known as Voina.[ii] The immediate audience for most of Voina’s actions in the Medvedev years (the feast in the subway car, the cats thrown at McDonald’s cashiers, and so on) are the by-standers: this is art that leverages physical presence and emphasizes the use of bodies in space (as they did during the Biological Museum orgy).[iii] The second, much larger audience, is on the Internet—most of what they did would have been local and ephemeral without video uploads. But there is a third audience whose role is undeniable, even if that audience is not always physically present: law enforcement.
Law enforcement, or, put more simply, the police, are always a potential restraint on their activities. In fact, I would argue that the police play the same role of productive restriction as meter and rhyme do for traditional poetry: nearly all of Voina’s performances took place within short time frames limited by the inevitable arrival of the police. Either the police’s arrival was part of the act, or a successful action relied on the complementary distribution of Actionist bodies and police bodies: it all worked out as long as they weren’t in the same place at the same time.
Voina’s last action, which now looks like a transitional, pupal stage between the larva of Voina and the butterfly of Pussy Riot, exposes the dangers in conflating the police as symbol and the police as body. “Commemorating” the new law transforming the militia into the police, “Kiss the Pig,” consisted of female members of Voina (including Nadia Tolokonnikova and Katia Samutsevich, two future Pussy Riot trial defendants) surprising female cops and kissing them on the lips without permission. Though Tolokonnikova says she wanted men involved, this was really the only arrangement unlikely to end in serious physical violence: women kissing male cops could not be sure of getting away safely, men kissing female cops would be arrested for assault, and men kissing male cops would be lucky to escape with their lives. Faced with the obvious (and in my opinion, entirely valid) criticism that what she and her colleagues were doing was a kind of sexual assault, Tolokonnikova responded that when a person puts on a cop’s uniform, they stop being a person and become only a cop.
In other words, she sees the symbolic cop as overriding the physical cop. Cops, like kings, have two bodies, but for the purposes of the action, only one of them really matters: the physical body is exploited as a weakness in the symbolic cop body. In a way, this is a brilliant reductio ad absurdum of the symbolic prominence that the police have attained under High Putinism. But it also means assenting to that very logic and deploying personal biological power in the cause of the negation of state biopower. This is a conundrum that cannot be solved, even by performance art. It is a losing proposition, transforming the political protester into something akin to an actual criminal, thereby validating the state’s framework.
When I was working on my book Pussy Riot: Speaking Punk to Power (2020), this was the only moment when I was truly disappointed in Tolokonnikova. For the most part, Actionists and the 2012 protesters had avoided the trap of binary, Manichaean thinking that caught so many Soviet-era dissidents (who, in their crusade for freedom, developed an ideologically rigid maximalism and became the mirror image of the regime they despised). The demonstrators and Actionists sidestepped this trap through absurdity, but also came close to the bodily self-sacrifice of the non-violence of Gandhi and King.
The final irony is that the Actionist who seemed to literally embody this ethos was Pavel Pavlensky, notorious, for among other things, nailing his own scrotum to the cobblestones of Red Square. But now his former partner Oksana Shalygina has written a book detailing the sadistic abuse she suffered at his hands. Shalgyina ends her interview with Wonderzine with a statement that says it all:
He was sincere in his struggle, but he was the same [repressive] authority as the one he fought against.
Power, authority, the law –they are like quicksand: the more you fight, the more you are sucked in. Or, in the words of Sonny Curtis and the Crickets: I fought the law and the law won.
Eliot Borenstein is Professor of Russian & Slavic Studies at New York University. His most recent books include Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism (winner of the 2020 Wayne S. Vucinich brook prize and the 2020 AATSEEL book prize), and Meanwhile, in Russia…: Russian Internet Memes and ViralVideo (2022).
Works Cited
Borenstein, Eliot. 2020. Pussy Riot: Speaking Punk to Power. London: Bloomsbury.
Taratura, Iuliia. 2020 “’Eto byli ne bytovye izbieniia, a sadizm’: Oksana Shalygina o zhizni s Petrom Pavlenskim.” Wonderzine, November 2. https://www.wonderzine.com/wonderzine/life/life-interview/253377-intervyu-oksana
References
[i] The case refers to a protest that took place in Moscow on May 6, 2012. More than thirty protesters were charged with various offense, twelve of whom received prison sentences from two to four and a half years.
[ii] Founded in 2007, Voina was a political performance art group with branches in both Moscow and St. Petersburg.
[iii] On February 29, 2008, right before Dmitry Medvedev was elected president, 10 members of Voina protested by having sex in the Moscow Timiryazev Museum of Biology.
This article was peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 Editorial Collective.
A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.
——Ralph Waldo Emerson
Charles Bernstein has been, of all contemporary American poets, the one who has done the most to bring back those important words and phrases that tend to be “excluded” from circulation.
——Marjorie Perloff
When a mother gives an egg to her child and says “egg” at the same time, she is helping her child establish “a link” between language and the world. But what is the nature of this link? As the great Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure explained, langue (by which he meant particular languages, like French, or English, or Mandarin Chinese) is a system of signs which parcels out the world of sense into discretely sayable things. The signs that comprise this system are complex: they are composed of a signifier – the acoustical image, as he called it, that is formed from a combination of a given language’s phonemes – and a signified – the conceptual image or item recalled and indivisibly linked with that string of phonemes. The linguistic sign is not the thing in the world which it names.[1] In the scene described, the mother teaches the child the link between all three elements in a single stroke, bringing the child irrevocably into the world of language – both the particular language, through which this introduction is made, and language in general, what Saussure called langage. Eventually, the child will learn to draw a self-conscious distinction between language and the world which it denominates, between what is sometimes called the linguistic functions of use and mention, as when he refers to ‘egg’: not the reproductive ovum and its nutriment, but the three-letter word spelled /e/g/g/. The creation of these links is the foundation for all human thinking, upon and out of which all of our most complicated thoughts are built. It is from the perspective of these links that we can examine some of the most pressing questions concerning what I will call international poetics, the communication of innovations and norms within and between the poetry of particular languages and cultures, and beyond.[2]
The best recorded story to demonstrate how the first links between a signified, a signifier, and the real world are created is that of Helen Keller. As she recalled: “As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!”[3 In this passage, Keller vividly describes the moment when “the link” between the word “water”, and the wonderful cool flowing water of the world that was impressed upon on her mind. Though the signifier of the linguistic sign is objective, common to all speakers of a language, the cognitive image to which it is linked, and the emotional associations it bears, are personal, subjective and changeable. The significance of this division between the objective elements of language, and the subjective half to which they are bound and supported, is significant to the study of poetics.
T.S. Eliot’s theory of an “objective correlative” is a case in point. He states: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”[4] Eliot is correct in suggesting that such an emotion can be “evoked”. However, it is mistaken to assume that “the link” between “the evoker” and “the evoked” is objective. In fact, as exemplified in the case of Helen Keller above, the emotional association with the image of a particular object in one’s mind is formed by a combination of personal experience and collective instruction, the results of which are at once common enough to allow communication among speakers, yet irreducibly individual, and variable among one another, such that we can never know if our signifieds are identical to each other’s. This is indeed one of the great mysteries and miracles of language. Beyond this brute difference of other minds, there are the idiosyncrasies and vagaries of experience that contribute to the formation of our sense of our language. For Helen Keller, the emotional response evoked by the word “water” included the unique joy and enlightenment she experienced when she learned the word. The word retained for her a sense of the discovery of its link to the world. Another reader, one perhaps not deprived of their senses in the way Keller was, might have a completely different emotional response to “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events,” not only with respect to other readers, but to the artist endeavoring to evoke the objective correlative itself.
Yet people do share certain common experience, which is what makes Eliot’s theory possible in the first place. All human beings, being human, share certain life experiences and outlooks upon the world that enable them to enjoy the same literary works. The notion of a classic work, enjoyed by people of all nations around the world, is tacit proof of the commonalities across regional differences that make international literary and artistic success possible. People of the same national or cultural background will of course share more personal experience than those of different national or cultural backgrounds. There are artistic works that are highly favored in one culture while not well regarded in others. A good example is the novel A Dream of Red Mansions (《红楼梦》，1744-1754)[5] which is regarded as the best novel ever written in Chinese, yet hardly read in the west.
Literature often serves a pedagogical function. The degree to which works are read, and continue to enjoy success, often depends on their ability to continue to teach readers something about themselves, and their world. Ezra Pound, another remarkable theorist of literature (and poet), is among the most vociferous exponents of this theory of literary efficacy. He vividly describes the rewards a fruitful reading experience offers as “that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.”[6] Indeed, rewarding reading experiences are those that enlighten and develop our minds, stimulating them to great satisfaction. At the root of any literary judgment, the overall motive force by which literary traditions are sustained, is this affective dimension of reading. To read in an engaged way, to persist in reading, is to be somehow moved by it.
How does this affective core of reading, which binds traditions and communities together in spite of their differences and distances, hold for the international communication of modern poetry, not least when even the most highly experienced reader of one culture can feel lost in the works of another. Bewilderment occurs not just with respect to the idiomatic sense of another language and culture but, when it comes to poetry especially, the ways in which an artist plays and puns with every level of that language. A story told by the distinguished scholar Huang Yunte about his colleague Zhang Ziqing, is illustrative. Reading Charles Bernstein’s poem “Fear of Flipping,” Zhang persistently asked the poet for the lexical meaning of the words in the poem. Huang explained, “the poet is more invested in the ring of echoes of wall, ball, fall, all, and even the half- rhyming repel, than the lexical meaning of these words. The ricochet of sounds and syllables, creating the titular fear of flipping, like a flip or slip of tongue, looks to walls to keep it inside or floors to hold it up.”[7] In other words, Bernstein is experimenting with the sonic dimension of poetic lines; indeed, one could say that the ‘meaning’ of his verse here is produced by his play effects with the reverberation of rhyming syllables across the poem. Poetic meaning is therefore not restricted to, or even primarily, lexical here. The title of the poem sets the terms for this play by punning on the phrase “fear of falling,” a substitution of one term / phobia for another, which flips the sense of the phrase on its head. The echoing internal rhymes create a verbal image which gives shape and body to this gesture of flipping, retaining the ghost of the original phrase even as it ricochets across the altered soundscape of the lines. This practice will no doubt be recognizable to readers who are familiar with the poetics of the Language School. The play serves as a framework for linking mind and world beyond and between the confines of individual languages, and is definitive of Bernstein’s practice.
Huang Yunte’s interpretation is not difficult to understand. However, it was wholly foreign to Zhang Ziqing, and would almost certainly be to anyone who did not come to Bernstein’s work with the framework of sound and cognitive play in mind. Modern poetry like his is not unique in being theory-laden – that is, constructed and expounded according to the unique poetics of its practitioners. Nevertheless, modern poetry and poetic theories are two sides of a coin; they stand by working together – all the more so as poetry becomes esoteric in form, further removed from the conventions of ordinary language use, and governed increasingly by rules of composition unique to it. Without knowledge of the theories which govern such an esoteric art, therefore, one can find oneself at sea while reading a modern poem.[8] This is especially true of poetry where innovation does not occur at the lexical level either: indeed, where the poetry at stake is not a matter of lexical play. The divergence of modern poetry from the rules which governed previous traditions – rules of a more subtle kind of artifice intelligible to a broader literate class – has made the dissemination of its doctrines and theories a necessary part of its reception and interpretation. The difficulty a lay but native reader faces with work like Bernstein’s is exacerbated in the international context, where neither fluency in the language of composition, nor education within a broadest concept of the originating culture, can serve as sure guides. It is paramount that Chinese scholars introduce both modern poetry and modern poetic theories together, teaching them as two facets of the same literary phenomenon.
Many modern poems make good sense in a lot of ways other than the traditional lexical one, which is why they seem quite difficult to understand. T. S. Eliot once said: “We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”[9] Indeed, modern poetry is as difficult to comprehend as modern civilization. The difficulties are comparable, mimetic even, in so far as the poet is driven, in Eliot’s reasoning, by a vocational maxim to both reflect and train the sensibility of his audience to his work through the dislocations of language he performs. The difficulty of modern poetry is a difficulty inherent in its context: modern civilization. What of its value, the other aspect (ever present) of Eliot’s judgment. A difficult poem is good not because it is difficult. In fact, the difficulty of many poems is not that difficulty of modernity refracted, but rather a failure to adequately make sense of the incoherence the poet intuits. It is a subtle difference, one with which Eliot was principally concerned. A difficult poem is good only when it creates one more possibility, “forcing language into meaning,” in an unconventional way. Again,“Fear of Flipping” is exemplary. From the perspective of linking, it is an exploration of more possible ways to make new, and possibly more efficient, thought ways and patterns. The poem’s difficulty is likewise a function of the way in which it is approached. Though Eliot would demur to such a consequentialist proposition, perhaps the test of a difficult poem’s quality may be the very satisfaction of mind, its inspiration and development, that has affectively and cognitively bound generations of poetry readers to one another in a tradition millennia-old, and world-wide.[10]
What then of the transposition of these difficult poems into foreign contexts. From one perspective, it would be easy to conclude that poems like“Fear of Flipping” simply cannot be translated into Chinese. Semantics are not what a translator ought to target here, yet there are no characters in the Chinese language that reproduce the poem’s soundscape either: wall, ball, fall, all, and repel, are constructions of the sound system of English. Chinese phonology simply does not permit their formation. Yet this perspective is impoverished, for the link the poem creates (the link which is its essential, creative practice and energy) is certainly “translatable.” The poem’s signature effect, its ‘fear of flipping’ so to speak, can be reached in the target language of Chinese, and the minds of readers from this or another culture, like those of its author and his native culture, can be enlightened and developed by a translation which ‘translates’ those effects. From the linking perspective, the reward for reading a poem is to build up some new and better links, so that the minds of its readers can grow. In bringing, i.e., “translating”, poems like “Fear of Flipping” to readers in China, we need to explicate them in detail, line by line, giving more detailed interpretations than what Huang Yunte does in his essay; but we also must consider the general theory and framework of mind that the poem conjures. For it is only by doing both that Chinese readers will be rewarded in their encounter with the difficulty of works like those of Bernstein, or his Language School peers. This is the true project and mission of translation.[11] To deal with such poems that stand closely with the linguistic features of the particular language in which it is written that cannot be replicated in Chinese, the strategy for translation is not to focus on the technical details of linguistic features, but on helping readers in China in understanding the ways, i.e., the frameworks of mind presented in the poems, so that they could not only understand them but also create links in Chinese in the same spirit – and to replicate the features where possible, according to the rules of Chinese.
