Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

By David Brian Howard

“It is not the portrayal of reality as hell on earth but the slick challenge to break out of it that is suspect. If there is anyone today to whom we can pass the responsibilities for the message, we bequeath it not to the “masses,” and not to the individual (who is powerless), but to an imaginary witness—lest it perish with us.”

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno,

The Dialectic of Enlightenment.

In the last two decades, scholarly interest in the work of one of the leaders of the Frankfurt School, Theodor W. Adorno, has accelerated significantly. Whether as a response to the need to maintain a complex engagement with Marxism in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall or out of the need to come to terms with the legacy of George Bush and 9/11 (and one might as well add the entire history of American imperialism and the history of modernity), monographs and journal articles on Adorno have elevated his profile to the point that it is now comparable one of the other great icon of twentieth century critical Marxism: Walter Benjamin. One of the tremendous benefits of this plethora of critical discourse on Adorno is that, unlike earlier periods of critical analysis on his work, the depth and range of critical opinion is far more diverse, more varied, and thus, for the devoted reader, extremely more rewarding in critical insights. One of the most subtle and insightful of these interpreters of Adorno’s work is Lambert Zuidervaart, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, whose previous book-length treatment of Adorno, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (2004), still stands as the finest critical explication of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.

In his intriguing new book, Zuidervaart sets himself two major tasks: the first, a welcome critical retrieval of the “crucial insights” into Adorno’s aesthetics and social philosophy after decades of criticism, and the second, an examination of the requirements for collectivity and normativity in a global context. The latter task, Zuidervaart suggests, requires salvaging many of Adorno’s keenest critical insights in order to enable a robust theory of social democracy that could better address the challenges facing social philosophy “after” Adorno. Taken as autonomous segments, Zuidervaart accomplishes both tasks with aplomb. Zuidervaart feels that it is Adorno’s own successors, more than his opponents, have blocked a fresh reception of his work. Zuidervaart singles out Jürgen Habermas, Adorno’s former pupil, in particular, as a key actor in thwarting the reapplication of Adorno’s theory in the 21^st century. In Chapter 4 Zuidervaart adroitly parries the Habermasian critique of the overarching theme of reification by highlighting the “sustained misreading of the remembrance of nature in Adorno’s thought.” Whereas Habermas claims that Adorno and Max Horkheimer fatally expand the concept of reification via Weber’s rationalization thesis and Luckác’s theory of reification into a totalizing “critique of instrumental reason” (118-119[1]) in their book, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Zuidervaart counters with a post-Habermasian renewal of Adorno’s social vision for the age of globalization. Zuidervaart argues convincingly that Adorno remains a dialectical critic that provides a normative critique of Western society. He also, quite rightly, draws attention to the allegorical interpretation that leads back to the Jewish religion reinforcing the commitment to dialectical social criticism but “without the Hegelian safety net of ‘totality … as the absolute.’” (116) Finally Zuidervaart highlights the claim that Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, make in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, that domination is inherently self-limiting especially as a result of the tools it requires. What Adorno articulates more eloquently than his successors, argues Zuidervaart, is that “the whole is the false.” Thus, we cannot resist the repression of desire and the destruction of nature unless we dismantle economic exploitation. What he [Adorno] needed to say more vigorously, however, and with greater nuance, is that the whole is not wholly false. This is the valid point to Habermas’s otherwise overwrought critique.” (131) Zuidervaart is extremely effective at neutralizing the critiques of Habermas, Axel Honneth, and others, and he assists in helping to rescue Adorno from the oddly reductive framing to which he was subjected by many associated with the second and third generations of the Frankfurt School.

Zuidervaart’s second and more challenging task is to develop a social philosophy that takes seriously the “new categorical imperative” that Adorno advocates for the avoidance of a repetition of Auschwitz in the future. Zuidervaart links his defense of Adorno with his vision of social philosophy after Adorno, hinting throughout his book, but elaborating more fully in Chapter 6, his own vision of a fully-fledged theory of social democracy. Drawing upon John Dewey’s three concepts of freedom, participation, and recognition, as well as Hauke Brunkhorst’s book Solidarity (2005), and the social vision of Rebecca Todd Peters, especially her In Search of the Good Life: The Ethics of Globalization (2004), Zuidervaart seeks to counter what he calls the increasingly antidemocratic turbocapitalist economy, with “a fully fledged theory of social democracy [that] would render Adorno’s strategic elitism moot.”(167). Peters, for example, advocates for a “democratized power sharing, caring for the planet, and the social well-being of all people, and as a normative framework for evaluating stances toward globalization,” (169-170) which strongly resonates with the underlying social message of Zuidervaart’s thesis. Throughout his text Zuidervaart draws our attention to the need for a social democratic politics of global transformation that heals the rift between the powerlessness of the autonomous individual and critical art practice and the far greater potential of a democratic vision of change. However, this is the crucial point where the threads of Zuidervaart’s argument begin to fray as he attempts to overcome the gap between theory and practice that he feels is present in Adorno. Zuidervaart separates himself from Adorno’s defense of modernist art and autonomy, which he characterizes as monadic and transgressive, by defending a post-Adornian model of autonomy characterized by dialogical and transformative characteristics. Zuidervaart’s characteristics of autonomy, while acknowledging that it is difficult to imagine the elimination of social exclusion (and the suffering associated with it), antidemocratic tendencies, and the life-destroying effects of capitalism, demonstrate that Zuidervaart is distancing himself from Adorno’s advocacy of critical modernism and the autonomous individual in favor of an insistence on normative and socially democratic forms of collective action that he obviously feels are the basis for a more socially and politically effective and responsible ethic in the twenty-first century. While claiming not to ignore Adorno’s critical insights, Zuidervaart harshly critiques Adorno on questions of collectivity and normativity while castigating him for the complete absence of arguments that could seen to represent a social ethics.

Therefore a social philosophy informed by Adorno would articulate principles of justice, resourcefulness, and solidarity that are not utopian “nor sink into a postmodern morass.”(180) However, Adorno’s defense of critical modernist art practices and the ongoing importance of the dialectically engaged autonomous individual remain important, if not the sole, sites of resistance in the face of increasing antidemocratic tendencies in the West, as well as around the world, and the life-destroying effects of late capitalism. As unforgivably weak as those positions are, it is important to remember the fundamental mistrust of both social democracy and the scientific Marxism of the Second International from the nineteenth century onwards that led Adorno, Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and other members of what would become to be known as the Frankfurt School, to adopt a highly critical stance towards any overly optimistic belief that the gap separating theory and practice in social philosophy could be transcended in such an undialectical manner, hence the emphasis by various key members on critical art production, whether of the modernist or avant-garde variety. Zuidervaart himself hints at such a deep anxiety for his own project when he states: “Clearly, if globalization simply means the spread of this [American] empire, all bets are off.” (128).

Given Zuidervaart’s apparent social and political optimism, it is perhaps surprising that a Toronto based philsoper is not more concerned about the omnipresence of the American Empire. In addition, why is it, as Slavoj Žižek has been so right to point out, that the default position for so many ex- or post-Marxists is a mildly left wing social democratic perspective, as if, somehow, the political and social contradicitions of social democracy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century have been overcome? It is hard to believe that the insights of the Frankfurt School of the 1930s, including those of Walter Benjamin, have been substantially surpassed by the moderate left wing discourses of the last several decades. Nor does it appear that a more viable political and social vision is now just around the corner for those on the critical left to rally around, which the election of President Barack Obama has done very little to dissipate? In addition, given all the difficulties with the social and aesthetic positions that current social democratic movements reveal in their attempts to unite theory and practice beyond the aporias of the Frankfurt School, little more than a regression to older critical stances that predate the critical breakthroughs the Frankfurt School in the 1930s seems to have been achieved.

Thus, while claiming to be in a position to close the gap between theory and practice in the present, and overcoming Adorno’s inability to articulate both a social ethics and a vision of societal transformation could unfold, Zuidervaart’s social and aesthetic approach is not entirely successful at bridging the historical divide between Critical Theory and social democracy. Yet after having said all of that, Zuidervaart’s book, along with other writers on Adorno’s politics of whom Zuidervaart is highly critical, such as Espen Hammer, author of Adorno and the Political (2005), are valuable contributions to the growing body of scholarly literature on Adorno. Zuidervaart deserves a wide readership both in terms of his nuanced defense of Adorno’s radicalism against his more conservative left wing critics and for his problematic efforts to articulate a social democratic philosophy foregrounding a rearticulated notion of autonomy after Adorno.

Note

[1] References to the reviewed book contain only the page number(s).

References

Brunkhorst, Hauke (2005) Solidarity. From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Hammer, Espen (2005) Adorno and the Political. New York: Routledge.

Peters, Rebecca Todd (2004) In Search of the Good Life: The Ethics of Globalization. London: Continuum.

Zuidervaart, Lambert (2004) Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate, 2009.

by Paul C. Bott

The relevance of mass media in conflicts has got much attention by the academia over the last years. The anthology edited by Pål Kolstø presents important findings of a research project conducted by The Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages at the University of Oslo in cooperation with Mediacentar (Sarajevo) and the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade.

The research cooperation focused on the analysis of the representation of conflict parties by the mass media in the Yugoslav republics and the nation-states emerging from the break-up of Yugoslavia, respectively. Unlike many other theoretical approaches that describe the role of the media in conflicts as agents of manipulation, the contributions of this book rightly follow a more complex understanding according to which, for example, politicians and media makers may become prisoners of the images, narrations and perceptions they have conjured up.

The overall approach is a comparative one taking into consideration three cases with high tolls of death (Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia), two cases of conflict with limited violence (Slovenia, Macedonia) plus one region (Serbia and Montenegro) where the dissociation did not enter a violent mode. To avoid overcomplexity the comparison dealt with the media presentations of ‘us’ vs ‘them’.

The issue of the discursive construction of Self and Other in this inspiring anthology theoretically starts from Barry Posen’s research on ethnic groups and their threat perception and integrates further work by Roger Petersen who has pointed to the relevance of emotions like hatred, rage and fear for understanding inter-ethnic relations and acts of violence. Yet, Kolstø emphasizes that Petersen’s emotion-based theory of ethnic violence does not include any discussion of how information about ‘reality’ is filtered and moulded through discourse before it becomes ‘knowledge’ that may direct behavior. Referring to the concept of politicizing and securitizing that has originated from the Copenhagen School and to the idea of the logic of generic attribution developed by Arne Johan Vetlesen according to which every individual is reduced to ‘a member of a group’ and every member of the respective group is held responsible for all alleged acts committed by all other putative members of the group, Kolstø argues that making the Other an enemy needs massive efforts especially in cases in which individuals belonging to different ethnic groups have lived together over a longer period of time without or with only little conflict. In comparison with the constructivist approach of the Copenhagen School the editor points out that the effectiveness of such “systematic propaganda” (9) cannot be explained through discourses alone but has to take power structures and the interests of diverse protagonists into consideration.

The book’s contributions cover seven case studies and three more general chapters. Tarik Jusić theorizes about the role of media ín conflictive surroundings and argues that three basic dimensions have to be taken into account: a) environmental variables such as the nature of the crisis, type of control over the media, and relationships between elites; b) the nature of the media made up, amongst other factors, by the presence of sensationalism, professional journalistic standards and the existence of alternative voices, c) the profile of the audience. Nedin Mutić’s contribution is about the representation of Self and Other in (post-)war Balkan cinema. Sabina Mihelj, Veronika Bajt and Miloš Pankov investigate the coverage of conflict development in Slovenia from mid 1988 to early 1992 broadcasted by TV in Slovenia and Serbia. One important result of their research is that “a series of discursive shifts” had to take place “before the media stage was cleared for an all-out war between the republics-turned-national states” (58).

This book is definintely worth reading for those interesting in the role of media in conflicts. It offers a complex theoretical frame plus a number of CDA based case studies which are especially interesting as they look at the reciprocity of the discourses of the conflict parties.

Stanford: Stanford U Press, 2002

By Peter Csigo

In this book review, my aim is to present Frank Ankersmit’s aesthetic theory of democratic representation, as it has been deployed in his book ‘Political Representation’. The reason why I have undertaken the unconventional task of reviewing a seven years old work is my conviction that Ankersmit’s great book has triggered far less reflection in cultural and political research than it would be qualified for by its very virtues and its (so far, neglected) critical potential.

Ankersmit theorizes the intimate ties between aesthetic and political representation, arguing that political representatives stand for their constituents with the same free-spirited loyalty that is typical to artists’ relation to the piece of reality they portray. This aesthetic core of political representation, Ankersmit suggests, allowed representative democracy (between the late 19^th and late-mid-20^th century) to develop into a most sophisticated, almost-optimal political system. At the first sight, such an aesthetic theory of political style and representation may offer a rather limited contribution to critical theory. Indeed, in our era of increasingly mediatized and aesthetized politics, an aesthetic approach to politics may seem to miss the (critical) point. What critical insights an aesthetic theory of democratic politics may offer in an era when it is especially the intense process of aesthetization that seems, for many, to endanger democracy?

The first step I propose to take is cutting the too easily assumed link between the aesthetization of politics and an aesthetic approach to politics. The latter should not be mistaken as a necessary reflection or rectification of the former. Such a conflation of today’s aesthetized politics and aesthetic theory would distort Ankersmit’s project. It would disregard the fact that Ankersmit’s aesthetic theory has been inspired by representative democracy, which is not a contemporary political system. In Ankersmit’s view, we are not any longer living in representative democracies (119-125[1]). Ours is an era of ‘plebiscitarian democracy’ which degrades voters’ political engagement to four yearly plebiscites driven by ephemeral feelings of general well-being. Ankersmit has explicitly stressed his aversions toward contemporary (post-representational) politics, and, as a cure, urged the reinvigoration of democratic representational machineries.

