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La Linterna. Be sure to turn on the English translation... AD

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La Linterna - Programa de Donde Vengo Yo

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In response to our first reading group earlier this week, I thought this might be a useful text to throw into the mix. The author, a good friend of mine, also happens to be a bit of an 'expert' on Walter Benjamin AND has just started teaching on the MPhil course at CSM! Perhaps we can ask him to join us sometime? AD

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A Letter to Goldsmiths art students on capitalism, art and pseudo-critique

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Dear Goldsmiths Art Students, I attended your MFA show two nights ago. I apologise to an extent: with so many artworks on display it was difficult to digest any of them. That situation was exacerbat…

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I thought this might interest some of you in terms of 'positioning' and in relation to David Harvey. A recent interview with Slavoj Žižek

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We Must Get Ready for an Emergency | Aaron Bastani Meets Slavoj Žižek | Downstream | Novara Media

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Slavoj Žižek is perhaps the most famous living Marxist philosopher. In 2023, he has written 3 books with topics ranging from the nature of freedom to his intensely pessimistic view of the future. He sat down with Aaron to talk about Israel and Palestine, Deep Fakes and the legacy of Stalin.…

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The Author as Producer. Address at the Institute for the Study of Facism. Paris, April 27, 1934. (New Left Review 1970).

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A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005).

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Walter Benjamin : Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. 1968

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Walter Benjamin : Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. 1968

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Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Walter Benjamin Ed. Hannah Arendt. Schocken Books; New York, 1968. 'Unpacking My Library' Pg 59-67.

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Class 01 Reading Marx's Capital Vol 1

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Reading Marx's Capital with David Harvey

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Class 01 Reading Marx's Capital Vol I with David Harvey

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'NewLiberalSpeak: Notes on the new planetary vulgate', Radical Philosophy 105, Jan/Feb 2001.

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putting myself in the Picture. BBC Arena Arts Series. 1987

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Arena. Jo Spence. 'Putting Myself in the Picture'

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Magna Carta and the Commons

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Talk - Peter Linebaugh - Magna Carta and the Commons

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How did we get here? Counterpunch 2014

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How Did We Get Here (University Hall) at this Point of Time (the “Anthropocene”)?

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2010

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Principio Potosí. ¿Cómo podemos cantar el canto del Señor en tierra ajena?

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The Duchess of Sutherland and Slavery (new York Daily Tribune, 1853)

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Articles by Karl Marx in The People's Paper

Published in: New-York Daily Tribune, February 9, 1853, p. 6; Semi-Weekly Tribune, February 11, 1853; The People's Paper, No. 45, March 12, 1853;

London, Friday, January 21, 1853 - During the present momentary slackness in political affairs, the address of the Stafford House Assembly of Ladies to their sisters in America upon the subject of Negro-Slavery, and the "affectionate and Christian address of many thousands of the women of the United States of America to their sisters, the women of England", upon white slavery, have proved a god-send to the press. Not one of the British papers was ever struck by the circumstance that the Stafford House Assembly took place at the palace under the Presidency of the Duchess of Sutherland, and yet the names of Stafford and Sutherland should have been sufficient to class the philanthropy of the British Aristocracy - a philanthropy which chooses its objects as far distant from home as possible, and rather on that than on this side of the ocean.

The history of the wealth of the Sutherland family is the history of the ruin and of the expropriation of the Scotch-Gaelic population from its native soil. As far back as the 10th century, the Danes had landed in Scotland, conquered the plains of Caithness, and driven back the aborigines into the mountains. Mhoir-Fhear-Chattaibh, as he was called in Gaelic, or the "Great Man of Sutherland", had always found his companions-in-arms ready to defend him at risk of their lives against all his enemies, Danes or Scots, foreigners or natives. After the revolution which drove the Stuarts from Britain, private feuds among the petty chieftains of Scotland became less and less frequent, and the British Kings, in order to keep up at least a semblance of dominion in these remote districts, encouraged the levying of family regiments among the chieftains, a system by which these lairds were enabled to combine modern military establishments with the ancient clan system in such a manner as to support one by the other.

Now, in order to distinctly appreciate the usurpation subsequently carried out, we must first properly understand what the clan meant. The clan belonged to a form of social existence which, in the scale of historical development, stands a full degree below the feudal state; viz., the patriarchal state of society. "Klaen", in Gaelic, means children. Every one of the usages and traditions of the Scottish Gaels reposes upon the supposition that the members of the clan belong to one and the same family. The "great man", the chieftain of the clan, is on the one hand quite as arbitrary, on the other quite as confined in his power, by consanguinity, &c., as every father of a family. To the clan, to the family, belonged the district where it had established itself, exactly as in Russia, the land occupied by a community of peasants belongs, not to the individual peasants, but to the community. Thus the district was the common property of the family. There could be no more question, under this system, of private property, in the modern sense of the word, than there could be of comparing the social existence of the members of the clan to that of individuals living in the midst of our modern society. The division and subdivision of the land corresponded to the military functions of the single members of the clan. According to their military abilities, the chieftain entrusted to them the several allotments, cancelled or enlarged according to his pleasure the tenures of the individual officers, and these officers again distributed to their vassals and under-vassals every separate plot of land. But the district at large always remained the property of the clan, and, however the claims of individuals might vary, the tenure remained the same; nor were the contributions for the common defence, or the tribute for the Laird, who at once was leader in battle and chief magistrate in peace, ever increased. Upon the whole, every plot of land was cultivated by the same family, from generation to generation, under fixed imposts. These imposts were insignificant, more a tribute by which the supremacy of the "great man" and of his officers was acknowledged, than a rent of land in a modern sense, or a source of revenue. The officers directly subordinate to the "great man" were called "Taksmen", and the district entrusted to their care, "Tak". Under then were placed inferior officers, at the head of every hamlet, and under these stood the peasantry.

Thus you see, the clan is nothing but a family organized in a military manner, quite as little defined by laws, just as closely hemmed in by traditions, as any family. But the land is the property of the family, in the midst of which differences of rank, in spite of consanguinity, do prevail as well as in all the ancient Asiatic family communities.

The first usurpation took place, after the expulsion of the Stuarts, by the establishment of the family Regiments. From that moment, pay became the principal source of revenue of the Great Man, the Mhoir-Fhear-Chattaibh. Entangled in the dissipation of the Court of London, he tried to squeeze as much money as possible out of his officers, and they applied the same system of their inferiors. The ancient tribute was transformed into fixed money contracts. In one respect these contracts constituted a progress, by fixing the traditional imposts; in another respect they were a usurpation, inasmuch as the "great man" now took the position of landlord toward the "taksmen" who again took toward the peasantry that of farmers. And as the "great men" now required money no less than the "taksmen", a production not only for direct consumption but for export and exchange also became necessary; the system of national production had to be changed, the hands superseded by this change had to be got rid of. Population, therefore, decreased. But that it as yet was kept up in a certain manner, and that man, in the 18th century, was not yet openly sacrificed to net-revenue, we see from a passage in Steuart, a Scotch political economist, whose work was published 10 years before Adam Smith's, where it says (Vol.1, Chap.16):

"The rent of these lands is very trifling compared to their extent, but compared to the number of mouths which a farm maintains, it will perhaps be found that a plot of land in the highlands of Scotland feeds ten times more people than a farm of the same extent in the richest provinces."

That even in the beginnings of the 19th century the rental imposts were very small, is shown by the work of Mr Loch (1820), the steward of the Countess of Sutherland, who directed the improvements on her estates. He gives for instance the rental of the Kintradawell estate for 1811, from which it appears that up to then, every family was obliged to pay a yearly impost of a few shillings in money, a few fowls, and some days' work, at the highest.

It was only after 1811 that the ultimate and real usurpation was enacted, the forcible transformation of clan-property into the private property, in the modern sense, of the Chief. The person who stood at the head of this economical revolution was a female Mehemet Ali, who had well digested her Malthus - the Countess of Sutherland, alias Marchioness of Stafford.

Let us first state that the ancestors of the Marchioness of Stafford were the "great men" of the most northern part of Scotland, of very near three-quarters of Sutherlandshire. This country is more extensive than many French Departments or small German Principalities. When the Countess of Sutherland inherited these estates, which she afterward brought to her husband, the Marquis of Stafford, afterward Duke of Sutherland, the population of them was already reduced to 15,000. My lady Countess resolved upon a radical economical reform, and determined upon transforming the whole tract of country into sheep-walks. From 1814 to 1820, these 15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were systematically expelled and exterminated. All their villages were demolished and burned down, and all their fields converted into pasturage. British soldiers were commanded for this execution, and came to blows with the natives. An old woman refusing to quit her hut was burned in the flames of it. Thus my lady Countess appropriated to herself 794,000 acres of land, which from time immemorial had belonged to the clan. In the exuberance of her generosity she allotted to the expelled natives about 6,000 acres - two acres per family. These 6,000 acres had been lying waste until then, and brought no revenue to the proprietors. The Countess was generous enough to sell the acre at 2s 6d on an average, to the clan-men who for centuries past had shed their blood for her family. The whole of the unrightfully appropriated clan-land she divided into 29 large sheep farms, each of them inhabited by one single family, mostly English farm-laborers; and in 1821 the 15,000 Gaels had already been superseded by 131,000 sheep.

A portion of the aborigines had been thrown upon the sea-shore, and attempted to live by fishing. They became amphibious, and, as an English author says, lived half on land and half on water, and after all did not live upon both.

Sismondi, in his Etudes Sociales, observes with regard to this expropriation of the Gaels from Sutherlandshire - an example, which, by-the-by, was imitated by other "great men" of Scotland:

"The large extent of seignorial domains is not a circumstance peculiar to Britain. In the whole Empire of Charlemagne, in the whole Occident, entire provinces were usurped by the warlike chiefs, who had them cultivated for their own account by the vanquished, and sometimes by their own companions-in-arms. During the 9th and 10th centuries the Counties of Maine, Anjou, Poitou were for the Counts of these provinces rather three large estates than principalities. Switzerland, which in so many respects resembles Scotland, was at that time divided among a small number of Seigneurs. If the Counts of Kyburg, of Lenzburg, of Habsburg, of Gruyeres had been protected by British laws, they would have been in the same position as the Earls of Sutherland; some of them would perhaps have had the same taste for improvement as the Marchioness of Stafford, and more than one republic might have disappeared from the Alps in order to make room for flocks of sheep. Not the most despotic monarch in Germany would be allowed to attempt anything of the sort."

Mr Loch, in his defense of the Countess of Sutherland (1820), replies to the above as follows:

"Why should there be made an exception to the rule adopted in every other case, just for this particular case? Why should the absolute authority of the landlord over his land be sacrificed to the public interest and to motives which concern the public only?"

And why, then, should the slave-holders in the Southern States of North America sacrifice their private interest to the philanthropic grimaces of her Grace, the Duchess of Sutherland?

The British aristocracy, who have everywhere superseded man by bullocks and sheep, will, in a future not very distant, be superseded, in turn, by these useful animals.

The process of clearing estates, which, in Scotland, we have just now described, was carried out in England in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Thomas Morus already complains of it in the beginning of the 16th century. It was performed in Scotland in the beginning of the 19th, and in Ireland it is now in full progress. The noble Viscount Palmerston, too, some years ago cleared of men his property in Ireland, exactly in the manner described above.