Marjorie Perloff has noted: “Charles Bernstein has been, of all contemporary American poets, the one who has done the most to bring back those important words and phrases that tend to be ‘excluded’ from circulation.”[12] In other words, the contribution Bernstein’s works have made is not only to serve an individual reader by promoting his/her intellectual and emotional growth, but also, and more importantly, to serve contemporary American language and culture as a whole. With poems like“Fear of Flipping”, Bernstein has been constructing and reconstructing some delicate links to promote the growth of contemporary American thought capacity. That is to say, his work has contributed to the growth of the thinking capacity of the American cultural being, which, if well “translated”, can help other cultural beings develop in similar, relevant areas too.
Different from lyrics, narrative works, both in verse and prose, tell stories that define the formation of certain links, as well as the associated emotions, so that they can often be translated in the traditional way. Story travels across cultural borders much more freely than poetic technique.
In the field of international cultural communications, a mind, or a culture at large, grows in two ways: one is of transplantation, the other of inspiration. The key difference between these two learning ways is that the former offers something that cannot be logically developed out of the exercise of the learner’s own mind or the recipient culture’s institutional self-renewal, while the latter brings something that can be logically achieved by the recipient person or culture.
Here are a few examples to further demonstrate the difference. When Sun Yat-sen established the Republic of China in 1911, he attempted to “transplant” the whole American political system into China, which was a failure because it did not function well in the Chinese culture by then. After the May Fourth Movement in 1919 (五四运动), the western ideology of free love and free marriage were introduced into China, which inspired many young people, who totally understood them, cherished them and were willingly guided by them, because in Chinese history there had been many people who had fought for their freedom of love and marriage, though they had not developed the theory of these practices to the degree the west had. In some cases, the transplantation model and the inspiration model are combined together, such as in the Socialism with Chinese Characteristics; Socialism was transplanted from the former Soviet Union, while Chinese Characteristics refers largely Chinese people’s own innovation, partly on basis of traditional Chinese political practice, and partly inspired by Western political practices.
When a Chinese student learns English, s/he needs to learn a vocabulary and a grammar / syntax (words, and the rules for their formation and combination). In this way, his/her mind grows by “transplantation”. When a Chinese scholar learns Charles Bernstein’s poetics, acquiring a totally new way of thinking, it is also of transplantation. Inspiration, by contrast, is the event of learning something that can be interpreted, understood, and made good sense of in the context of one’s already established knowledge. For example, all traditional western poetry, especially Romanticist’s works, such as those by William Wordsworth, can be easily understood by Chinese readers, as they share much of the spirit with traditional Chinese poetry.
Where do these processes of transplantation and inspiration fit in the current world of international poetics? Among the most interesting instances in the communication of inspirational learning is what one may call mis-interpretive innovation. These are cases defined by a fortunate mistake, in which the application of a norm in the target language and culture to the translation of a work produces something incongruous with the original cultural perspective. One famous example is Ezra Pound’s invention of the “Ideogrammic method”. As Xie Ming said, “This etymological, compositional theory of the ideogram, from which Pound derived his ‘ideogrammic’ method, had an enormous impact on his thinking about poetry and other cultural matters, and on the writing of the Cantos.”[13] The method has influenced many poets in the west: “An American mind, brought to ideographs by an art historian of Spanish descent who had been exposed to Transcendentalism, derived Vorticism, the Cantos, and an ‘ideogrammic method’ that modifies our sense of what Chinese can be.”[14] Indeed, it is for this reason that Pound is said, in a well-known oxymoronic idiom, to have ‘invented Chinese poetry in English”. And yet, as explained on the back cover of the book The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, the Chinese language is just a set of signifiers, like the English language or any other languages.[15] This now seems to be common knowledge to most English readers. However, Ezra Pound’s invention of the “Ideogrammic method” made perfect sense in its context, and it was a wonderfully productive method for the composition of his works. It was an extremely valuable invention in poetics in English, inspired indeed.
There are many more examples of mis-interpretive innovation. Let us offer a personal one. When Li Zhimin was invited to give a talk on Ezra Pound’s lyric “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”, Li found the other three panelists interpreted the poem as a war poem, the context for which was England’s involvement in WWI.[16] This appeared quite strange to him, as Li had been accustomed to interpretating the poem in the cultural context of its original author, the great Chinese poet Li Bai (701-762). In the traditional Chinese cultural context, this poem is normally taken as a love poem that romanticizes the mutual love and devotion of a young couple, which is considered a key virtue of the family ethics highly valued by Confucianism. Li found his American colleagues’ new (to me) interpretation compelling, making good sense as it does of the historic context in which the poem was translated and read in England. In fact, this new interpretation is inspiring and fascinating, and has contributed to the growth of Li’s understanding of the original and translated poem. What we can see from this example is that poetry not only exists in its original or translated context, but between them, in the historical and cultural rhymes that mutually illuminate diverse regions of the literary tradition.
Let us give another example that illuminates the importance and shifting influence of context. A famous Chinese scholar prof. Yue Daiyun once held a seminar and discussed a novel entitled “Marriage of Xiao‘erhei (小二黑结婚)” with her American students. In the novel, there is a character named Sanxiangu (三仙姑) who often makes herself up to look more beautiful, which is meant to be inappropriate as she is of the working class, so that the conventional comments in the proletarian literary circle in China on this character is always negative. However, Yue Daiyun found all her American students were supporting Sanxiangu, as they thought there was nothing wrong with her making herself up. On the contrary, they considered Sanxiangu to be an admirable woman, as she seemed to them to love life.[17] Yue Daiyun came to agree with her American students’ comments, and has been retelling their views to her students and colleagues back in China, which is surely a contribution to the interpretation of the character Sanxiangu as well as the whole novel in China.
The purpose of international interactions is not to make all cultures the same. Rather, international interactions can make all parties more perfect in their own way. We learn from each other in the transplantation model only when there is no alternative. We apply the model of inspirational learning in most cases. The overriding principle to decide whether any international communication is fruitful or not is whether it makes good sense in terms of the recipient individual or culture, indeed, whether it enriches the recipient through the change it rings.
In the model of inspirational learning, the exchange can move in both directions: the innovative knowledge produced by the recipient may depart from the codes and conscience of the original culture, and yet in doing so inspire something novel in return, within the original culture. With the back and forth of such international communications, human knowledge on the whole is greatly expanded. In fact, the method of international communication, especially of the mind-expanding forms of poetry, is perhaps the best way for humanity to develop itself by diversifying itself: that is, to resist the pull of sameness.
International interaction follows more or less the same principles in other fields. For example, in the field of politics, China and the West have learned and benefited from each other, and will continue to do so in the future. Jacques Gernet has said: “China furnished the first example of a disciplined, rich, and powerful state which owed nothing to Christianity and seemed to be based on reason and natural law. It thus made a powerful contribution to the formation of modern political thought, and even some of its basic institutions were imitated by Europe.”[18] Indeed, he convincingly argues that what the West has learned from China it has learned in the inspirational model. In return, China has learned a lot from the West as it developed during the modern age, much of which has transformed Chinese society to a great extent, such as in the fields of education, industrialization, urbanization and so on. And again, perhaps in the future, some of modern China’s successful institutions might serve as good examples from which the West might learn, and so on in perpetuity.[19]
Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that all forms of life are linked: “A subtle chain of countless rings/ The next unto the farthest brings”[20] as he writes in the poem which prefaces his essay “Nature.” Helen Keller’s story about the creation of the link between the signifier “water,” the concept water the signified on her mind, and the water out there in the world, is a story about the origination of thought, without which she would have lived in a kind of intellectual darkness all her life. But the story is general: if human beings could not create links between the world and the world of signs, human beings would have lived in the darkness as well. Without poetry to further enhance these links, or to break and remake them, and without its transposition between languages, in which it is once more remade into a monster of linguistic and cultural confusion (in the etymological sense of this word), our thought would be even darker. The linking is everything; it is, as Emerson reminds us, life itself.
2022/04/18
_____
LI Zhimin is “Guangzhou Scholar” Distinguished Professor of English at School of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University (Guangzhou, China, 510006). He serves as President of Foreign Literature Society of Guangdong Province. His research interests focus upon studies on modern poetics, culture (philosophy) and English Education (Email: washingtonlzm@sina.com).
Daniel Braun is English Lecturer with Special Honor at School of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University. He got his PhD in English literature Studies in Princeton University in 2019.
[1] Ferdinand De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, Trans. Wade Baskin, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 65-66.
[2] More discussions on the formation, nature and functioning of such links are made in Li Zhimin’s monograph The Good and the True of Knowledge (Beijing: The People’s Press, 2011) [黎志敏：《知识的“善”与“真”》。北京：人民出版社2011年版。]
[3] Helen Keller, Story of My Life (C. Rainfield, 2003), 11. This ebook was produced by Project Gutenberg. It is available at: http://www.CherylRainfield.com.
[4] T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Methuen, 1920), 92.
[5] TSAO Hsueh-Chin and Kao Heo, A Dream of Red Mansions, Trans. Yang Hsien-Yi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994). TSAO Hsueh-Chin and Kao Heo are of the Wade-Giles System. In modern Pinyin system, they are Cao Xueqin and Gao E respectively.
[6] Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect”. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (Toronto：George J. Mcleod Ltd., 1968), 4.
[7] Yunte Huang, “Ten Plus Ways of Reading Charles Bernstein: Improvisations on Aphoristic Cores,” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture, Vol. 48, No. 4, 2021, p. 275.
[8] Please refer to LI Zhimin, “Modern English Poetry: Innovation through Theory,” Foreign Language and Literature Research, Vol. 35, No. 5, 2020, pp. 27-34. [黎志敏：《理论主导下英语诗歌的现代转型》，《外国语文研究》2020年第5期。] In this essay, Li argued that modern poetry and modern poetic theories have to be read side by side to make good sense of both of them.
[9] T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), 289.
[10] Please refer to LI Zhimin, “Innovative Spirit of Modern Poetry: To Develop Human’s Intellectual and Emotional Capacities,” Foreign Languages and Cultures, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2021: 1-8. [黎志敏：《现代诗歌的创新精神》，《外国语言与文化》2021年第2期。] In this essay, Li argues that one major function of modern poetry is to promote the development of human’s intellectual and emotional capacities.
[11] In fact, this is what we have done in our on-line bilingual course on modern poetry in English. This on-line course can be reached at: https://www.ulearning.cn/course/25598. In this course, Charles Bernstein is invited to have given a talk on an excerpt from Dark City, in which he gives a line to line interpretation. This is indeed the best way to “translate” a difficult modern poem.
[12] Marjorie Perloff, “Introduction to Charles Bernstein’s Distinguished Wenqin Yao Lectures at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Fall 2019,” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture. Vol. 48, No. 4, 2021, p. 86.
[13] Ming Xie, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999), 236-237.
[14] Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 162.
[15] See the note on the back cover in the book: Ernst Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1936).
[17] Yue Daiyun and others, “Feminism and Literary Criticism,” Free Talks on Literature, No. 6, 1989, p. 19. [乐黛云等：《女权主义与文学批评》，《文学自由谈》1989年第6期。]
[18] Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, trans. J. R. Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 523.
[19] Please refer to LI Zhimin, “The One Way Model of Cultural Interaction: Literary Interactions between China and Cambridge,” The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2012: 111-127.
[20] R.W. Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: The Modern Library, 2009), 18.
_____
Works Cited
Eliot, T. S. “The Metaphysical Poets.” In Selected Essays, edited by T. S. Eliot, 281–291. London: Faber and Faber, 1954.
——. “Hamlet and His Problems.” In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, edited by T. S. Eliot, 87–94. London: Methuen, 1920.
Emerson, R.W. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Brooks Atkinson. New York: The Modern Library, 2009.
Gernet, Jacques. A History of Chinese Civilization, translated by J. R. Foster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Huang, Yunte. “Ten Plus Ways of Reading Charles Bernstein: Improvisations on Aphoristic Cores.” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture, no. 4 (2021): 255–278.
Keller, Helen. Story of My Life. C. Rainfield, 2003. This ebook was produced by Project Gutenberg. It is available at: http://www.CherylRainfield.com.
Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era. London: Faber and Faber, 1972.
Perloff, Marjorie. “Introduction to Charles Bernstein’s Distinguished Wenqin Yao Lectures at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Fall 2019.” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture, no. 4 (2021): 85-90.
Pound, Ezra. “A Retrospect.” In Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, edited by T. S. Eliot, 3-14. Toronto: George J. Mcleod Ltd., 1968.
Saussure, Ferdinand De. Course in General Linguistics, translated by Wade Baskin, edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. NY: Philosophical Library, 1959.