Ankersmit’s aesthetic approach to political representation is not a theoretical rectification of today’s aesthetized politics, but an endeavour aimed to grasp representative democracy in its historically existing form, and to distil from its existing (aesthetic) machineries a set of normative measures to which today’s politics can be critically compared. Seen from this point of view, it would be hard to miss the fundamental kinship between Ankersmit’s project and Habermas’ classical critical inquiry into the democratic public sphere (Habermas, 1989). In the case of Habermas, it was the historical analysis of the deliberative practices typical to the bourgeois public sphere that allowed for a normative model of power-free deliberative communication to emerge. Sharing the same spirit of historically grounded theory building, but heading towards very different conclusions, Ankersmit is seeking for normative principles to distil from the representational practices typical to the – decreasingly ‘bourgeois’ and increasingly ‘massified’ – representative democracies of the 19th and 20th centuries. Similarly to the tensionful love story between Habermas and the bourgeois public sphere, Ankersmit’s deep (but troubled) sympathy to representative democracy is unmissably apparent throughout the whole book. As we shall see, Ankersmit’s sympathies stem from his assumption that political representation is a relatively autonomous practice which, due to its aesthetic autonomy, provides the system of representative democracy with a unique – although often severely compromised – potential of self-amelioration and inclusivity.

The aesthetic autonomy resides in the existing power imbalance between representatives and constituents: the fact that the former are relatively free to represent (and indeed, construct) the latter’s will. This power imbalance cannot be eliminated. In line with the standard arguments for political representation, Ankersmit rejects as illusionary all theoretical efforts toward ensuring a free and direct expression of existing social identities, interests or values. Assuming the necessity of existing power imbalances between power elites (experts, bureaucratic networks, decision-makers) and citizens, Ankersmit propagates the democratic significance of interaction between the two spheres. It is in the sphere of this interaction that the relatively autonomous and liberating practice of political representation takes place. In order to support this thesis, Ankersmit turns – in a rather unexpected way – to Machiavelli’s political theory, of which he concludes that “freedom should not be exclusively located in or associated with either the nobles or the people; freedom rather requires a specific form of interaction between the two and can only come into being between them instead of having its exclusive location in the people (as the believers of popular sovereignty always argue)” (190, italics in original).

As we shall see, the above idea of ‘in-betweenness’ is central to Ankersmit’s theory. However, at the first sight, it may not be imminently apparent whether and how this ‘in-betweenness’ transcends the standard, elitist conception of electoral representation, and especially its inclination with the idea of ‘balance’. According to the standard argument, “electoral representation enable(s) a dynamic, if often fractious, balance between the rule of elites and the social and political democratization of society.” (Castiglione – Warren cited by Urbinati-Warren, 2008: 389) This idea may open the way towards an elitist division of labour, where popular will expresses itself in electoral voting, while elite competence makes its own way in decision-making. In spite of its overlaps with this conservative approach, Ankersmit’s work would be entirely mistaken if seen as a mere aesthetic ornament of the standard and elitist, ‘balance’ view of electoral vote and power delegation. Seen from Ankersmit’s viewpoint, the standard approach is complicit with today’s plebiscitarian systems, as proven by the fact that it still qualifies them as ‘representational’ democracies – which is an unacceptable claim.

The elitist concept of representation does not fall closer to Ankersmit’s position than the ideas of direct or genuine representation do. The two approaches share a basic assumption that is unacceptable for Ankersmit: Namely, that in the ordinary, routine practice of existing democratic politics, the distance between representation and represented is frozen and unbridgeable. This assumption suggests that citizens have no substantial means to influence neither their representatives, nor the symbolic representations they produce. This ‘common denominator’ of standard elitist and critical anti-representational approaches is perhaps the best measure compared to which Ankersmit’s efforts may best be understood. For, he has mobilized a large theoretical apparatus for refuting that the one-time existing practice of representative democracy had elected impermeable walls between citizens and representatives. This diagnosis may apply well to today’s post-representative democracies, but misjudges their predecessor.

Ankersmit has built his vision of representative democracy on a dynamic understanding of the distance between represented and representative/representation. He has conceived of the distance as necessary and inerasable on the one hand, but also ephemeral and flexibly bridgeable on the other – and praised this duality as substantial to the healthy functioning of democracy. This idea of a distance that is bridgeable but non-erasable may allow us, Ankersmit suggests, to acknowledge that the everyday practice of democracy feeds a permanent outflow of flexible, non-identical correspondences between citizens and their political representatives, between social constituencies and their representations. These imperfect correspondences – half genuine, half imposed – stand in the centre of Ankersmit’s aesthetic theory of political representation. As he argues, all political representations and representatives are doomed to the indeterminate levitation between antagonistic poles: illusion and reality, sameness and alienation, acceptance and coercion, individual and public interest, domination and compassion, status quo and upheaval. However, the inherent ‘incorrectness’ of representations is not a burden, Ankersmit suggests. On the contrary, representative democracy was able to develop into “the most successful and subtle political instrument ever invented by mankind” (119) just because it institutionalized the above indeterminacy and in-betweenness.

Had I to define Ankersmit’s project in five words, I would say it is an aesthetic theory of democratic representation’s ‘in-betweenness’. Ankersmit constructs a model of political representation in analogy to aesthetic representation – which analogy needs to be addressed before any further step into Ankersmit’s universe. Relying on existing theories of ‘aesthetic substitution’ (eg. that of Danto), Ankersmit argues that, contrary to common knowledge, when an aesthetic representation like a picture claims validity, it does not do it by asserting itself to be a ‘mimetic’, direct reflection of the represented object. Instead, it presents itself as a substitute that ‘stands for’ the given object, expresses and emblematizes the object’s inner nature, and invites the viewer into its own particular representation-game. The substitute status of aesthetic representations dooms them (and their authors) to an in-between position between total dependence and full independence with regard to the represented object. The reason for this is the basic democracy of representational art, the fact that it depends too much on the goodwill of its (expert and lay) audience. It has to fully respect the fact that viewers approach a picture with two hardly compatible expectations. First, they are interested in what solution a particular still life or Golgota can offer to the same aesthetic and moral problem that has occupied the minds of a whole tradition of still life and Golgota painters. At the same time, viewers are also curious about how the painting relates to the ‘real’ flowers and rocky hills, as they have experienced them outside the museum. Caught between these incompatible expectations, representations can neither attempt to be fully ‘mimetic’ reflections of their object (which would simply catapult them outside the artistic tradition), but nor they can become fully voluntaristic products, taking artistic tradition as their only reference point, and rejecting any connection to an ‘outside’ reality (if they do this they leave the terrain of representational art). Representational art is doomed to the in-between tightrope walking between direct mimesis and the voluntaristic fulfilment of elitist aesthetic projects.

This aesthetic tightrope walking might be brought closer to the world of politics with the example of a painter and her model. As long as artists insist on painting after a model, they are caught in the dilemma described above. They have to be faithful to the model’s identity, while also filtering it through an aesthetic texture that express their own identity and unique position in a self-containing artistic universe. Similarly, as long as political actors act as representatives of a social group (that serves as its ‘model’), they need to do it in an in-between modality: they cannot trick the group’s inner identity, but also need to adjust it to other representational (and expert) claims which populate the field of political professionals. Such an understanding of political representation as aesthetic reinvention delineates a terrain of flexible adjustment, halfway between direct representation (or ‘mimetic representation’, rejected by Ankersmit as an illusory misunderstanding) and elitist, formal electoral representation (which is typical to today’s democracies, but is also “an infringement on what representative government used to be” [p. 123]). The in-between position of political representation is relatively easy to illustrate, for example, with the figure of a trade union leader who cannot increase the wage claims to a level which, in the best understanding of the situation, would push the company to the verge of collapse. The ‘representations’ – concerning trade union members’ interests and future – that are created in this context, will reside ‘in between’ those positions that would have been taken by workers and management in lack of representational mechanisms.

The fact that in a representative democracy social groups and interests interact via their imperfect and distorted ‘substitutes’ (representatives) pushes the system towards the highest possible level of resilience, and at the same time stabilizes the system as a whole. In other words, the aesthetic nature of representation turns representative democracy into a permanently reformed political system. This is further triggered by the fact that, beyond its core function of mediating between state and citizen, the practice of representation penetrates the whole body of democratic politics. Throughout his book, Ankersmit refers to a multitude of sites where aesthetic political representation opens a middle ground between antagonistic positions. He argues that representation mediates between the existing and the ideal, working in a space of “indeterminate limbo between what is already and what is not yet reality” (158). Representation creates a fragile balance between capitalist status quo and socialist utopia, and allows the welfare state, this major achievement of representational democracy, to emerge (210). Representation adjusts the pagan virtue of striving for power and the Christian aesthetic virtue of compassion (167-8). Finally, in political decision making, representation creates an – always contextual – modus vivendi between values of freedom and equality (172), egoism and common interest (145), perceived moral rectitude (‘us’) and perceived moral insanity (‘them’) (146).

Given the multiplicity of these antagonistic positions, political representation has to operate in a multiple and over-determined space. Its practice could be best described as the elaboration of aesthetic ‘proposals’ (219) which are expected to create a ‘narrow optimum’ between the represented and all the alternative claims present at the messy field of representation. How to form ‘proposals’ that may successfully meet these expectations? Ankersmit offers an unexpected role model for the politician: the historian, who has to handle her fragmented and ambivalent source material with the highest level of open-mindedness and self-restrain, and who, at the same time, needs to resist all forms of empty relativism and invest all energies into establishing a characteristic viewpoint which allows for a clear and conclusive understanding of history. No overall rules about how to find this ‘narrow optimum’ can ever be established. The struggle to find it restarts from ground zero in every single attempt to represent a piece of history – or a piece of society. And this is exactly where historical and political representation collide: “[O]ur only alternative is to decide for each individual case where we should situate the narrow optimum between … mutually exclusive options. The talent for finding this optimum is what distinguishes good politicians and historians from their less gifted colleagues” (194).

In Ankersmit’s view, representational democracy was optimized to triggering, in its everyday operation, a ceaseless aesthetic production of the above ‘narrow optimums’. By eliciting these in-between ‘optimums’ to arise, representational democracy established unparalleled standards of inclusivity (respect) and innovativity (creativity). It promoted respect, because it urged representatives (and their constituents) to adjust themselves to concurrent, often radically discrepant perspectives (214-233). It promoted creativity, because it pushed actors toward inventing a modus vivendi between the incommensurable representational claims (193-214). The compound of mutual respect and creative compromise allowed for a continuous parallel development of social actors’ identities, what Ankersmit theorised as their dialectical ‘metamorphosis’. Metamorphosis is itself an in-between category “consisting in the combination of remaining as close as possible to one’s original position with the greatest possible transformation of that original position” (209). In Ankersmit’s view, neither direct representation, nor formal electoral representation allows for the above permanent ‘metamorphosis’ of social actors.

In this dialectical spirit, we may conclude that representative democracy enabled the continuous development and mutual adjustment of social groups (values and interests) along the actual ‘narrow optimums’ that had been offered by representatives’ aesthetic proposals. By denying social groups to express their identity outside these ‘half-genuine’ proposals, representative democracy deprived these groups from the power of direct self-definition, but also from that of debunking their antagonists (their ‘others’) with the same un-ambiguity. Representative democracy promoted a perspectivist sense of truth, and as a consequence, unfreezed existing power imbalances and allowed for their dispersal to places where representations were negotiated. As a consequence, from the dense interplay of incommensurable representational claims, an almost Foucauldian web of dispersed and productive power emerged. In a representative democracy, power was less ‘possessed’ by rulers and ‘suffered’ by the ruled (118), than complicitly utilized, played upon and redefined by all – regularly interacting – actors of the social hierarchy. It is exactly this dispersal of power that has been mostly endangered due to the decline of representative institutions in today’s ‘plebiscitarian’ democracies.

Ankersmit’s account on representational democracy is not an abstract political theory, but is itself an ‘aesthetic proposal’, halfway between utopia and historic reality. Its indeterminate status, however, should not overshadow this book’s argumentative force, theoretical innovativity and, indeed, political necessity. For, if it did, we would also have to write off another aesthetic proposal, very similar to this one, without which – we already know – it would be hard to keep going in political research. I am thinking here of Habermas’ account on the bourgeois public sphere, this immensely inspiring and fertilizing proposal. Ankersmit’s aesthetic model of representative democracy would take its due place in academic research if it became part of scholarly common sense the same way as did the concept of Habermas. Its historical grounds, normative claims and critical potential make Ankersmit’s aesthetic model of representation an indispensable asset in the contemporary intellectual Zeitgeist, which is marked by a major interest in reinvigorating representation (Urbinati-Warren, 2008), breathing life to an old concept that still has a potential to ‘repair’ our increasingly emptying political systems.

Note

[1] References to the reviewed book contain only the page number(s).

References

Habermas, J. (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Urbinati, N., Warren, M.E. (2008) ‘The concept of representation in contemporary democratic theory’, American Review of Political Science, 11: 387-412.

Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008

By Frederik Dhaenens

Linda William’s Screening Sex is undoubtedly indebted to the legacy of Michel Foucault. In 1976, he stressed that there is no essential truth and fixed meaning in relation to human sexuality. How one experiences and/or expresses sexual desires depends upon a specific time and place. He argued that there is no core identity that defines one’s sexuality. Rather, the construction of sexual identity happens within the realm of a specific society where hegemonic discourses define the sexual, and social, political and cultural institutions are used to subdivide sexuality into categories of preferable, deviant or restricted sex acts. Throughout history, each society has been relocating its boundaries and redefining what is approved sexuality and what is sexually perverted. Stephen Garton (2004) argued that because of this continuous shape-shifting it is impossible to draw up ‘a’ history of sexuality. Yet, he stressed that it is important to study the diversity of sexualities throughout history. In a similar way, Williams does not set out to write a history of the representations of sex but presents us an assessment of different discourses on the screening of sexualities throughout the history of the moving images. Although her book is a chronological retelling of cinematic representations, she does not consider her study to be a straightforward story that starts with humble kisses and ends with explicit in-your-face pornography. She is more concerned with how these screenings of sexuality became part of the carnal knowledge – the sexual awakening of an individual – of US American audiences. According to her, American audiences dealt with these sexual expressions like a child deals with carnal knowledge. She sees it as knowledge that came too soon or too late, in the shape of a vague, deferred and blurry revelation. To this end, she uses Sigmund Freud’s concept of primal scenes. This refers to the first moment a child witnesses its parents having sex. The child does not understand the scene and defines it as a violent scene while at the same time being sexually aroused by it.

Besides, Williams is interested in how these screenings both reveal and conceal. In this respect, she emphasizes the double meaning of the verb ‘to screen’. On the one hand, to screen sex is to reveal its many expressions through explicit imageries. On the other, to screen sex is to conceal sex and hide its representations. Williams does stress that audiences may experience suggested sex acts in a similar way as explicitly depicted sex acts. To this end, she refers to the role of the imagination of audiences:

“Movies move us, often powerfully. Sex in movies is especially volatile: it can arouse, fascinate, disgust, bore, instruct, and incite. Yet it also distances us from the immediate, proximate experience of touching and feeling with our own bodies, while at the same time bringing us back to feelings in the same bodies” (2[1]).

Williams makes out a strong case against Frederick Schauer’s (1982) assumption that hard-core pornography has a direct effect onto the body of the spectator. Even though she argues that the screening of sex has become part of how we think and feel about sex – assuming that ‘we’ have actually watched screened depictions of sex – she clarifies the difference between watching sex and having sex by first accentuating that audiences cannot be reduced to a unified spectator and second that the role of the mediator cannot be erased. Significant differences in experience can occur because of one’s different sexual foreknowledge or because of choosing for either a public screening in a cinema or a private screening on video or Internet. For this study, Williams prefers to elaborate more on the public cinematic experience and only elaborates on the future of screening sex in the ‘private’ environment of home in her conclusion.

Aside from the conclusion, each chapter is devoted to the cinematic screening of a significant sexual act. Williams discusses a variety of sexual acts such as kisses, the female orgasm, hard-core sex or anal sex while paying attention to the way they were screened and how they were received. She illustrates these acts with detailed text analyses of transgressive films that depicted these sex acts. She approaches these case-studies from a multidisciplinary point of view, starting with personal recollections of her movie-going days she has spent with friends, remembering for instance the thrill in going to watch the porno chic movie ‘Deep Throat’ (Damiano, 1972). She mixes her own experiences with insights from psychoanalysis, film history, film studies and cultural studies. She manages to steer clear from dense theorisation, thanks to her well-balanced and witty style. Considering her personal memories as a reference frame, she mainly discusses films that were distributed in the United States and were viewed by middle-class audiences. However, she does include a considerable range of non-US American films that were distributed in the United States.

Her first chapter discusses the so-called long adolescence of American movies, referring to the fact that it took a while for US American cinema to fully explore issues of sex and sexuality. Rather, it began with the amazement of seeing a kiss on a big screen (Edison’s ‘The Kiss’ (1896)) and the spectacle of seeing ‘moving’ images, but from the late 1930s on movie content was being regulated. The attempts of pushing the boundaries by representing more nudity and sexual content were stopped by the instalment of the Production Code Administration (1934-1968). The Code consisted out of a list of images that were forbidden to be shown. As such, Hollywood movies could no longer incorporate images of carnal representation, lustful kissing, perversion or adultery. But at the same time, the Code unwillingly encouraged film makers to hint at these societal taboos. Williams illustrates this with ‘Casablanca’ (Curtiz, 1942), a picture that obeyed the Code’s rules but managed to suggest adulterous sex acts in between shots. She continues with chapters that show how blunt representations of sex found their way to the screen, and became part of the US American audiences’ carnal knowledge. Williams locates their sexual awakening in the early 1960s, when foreign films such as Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Virgin Spring’ (1959), which displayed transgressive representations of sex while other avant-garde and Blaxploitation pictures began to experiment with displaying moments of sex. Next, she discusses the cultural impact of ‘Last Tango in Paris’ (Bertolucci, 1973) that introduced simulated graphic sex into the art film. Interestingly, she juxtaposes this art film to ‘Deep Throat’ and ‘Boys in the Sand’ (Poole, 1971), both porn flicks that were flirting with the status of art. Moreover, almost all the films analysed in Screening Sex can be labelled as art house films transgressing the more generic format of porn. It seems that Williams was looking for those films that were culturally preapproved by their reputation or the status of their director but that dared to show the sexual. Pedro Almodóvar could easily get away with a shrinking man plunging into a giant vagina in ‘Talk to Her’ (‘Hable con ella’, 2002) and nobody expected any less of Lars von Trier when he inserted real sex in ‘The Idiots’ (‘Idioterne’, 1998), a film that was made by the rules of the Dogma 95 manifesto which emphasizes a return to cinematic purity. Art house cinema proved to be an ideal and accepted site of experimenting with simulated or real sex while balancing between general acceptable erotic and transgressive perverse imagery. Art house directors sometimes even succeeded in bringing these pictures to a mainstream audience, such as Ang Lee’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’ (2005). This ‘gay’ cowboy melodrama became a movie touchstone and Williams is at her best when she elaborates on this film, offering both an in-depth analysis of several sex scenes and a significant discussion of the movie poster. She stresses that the representation of the sex scenes as primal scenes helped changing the stigma of same-sex anal sex as humiliating or painful into a desirable form of pleasure. With further analyses of ‘Shortbus’ (Mitchell, 2006) and ‘Boys in the Sand’, she argues that screening queer sex is imperative to the representation of queer sexualities as much as Jane Fonda’s screened orgasms showed the potential of the female orgasm without the necessity of the phallus.

In her concluding words, Williams expresses the necessity for American mainstream cinema to finally grow up. It is clear that she prefers the way European cinema has smoothly integrated explicit sexual imagery and disapproves that American screened sex is stuck in repetition. However, she argues that an increase in screening explicit sexual intercourse should not be pursued as a means to approach real sex through moving images. Rather, these various representations should be desired for what they are. Screened explorations of carnal knowledge may arouse because they are screened, not because they want to replace the real thing.

Note

[1] References to the reviewed book contain only the page number(s).

References

Foucault, M. (1976) Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 1: La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard.

Garton, S. (2004) Histories of Sexuality: Antiquity to Sexual Revolution. London and New York: Routledge.

Schauer, F. F. (1982) Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2009

By Joke Beyl

Modes Of Spectating offers the reader a refreshing look on the way art and research can converge. Given the fact that most of the contributions originate from, on the one side, researchers who are also artistically active and, on the other side, artists who interweave research within their creative endeavours, this book allows the reader to gain an unusual insight into the way art and audience interact today. More specific, the focus is on the way this interaction can be understood in our present, digital and participative society. Hence, the book opens up intriguing ways of reasoning about current artistic practices and about the way expression and communication manifest in creating and spectating art today.

In the introduction of the book, editors Alison Oddey and Christine White induce this type of reflection by questioning what is radically different about how we spectate today. According to them spectatorship has changed since now “the spectator wants to engage in a more active way, to play a significant part or role in the reception of the work.” (9[1]). Notwithstanding that this particular point of view can be questioned – is the spectator really eager to be active? – they highlight that the book intends to examine what spectatorship can be, “presenting an interdisciplinary snap-shot” (9). The book succeeds in attaining this objective for it does indeed try to offer insight in current artistic and aesthetic experiences by elaborating on actual artistic practices and artists’ experiences. In this context several authors relate to theoretical frameworks and concepts as an inspiration for reflection (e.g. the Internet as a ‘pull’ medium (67), virtuality-actuality-reality (84), digital flâneur (139), identity (147), haptic visuality (171), body perceptions (198), agency (221), …).

The book is divided in four main parts. The first part focuses on interactive media and youth culture. Here the focus is on the users and the viewers of games, film and digital arts and on the way being a member of the audience today means being confronted with discovery, associative thought, in other words with a less conscious art (20). Christine White states that new media technologies offer the possibility of gathering enhanced knowledge since spectators become more engaged and are stimulated to understand how reality is constructed. “It breaks the illusion of truth,” rather than merely representing reality (23). “The ideal is an ethically informed public”, she says (26). Such is the impact of technology on society today. However, it can be asked whether this development is really new and, secondly, whether there is a change for the better. For example, when considering 3D technology Saint John Walker (33) elaborates on how too much technological perfection can fail to engage and can even disturb the viewer. Therefore, he underlines the importance of artistic and creative imagination and expression. Only then the interactive aesthetic experience will thrive and will lead towards knowledge transfer and social change (43). Hence, it can be acknowledged that the authors hold a positive stance by fawning on the possibility offered by new media technologies for young people to see themselves as creative and communicative artists (44-47). It is all about imagination, creativity, expression, sharing, communicating and empowering, it is said (54). This focus will reappear throughout the distinct chapters of the book.

Part two ‘Imaginative Escape’ is about transcending boundaries. More specific, the focus is on the way the traditional distinction between the producer and the consumer can be overcome and what this implies. Gregory Sporton, for instance, elaborates on how YouTube users engaged with a video of his artistic work in a multitude of unexpected creative approaches. This made him realize that the web today presents a new sphere of cultural production (65). Although reflections in distinct works of art constitutes the book’s original stance, the actual perceptions of the actors involved, being the artists and their audience, remain under-studied. Of course, several of the authors themselves are artists. However, they rarely question how artists working within the context of more classic and less interactive arts experience the interactive opportunities offered by the Internet. Is this type of artist also interested in sharing thoughts and, what is more, even the creative process with the audience? Moreover, it is interesting to find out how Chris Hales – an interactive movie artist himself – is surprised by the fact that even “most artists working with interactive video sequences, or with interactive art in general, do not seem concerned with observing and documenting the quality of the user’s experience.” (99). In other words, the authors do not completely ignore critical reflections such as the fact that technologically enhanced performances are not always progressive and can even reinforce the old media relations between the artist and the spectator, as Sporton notices:

“Rather than democratizing, this approach to the technology risks creating closed circles of self-referential discourse, using the low costs of production and distribution as a means of empowering the self without creating anything like a new way of encountering ideas, experiences or art, exploiting new technology to do more than resolve a longstanding difference with the old ones.” (69).

Nevertheless, throughout the book slumbers an overtly optimistic stance concerning these new technologies and the creative possibilities they offer. Sporton even mentions a “Kuhnian-style paradigm shift” in which “the Internet is unique in granting the opportunity to participate in a creative enterprise simply by being interested in it” (71). Once again, it can be regretted that the editors did not integrate some more critical studies concerning the audience’s perceptions. Are they really as interested as assumed and, if they are, what is it that the audience is interested in? This is, of course, not an easy task and, consequently, the book should be recognized for stimulating this type of questions. As Dan Zellner states, in the artistic field as well “there seems to be considerable experimentation and no established approaches.” (73). As a result, it seems that the question whether the spectator is also an actor cannot be fully answered at this stage. Hence, the importance of learning and reflecting through doing and exploring seems to be one of the messages the editors intend to communicate by means of this book. This is acknowledged in the chapter written by Iryna Kuksa: “Undoubtedly, new media have already become an integral part of our culture; however, the ethical, aesthetical, psychological and overall societal implications of this recent marriage remain to be explored.” (83).

What the various authors of the book agree about is the observation that interaction in experiencing art is no new development. Yet, the potential to further enhance the process of exchanging meanings is what distinguishes new media from old media (87). This, then, raises another intriguing question. How does the artist employ this exchange of meanings? Is he really prepared to give control over the creative process in hands of the user or is he looking for, what seems to be the driving motive for Hales, the audience reacting to the work “in the way that I intend” (108). This type of reasoning can be found in other chapters as well. For instance, Jeremy Mulvey states that in the twenty-first century gathering feedback and gauging how his practice might be adjusted to achieve desired results should be a vital part of the artist’s practice (160).

Between part two and part three a change of focus appears in the book. In part three attention is given to a specific type of interactivity, i.e. the spectator interacting with the self and, in part four, the spotlight is on how bodily immersion into a work of art can be understood. In other words, the focus is more on the spectator than on the technology. This does not always make it easy to disclose connections between the various chapters of the book since the link with interactive digital technologies is not always clearly marked in the last two parts. This is, for example, the case in the writings of Valerie Thomas on the way “spectating theory has the capacity to disclose previously hidden aspects of therapeutic practice” (119). Yet, the authors of the chapters in part three as well underline the current shift in audience perceptions and perspectives. It is interesting to read how they accentuate the link between local, individual modes of spectating and global media technologies. This puts in mind the ideas of John Dewey (1958), expressed as early as the 1930s, about art as experience. Like Dewey, who emphasized the connection between everyday and aesthetic experiences, Oddey for one states that “the serendipity of everyday life and the personal experiences of the spectator’s unexpected encounters or views, actively create and produce unfolding narratives and a new aesthetic practice.” (142). As a result, it is agreed upon that in this day and age the traditional distinctions between the artist and the spectator collapse and that the viewer experiences an “embodied awareness” (171).