If of any property it ever was true that it was robbery, it is literally true of the property of the British aristocracy. Robbery of Church property, robbery of commons, fraudulent transformation, accompanied by murder, of feudal and patriarchal property into private property - these are the titles of British aristocrats to their possessions. And what services in this latter process were performed by a servile class of lawyers, you may see from an English lawyer of the last century, Dalrymple, who, in his History of Feudal Property, very naively proves that every law or deed concerning property was interpreted by the lawyers, in England, when the middle class rose in wealth in favor of the middle class - in Scotland, where the nobility enriched themselves, in favor of the nobility - in either case it was interpreted in a sense hostile to the people.

The above Turkish reform by the Countess of Sutherland was justifiable, at least, from a Malthusian point of view. Other Scottish noblemen went further. Having superseded human beings by sheep, they superseded sheep by game, and the pasture grounds by forests. At the head of these was the Duke of Atholl.

"After the conquest, the Norman Kings afforested large portions of the soil of England, in much the same way as the landlords here are now doing with the Highlands.

(R. Somers, Letters on the Highlands, 1848)

As for a large number of the human beings expelled to make room for the game of the Duke of Atholl, and the sheep of the Countess of Sutherland, where did they fly to, where did they find a home?

In the United States of America.

The enemy of British Wage-Slavery has a right to condemn Negro-Slavery; a Duchess of Sutherland, a Duke of Atholl, a Manchester Cotton-lord - never!

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Articles by Karl Marx in The People's Paper Published in: New-York Daily Tribune , February 9, 1853, p. 6; Semi-Weekly Tribune, February 11, 1853; The People's Paper, No.

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Brian O'Doherty- Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space

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Brian O'Doherty- Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space

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Pdf here:

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Nicolas Bourriaud : Relational Aesthetics. 1998

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Nicolas Bourriaud : Relational Aesthetics. 1998

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Your Donation Will Be Matched 1-to-1! Can You Chip In?

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Relational aesthetics : Bourriaud, Nicolas : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

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Foucault:  Archaeology of Knowledge. 1972

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Foucault:  Archaeology of Knowledge. 1972

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Foucault and Neoliberalism as "Left Governmentality". Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora. Verso Books. 2021

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Foucault and Neoliberalism as "Left Governmentality". Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora. Verso Books. 2021

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An excerpt from The Last Man Takes LSD by Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora, one of our May book club picks. Get your copy by joining the book club for 50% off!

Neoliberalism beyond Right and Left
In this context of hostility towards the post-war Left, Foucault and many others set out in search of what could be called a 'left governmentality'. As he consistently stated, in his view the French Left did not have a 'problematic of government' but only 'a problematic of the State'. This idea was explicit in his lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics given at the Collège de France, where he famously argued that there was no 'autonomous socialist governmentality' and that, therefore, 'in actual fact, and history has shown this, socialism may only be implemented, connected up to diverse types of governmentality'. A socialist governmentality was thus, for Foucault, still to be 'invented'.
Neoliberalism with a Franco-German prism
From this perspective, it is interesting to note how much Foucault's lectures on biopolitics were marked by what Audier called the French 'crisis of socialism'. If we are used to reading these lectures as being about neoliberalism in general, they are nonetheless also strongly related to the French politics of the time. Foucault's focus is partially on Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and Raymond Barre's neoliberal policies and on Germany - especially Helmut Schmidt's SPD (Social Democratic Party). This choice may seem a strange one for anyone interested in the rise of neoliberal governmentality in the late 1970s. Why, for instance, is there no reference to Pinochet's coup against Allende in Chile and the neoliberal experiment that followed? Or to Ronald Reagan's hyper-conservative governorship of California between 1967 and 1975? Why was Foucault only interested in a very abstract reading of neoliberalism, with no regard for its potentially very conservative effects, already manifest in Barry Goldwater's extremely conservative 1964 US presidential campaign, conducted under Milton Friedman's economic counsel, and in Reagan's presidential bid in 1976? He does not even mention Friedrich Hayek's aristocratic conception of democracy, or the often reactionary opinions of Austrian neoliberals.

One of the reasons for this standpoint is elucidated by Audier, who highlights Foucault's interest in the very good relations - 'unique' as Giscard said himself - between Giscard's neoliberal government and the Social Democratic government of Schmidt, and what this meant for the future of socialism. As Audier suggests, 'if Foucault assumes a very German-centred point of view, it's because he is questioning the destiny of France and of French socialism in 1979: if the "neoliberal" policy of Barre and Giscard seems to partially imitate the social democratic policy of Schmidt, what does socialism mean today?' This interrogation would divide at the same time both the Left and the Right. As the French economist Christian Stoffaës wrote at the time, 'the debate on the German model is the moment of original divisions within the political class: Gaullists and Communists communicate in their grumbling; liberal Giscardians, Rocardian socialists and cédétistes [members of the CFDT union] communicate in a barely veiled admiration'. This division would be even stronger in light of the marked lack of enthusiasm among German and UK social democrats for the Common Programme. Giscard would even explain that the day after the 1978 election, the first to rejoice openly at his victory were the social democratic leaders Helmut Schmidt and James Callaghan. From this perspective, Foucault's lectures on biopolitics are deeply concerned with the crisis facing the Union of the Left at that moment, and with the rise of the neoliberal Right behind Giscard, which in many ways broke with the old Gaullist power. As Foucault himself explained in his lectures, we 'pass from a, broadly speaking, Keynesian type of system, which had more or less lingered on in Gaullist policy, to a new art of government, which would be taken up by Giscard'. The French context manifests, then, a neoliberalism surging from different sides and with different actors, transcending the old Left-Right opposition to reshape the whole political framework.

In this context, Foucault - along with some of his contemporaries - saw neoliberalism as an interesting framework within which to rethink the Left as a 'governmentality' rather than a 'simple economic logic'. As Lagasnerie argues, Foucault did not see it as 'something that would function as a political alternative to which a well-defined programme or plan could be attached'. The important point here is that Foucault did not really study neoliberalism as a problem of the 'Left' or the 'Right'. Instead, he was interested in it as a form of governmentality, or what we could call its political ontology, the framework within which it conceived politics and society. As he put it in his lectures:

Liberalism in America is a whole way of being and thinking. It is a type of relation between the governors and the governed much more than a technique of governors with regard to the governed . . . I think this is why American liberalism currently appears not just, or not so much as a political alternative, but let's say as a sort of many-sided, ambiguous, global claim with a foothold in both the right and the left. It is also a sort of utopian focus which is always being revived. It is also a method of thought, a grid of economic and sociological analysis.

The emergent neoliberal governmentality would thus be essential for the philosopher's attempt to find an alternative to 'social-statism' and to open a space for the proliferation of minority practices.

This political context sheds new light on Foucault's reading of neoliberalism. Indeed, since the publication of his lectures in 2004, the majority of authoritative commentators have generally projected onto them their own interpretations of neoliberalism. The enormous contrast between the reception of the published courses and that of the course given at the Collège de France is particularly well illustrated by the first account of it, published in September 1979, in the journal Autrement, the emblematic publication of the Second Left. In this piece, written by the journalist Jules Chancel and the management theorist Pierre-Eric Tixier, Foucault's lessons are not at all depicted as a denunciation of neoliberalism. Their article, entitled 'The Desire of Entrepreneurship', argued that with the explosion of alternative economic models in the aftermath of May '68 (such as autonomous and local experimentations within the ecological movement, anti-institutional struggles or self-management alternatives), 'the notion of enterprise' was 'at the centre of this cocktail of ideologies'. In that context, the authors remarked, Giscard's government and his neoliberal reforms were surprisingly 'favourable' to the proliferation of small, autonomous 'entrepreneurial' experiments. Using Foucault's lectures on neoliberalism, Chancel and Tixier argued that these 'new entrepreneurs' of the Left could, within the neoliberal framework, 'use the convergences, objective but partial, which exist between their experiences and the governmental perspectives, without falling into the trap, so convenient, of "co-optation" '. In their view, what Foucault helped us to understand was that a subversive use of neoliberalism was possible, that in its 'enterprise-oriented' framework the Left could open spaces for its own anti-'social-statist' politics, to create a 'third sector' of 'creative entrepreneurs' in between the state and the more traditional firms. As Audier observed, 'this first and almost immediate mobilization of Foucault's lectures on neoliberalism . . . is undoubtedly a valuable document because it reveals elements of context that are no longer those of readers of the twenty-first century or even of the nineties, and are generally ignored by them, as if Foucault had written only for them and in their own context'.

The Autrement journal intended then to 'rehabilitate' the concept of 'enterprise' within the Left by titling its special issue 'What If Everyone Created His Own Job?' It included articles by Jacques Delors, future president of the European Commission, criticizing the 'invasion of the person by institutions', and by Michel Rocard - Foucault's favourite socialist - arguing that the 'freedom' to be an entrepreneur should be an integral part of the struggle against totalitarianism. Interestingly, this key publication of the French Second Left also included an interview with Bernard Stasi, a former right-wing minister in Giscard's government. Stasi illustrated perfectly what Foucault had sensed about neoliberalism:

the state, whatever its political connotation, necessarily tends to tighten its control, its tutelage, on society. It is necessary, by building all kinds of safeguards, to ensure that society is not crushed by the State, that there is a certain autonomy, spaces of freedom for individuals and natural communities. It is only through the diversification of funding sources that it will be possible to avoid the increase in state control.

Finally, in the same issue, it is worth noting the paper by the sociologists Bernard Rochette and Elie Théofilakis, who argued openly that 'the remedy is simple if a little retro: reinventing the market'.66 In their view, in the aftermath of '68 and the energy it released, it was obvious that 'the market is no longer only the static equilibrium between a supply and a demand for goods, but the global dynamic process of integration and articulation of all the effervescent elements of a new social order'. Indeed, while the old welfare state affected negatively both economic growth and social justice, the market, if carefully reorganized, could have a 'therapeutic value' in regulating social exchanges. Behind this shift, what was now emerging, on both the Right and the Left, was 'the figure, for a time overshadowed by the planning technocrat, of the entrepreneur'. In this new context, the neoliberal economist, the 'manager' and the 'leftist entrepreneur' could all rejoice together within the spaces freed from statist normativity.

In many ways, this Second Left felt that it sometimes shared more with the Giscardian and neoliberal Right than with the 'social-statism' of its own party. A new field of experimentation was thus opened by this 'new capitalism', creating the conditions for new coalitions between past enemies. If this context is important, it is precisely because it gives us a sense of what kind of neoliberalism Foucault was talking about in his lectures, and of the conversation of which they were a part.

[book-strip index="1" style="display"]
Filed under:&puncsp; 1968,&puncsp; foucault,&puncsp; neoliberalism

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Foucault and Neoliberalism as "Left Governmentality"

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An excerpt from The Last Man Takes LSD by Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora, one of our May book club picks. Get your copy by joining the book club for 50% off!

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PARA-EXHIBITION 01. Tuesday, November 21st 4.30-5.30pm (tbc)

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PARA-EXHIBITION 01. Tuesday, November 21st 4.30-5.30pm (tbc)

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As discussed in the last Group Tutorial, this should be regarded as an opportunity to exhibit work on a regular basis and normalise the act of engaging a viewer/audience. It will be student-led and the aim will be to test out work/ideas etc. in a 'public' setting. Can those participating on November 21st, please add their names below.