Xie, Ming. Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999.
Yue, Daiyun and others. “Feminism and Literary Criticism.” Free Talks on Literature, no. 6 (1989): 18–24.
In Philosophy for Spiders McKenzie Wark reads the novels of the punk avant-garde writer Kathy Acker as philosophical texts, or as the title proposes: as “low theory.” Low theory rejects the privileged terms of “high theory” and likes to remind the reader that the philosopher has a body. This theory “from below” often talks about sex and makes theoretical thinking a bodily task. Wark also finds this kind of thinking in Kathy Acker’s literary experimentation. Acker’s “null philosophy” comes from below – from the body and self of the author – while undoing that same self.
As scholar and writer, Wark has made significant contributions to the fields of media theory and cultural studies with Hacker Manifesto (2004), Molecular Red (2015) and Capital is Dead: is this something worse? (2019). More recently, she turned to gender theory and memoir writing with Reverse Cowgirl (2019) and now she has published this personal-critical reading of Acker’s experimental prose. Philosophy for Spiders comes with a content warning for “sex, violence, sexual violence and spiders” as well as a form warning: “this book has elements of memoir and criticism but is neither” (4). As the subtitle of the book suggests, Wark proposes to read Acker’s work as philosophy, more specifically as low theory, a term first used to describe the work of cultural theorist Stuart Hall and popularized by Jack Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure (2011). Wark follows Acker in her view that perhaps she was not writing novels: “they’re big chunks of prose, but are they novels? More groups of stories. Some of them aren’t even that” (54). Rejecting a clear-cut division between the novel and a philosophical text allows Wark to read Acker’s prose as “philosophical treatises” (54). The reader might wonder what the low in low theory reacts to: is it the dominance of the “master discourse” of high theory, or does the complicated content of high theory make the genre inaccessible? Developing low theory as an aspirational genre, Wark longs for a kind of philosophy that emerges outside of a (patriarchal; and even matriarchal) tradition:
It is a philosophy without fathers (or even mothers), and so no more of their Proper Names will be mentioned. This philosophy for spiders is not a philosophy in which gentlemen discourse on the nature of the beautiful, the good, and the true. It is philosophy for those who were nameless as they had to spend their time working for the money. A philosophy not by those who could arise from their place to announce it, because their place was to be on their knees, their mouths full of cock. A theory in which otherwise quite tractable bad girls and punk boys go off campus and conduct base experiments in making sense and nonsense out of situations. “Recruited due to our good intentions, V and I’ve instead learned a brutal philosophy: ignorance of all rational facts and concepts; raging for personal physical pleasure; may the whole Western intellectual world go to hell.” (81)
Where Wark aims for a philosophy without “Proper Names” Acker turns to the literary and philosophical canon to think with and write through. Acker’s work refers to (but never cites) a wide range of canonical thinkers such as Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Marquis de Sade, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud who inspire her to question the primacy of rationality and the Cartesian subject. In one of her first novellas Kathy Acker writes: “I’m trying to get away from self-expression but not from personal life. I hate creativity” (Acker 1998, 86) and in her short story New York City in 1979 the character Janey “believes it is necessary to blast open her mind constantly and destroy every particle of memory that she likes” (Acker 1981, 6-7) Acker’s work rejects the idea that an author should have an original voice, which for her is a bourgeois conception of literature that only serves to support the capitalist “cult” of individuality. For Acker there is no creativity involved in creation. As Wark asserts, “the bourgeois writer is an acquisitive animal. A creature of power, ownership, and control. What it writes, it owns; that which writes is the kind of being that can own. Kathy was a different beast – or beasts” (5). Acker’s interest in anti-creativity stimulates her appropriation of “found” material such as canonical texts, overheard conversations and dreams – for Acker they are all as “real” as any other event. Throughout her work Acker compulsively recounts and repeats events from her life; her mother’s death, painful romantic encounters, unrequited crushes, dreams, gossip, and jobs she did. At the same time, Acker consistently lies about all of those aspects of her life – to the extent that even her date of birth is contested.[1] Treating events of her own life in a similar manner to the texts she plagiarizes, everything is part of Acker’s “anti-creative” project. Her work is sometimes seen as aggressively opposing meaning-making – thanks to her oft-cited mantra of “Get rid of meaning. Now eat your mind.” But Acker’s ambitious rewriting of the literary canon is not simply a postmodern displacement of meaning. Her literary experiments are concerned with procedure, method, and memory.
One of the ways Acker explored her interest in (and suspicion of) memory was writing “fake autobiography”: a rewriting of her life interwoven with found materials, like conversations she overheard and texts she copied. In her early text “Politics” (1972) for example, she collages conversations between her stripper-colleagues together with scripts she wrote for a live sex show on 42nd Street with (clearly fictional) incestuous lesbian fantasies. In her biography of Acker Chris Kraus suggests that Kathy Acker’s numerous lies must be seen as a fundamental part of both her life and work. She even goes as far as to propose that her consistent lying was a condition for writing:
Because in a certain sense, Acker lied all the time. She was rich, she was poor, she was the mother of twins, she’d been a stripper for years, a guest editor of Film Comment magazine at the age of fourteen, a graduate student of Herbert Marcuse’s. She lied when it was clearly beneficial to her, and she lied even when it was not. […] But then again, didn’t she do what all writers must do? Create a position from which to write? (Kraus 2017, 14)
In Wark’s recounting of their shared past (Wark and Acker met in Australia in 1995 and embarked on a short affair) she is fully aware of Acker’s self-mythologizing tendencies. Wark fictionalizes their meeting and points to the gaps in her own memory as well as Acker’s habit to treat her life and her literature the same:
Not everything Kathy ever said to me was—strictly speaking—true. Particularly when we got to New York. It was as if we were inside a Kathy Acker book, written on flesh and city. […] I knew nothing about New York at the time. Anything Kathy told me could be true to me, was true to me. She showed me the New York of myth. We wandered from Central Park toward the East River, to Sutton Place. Sutton Place, she told me, was her childhood home. In the psychogeography of New York, it is certainly a place from which a Kathy Acker should hail. It is in countless movies, from How to Marry a Millionaire to Black Caesar. Lou Reed has a song that mentions not walking there. It’s in Catcher in the Rye; it’s in Great Expectations and My Life My Death by Pier Paolo Pasolini—by Kathy Acker—and some of her other books. (33)
Considering all the ways in which Acker put herself on the line in her work, her body as a performer, autobiographical material, her creation of the persona, makes it possible for Wark to read Acker’s life and work as a spider web of narratives, identities, and concepts. In the early 1970s Acker started publishing her first appropriative texts under the pseudonym “The Black Tarantula” and copying from the Marquis de Sade and a book of portraits of female serial killers. In her work Acker often puts everything she copies in the first person but she did not only steal from other texts, she also stole from her own life. Wark’s construction of a spider web of Ackers takes its cue from Martino Scioliona’s suggestion that Acker’s auto-plagiarism becomes a narrative web in which “Acker always recounted her own life story as if it, too, was a stolen text” (in Wark 2021, 5).
Weaving a web of Acker’s selves, Wark unwraps herself too, at least the selves that Acker made possible in their affair and in her texts. Wark met Acker in 1995 at a reading in Sydney. At the dinner after the reading the two writers connected and started a short affair. An email correspondence followed their meeting and was published in 2015 as I’m Very Into You: an intimate document of the flirty and intellectual emails they exchanged over a period of a few weeks. Both I’m Very Into You and the memoir part of Philosophy for Spiders reveal how Wark felt seen in her femininity in this meeting with Acker in the 1990s and how this might have informed her recent gender transition. In 1995 Wark wrote in an email to Acker: “There are reaches of me that I can only put in language as feminine, and those reaches exposed themselves to you, felt comfortable next to you sometimes. That doesn’t happen very often” and now in her Philosophy for Spiders Wark says she wanted to escape masculinity and that “reading Kathy again helped to transition” (7). Wark remembers: “who I was starting to be with Kathy. I was starting to be her girlfriend. That concept” (22). In search of more concepts, Wark (re)reads Acker’s complete body of work almost thirty years after their initial meeting in Australia. From Acker’s texts Wark assembles phrases and claims around different concepts like “love,” “capitalism” and “penetration.” In so doing Philosophy for Spiders sketches a web of Acker’s selves along with concepts Wark finds in Acker’s work, providing a glimpse into what might turn out to be a philosophical system.
Wark rightly points out that Acker’s texts are “studded with philosophical questions” (56) and that these questions predominantly center around desire, subjectivity, form, and the failure of language. Her novel Great Expectations (1982) is exemplary for how Acker’s philosophical mode, if we can detect one, rejects the linearity of logical thinking:
Stylistically: simultaneous contrasts, extravagancies, incoherences, half-formed misshapen thoughts, lousy spelling, what signifies what? What is the secret of this chaos? (Since there is no possibility, there’s play. Elegance and completely filthy sex fit together. Expectations that aren’t satiated.) Questioning is our mode.” (Acker 1982, 107)
Acker’s philosophical mode questions hierarchies of knowledge by asking the “big” questions of philosophy as if they were dumb questions. Moreover, this questioning mode is inherently tied to the body, and thus to sex and gender. In her essay “Seeing Gender” (1997 [1995]) Acker reflects on her writing practice and directly responds to the work of “high theorists” like Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray. In the essay she looks back on her writing practice, the (gender) politics of plagiarism, and her ambition to find what she called “the languages of the body.” In a typical Ackerian manner, she takes the figure of the young girl – in this essay she uses Alice from Alice in Wonderland –who has yet to discover the limits of her being and knowledge. As a child, the girl wanted to become a pirate – the only way to see the world – but since “I wasn’t a stupid child, I knew that I couldn’t.” Still, she knows what “the pirates know”, namely that in writing and being “I do not see, for there is no I to see” (Acker 1997, 159). Instead, “to see was to be an eye, not an I.” The essay progresses as a theoretical inquiry into gender and the body through Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One (1979) and Butler’s reading of that text in Bodies that Matter (1996). Acker’s ambitious quest for self-knowledge and knowledge of the world come together in her observation of the self: this conflation of the eye and the I, consistently destabilizing the second through the first. In Acker’s logic then, a feeling is a concept. This doesn’t mean that experiencing an emotion will directly lead to knowledge, but that to see is a way of knowing. Since Acker’s girls don’t have a language of their own, they can’t know themselves except through feelings. In Don Quixote (1986) Acker writes that “real teaching happens via feelings” (159) and “my feelings’re my brains” (17). Barred entrance to the world of knowledge, the “stupid” girl as philosopher can make sense of her own subjectivity through sensuality, not rationality. Quoting a letter from the Romantic poet John Keats from 1817, Acker reflects in Great Expectations:
Only sensations. What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it exists materially or not – for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty… The imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth. I am the more zealous in this affair, because I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning – and yet it must be. Can it be that even the greatest philosopher ever arrived at his goal without putting aside numerous objections? However it may be Oh, for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts! (Acker 1982, 64)
Acker rewrites Keats but keeps his opposing two notions of truth here: the reasoned truth of the philosopher and the truth of the artist which, for Keats, can only emerge through sensations and passions, through the imagination. As Wark’s Acker web suggests, Acker is not interested in a mastering feelings with language, rather the opposite: “I feel I feel I feel I have no language, any emotion for me is a prison” (Acker 1982, 24).
Wark follows Acker in that she lets the intensity of their mutual crush precede the thinking. In the first chapters Wark serves the reader queer sex scenes before she turns to Acker’s philosophy. Both the story of their affair and Wark’s readings of Acker are tied to questions of gender and a dysphoric experience of the body. In “The City of Memory” Wark recalls:
In our room at the Gramercy, sometimes I was Kathy’s girl. I wanted to watch her strap himself into her cocks. The leather harness was all black straps and shiny buckles. Its odor an appealing blend of leather, lube, and sweat. Kathy did not want my help with it, but she took her time. Choosing cocks. Inserting a cock in the harness, another in his cunt. Strapping on the harness without either falling back out again. Even after a few drinks Kathy was deft at this. I Just lay back and admired her technique, his presence. (35)
Using this descriptive mode for a “phenomenology of the body” (81) allows Wark to narrate Acker’s genderqueerness too, underscored by the use of alternating he/she pronouns. Wark shows how remembering their encounter will always also be a rewriting of the meeting. Throughout the book Wark’s receptiveness and passivity are important–in bed but also in their shared thinking: “She had philosophical questions. I could only describe things” (22). In Philosophy for Spiders Wark connects Acker’s multiplication of the authorial self to gender and what she calls a “penetration theory” (92). Acker’s appropriative and autoplagiaristic writing becomes a practice of “selving: reproducing self-ness” (54). Wark shows how thinking about gender in terms of penetration destabilizes a coherent sense of the self as gendered. This is also a textual concern because reading and writing turn out to be processes of penetration too. In Reverse Cowgirl, Wark finds that “the great asymmetry of human being” is the division between the penetrators and the penetrated and this asymmetry allows for trans identifications:
If I could not know who I was from the world touching me from the outside, prodding ‘til I felt a self; then I would become one by being touched from the inside. Edward’s cock would press my insides against their boundaries, pushing what would become, when pressed, against skin from the inside, a being I could call, a being I could call I. This coming into being, this inside out subjectivity, would change things between us. (Wark 2020, 53)
Both the penetrator and the penetrated are “involuntary agents” but allow for different experiences of gender. In Reverse Cowgirl penetrative sex makes it possible for Wark to feel a “temporary non-masculinity” (Wark 2020, 176). In this space of “non-existence” the body comes first, negotiating power dynamics and identity through a relationality of being penetrated, penetrating and penetrable. Acker too was interested in penetration, particularly the penetrable body as a site of knowledge. In her experimentation Acker soughtliterary forms for “the languages of the body” (Acker 1997, 143) by way of masturbatory writing, bodybuilding and writing pornography. Foregrounding the body creates an articulation of gender as an asymmetry of sex rather than a binary position. This allows Wark to read the bodies in Acker’s work as “potentially trans:”
Just as the eye and I, or sensation and desire, differ, so too the fucker and the fucked. This asymmetry of sex might be just one of the zones in which to think about gender, although in the Acker-text the asymmetries of sex acts can arise in all sorts of ways out of all sorts of bodies. There’s no essential diagram of gendered bodies. In that sense all Acker bodies are potentially trans. (90)
Bodies are trans here to the extent that they are assumed as not-cis. Still, assuming that desire always destabilizes sexual difference doesn’t necessarily illuminate our understanding of what gender is, because as Wark writes in Reverse Cowgirl “there is never any symmetry to what wants” (26). To desire is to not know or understand that desire. Both in Reverse Cowgirl and in Philosophy for Spiders, Wark is interested in the way penetration potentiates a different experience of the body and self-consciousness: “being-penetrated creates a node around which every other difference— sensations, selves, genders—can disperse” (Wark 2021, 91).