In part four, the focus is on the fact that “the significance of the art event more and more frequently thrives on the encountering of the work and the participating visitor.” (199). In this context the viewer’s body is acknowledged as the most important ‘perceiver’. Consequently, perceiving and experiencing art nowadays is regarded as a dynamic and immersive process of exchange between the viewer and the viewed or between the performer and the beholder in which tactility and perspective dominate. Although this is an interesting reflection, it is unfortunate that there is little comparison made with the Internet’s interactive opportunities. When reading about the numerous artistic endeavours the authors created or experienced, one could question what the Internet could mean in this context. Could the Internet enhance this dynamic, immersive process of exchange between the artist and the audience? Or might this be hampered by what Gareth White refers to as the “learnt habits – and the habitus – of theatre culture” (225). In other words, will both the artist and the audience accept audience participation via the Internet and how will this impact existing power relations and artistic conventions?

In conclusion, Modes of Spectating offers an original reading experience since it grounds reflection on contemporary modes of spectating in the artistic practice itself by combining art and research. This approach, however, seems to leave the reader with the feeling that the authors succeeded in tackling a very interesting issue, i.e. the social impact of new media technologies on the relation between the artist, the work of art and the audience, yet left the answers unfinished. Several questions – some of which were raised by the authors – come to the reader’s mind. How do these new modes of spectating influence the authority of the artist? Are artists interested in understanding the audience’s experience? Is the spectator always willing to engage in a more active, direct way and, if so, why? What does this imply in terms of power relations? Is what is happening today completely different compared to the way ‘old’ media are used by both creators and audience? How do the artist and the audience perceive this more interactive, expressive and communicative way of spectating? Given the fact that these questions are merely touched upon rather than theoretically and empirically developed in depth, the reader is left with a longing for more. Therefore, although it should be acknowledged that there is a need for more profound research in this field to be able to answer these questions, it is regrettable that the editors did not complete the book by means of an overall conclusion bringing together the most important reflections and wider questions, cited throughout the book. Nonetheless, it is this arousing of reflection, combined with its focus on tangible and specific cases, that can be acknowledged as the most significant contribution offered by the book.

Note

[1] References to the reviewed book contain only the page number(s).

References

Dewey, J. (1958) Art as Experience (16^th ed.). New York: Capricorn Books.

Willig, Rasmus

Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag, 2007.

By Tina Askanius

Sociology has neglected its primary duty as the critical watchdog in society and has been reduced to a fragmentized, shallow discipline lacking teeth as well as clout in the general public sphere. As a consequence, critical theory is left disarmed and individualized, incapable of delivering a coherent and exhaustive critical account of contemporary society. The harsh words stem from the Danish sociologist Rasmus Willig, who levels a severe critique against his own discipline in the 2007 book ’In Defence of Critique’ (‘Til Forsvar for Kritikken’) in which he address the state of crisis in which critical theory is plunged and examines the conditions and possibilities of critique in contemporary society.

Willig departs from the basic assumption that sociology as a discipline has turned into a capitalized consumer-version of its previous self in a context where critique itself never refers directly to the fundamental problems of society but rather to their manifestations as superficial, everyday phenomena thus only scratching the surface. Instead of lashing out at the bedrock of societal development, sociology merely clamps down on the inadequate access to consumer or service goods but never questions the underlying structures and the fundamental logic, which control and organize societal development (12[1]). The concept of critique has itself become a victim of the market hegemony and its subversive discourse been colonized by that of capitalism. Far from the leading critical discipline it once was, delivering a continuous flow of systematic and in-dept analysis of the distorted relations of power and dominance in society, critical theory of today is reduced to yet another productive force in neo-liberal society lending itself to the very same forces it tries to subvert thus merely bringing grist to the mill of capitalism.

Although a rather sinister picture is painted here, to some extent influenced by the strokes of Bauman’s dark brush with which he sketches his pessimistic diagnosis of contemporary society, some degree of hope is offered to the reader. If the discipline is to regain its status as a megaphone for the socially excluded unable to articulate critique conventionally, a new programmatic outline for a critical sociology is required. In this manner, this book forms part of Willig’s ongoing and more general project to revitalize the concept of critique so that it becomes possible to formulate a critical sociology, which applies the positive characteristics of the concept as a yardstick for society’s moral development (Willig, 2009a).

The solution to our problems, however, is not served to us on a silver platter. In order to follow the arguments forwarded by Willig, one should master the social-philosophical vocabulary and be able to navigate in the tortuous phrasings and winding argumentations of social science literature pitching at the high level of philosophical abstraction.

In search of a new critical programme

Ever since its historical beginnings, the prime target of sociology has been articulated as the ‘social problems’, ‘discrepancies’ or ‘sufferings’ in society when pointing out the pathological consequences of each new technological advance. However, despite the implicit externalization of its normative critique, sociology has, according to Willig, never had a tradition of explicitly enumerating the normative principles for a good society but only implicitly through the numerous critical diagnosis of societal development pointed out what can be considered as ‘the good society’. In his search of the cornerstones of this good society, Willig takes the reader through the development of social critique in the works of central thinkers ranging from Boltanski & Chiapello and Judith Butler to Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth. Being a former student of Honneth however, the body of theory of this latter holds a central place in this particular account of well-established normative frameworks (and in Willig’s work in general). Axel Honneth’s theory of the struggle for recognition is thus, according to the vein of enquiry proposed by Willig, the main theoretical pillar of the programme to be launched. Consequently, the concept of recognition or more specifically the closely-knit relationship between recognition and critical theory, as this is propounded by Honneth, is brought to the fore throughout the book and serves as a point of orientation in his search of the missing links of a coherent normative foundation.

Bauman has argued that one can think of the kind of ‘hospitality to critique’ which characterize present-day society as having the patterns of a camping site (Bauman, 2001). People come and go without much interest in challenging or renegotiating the managerial philosophy of the site. Visitors pay rent, make demands and might even occasionally complain but generally stick to themselves. When they break up to follow each their individual itinerary they leave the place untouched for the next guests to arrive (Bauman, 2001: 100). Willig leans on this metaphor of a camping-site critique to characterize the impotence of critique and popular contestation today in a society that has stopped questioning itself.  But when speaking of an individualized critique he puts a different spin on Bauman’s argument of the individualized society by claiming that the process of individualization or rather internalization of critique is prevalent to the extend that all forms of social critique today are responded to at an individual level. The crisis of society therefore remains within the subject’s own experience-based framework. Critique has made a u-turn so to speak, turning the previously visible, collective critical demands into individual demands and accordingly structural responsibility has shifted to the subject itself. The subject is in this manner made responsible for his own personal ‘crisis’ despite the fact that this crisis is in principle structurally contingent (Willig, 2009a: 13).

Hence, this is not to say that critique and contestation is not present in today’s neoliberal society but rather that every critique launched against the system lacks a clear and coherent normative foundation. The majority of contemporary sociological contributions is based on fluctuating and inconsistent grounds and seems to be produced with the primary purpose of meeting the demands of the sociological market of quick formula success and pervasive sales slogans. However, Willig does concede that exceptions can be found. In this regard, he accentuates the extensive analysis of the flexibility and integrative powers of Western capitalism by Boltanski and Chiapello in their collective work ‘The New Spirit of Capitalism’ (1999) in which they convincingly demonstrate how the different forms of critique levelled against capitalism have paradoxically helped to reproduce its dominance. But where Boltanski’s and Chiapello’s projects remains on a descriptive level seeking to establish a sociology of critique, Willig instead aims to cast the foundation of a critical sociology.

Several systematic attempts have previously been made to construct a body of theory, which allows for solidly grounded value judgements to be made. Here, he highlights the works of Jürgen Habermas on discourse ethics as well as Nancy Fraser’s theory of redistribution and cultural forms of stigmatization. In particular, he identifies a possible point of entrance in the context of social philosophy and more specifically in the theory of recognition of Axel Honneth who, according to Willig, is capable of providing the normative foundation for a sociology with a methodologically substantiated social critique. But if sociology is to realize its ‘normative turn’ a serious effort needs to be made in terms of empirical contributions providing new accounts for society’s distorted conditions. And for this to be possible the very founding fathers of sociology need to be reread and a new programme for a critical sociology is to be launched. What we need in other words is a clear-cut and psychologically feasible idea of ‘the good life’. In order to criticize society we must know exactly what the kind of society we want to inhabit.

A democratic project?

Despite the reiterated appeals for critical empirical efforts in the field, the book itself provides few attempts to give sociological substance to a critical sociology (a lack of empirical evidence that he however fully admits to). In the one chapter where he sets out to test his tentative programmatic outline and demonstrate how one such critically informed diagnosis can be made, he (perhaps somewhat predictably) clamps down on neo-liberalism as the primary evil-doer in modern life. In an argument akin to many of his contemporaries, he appoints the neoliberal doctrine permeating contemporary society as the main malaise of our time and instigator of social pathologies such as depression and anxiety amongst the populations of Westerns societies. In this Foucauldian line of argument, modern steering technologies compose the kind of new and subtle forms of power exercise which prevail in our present-day era of neoliberal capitalism; a distinct form of social engineering which serves to motivate the masses and sculpture the docile bodies of the working force. In this context, traditional forms of human recognition are changing in the sense that the dominant rituals and graduations of recognition today foster and nourish those values and norms, which ultimately reproduce the established order. Neo-liberalism and the ideological laden forms of recognition it breeds are ‘barbaric’ in the sense that its normative demands of self-realization and autobiographic success pave the way for new forms of manipulation and repression. At present this process is perhaps most manifest in the sphere of contemporary working conditions forging flexibility, mobility and autonomy (Petersen & Willig, 2004: 341). In this regard, Willig makes an interesting analytical distinction between options and possibilities of self-realization. Whereas ‘possibilities’ represent the ‘true’ or realistic paths for the individual to take, ‘options’ form an important ideological element in neoliberal society keeping the self locked up in an absurd and illusionary idea of a successful auto-biographical project that is ultimately led by the norms of efficiency and values of the market (160).

‘In Defence of Critique’ is a must-read for everyone interested in critical theory and critique as a broad socio-philosophical concept. Willig takes the reader on an interesting guided tour of the winding roads of central thinkers within the social sciences, with the concept of critique as the guiding road marker. The book has so far only been published in Danish but many of its main arguments are available in English in additional and perhaps more manageable journal publications. By way of example, in the article ‘Work and Recognition: Reviewing New Forms of Pathological Developments’ (Willig & Petersen, 2004) his thoughts on the relationship between work, recognition and neo-liberalism are further elaborated and in the newly published article ‘Critique with Anthropological Authority: A Programmatic Outline for a Critical Sociology’ (Willig, 2009a), the programme for a critical sociology is taken a step further with the anthropology assumption that “every subject possesses a form of quasi-naturalistic or essential critical ‘ability’ or ‘impulse’ which can be considered as a fundamental pre-condition for human existence” (Willig, 2009a: 511). In his most recent book (Willig, 2009b), he develops his ideas of how to democratize critical practice and thinking so that is becomes an empowering and emancipating weapon to people in every stratum of society in a critical discussion of the lacking possibilities of social workers to challenge or influence their working conditions in the Danish public service sector.

When taking into consideration that one of the primary purposes of his overall project is just this; i.e. to democratize the concept and practice of critique in order for it to become useful for everyone regardless of their social strata, one might question just how democratic a form his argument takes. The book is complex reading and definitely no lightweight introduction to critical theory. To be sure, if the aim is to reach beyond the echo chambers and confined boundaries of the ivory tower with an easily accessible toolkit for critical practice, this has certainly not been accomplished with this book. It does however point towards an interesting path for sociology to take in the future and provides essential building blocks for further work into the embryonic programme of a new critical sociology. And one can only hope that this, along with future publications, will serve as a launch pad for social science to once again assume its critical role in society.

Note

[1] References to the reviewed book contain only the page number(s).

References

Bauman, Zygmunt (2001) The Individualized Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Boltanski, Luc & Chiapello, Eve (1999) The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso.

Petersen, Anders & Willig, Rasmus (2004) ‘Work & Recognition: Reviewing New Forms of Pathological Developments’, Acta Sociologica, 47(4): 338-350.

Willig, Rasmus (2009a) ‘Critique with Anthropological Authority: A programmatic Outline for a Critical Sociology’, Critical Sociology, 35(4): 509-519.

Willig, Rasmus (2009b) Umyndiggørelse. Et Essay om Kritikkens Infrastruktur. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag.

Asad has articulated his critique of Said’s ‘Secular Criticism’ in the context of post-9/11 conversations about religion and secularism. The author of an ‘anthropology of secularism’ that questions the de facto assumption that secularism is a ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’ form for modernity to take, Asad has been associated with a certain Left defense of religion, and with a refusal to attack theocracy merely because it deviates from secular norms of governance. However, it should be both shocking and instructive to observe that the central premise of Asad’s ‘anthropology of secularism’ was anticipated by the early work of the conservative historian of political philosophy, Leo Strauss (1899-1973). Beginning in the late 1920s Strauss called for an investigation of the prejudices inherent in the post-Enlightenment, secular West, which (in his view) thought of itself as ‘beyond prejudice’ because it had left religion behind and embraced science. Like Asad, Strauss observed a confrontation between religious and secular concerns – but his world was that of Weimar Germany, where the modern language of ‘political theology’ was forged in a crucible of political radicalism and crisis, and where Jews like Strauss could observe anti-Semitic politicians garnering more and more support. During the Weimar years, the Enlightenment’s legacy seemed under attack both within the academy – as so many lost faith in neo-Kantiansm – and outside it, as Germans at all points on the political spectrum lost faith in liberalism. It is easy to see how, in such a climate, Strauss could have grown interested not only in the practice of critique but in the relation of critique, which he understood as a modern practice, to a secular modernity.