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Every reasonably aware person of our time is aware of the obvious fact that art can no longer be justified as a superior activity, or even as a compensatory activity to which one might honorably devote oneself. The reason for this deterioration is clearly the emergence of productive forces that necessitate other production relations and a new practice of life. In the civil-war phase we are engaged in, and in close connection with the orientation we are discovering for certain superior activities to come, we believe that all known means of expression are going to converge in a general movement of propaganda that must encompass all the perpetually interacting aspects of social reality.

There are several conflicting opinions about the forms and even the very nature of educative propaganda, opinions that generally reflect one or another currently fashionable variety of reformist politics. Suffice it to say that in our view the premises for revolution, on the cultural as well as the strictly political level, are not only ripe, they have begun to rot. It is not just returning to the past which is reactionary; even "modern" cultural objectives are ultimately reactionary since they depend on ideological formulations of a past society that has prolonged its death agony to the present. The only historically justified tactic is extremist innovation.

The literary and artistic heritage of humanity should be used for partisan propaganda purposes. It is, of course, necessary to go beyond any idea of mere scandal. Since opposition to the bourgeois notion of art and artistic genius has become pretty much old hat, [Marcel Duchamp's] drawing of a mustache on the Mona Lisa is no more interesting than the original version of that painting. We must now push this process to the point of negating the negation. Bertolt Brecht, revealing in a recent interview in France-Observateur that he makes cuts in the classics of the theater in order to make the performances more educative, is much closer than Duchamp to the revolutionary orientation we are calling for. We must note, however, that in Brecht's case these salutary alterations are narrowly limited by his unfortunate respect for culture as defined by the ruling class — that same respect, taught in the newspapers of the workers parties as well as in the primary schools of the bourgeoisie, which leads even the reddest worker districts of Paris always to prefer The Cid over [Brecht's] Mother Courage.

It is in fact necessary to eliminate all remnants of the notion of personal property in this area. The appearance of new necessities outmodes previous "inspired" works. They become obstacles, dangerous habits. The point is not whether we like them or not. We have to go beyond them.

Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can be used to make new combinations. The discoveries of modern poetry regarding the analogical structure of images demonstrate that when two objects are brought together, no matter how far apart their original contexts may be, a relationship is always formed. Restricting oneself to a personal arrangement of words is mere convention. The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the juxtaposition of two independent expressions, supersedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organization of greater efficacy. Anything can be used.

It goes without saying that one is not limited to correcting a work or to integrating diverse fragments of out-of-date works into a new one; one can also alter the meaning of those fragments in any appropriate way, leaving the imbeciles to their slavish reference to "citations."

Such parodistic methods have often been used to obtain comical effects. But such humor is the result of contradictions within a condition whose existence is taken for granted. Since the world of literature seems to us almost as distant as the Stone Age, such contradictions don't make us laugh. It is thus necessary to envisage a parodic-serious stage where the accumulation of detourned elements, far from aiming to arouse indignation or laughter by alluding to some original work, will express our indifference toward a meaningless and forgotten original, and concern itself with rendering a certain sublimity.

Lautréamont advanced so far in this direction that he is still partially misunderstood even by his most ostentatious admirers. In spite of his obvious application of this method to theoretical language in Poésies — where Lautréamont (drawing particularly on the maxims of Pascal and Vauvenargues) strives to reduce the argument, through successive concentrations, to maxims alone — a certain Viroux caused considerable astonishment three or four years ago by conclusively demonstrating that Maldoror is one vast détournement of Buffon and other works of natural history, among other things. The fact that the prosaists of Figaro, like Viroux himself, were able to see this as a justification for disparaging Lautréamont, and that others believed they had to defend him by praising his insolence, only testifies to the senility of these two camps of dotards in courtly combat with each other. A slogan like "Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it" is still as poorly understood, and for the same reasons, as the famous phrase about the poetry that "must be made by all."

Apart from Lautréamont's work — whose appearance so far ahead of its time has to a great extent preserved it from a detailed examination — the tendencies toward détournement that can be observed in contemporary expression are for the most part unconscious or accidental. It is in the advertising industry, more than in the domain of decaying aesthetic production, that one can find the best examples.

We can first of all define two main categories of detourned elements, without considering whether or not their being brought together is accompanied by corrections introduced in the originals. These are minor détournements and deceptive détournements.

Minor détournement is the détournement of an element which has no importance in itself and which thus draws all its meaning from the new context in which it has been placed. For example, a press clipping, a neutral phrase, a commonplace photograph.

Deceptive détournement, also termed premonitory-proposition détournement, is in contrast the détournement of an intrinsically significant element, which derives a different scope from the new context. A slogan of Saint-Just, for example, or a film sequence from Eisenstein.

Extensive detourned works will thus usually be composed of one or more series of deceptive and minor détournements.

Several laws on the use of détournement can now be formulated.

It is the most distant detourned element which contributes most sharply to the overall impression, and not the elements that directly determine the nature of this impression. For example, in a metagraph relating to the Spanish Civil War the phrase with the most distinctly revolutionary sense is a fragment from a lipstick ad: "Pretty lips are red." In another metagraph ( The Death of J.H.) 125 classified ads of bars for sale express a suicide more strikingly than the newspaper articles that recount it.

The distortions introduced in the detourned elements must be as simplified as possible, since the main impact of a détournement is directly related to the conscious or semiconscious recollection of the original contexts of the elements. This is well known. Let us simply note that if this dependence on memory implies that one must determine one's public before devising a détournement, this is only a particular case of a general law that governs not only détournement but also any other form of action on the world. The idea of pure, absolute expression is dead; it only temporarily survives in parodic form as long as our other enemies survive.

Détournement is less effective the more it approaches a rational reply. This is the case with a rather large number of Lautréamont's altered maxims. The more the rational character of the reply is apparent, the more indistinguishable it becomes from the ordinary spirit of repartee, which similarly uses the opponent's words against him. This is naturally not limited to spoken language. It was in this connection that we objected to the project of some of our comrades who proposed to detourn an anti-Soviet poster of the fascist organization "Peace and Liberty" — which proclaimed, amid images of overlapping flags of the Western powers, "Union makes strength" — by adding onto it a smaller sheet with the phrase "and coalitions make war."

Détournement by simple reversal is always the most direct and the least effective. Thus, the Black Mass reacts against the construction of an ambience based on a given metaphysics by constructing an ambience within the same framework that merely reverses — and thus simultaneously conserves — the values of that metaphysics. Such reversals may nevertheless have a certain progressive aspect. For example, Clemenceau [nicknamed "The Tiger"] could be referred to as "The Tiger Named Clemenceau."

Of the four laws that have just been set forth, the first is essential and applies universally. The other three are practically applicable only to deceptive detourned elements.

The first visible consequences of a widespread use of détournement, apart from its intrinsic propaganda powers, will be the revival of a multitude of bad books, and thus the extensive (unintended) participation of their unknown authors; an increasingly extensive transformation of phrases or plastic works that happen to be in fashion; and above all an ease of production far surpassing in quantity, variety and quality the automatic writing that has bored us for so long.

Détournement not only leads to the discovery of new aspects of talent; in addition, clashing head-on with all social and legal conventions, it cannot fail to be a powerful cultural weapon in the service of a real class struggle. The cheapness of its products is the heavy artillery that breaks through all the Chinese walls of understanding. It is a real means of proletarian artistic education, the first step toward a literary communism.

Ideas and creations in the realm of détournement can be multiplied at will. For the moment we will limit ourselves to showing a few concrete possibilities in various current sectors of communication — it being understood that these separate sectors are significant only in relation to present-day technologies, and are all tending to merge into superior syntheses with the advance of these technologies.

Apart from the various direct uses of detourned phrases in posters, records and radio broadcasts, the two main applications of detourned prose are metagraphic writings and, to a lesser degree, the adroit perversion of the classical novel form.

There is not much future in the détournement of complete novels, but during the transitional phase there might be a certain number of undertakings of this sort. Such a détournement gains by being accompanied by illustrations whose relationships to the text are not immediately obvious. In spite of undeniable difficulties, we believe it would be possible to produce an instructive psychogeographical détournement of George Sand's Consuelo, which thus decked out could be relaunched on the literary market disguised under some innocuous title like "Life in the Suburbs," or even under a title itself detourned, such as "The Lost Patrol." (It would be a good idea to reuse in this way many titles of deteriorated old films of which nothing else remains, or of the films that continue to deaden the minds of young people in the cinema clubs.)

Metagraphic writing, no matter how outdated its plastic framework may be, presents far richer opportunities for detourning prose, as well as other appropriate objects or images. One can get some idea of this from the project, conceived in 1951 but eventually abandoned for lack of sufficient financial means, which envisaged a pinball machine arranged in such a way that the play of the lights and the more or less predictable trajectories of the balls would form a metagraphic-spatial composition entitled Thermal Sensations and Desires of People Passing by the Gates of the Cluny Museum Around an Hour after Sunset in November. We have since come to realize that a situationist-analytic enterprise cannot scientifically advance by way of such works. The means nevertheless remain suitable for less ambitious goals.

It is obviously in the realm of the cinema that détournement can attain its greatest effectiveness and, for those concerned with this aspect, its greatest beauty.

The powers of film are so extensive, and the absence of coordination of those powers is so glaring, that virtually any film that is above the miserable average can provide matter for endless polemics among spectators or professional critics. Only the conformism of those people prevents them from discovering equally appealing charms and equally glaring faults even in the worst films. To cut through this absurd confusion of values, we can observe that Griffith's Birth of a Nation is one of the most important films in the history of the cinema because of its wealth of innovations. On the other hand, it is a racist film and therefore absolutely does not merit being shown in its present form. But its total prohibition could be seen as regrettable from the point of view of the secondary, but potentially worthier, domain of the cinema. It would be better to detourn it as a whole, without necessarily even altering the montage, by adding a soundtrack that made a powerful denunciation of the horrors of imperialist war and of the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, which are continuing in the United States even now.

Such a détournement — a very moderate one — is in the final analysis nothing more than the moral equivalent of the restoration of old paintings in museums. But most films only merit being cut up to compose other works. This reconversion of preexisting sequences will obviously be accompanied by other elements, musical or pictorial as well as historical. While the cinematic rewriting of history has until now been largely along the lines of Sacha Guitry's burlesque re-creations, one could have Robespierre say, before his execution: "In spite of so many trials, my experience and the grandeur of my task convinces me that all is well." If in this case an appropriate reuse of a Greek tragedy enables us to exalt Robespierre, we can conversely imagine a neorealist-type sequence, at the counter of a truck stop bar, for example, with one of the truck drivers saying seriously to another: "Ethics was formerly confined to the books of the philosophers; we have introduced it into the governing of nations." One can see that this juxtaposition illuminates Maximilien's idea, the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat.

The light of détournement is propagated in a straight line. To the extent that new architecture seems to have to begin with an experimental baroque stage, the architectural complex — which we conceive as the construction of a dynamic environment related to styles of behavior — will probably detourn existing architectural forms, and in any case will make plastic and emotional use of all sorts of detourned objects: careful arrangements of such things as cranes or metal scaffolding replacing a defunct sculptural tradition. This is shocking only to the most fanatical admirers of French-style gardens. It is said that in his old age D'Annunzio, that pro-fascist swine, had the prow of a torpedo boat in his park. Leaving aside his patriotic motives, the idea of such a monument is not without a certain charm.

If détournement were extended to urbanistic realizations, not many people would remain unaffected by an exact reconstruction in one city of an entire neighborhood of another. Life can never be too disorienting: détournement on this level would really spice it up.