In Acker’s logic, penetration centers the self and makes thinking possible. In Wark’s words, to be penetrable and penetrated is “to have an axis for sensation in the world” as opposed to those who do the penetrating. They “act as subjects in the world but they don’t react, they don’t let the world in much” which leads Wark to claim that to penetrate is “just not that interesting” (92). The question left unanswered here is: uninteresting for whom? And how are we expected to view Acker’s role of the penetrator in the sex scenes Wark describes? An obvious answer would be that switching positions allows access to both experiences but in this book being penetrated appears to be the privileged position because the penetrable body has access to a specific form of knowledge as it “comes to know itself, not its penetrator” (153).
For Acker, the question of penetration is a problem of language. In her early text Breaking through memoriesinto desire (2019 [1973]) Acker asks: “Language. How do I, fucked, use the language? I don’t want to be doing this writing” (381) and in My Mother: Demonology (1993) Acker writes that “the more I try to describe myself, the more I find a hole” (in Wark, 154). A temporary centralized subject emerges in the destabilizing encounter of sexual penetration. This is where Wark finds a first philosophical concept in Acker’s work: a phenomenology of the body or what she calls Acker’s “phenomenology without the subject” (54).
Wark’s reading of Acker’s “languages of the body” as low theory raises the crucial question of how sex relates to knowledge. To theorize through sex is to choose confusion over rationality, non-knowledge over knowledge and to problematize the subject’s relation to knowledge. Sexuality clearly interests Acker, not necessarily because it precedes patriarchal discourse or cannot translate the experience of sexuality to language, but because sex does not affirm a self or one’s personal pleasures. For Acker, sex is a crucial site of negativity: her texts reveal the failure of language to express identity and introduces sex as a question of the (incoherence) of subjecthood. Sex is the moment in which the self is destabilized, displaced once more, and thus where knowledge breaks down.[2]
Acker’s recurring character Janey fails to be a sovereign subject in the patriarchal structures imposed on her. Her obsession with sex ruins her education as a proper young woman because rationalized knowledge is inaccessible to a “stupid” young girl like Janey. Her failure to know how to use language, how to behave properly, how to be, illustrates the typical young girl’s experience of inhabiting available structures of knowing and their limits. Stupidity in Acker’s work is not necessarily non-knowledge or absence of knowledge, it is more an investigation of the unknowability of the subject herself and the limits of her language. Avital Ronell has pointed out how Acker’s texts explore the emancipatory potential of stupidity.[3] Acker’s characters embrace stupidity in that they refuse knowledge in the form it is given to them. In her book Stupidity (2002) Ronell proposes to take stupidity seriously as a philosophical position because it does not “stand in the way of wisdom” (5) and asks how it can be turned into a productive category of thought and as a locus for the unmaking of language – one of Acker’s literary concerns too. Stupidity, Ronell writes, is a “political problem hailing from the father; it combines with conservative desires for stability, comfort, and authenticity, but it also opens up other spaces of knowing” (16). Wark makes a similar point:
A philosophy of emotions, like a philosophy of language or sensations, has to start from doubt, uncertainly, confusion – with nonknowledge. “My emotional limbs stuck out as if they were broken and unfixable.” (GE 58) And: “I don’t think I’m crazy. There’s just no reality in my head and my emotions fly all over the place.” (63)
The problem of the speaking subject in Acker’s work becomes a project of asking the “stupid” questions. This way, Acker’s project is concerned with a philosophical position from which to think “stupidly.” Reading Acker’s texts as philosophy should therefore not be a question of what ideological tendencies or feminist politics are being thought or taught, but a much narrower question: how to establish a thinking self without relying on the Cartesian model of the subject. Acker asks: “But what if I isn’t the subject, but the object?” (in Wark, 142).
As her literary experiments started to take shape in the early 1970s, Acker sought words and ideas to understand what she was doing. Considering her radical decentralizing approach to identity, Acker found a home in the thinkers of poststructuralism. But any attempt to uncover intentionality in her work is tricky because she successfully mystified her own methods and theoretical influences in interviews. In an interview with her publisher Sylvère Lotringer, Acker claims she started to understand her experimental writings strategies when she got to know poststructuralist thought through Lotringer’s publishing house Semiotext(e). Interestingly, Acker places herself on the same level as the French philosophers she admired and was even surprised they didn’t know her work:
I was like a death-dumb-and-blind person for years, I just did what I did but had no way of telling anyone about it, or talking about it. And then when I read ANTI-OEDIPUS and Foucault’s work, suddenly I had this whole language at my disposal. I could say, Hi! And that other people were doing the same thing. I remember thinking, why don’t they know me? I know exactly what they’re talking about. And I could go farther. (Acker 1991, 10)
Whether Acker really was not aware of “French theory” before meeting Lotringer is disputed by Chris Kraus, but the typically poststructuralist concern with identity and desire through the fragmentation or decentralization of the “I” is present from her earliest published work in the 1970s. In 1975 Acker did take her place among the philosophers: at the “Schizo-culture” conference Lotringer organized with French thinkers like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard as well as American artists and writers like Richard Foreman, Philip Glass, and Acker’s literary idol William Burroughs. Lotringer’s introduction of the “then unknown radical philosophies of post-’68 France” (as MIT Press retroactively describes the event) to the American avant-garde marked a shift in how Acker relates to theory in her work. Acker’s poststructuralist tendencies were a perfect fit for the academic zeitgeist and appear to have contributed to the “meteoric rise of her academic reputation” (Punday 2003). Her texts proved popular among academics who aimed to lay bare the ways in which Acker engaged with theory: in her rewriting of film scripts, one might find a reflection of Baudrillard’s ideas; her wild science fiction novel Empire of the Senseless must be the result of reading Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. But as the Acker scholar Tyler Bradway recently pointed out, these theoretical readings of Acker “obscure her ultimate frustration with the way that these discourses, particularly deconstruction, made her writing too narrowly readable, rendering it ironically subordinate to and exemplary of an external master discourse” (Bradway 2017, 106). Still, Acker’s typically fragmented and “unreadable” texts continue to resist such theoretical interpretations – hence Wark’s interest in reading her as low theory.
To render the text unreadable, to think non-intelligibly, writing stupidly, obviously implies a questioning of the distinction between false and true knowledge. Embracing stupidity as a philosophical mode blurs the line between true and false statements, but also informs Acker’s ambition to develop a non-authoritarian use of language. In 1984 Acker writes in Art Forum:
I write. I want to write I want my writing to be meaningless I want my writing to be stupid. But the language I use isn’t what I want and make, it’s what’s given to me. Language is always a community. Language is what I know and is my cry.” (Acker 1984)
Writing the immediacy of thought through a nontransparent use of language – language as a “cry” rather than expressive of an idea – leads to a “false clarity” (Harper 1987) and in Acker’s case results in a logic that sounds consciously contradictory and finds a ground in excessive affect. Acker’s writing of sex and romantic crushes seems personal and very intimate but the feelings she describes are not “hers” in the way that they belong to Kathy Acker, they are taken from or inspired by the texts she reads while writing. Wark proposes that in Acker’s work, “emotions, feelings, affect, might be keys to a certain kind of understanding that is subjective but not necessarily individuated” and that “feelings can become concepts” (63). The question of desire and self-reflection in narrative is crucial for Acker. In Great Expectations (1982) Acker writes that “narrative is an emotional moving” and in Eurydice in the Underworld (1997) that “as if reality was emotional, I perceived solely by feeling” (in Wark, 63). Acker works consistently against the idea that feeling opposes knowing. We can “know” our feelings but the feelings are not pieces of knowledge themselves, at least not in the kind of “high theory for whom Plato is daddy” (Wark, 54).
To understand how Acker’s texts both work with and reject philosophy as high theory, it is worth considering her contribution to the Lotringer’s Schizo-culture conference, which was neither theoretical nor particularly literary. At the conference Acker presented translation exercises: Janey’s “Persian Poems” which would later become part of Janey’s education from age ten to fourteen in Blood and Guts in High School (1984). The translation exercise is short but unambiguous about Janey’s position as object: “to have Janey / to buy Janey / to want Janey / to see Janey / to come Janey / to beat up Janey” (1984, 84). In these evidently false translations Acker reaffirms her concern with how language constrains rather than liberates. The only possible agency for Acker’s recurring protagonist Janey is to surrender to the position of object. In these translation exercises and throughout Acker’s work, Janey is doomed to be the predicate of the sentence, the object to the subject. The first numbered lines are succeeded by a translated line that overflows, exceeding the initial format as it turns into a passionate address:
5. The streets are black. You haven’t fucked for a long time. You forget how incredibly sensitive you are. You hurt. Hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt. You meet the nicest guy in the world and you fall in love with him you do and you manage to get into his house and you stand before him. A girl who puts herself out on a line. A girl who asks for trouble and forgets that she has feelings and doesn’t even remember what fucking’s about or how she’s supposed to go about it because she wasn’t fucked in so long and now she’s naïve and stupid. So like a dope she sticks herself in front of the guy: here I am; understood: do you want me? No, thank you. She did it. There she is. What does she do now? Where does she go? She was a stupid girl: she went and offered herself, awkwardly, to someone who didn’t want her. That’s not stupid. The biggest pain in the world is feeling but sharper is the pain of the self.
6. Is there any fresh meat? (Acker 1984, 88-92)
The turn from the interpellating “you” to the descriptive “a girl” signals a shift from an intimate address to a distant observation of the girl’s being as defined by rejection. The “there she is” is characteristic of the way the figure of the girl features as an ontological negation throughout Acker’s work; she momentarily comes into being through an encounter with lack, in this case simple and clear rejection, and thus when she starts questioning her own desires. These painful desires reveal how feelings are a problem for Acker’s subject: “the biggest pain in the world is feeling but sharper is the pain of the self.” In Wark’s reading the only agency Acker’s girls have is their “amorality and ability to exploit their own desirability” (151):
Girls are, among other things, objects that power perceives as a thing to desire. As if they had no subjectivity. Rather than claiming to be subjects, girls in the Acker-web escape into unknowability, as far as power’s gaze is concerned. Their bodies may be penetrable, and that is the function assigned them as objects, but otherwise they can choose not to be known at all. The girl too is not an identity but an event, something produced by chance and fluid time. Lulu: “you can’t change me cause there’s nothing to change. I’ve never been.” (151)
Acker’s radical determinism about the symbolic absence of woman in language and literature generated a wide range of feminist interpretations of her work, particularly as being exemplary of écriture féminine by studying Acker’s experimental literary form as a critique of the male canon (which it undoubtedly is) and her sex writing as expressive of a female voice. Even if Acker’s texts themselves appear to reject academic interpretations, Acker herself was a fanatic reader of philosophy, including “French feminists” like Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Helène Cixous. As she writes in “Seeing Gender”, philosophy pointed her towards knowledge she had experienced intuitively herself, namely that “woman” does not exist: “She has no essence, for all that comes into being, according to Plato, partakes of form. I knew this as a child, before I had ever read Plato, Irigaray, Butler. That, as a girl, I was outside the world. I wasn’t. I had no name. For me, language was being.” (Acker 1997, 161) Acker’s concern with the linguistic “I” as a being that always lacks, and thus must copy if she is to speak, also reveals the role that sex plays to understand the failure of language.
Wark is not the first to suspect that Acker’s interest in the immediacy of language and sex can function as a form of theorizing. Martina Sciolino pointed out in 1990 that we might read Acker’s fiction as performative philosophy: “A writer of innovative narratives that converse with theorists as diverse in their constructions of desire as Georges Bataille and Andrea Dworkin, Acker creates fictions that are theories-in-performance” (Sciolino 1990, 438). Acker’s “theories-in-performance” reveal different ways in which lines can be drawn between the author and her theoretical material. To see how this kind of “performative philosophy” can function outside of an already established philosophical discourse, it might be helpful to turn to Chris Kraus again who reads the diaries of the French philosopher Simone Weil as philosophical investigations. For Kraus, the only condition for a text to be philosophical, to read these “personal” texts beyond memoir, is that the text must be concerned with rhetoric: “In Weil’s philosophy, just like in narrative or phone sex, it’s not the story that we’re really hearing, it is the fact and act of telling it” (Kraus 2004, 77).