The product of Strauss’s investigation of secularist prejudice was the 1930 volume ‘Spinoza’s Critique of Religion’, a dense tome that sought to understand the gesture with which modernity claimed to have conquered and moved beyond tradition and its prejudices: the ‘critique of religion’ (Strauss, 1962). On its most basic level this book, which Strauss wrote while a junior researcher at Berlin’s Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, was an investigation of Baruch Spinoza’s critiques of both Christianity and Judaism, represented by the figures of John Calvin and Moses Maimonides. Strauss took Spinoza’s critique as a founding moment of the Enlightenment’s view of traditional religion, and thus a crucial document to investigate if one wished to accept or reject the Enlightenment critique of religion with a clear conscience. As Eugene Sheppard has pointed out, Spinoza also served a crucial symbolic function for Strauss because of his status as an outcast, banished from Amsterdam’s Jewish community because of his views. His alienation must have appeared, to Strauss, as a prefiguration of the condition of German Jews who had grown away from their traditions (Sheppard, 2006: 35).

Strauss’s supervisor at the Akademie, the neo-Kantian philosopher and historian of Jewish philosophy Julius Guttmann, hoped that Strauss’s book would contribute to the historical treatment of Jewish thought by illuminating the links between Spinoza’s ‘Bible Science’ – his view of the Bible as an artifact fashioned by human hands that could best be understood through historical means – and the Wissenschaft des Judentums (literally, the ‘science of Judaism’) tradition, which had emerged in Germany in the early 19^th century. However, as he researched and wrote, Strauss grew increasingly critical of the historicist and ‘scientific’ approach to Jewish thought that Guttmann promoted, which seemed to deprive Judaism of its religious and political content by treating it merely as a set of cultural traditions that developed over time. He rebelled against his teacher. While ‘Spinoza’s Critique of Religion’ is a scholarly work that reconstructs Spinoza’s specific judgments on Maimonides and Calvin, assesses Spinoza’s view of the social function of religion and describes how Spinoza tried to make Biblical scholarship into a ‘positive science,’ it is also an exploration of the significance of critique as a foundational event in the establishment of modernity. Indeed, ‘Spinoza’s Critique of Religion’ should be understood as an attempt to challenge the necessity of critique’s secularism. Strauss turned a skeptical eye towards precisely the method that Guttmann’s philosophical inspiration, Kant, had employed to such great effect in his series of late 18^th-century Critiques.

At the heart the book was a comparison between Spinoza and Maimonides, two Jewish philosophers of different eras with very different attitudes towards the relation between philosophy and Jewish law. Through an examination of their views on the relationship between philosophy and religion, Strauss came to understand them as exponents of modern and medieval versions of philosophical rationalism, with different understandings of the role reason should play within the political community. Whereas Spinoza and other figures of the modern Enlightenment placed reason within the public square and tried to show the public that reason could serve their interests, the ‘medieval Enlightenment’ of Maimonides sought to protect the public from the potential instability that skeptical reason could produce. Reason, thought Strauss’s Maimonides, tended to lead community members to question the very traditions that preserved harmony on every level of society.

In this juxtaposition of Spinoza and Maimonides, the young Strauss of ‘Spinoza’s Critique of Religion’ anticipated the mature Strauss of the famous ‘Persecution and the Art of Writing,’ who would claim that Maimonides (and so many other philosophers) wrote multi-layered texts with both ‘exoteric’ and ‘esoteric’ dimensions, so that his philosophical lessons would only reveal themselves fully to the right readers (Strauss, 1952). Strauss, troubled by the modern Enlightenment’s flagrant disregard for the effects of knowledge on the public at large, tended to favor the medieval approach, which he praised for its careful attention to the effects of rationalism on the social order. Implicit in Strauss’s discussion of medieval and modern rationalisms, was the claim that Spinoza’s rationalism – the rationalism of Spinoza’s critique of religion – was an inherently public practice. As Strauss would later suggest, Spinoza was one of the intellectual founders of liberal modernity, and his critique of religion was central to that founding.

In contrast to Spinoza, who disregarded the communal needs of the Jewish people wherever they conflicted with the needs of science, Strauss’s Maimonides was aware of the need to curb philosophy’s scope when it threatened the legal (and thus political) authority of Judaism. As Strauss said of the ‘Great Eagle’ of medieval Jewish thought,

“His argumentation takes its course, his disputes take place, within the context of Jewish life, and for that context. He defends the context of Jewish life which is threatened by the philosophers in so far as it is threatened by them.” (Strauss, 1962: 164)

Interestingly Strauss never referred to Maimonides as having had a ‘critique,’ reserving that term for those moderns –like Spinoza and like himself– who either accepted, or were forced to accept, a division between religion and the activities of rational science. In his view, science as practiced by natural philosophers, and even ‘Bible Science’ as practiced by the historicist exponents of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, strikes a pose of neutrality with regards to the needs of surrounding political communities. Unlike Julius Guttmann, Strauss took a radical stance on the political meanings of Jewish Studies scholarship. In this he followed from one of his most important influences, the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig (who died in 1929, while Strauss was revising ‘Spinoza’s Critique of Religion’). For Rosenzweig, all efforts in Jewish Studies had an explicitly political valence, contributing either to the regeneration of Jewish cultural life in Europe or to the continued attempt to assimilate, which always resulted in the abandonment of Jewish tradition. Thus for Strauss there could be no critique – not even his own critique of Spinoza – that was truly neutral with regard to the fate of the Jewish people in the Diaspora.

The conservative Jew Leo Strauss was no friend to the European modernity that the critique of religion had helped to establish. To his mind, the crisis of Weimar politics was not an exceptional circumstance but rather a confirmation of the modernity’s failures. Nevertheless, he was particularly skeptical about the secular liberalism of the Weimar Republic, because it seemed to have failed Germany Jewry. A member of the Zionist youth organization Blau-Weiss until his mid-20s, Strauss developed sharp criticisms of the ‘assimilationist’ dimensions of the liberal emancipation of the Jews – the process by which Jews had been slowly gaining civil rights since the eighteenth century. In his view, the Jews were granted the freedom to participate in European life not as Jews but simply as ‘men.’ Their emancipation had been contingent on their appearing in public not as Jews but rather as ‘Europeans,’ universal client citizens of their adoptive nation-states whose particular identities could not interfere with citizenship. The result was that Jewishness could no longer be a political condition and instead had to become a private ‘confession’ akin to Protestantism: German Jews, as Strauss said, had to become ‘Germans of the Jewish Faith.’ The communal dimension of Jewish life and the political nature of Judaism qua religion, had to suffer in order for Jewish modernity to flourish. Thus the arguments Strauss explored in ‘Spinoza’s Critique of Religion’, while technical, had enormous political implications beyond the discursive universes of philosophy, Biblical studies and Jewish history. Understanding Spinoza’s challenge to religion as one of the foundational moments of liberalism, Strauss also saw it as foundational for the modern Jewish condition – a condition that he understood to be endangered by the weakness of the very liberalism that had brought it into being. The liberal state, thought Strauss, was constitutionally incapable of defending its citizens against discrimination because it recognized the existence of a private social sphere in which it could not interfere.

The comparison of Spinoza and Maimonides in ‘Spinoza’s Critique of Religion’ was intended to highlight one aspect of Judaism that, in Strauss’s view, both historicism and liberalism threatened: religious revelation as a source of political legislation. On a similar note but much later in his career, Strauss would write “Scientific knowledge of Judaism is purchased at the price of belief in the authority of revelation.” (Strauss, 1987: 45). However, this statement was not intended to signal his own preference for religion, but rather to pass a verdict on the ‘scientific’ approach to Judaism: Leo Strauss was not a religious Jew, but a self-identified atheist who nevertheless believed that there was something admirable to be found in the political dimensions of Judaism. It was only by questioning the critique of religion that such an understanding could be revived. Interestingly, Strauss’s very antipathy towards secularism may have pushed him away from the secularist Zionist organizations of his youth: During the period when he worked on ‘Spinoza’s Critique of Religion’ Strauss’s activities within Blau-Weiss decreased, and eventually he withdrew his membership altogether, dissatisfied with Zionism’s inattention to religion as a binding agent in Jewish life.

While Strauss saw ‘Spinoza’s Critique of Religion’ as a secularist gesture, and one that decoupled religion and reason from one another, he nevertheless did not assume that critiques must be secular. The force of ‘Spinoza’s Critique of Religion’ goes towards placing secular rationality on the same footing as religion – that is, each is based on ‘prejudice’ of one kind or another. Critique as Strauss practiced it, in writing his book, is the technique of becoming transparent about prejudices – both one’s own and those of the social world. Strauss’s book intends to show that even the Enlightenment’s tribunals of critical reason could be called into question, and that while critique might not be the chosen tool of the advocates of Orthodoxy, it could be used to draw them to the table for conversation.

Strauss himself has offered us powerful clues to his understanding of critique in a late reflection on the meaning of his first book. In the 1962 Preface to the English translation of ‘Spinoza’s Critique of Religion’ Strauss said that he had been “a young Jew born and raised in Germany who found himself in the grip of the theologico-political predicament.” (Strauss, 1962: 1) The term ‘theologico-political’ referred not only to Spinoza’s ‘Tractatus Theologico-Politicus’, but also to Carl Schmitt’s famous 1922 ‘Political Theology’, which Strauss knew well – in 1932 he would publish a critique of Schmitt’s 1928 ‘The Concept of the Political,’ and the two would maintain a correspondence that was, as Heinrich Meier has shown, crucial for their intellectual development (Meier, 1995). While they differed in many crucial respects – Strauss favoring political philosophy over political theology – they nevertheless both drew from the same well of animus against Enlightenment thought. Strauss may not have shared Schmitt’s view that all political concepts are basically secularized theological concepts, but he did share a less extreme version of Schmitt’s intuition. John McCormick refers to Strauss’s position as ‘Biblical Atheism,’ the view that regardless of the non-existence of the Divine, the disposition of fear and awe invoked by the Bible nevertheless had social and political uses (McCormick, 2009). Spinoza’s secularist critique of religion, thought Strauss, had helped produce a political order that could never establish itself as legitimate. Strauss did not defend religion itself, much less theocracy, but he did believe that religion supplies structures of experience that political life may not be able to do without. Michel Foucault famously called Kant’s version of critique “the art of not being governed so much.” (Foucault, 1997: 45) The young Strauss, on the other hand, worried that Enlightenment rationality – which the practice of critique had helped to usher in – produced forms of governance that might hold their own weaknesses.

References

Asad, T. (2009) ‘Is Critique Secular?’, in T. Asad, J. Butler, S. Mahmood and W. Brown. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. (Forthcoming 2009) Berkeley: University of California Press.

Foucault, M. (1997) ‘What is Critique?’, pp. 23-83 in M. Foucault The Politics of Truth. New York: Semiotext(e).

McCormick, J. (2009) ‘Authority Beyond the Bounds of Mere Reason: A Political-Theological Sketch of the Schmitt-Strauss Exchange’, in L.V. Kaplan and R.J. Koshar (Eds.) The Weimar Moment: Liberalism, Political Theology, and Law. (Forthcoming 2009) Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Meier, H. (1995) Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: the Hidden Dialogue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Said, E. (1983) The World, The Text and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sheppard, E. (2006) Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: the Formation of a Weimar Conservative Jew. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press.

Strauss, L. (1952) Persecution and the Art of Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Strauss, L. (1962) Spinoza’s Critique of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Strauss, L. (1987) Philosophy and Law. Fred Baumann, trans. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society.

1. Introduction

‘Post feminism’ has become one of the most fundamental, yet contested notions in the lexicon of feminist media studies and cultural studies because of its different interpretations among scholars (for an overview see Genz, 2006; Lotz, 2001; Tasker & Negra, 2005). In literature, three dominant but diverging visions on the concept are visible: Firstly, post feminism is seen as a ‘political position’ in the light of the feminist confrontation with difference, or secondly, as a historical shift within feminism or finally, as a backlash against feminism where a celebration of neoconservative, traditional values becomes prominent. Post feminism has no fixed meaning; it is a contradictory, pluralistic discourse that is mainly located in the academic context of television and cultural studies, in the media context of popular culture and within consumer culture. Since “post feminism is not against feminism, it’s about feminism today” (Brooks, 1997), it needs to be situated in the contemporary context of contemporary neo-liberal, late-capitalist society characterized by consumer culture, individualism, postmodernism and a decreased interest in institutional politics and activism. In this context, the gender struggle remains an actual issue in public and private lives (e.g. the demand for equal pay or the glass ceiling). Post feminism is a new form of empowerment and independence, individual choice, (sexual) pleasure, consumer culture, fashion, hybridism, humour, and the renewed focus on the female body can be considered fundamental for this contemporary feminism. It is a new, critical way of understanding the changed relations between feminism, popular culture and femininity. Media discourses play a crucial role in the representation, evolution and development of this new feminism. In recent academic literature, ‘post feminist media texts’ are often studied and referred to (e.g. ‘Sex and the City’, ‘Bridget Jones’, …).

Situating post feminism within the world of academic paradigms, it can be located on the crossroads between post modernism, post structuralism and post colonialism. The link is obvious since all paradigms are concerned with breaking through binary thinking. They question authoritarian paradigms and fixed, universal categories such as ‘gender’ or ‘heteronormativity’. They also reconceptualise identity as a concept by rejecting essentialist notions of it, or by deconstructing them. In addition, ‘difference’ becomes a central notion (Lotz, 2001).

