THE NEW 1914 THAT CONFRONTS US

AN INTERVIEW WITH RETORT

In 2005 Retort, a group of forty or so dissidents who regularly meet for political discussions in the San Francisco Bay Area, released their book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, a work of collaborative writing by four of their members. The

Retort has created a heady cocktail of concrete political analysis and theoretical speculation. The basic ingredient is Marxism, but expansively defined: incorporating the ideas of Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, but also Guy Debord. Indeed, Debord permeates Afflicted Powers. An essay like "The Decline and Fall of the Spectacular Commodity Economy" (about the 1965 Watts Riots in Los Angeles) is treated as exemplary polemical writing, ranking with the greatest achievements in the Marxist pamphleteering tradition. Retort reminds readers that such writing was the original context for a concept like "the society of the spectacle" that has now been crudely appropriated and often rendered apolitical by the postmodernist academy. In contrast, Retort seeks to deploy the concept in a manner that Debord would have appreciated. "Spectacle" is associated with the complex of tactics that continuously generates advanced consumers. The processes are market led but are anxiously monitored by a state that has a vested interest in consumer obedience and its complement, weak citizenship. For Retort, the perpetrators of the September 11, 2001, attacks had a profound understanding of spectacular politics and consciously sought to defeat the United States in the realm of images. In this sense, the collapsing Twin Towers was a victory: a carnivalesque moment when the world appeared to be turned upside down.1

DAVID EVANS: Probably the most infamous image to emerge so far from the current war in Iraq was taken in Abu Ghraib prison in 2003-a hooded prisoner on a "plinth" seems to be the recipient of electric shock torture by U.S. forces. This amateur photograph has now been reproduced globally in many contexts. The Economist used it on a front cover with the imperative caption "Rumsfeld must resign." On anti-war posters it was combined with the question "Is this your freedom?" You have selected it for your frontispiece, accompanied by an extended quotation from the seventeenth-century English poet John Milton:

And reassembling our afflicted Powers; Consult how we may henceforth most offend Our Enemy, our own loss how repair, How overcome this dire calamity, What reinforcements we may gain from Hope, If not what resolution from despare.2

Could yon explain the significance of this pairing?

RETORT: Our pairing of Paradise Lost with the "wired Christ" in Abu Ghraib reflects the central claim of the book, that the essential task of political thinking and writing at this moment is to confront the strange atavism of the new world situation-a seeming brute return to the seventeenth-century wars of religion familiar to Milton, twinned with an intensified deployment of the apparatus of the production of appearances. The U.S. in particular feels a double threat: first, to the monopoly of the means of mass destruction and second, to its management of the image-world-in both cases from non-state actors of various kinds. The events of 9/11, were, we believe, a defeat for the imperial state at the level of spectacle (to which, by the way, its managers have been unable to stage an answer-not that they haven't tried). Likewise, if the recorded collapse of the World Trade Center wordlessly proposed-revealed, actually-the vulnerability of the U.S. Heimat, then the global circulation of the Abu Ghraib snapshot struck a parallel blow at the ideological claim of the U.S. to be the guarantor of "human rights," "freedom," and so on. Now, we further insist that the attack on the towers by a neo-Leninist vanguard of Islamic militants was a symbolic (but nonetheless real) defeat not only for the capitalist hegemon but also for those (Retort included) who count themselves enemies of capitalist globalization-for the "movement of movements" such as it is. In that sense, we intend "afflicted powers" to refer ambiguously to this Janus-faced defeat. We appreciate that, in identifying with Milton's resonant phrase, we belong to the party of Satan, as he is summoning the rebel angels to storm heaven.

DE: Photographs are used discretely throughout the book. Sometimes you seek dissonance between image and text-a grim, contemporary photograph of the Israeli separation wall and a sardonic reference to "Making the Desert Bloom," an important motif in Israeli propaganda from the 1950s onward (in the chapter on U.S./Israel relations called "The Future of an Illusion"). And sometimes there is a surprising choice of imagea color photograph of an Avon lady testing deodorant samples with Indians in Brazil (in the concluding chapter, "Modernity and Terror"). But mainly yon seem to be using interesting but unexceptional press photographs, given straightforward descriptive captions like "oil spill, Nembe Creek, Niger Delta, Nigeria, August, 2004" (in the chapter "Blood for Oil?"). What thinking informed your picture editing?