Considering the significant reception of Acker’s texts in the world of “high theory” and Wark’s reaction to these readings through the concept of low theory, the question of the intentionality of Acker’s project lingers. It is complicated because, for Acker, the subject always emerges as a being of language for whom no “genuine” agency is possible; in Acker’s world agency is limited to being a receptacle. To do is always a being done to. In this sense, it might not be particularly helpful to look at the influence of theory on Acker’s work because it assumes a text outside of, or a “before” reading theory, while Acker’s writing practice itself is a reading practice as much as it is a writing practice.
Leslie Dick has observed how Acker’s writing functioned as an extension of her reading, that “her plagiarism was a way of reading, or re-reading, appropriating and customizing what she read, writing herself, so to speak, into the fabric of the original text” (Scholder et al. 2006, 1). Her writing consists of readings of texts that provoke her reaction, evoke a fantasy or stimulate her to rewrite the texts she is consuming. In this sense, her writing has always been a form of critical writing. In Learning for the Revolution (2011), Spencer Dew reads Acker’s work as instructive, labelling it a “pedagogical project,” and Martina Sciolino describes Acker’s work as “materially didactic” (437). Harper (1987) specifies Acker’s critical project further as “less a conscious political philosophy than a pursuit of the immediate the unregulated present” but argues that Acker “consciously participates in the poststructuralist project of the liberation of the signifier from fixed meaning” (47). In Philosophy for Spiders, Wark smartly avoids the question of intentionality by emphasizing the inseparability of reading and writing and how that relation creates subjectivity in the text. Wark frames this as a relation of passivity and, again, penetration:
The Acker-field is a sequence of books about—no, not about. They are not about anything. They don’t mean, they do. What do they do? Get rid of the self. Among other things. For writer but also reader. If you let them in. You have to want it to fuck you. It happens when there’s a hole. Rather than say one reads, one could say that one is booked. A body can be booked a bit like the way it can be fucked. A body uses its agency to give access to itself to another. A body lets go of its boundedness, its self, its selfishness, and through opening to sensation disappears into the turbulent real. (156)
For Wark the reader as well as the writer is a hole, ready to be penetrated by other texts. Not that the author has no agency at all but in writing she is also being written. This is how Acker’s philosophy can be understood in terms of stupidity and unknowledge; it rejects the idea that anything we think we know or want is “ours.” Acker’s naïve lyrical I is also a displacement of the position of the philosopher.
This penetrative relation between self and text is also what Wark scrutinizes with Acker’s words in Philosophy for Spiders. Wark’s reading of Acker is clearly this kind of “penetrated writing:” Wark herself does not emerge as a particularly original thinker here but instead lets Acker do the thinking. For Acker the impossibility to speak as an authentic self is at the center of her work and Wark’s proposition to let Acker talk to herself creates an interesting encounter of voices but is oftentimes awkward, especially when the reading lacks interpretative strength. Wark offers us Ackers on a plate but does not interpret this group of texts. The voices in Wark’s web of Ackers sometimes sound detached, as isolated sound bites. Wark appears to share the view of the artist Vanessa Place, who she cites early in the book: “citation is always castration: the author’s lack of authority made manifest by the phallus, presence of another authority” (7) but Wark does not really do the work of using the citations to create a different text. This makes it at times difficult to feel where Philosophy for Spiders is going with this mapping of concepts and raises the question what is exactly at stake in this low-theoretical reading of Acker. Is it to make way for other, more detailed, theoretical readings of Acker’s work, or for Wark to create a personal encounter with Acker’s texts? Both are of course possible and fair reasons to write the book, but the wide range of concepts and citations at times are puzzling when they are not brought together in a reading.
The sex scenes in the book offer a way to read the book: Wark’s reading of Acker lets itself be penetrated by Acker. The meeting of texts as the meeting of bodies:
Maybe gender is transitive in another sense. Between any two bodies is a difference. Maybe that difference is gender even when it is not, actually, gender. It’s what top and bottom imply, a difference. Maybe the genders could be transitive verbs, and can be applied in any situation where part of a person acts on another through that gender as an action: Kathy manned me. (29)
This difference that is not sexual difference leads Wark to formulate an “asymmetrical” theory of penetration which can be mapped onto gendered bodies: “the body penetrating is often (but not always) male and the body penetrated is often (but not always) female” (93). Wark’s interest in penetration and penetrability sounds almost instructive when she tells us that “everyone ought to know how to top: ethics” (22). The lesson for the reader here seems to be that these dynamics in sex reveal “gender as an action” which in turn affirms the action of passive and active in terms of feminine and masculine – at least Wark herself when Acker “manned” her. Wark’s reading of Acker’s texts as making space for transness relies on this evocation of the “dysphoric body” and its needs and desires, “a category that maybe overlaps a lot with the trans body but is not ever identical to it” (178). Wark develops three “philosophies” of Acker in the book. The first is a “null philosophy” centered around the question of the self. Wark finds this philosophy in Acker’s questions around emotions, memory, and exteriority. The second philosophy is the encounter with the other, with sections ranging from “library” and “rape” to “fathers” and “death.” The third philosophy that Wark discerns is concerned with capitalism and Acker’s questions around sex work, the commercialization of art, and Acker’s fame.
Acker’s legacy has had many faces. First as punk and transgressive in the NYC art and performance world, then the critical reception with poststructuralism in the 1980s and 1990s and today we are seeing another one of Acker’s afterlives in contemporary (auto)fiction, for which she functions as some sort of precursor, like in the works of Olivia Laing and Kate Zambreno.[4] Perhaps together with the publication of the emails I’m Very Into You these books stimulate the cultivation of Acker’s persona. In her blurb for Philosophy for Spiders, Sarah Schulman asserts that Wark’s “highly personal sex memoir evolves the growing ‘My Kathy’ genre in trans directions.” One recent publication in this supposed ‘My Kathy’ genre is Olivia Laing’s novel Crudo (2018), whose fictional narrator is called “Kathy” and bears some characteristics of what we know of Acker’s life but at the same time functions as a placeholder for Laing to talk about developments in her own personal life: her approaching marriage to an older well-known poet during a summer holiday in an Italian villa. This kind of autobiographical writing would undoubtedly be the classic bourgeois novel form for Acker, despite the appropriation of the voice of “Kathy.”[5] In The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012) Schulman positions Acker as a central figure in an art scene that was “radically queer” and describes how Acker’s fiction “faded from view” due to gentrification: “[H]er context is gone. Not that she was a gay male icon, but rather that she was a founder and product of an oppositional class of artists, those who spoke back to the system rather than replicating its vanities” (Schulman 2012, 53). Even though Schulman is referring to a post-1980s gentrification, we might ask if the growing ‘My Kathy’ genre indicates a new kind of Acker reception. Now that Acker is no longer “fading from view” because of gentrification, might her renewed popularity point towards a new kind of gentrification? To see how Acker’s persona is being used today raises the question if she, as the typical transgressive and outcast writer, functions as some sort of token for radical literature in personal memoir and autofiction writing. And where can we situate Philosophy for Spiders in the web of Kathy Acker’s afterlives?
In the afterword Wark claims that she wants to “push her back in the direction of a minor literature – trans lit: the writing of and by and for trans people” (170). Not to retroactively label Acker’s person as trans, but to think of her texts as a writing “among those for whom being cis gendered is not their state, their homeland, their family, their fantasy” (170). Wark wants to make space for Acker in a genre she calls “trans girl lit.” Wark’s own autofictional undertaking in Reverse Cowgirl might give us a clue as to how an author can be the “involuntary agent” of her own writing when Wark, high on shrooms, reflects on the narrative web she has created à la Acker: “Reverse Cowgirl made sense to me, finally, as a sort of autofiction account of someone who was trans all along and did not know it yet. In this case, even the writer didn’t know the shape of the web she made” (175). Like in Acker’s appropriative writing, other people’s texts have authorial agency and Wark’s own life is reframed as a web of unconscious narrative turns. Penetrating or penetrated, neither the life story nor the texts are in the author’s hands.
Now that the reputation and position of Acker’s work is moving towards canonization and perhaps even gentrification, can we view Wark’s book indeed as a pushback against the canonization of Acker? Wark’s reading of Acker as “minor literature” provokes a shift in the reception of her work in two ways: to consider Acker as a theorist, which I’m sure will bring about various new Acker readings, as well as to pose the question of the “non-cisness” of Acker’s work.
As such, Wark’s move does secure Acker’s radical work from being completely assimilated into a literary world where bourgeois story lines, plot development and stable subject-positions still reign – even if Wark does this work in the very contemporary self-reflective autofictional mode. On a more theoretical level, Wark’s reading of Acker is slightly opaque in a style we might call “after Kathy Acker,” namely dealing with (philosophical) knowledge as a question of subjectivation and sex. The knowledge in the text does not belong to the author-philosopher or the reader when the theorist refuses to engage with her material in a straightforward top-bottom relationship. Perhaps “theory” as a label is even outdated. Wark writes, with Acker:
There’s no consistent and self-same subject that can be the author of theory from on high, and who could survey history, discover its hidden concept, and announce its destiny. “Since all acts, including expressive acts, are interdependent, paradise cannot be an absolute. Theory doesn’t work.” (138)
As “switchy philosophers” Wark and Acker want to be topped and penetrated by the texts they encounter but in so doing they do not get rid of mastery completely. It cannot be denied that in the top/bottom difference Wark explores, the bottom has power too and can even be a form of mastery in itself,[6] especially in this case, when producing a new text. This is perhaps how the genre of low theory can function as a form of mastery as well. Even if we accept that low theory is accessible and not pretentious like classic high theory, it imposes a reading that is hard to object to. Whereas the critical reader can oppose high theory with arguments, low theory does not allow for a similar debate because it already preempts theoretical objections. Using the terms of penetration theory we might say that low theory works with the power of the bottom. A seduction that can hardly be countered – surely not with theoretical arguments. And this seems to be what Wark has learned from Acker and Philosophy for Spiders shows in a smart way: to think about and with the penetrable body as a site of power and (self)knowledge. In Kathy Acker’s texts the lyrical I as theorist emerges as an inarticulate subject who cries stupid phrases and expresses illogical desires: a girl. And even if “theory doesn’t work,” Acker’s girls and Wark’s web of Ackers remind us that as long as there is feeling, there will be thinking.
_____
Tessel Veneboer is a PhD candidate in English Literature at Ghent University. She specializes in queer theory and experimental literature. She is currently working on a dissertation on Kathy Acker (supported by the Research Foundation Flanders).
[1] Library of Congress gives her birth date as 1948 while most obituaries used 1944 as date of birth.
[2] In her book What is Sex (2017), philosopher Alenka Zupančič takes psychoanalysis as a philosophical problem and proposes that sex is the missing link between epistemology and ontology: “sex is messy because it appears at the point of the breaking down of the signifying consistency, or logic (its point of impossibility), not because it is in itself illogical and messy: its messiness is the result of the attempt to invent a logic at the very point of the impasse of such logic. Its “irrationality” is the summit of its efforts to establish a sexual rationale” (What IS Sex, 43).
[3] See “Kathy Goes to Hell: On the Irresolvable Stupidity of Acker’s Death” by Avital Ronell in Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (2006).
[4] See Olivia Laing’s Crudo (2018) and Kate Zambreno’s Screen Tests (2019).
[5] In an interview with Sylvère Lotringer Acker explains that she “always hated the bourgeois story-line because the real content of that novel is the property structure of reality. It’s about ownership. That isn’t my world-reality. My world isn’t about ownership. In my world people don’t even remember their names, they aren’t sure of their sexuality, they aren’t sure if they can define their genders.” (Acker 1991, 23).
[6] In Homos (1995) Leo Bersani shows how S/M relations demonstrate the power of the bottom over the top and as such S/M practices have “helped to empower a position traditionally associated with female sexuality” (82). In light of Wark’s “penetration theory” this would mean that the position of the bottom is not necessarily female or powerless because for Bersani “the reversibility of roles in S/M does allow everyone to get his or her moment in the exalted position of Masculinity (and, if everyone can be a bottom, no one owns the top or dominant position), but this can be a relatively mild challenge to social hierarchies of power” (86).
_____
Works Cited
Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School. 1984. New York: Grove Press.
—. Bodies of Work: Essays. 1997. London: Serpent’s Tail.
—. Don Quixote. 1986. New York: Grove Press.
—. Great Expectations. 1982. New York: Grove Press.
—. Hannibal Lecter, My Father. 1991 New York: Semiotext(e).
—. “Models of our present.” Art Forum. February 1984.
—. My Mother: Demonology. 1993. New York: Grove Press.
—. Portrait of an Eye. 1982. New York: Grove Press.
Bersani, Leo. 1996. Homos. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Bradway, Tyler. 2017. Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
A pigeon in a mural. In early August 2011, the American street artist Shepard Fairey paints a mural in Copenhagen, Denmark, on a wall adjacent to the “ground zero” of a recently demolished squat called Ungdomshuset (the Youth House). Fairey could hardly have chosen a worse spot in the city to sport his ready-made design of a pigeon hovering over the word “peace”: shortly after the mural’s completion, graffiti writers defaced what Fairey refers to as “my Peace Dove mural.”[2] Their message was clear: “no peace” and “go home yankee hipster.” To make matters worse, Fairey ended his trip to Copenhagen with a “black eye and a bruised rib” after a violent assault.[3]
Today, Fairey’s pigeon—a take on Picasso’s famous peace dove—is still aloft in the mural high above the vacant lot, a serene emblem of triumphant peace. Unlike Hito Steyerl’s parable of contemporary art in “A Tank on a Pedestal”—where she recounts how pro-Russian separatists drove a Soviet battle tank “off a World War II memorial pedestal” to use it in guerilla warfare—the pigeon was never hijacked from its mural and redeployed as a war machine.[4] Or was it? Considering Fairey’s controversial mural from the combined perspective of art history, the history of counterinsurgency, and late-modern warfare prompts a series of questions that pertain to our “hypercontemporary” moment in much the same way that Steyerl’s example of a tank on a pedestal does: is the mural a theater of war? Picasso’s peace dove, a drone?