Titles themselves, as we have already seen, are a basic element of détournement. This follows from two general observations: that all titles are interchangeable and that they have a decisive importance in several genres. The detective stories in the "Série Noir" are all extremely similar, yet merely continually changing the titles suffices to hold a considerable audience. In music a title always exerts a great influence, yet the choice of one is quite arbitrary. Thus it wouldn't be a bad idea to make a final correction to the title of the "Eroica Symphony" by changing it, for example, to "Lenin Symphony."

The title contributes strongly to the détournement of a work, but there is an inevitable counteraction of the work on the title. Thus one can make extensive use of specific titles taken from scientific publications ("Coastal Biology of Temperate Seas") or military ones ("Night Combat of Small Infantry Units"), or even of many phrases found in illustrated children's books ("Marvelous Landscapes Greet the Voyagers").

In closing, we should briefly mention some aspects of what we call ultra-détournement, that is, the tendencies for détournement to operate in everyday social life. Gestures and words can be given other meanings, and have been throughout history for various practical reasons. The secret societies of ancient China made use of quite subtle recognition signals encompassing the greater part of social behavior (the manner of arranging cups; of drinking; quotations of poems interrupted at agreed-on points). The need for a secret language, for passwords, is inseparable from a tendency toward play. Ultimately, any sign or word is susceptible to being converted into something else, even into its opposite. The royalist insurgents of the Vendée, because they bore the disgusting image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, were called the Red Army. In the limited domain of political war vocabulary this expression was completely detourned within a century.

Outside of language, it is possible to use the same methods to detourn clothing, with all its strong emotional connotations. Here again we find the notion of disguise closely linked to play. Finally, when we have got to the stage of constructing situations — the ultimate goal of all our activity — everyone will be free to detourn entire situations by deliberately changing this or that determinant condition of them.

The methods that we have briefly examined here are presented not as our own invention, but as a generally widespread practice which we propose to systematize.

In itself, the theory of détournement scarcely interests us. But we find it linked to almost all the constructive aspects of the presituationist period of transition. Thus its enrichment, through practice, seems necessary.

We will postpone the development of these theses until later.

GUY DEBORD, GIL J WOLMAN
1956
[TRANSLATOR'S NOTES]
1. The French word détournement means deflection, diversion, rerouting, distortion, misuse, misappropriation, hijacking, or otherwise turning something aside from its normal course or purpose. It has sometimes been translated as "diversion," but this word is confusing because of its more common meaning of idle entertainment. Like most other English-speaking people who have actually practiced détournement, I have chosen simply to anglicize the French word. For more on détournement, see theses 204-209 ofThe Society of the Spectacle.

2. The two quoted phrases are from Isidore Ducasse's Poésies. Lautr éamont was the pseudonym used by Ducasse for his other work, Maldoror. The "Plagiarism is necessary" passage was later plagiarized by Debord in thesis #207 of The Society of the Spectacle.

3. The "metagraph," a genre developed by the lettrists, is a sort of collage with largely textual elements. The two metagraphs mentioned here are both by Debord, and can be found in his Oeuvres (p. 127).

4. The authors are detourning a sentence from the Communist Manifesto: "The cheapness of the bourgeoisie's commodities is the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate."

5. In the first imagined scene a phrase from a Greek tragedy (Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus) is put in the mouth of French Revolution leader Maximilien Robespierre. In the second, a phrase from Robespierre is put in the mouth of a truck driver.

6. Beethoven originally named his third symphony after Napoleon (seen as a defender of the French Revolution) but when Napoleon crowned himself emperor he angrily tore up the dedication to him and renamed it "Eroica."
The implied respect in this passage for Lenin (like the passing references to "workers states" in Debord's "Report on the Construction of Situations") is a vestige of the lettrists' early, less politically sophisticated period, when they seem to have been sort of anarcho-Trotskyist.

7. The Vendée: region in southwestern France, locale of a pro-monarchist revolt against the Revolutionary government (1793-1796).

"Mode d'emploi du détournement" originally appeared in the Belgian surrealist journal Les Lèvres Nues #8 (May 1956). This translation by Ken Knabb is from theSituationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.

[ Other Situationist Texts]

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A User's Guide to Detournement (Debord & Wolman)

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Every reasonably aware person of our time is aware of the obvious fact that art can no longer be justified as a superior activity, or even as a compensatory activity to which one might honorably devote oneself. The reason for this deterioration is clearly the emergence of productive forces that necessitate other production relations and a new practice of life.

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Melissa Moreano Venegas looks at Sunday's presidential election in Ecuador through the lens of Thea Riofrancos' recent analysis of extractivism and its opponents.
Thea Riofrancos, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2020) 264pp, $26.95

***

On February 7 Ecuador will elect as its new president one of three candidates: the banker Guillermo Lasso, who represents traditional right-wing parties; the young economist Andrés Arauz, of former president Rafael Correa's political movement and part of the so-called Latin American 'pink tide'; or Yaku Pérez, candidate of the Indigenous party. These elections are historic for three reasons:

1) The COVID-19 health crisis has been managed with negligence and corruption. As in most countries, the pandemic has revealed the deep contempt of elites for the working class, whom they consider disposable and replaceable. As of December 2020, Ecuador had around 40,000 excess deaths (by comparison, the UK had around 80,000 excess deaths but with four times the population). One corruption scandal followed the next; the most recent affront to the Ecuadorian people was the promise to acquire 4 million vaccine shots, after which only 4,000 arrived. The vaccination campaign is being undertaken in secrecy, amidst revulsion that the minister of health and his family were the first to get the vaccine, before the doctors on the front line.

2) For the first time in the history of this profoundly racist country a candidate from the powerful Ecuadorian Indigenous movement (organised around the Indigenous organisation CONAIE and its political arm, Pachakutik), have a very good chance of winning the presidency. This shift in Ecuadorian politics is a response to the success of the National Uprising of October 2019, an Indigenous and popular demonstration that saw 11 days of blockades, marches, and physical confrontation with the police and the military across the country. The Uprising was violently repressed and ended with 11 people shot dead by the armed forces, more than 1,200 injured and many Indigenous leaders criminalised. [1] But the Uprising also ended with a round of negotiations broadcast live on television and social networks in which, for two hours, Indigenous leaders negotiated with ministers on equal terms on behalf of the entire Ecuadorian population and in front of a mass audience many of whom had been used to viewing Indigenous people as ignorant quasi-citizens. Although Yaku Pérez was not a leading figure of the Uprising, his candidacy has benefited from this new view of Indigenous politics. His candidacy also prevailed over those of two leaders of the Uprising, due to his long record of anti-mining and environmental activism. However, during his campaign he has revealed stances that seem to more and more coincide with those of the right. He has left open the possibility of continuing the agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that triggered the Uprising, and of signing a new free trade agreement with the US, while proposing to reduce taxes on the rich. He is also committed to the neoliberal agenda of 'downsizing the state,' which would lead to massive layoffs of public sector workers and the deterioration of public services. In sum, his predilection for austerity raises the question of whether he is really a leftist candidate, even though he is backed by CONAIE.

3) The elections also present the possibility of an apparent return of the so-called 'pink tide' in Latin America. The pink tide refers to the period in which the left was in power in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina and briefly in Uruguay, following years of neoliberal government. However, the right successively returned. In Argentina, the right-wing Mauricio Macri was elected in 2015 following 12 years of Peronism, the social force that returned to power in 2019 with Alberto Fernández; Jair Bolsonaro arrived in office in Brazil in 2019 after 13 years of government of the Workers' Party ended in 2016; Jeanine Añez in Bolivia briefly replaced Evo Morales in 2019 through a violent coup, but Morales' Movement towards Socialism returned in 2020 with the election of Luis Arce. Finally, Lenín Moreno in Ecuador won the presidency in 2017, representing the party of Rafael Correa (who had governed for ten years) but before long sided with right-wing parties and re-installed neoliberal policies. Now, Moreno could be replaced by Andrés Arauz. He represents both the worst and the best of Correa. While Arauz promises to stop neoliberal policies, offers resistance to interference by the US and the IMF, and adopt social policies that would help overcome the COVID-19 health crisis and obtain the vaccine for the entire populace, he has been unable to distance himself from Correa or from the memories of the authoritarianism and violence with which Correa's government treated those groups who opposed extractivism and, in general, any social movements that dared to criticise it, particularly the Indigenous movement.

Correa entered office in 2006 supported by a coalition of social movements and organisations led by CONAIE, and on the back of a wave of resistance against neoliberal reforms (privatisations, austerity measures backed by US imperialism, Free Trade Agreements and so on) that had led to a massive economic and political crisis in 1999 and to almost two million people fleeing the country as economic migrants. CONAIE and its allies were at the heart of the anti-imperialist movement that was behind the expulsion of a US military base and a US oil company from Ecuadorian territory. Although Correa worked to established a 'socialism of the twenty-first century' in Ecuador, the coalition deteriorated rapidly: by 2009 many leftists and allies of the Indigenous movement in the government had quit due to disagreements over what was coming to be known as 'the extractivist model', but also over questions of intercultural Indigenous education and Indigenous justice, the territorial and political autonomy of Indigenous communities, the government's determination to control social movements and, importantly, Correa's authoritarian style. Before long, CONAIE and other leftists allies were exerting oppositional pressure to the government from the left.

Of the three presidential candidates, two present themselves as left-wing but confront each other with more passion than they confront the candidate of the right. As mentioned above, the differences arose at the beginning of Rafael Correa's government between a left that stayed with Correa and one that separated from his political project and now supports an Indigenous candidate who is an anti-extraction and environmental activist. The Ecuadorian elections - much as the Bolivian elections last year- put a spotlight on the troubled relationship between the mainstream left and environmental and Indigenous movements.

How did we get to this point? Thea Riofrancos' book From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador provides some clues in her analysis of Yaku Pérez' resistance to the mining interests and to Correa's progressive government, which has led him to enter the presidential race. The book also calls on the Latin American left to move to a revolutionary project that can seriously question the extractive base of wealth production and its relation to the environmental crisis while also respecting Indigenous people's sovereignty and self-determination. Riofrancos sees the need to build a mass ecological movement capable of forcing radical change by directing the struggle against capitalism and not only extractivism. Her book also reminds us, in the current Ecuadorian conjuncture, to be alert to the instrumentalisation of environmentalism by the right.

Thea Riofrancos' book begins by noting that the 'left in power' (the supporters of Correa who now back Arauz) and the 'left in resistance' (who abandoned Correa's project and now back Yaku Pérez) had grown apart to the point of seeing in each other 'a political enemy more dangerous than neoliberalism' (p. 182). Riofrancos' book explores this confrontation to see how these two 'lefts' presented different projects for advancing towards a post-extractive society in the context of Ecuador's plurinational state. For the left in power, oil and minerals extraction was necessary to enable national development and poverty reduction; their export provided revenues for increasing social expenditure, however, 'without transforming the model of accumulation or the class relations that it generates' (p. 182). Although Correa's regime increased social expenditure, and succeeded in reducing poverty and (at least until 2011) inequality [2], it refused to evaluate the social and environmental impacts of oil and minerals extraction and repressed and criminalised the communities and Indigenous peoples who opposed extractivism.

