THE SEMIOTIC REVIEW OF BOOKS VOLUME 13.3 2003 http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/srb ISSN 0847-1622 Editorial The Political Semiosis of Populism By Samir Gandesha

t has become almost a cliché that highlight the shift of gravity already effected FDP which sought to fuse an exclusionary and globalization embodies a logic in which by Jörg Haider’s FPÖ in Austria which in 1996 anti-semitic discourse with a neo-liberal agenda I borders of every kind are radically called into won 22% in a general election and three years of dismantling the German “Sozialstaat.” question. As was said with rare perspicuity by later 27%. In Italy, after last year’s election, Combined with the success of the Greens led the current US President, after the attacks of media mogul Silvio Berlusconi included in his by Joschka Fischer, it is possible to understand September 11th, 2001, foreign policy has become Forza Italia-led government, Gianfranco Fini the German election as a tentative step in the domestic policy. In other words, by virtue of and Umberto Bossi, leaders of the neo-fascist direction of a more liberal conception of German recent events, the border between the domestic National Alliance and the xenophobic, anti- identity. and the foreign—perhaps the central binary southern, anti-immigrant Lega Nord Despite these recent set-backs, right- opposition in the study of politics—has been respectively. In Denmark, the Danish People’s populism will, I think, continue to play a pivotal deconstructed. The consequence of such a Party now plays a pivotal role in the coalition role, if in many cases from the periphery, in the deconstruction was vividly brought home by government as does a similarly rightist party in future of European politics. It must therefore be Thomas Friedman, author of The Lexus and the the coalition government in Norway. After the treated with the utmost seriousness in Olive Tree (2000), who argued recently that the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, his Lisjt Fortuyn considering the future of a united Europe, Bush administration ought to set aside its Party took nearly one fifth of the seats in May’s indeed, a European Union that, by 2004, will preoccupation with Iraq for the moment and Dutch election. expand to 25 member states. Looming in the direct more of its attention to “stop the slide of Since that time, however, there have been background, of course, is the possible over there into over here.” numerous countervailing tendencies that show membership of a Turkey in which the Islamist Nowhere has the border between the that the triumph of the far-right is far from being Justice and Development Party will more than “foreign” and the “domestic” been posed more a fait accompli. In Sweden, the Social likely play a commanding role. dramatically and directly than in the recent Democrats have managed to hang on to power The aim of this paper is to begin constructing successes of political parties and social and in Britain the local elections led only to a a theoretical model within which it might be movements of the radical right that have been very moderate showing for a revamped, possible to engage in an analysis not only of the sweeping through Europe in the past twenty-four sanitized BNP which managed to win three structure of right-populist discourse but, also, of months. Indeed, it seemed last spring from my seats in racially-polarized Burnley. More its appeal. Accordingly, the first section of this vantage point in Berlin, as if these forces, some recently, the FPÖ has entered a crisis, not paper defends the concept of populism yet with direct links to fascist and neo-fascist unlike that of the Canadian Reform/Alliance suggests that, unlike most other analyses, this movements (which I shall call “right-populist”), party last summer, over the question of tax-cuts phenomenon must be viewed in a global frame. were posed to fundamentally alter the ideological in the context of an unforeseen need to In the second section, I clarify the concept of map of Europe. increase spending due to the floods, which, in globalization, which I understand as the To mention only the most notable cases: In turn, has brought about a fatal crisis in the accelerated inter-penetration of the local and France, Jean-Marie Le Pen not only survived coalition government. New elections have the global that always already underlies modern challenges to his authority by his erstwhile been called for November which do not augur experience. In the third section of the paper, I lieutenant, Bruno Megret, who subsequently left well for the future of the party. In October, suggest that globalization radically intensifies the to form the Mouvement National Republicain, the LPF became so divided that the Christian problem of “ontological security” or the basic but managed to win an unprecedented 17% of Democratic Prime Minister, Jan Peter individual and social parameters of identity. the first poll in the Presidential Election dealing Balkenende, saw no alternative other than to Next, I suggest that capitalizing on the a humiliating defeat to Socialist Prime Minister dissolve the government less than one hundred accumulation and intensification of the anxiety Lionel Jospin. While for the French political days after the elections. Most remarkably, resulting from the resulting ontological insecurity, establishment and media, Le Pen’s victory was a however, in the recent general election in right-populism, with all of its internal differences, crisis for the Fifth Republic, it only served to Germany, voters resoundingly rejected the can be understood as pursuing the same strategy: the translation of pervasive yet diffuse anxiety deepened by the effects of globalization into a determinate fear of a particular object around Rates Canada USA Others which various economic, political, cultural, The Semiotic Review of Books Individual $30 US $30 US $35 corporeal anxieties can be said to coalesce. This