As already briefly mentioned, post feminism is rooted within neo-liberal society and consumer culture. In recent years, a number of writers have explored neo-liberalism and have shown that it has shifted from being a political or economic rationality to a mode of governmentality that operates across a range of social spheres (see for example Brown, 2003; Genz, 2006; Van Bauwel, 2004). ‘Flexibility’ has been stressed as the keystone of the current neo-liberal agenda, embodied in the fluid movements and restructuring of labour, capital, and information and, at the individual level, in a flexible competence for creative self-invention and self-mastery (Van Bauwel, 2004). Post feminism can be situated within, and is closely related to, neo-liberal ideologies and shares the same late-capitalist values. It is not simply a response to feminism but also a sensibility partly constituted through the pervasiveness of neo-liberal thoughts. Gill (2007: 163-164) positions the powerful resonance or ‘synergy’ between post feminism and neo-liberalism at three levels. First, both appear to be structured by the current increase of individualism that has invaded major parts of the social or the political, and that has pushed any idea of the individual as subject to pressures, constraints or influence outside themselves, to the margins. Second, the entrepreneurial, independent, calculating, self-governing subjects of neo-liberalism bear a strong resemblance to the dynamic, freely choosing, self-reinventing subjects of post feminism. Third, the synergy is even more significant in popular cultural discourses where women are called upon to exercise to self-management and self-discipline, to a much greater extent than men (Gill, 2007: 163-164). This call for self-management is articulated in post feminist popular cultural texts such as reality make-over television shows (e.g. ‘What not to wear’, ‘10 years younger’, ‘House doctor’), television fiction series and films (e.g. ‘Sex and the City’, ‘Desperate Housewives’), but also in magazines (e.g. articles on dieting, ‘Brazilian waxing’) and ‘chicklits’ (e.g. ‘The Devil Wears Prada’, ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary’).

Post feminism is thus embedded within a neo-liberal context and located in post modern popular culture. Moreover, it is mainly discussed in the light of its ‘political’ potential in terms of agency, resistance and counter hegemony within feminist theory and praxis. In this context Genz (2006: 338) concludes that post feminism is a politically impure practice, which is at odds with other, particularly feminist, strategies of resistance because of its paradoxical engagements in consumer society as well as in theorist debates on anti-essentialism and difference. This questions the idea that post feminism is, besides a political practice, also a possible site of ‘critical’ resistance. Can post feminism offer a critique? And more specifically, as the question of ‘the critical potential’ is originally situated within Marxist research traditions and cultural studies, is this question also of value within late-capitalist, neo-liberal twenty-first century discourses? And if so, what is the object of critique and how is this articulated within popular culture and in particular popular television discourses? Before trying to answer previous questions, I want to raise the question whether ‘the political’ and ‘the critical’ should not be interpreted as interrelated concepts? I think that the so-called ‘political potential’ of a discourse or paradigm (within or outside popular culture) cannot be observed separately from its ‘critical potential’ and vice versa. When something is considered having political potential, for example the ‘political’ demand for media-friendly representations of minority groups, does this not always imply a critique, for instance on the fact that minorities are excluded from the screen? In the light of this short essay, I will only touch upon certain critical aspects of post feminist discourses acknowledging that more (and different kinds of) critical potential can be discovered. First, I will take a closer look at post feminism as a critique on second wave feminism. Second, I will elaborate on its paradoxical critique on neo-liberal society, keeping in mind the interrelatedness between political and critical potentials.

2. Critique on second wave ‘old-fashioned’ feminism

Post feminism can be considered as a critique on what is called ‘second wave feminism’. The second wave of feminist thought is a ‘hyphenated feminism’ containing different theoretical frameworks (for example liberal, radical, Marxist, psychoanalytical, …), united by a commitment to sameness, equality, universal action, sisterhood and scientific understanding (Arneil, 1999: 153; Gamble, 2001: 360). Post feminism critiques especially second wave’s binary thinking and essentialism, its vision on sexuality and its perception of the relationship between femininity and feminism.

2.1 Post feminism: Opposing essentialism and binary thinking

By focusing on equality, the basic similarity between sexes, universalism and sisterhood, second wave thought uses binary categorizations, such as man/woman or straight/gay, postulates a fixed unitary identity (‘the female identity’) and employs a monolithic conception of ‘woman’ (Genz, 2006: 337). Post feminism, like post modernism, offers a critique on these modernist, enlightened models. This critique is mainly articulated by post feminists’ focus on ‘difference’, anti-essentialism and hybridism, where fixed binary categories are pierced and multiple identities are promoted. This multiplex of identities operates through the generation of contradictions in someone’s concept of self-feeling (Featherstone, 1996). Post feminism pleads that every woman must recognise her own personal mix of identities. This claim contradicts the universal identity that was often promoted by feminists and that fits within a neo-liberal individualistic society with its emphasis on flexibility. In popular culture, this stance against binary thinking is articulated by for instance the increased attention for themes as androgyny, queerness, …

Second wave feminism is often critiqued for being too ‘white’, too ‘straight’, too ‘liberal’ and consequently ignoring the needs of women from marginalized, diasporic and colonized groups and cultures. Post feminism, also linked with post structuralism and post colonialism, often referred to as ‘women of colour feminism’ (e.g. Hooks, 1996; Spivak, 1999), not only critiques the modernist aspect of second wave feminism, but also challenges imperialist and patriarchal frameworks: “In the process post feminism facilitates a broad-based, pluralistic conception of the application of feminism, and addresses the demands of marginalized, diasporic and colonized cultures for a non-hegemonic feminism capable of giving voice to local, indigenous and post-colonial feminisms” (Murray, 1997: 39). This illustrates the interrelatedness between ‘the political’ and ‘the critical’.

2.2 Post feminism: Celebration of sexual pleasure and subjectification

Second wave feminists stand for a pessimistic vision on sexuality and mainly emphasize the ‘dangers’ and ‘disadvantages’ of sexual encounters for women. They focus on themes as sexual transmittable diseases, sexual abuse and sexual objectification of women in media discourse. For example Andrea Dworkin (1988), a radical feminist, pointed to the effects of pornography on the increased number of rapes. Here, it is important to note that within second wave thought, less radical ideas on sexuality occur as well, but the main tone is ‘negative’. Post feminism rejects these rigid and pessimistic standpoints and instead promotes the fundamental female right on ‘sexual pleasure and fun’ as a form of critical resistance. In the light of neo-liberal society with its emphasis on ‘personal choice’, post feminists point to the importance of sexual pleasure, freedom and choice. This becomes very salient in popular discourse as a marked sexualisation of culture arises. ‘Sexualisation’ here refers to both the extraordinary proliferation of discourses about sex and sexuality across all media forms as well as to the increasingly frequent erotic representation of girls’, women’s and (in a lesser extent) men’s bodies in the public spheres (Gill, 2007: 149-150). For example in magazines aimed at young women, sex is discussed through a vocabulary of youthful pleasure-seeking (indicating a blurring of boundaries between pornography and other genres), and sex is constructed as something requiring constant attention, discipline, self-surveillance and emotional labour (Gill, 2007: 151). This again fits within neo-liberal discourse where women, as ‘entrepreneurs’, are required to work on and transform the self and regulate every aspect of their sexual conduct. Linked to this changed representation is the shift from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification, from a focus on a powerful male gaze to a self-regulating narcissistic individualistic gaze. In post feminist discourse, emphasis is placed on sexual subjectification, as women are portrayed as active, desiring sexual ‘neo-liberal subjectivities’. The female protagonists in the television series ‘Sex and the City’ can be seen as good examples. Here again, the political and the critical cannot be separated as the demand for more female sexual freedom is linked with the critique on the early and rigid conceptualisations of female sexuality.

2.3 Post feminism: Re-evaluation of the relationship between femininity and feminism

Central to second wave thought is the idea that femininity and feminism are oppositional, mutually exclusive and that the adoption of one of these identities (feminine or feminist) can only be achieved at the expense of the other. Also, second wave endorses ‘body politics’ which implicates a rejection of practices that draw attention to differences between male and female bodies, refusing to shave the legs and underarms and rejecting cosmetics and revealing, form-fitting clothing as they are a creation of patriarchy. Post feminism critiques these body politics and re-evaluates the tension that existed between feminism and femininity, establishing a link between previously opposed alternatives, carving out a new subjective space for women, allowing them to be feminine and feminist at the same time without losing their integrity or being relegated to the position of passive dupes (Genz, 2006: 334). The conventional manners of articulating femininity – such as lipstick, high heels or glamour – do not conflict with female power anymore. We can even say that one of the most striking aspects of post feminist media culture is its preoccupation with the body which implies a huge contradiction with earlier representational practices. It appears that femininity is defined as a bodily property rather than a social, structural of psychological one. Possession of a ‘sexy body’ is represented as women’s key source of identity (Gill, 2007: 149). This newly defined femininity is taken up in feminist popular discourse and can (again) be exemplified by TV-series as ‘Sex and the City’, ‘Ally McBeal’ and ‘Desperate Housewives’. The observation of women’s bodies constitutes perhaps the largest type of media content across all genres and media forms, for example the numerous ‘makeover programmes’ like ‘Trinny & Susannah’.

3. Critique on neo-liberal society through irony: resisting or neutralizing?

Although embedded in neo-liberal society, proclaiming individualistic, late-capitalist consumerist values, post feminist discourse can (paradoxically enough) be considered as a form of non-hegemonic resistance against neo-liberalism and its values. In post modern visual culture, this critique on society, its values and its media representations is mainly expressed by means of humour, irony and through the practice of ‘overemphasising’. Consumer culture for instance, is an essential element within the post feminist tradition. Consumption within a neo-liberal context is a tool to achieve power and pleasure, an alternative route for self-esteem; women construct their identity and receive societal appreciation through consumption (Featherstone, 1996). The emphasis on consumption has often been criticized by second-wave feminists, defining consumers as victims of commodification. Although consumption seems to be an important topic, it is often mocked at and represented with irony, indicating an ambivalence and contradiction typical for post feminism/postmodernism. In ‘Sex and the City’ for instance, what was initially a celebration of plastic surgery consumption is actually being laughed at. Post feminist media texts always imply a hint of irony, a wink of the eye to the audience. Though, the credibility and critical potential of these texts need to be questioned since humour and irony, exactly because of its ‘humour aspect’, may be taken less seriously. That is why reception analysis is necessary to establish whether readings against the grain of the media text are actually made in practice (and how they are made).

4. Conclusion

Because of the overall academic attention for the political aspect of post feminism, this essay questions whether post feminism also comprises a critical potential. Conclusively, post feminism can be considered a possible site for critical resistance as it offers a critique on earlier ‘old-fashioned’ feminism(s), also called ‘the second wave’. Objects of critique are second wave’s binary thinking, essentialism, ideas on sexuality, vision on the relationship between femininity and feminism and body politics. Here, post feminism not only expresses a critique, it also provides and articulates alternatives by focussing on difference, anti-essentialism and hybridism, pleading for female sexual pleasure and choice, re-evaluating the tension that existed between femininity and feminism and rejecting body politics by defining the body as key signifier for women’s identities. But not only second wave feminism is critically assessed. Although fully rooted within the consumer culture of neo-liberal societies, post feminism also critiques its hegemonic values. This paradox fits within post modern/post feminist paradigms where ambivalence and contradiction are typical and central characteristics. In popular culture, the post feminist critique on neo-liberalism is predominantly articulated through humour, irony and overemphasising. Although critical resistance can be found within post feminist discourse, care in interpreting them remains necessary, as the critical aspect in post feminism is weakened by the fact that many divergent and contradictory meanings are attached to the concept.

In the end, post feminism is not an exclusive signifying practice. Post feminism and post feminist popular cultural texts are a potential breeding ground for emancipatory discourses (‘the political’) and at the same time extend and stabilise, but also critique and question (‘the critical’), a hegemonic neo-liberal consumer culture. Therefore, the political and the critical potential of post feminist discourses have to be seen as interrelated.

References

Arneil, B. (1999) Politics and feminism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Brooks, A. (1997) Post feminisms: Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms. London and New York: Routledge.

Brown, W. (2003) ‘Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,’ Theory and Event, 7(1) accessed at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.1brown.html on September 2, 2009.

Dworkin, A., MacKinnon, C. (1988) Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality. Minneapolis: Organizing Against Pornography.

Featherstone, M. (1996) Consumer culture and postmodernism. London: Sage.

Gamble, S. (2001). The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Post feminism. London and New York: Routledge.

Genz, S. (2006) ‘Third Way/ve. The politics of post feminism,’ Feminist Theory, 7(3): 333-353.

Gill, R. (2007) ‘Post feminism Media Culture. Elements of a sensibility,’ European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10(2): 147-166.

Hooks, B. (1996) Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies. New York: Routledge.

Lotz, A. (2001) ‘Postfeminist Television Criticism: Rehabilitating Critical Terms and identifying postfeminist attributes,’ Feminist Media Studies, 1(1): 105-121.

Murray, G. (1997) ‘Agonize, Don’t Organize: A Critique of Post feminism,’ Current Sociology, 45: 37-47.

Spivak, G.C. (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.

Tasker, Y., Negra, D. (2005) ‘In focus: Post feminism and Contemporary Media Studies,’ Cinema Journal, 44(2): 107-110.

Van Bauwel, Sofie (2004) ‘Representing Gender Benders: Consumerism and the Muting of Subversion,’ pp.17-38 in E. Siapera & J. Hands (Eds.) At the Interface: Continuity and Transformations in Culture and Politics. Oxford: Rodopi Press.

The Village of Arts and Humanities is an exemplary community art organization, providing a long-term example of urban intervention through art. The Village, although it has been greatly lauded for the social justice work that it has performed, was not initially conceived in these terms. Rather, it started through the simple gesture of an artist and a group of children drawing a circle in an abandoned lot and beginning to dig. However, through the actions of those involved in the Village, the neighbourhood shifted, from an easily recognizable deteriorating inner city, to an attempt at a collective project of self-determination.

Background: What is community art?