R: The selection and placement and captioning of the photographs was very important to us, and we thank you for noticing. We had the help of a photographer friend, Ed Kashi, who was responsible for the cover as well as the shot of the Nembe Creek oil spill you mention. Of course we were alive to the problem of choosing images for a book critical of the current image-regime, and we are not such fools as to believe that we could elude utterly the mills of the spectacle. Each image was chosen to perform a certain kind of work on its own; none was intended as "illustration." We should also say that the universal (that is, from all points on the political/cultural compass) opinion that image has somehow trumped or superseded word in the brave new media world strikes us as nonsense. To the contrary, never has the image-array been so auxiliary to scripts of one kind or another, typically written by modernity's specialists in solicitation-copywriters, public relations hacks, human resources officers, soundbite artists, poets of the advertisement-and delivered into a mediascape in which language itself has been flattened and truncated. One might incidentally mention the very heavy cost of reproducing images in books these days, thanks to the neoliberal regime of intellectual property in which image libraries have become major "profit centres." The fees charged by Corbis, Getty, etc., for the images used in Afflicted Powers (fewer than a dozen) amounted to several thousand dollars.

DE: German poet and playwright Heiner M?llier wrote that to use Bertolt Brecht without changing him was a betrayal. I could imagine Retort saying the same thing about Debord and the Situationist International-materials to be continuously reworked rather than revered. How, then, have yon adapted the Situationist notions of the spectacle and the colonization of everyday life to understand the present conjuncture?

R: We assert in the opening chapter that our intention is to turn the two notions-"the society of the spectacle" and "the colonization of everyday life"-back to the task for which they were originally deployed-namely, to understand the powers and vulnerabilities of the capitalist state. We set out to grasp the logic of the present moment, in the aftermath of the events of 9/11, and the seeming historical regression of U.S. statecraft. Specifically, we asked ourselves about the possibility of real interaction between the political economy of neoliberalism, the warfare state, and new developments in the realm of the image. To put it in a single phrase-a dense phrase but one that captures the analytic linkages-we aimed to explore "the contradictions of military neoliberalism under conditions of spectacle." We remain agnostic about the possibilities of destabilisation in a system that increasingly depends on image-management. The spectacle accelerates as a result of the falling rate of illusion; the disenchantment of the image-world may follow. In any case, we take spectacle in a minimal, matter-of-fact way to characterize this new stage of accumulation of capital. Not just a piling up of images, as media studies would have it, but in Debord's sense of a social relationship between people that is mediated by representations. Crucially, our analysis depends on the complementary notion of the colonization of everyday life, and of subjection to an endless bombardment of brands, logos, slogans, consumption-motifs, invitations to feel happy. Globalization turned inward, as it were. We argue in Afflicted Powers, then, that globalization is producing "weak states" across the world economy and "weak citizenship" at the spectacular center, the result of the thinning of the texture of daily life. Weak citizenship may be optimal for the demands of the market but not when the state has to embark on a major round of primitive accumulation, as we argue the U.S. imperial state attempted in Iraq. Never before have politics been conducted in the shadow of defeat both on the ground and at the level of the spectacle.

DE: Situationist writing and picture captioning frequently involved the use of pre-modern literary quotations for various reasons-to wake up readers, perhaps, or to escape the tyranny of the present. To what extent did this tactic inspire your work?