Shepard Fairey’s “Peace Dove Mural”, Copenhagen, August 2011.
In this essay, I consider Fairey’s pigeon in a mural as an art-historical index for the “bodies of beliefs, images, values and techniques of representation” that characterize the “historical situation” of US drone warfare under the Obama administration.[5] By analyzing the peace-dove motif, and situating it in the broader context of drone warfare, I argue that the pigeon-cum-peace-dove emerges as an instrument of war alongside its mechanical double, the drone. The pigeon in the mural, then, is more than some helpless animal caught in the crossfire of a chance conflict: it is also a cipher for late capitalist war.
In what follows, I begin from the controversy surrounding Fairey’s Copenhagen peace dove mural before zooming out to reconsider how the peace dove motif relates to the conduct of war and politics from the end of the Second World War to the age of drone warfare—and beyond. As I show, the peace dove motif is historically at the center of an “image war” in which opposing political ideologies struggle for mastery in the realm of representations.[6] The story of the peace dove from Picasso through to Fairey, in other words, is the story of how an “icon of the left” was detached from its origins and aligned with a triumphant conception of liberal peace: one that effectively helped obscure US military aggression in the era of drone warfare.[7] Ultimately, then, the image conflict traced and contextualized in this essay points toward the historical limits of what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, in a seminal essay from 1795, called the “sweet dream of perpetual peace.”[8]
I
“You don’t have to be Picasso, you just need to be inspired by Barack Obama.”[9]
To the Copenhagen Youth House activists, Fairey’s artistic peace statement was unwanted because it literally and symbolically erased the traces of conflict from the site of a year-long struggle that revolved around systemic dynamics of capitalist gentrification, political repression, and police violence. But the activists’ fury—as the tag line “go home yankee hipster” suggests—was equally fueled by their perception that Fairey’s peace message converged with President Obama’s rhetoric in the US-led war on terror by other supposedly more “peaceful” means, mostly drones.
On the street address Jagtvej 69 in Copenhagen where the Youth House once stood, there is now an empty, graffiti-covered lot. The house that once stood there, by contrast, was a vibrant hub for radical politics and dissidence for more than a century. Historical figures like Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin would pass through to give political speeches and conspire with local revolutionaries and exiled comrades. It was also here, in August 1910, that the German Marxist Clara Zetkin proposed the annual celebration of what is now known as the International Women’s Day.
After the eclipse of the historical workers’ movement, the building was temporarily abandoned. In 1982, in the wake of severe street confrontations, the Copenhagen municipality surrendered the disused building to the “BZ-movement” of young squatters, dropouts, and punks.[10] People started referring to the building as Ungdomshuset (the Youth House), which became a crucial countercultural node for the European punk movement and radicals of various stripes.
Around the turn of the millennium, the Copenhagen municipality sold off the estate to a Christian sect. The sale technically turned the building into an illegal “squat,” as its users refused to acknowledge the change of ownership. Instead, existing tensions rose, and conflicts about “the right to the city” developed into riots. The militants responded to eviction notices and a sensation-hungry press by hanging a banner from the windows of the occupied building, reading: “For sale, including 500 autonomist stone-throwing violent psychopaths from hell.”[11]
Early one morning in March 2007, one of the most carefully planned and most spectacular police operations ever carried out in Denmark took place. In scenes resembling a film, police helicopters lowered a team of special operations agents onto the Youth House, broke through barricaded windows with power tools, and filled the house with tear gas to evict the militants and clear the house for demolition. As news of the eviction spread, Copenhagen’s streets became ablaze with anger. Hundreds of militants from all over Europe joined the struggle. In their effort to “keep the peace,” while facing some of the most severe riots Denmark had ever seen, the Copenhagen police department mustered reinforcements from neighboring districts, and even neighboring countries.[12]
The state forces far outnumbered protesters and rioters, who could not prevent the Youth House’s eventual demolition.[13] Still, the riots, protests, and demonstrations carried on relentlessly after the demolition, and every single Thursday for several years, thousands of protesters would ritually march through the city. Even though in 2008 the municipality yielded to the pressure and allotted another building in the city’s outskirts to activist purposes, the Thursday protests carried on unrelentingly for several years. The original battle cry—nothing forgotten, nothing forgiven—still resounded among a discontented youth when Shepard Fairey made his cameo appearance in 2011.
When Fairey flew in to decorate the city—Fairey’s stint as a Copenhagen street artist included an art show at the self-styled “street art gallery,” V1, and no fewer than seven murals in prime locations across the city—the Youth House struggles were still recent memory. In a blog post, Fairey recalls being aware that “the mural location in question had a controversial history” but says he thought to himself: “what a shame, I hope I can do something that is a symbolically positive transformation.”[14] Apparently, some activists thought differently. Even before the mural was completed it was destroyed by graffiti.
The destruction of the Copenhagen mural and the ensuing image conflict soon attracted international media attention. The Guardian, for instance, reported that Fairey’s mural “appeared to reopen old wounds, with critics accusing Fairey of peddling government-funded propaganda.”[15] Fairey, in turn, insisted that his mural was non-political, stressing that he was merely promoting a universal message of peace, and went back to restore his mural. Just as quickly as he restored it, however, someone destroyed it anew.
V1, Fairey’s local art gallery, stepped in to mediate by inviting some artists, who supposedly represented the Youth House, to repaint the bottom half of the mural in a design of their own choice. Fairey recalls:
It was a powerful scene of hostile riot police like those who had evicted the Youth House dwellers and it incorporated one of the paint bombs on the mural as if it had been thrown by a riot cop. I thought it was a brilliant solution reflecting the history of the site and keeping my pro-peace message intact, but adding additional emphasis to the idea that peace is always facing attack from injustice that I felt was already more subtly implied by placing the dove in a target.[16]
These changes did little to help, and the mural kept getting attacked. And so too, unfortunately, did the artist. Soon, a mock version of the famous Obama posters the artist created for the 2008 US presidential election appeared on Copenhagen street corners. Instead of a picture of Obama, the poster now featured Fairey, with a bruised eye, over the familiar caption: HOPE. But why such vehement opposition? And “how”—as the artist asked—“is a mural advocating global peace inflammatory”?[17]
To understand the antagonism toward Fairey, one needs to consider how Fairey glossed over decades of struggles between local activists and a repressive state apparatus parading as the apotheosis of liberal democracy. As the mock poster amply suggests, the activists’ perception of Fairey as a useful idiot for American cultural imperialism originates in the street artist’s world-renown campaign to help elect Obama for president.
In 2008, Fairey created and distributed thousands of stickers, posters, T-shirts, and other merchandise to support the future president. Fairey even painted an “Obama mural” in Hollywood, photographed from a spectacular bird’s eye view. Across these images, the graphic form of Obama’s face is invariant. Fairey’s instantly recognizable aesthetic, which borrows in equal parts from political propaganda, pop art, and advertising, led TheNew Yorker’s art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, to extol Fairey’s Obama HOPE poster as “the most efficacious American political illustration since ‘Uncle Sam Wants You.’”[18]
Obama too, recognized the poster’s political efficacy. In a letter of appreciation to the street artist, Obama said: “I would like to thank you for using your talent in support of my campaign. […] Your images have a profound effect on people, whether seen in a gallery or on a stop sign. I am privileged to be a part of your artwork and proud to have your support.”[19] Soon after, with a little help from his “poster boy,” as the media later dubbed Fairey, Obama was elected. He was sworn into office on January 20, 2009. The rest is history. A history of hope, among other things.
Looking back from the recent Trump era, Obama’s presidency might appear to embody the progressive march towards what Kant, in 1795, had called “perpetual peace.” But the “sweet dream of perpetual peace,” as Kant stressed—to shield himself from allegations of subversive intent—remains precisely that: a philosopher’s dream, to which the “worldly statesman” does not need to “pay […] any heed.”[20] And though the worldly statesman Obama rhetorically advocated peace, he didn’t shy back from using military force.
One of President Obama’s first military campaigns, what became known as the “Obama-surge,” consisted in ramping up US troops in Afghanistan by an additional 17.000 soldiers. Later Obama’s military strategy shifted toward a series of so-called “small wars” or military interventions in Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, among other places, that most certainly violated key philosophical articles in Kant’s treatise on peace – e.g. intervening forcibly in another state and employing “assassins.”[21] Advanced weapon technologies or “drones” for carrying out assassinations were instrumental to what some would describe as the Obama administration’s transformation of “the whole concept of war,” along with its attendant relationship to peace.[22]
However, Obama was not yet another “war president” but rather an example of a statesman who carefully paid heed to the dream of lasting peace and whose chief political task, accordingly, was to engineer this peace by all means necessary. One of the most potent tools that Obama inherited and redefined was the infamous US drone program. However, while new technology may have changed the reality of warfare, it takes more than technical advances to change social conceptions of war. Critics have rightly exposed the ambiguities in Obama’s peace rhetoric.[23] But which other “instruments” may have helped transform our understanding of war and its relationship to peace?
Key here, I believe, is how state and non-state actors ideologically supercharge artworks to wage “image war.”[24] One of the most famous examples of image war occurred when US officials, prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, deemed the reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica that was hanging in the UN Security Council chamber an inappropriate backdrop and ordered it to be concealed behind a curtain before the media arrived. According to the Retort collective’s analysis, this incident illustrates how states “struggle for mastery in the realm of the image.”[25] Can we pursue this analysis one step further to explore forms of image war that do not directly involve the state’s micromanagement of the “means of symbolic production”?
The advent of blogs, social media, and algorithms has challenged traditional top-down approaches to the politics of representation. As the Situationist Guy Debord pointed out at the dawn of our networked era, new decentralized or “diffuse” forms of control in the realm of the image exist side by side with more “concentrated” forms of spectacular representation.[26] State power no longer relies to the same extent on micromanaging appearances. Instead, as in the case of the Obama administration’s quasi-official endorsement of Fairey’s artwork, state power now benefits equally from artists-as-influencers who more or less wittingly align their aesthetics with the ideological exigencies of those in power.
Fairey placing his pigeon in a target to “subtly” imply, in his own words, “that peace is always facing attack from injustice” is an example of how ideology exists, independently of overt state control, in the expanded realm of art.[27] Fairey’s idea of a fragile and easily victimized peace—as not-so-subtly underscored by the white-feathered creature placed in a target—thus readily exposes a key ideological component of the liberal reasoning behind late-modern warfare: that perpetual peace requires an advanced pre-emptive “security” regime to ward off potential attacks from the enemies of peace.
In the liberal conception of peace, “keeping the peace” does not mean waging war indiscriminately but protecting the international community’s fragile state of equilibrium from external threats. What the US-led international community refers to as “peace” is not just a misnomer for perpetual war but also, in a historically specific sense, the precondition for newfangled forms of pre-emptive state violence, the urbanization of drone warfare, and the policing of racialized “surplus populations.”[28] From war power to police power, in other words.[29]
From such a perspective, Fairey’s pigeon dovetails with what Mark Neocleous calls the “liberal peace thesis.”[30] Now “a standard trope in the political discourse of international theory,” Neocleous argues, the liberal peace thesis is an untenable “claim for capitalism’s essentially pacific grounds.”[31] Since its inception in eighteenth-century political philosophy, the proponents of the liberal peace thesis have ignored evidence that contradicts the idea that free markets are an effective antidote to armed conflict. The constitutive violence at the heart of the liberal peace thesis, Neocleous notes, is encapsulated in ahistorical interpretations of Kant’s essay:
Liberalism, and thus many international lawyers, like [sic] to cite Kant’s essay ‘Perpetual Peace’ as a key philosophical document outlining the liberal foundations of peace, yet usually omit the fact that the essay was published in October 1795, just one month after the military suppression of the revolt in Poland led by Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Poland’s partition by Russia and Prussia, and about which Kant had nothing to say.[32]
Likewise, proponents of the liberal peace thesis in the age of drone warfare typically have little to say about the lethal violence undergirding the “peace” discourse of the Global North. Obama is, again, a case in point. As one of the most popular American presidents ever, Obama was—and to some extent still is—primarily perceived as the embodiment of liberal democracy. In terms of US politics, Obama is something close to the incarnation of the liberal peace thesis: a champion of the most politically progressive values, with “peace” chief among them.
Eleven months into his presidency, in December 2009, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for helping the US to play a more constructive role in world politics and for preferring “dialogue and negotiations” as “instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts.”[33] The news that the 44th American president had received the world’s most prestigious peace prize resonated globally. Prefiguring Fairey’s pigeon mural, the Spanish newspaper El Pais published a cartoon picturing Obama as a “black peace dove.”[34]
But the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate admitted to having “instruments” other than just “dialogue and negotiations” in his peace arsenal. In his acceptance speech, Obama acknowledged that, as “the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars,” he was “filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace.”[35] The answer to these “difficult questions,” as is now well known, took the form of the drone.
As Daniel Klaidman stated in his contemporaneous bestselling book Kill or Capture: the War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency, “[b]y the time Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2009, he had authorized more drone strikes than George W. Bush had approved during his entire presidency.”[36] According to estimates produced by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Obama oversaw “ten times more” air strikes than his predecessor, amounting to “a total of 563 strikes, largely by drones,” in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen among other places. The corresponding death-by-drone casualties logged by the bureau amount to somewhere “between 384 and 807 civilians,” and counting.[37]
In his Nobel Peace Prize remarks, Obama gauged the “costs of armed conflict” in relation to the “imperatives of a just peace” and concluded: “So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.”[38] Obama’s closing remark?