Situated explicitly within a grassroots, activist agenda, community-engaged art is a form of art that seeks to undermine the elitism of artistic production and reception. Modernist paradigms have determined who has access to the arts, as a producer and as a consumer, and this has been limited to those with the wealth, education and leisure to be able to “fully appreciate” the difficulty of the avant-garde. Following François Matarasso’s (2005) conviction that access to arts is key to our ability to participate autonomously in democratic society, community-engaged art brings political art practices into the content, methods, processes, and institutions that define and create art. Community-engaged art practices orient themselves to disenfranchised, marginalized groups, in the hope that this will enable art to become more democratic, and for these creative ways of working to open up new political possibilities. What is interesting about the Village of Arts and Humanities, and why it is exemplary of community arts more generally, is that this process of citizen engagement happened, in large part, through the material practices of art, through the physical transformation of a neighbourhood.

Turning to the Village …

In 1986 artist Lily Yeh was asked by her friend acclaimed dancer Arthur Hall to transform the abandoned lot next to his house. He had seen her indoor gardens that she had created in galleries, and asked if she could do a similar project outdoors. When Yeh first entered the North Philadelphia neighbourhood of Fairhill-Hartranft, it was nothing like the neighbourhood she would leave in 2004. Walking down the streets for the first time she saw many adults with suspicious faces staring at her as she made her way past abandoned lot after abandoned lot. Broken glass in boarded up doorways were the gathering places for people with nowhere else to go. The lines of poverty and racism, the systematic marginalization and neglect of (primarily) black people in the United States, resulted in the overdetermined positioning of the so-called ‘inner-city ghetto.’

Yeh began to work in this community, not to ameliorate its social problems, but to initiate a process of creating art with community members. As she worked, she drew the attention and curiosity of the neighbourhood children, later recruiting the help of various adults, some of who were unemployed and struggling with substance abuse. A collective of citizens emerged through this work which allowed them to begin to address some of the larger needs of the community. The needs for food, for Narcotics Anonymous meetings, for housing were addressed through the work of the Village. These social problems were met laterally by connecting people to their immediate environment. By providing the opportunity for a neighbourhood to express itself differently, people could begin to imagine a community that was more beautiful, that inspired awe, building moments of the sacred into the profane urban landscape.

The Village of Arts and Humanities, as it stands now, 23 years later, is composed of 12 art parks and sculpture gardens. It has involved the transformation of a 260-block area, a transformation that equally includes environmental, social and political spheres. And this beauty of mosaics, carefully designed walls, poles planted and erected to mark tribute, as well as a tree farm, and various vegetable gardens, constitutes the visual manifestation of the work of the Village. But what is really important in these physical transformations are the social and political shifts that they also imply. They imply the working together of a community, the investment in place from its members. These efforts also seek to address the larger questions of systemic oppression from which they originate. As one project organizer put it: “lot cleaning and greening are practices that could help to heal the deep wounds of cultural misrecognition, but only if done as part of a much broader effort to dismantle racism in our society at large” (Hufford and Miller, 2006: 72). However, although the Village may begin to address the questions of systemic oppression from within the community itself, it is not obvious how they go about the larger project of dismantling racism more broadly.

Critiques of community arts

The fact that these larger power structures are often not explicitly addressed within community art projects is one of the strongest critiques leveled at its ways of working. Miwon Kwon (2002) cautions that in community art the function of art is often placed as a kind of romantic cure-all for the ills of a community, where self-expression is privileged over critiques of systemic oppression. Community art practices have been increasingly taken up by state governments as a way of focusing on individual (faults), rather than on the systems that produce individuals, lessening the state’s responsibility in the production of poverty, racism, etc.. This reflects what Grant Kester has identified as a “persuasive cultural mythology, grounded in romanticism, that conceives of the artist as a shamanistic figure able to identify with, and speak on behalf of, the poor and the marginalized. Within this mythology the artist becomes a channel for other people’s experiences of social oppression” (Kester, 2004: 140). Further, these romantic myths are founded upon a notion that ‘arts are good for people,’ the arts being used historically as a tool for social organization and normalization (Lash, 2006). Community art can then exacerbate the socio-economic divisions between artist, as privileged subject, here positioned as ‘expert’, and marginalized subjectivities, by addressing people as always already marginal.

The possibility of public space

However, the strengths of community arts are to offer a way of working that allows for a different approach to politics, to the critical, and, in the case of the Village, the re-patterning of an entire neighbourhood. Instead of working only through creative individual expression, the Village works as a way to expand upon existing knowledges, for example, through oral history projects linking elders and youth. Importantly, as its critical practice, the physical transformation of the neighbourhood has created a kind of buffer to protect the community from imposed development and simultaneously creating a desirable place for people to live.

The work of the Village can be seen as a political intervention by way of creating public space in a context and “period marked by the ascendance of private authority/power over spaces once considered public” (Sassen, 2008: 85). In this sense, the physical transformation that the Village enabled, explicitly undermining both paternalistic structures imposed by the state and models of market capitalism that displace communities, can be seen as a form of material critique or critical practice. For “If, following Raymond Geuss (in turn following Marx), critical theory can be defined in terms of self-reflectivity and the desire to change the world, then when criticism and design take on the task of self-reflection and evidence a desire for social change both can be described as critical (as forms of critical practice here rather than critical theory)” (Rendell, 2007: 4). Critical practice is here defined as evidence of self-reflection with a desire to change the world manifested through a built environment. The material transformations that the Village enabled fully fit within this model of critique, offering a collective grassroots take on critical practice. The Village begins to incite the question why more neighbourhoods are not planned, are not literally built or ameliorated, by the people who live in them. It serves as a model for understanding community autonomy while refusing the forces of market-driven urban development. Understanding the importance of small and medium scale projects in shifting politics also entails an understanding that political efficacy is not necessarily tied to state actors. “Street-level politics makes possible the formation of new types of political subjects that do not have to go through the formal political system” (Sassen, 2008: 86). What these kinds of interventions make clear, in fact, is that there is a kind of political possibility in abandonment, for it allows people to work in ways that might not otherwise be possible. As Lily Yeh speaks of the Village she notes that its status as marginal is what marked its success: “The reason the Village happens is because it is in the inner city where things are broken down, where the law doesn’t choke everything. We are out in the wilderness, where things are kind of quirky, where it’s possible for wildflowers to break through” (Yeh, 2004). She makes clear that being outside of the normal parameters of political engagement is what allows for different ways of conceiving of living and being together, different ways of organizing politically. The recognition that the Village’s supposed deficits could be valuable resources is central to the Village’s politics. Because city planners had already abandoned the neighbourhood, they did not interfere when Village participants began to transform abandoned buildings into low-income housing. Former Operations Director James Maxton describes the process this way:

“We took a backdoor approach to a lot of things that we did. The parks and the houses we rehabbed weren’t built with expert supervision and/or skills and talent. We stepped outside the norm. We didn’t use union labor; we used a lot of drug addicts. I was pushed into areas and made more capable than I’d ever dreamt possible. It was through trial and error that we were able to put all these pieces together. And the community began to feel better about itself” (Wallace Foundation, 2004a).

In this, the Village displays how empowerment can spring from an ethic of simply figuring out how to get things done. The material transformation of a neighbourhood, as the Village shows, is never simply material, but rather can be a powerful step towards community self-determination. Following Doreen Massey, it becomes apparent through this example that “The spatial is both open to, and a necessary element in politics in the broadest sense of the word” (Massey, 1994: 4). Our spatial, material practices become not simply the backdrop of social and political realities, but rather, contribute to their constitution.

The Village as Community Cultural Development

Village members recently decided to join forces with 10 other local community organizations to create a community development project entitled ‘Shared Prosperity’. It is an attempt to take the lessons of community arts, by empowering people through what they already have, to determine their economic and political future together. ‘Shared Prosperity’ became a forum to collectively decide the direction that the community wanted to move in, and to begin to address some of the systemic problems of racism, poverty, etc. with creative solutions, rather than simply weeding them out. In Yeh’s words

“For me, it’s about sense of place, and the creative act is to launch this project [Shared Prosperity]. I could see the future of the whole Village being tied to the neighbourhood; instead of building a million dollar center, you build the Village horizontally. The bigger goal is to try to create something so deeply rooted that it can stand firm against the global takeover by interest groups” (Hufford and Miller, 2006: 32).

In this sense, community cultural development can be a way of challenging imposed and normalized cultural values (Goldbard). But it is possible that the Village will not be able to maintain the balance between artistic vision, community engagement and social justice. It has begun the process of institutionalization, employing 16 full-time and a dozen part-time staff and operating on a budget of $1.3 million (Wallace Foundation, 2004b). Although this kind of funding can open up possibilities for furthering the kind of horizontally driven work of the Village, it can also signal a shift from responding to neighbourhood needs to needing to support itself as an institution. Further, if the Village’s success was predicated on the fact that it didn’t need to rely upon standardized structures, what happens now that it has become its own kind of regulatory model? Are the possibilities for remaining critical limited by the processes of institutionalization?

Conclusion

What the example of the Village of Arts and Humanities does offer is a way of recognizing the importance of forgotten urban spaces, as places of incredible potential. This is not to deny the efficacy of state led or more institutionalized projects, but the Village does serve as a reminder that overlooked or abandoned places can equally be sites of resistance, that local continues serve as a specific nexus of fluxes of more global issues, power dynamics, and struggle. The creative production of place can be seen as a critical material intervention that can serve to challenge and check normalized social, political, and physical systems. In this sense, the critical becomes a set of practices and debates that call into question hierarchies and solidifications of power and an attempt to rework these entrenched dynamics. It is important to recognize that the struggle for more equitable power relations happens not solely within a discursive realm, but also through our physical environments. The Village reminds us that physicality, the creation of public space, is inseparable from social justice projects, implicitly showing the ways in which the critical needs to be thought through materiality and everyday practice.

References

Goldbard, A. (2006) New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development. Oakland: New Village Press.

Hufford, M., Miller, R. (2006) Piecing Together the Fragments: Ethnography of Leadership for Social Change in North Central Philadelphia 2004-5. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.

Joseph, M. (2002) Against the Romance of Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Kester, G. (2004). Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kwon, M. (2002) One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Lash, H. (2006) ‘You are my sunshine: Refugee Participation in Performance,’ pp. 221-229 in D. Barndt (Ed.) Wild Fire: Art as Activism. Toronto: Sumach Press.

Leggiere, P. (2000) ‘Lily Yeh’s Art of Transformation,’ The Pennsylvania Gazette. Downloaded on September 13, 2009 from www.upenn.edu/gazette/0700/leggiere.html.

Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Matarasso, F. (2005) ‘Art for Our Sake: The Artistic Importance of Community Arts,’ Downloaded on September 15, 2009 from http://web.me.com/matarasso/one/downloads/Entries/2009/2/20_Community_arts_files/Art%20for%20Our%20Sake.pdf

Miller, R. (2005) Performing the Urban Village: Art, Place-making and Cultural Politics in North Central Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Rendell, J. (2007) ‘Introduction: Critical Architecture: Between Criticism and Design,’ pp. 1-9 in J. Rendell, J. Hill, M. Fraser and M. Dorrian (Eds.) Critical Architecture. New York: Routledge.

Sassen, S. (2008) ‘Cities as Frontier Zones: Making Informal Politics,’ pp. 83-94 in J. Backstein, D. Birnbaum and S. Wallenstein (Eds.) Thinking Worlds: The Moscow Conference on Philosophy, Politics, and Art. New York: Sternberg Press.

Scher, A. (2005) ‘Art in the Village,’ YES Magazine. Downloaded on 14 September, 2009 from http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1263.

Wallace Foundation (2004a) ‘Village of Arts Big Man,’ Downloaded on 14 September, 2009 from http://www.wallacefoundation.org/KnowledgeCenter/Pages/VillageOfArtsBigMan.aspx.

Wallace Foundation (2004b) ‘Going Toward the Light: Philadelphia’s Village of Arts and Humanities,’ Downloaded on September 15, 2009 from http://www.wallacefoundation.org/KnowledgeCenter/KnowledgeTopics/CurrentAreasofFocus/ArtsParticipation/Pages/VillageofArtsandHumanities.aspx.

Yeh, L. (2004) ‘Yeh in her own words,’ Downloaded on 14 September, 2009 from http://www.wallacefoundation.org/KnowledgeCenter/Pages/VillageOfArtsLILYYEH.aspx.

This article, in turn, attempts to write a ‘history of the present’ of the Black Block as a form and as a signifier of anti-capitalist militancy. In an attempt to fill out the partial account found in George Katsiaficas’ otherwise landmark history of European autonomous movements, I trace the origins of the Block Black to the West German Autonomen of the late 1970s and 1980s. I argue that the popularity of the Block Black as a form of militancy is a departure from the tactics and the figure of ‘Stadtguerilla’ [urban guerrilla], a form of resistance that attained a certain degree of notoriety in Western Europe in the 1970s. Indeed, the Black Block’s mass, anonymous militancy—the fundamental characteristic of the tactic—is first and foremost of a defensive measure, but highlights other elements that speak to our current moment. Before we can begin to understand its importance, some historical background is necessary at this juncture.

Channeling both Mao and Brazilian radical Carlos Marighella, the Rote Armee Fraction’s [RAF] ‘Das Konzept Stadtguerilla’ is a more or less straightforward text and one of the earliest theoretical engagements with urban guerrilla ideas in postwar Western Europe. Discussing a wide range of geographic locals and historical settings, the RAF claims that the Stadtguerilla is “one weapon in the class struggle,” and it “assumes the organization of an illegal apparatus, that is to say, residences, weapons, munitions, cars, documents” (RAF, 1997: 42). Resistance here takes the form of bombings, shootings, bank robberies, and kidnappings, a kind of resistance that garnered intense media coverage. Not surprisingly, the RAF quickly emerged as the most well-known of all the militant organizations active in West Germany in the 1970s, proclaiming their dedication to armed, anti-imperial struggle against the capitalist state (some other examples include the Bewegung 2. Juni, Tupamaros West-Berlin, and Revolutionäre Zellen). And also not surprisingly, all of these groups were pursued relentlessly by the authorities. Most of the so-called ‘first generation’ of the RAF were in prison by the end of 1972, only months after their first major offensive. This included legal strategies as well: In 1976, an amendment was added to the controversial §129 to the Germany Criminal Code, known as the RAF amendment, criminalizing the creation and membership of a ‘terrorist organization’.