Institution $40 US $40 US $45 Volume 13.3 (2003) object is the figure of the “stranger.” In the General Editor: Gary Genosko Table of Contents concluding section, I reflect on the challenge of Associate Editors: Verena Andermatt Conley (Harvard) Samir Gandesha (Simon Fraser), Barbara Godard (York), Tom Kemple right-populist discourse for liberal-democratic (UBC), Anne Urbancic (Toronto) regimes. Editorial: Section Editors: Leslie Boldt-Irons (Brock),William Conklin The Political Semiosis of Populism 1-7 (Windsor), Akira Lippit (UCal-Irvine), Alice den Otter 1. Populism By Samir Gandesha (Lakehead), Scott Simpkins (UN Texas), Bart Testa (Toronto), Peter Van Wyck (Concordia), Anne Zeller (Waterloo) While the use of the term “populism” is fairly SRB Insight: Layout: Gail Zanette, Lakehead University Graphics widespread in the media (see Die Zeit Spring- Becoming-Revolutionary 7-9 Address: Department of Sociology, Lakehead University, Summer 2002 and the New York Times of the By Paul Patton 955 Oliver Road, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada P7B 5E1 same period) it is necessary to provide a Tel.: 807-343-8391; Fax: 807-346-7831 conceptual definition of what is one of the most Cathode Ray Cages 9-11 E-mail: [email protected] or [email protected] By Ron Harpelle used and abused concepts of politics. Populism Founding Editor: Paul Bouissac, Professor Emeritus, was adopted as the name of a political party in Before Reality TV 11-12 Victoria University, Victoria College 205, 73 Queen’s Prk Cr. E., post-Reconstruction era United States that Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 1K7 By Gary Genosko E-mail:[email protected] purported to defend the interests of the farmers Web Site http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/srb against those of the large combines, in particular The SRB is published 3 times per year in the Fall, the interests of the railways (Dubiel 2002). The Winter and Spring/Summer. term also refers to the political orientations of the Russian peasants or narodniki in the period

SRB 13.3 (2003) - 1 just prior to the Russian Revolution (Kitching unsatisfactory term “globalization.” It should also the left is the most striking example of this 1989). Populism as an ideology was the means be said, however, that the specific nature of this process. by which the masses were incorporated into crisis will be determined by the historical and Already in the Communist Manifesto Marx politics in a subordinate and dependent manner social context in which it presents itself. As had identified processes that were pointing in the Latin American southern cone or the Betz and Immerfall have recently argued, “the beyond extant national economies, processes semi-periphery (Cf. Mouzelis 1985). The term success of the radical right is above all a that were integrating territories via new has also been used to characterize the ideology reflection of the psychological strain associated communications and transportation of the Social Credit Party in British Columbia in with the uncertainties produced by large-scale technologies and creating new forms of solidarity the 1930s. More recently, the term “authoritarian economic and socio-structural change” (1998: that were now beginning to pose a spectral threat populism” has been used by Stuart Hall, drawing 249). Yet, the authors provide neither a to the capitalist state: upon the work of Ernesto Laclau, to analyze the convincing account of the nature of these phenomenon of Thatcherism as a way of uncertainties nor of their relation to such Modern industry has established the simultaneously re-inventing or re-imagining the “psychological strain.” As a way of beginning world-market, for which the discovery of British nation within the wider project of to think about how we might address the America has paved the way. The market transforming the British state (Laclau 1977, Hall question of “psychological strain,” I shall suggest has given an immense development to 1988, Harrison 1995, Patten, 1999). that right-populism emerges as a specific commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This It is the latter approach that I believe to be response to the undermining of ontological development has, in its turn, reacted on particularly important and useful. The central security within the context of globalization. the extension of industry; and in the same reason for this is its formal nature. Rather than proportion the bourgeoisie developed, understanding populism as a specific, substantive 2. Globalization increased its capital and pushed into the doctrine, Hall understands it in terms of a specific If the concept of “populism” has been highly background every class handed down ideological and political (as opposed to contested, then the same holds for the concept from the Middle Ages (Marx and Engels economic) opposition between the “people” and of “globalization.” It is not my intention here 1978: 337). the “power bloc.” This opposition, moreover, to add yet another voice to an already cannot be understood as simply reducible to any cacophonous discussion surrounding this The logic of capitalism involved a constant given economic contradiction, for example, unusually fraught concept. Nonetheless, in very revolutionizing of the means of production between labour and capital. The formal nature general terms we can understand globalization which, itself, played a profound role in what of this opposition enables us to assess the relative as involving important transformations at Weber was later to call the disenchantment democratic or authoritarian nature of populism. economic, cultural and political levels: (Entzauberung) of the world, stripping the feudal ties that bound individuals together organically In other words, this approach, while giving a § Economic Level: The creation by the “callous cash payment,” and “drowned specific account of populism as a discourse can of a global economy that operates