Savages, Barbarians and Civilized Men

"“Soon the people will decide that they want their land to be part of today’s monstrous world, and once that happens, it will all be over. As soon as you have that desire, you are infected with the deadly virus, and you begin to show symptoms of the disease. You live in terms of time and money, and you think in terms of society and progress. Then all that is left is for you to kill the other people who think the same way, along with a good many of those who do not, since that is the final manifestation of the malady.”

Paul Bowles, “Pages From Cold Point”

One day, with any luck, an archaeologist will pick up the magazine you are holding and scrutinize this fragment of a lost civilization. Well, it’s possible, in any case. So let’s imagine. Given that this hypothetical academic of the future is more likely than not to be perplexed by what he or she sees—and just to clarify, I’m thinking way, way, way into the future—I’m here to provide a little context.
In September 2000 a group of financiers known at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank held its annual meeting in Prague, a city in the Czech Republic, a nation-state in Europe. Roughly 15,000 people gathered and listened to various speeches given by the leaders of this organization. Concurrent with this meeting and in the same city, a similar meeting took place of several thousand people gathering to express their displeasure at the existence of the aforementioned organizations. A large, well-organized police force was called into action to ensure that the meetings and the speeches went smoothly. Outside, people hurled stones in excitement. Minor incendiary devices were employed by one side (glass bottles filled with gasoline), while the other captured many prisoners.
Nobody was killed or seriously hurt in these disturbances. There were no executions because a relatively small number of societies in the world still perform executions. The majority of the prisoners were soon released; none were sold into slavery because slavery, as such, has ceased to exist in most parts of the world as well. In short, the events soon passed and few people were the wiser.
Within this context, the periodical contemporary art publication Umělec has decided to devote a part of this issue to artists’ activities related to these events. The author of this article does not take sides in this dispute, if it indeed can be called that. He sides with neither the bankers, nor the protestors, nor the artists, but considers them all, to grossly mis-paraphrase something somebody famous once said, merely aspects of the situation.
Surely, the Future Archaeologist asks, there must be more to the story. To begin with, what was the exact nature of the dispute? What is the precise power relationship between the two sides? And where do the artists fall into the picture? To the last question, the author will allow the artists discussed in the following pages to make their own statements on the matter. Patterns will then emerge, answering these questions more clearly than this essay could hope to. So let’s turn our inquiry to the question of power and the various theories abounding as to who is in charge of the world today, and hope that the ensuing discussion will bring these patterns into greater relief.
In 1968, during somewhat more perilous times, two Frenchmen named Gilles Deleuze and Felex Guatarri—a leftist philosopher and an eccentric psychoanalyst, respectively—together penned a tome audaciously titled Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Among a number of other points, many of them delightfully nonsensical, Deleuze and Guattari suggested there was in fact something inherently liberating about capitalism, the form of economy most of the leading nations of the world, or at least a good half of them, had adopted. This was a novel idea for the academic Left at the time, among whom Deleuze and Guatarri counted, who generally opposed capitalism on the grounds that it produced great inequities in power and wealth. Anti-Oedipus was written at a time when the world divided itself between opposing ideologies of capitalism and communism. Despite this, and despite being laden with names like Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, the headiest and hairiest philosophical chumps of the previous centennial, events of the last thirty years have unfolded in such a way as to allow us to give Deleuze and Guattari’s thesis another go round. So here we go. They write: “[C]apitalism is the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded flows, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract quantities in the form of money. Capitalism therefore liberates the flow of desire, but under the conditions that define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution[.]”
Bear with me. Stop for a moment and consider what is said here. In fact, this stuff is straight out of the first chapter of Capital, where in the 19th century Karl Marx writes of “the fetishism of the commodity and its secret.” The secret of the commodity, which “appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing” but upon further analysis emerges as “a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” is, for Deleuze and Guattari, the secret of the liberated flows of capitalism itself. This secret lies in quantitative abstraction, and the enigmatic character assumed by products of labor as they are transformed into purely objective characteristics—that is, exchange value, plain and simple.
And rather than speak of economies of wealth and economies of libido, they speak of one single economy: an economy of flows. Capitalism proceeds as a decoding of flows.
Take today’s advertising. This is surely the closest we have come aesthetically—or will ever come again—to recreating the 19th-century Impressionists’ bourgeois “landscape of pleasure.” The difference is that sex and wealth play crucial roles not simply in the landscape itself, but in continual building and re-building of that landscape. Desire is caught in an endless loop of seeing, wanting, wanting to be seen wanting, pursuing, and wanting to be seen having by the ones you see wanting. In advertising and consumption that based on sex appeal in particular, the flow of libido and the flow of capital intersect, and indeed are thrown into the same reduced soup until one begins to get a sense that these are merely outward forms of a singularity: the Flow.