But there were crucial differences among the groups. The Revolutionäre Zellen did not require participants to go underground—although one statement lauds the RAF for making it clear that “resistance does not end where the criminal code begins” (RAF, 1997: 174). Describing the groups as ‘kleine Kernen’ (small cores), the philosophical-political underpinnings fell much closer to the Autonomen than to any kind of Marxist-Leninism, it was a militancy of small groups, not organized around a central organ. Focused largely (but not entirely—they shot to injure, not to kill) on the destruction of property, it is no accident, then, that the Berlin rock band Ton Steine Scherben’s classic ‘Macht Kapput Was Euch Kapput Macht’ (‘Destroy what Destroys you’) is an anthem of the Autonomen [1]. What Black Block militancy adds to this tradition relates to the question of scale, turning to mass visibility and mass anonymity, with a primary focus on property destruction. Calling it “perfomative violence,” Jeffrey Juris (2005: 420) argues that Black Block militancy “generally has a specific communicative logic: destruction of the symbols of corporate capitalism and the state”. While I do not have the space to engage with Juris’ notion of performative violence in relation to the Black Block, the crucial element here is the fact that the destruction is focused on objects and not on people. As a result, it fundamentally departs from the Stadtguerilla concept.

Let us return to some concrete early examples. According to one source, the first usage of the term ‘schwarzer Block’ can be found in a Frankfurt anarchist call out for the 1980 Mayday festivities: ‘Anarchy=Freedom! Come out to the Black Block’ (Sturm und Drang, 2005). The call was following a particularly brutal battle that took place the previous year between police and anti-fascist protesters, dressed in black, wearing helmets, and carrying sticks, keen on stopping an annual neo-Nazi march, which they succeeded in doing. Unlike contemporary Germany, it was not a crime to wear a motorcycle helmet and a ski mask at a demonstration—and thus it was common to see streams of black-clad, helmeted protesters in demos. During the 1970s, anti-nuclear activists fought brutal battles with police—often resulting in the police’s withdrawal—using masks to hide their identities. The German authorities recognized the importance of being able to obtain someone’s identity and banned the practice of ‘Vermummung’ (the act of covering one’s face) in the mid-1980s—something that France did only in June 2009 [2].

Out of the ashes, a unity came. The Black Block as a form of resistance functions as a singularity, ‘united’ in anonymity against a police apparatus that cannot map its organizational structures. The Black Block is a combination of affinity groups—an anarchist formulation—and free flowing individuals. The individuals share nothing but certain motifs of militancy—attire, chants, and above all, a desire to remain anonymous. Returning to our earlier example, we find a telling statement from the self-described ‘Black Block Investigation Committee,’ which published a newsletter in solidarity with the accused in Frankfurt:

“A ‘Black Block’ in the sense of the BKA [the Federal Crime Bureau]—namely as a terrorist organization—has never existed. Was does exist is an Autonomen scene, which is made up of leftist school children, apprentices, university students, employed and unemployed, which has no organization or parties belonging to it” (Schwarzer Block Ermittlungsausschuss Info.2)[3].

In an ironic letter addressed to prosecutors, we can find a discussion of the ‘origins’ of the Black Block: “The Black Block is black because it dresses in black. It is a block, the word almost gives it away, because of its locked appearance” (‘Offener Brief’, n.d.). In the autumn following the arrests, a long, rambling piece was published in the magazine vollautonom, and re-published in the widely-read radikal magazine: “There are no programs, no statutes, and no members of the Black Block. There are, however, political ideas and utopias, which determine our lives and our resistance. This resistance has many names, one of them is called the Black Block” (‘Schwarzer Block’, 1981). The authors quote a report from the local Verfassungsshutz—the agency in charge of monitoring anti-constitutional activity—with both irony and pride: “they continue to reject Marxist-Leninist conceptions, fixed organizational forms, and every condition and program, and espouse autonomy and spontaneity.” As mentioned, the attempts to render the Black Block into an ‘organization’ failed, although that was certainly not the end.

It is difficult to trace the Black Block through its multiple incarnations and appearances. But one thing can be said with certainty: It has taken form in many places around the world: Europe, North and South America, and even Southeast Asia[4]. The ‘Black Block’ has an entry dedicated to it in one pictorial history of West German protest movements, and is described as having “adopted a consciously militant stance [haltung]” (Jungwirth, 1986: 148). This last point is crucial: It highlights the intimate link between militancy and its expression in the form of the Black Block.

We need to go to 1999 and the gathering of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, where the Black Block emerged onto the international stage. In terms of the spread of the Black Block tactic, the single most powerful development emerging from Seattle has nothing to do with any protests, but rather the founding of IndyMedia. For the first time in history, activists themselves could produce and publish their own reports instantly and share them, reaching an international audience. Seattle inaugurated the era of conference protesting, and the year that followed saw the four major capitalist conferences held in Prague, Quebec City, and Gothenburg, and Genoa all having one thing in common: the (mainstream) media’s obsession with the Black Block[5]. In addition, the last decade has also seen the rise of the self-produced, widely-distributed riot-demo video, propelled by the ubiquity of high-quality digital camera and the popularity of free video file sharing sites. This, in many ways, has played a crucial role in the dissemination of the tactic—as the many of the Black Block ‘fan videos’ prove.

But the police forces have responded in equal measure: At the 60^th anniversary of NATO in Strasbourg in April 2009 and the G8 in Heiligendamm, Germany, two years before, the relatively militant Black Blocks that were present at both events were confronted by literally thousands of police officers, backed up by military helicopters, naval forces, and other weapons of crowd surveillance and control. Francis Dupuis-Déri (2005: 80) makes this point well: As a result of its visibility, the popularity of the Black Block and the resulting loss of the element of surprise could actually be its own demise.

What can be said about the Black Block as a form of political agitation? In a way, we can say that the Black Block seeks to undercut the very stability of the ‘militant organization’ as a form of political organization. The appeal of this tactic is fairly clear: Any ‘militant organization’ can be infiltrated, names can be collected, and arrests can be made. Indeed, the awareness of such infiltration seems to be playing in the background in one Black Block participant’s reflections, who, despite her expressed solidarity with the French urban guerrilla group Action Directe, claims that “one is sufficiently aware of the last fifty years of world history to avoid making the same mistakes” (quoted in Dupuis-Déri, 2005: 47). But the Black Block and the disavowal of any organizational strategy—be it Marxist-Leninist or other—resists the police apparatus in some fairly profound ways. Denied any singular ‘head’ or ‘ringleaders’, the forces of order must fall back upon more brutal methods of dispersal. In effect, the Black Block neutralizes (a part of) the bureaucratic machinery of the police. If the coming together and the (albeit varying degrees of) solidarity is grounded in being-there-at-the-protest, then the police can do nothing to disrupt that unity but to forcibly break up the protest.

But questions need to be raised: What role does the Black Block play in the critique of global capital? Can the Black Block function as a model for political action? Obviously not—it is a tactic, not a goal. Even as a protest tactic, anonymity also facilitates police infiltration. Indeed, after every major protest event, stories and photos circulate of police agents dressed in black, using the anonymity to track and pick out individual protesters. Be it a German ‘Zivi’ (a police officer in civilian clothing) or a member of the French BAC [Brigade anticriminalité], or the famous squad of Black Blockers from the Cabinieri caught on camera in Genoa—the forces of order are more than capable of inserting themselves into Black Blocks. The tactic is so open that even the German neo-fascists have begun to use it: Calling themselves ‘Autonomen Nationalisten’, they too dress in black and attempt to use Black Block tactics. Among anti-capitalist protesters, some have raised the question whether the tactic should be abandoned in the face of improved police tactics (Cunningham, 2002: 13). Others have expressed concern that more militant demonstrators were ‘taking cover’ among less militant protesters and hijacking infrastructure without significantly contributing to the maintenance of solidarity networks, focusing only on the production of ‘riot-porn’ (‘Après avoir tout brûlé’, 2009). Indeed, the author of the latter piece reflects quite critically on the Black Block, in the context of anti-NATO protests in Strasbourg in April 2009, and how “the success or failure of the actions, it seemed, could be measured in the number of stones thrown, burnt trash cans, broken windows, or injured cops. Rioting thus ceased to be a tactic and became an end in itself.”

Georgio Agamben (1993: 85) argues that “… what the State cannot tolerate in any way … is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging.” In the case of the Black Block, the condition of belonging is the condition of anonymity. In a similar vein, in a text attributed (by the police) to a group of French anarchists, L’insurrection qui vient [The Coming Insurrection], we read that anti-capitalists need to “flee [fuir] from visibility” and “turn anonymity into an offensive position” (comité invisible, 2007: 102). The Black Block, it can be said, embodies a form of politics that does turn to anonymity (mainly as a defensive gesture) while retaining a certain kind of visibility. In this way, the Black Block forces us to rethink our conceptions of coming together as a project. As the American anarchist collective Crimethinc (‘Blocs, Black and Otherwise,’ n.d.). describes it, the Black Block “can simply be present as a promise of solidarity, or a threat.” And, one could add, as both at the same time.

References

‘Après avoir tout brûlé…Suite à au sommet de l’OTAN à Strasbourg en avril 2009 – Correspondance à propos de stratégies et émotions révolutionnaires’ (2009) Downloaded on 3 September 2009 from http://ch.indymedia.org/fr/2009/07/70590.shtml.

‘Offener Brief’ (n.d.).

‘Schwarzer Block’ (1981) Downloaded on 21 May 2009 from http://autox.nadir.org/archiv/auto/81_radi_98e.html.

Agamben, G., Hardt, M. (trans.) (1993) The Coming Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

comité invisible (2007) L’insurrection qui vient. Paris: La Fabrique éditions.

Crimethinc: Ex-Workers’ Collective (n.d.) ‘Blocs, Black and Otherwise.’ Downloaded on 2 September 2009 from http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/atoz/blocs.php

Cunningham, R. (2002) ‘Bashing the Black Block?’ Red and Black Revolution, 6: 13-15. Downloaded on 25 May 2009 from http://struggle.ws/rbr/rbr6/black.html.

Dupuis-Déri, F. (2005) Les Black Blocs: La liberté et l’égalité se manifestent. Lyon: Atelier de Création Libertaire.

Geronimo (2003) Feuer und Flamme: Zur Geschicte der Autonomen. Berlin: ID-Verlag.

Jungwirth, N. (1986) Demo: ein Bildgeschichte der Protests in der Bundesrepublik. Weinheim: Beltz.

Juris, J. (2005) ‘Violence Performed and Imagined: Militant Action, the Black Bloc and the Mass Media in Genoa,’ Critique of Anthropology, 25(4): 413–432.

Katsiaficas, G. (1997) The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life. New Jersey: Humanities Press.

Revolutionäre Zellen (1993) Die Früchte des Zorns : Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der Revolutionären Zellen und der Roten Zora. Berlin: ID-Verlag

Rote Armee Fraktion (1997) Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF. Berlin: ID-Verlag.

Sturm und Drang (2005) ‘Der Papst ist tot! – 25 Jahre Schwarzer Block.’ Trend Onlinezeitung. Downloaded on 31 August 2009 from http://www.trend.infopartisan.net/trd0605/t370605.html.

Winter, M. ‘Police Philosophy and Protest Policing in the Federal Republic of Germany 1960-1990,’ pp. 188-212, in D. della Porta and H. Reiter (Eds.) Policing Protest: The Control of Mass Demonstrations in Western Democracies, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, (1998).

Notes

[*] This paper was made possible through the support of a Doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I would like to thank the staff of the Papiertiger Archiv & Bibliothek der Sozialen Bewegungen, who provided invaluable assistance tracking down materials. All the translations from French and German are my own.

[1] This is not the full story. To go into a long discussion on the history of the Autonomen-something I cannot do in this paper-one needs to engage the so-called ‘Militanz Debatte’ which went on for almost a decade in various underground journals beginning in the mid-1990s. Available at http://www.geocities.com/militanzdebatte/. And, of course, Geronimo’s history of the German movement contains an important discussion on armed resistance. Interestingly enough the RAF is critical of the undertones that the phrase ‘Macht Kaputt was Euch Kaputt Macht’ seems to suggest because “organizing is made out to be secondary, discipline bourgeois, class analysis unnecessary” (Geronimo, 2003: 45).

[2] The German law can be found here, http://dejure.org/gesetze/VersG/17a.html. For the text of the new French law, see http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT000020763885&dateTexte=&categorieLien=id.

[3] All the documents related to the events in Frankfurt in 1981 are available for consultation in the Papiertiger Archiv & Bibliothek der Sozialen Bewegungen in Berlin, under the folder ‘Schwarzer Block.’

[4] Dupuis-Déri’s (2005: 22-25) text traces the spread of the Black Block, as does David Van Deusen and Xavier Massot’s as yet unpublished collection and analysis of the Black Block in America, ‘The Black Block Papers’.

[5] Eamonn Crudden’s film ‘Berlusconi’s Mousetrap’ engages this media fascination in the context of the G8 that took place in Genova, Italy, in 2001. It is available for download here http://www.indymedia.ie/article/75401. Another video worth downloading is ‘New Kids on the Black Block,’ put together by an anonymous video activist. It combines images of the protests at Genova with cheesy promotional videos of 1980s and 1990s boy bands. It can be found here http://video.indymedia.org/en/2005/09/148.shtml.