Riofrancos argues for a post-extractive future, while criticizing the understanding of 'extractivism' in Ecuador and Latin America, including by anti-extractive activists. Extractivism refers to the large-scale extraction of raw materials for export with little or no processing and little wealth generation in the country of origin, a process that creates intense and lasting socio-ecological harm. Rightly, Riofrancos describes 'a model [that] pollutes the environment, violates collective rights, reinforces dependency on foreign capital, and undermines democracy [that] originated with European conquest and was only reproduced by the recent turn to post-neoliberal resource nationalism' (p. 15). That is, extractivism is a colonial legacy that has continued throughout Latin American history.

In her critique of the 'hegemonic common sense' (p. 175) of extractivism, Riofrancos starts by tracing the origins of the term. Opposing extractivism emerged as a new political movement when the anti-neoliberal mobilisations of 1990-2006 found themselves without a political project in a new historical moment, in which the government was walking away from neoliberalism and nationalising oil and minerals reserves. But anti-extractive activists found their concerns about the socio-environmental impacts of extraction unheard and even derided by Correa's government, read by anti-extractive activists as contempt for ecological concerns by the twenty-first century socialism. So the 'left in resistance' shifted from demanding public ownership of oil and minerals to the demand to stop extractivism altogether and move towards a 'post-extractive society'. This process was conflictual, pitting the 'left in power' against the 'left in resistance' around the role of natural resource extraction for achieving wellbeing. [3]

Riofrancos organises her critique of extractivism around three elements. Firstly she is honest in her criticism, in Chapter 2, of how the anti-extractive movement errs by presenting a vision of a monolithic state obsessed with extracting and exporting raw materials. Rather, she describes a critical bureaucracy that in fact has sought to build a post-neoliberal government and planned for the transition to a post-extractive future. In other words, in some sense the disagreement between the two lefts is about how to organise the transition and on the pace of the transition. However, for the anti-extractive activists, any mention to a planned transition out of extractivism was written off as empty rhetoric. And from my perspective, the anti-extractive movement cultivated an image of an all-powerful state that dispossess local people of their land and negates their right to oppose to such projects. Such an image prepared the path for a leader as Yaku Pérez, who offers 'to reduce the state'.

The second characteristic Riofrancos identifies in the comprehension of extractivism that led to the antagonism between the two lefts in Ecuador rests on the contentious issue of national sovereignty versus local autonomy. Anti-extractivism in Ecuador, in the historical context described in the book, flowed from anti-neoliberal and anti-imperial demands to assume the defence of local communities' right to decide whether or not they want an extractive project to be undertaken in their territories. Ecuador, as a plurinational state, grants Indigenous communities the constitutional right to veto extractive projects through the 'consulta previa' or prior consultation, a right won after decades of struggles that forced the state to recognise the Indigenous territories as 'socio-natural spaces and the site of Indigenous sovereignty' (p. 50), with self-determination and political autonomy. Chapters 3 and 4 analyse this particular legal tool. The left in resistance presented Indigenous, local autonomy as opposed to national sovereignty as vital for protecting peoples and nature from extractivism through the previous consultation. The left in power, on the other hand, assumed a position of defence of the national interest, for which extractivism was vital. The government's breach of Indigenous territorial autonomy to implant extractive projects led to racist politics, hundreds of Indigenous leaders criminalised and dozens of communities violently evicted. This authoritarian and violent past is definitely taking its toll on Andrés Arauz's chances of winning the elections, and favouring Yaku Pérez.

Finally, Riofrancos turns to a third element of extractivism that affects the global environmental movement itself: its inability to inspire a mass movement able to build a global politics for fighting the ecological crisis. In the concluding chapter she questions the capacity of the left within the anti-extractive movement to mobilise 'a mass movement of the scale and strength of the anti-neoliberal popular sector coalition that swept the leftist governments into office in the first place' (p. 174). This inability is due in part to the analysis of extractivism as an autonomous dynamic which explains everything that is wrong in Latin America, a position held by a myriad of Latin American anti-extractive activists and intellectuals, many of them quoted in the book. The development model, north-south subordination, the way in which humans relate to the world, are rooted in the extractivist model. Moreover, extractivism - more than capitalism - is viewed as a political and economic regime and an organiser of territory. Riofrancos explains that in the consolidation of anti-extractive movements that occurred against the backdrop of a sharpening confrontation with Correa's post-neoliberal and anti-imperialist regime (as other pink tide governments) the concept of the post-extractive society became almost a political system in-and-of-itself. So defined, extractivism is the main enemy to be confronted, while the goal of fighting capitalism, or even neoliberalism, has been forgotten or at least postponed. The anticapitalist vocabulary has been foreclosed also by a misdiagnosis of a 'really existing socialism' that was as damaging to the environment as capitalism, a superficially apolitical stance inside the anti-extractive movement in which both the right and the left, 'capitalism and state socialism [exhibit] a wanton disregard for socio-natural harmony' (p. 174). In this panorama, the anti-extraction struggle places post-extractivism as the final goal, which, according to Riofrancos, leaves local communities alone fighting both the oil and mining companies and the 'extractivist state'. For me, the rejection of the state together with the distrust of leftist regimes brings the anti-extractive movement closer to right-wing politics, as it is evident with Yaku Pérez candidacy.

In some senses, Riofrancos agrees with an alternative, still marginal, approach that situates extractivism within the wider process of capitalist accumulation. In this explanation, the intensity and scale of the current extractive moment is a symptom of the contemporary phase of capitalist expansion and its destructive power, in which the cycles of reproduction of capital are accelerated, thanks also to technological advances. These writers argue that we should not see extractivism as 'an autonomous phenomenon [and] begin to consider the 'extractive process' as a characteristic component of the contemporary accumulation regime' (Galafassi and Riffo, p. 112). [4]

This alternative understanding of extractivism would have two effects on political strategy, and here rests the central contribution of Riofrancos' book for us, anti-extraction and climate activists within the global environmental movement. First, we need to push for the breaking free from narrow and limited anti-extraction (or carbon neutral or nature conservation) demands. It is necessary to define an alternative that does not take as its endpoint a post-extractive future or the end of fossil fuels dependency but goes beyond and fights capitalism. For Riofrancos, an anticapitalist objective would have more potential to attract people not directly affected by extraction - but who stand in solidarity with local communities because there is recognition of a common (whilst differentiated) relation of exploitation by capital. In other words, the way for environmentalism to become a mass movement is to adopt a clear anticapitalist objective (along with being anti-racist and anti-imperialist). The anticapitalist objective may be the 'glue' that brings together diverse movements and jump from the local to the national and to the global.

Second, the book shows us that without an anticapitalist political objective, environmentalism can be easily co-opted by the right, as we are witnessing today in the Ecuadorian elections. Again, an anticapitalist goal will foreground the need for a planned transition to overcome extractivism but on a clear leftist path. As Riofrancos states, what is needed is to start with a transformational programme that 'coherently demand both the redistribution of oil and mining revenues and a transition away from the extractive model of accumulation that generates those revenues. Just such a vision inflected CONAIE's 1994 political program, published amidst massive mobilisations against neoliberal land reforms, that called for a planned ecological communitarian economy' (p. 182). For an ecosocialist transition, we must think seriously about shifting ownership and control of the means of production, reorganising the international division of labour that confines millions of people to the role of tearing raw materials from the natural world. We must face the ecological disaster head-on whilst building political projects capable of understanding sub-national sovereignties and Indigenous self-determination. Those are objectives that any new Latin American pink tide government must consider once they are back in office.

Footnotes

[1] The uprising was against the re-established IMF's interference in the national economy. After several years of distancing and criticism to the financial entity by Correa's government, Lenín Moreno, Correa's successor, had once again asked for loans and complied with the economic adjustment mandates that affected the poorest population, particularly the Indigenous population. Specifically, what triggered the mobilisations was the withdrawal of fuel subsidies, which would increase living costs.

[2] Social expenditure (education, health, social housing, employment, etc.) increased from 5.3% of GDP in 2007 to 9.7% in 2016; multidimensional poverty rate fell from 44.4% in 2009 to 28.8% in 2016; inequality decreased until 2011, when it started to increase again as economic growth slowed mainly explained by the drop in oil prices. Sources: María Dolores Almeida, Justicia económica y equidad de género en Ecuador (Quito: FES-ILDIS, 2017); Iván Gachet, Diego Grijalva, Paúl Ponce and Damián Rodríguez, 'Vertical and Horizontal Inequality in Ecuador: The Lack of Sustainability', Soc Indic Res, 145 (2019), pp. 861-900 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1810-2.

[3] The antagonism between the two lefts around the contentious issue of extractivism is true also for other Latin American countries. With some differences, the coalition between anti-extractive activists, peasants, Indigenous and black peoples reclaiming sovereignty and plurinationality occurred in all the pink tide regimes. Ecological conflicts over the mining arch in Venezuela, the Belo Monte dam in Brazil, Yasuni National Park and Cordillera del Cóndor in Ecuador, the TIPNIS in Bolivia, and Vaca Muerta or Pascual Lama in Argentina, are all conflicts over the 'extractive model' and 'territorial autonomy'.

[4] Guido Galafassi and Natalia Riffo, 'A critical reading of the concept of "extractivism" within the framework of accumulation processes', Trama, 7:2 (2018), pp. 108-117.

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Revolutionary Reflections | Anti-extractivism and radical politics in Ecuador

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Can the left in Latin America escape the trap of extractivism?

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Internet Culture and Politicised Digital Aesthetics 

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Internet Culture and Politicised Digital Aesthetics 

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Death to the World was started by monks and nuns from the St Herman of Alaska Monastery in Platina, California, as a medium of evangelism to teens involved in the punk subculture by monastics who were ex-punks. A founding member was Justin Marler who, soon after recording Volume One with seminal doom metal band Sleep in 1991, left for seven years of monastic life while Sleep went on to become metal icons.

Justin Marler was a young punk left with the uncomfortable feeling of emptiness, irritated by the world and in search for answers and knowledge.

Using religion as a medium and methodology to rethink and visualise the distain for modern life. critiquing the systems we find ourselves in.

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Publication I made in 2022,

The zine focuses on the cartoon character Lola Bunny and her recent role in "Space Jam 2"

In the new movie, her character has gone through a redesign to fit a more 21st century look.

" the de- sexualisation of Lola "

The zine is a reaction to the fan art posted and about the cultural upheaval the internet experienced towards Lola Bunny.

----- Zine Text ------

Rabbit hole is dedicated to

The online culture war that happened when the new

Space Jam 2 was announced earlier in the year.

Falling into a internet hole of useless information, opinions

and a strange / slightly alarming amount of Lola Bunny erotica.

The desexualisation of Lola Bunny was vastly approaching.

Some fans outraged and concerned for the character, damning “woke culture” and “political correctness”

This created such a stir even celebrities (e.g. Piers Morgan) even gave their own two cents into this important cultural endeavor.

Through this political discourse around the body of an imaginary sexy female rabbit, fans started to share art showing Lola in all different shapes and forms.

Expressing their love for the character and excitement to see the new film.

Different approaches and interpretation of a character.

Sincere but sometimes slightly off putting, it’s a strange and wonderful world fan art creates.

Allowing this anthropomorphic female bunny to represent whatever the fan wants.

She’s able to be whatever that person needs, adaptable, ever changing and never fixed.

This little book is made to catalog all the strange but wonderful art found through my trip down the rabbit hole.