as a the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, also, at the same time, account for the very single entity on real or chosen time on a of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine amorphousness of the concept. At the same time, planetary scale (Castells 2000: 101). It is sentimentalism, in the icy waters of egotistical its explanatory power is limited in as much as, characterized by the specific calculation (337).” What was crucial about the like the Gramscian theory of hegemony upon contradiction between the “space of constant revolutionizing of the means of which it based, it is confined to the specific flows” and the “space of places” (Castells production was that it had transformed being contours of nation-popular discourses that are, 2000: 409). more or less, articulated within the framework itself: “All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with of a single social formation. But, as we have seen, § Cultural Level: The their train of ancient and venerable prejudices the affinities shared by the various movements homogenization of culture, and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed and parties actually transcend the nation-state predominantly through US cultural ones become antiquated before they can ossify. and, in many ways, are responses to the crisis of industries, leads to a countervailing All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is the state (Betz and Immerfall 1998). eruption of particularistic, exclusionary profaned, and man is at last compelled to face forms of culture (Barber 1996). with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and Moreover, despite its dependence upon a his relations with his kind (338).” certain form of psychoanalysis—Lacanian § Political level: The psychoanalysis to be precise—for an undermining of the sovereignty of the Yet Marx could celebrate this process in a understanding of how discrete, seemingly nation-state from above and from below. fairly unabashed manner because he tended to contradictory ideological elements are articulated Consequently, this has brought to the fore view the destructive moment of modern into a coherent, potentially hegemonic a representational crisis of liberal experience as, ultimately, part and parcel of a constellation, this approach fails to examine the democratic institutions (Loch and profoundly creative dialectic. Marx believed that subjective pre-conditions of the success or failure Heitmeyer 2001). the process by which men and women were of the appeal to collective identities. It can show Globalization can be said to involve a process forced to face the “real conditions of life” would how identities are invented within hegemonic of simultaneous integration and fragmentation. have the enlightening effect of enabling the struggles, yet cannot account for why certain Yet, we need to be clear that globalization does proletariat to see more or less transparently its identities exert greater power over the subjects not represent an entirely novel phenomenon universal, human interest in the transcendence to which it appeals than others. In other words, but, rather, intensifies crucial tensions that were of the very social relations that created it. The there is not enough attention paid to the inner, always already present within modernity itself. reconciliation of creation with destruction psychological aspects of identity. Identity is, for There are those who view the would happen through the unfolding of history the most part, understood along the lines laid deterritorializing logic of globalization to present and communism would be the result. All that down by Althusser according to which unique opportunities for new forms of solidarity had melted would, so to speak, become solid subjectivity is a function of interpellation or the and the creation of new emancipatory identities. once more. History was an inherently redemptive manner in which subjects are “hailed” by social For example, in Empire, a book that has been story. institutions (Althusser 1971). In this account, called the “The Communist Manifesto for our Globalization accelerates the processes then, populist discourses like all ideological time” (even though it is several times as long) identified by Marx, without the reconciliation discourse provide opportunities for individuals Hardt and Negri argue that “far from being that would ultimately be achieved by the to recognize themselves in various kinds of ways. defeated, the revolutions of the twentieth creation of a modern Prometheus no longer What this approach misses, however, is the century have each pushed forward and bound by national, religious or ethnic identities. affective dimension of identification. transformed the terms of class conflict, posing Indeed, the process of the fragmentation on the It could be argued that the tremendous the conditions of a new political subjectivity, left is not, strictly speaking, a recent challenge of populist discourses is that, at both an insurgent multitude against imperial power” phenomenon. If the Manifesto was written as individual and collective levels, they represent (2000: 394). It is difficult not to view the the founding text of the International Working the attempt to address in a decisive manner the processes of globalization as presenting very real Men’s Association, some seventy years later, its pervasive crisis of identity lying at the heart of problems for a new politics. While the global successor organization, the Second Socialist the modern experience—a crisis that has only economy is becoming ever more closely International, would collapse as a result of the been exacerbated by the dynamics arising out of integrated, political institutions and identities re-emergence of the very forms of particularlism, the deepening interpenetration of the global and have become subjected to a progressive namely nationalism, that Marx had thought the local which I will simply refer to by the fragmentation. The rise of identity politics on were a thing of the past. What was significant