There are those who say that under the existing global capitalist order, the mass of humanity is oppressed by ever-increasing concentrations of wealth in the hands of the few. There are others who say quite the opposite: that non-capitalist economic models are both economically inefficient and inherently repressive because they substitute the arrogance of the state for the liberty of the free market. Still more have sought a so-called “third way.”
Yet in today’s world we find it increasingly difficult to think in these terms. During the better part of the 20th century, the world was ruled by ideology—fascism, communism, capitalism. All of these ways of thinking seem a bit outdated to us now. In the art world, too, all –isms are now –wasms: Minimalism, Conceptualism, etc. Multiplicity and plurality are the order of the day. And if it appears that the hammer-and-sickle-waving, stone-throwing antics of the anti-capitalist Left seem old fashioned, it’s mostly because ideology itself—rather than this particular brand of ideology—can no longer perform the function it once did.
Yet in the midst of this overload of -isms, in recent years we have been asked to digest yet another: Globalism. Many do not even know what it means, this specter of globalism. Merriam-Webster defines it as “a national policy of treating the whole world as a proper sphere for political influence.” Yet globalism can no longer be said to describe “national policy,” but rather a purely economic phenomenon, represented by globally recognized brand names such as Nike, Coke and McDonald’s. Indeed, it is exactly clashes the likes of which we saw in Prague in September that are helping to shape the definition of globalism, if only by giving face to its emerging opposite: anti-globalism.
Globalism is not ideology; it is anti-ideology. It is a decoding of flows. Neither is it culture, or the spread of American culture. Such an assumption confuses the outward forms taken by the signifiers of the flow—the TV images and billboards—with the inexorable flow itself. “Hence it is correct to retrospectively understand all history in the light of capitalism, provided that the rules formulated by Marx are followed exactly,” the authors of Anti-Oedipus declare.
Where writers and artists in the past five centuries concerned themselves mainly with what the future will bring, often today we hear of “the end of history.” However misguided the notion may be, there is a sense in the world today that the end of history is indeed at hand. This sense emerges simply because the form of the world’s economy, capitalism, allows us to retroactively understand history in relation to itself. Rather than being at an end, the light of capitalism reveals history to be an ongoing process of the decoding of social flows—that is, culture, as we have understood it under previous regimes—following an axiomatic, intractable logic, bound to and prodded by the reductive power of commerce.
Yet Deleuze and Guattari also speak of the “reterritorialization” of the social machine “in a global system of desire and destiny that organizes the productions of production, the productions of recording, and the productions of consumption.” They assign particular importance to this re-assignment of meanings to bodily functions and specific organs, and to literal territory, “the great unengendered stasis” of the Earth: “Flows of women and children, flows of herds and of seed, sperm flows, flows of shit, menstrual flows; nothing must escape coding.”
They say the roots of society’s illness lay not in the perverse ideology of capitalism as such—though they are quick to state that capitalism is, by nature, delirious and insane—but in the economic and political nature of desire itself. In particular, they point to humanity’s desire to be led, or the fascism that lies within us.
Whence issues this desire to be led? From Oedipus, the root of authority and the root of humankind’s collective subjugation to the authority of the mob.
The anus plays a particularly crucial role in the Oedipal reterritorialization of human beings. In traditional psychoanalysis, control of the anal sphincter is said to be an important stage in the child’s development. It represents the control of desire under the regime of the super-ego. The child produces something; he sees it as a gift. “Mommy, mommy,” he says. “Look what I brought you!” But it is a gift of shit. As such it is usually not very well appreciated by the disgusted parent. In fact this gift is more often than not likely to produce anger and recriminations.
“Our modern societies have instead undertaken a vast privatization of the organs, which corresponds to the decoding of flows which have become abstract.” And the first organ to undergo such privatization is—you guessed it—the butt-hole. Indeed it is the anus, the very model of privatization, which plays the pivotal role in the mommy-daddy-me Oedipal triangle, not the penis, as is often supposed. External authority is absorbed via the privatization of the anus and its subsequent anal tyranny. The use of language particular to contemporary economic models is telling: “The whole of Oedipus is anal and implies an individual overinvestment of the organ to compensate for its collective disinvestments.”
History—and what we now call globalization—is a continual subordination to the flow. Our best hope is to catch a “line of escape” from the reterritorilizing regime of Oedipus. You can judge for yourself whether the artists profiled in these pages have been successful in that endeavor.
Back to our archaeologist’s question of power. More and more, are we not seeing that nobody is really in charge? Despite the claims made by many on the militant Left, there is no oligarchy of bankers in suits running the global economy. In fact, sometimes one gets the sense that power as an overt political force is dissolving—and that we’ve only just seen the beginning.
Political power dissolves in the flow, yielding to the absorbed authority of the mob. Culture dissolves in the flow of libido and capital. For a moment, imagine a world where there is nothing but flow. Imagine a world with no power grid, only lines of escape. Where there are no images that are not already displaced, there are no statements that are not already at once ironic and genuine: where the distinction has withered away. Imagine a family celebration during which half the time is spent videotaping the celebration and the other half watching the recording. Gradually the latter becomes the celebration itself. But you knew this already, because you’re from the future.
So now you at least know where we’re coming from.
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01.05.2000