Clear-eyed, we can understand thatthere will be war, and still strive forpeace. We can do that—for that is the story of human progress; that’s the hope of all the world; and at thismoment of challenge, that must be our work here on Earth.[39]
Leaving aside the question of whether the US-led, drone-based peace campaign is the story of human progress, it is clear that Obama’s work on Earth changed how we think about war and international conflict. Touting promises of “hope,” “progress,” and “change” (incidentally, the words that Fairey interchangeably used on his iconic HOPE posters), the Obama administration helped transform the concept of warfare into a logic of global “security.” As Grégoire Chamayou, in his instant classic of the drone age, pointed out, “in the logic of this security, based on the preventive elimination of dangerous individuals, ‘warfare’ takes the form of vast campaigns of extrajudiciary executions.”[40] As Chamayou remarks, “the names given to the drones—Predators (birds of prey) and Reapers (angels of death)—are certainly well chosen.”[41] So, is the pigeon in Fairey’s mural a bird of prey? The peace dove, an angel of death? Let’s examine in more detail the history of this magically ambiguous motif.
II
In 2010, the year before Fairey painted his “Peace Dove mural” in Copenhagen, there had been a global celebration of Picasso’s work. The temporary closure of the Picasso Museum in Paris, which sent many of Picasso’s works on tours of the global museum circuit, enabled major Picasso retrospectives in Moscow, New York, Münster, Seattle, Zürich, Vienna, and Liverpool.[42] The Liverpool exhibition, which took place at the Tate Liverpool gallery, was called Picasso: Peace and Freedom.
The exhibition frontispiece sported one of the artist’s iconic peace dove designs. According to the exhibition statement, this would be the first exhibition “to examine in depth the artist’s engagement with politics and the Peace Movement,” and it would “reflect a new Picasso for a new time.”[43] A new Picasso for a new time—but what “new time,” exactly? A time before Brexit, Boris Johnson, and Trump. A time of “hope,” for sure. A time that embodied all the most progressive values and hopes of Western liberal democracies. But how did Picasso’s peace dove become an emblem for an overarching liberal narrative of progress, peace and freedom?
While the dove has been a symbol of peace since ancient times, it was in the hands of the twentieth century’s most famous artist, Pablo Picasso, that it acquired its status as the quasi-official symbol of world peace. Appropriately to our story, Picasso’s peace dove originated, it is not often noted, as a fusion of street art avant la lettre and political propaganda. According to art historian Sarah Wilson, Picasso’s peace dove first appeared on the world stage in a poster on the streets of Paris announcing the World Congress for Peace, Paris-Prague, in 1949. It was the French communist and founding member of Surrealism, Louis Aragon, who, during a visit to Picasso’s studio, had chosen “Picasso’s pigeon—a soft wash drawing on a black ground” as a symbol for the upcoming international peace congress.[44]
Thanks to mechanical reproduction techniques, Picasso’s pigeon or La Colombe (1949)—originally intended as a limited edition lithograph of 50 prints—was being churned out by the thousands. Under the French Communist Party (PCF) auspices, Picasso’s delicate peace dove motif thus evolved into what specialist in political imagery Zvonimir Novak fittingly describes as a machine de guerre graphique, a graphical war machine.[45]
In response to the PCF’s “extremely successful billboard campaign,” French anti-communists, covertly sponsored by the CIA, formed a movement called Paix et Liberté (peace and freedom), with the sole purpose of discrediting the communist peace campaign that symbolically centered on Picasso’s wildly popular peace dove motif.[46] Did the 2010 Tate exhibition, Picasso: Peace and Freedom, perhaps intend some historical pun by alluding to the anti-communist propaganda of Paix et liberté in their exhibition title? It is difficult to tell, especially given that there was also a pacifist communist group with that name in the interwar years.[47] The changing ideological valence of the terms “peace and freedom” notwithstanding, the recuperation of Picasso’s peace dove exemplifies how art and politics intertwine in ways that exceed artistic intent. Much like Picasso’s Guernica was detached from its historical origins in “exchange for its continuing topicality”—as O.K. Werckmeister argued in his seminal book Icons of the Left—so too did his peace dove evolve into an all-purpose image of a politically non-descript peace. [48]
The original Paix et liberté group is an essential component in the history of Picasso’s peace dove. It was the French socialist politician, Jean-Paul David, who in 1950 founded Paix et liberté together with fellow partisans of the North Atlantic Treaty. To their concern, the signing of the treaty had been “effectively eclipsed” in France by the press coverage of the first communist peace congress.[49] The group’s aesthetic counter-offensive launched a flood of “posters supplemented by newsletters, brochures, pamphlets, stickers, and tracts that used the words, themes and symbols of the Communist Party to counter their message.”[50] In the climate of tense ideological antagonism that characterized the early phases of the Cold War, Novak recalls, the Parisian “walls were a site for a permanent war between billposters, the streets a battlefield scattered with paper tracts.”[51] A recurrent feature of the anti-communist campaign was how it exploited a deep-seated cultural sense of ambiguity about birds to draw attention to the two-faced nature of the communist peace symbol.
In a popular fable by Jean de La Fontaine, “The Bat and The Weasels,” a bat is caught by a weasel with an appetite for mice. The poor creature cunningly escapes death by convincing the predator that it is “not of that species” at all: “I, a mouse? No, no, some people must have told you merely out of malice. Thanks to the creator of the universe, I am a bird: behold my wings. Long live the nation that skims the air.” A little later, the same bat is caught again by another weasel, this time one that harbors an “enmity” toward birds. Again, the clever bat escapes. But this time by refusing to be a bird, insisting that, surely, it is the feathers that make the bird, not the mere ability to fly. La Fontaine’s fable—which, as one can imagine, also lent itself to French anti-Semitic political caricatures—was used against the communists to present them as morally suspect.
Because much of the support for the PCF in the 1940s and 1950s stemmed from the glory of the communist resistance movement’s fight against fascism during the Second World War, the Fontainesque anti-communist propaganda centered on undermining the idea that communists could be French republican patriots. One particular tract, a precursor to the Paix et liberté variations that followed in its path, gets this message across: recto, there is a winged creature draped in the French colors, with a caption that reads “I am bird, behold my wings”; verso, the creature reveals its true colors, a deep communist red, hammer and sickle on its chest, with the caption now reading “I am a mouse! Long live the rats!”
Perhaps the most successful attack of this kind was the poster, La colombe qui fait boum, which ingeniously transformed Picasso’s peace dove into an explosive device. According to Wilson, “the explosive slogan was soon pasted all over the walls of Paris as Picasso’s Dove had been: the print run was purportedly 300,000.”[52] As Wilson notes, Picasso’s voluminous FBI file references the satirical poster along with a press clipping from The Washington Post, February 17, 1952:
The back, the pouting breast and the belly made the form of a tank: the tail feathers were exhaust fumes. The head was a turret and the beak a cannon, the hammer and sickle brand was on the shoulder. There was a simple five word caption: ‘The Dove that goes Boom’. All Paris laughed and the Communists were ridiculed.[53]
The satirical attacks may have harmed the PCF’s image momentarily, but Picasso’s peace dove took off to become the quasi-official mascot of the world peace movement. From today’s perspective, however, the peace dove of the Picasso: Peace and Freedom exhibition at Tate Liverpool Gallery stands, along with Fairey’s peace dove mural, at the end of the historical arc of triumphant liberalism.
Retrospectively, 1989 was a hinge moment. On this crucial threshold from the “modern” to the “contemporary,” Francis Fukuyama famously trumpeted the “end of history” based on the alleged “fact that ‘peace’ seems to be breaking out in many regions of the world.”[54] In the prominent political scientist’s global peace narrative, “Western liberal democracy” had revealed itself to be the “endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution.”[55] The future, from this perspective, was canceled. The only significant task left to humankind would be to come to terms with the past, a perpetual historical curating. Or, in Fukuyama’s own words: “In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.”[56] But the “modern” constraints and contradictions of the pigeon-cum-peace-dove were carried over into the age of drone warfare and continues to shape our hypercontemporary—and oddly Fontainesque—condition.
III
Imagine this. Just as Shepard Fairey puts the finishing touches to his mural in Copenhagen, a mysterious mechanical bird crashes to the ground. But Fairey, in deep concentration, perhaps mulling over whether to include an olive branch in the pigeon’s beak, doesn’t notice it at all. The street artist is so immersed in his work that he forgets where he is. Los Angeles, New York, Reykjavik, or perhaps Tel Aviv? When Fairey looks around to see what the commotion is about, it is nightfall in Balochistan Province, Pakistan. A man, lit up by the headlights of a parked car, holds up what “looks a bit like a silver bird,” while another man stands guard with a Kalashnikov.[57] What’s going on here? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? A toy? No, it’s “a small combat-proven spy drone.”[58]
Of course, Fairey painting his peace dove mural and the “weird, birdlike mystery drone” falling from the sky were two separate events that happened in two different places. Fairey wasn’t magically beamed into Pakistan. Sheer historical coincidence brings these two birds to the fore at this exact historical moment (August 2011). But there is something uncanny about these twin events that brings to mind the work of the Egyptian artist Heba Y. Amin, who in As Birds Flying (video, 2016) and The General’s Stork (mixed media, 2016–ongoing), mines the contemporary drone imaginary through an aesthetic exploration of the historical and ideological overlaps between birds and drones.
Amin does not discuss Shepard Fairey’s peace dove, but she does refer to the Pakistan “mystery drone” as an example of how drones are nested in deep-seated cultural imaginaries about birds flying. In The Generals Stork, Amin relates the crashed mystery drone to its commercial twin, the then much-hyped “SmartBird” by Festo engineering, and brings these two birds-as-drones into a larger media narrative about how, in 2013, Egyptian authorities detained a migratory stork on suspicions of espionage because it was equipped with an electronic tracking device. A device that, as it transpired, merely registered the bird’s migratory patterns.
To Amin, the Pakistan spy-drone crash highlights the progressive obscuring of the boundaries between natural beings and military artifacts that characterize situations of drone warfare and creates the conditions of possibility not only for storks being detained but also for generalizing a sense of paranoia that pervades everyday life under drone surveillance: “Imagine the confusion of finding such an object in a place where people are so accustomed to drone attacks. What happens when we can no longer differentiate a machine from a living thing?”[59]
Amin critically addresses the projected drone future where birds-as-drones and other similar creatures “naturally” circle the sky above. And Festo’s “smart bird,” to be sure, marks a historical threshold. The “SmartbBird” has since inspired a flock of cheaply available “bionic” or “bio-mimetic” drones, so called because they are engineered to mimic birds and other living creatures. In 2016, for instance, Amazon patented new drone technology that would allow future delivery drones to perch “like pigeons” on streetlights, church steeples, and other vertical urban structures.[60] When the world’s largest online retailer jumps on the bionic drone bandwagon, we can start to imagine what the drone future might bring.
Indeed, if one is to believe the media hype, bio-inspired drones might be the next big thing. One 2019 NBC news report rubric reads: “Inspired by the aerial abilities of birds, bats and insects, researchers are crafting a new generation of ultralight drones that lack propellers and are equipped not with fixed wings but with flapping ones.”[61] More recent examples confirming this trend are legion. In contemporary robotics, common pigeons of the kind that inspired Picasso’s peace dove motif are being anatomically dissected to teach semi-autonomous machines to perform more like their feathered brethren.[62] The common pigeon that inspired Picasso’s peace dove is, essentially, a proto-drone.[63]
Amin’s art project, As Birds Flying, further instructs us about the historical and symbolic crossovers between birds and their mechanical counterparts, the drones, and crucially brings colonialism into the frame. Amin’s film is based on found drone footage of locations in the Middle East, including views of Israeli settlements, and poetically reinterprets how religious myths, colonial wars, airpower, spy birds, surveillance technologies, and late-modern drone warfare historically interlock.
In the artistic research project The General’s Stork, Amin recalls the story of Lord Allenby’s seizure of Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks in 1917 to show how deep the bird-as-drone imaginary reaches into the historical texture of orientalism and colonialism:
[Lord Allenby] launched an attack based on a biblical prophecy found in the book of Isaiah 31:5, which states: “As birds flying, so will the Lord of hosts defend Jerusalem; defending also he will deliver it; and passing over he will preserve it.” By reason of this prophecy, he sent as many planes as possible to fly over Jerusalem, forcing the Turks to surrender the city. So, when Allenby marched into Jerusalem, it was seen as a prophecy fulfilled. Right at the core of this prophetic figure, or augury, is the symbolic and actual presence of the avian, the prophecy of the birds flying over Jerusalem, the birds mutating into airplanes, the airplanes mutating into drones, and the menace of predictive drone technology metastasizing into the specter of aerial bombardment. This prophecy has become predictive in terms of drone technology, envisioning what will be and what is yet to come.[64]
Amin’s examination of “the symbolic and actual presence of the avian” in the historical ascendance of the drone underscores how the realms of the symbolic and the real overlap. Just as the biblical prophecy helped Lord Allenby visualize and ultimately legitimize Jerusalem’s destruction, the liberal peace thesis provides ideological justification for the US-led drone program. Lord Allenby’s prophecy materialized as mechanical birds flying over Jerusalem dropping bombs while Picasso’s peace dove, in turn, participates in an ongoing image war with no less deadly consequences. As diverse as these different historical contexts of killing may be, they are equally grounded in deep-seated cultural narratives with a near palpable orientalist subtext.