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Walter Benjamin's 'The Author as Producer' on Tuesday November 7th, 2.00-3.00pm (tbc). Please read text in advance and feel free to add comments/notes etc. below. AD

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Walter Benjamin 1970

The Author as Producer

First Published: New Left Review 1/62, July-August 1970;
Translated: by John Heckman;
Source: archive.org;
Transcribed: by Mahnoor Javed.

II s'agit de gagner les intellectuels "la classe ouvriere, en leur faisant prendre conscience de l'identité de leurs de-marches spirituelles et de leurs conditions de producteur. - Ramon Fernandez

You recall how Plato treats the poets in his projected State. In the interest of the community, he does not allow them to live there. He had a high idea of the power of poetry. But he considered it destructive, superfluous - in a perfect community, needless to say. Since then, the question of the poet's right to exist has not often been stated with the same insistence; but it is today. Certainly it has rarely been posed in this form. But you are all more or less familiar with it as the question of the poet's autonomy: his freedom to write whatever he may please. You are not inclined to accord him this autonomy. You believe that the current social situation forces the poet to choose whom his activity will serve. The bourgeois writer of popular stories does not acknowledge this alternative. So you show him that even without admitting it, he works in the interests of a particular class. An advanced type of writer acknowledges this alternative. His decision is determined on the basis of the class struggle when he places himself on the side of the proletariat. But then his autonomy is done for. He directs his energies toward what is useful for the proletariat in the class struggle. We say that he espouses a tendency.

There you have the key word about which there has long been a debate, as you well know. It is well-known to you, so you also know how fruitless it has been. It has never broken away from the boring 'on the one hand - on the other hand': on the one hand we should demand that the poet's work conform to the correct political tendency, on the other hand we have the right to expect that his work be of high quality. Naturally this formula is unsatisfactory as long as we do not understand the connection which really exists between the two factors: tendency and quality. Of course we can simply decree what this relation is. We can say: a work which exhibits the correct political tendency need demonstrate no further qualities. We can also decree: a work which exhibits the correct tendency must necessarily exhibit all other qualities.

The second formulation is not uninteresting. What is more, it is correct. It is the one I adopt. But at the same time I refuse to decree it. This assertion must be proven. I ask your attention for an attempt at this proof. 'That is', you will perhaps object, 'a very peculiar, not to say farfetched, subject. Yet you want to advance the study of fascism with such a proof?' That is indeed what I have in mind. For I hope to be able to show you that the concept of tendency, in the summary form that it usually occurs in the above-mentioned debate, is a completely inappropriate instrument of political literary criticism. I want to show you that the political tendency of a work can only be politically correct if it is also literarily correct. That means that the correct political tendency includes a literary tendency. For, just to clarify things right away, this literary tendency, which is implicitly or explicitly contained in every correct political tendency - that, and nothing else constitutes the quality of a work. The correct political tendency of a work includes its literary quality because it includes its literary tendency.

I hope I can promise you that this affirmation will shortly become clearer. For the moment I would point out that I could have chosen another starting point for my observations. I started from the fruitless debate over the relation between a work's political tendency and its quality. I could have started from an older but no less sterile debate: what is the relation between form and content, in political literature in particular? This way of formulating the question is decried: rightly so. It is considered an academic method of trying to fit literary relations undialectically into compartments. Very well. But what does the dialectical treatment of the same question look like?

The Concept of Technique

The dialectical consideration of this question, the one by which I come to the subject itself, can never lead anywhere by starting with isolated and lifeless objects: work, novel, book. It must be situated in the living social context. You reply, correctly, that this has been undertaken an innumerable number of times in our friends' circles. Certainly. But in so doing, they have often proceeded to generalities right away and thus necessarily became lost in vagaries. As we know, social relationships are determined by relationships of production. When it examined a work of art, materialist criticism was accustomed to ask how that work stood in relation to the social relationships of production of its time. That is an important question. But also a very difficult one. The answer to it is not always unambiguous. Thus I would now like to suggest a question which lies closer at hand. A question which is somewhat more modest, which is less encompassing, but which seems to me to have a better chance of being answered. Namely, instead of asking: what is the relationship of a work of art to the relationships of production of the time? Is it in accord with them, is it reactionary or does it strive to overthrow them, is it revolutionary? - in place of this question, or in any case before asking this question, I would like to propose another. Before I ask: how does a literary work stand in relation to the relationships of production of a period, I would like to ask: how does it stand in them? This question aims directly at the function that the work has within the literary relationships of production of a period. In other words, it aims directly at a work's literary technique.

With the concept of technique, I have named the concept which gives access to a direct social analysis, and thus a materialist analysis of literary products. At the same time the concept of technique gives us the dialectical starting-point from which the sterile opposition between form and content can be overcome. The concept of technique also indicates the way to determine correctly the relationships between tendency and quality about which we asked at the beginning. So if we could make the above formulation, that the correct political tendency of a work includes its literary quality because it includes its literary tendency, now we can state more exactly that this literary tendency can be found in the progress or regression of literary technique.

It will certainly be in line with your thinking if I now, only apparently without transition, go on to quite concrete literary problems. Russian ones. I should like to call your attention to Sergei Tretiakov and to the model of the 'operative' writer which he has defined and embodied. This operative writer presents the clearest example of the functional relation which always exists, in any circumstances, between correct political tendency and a progressive literary technique. Of course it is only one example: I am keeping others in reserve. Tretiakov distinguishes the operative writer from one who gives information. His mission is not to report, but to struggle; he does not play the role of spectator, but actively intervenes. He defines his task through the statements he makes about his activity. At the time of the total collectivization of agriculture, in 1928, when the slogan 'writers to the kolkhozy (collective farms)' was launched, Tretiakov left for the 'Communist Lighthouse' commune and during two lengthy stays there undertook the following tasks: calling mass meetings, collecting money to pay for tractors, persuading individual peasants who worked alone to enter the kolkhoz, inspecting reading rooms, creating wall-newspapers and editing the kolkhoz newspaper, being a reporter for Moscow papers, introducing radio and travelling movies. It is not surprising that the novel Master of the fields which Tretiakov wrote after his stay, had a substantial influence on the further formation of agricultural collectives.

You may appreciate Tretiakov and perhaps still think that his example does not mean very much in this situation. The duties he undertook, you may perhaps object, are all those of a journalist or a propagandist: all that doesn't have very much to do with literature. Yet I chose the example of Tretiakov intentionally, to indicate the breadth of the horizon from which we should rethink our notion of literary forms or genres in line with the given techniques of our current situation, so that we may arrive at the forms of expression to which literary energies should be applied today. There have not always been novels in the past, they do not always have to exist in the future; there have not always been tragedies, not always great epics. Commentaries, translations, even so-called forgeries have not always been divertissements on the borders of literature: they have had their place not only in philosophical literature, but in the poetic literatures of Arabia or China. Rhetoric has not always been an insignificant form. On the contrary, in Antiquity large areas of literature bore its stamp. All that should make you conscious of the fact that we stand in the midst of a powerful process of the transformation of literary forms, a process of transformation in which many of the oppositions with which we used to work could lose their power. Allow me to give you an example of the sterility of such oppositions and of the process by which they are dialectically overcome. That is where we again find Tretiakov. The example is, in fact, that of the newspaper.

The Advent of the Newspaper

'In our literature,' a leftist author writes, 'oppositions which mutually enriched each other in earlier, happier times, have become insoluble antinomies. Thus science and belles lettres, criticism and production, culture and politics have fallen away from each other, without maintaining any relationship or order. The showplace of this literary confusion is the newspaper. Its content is "material" which refuses any form of organization other than that imposed by the reader's impatience. This impatience is not only that of the politician who expects a piece of news, or of a speculator who awaits a tip: behind them hovers the impatience of whoever feels himself excluded, whoever thinks he has a right to express his own interests himself. For a long time, the fact that nothing binds the reader to his paper as much as this avid impatience for fresh nourishment every day, has been used by editors, who are always starting new columns open to his questions, opinions, protestations. So the indiscriminate assimilation of facts goes hand in hand with the similar indiscriminate assimilation of readers, who see themselves instantly raised to the level of co-workers. But this phenomenon hides a dialectical moment: the fall of literature in the bourgeois press reveals the formula for its resuscitation in the Soviet Russian press, because the realm of literature gains in width what it loses in depth. In the Soviet press, the difference between author and public, maintained artificially by the bourgeois press, is beginning to disappear. The reader is indeed always ready to become a writer, that is to say, someone who describes or even who prescribes. As an expert - even if not a professional, but only a job-occupant - he gains entrance to authorship. Labour itself speaks out for writing it out in words constitutes part of the knowledge necessary to becoming an author. Literary competence is no longer based on specialized training in academic schools, but on technical and commercial training in trade schools and thus becomes common property. In a word, it is the literarization of the relationships of life which overcomes otherwise insoluble antinomies and it is the showplace of the unrestrained degradation of the word - that is, the newspaper - which prepares its salvation.'

Thus I hope I have shown that the portrayal of the author as a producer must be derived from the press. For the press, at least the Russian press, makes us acknowledge that the powerful process of transformation of which I spoke before goes beyond not only the conventional separations between genres, between writer and poet, between the scholar and the popularizer, but it also forces us to re-examine the separation between author and reader. The press is the most authoritative instance of this process and therefore any study of the author as a producer must deal with it.

But we cannot remain at that point. For as yet the newspapers of Western Europe are not a suitable instrument of production in the hands of the writer. They still belong to capital. On the one hand the newspaper, on the technical level, represents the most important literary position. But this position is on the other hand in the control of our opponents, so it should not be surprising that the writer's comprehension of his dependent social position, of his technical possibilities and of his political tasks must struggle against enormous difficulties. Among the most important developments in Germany in the last 10 years is the fact that many productive minds have gone through a revolutionary development parallel to and under the pressure of the economic situation, without however, having been able in a revolutionary way to think through their own work and its relationship to the means of production, its productive techniques, its technology. As you see, I am talking about the so-called left-wing intellectuals, and I will limit myself to left-wing bourgeois intellectuals. In Germany, the pace-setting politico-literary movements of the last decade have originated with these left intellectuals. By the example of two of these movements, 'activism' and the 'new objectivity', I want to show that however revolutionary this political tendency may appear, it actually functions in a counterrevolutionary manner as long as the writer experiences his solidarity with the proletariat ideologically and not as a producer.

The Credo of Activism

The slogan which summarizes the demands of activism is 'logocracy', that is, the power of the intellect. Power to the intellect. The expression could well be translated as the power of the intellectuals. This conception of intellectuals has, in fact, become standard among left-wing intellectuals and it dominates their political manifestoes from Heinrich Mann to Doblin. It is not difficult to see that this conception completely ignores the position of intellectuals in the process of production. Hiller himself, the theoretician of activism, does not want to consider intellectuals as 'belonging to certain professions', but as 'representatives of a certain character type'. Naturally this character type as such occupies a position between classes. It includes a certain number of private existences, without offering the slightest opportunity of organizing them. When Hiller formulates his refusal (to join the Party - trs) for Party leaders, he at least concedes them something: they may 'be more knowledgeable about essential matters . . . speak the language of the people better . . . struggle more firmly' than he, but one thing is clear to him: that they 'have more intellectual deficiencies'. Very probably. But where does this get him, since in politics it is not individual thoughts, but, as Brecht once expressed it, the art of thinking what is in the heads of other people, that is decisive? Activism tried to replace materialist dialectics by a generality which is not definable in class terms: common sense. At best, its intellectuals represent a social stratum. In other words, in itself, the principle of this formation of a collective is a reactionary principle: no wonder the effect of such a collective can never be revolutionary.