SRB 13.3 (2003) - 2 here is that—in the absence of a proletariat that welfare state grounded in the projection of a (i) the nature of existence constituted a solid majority of the population— future based on a steady, perpetual increase in (ii) death and finitude social democracy now had to reframe its political the standard of living. After the crisis of the early (iii) relations to others discourse and appeal not to the “working class” 1970s, such a social democratic vision becomes as such but, rather, to the “people.” The increasingly untenable. Is it any surprise, then, (iv) self-identity nationalism that was the undoing of the Second that the post-modernist skepticism towards meta- As is implicit in the foregoing, a central tension Socialist International with the outbreak of narratives takes hold in the wake of the shattering inherent in modernity is, to quote Giddens, that hostilities in 1914 became increasingly of the post-war consensus? For, at the collective between “globalizing influences on the one hand institutionalized thereafter. That is to say, after level, an adherence to a progressive philosophy and personal dispositions on the other” (1991:1). the demise of the Second Socialist International of history—either in liberal or Marxist form— In other words, a key dimension of modernity is and after the long period of war stretching from served to provide narratives of collective and to be understood as a set of new mechanisms of 1914-1945, the non-Communist left accepted individual identity with an internal coherence. self-identity that both shapes and is shaped by the nation-state as the fundamental unit of The process that Marx analyzed with such modern institutions (1991:2). The self is a politics. Social democracy, in other words, was penetration, the process by which all that is solid reflexive phenomenon, that is to say, modern forced by purely sociological and pragmatic melts into air, destabilizes and ultimately individuals not only have a self but also are aware reasons to return to a language based on the undermines the frameworks of everyday life that, of having a self. centrality of national-popular as opposed to as Anthony Giddens (1991) points out, serves But what is it, precisely, to have a self? It is international proletarian solidarity (Pzeworski as the basis for “ontological security.” Giddens’ to be able to organize the discreet moments of 1986, Esping-Andersen 1985, Laclau and account of ontological security is especially our experience into a more or less coherent Mouffe 1985). important for our purposes because it is premised biography or story that unifies past, present and As Horkheimer and Adorno, writing during on a dual relation between the globalizing future. It is to be able to answer the fundamental the dark years of the Second World War, processes, on the one hand, and personal identity questions of “Where have I come from?” and recognized, history was not to be understood as on the other. “Where am I going?” The modern self is the simply passage from nature to history; from What does Giddens mean by the concept of characterized fundamentally by both an increase barbarism to civilization, a condition of “bellum “ontological security”? Ontological security in freedom in the sense that it understands omnes contra omnium” to a condition of peace, consists of the coherence, continuity and selfhood, itself, to be a project, as something that but, rather, the two conditions inter-penetrated dependability of the relation between the self is reflexively constructed and, the self is one another. History was inextricable from nature, and world or “being-in-the-world.” Such stability constituted by an essential anxiety that arises out enlightenment inextricable from mythology is grounded in the taken-for-granted patterns of its lack of solidity. Ontological security (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972). Indeed, constitutive of every day life or what he calls the becomes a specific problem under conditions of Horkheimer and Adorno understood “natural attitude” (1991:36). The natural attitude modernity. Giddens argues that modernity must “enlightenment as mythological fear turned establishes stability in our relations with others, be understood in terms of a specific ensemble of radical” (1972). Under conditions of a the shared object world and, consequently, our institutions that (1) are dynamic and reflexive disenchanted and rationalized world, the self-identity, which is anchored in the foregoing (i.e. they are able to react to changes in their primordial fear experienced by individuals—that subject-object and subject-subject relations. immediate environments); (2) they under-cut of an over-powering nature—becomes the fear Giddens contends that while these patterns have traditions, customs and habits and (3) they have produced in and by a society that had congealed a cognitive dimension, their real significance lies a global impact, that is, do not remain tied to a into a kind of “second nature”—contingent in the fact that, inasmuch as they progressively specific time-space nexus. As we have already human practices that, because they appear to supplant relations between the nascent self and suggested, globalization with its effects at the lie beyond the reach of human intervention, significant others, such patterns become deeply economic, cultural and political levels, reinforces seem as if they were part of first nature. If invested with emotional commitments. Indeed, all three aspects of modernity: it makes mythology and enlightenment were bound up socialization marks the transition from the institutions yet more dynamic, further relativizes with one another, if there were no relations of mutuality between infant and care- traditions, customs and habits and further severs straightforward transition from nature to history