R: Of the quartet of authors of Afflicted Powers, two are historians and the other two are historically minded. Perhaps it is just the deformation of the historian to raid the lumber rooms of the past. But frankly we cannot imagine having embarked on such a project without the assistance of Hannah Arendt, Randolph Bourne, or Luxemburg. And unless [Friedrich] Nietzsche were at hand, a critique of modernity would be far more difficult to frame. Edmund Burke and Thomas Hobbes were an essential part of the analytic toolkit. Milton, who helped forge a radical, political idiom in the revolutionary decades of the seventeenth century, gave us our tide and was an abiding inspiration, not least because his great poem was written in the face of defeat. And of course the indelible line of Tacitus, "They make a desert and call it peace," speaks to us across the centuries. These were words he put in the mouth of a Gaelic warrior on the eve of battle against a Roman legion in the Scottish highlands, at the far northwestern edge of the empire. We need Tacitus to remind us what kind of peace is meant by the masters of war-the peace of the "peace process," the peace of cemeteries. Much of the work of the late Pierre Vidal-Naquet, the French historian of ancient Greece and tribune of the people, was concerned with state violence and the assassination of memory, which is central to the spectacle. He was inspired by a line of Chateaubriand he found transcribed in his father's diary before his deportation to Auschwitz: "Nero triumphs in vain, as elsewhere in the empire Tacitus has already been born."

DE: The Situationist idea of d?tournement never appears in Afflicted Powers. Yet the events of 9/11 could be considered d?tournement in at least two senses. Sense 1 : literal d?tournement, since the hard-working French word can mean, among other things, airplane hijacking. Sense 2: reactionary d?tournement. That is, three elements that have been associated with Americanism since the 1920s-airplanes, skyscrapers, and mass communications-were taken by [Mohammed] Atta and his accomplices and recombined. The resulting message may not have been anti-Americanist exactly, but it may certainly anti-American. What do yon think?

R: D?tournement, indeed. Remember that the kind of planes that Atta and his crews refunctioned as missile-bombers to strike the World Trade Center and the Pentagon actually originated as weapons of mass destruction. The Boeing Corporation took the old bombers used to create firestorms over European and Japanese cities during the Second World War and redesigned them for purposes of mass tourism and corporate air travel in the 1960s. Atta himself, as we note in the chapter on revolutionary Islam, was an urban planner (in Cairo and Aleppo) disgusted with the Disneyfication he saw coming in the wake of the failure of secular national development in Egypt and the rest of the Third World. He was right; Dubai is one face of neoliberal globalization, megaslums another. At the same time it is necessary to acknowledge Al-Qaeda's love affair with image-politics. Even in its rejection of the West, the Islamic vanguard displays a mastery of the virtual and of the new technics of dissemination. This is one aspect of the current moment's mixture of atavism and new-fangledness that those in opposition to both Empire and Jihad, two virulent mutations of the Right, must take very seriously. The issue, in fact, is not ultimately America or Americanism, but modernity itself.3

AFFLICTED POWERS:

CAPITAL AND SPECTACLE IN A NEW AGE OF WAR BY RETORT (LAIN BOAL, T.J. CLARK, JOSEPH MATTHEWS, MICHAEL WATTS) LONDON AND NEW YORK! VERSO, 2005 224 PP./$16.00 (SB)

Creating a user's manual for those in opposition to the "war on terror," Retort draws on the concepts of Guy Debord (spectacle) as well as Vladimir Lenin (the revolutionary vanguard) and Rosa Luxemburg (primitive accumulation). Luxemburg's Juntas Pamphlet (1916) is acknowledged as an inspirational precedent. Her main theme was the "orgy" unleashed by capitalist society in 1914, but she also tried to come to terms with the "world tragedy" represented by the capitulation of Social Democracy. For Retort, the parallels are painfully obvious: the global anti-war movement failed to prevent war. And in the shadow of defeat, Afflicted Powers is ambitiously offered as an updated Junius Pamphlet for "the new 1914 which confronts us" (xii).

Afflicted Powers offers an analysis that emphasizes "the contradictions of military neo-liberalism under conditions of spectacle" (15). For Retort, it is this war on two fronts-for the control of material resources and for the control of appearances-that needs to be understood as a precondition for effective resistance. Every thesis is debatable. Approaching Al-Qaeda as a global brand available for franchising like Kentucky Fried Chicken or Starbucks seems more plausible than Retort's comparison of the group with the Leninist vanguard. Nevertheless, Afflicted Powers robustly presents a complex of ideas and information that is meant to be used.