The unhealthy principles of such a collective formation can still be felt. We could calculate them when Doblin's Wissen und Verandern ('Know and transform') was published three years ago. This tract was written as an answer to a young man - Doblin calls him Mr Hocke - who had come to the famous author with the question 'what is to be done?' Doblin invites him to attach himself to the cause of socialism, but with conditions that give one pause. Socialism, according to Doblin, is 'freedom, the spontaneous association of man, the refusal of any constraints, indignation against injustice and force, humanity, tolerance and peace'. Whatever the truth of that may be, in any case he starts from this socialism to make common cause against the theory and practice of the radical working-class movement. 'Nothing', Doblin claims, 'can grow out of something which cannot already be found in it - from a murderously aggravated class struggle can come justice, but not socialism.' 'You, my dear sir' - Doblin formulates the recommendations he gives Mr Hocke on this and other grounds - 'cannot bring to fruition the principled "yes" you accord the struggle (of the proletariat) by integrating yourself into the proletarian forces. You must accord your disturbed and bitter agreement to this struggle, but you also know: if you do more, an enormously important position will no longer be occupied . . . that of original communistic individual freedom, spontaneous solidarity and the unity of man. It is this position which you must adopt as your own.' Here we can clearly see where the concept of the 'intellectual' as a type defined according to his opinions, ideas or dispositions, but not according to his position in the process of production leads. He should, as we read in Doblin, take up his position next to the proletariat. But what kind of a position is that? It is that of a benefactor. Of an ideological patron. An impossible position. And so we come back to the thesis we stated at the beginning: the place of the intellectual in the class struggle can only be determined, or better, chosen, on the basis of his position in the process of production.

Brecht elaborated the concept of 'functional transformation' (Umfunktionierung) for the transformation of the forms and instruments of production by a progressive intelligentsia - interested in the liberation of the means of production and thus useful in the class struggle. He was the first to formulate for intellectuals this far-reaching demand: do not simply transmit the apparatus of production without simultaneously changing it to the maximum extent possible in the direction of socialism. 'The publication of the Versuche', as the author of that series writes in the introduction, 'takes place at a point in time at which certain works should no longer so much relate individual experiences (have the character of a work), but rather should be aimed at the utilization (transformation) of certain institutes or institutions.' What is proposed is not a spiritual renewal such as the fascists proclaim, but technical innovations. I will return to these innovations. Here I will limit myself to indicating the decisive difference between merely transmitting the apparatus of production and transforming it. At the beginning of my comments on the 'new objectivity', I would like to set forth the notion that transmitting an apparatus of production without - as much as possible - transforming it, is a highly debatable procedure even when the content of the apparatus which is transmitted seems to be revolutionary in nature. In point of fact we are faced with a situation - for which the last decade in Germany furnishes complete proof - in which the bourgeois apparatus of production and publication can assimilate an astonishing number of revolutionary themes, and can even propagate them without seriously placing its own existence or the existence of the class that possesses them into question. This is certainly true as long as the apparatus is transmitted by hacks, even if they are revolutionary hacks. I define a hack as a writer who fundamentally renounces the effort to alienate the apparatus of production from the ruling class in favour of socialism, by means of improving it. I further affirm that a substantial part of so-called left-wing writers have no other social function whatever, than eternally to draw new effects from the political situation in order to amuse the public. With that I come to the 'new objectivity'. It made documentaries fashionable. But we should ask: to whom is this technique useful?

The New Objectivity

For greater clarity, I will put photographic documentary in the foreground. What is valid for it can be extended to literature. Both owe their extraordinary growth to techniques of publication: to radio and the illustrated press. Let us think back to Dadaism. The revolutionary force of Dadaism lay in the fact that it put the authenticity of art to the test. The Dadaists made still-lifes out of tickets, spools, cigarette butts that were integrated into painted elements. Then they showed it to the public: see, the picture-frame explodes time, the tiniest real fragment of everyday life says more than painting. Just as the bloody fingerprint of a murderer on the page of a book says more than the text. Many aspects of this revolutionary attitude have made their way into photomontage. You only need to think of the work of John Heartfield, whose technique made book jackets into a political instrument. But now follow the path of photography further. What do you see? It becomes more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it can no longer photograph a run-down apartment house or a pile of manure without transfiguring it. Not to speak of the fact that it would be impossible to say anything about a dam or a cable factory except this: the world is beautiful. The World is Beautiful - that is the title of a famous book of photographs by Renger-Patsch, in which we see the photography of the 'new objectivity' at its height. It has even succeeded in making misery itself an object of pleasure, by treating it stylishly and with technical perfection. For the 'new objectivity', it is the economic function of photography to bring to the masses elements which they could not previously enjoy - spring, movie stars, foreign countries - by reworking them according to the current fashion; it is the political function of photography to renew the world as it actually is from within, in other words, according to the current fashion.

Here we have a drastic example of what it means to pass on an apparatus of production without transforming it. Changing it would have meant breaking down one of the barriers, overcoming one of the contradictions which fetters the production of intellectuals. In this case the barrier between writing and pictures. What we should demand from photography is the capacity of giving a print a caption which would tear it away from fashionable clichés and give it a revolutionary use-value. But we will pose this demand with the greatest insistence if we - writers - take up photography. Here too technical progress is the basis of political progress for the author as producer. In other words: the only way to make this production politically useful is to master the competencies in the process of intellectual production which, according to the bourgeois notion, constitutes their hierarchy; and more exactly, the barriers which were erected to separate the skills of both productive forces must be simultaneously broken down. When he experiences his solidarity with the proletariat, the author as producer also experiences directly a solidarity with certain other producers in whom earlier he was not much interested. I spoke of photography. I want just briefly to quote a few of Eisler's comments about music: 'Even in the development of music, both in its production and in its reproduction, we must learn to recognize an increasingly strong process of rationalization . . . records, sound films, and gramophones can present exceptional musical performances in a canned form as a product. This process of rationalization has the result that the production of music will be limited to ever smaller, but also more highly qualified groups of specialists. This crisis of the concert business is the crisis of a form of production which has been made obsolete and anachronistic by new technical discoveries.' Our duty would thus be to transform the concert form in a way which must fulfil two conditions: it must supersede both the opposition between the musicians and the listeners, and that between technical performance and content. To this end, Eisler makes the following useful observation: 'We must be careful not to over-rate orchestral music and think of it as the only form of high art. Music without words took on its great importance and fullest development only with capitalism.' Which means: the duty of transforming the concert is not possible without the aid of words. Words alone can, in Eisler's formulation, bring about the transformation of the concert into a political meeting. That such a transformation does, in fact, present a high point of musical and literary technique, Brecht and Eisler have proven with their play The Measures Taken.

If you now look back at the process of recasting literary forms of which we were speaking, you can see how photography and music (and from these we can judge other forms) will enter a molten stream from which new forms will be cast. You see confirmed that only the literarization of all relationships of life can give a correct notion of the extent of this process of recasting, just as the state of the class struggle determines the temperature at which it occurs - in a more or less perfected form.

I spoke of the operation of a certain type of fashionable photography, which makes misery into a consumer good. When I turn to the 'new objectivity' as a literary movement, I must go a step further and say that it has made the struggle against misery into a consumer good. In fact, in many cases its political meaning has been exhausted with the transposition of revolutionary reflexes, in so far as they appeared in the bourgeoisie, into objects of distraction and amusement which were integrated without difficulty into the cabaret business of the big cities. The metamorphosis of the political struggle from a drive to make a political commitment into an object of contemplative pleasure, from a means of production into an article of consumption, is characteristic of this literature. A perceptive critic explained this in connection with the example of Erich Kastner thus: 'These extreme left-wing intellectuals have nothing to do with the worker's movement. Rather they exist as the mirror image of that fringe of bourgeois decadence which tried to assimilate itself to feudal strata and admired the Empire in the person of the reserve lieutenant. The extreme left journalists of the type Kastner. Mehring or Tucholsky are the decadent strata of the bourgeoisie who try to mimic the proletariat. Their function, seen from a political point of view, is to form not a Party, but a clique, seen from a literary point of view, not a school but a fad, from an economic point of view not to become producers but agents. Agents or hacks, who make a great show of their poverty and congratulate themselves on the yawning void. It would be impossible to carve a more comfortable position out of an uncomfortable situation.'

This school, as I said, makes a great show of its poverty. Thus it avoids the most pressing task of the contemporary writer: acknowledgment of how poor he is and how poor he must be to begin all over again. For that is the question. Of course, the Soviet State is not going to exclude the poet, as the Platonic State did - that is why I mentioned the Platonic State at the beginning - but it will assign him tasks which will not allow him to parade forth what have long been exposed as the false riches of the creative personality, in the form of new masterpieces. To wait for a renewal in the form of more famous authors is a privilege of fascism, which brings forth such crazy formulations as that with which Giinther Griindel concludes his essay on literature in the Mission of the Young Generation: 'There is no better way to close this survey and perspective than with the comment that the Wilhelm Meister or the Griine Heinrich of our generation has not yet been written.' To an author who has thought through the conditions of production today, nothing could be further from thought than to expect or even to want such works. His work would never merely be developing products, but always at the same time working with the means of production themselves. In other words, his productions must possess, in addition to and even before their characteristics as works, an organizing function. Yet their organisational value should not at all be limited to their use as propaganda. The political line alone cannot organize. The excellent Lichtenberg has said: it doesn't matter what opinions someone has, but what kind of a man these opinions make of him. Now a great deal depends on one's opinions, but the best opinions won't help, if they don't make something useful out of the person who holds them. The best political tendency is false when it doesn't indicate the attitude with which one should approach it for the writer can only indicate this attitude when he makes something: namely something written. The tendency is the necessary but never sufficient condition of the organizational function of a work. The tendency also demands an exemplary, indicative performance from the writer. Today more than ever before that should be demanded. An author who teaches a writer nothing, teaches nobody anything. The determinant factor is the exemplary character of a production that enables it, first, to lead other producers to this production, and secondly to present them with an improved apparatus for their use. And this apparatus is better to the degree that it leads consumers to production, in short that it is capable of making co-workers out of readers or spectators. We already possess such a model, about which I can only speak briefly here. That is Brecht's epic theatre.

The Epic Theatre

People continue to write tragedies and operas which are apparently based on a stage apparatus proven by long experience, whereas in reality they do nothing but transmit an apparatus on the verge of collapse. 'The prevailing lack of clarity about their situation on the part of musicians, writers and critics,' Brecht says, 'has tremendous consequences, which are not sufficiently stressed. For since they think they possess an apparatus which in reality possesses them, they defend an apparatus over which they no longer have any control, which is no longer, as they believe, a means for the producer, but has become a means opposed to the producer.' The theatre's complicated machinery, enormous expenses for actors, subtle effects, have become a means of opposition to the producers, not least of all because this theatre seeks to recruit the producer for a competition in which film and radio have entangled it and which can lead nowhere. This theatre - whether one thinks of the 'high- brow' theatre or that of mere entertainment - belongs to a satiated social stratum which transforms everything it touches into amusement. Its position is hopeless. That is not true of a theatre which, instead of entering into competition with the newer instruments of publication and publicity, tries to use them and learn from them, in short, seeks to come to grips with them. Epic theatre has chosen to grapple with them. Seen from the current level of development of film and radio, it is the modern form of theatre.