Seen from an art-historical perspective, the migration of the common pigeon (Colombia livia)—from Picasso’s 1949 ink-wash drawing through to Fairey’s 2011 peace dove mural and further still—forms an irregular pattern across history that culminates symbolically at the height of the age of drone warfare and resonates into our present moment. Today, there is a more-than-symbolic sense in which Picasso’s peace dove mutates into a drone—or a swarm of drones, to be exact.
In December 2016, as Obama’s presidency was coming to an end, the skies above the Disney World theme park “dazzled with drones” in a spectacular night-time show: “For Starbright Holidays’ finale, the drones form a dove. With the music swelling, the sequence packs an emotional punch.”[65] In an article in USA Today, Ayala, one of Disney’s so-called Imagineers (that is, an imagination engineer) notes that “his team originally animated the word, ‘peace,’ but later removed it. The dove, the Imagineers figured, transcends language and culture. ‘We have the symbol of peace,’ notes Ayala. ‘What better way to show it than from the stars themselves—from the universe?’”[66]
Although arbitrary to the events recounted in this essay, the Disney show appears as a grand finale of the ideology of liberal peace as epitomized by the drone. It also bespeaks what Andrea Miller calls the “specter of the drone,” an example of how “diffuse histories and geographies of war are folded into the sign of the drone” in new forms of entertainment.[67] The proliferation of drones as a tool of entertainment since 2016 practically refutes its reputation as an aggressive instrument of US neo-imperialist war in ways that are most certainly conducive to the drone industry. President-elect Joe Biden’s drone fireworks celebration in November 2020 testifies to this historical shift—and raises important questions about what the drone future might hold.[68] So where are we now? And what happened to the pigeon in the mural?
*
In 2013, Shepard Fairey fell out of love with his former political icon, Obama, and became an outspoken critic of drone warfare (if not of liberal peace).[69] As Fairey’s criticism of Obama’s use of drones became known to the public, one blogger quipped: “End of a Fairey Tale: Poster Artist Says Obama’s Drones Killed ‘Hope’.”[70] A 2015 Washington Post op-ed took a similar line: “Obama’s done. It’s the perfect metaphor for the Obama administration for Republicans. That widespread enthusiasm for Obama in 2008 has eroded, and with less than two years left in office, one of his most visible supporters, the guy who made the most iconic image of the Obama years has even turned on him.”[71] The commentator turned out to be correct: Obama was done. The Fairey Tale of perpetual peace ended, as we now know, with the brutal awakening in 2017 to the Trump era and the spectacular rise of late-capitalist fascism.[72]
The story about the destruction of Fairey’s peace dove mural in Copenhagen now belongs in a backroom of Fukuyama’s “museum of human history.” And no one paid much attention to Shepard Fairey’s peace dove after its attempted assassination by graffiti writers in 2011. After Fairey returned to the US, the partly destroyed mural was left to its own devices; an aesthetic prop in the staging of a “radical chic” image that accompanies Copenhagen’s ongoing gentrification. To this day, Fairey’s pigeon remains intact in its mural, hovering peacefully above street level commotion. Its mechanical double, however, is as busy as a bee.
The Covid 19-pandemic has rekindled interest in “bionic” drones inspired by flying creatures such as birds, bats, and bees. In China, for instance, drones disguised as white doves surveil the population, firing up the imagination of conspiracy theorists worldwide.[73] In the US and in many other countries, a new breed of Fontainesque drones with and without feathers are operating daily outside of the military context. In addition to commercial drones and drones operated by amateur hobbyists, so-called “pandemic drones” are now performing various roles: delivering medical supplies, sanitizing streets, or “shouting” at people to keep their distance.
According to statistics from the Bard College Drone Center, more than 500 public safety agencies acquired drones between 2018 and 2020, bringing their total number close to 1,600—and counting. If the US is a bellwether of a global tendency for public safety agencies to add drones to their “peace arsenal,” the question remains whether this peace is preferable to what was called, once upon a time, by a more recognizable name: war.
Taking recent political unrest in the US and elsewhere into consideration one can fear that the mainstream adoption of drones—under continuing capitalist relations of production—will reinforce rather than challenge existing systems of technologically enabled oppression. It is crucial to remember, as scholar of surveillance Simone Brown notes, that oppressive forms of surveillance did not arrive with new technologies such as drones. Instead, drone surveillance is but a new expression of the same racism and anti-blackness that undergird existing power structures.[74] Whether we are dealing with “ghetto birds” or drones disguised as white peace doves, racist police power is still, to paraphrase James Baldwin, policing black communities like occupied territories.[75] The “sweet dream of perpetual peace,” in other words, still weighs heavily on the brains of the living.[76]
_____
Dominique Routhier is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the research project Drone Imaginaries and Communities (Independent Research Fund Denmark) at the University of Southern Denmark. His first book With and Against: the Situationist International in the Age of Automation, is forthcoming with Verso Books in 2023.
[1] Jean de La Fontaine, Fables choisies, mises en vers par J. de La Fontaine, vol. 1 (Paris: Desaint and Saillant, 1755), 53, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1049428h.
[4] Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art (New York: Verso, 2017), 1–8.
[5] T. J. Clark, “The Conditions of Artistic Creation,” Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 1974, 562.
[6] The term “image war” has been used in various theoretical contexts since the Gulf War. Perhaps most famously, Jean Baudrillard theorized “the birth of a new kind of military apparatus which incorporates the power to control the production and circulation of images” in a series of essays that appeared in English translation under the title The Gulf War did not take place (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 5. Dora Apel in War Culture and the Contest of Images (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univeristy Press, 2012), W.J.T. Mitchell in Cloning Terror: The War of Images (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011), and, of course, the Retort collective in Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (New York: Verso, 2005) all use the term (or corelates) in their analysis of the spectacular nature of late modern warfare.
[7] In terms of methodology, I rely on Otto Karl Werckmeister, Icons of the Left: Benjamin and Eisenstein, Picasso and Kafka after the Fall of Communism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999).
[8] Immanuel Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, ed. Pauline Kleingeld, trans. David L. Colclasure (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 67.
[10] For a more detailed historical contextualization of the Youth House, see René Karpantschof and Flemming Mikkelsen, “Youth, Space, and Autonomy in Copenhagen: the Squatters’ and Autonomous Movement, 1963-2012,” in The City is Ours: Squatting and Autonomous Movements from the 1970s to the Present, eds. Bart van der Steen, Ask Katzeff, and Leendert van Hoogenhuijze (Oakland: PM Press, 2014), 179-206.
[20] Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” 67.
[21] “Targeted killing” using drone airstrikes is arguably state assassination by another name. Thanks to Tim Carter for helping me clarify my argument here.
[22] Christi Parsons and W. J. Hennigan, “President Obama, Who Hoped to Sow Peace, Instead Led the Nation in War,” Los Angelses Times, January 13, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-na-pol-obama-at-war/.
[23] See, for instance, Joshua Reeves and Matthew S. May, “The Peace Rhetoric of a War President: Barack Obama and the Just War Legacy,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2013, pp. 623-650.
[24] For an excellent discussion of this term in relation to the task of art history, see James Day, “Review Essay: Art History in Its Image War: Ten Recent Publications on Image-Politics in Relation to the Possibility of Art Historical Analysis,” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 24, no. 48 (2015), doi:10.7146/nja.v24i48.23071.
[25] Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts (Retort), Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (New York: Verso, 2005), 19.
[26] See Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (London ; New York: Verso, 1990).
[28] See Ian G. R. Shaw, “The Urbanization of Drone Warfare: Policing Surplus Populations in the Dronepolis,” Geographica Helvetica 71, no. 1 (February 15, 2016): 19–28, doi:10.5194/gh-71-19-2016.
[29] Mark Neocleous, War Power, Police Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
[33] “The Nobel Peace Prize 2009,” NobelPrize.Org, accessed February 2, 2021, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2009/press-release/.
[34] Stephanie Busari and Claire Barthelemy, “Obama Peace Prize Win Polarizes Web,” CNN World, accessed April 21, 2021, https://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/10/09/obama.nobel.peace.reaction/index.html.
[35] Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at the Acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize” (Oslo City Hall, Oslo, Norway, December 10, 2009), https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-acceptance-nobel-peace-prize.
[36] Daniel Klaidman, Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 117.
[37] Jessica Purkiss and Jack Serle, “Obama’s Covert Drone War in Numbers: Ten Times More Strikes than Bush,” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, January 17, 2017, https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/obamas-covert-drone-war-in-numbers-ten-times-more-strikes-than-bush.
[44] Sarah Wilson, Picasso/Marx and Socialist Realism in France (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 131.
[45] Zvonimir Novak, Agit tracts: un siècle d’actions politique et militaire (Les Éditions L’échapée, 2015), 210.
[46] Anastasia Karel, “Brief History of Paix et Liberté,” Princeton University Libraries, accessed February 11, 2021, http://infoshare1.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/mudd/online_ex/paix/.
[48] See Otto Karl Werckmeister, Icons of the Left: Benjamin and Eisenstein, Picasso and Kafka after the Fall of Communism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 78.
[62] Eric Chang et al., “Soft Biohybrid Morphing Wings with Feathers Underactuated by Wrist and Finger Motion,” Science Robotics 5, no. 38 (January 16, 2020), doi:10.1126/scirobotics.aay1246.
[63] The “animal prehistory” of drone technology is comparatively well-rehearsed, see Stubblefield, Drone Art, especially chapter 4, “The Animal Remainder: Excavating Nohuman Life from Contemporary Drones.”
[67] Andrea Miller, “Shadows of War, Traces of Policing: The Weaponization of Space and the Sensible in Preemption,” in Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, ed. Ruha Benjamin (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 86.
[68] For an excellent analysis of Joe Biden’s drone fireworks in the shifting historical context of drones, see Caren Kaplan “Everyday Militarisms: Drones and the Blurring of the Civilian-Military Divide During COVID-19” Forthcoming in Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology, eds. Michael Richardson and Beryl Pong, Open Humanities Press.
[69] A more recent incident in France testifies to Fairey’s continued commitment to the liberal cause and his knack for appealing to world leaders with his propaganda art. Briefly told, Fairey painted a gigantic Marianne-mural, that, in an echo of the 2011 Copenhagen incident, was destroyed by anonymous graffiti artists. See HIYA! Rédaction, “Un Crew Anonyme Fait «pleurer» La plus Grande Marianne de France! #MariannePleure,” HIYA!, December 14, 2020, https://hiya.fr/2020/12/14/inedit-un-crew-anonyme-fait-pleurer-la-plus-grande-marianne-de-france-mariannepleure/.
[72] For a forthcoming analysis of “late capitalist fascism,” see Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Late Capitalist Fascism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022).
[73] See for instance the self-declared international movement “Birds Aren’t Real,” which absurdly claims that all birds are government-controlled drones. Whether or not these “activists” are serious about their claims is hard to tell.
[74] Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 8.
[76] I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and insightful criticisms that have helped me greatly improve this essay.
Chamayou, Grégoire. A Theory of the Drone. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York: The New Press, 2015.
Chang, Eric, Laura Y. Matloff, Amanda K. Stowers, and David Lentink. “Soft Biohybrid Morphing Wings with Feathers Underactuated by Wrist and Finger Motion.” Science Robotics 5, no. 38 (January 16, 2020). doi:10.1126/scirobotics.aay1246.
Clark, T.J. “The Conditions of Artistic Creation.” Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 1974, 561–62.
Day, James. “Review Essay: Art History in Its Image War. Ten Recent Publications on Image-Politics in Relation to the Possibility of Art Historical Analysis.” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 24, no. 48 (2015). doi:10.7146/nja.v24i48.23071.
Debord, Guy. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Malcolm Imrie. London ; New York: Verso, 1990.
Joshua Reeves and Matthew S. May. “The Peace Rhetoric of a War President: Barack Obama and the Just War Legacy.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 16, no. 4 (2013): 623. doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.4.0623.
Kant, Immanuel. Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History. Edited by Pauline Kleingeld. Translated by David L. Colclasure. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Kaplan, Caren. “Everyday Militarisms: Drones and the Blurring of the Civilian-Military Divide During COVID-19.” In Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology, edited by Michael Richardson and Beryl Pong. Open Humanities Press, Forthcoming.
Karpantschof, René, and Flemming Mikkelsen. “Youth, Space, and Autonomy in Copenhagen: The Squatters’ and Autonomous Movement, 1963-2012.” In The City Is Ours: Squatting and Autonomous Movements in Europe from the 1970s to the Present, edited by Bart van der Steen, Ask Katzeff, and Leendert van Hoogenhuijze, 179–206. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014.
Klaidman, Daniel. Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
La Fontaine, Jean de. Fables choisies. Tome 1 / , mises en vers par J. de La Fontaine. Tome premier, 1755. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1049428h.
Miller, Andrea. “Shadows of War, Traces of Policing: The Weaponization of Space and the Sensible in Preemption.” In Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, edited by Ruha Benjamin, 85–106. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present. Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Neocleous, Mark. War Power, Police Power. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
Novak, Zvonimir. Agit tracts: un siècle d’actions politique et militaire, 2015.
Shaw, Ian G. R. “The Urbanization of Drone Warfare: Policing Surplus Populations in the Dronepolis.” Geographica Helvetica 71, no. 1 (February 15, 2016): 19–28. doi:10.5194/gh-71-19-2016.
Werckmeister, Otto Karl. Icons of the Left: Benjamin and Eisenstein, Picasso and Kafka after the Fall of Communism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Wilson, Sarah. Picasso/Marx and Socialist Realism in France. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013.