In the interest of this grappling, Brecht went back to the original elements of the theatre. He more or less made do with a platform. He renounced too far-reaching plots. Thus he succeeded in transforming the functional relation between the stage and the public, text and production, director and actor. Epic theatre, he explained, should not so much develop an action as present a situation. It attains that condition, as we shall soon see, by allowing the action to be broken up. Here I would remind you of the songs whose main function is to break the action. It is here - namely with the principle of breaking into the action - that the epic theatre takes up a process which, as you can clearly see, has become common in film and radio, press and photography, over the last few years. I am speaking of the process of montage: the element which is superimposed breaks into the situation on which it is imposed. Allow me to briefly emphasize that this process attains its appropriate, even perhaps its most fully justified form, with epic theatre.

The interruption of the action, which inspired Brecht to call his theatre 'epic', constantly goes against the public's theatrical illusion. Indeed, such illusion is useless for a theatre which is trying to treat elements of reality as a series of experiments. But the situations the epic theatre presents are to be found at the end, not at the beginning of these experiments. Situations which, in whatever form, are always ours. They are not brought closer to the spectator, but distanced from him. He perceives them as real situations, not, as with the naturalist theatre, with self-satisfaction, but with astonishment. Thus the epic theatre does not reproduce situations, rather it uncovers them. The discovery of situations is accomplished by means of the interruption of the action. Only here the interruption does not have the character of fear and pity, but has an organizing function. In the midst of the action, it brings it to a stop, and thus obliges the spectator to take a position toward the action, obliges the actor to adopt an attitude toward his role. From a single example I want to show you how Brecht's discovery and development of the notion of the 'gesture' signifies nothing other than a return to the decisive methods of montage in radio and film, but at the same time transforms montage from a process too often dictated by fashion into a human act. Imagine a family scene: the woman is just about to grab a bronze statue and throw it at her daughter; the father about to open the window and call for help. At this very moment a stranger enters. The action is interrupted; what comes to the foreground in its place is the situation which meets the glance of the stranger: contorted faces, open window, smashed furniture. But there is a point of view from which even more common scenes of contemporary existence don't look very different. That is the viewpoint of the epic dramatist.

To dramatic art as a whole he opposes the dramatic laboratory. He seizes in a new way the old and great opportunity of the theatre - calling into question all that exists. At the centre of such an experiment stands man. Contemporary man: thus a reduced, a limited man, a man thrown coldly into a cold world. But since this is the only man available to us, it is in our interest to know him. He undergoes trials, examinations. What results is this: the course of events cannot be changed at its peaks, not by heroic virtue and resolution, but only through strictly ordinary habitual actions, through reason and practice. To construct what in Aristotelian dramaturgy is called 'action' out of the smallest elements of behaviour, that is the meaning of the epic theatre. So its means are more modest than those of the traditional theatre; its purposes also. It aims less at filling the public with emotion, even if it is that of revolt, than at making it consider thoughtfully, from a distance and over a period of time, the situations in which it lives. We can remark in passing that there is no better starting point for thought than laughter. In particular, thought usually has a better chance when one is shaken by laughter than when one's mind is shaken and upset. The only extravagance of the epic theatre is its amount of laughter.

A Mediated Solidarity

You may have noticed that the chain of thought whose conclusion we are approaching only presents the writer with a single demand, the demand of reflecting, of thinking about his position in the process of production. We can be sure of this: this reflection sooner or later leads the writers who are essential, that is, the best technicians of their trade, to conclusions and positions which are the basis of their trustworthy solidarity with the proletariat. Finally, I would like to mention a real proof in the form of a short passage from the current issue of Commune. Commune organized a questionaire: 'For whom do you write?'. I quote from Rene Maublanc's answer, as well as from Aragon's additional comments. 'There can be no doubt', Maublanc writes, 'that I write almost exclusively for a bourgeois public. First because I am forced to' - here Maublanc indicates his duties as a teacher in a high school - 'secondly because I am of bourgeois origin and of a bourgeois education and come from a bourgeois milieu, and therefore am naturally inclined to address myself to the class to which I belong, which I know best and can best understand. But that does not mean that I write to please it or to support it. On the one hand I am convinced that the proletarian revolution is necessary and desirable, on the other hand that the weaker the opposition of the bourgeoisie, the quicker, easier, more successful and less bloody the revolution will be. . . . Today the proletariat needs allies who come from the bourgeois camp, just as in the eighteenth century the bourgeoisie needed allies from the feudal camp. I want to be among these allies.'

To this Aragon comments: 'Here our comrade treats a question which concerns a very great number of today's writers. Not all of them have the courage to face up to it . . . Those who are as clear about their own position as Rene Maublanc are infrequent. But precisely from them we must ask more . . . It is not enough to weaken the bourgeoisie from the inside, one must fight along with the proletariat . . . For Rene Maublanc and many of our friends among writers who still hesitate, there exists the example of the Soviet Russian writers, who came out of the Russian bourgeoisie and still have become pioneers of socialist development.'

So far Aragon. But how did they become pioneers? Certainly not without bitter struggles, extremely difficult confrontations. The thoughts that I have presented to you attempt to draw some benefits from these struggles. They are based on the concept to which the debate over the attitude of the Russian intellectuals owes its decisive clarification: to the concept of the specialist. The solidarity of the specialist with the proletariat - which constituted the beginning of this clarification - can never be anything but a mediated one. The activists and the representatives of the new objectivity can wave their arms as much as they please: they cannot do away with the fact that even the proletarianization of an intellectual almost never makes a proletarian. Why? because, in the form of his culture, the bourgeois class gave him a means of production which, on the basis of the privilege of culture, makes him solidary with it, and even more so it with him. It is thus completely correct when Aragon, in another connection, declares: 'The revolutionary intellectual appears, first and foremost, as a traitor to his class of origin.' This betrayal consists, in the case of the writer, in behaviour which changes him from a reproducer of the apparatus of production into an engineer who sees his task as the effort of adapting that apparatus to the aims of the proletarian revolution. That is an indirect, mediated effectiveness, but it does free the intellectual from that merely destructive task to which Maublanc and many comrades believe they must limit themselves. Does he succeed in furthering the socialization of the intellectual means of production? Does he see a way for the intellectual worker to organize the process of production by himself? Does he have suggestions for transforming the function of the novel, the drama, poetry? The more he is able to orient his activity toward this task, the more correct the political tendency, and by necessity the higher the technical quality of his work will be. And in addition: the more exactly he knows his position in the process of production, the less he will be tempted by the idea of passing for an 'intellectual'. The intellectual attitude which makes itself felt in the name of fascism should disappear. The intellectual who opposes fascism by trusting to his own miraculous power will disappear. For the revolutionary struggle does not take place between capitalism and the intellect, but between capitalism and the proletariat.

Notes

Sergei Tretiakov (1892-1939?) was a famous Soviet playwright and futurist. He was a leading participant in the Moscow group which produced the journals Lef and Novy Lef. His most important plays, produced in collaboration with Meyerhold and Eisenstein, were Gas Masks (1924), Listen Moscow (1924) and Roar China (1930). His views on newspapers were published in a collective volume edited by Chuzak in 1929, entitled The Lieterature of Fact, which also included contributions by Brik and Shklovsky. Attacking those who demanded 'Red Tolstoys', he wrote: 'There is no need for us to wait for Tolstoys, because we have our own epics. Our epics are the newspapers.' Tretiakov was purged about 1937. The date of his death shortly thereafter is unknown.

Activism was a literary phenomenon, led by Hiller, which agitated for certain legal reforms in Germany.

Hans Eisler was a pupil of Schoenberg, who worked particularly closely with Brecht in the 'thirties and early 'forties. He emigrated to Hollywood via the USSR in 1933, going to East Germany after the War.

Walter Mehring (born 1896) was known mainly for his plays and political songs. He later emigrated to the USA.

Georg Lichtenberg (1742-99) was one of the great satirists of German literature. He was famous above all for his Aphorisms and his analyses of Hogarth's prints, which have recently been published in English.

Rene Maublanc was a French Communist philosopher, and author of La Philosophie du Marxisms et I'Enseignment Official (1935) and Le Marxisme et la Liberie (1946).

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The Author as Producer by Walter Benjamin 1970

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Walter Benjamin 1970 First Published: New Left Review 1/62, July-August 1970; Translated: by John Heckman; Source: archive.org; Transcribed: by Mahnoor Javed. II s'agit de gagner les intellectuels "la classe ouvriere, en leur faisant prendre conscience de l'identité de leurs de-marches spirituelles et de leurs conditions de producteur.

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Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence. Financial Times Editorial, May 26, 2023

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Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence. Financial Times Editorial, May 26, 2023

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In its more than 130-year history the Financial Times has upheld the highest standards of journalism. As editor of this newspaper, nothing matters to me more than the trust of readers in the quality journalism we produce. Quality means above all accuracy. It also means fairness and transparency.

That’s why today I am sharing my current thinking on the use of generative artificial intelligence in the newsroom.

Generative AI is the most significant new technology since the advent of the internet. It is developing at breakneck speed and its applications, and implications, are still emerging. Generative AI models learn from huge amounts of published data, including books, publications, Wikipedia and social media sites, to predict the most likely next word in a sentence.

This innovation is an increasingly important area of coverage for us and I am determined to make the FT an invaluable source of information and analysis on AI in the years to come. But it also has obvious and potentially far-reaching implications for journalists and editors in the way we approach our daily work, and could help us in our analysis and discovery of stories. It has the potential to increase productivity and liberate reporters and editors’ time to focus on generating and reporting original content.

However, while they appear to be very articulate and plausible, AI models on the market today are ultimately a prediction engine and they are learning from the past. They can fabricate facts — this is what is referred to as “hallucinations” — and make up references and links. If sufficiently manipulated, AI models can produce entirely false images and articles. They also replicate the existing societal perspectives, including historic biases.

It is my conviction that our mission to produce journalism of the highest standards is all the more important in this era of rapid technological innovation. At a time when misinformation can be generated and spread rapidly and trust in the media in general has declined, we at the FT have a greater responsibility to be transparent, to report the facts and to pursue the truth. That is why FT journalism in the new AI age will continue to be reported and written by humans who are the best in their fields and who are dedicated to reporting on and analysing the world as it is, accurately and fairly.

The FT is also a pioneer in the business of digital journalism and our business colleagues will embrace AI to provide services for readers and clients and sustain our record of effective innovation. Our newsroom too must remain a hub for innovation. It is important and necessary for the FT to have a team in the newsroom that can experiment responsibly with AI tools to assist journalists in tasks such as mining data, analysing text and images and translation. We won’t publish photorealistic images generated by AI but we will explore the use of AI-augmented visuals (infographics, diagrams, photos) and when we do we will make that clear to the reader. This will not affect artists’ illustrations for the FT. The team will also consider, always with human oversight, generative AI’s summarising abilities.

We will be transparent, within the FT and with our readers. All newsroom experimentation will be recorded in an internal register, including, to the extent possible, the use of third-party providers who may be using the tool. Training for our journalists on the use of generative AI for story discovery will be provided through a series of masterclasses.

Every technology opens exciting new frontiers that must be responsibly explored. But as recent history has shown, the excitement must be accompanied by caution over the risk of misinformation and the corruption of the truth. The FT will remain committed to its fundamental mission and will keep readers informed as generative AI itself and our thinking on it evolve.