giver(s) constituted out of patterns that regularize them from a specific nexus of space and time. then lying just below the surface of civilization the play of their presence and absence and All three institutional aspects of late was the threat of a profound and pervasive establish temporal continuity and spatial stability. modernity, according to Giddens, make it into insecurity. This is because nature can never be The natural attitude “brackets out” or holds in what he calls a “risk culture.” By this he doesn’t fully historicized and dominated, there will abeyance, the fundamental questions about mean that modernity is necessarily more always remain residues of what has remianed ourselves, others and the object world that must dangerous than previous epochs. The idea of risk immune from instrumental reason. These simply be presupposed in order to “go on” (in culture is that the concept of risk is inherent in residues, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, the Wittgensteinian sense) in our everyday the manner in which the social world is in the important “Elements of Anti-Semitism” activities. To put it in Kuhnian terms, while the organized. Thus, the future is not simply as an Chapter of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, are the natural attitude is analogous to “normal science,” open horizon on which progress “happens” in a objects of both utopian longing and disgust. the posing of fundamental questions runs parallel unidirectional way, but rather, as a horizon of Indeed, this provides us with our first clue as to to “revolutionary science.” Just as revolutionary potential, precisely calculable risks. Here, again, how populist discourse can be said to operate. It science cannot sustain on-going research we see an intertwining of freedom and anxiety. constructs historical processes—ie. migration— projects, it is, similarly, not possible to function Thus, according to Giddens, “the risk climate of in terms of natural processes, indeed, as natural in everyday life when one is constantly driven modernity is thus unsettling for everyone; no one catastrophes. to pose radical questions concerning the escapes (1991:124).” ontological status or the nature of the objective, 3. Security inter-subjective and subjective worlds. As There is much to take exception with in Giddens’ account of “ontological security.” First, While recognizing the inherently dynamic Giddens puts it: “To be ontologically secure is to like the tradition of classical sociological theory and unstable nature of modern experience, possess at the level of the unconscious and that he has done so much to introduce to the Marx did not view this as a problem inasmuch practical consciousness, ‘answers’ to fundamental English-speaking world, Giddens assumes a as he saw emergent forms of solidarity, arising questions which all human life in some way binary framework consisting of the familiar from within the production process itself, which addresses” (1991: 47). While the natural attitude oppositions between the “traditional” and the would supplant fast-antiquated traditional plays a crucial role, it is at the same time “modern,” Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, norms. Such emergent forms of solidarity were, extremely fragile. Such fragility derives from the mechanical and organic solidarity and so on. Yet moreover, underwritten by a philosophy of fact that, unlike nature, it does not possess solidity as Horkheimer and Adorno have shown, there history still deeply indebted to Hegelian and objectivity, but, rather, is produced and exist aspects of the modern self in Greek theodicy. At the most immediate level, it is reproduced through inter-action with others mythology, just as the modern, Enlightenment possible to argue that social democratic politics within a shared inter-subjective world. Anxiety individual exhibits certain mythological traits. put into practice precisely this progressive can erupt with the slightest rent or tear in the That is, when confronted with external threats, version of history even if it did replace tissue of this world, and, when this occurs, the the (masculine) individual either hardens himself Luxemburg’s “revolution” with Bernstein’s fundamental questions pertaining to the world up against them or loses himself completely. Far “reform.” It did so in the form of the post-war can no longer be bracketed by the natural attitude (Heidegger 1962:16). These questions concern: from being exclusively characterized by

SRB 13.3 (2003) - 3 autonomy, in the Kantian sense, modernity “Deferment in time and remoteness in “space of places” they become marked by contains within it darker possibility. This is the space…reduce the disquiet that awareness of risk widening socio-economic inequalities (Davis possibility of “authoritarian personality” as risk might otherwise produce” (1991:130). If 1990). The increasingly global reach of the structures, characterized by utter submissiveness this is true, the exact obverse must also hold: products of the US cultural industries, aided by towards authority, on the one hand, and the acceleration of time and compression of space the emergence of new technologies, generates a aggression or dominance towards members of can be said to increase such disquiet. perceived threat to integrity of cultural difference minority groups, on the other (Adorno, Frenkel- The very dynamism of modernity is and the normative orders that they represent. Brunswik, et al 1969). embodied in the sociological type of the Fundamentally, migration or flows of populations Second, as a corollary of the previous point, “stranger.” Georg Simmel suggests that the across is both a cause and a consequence of all Giddens holds that, while obviously operating stranger is not simply the absolute other; he does of the above. Inasmuch as it leads to a further within certain constraints, the “late-modern” not come from another planet. Rather, he is the shrinkage in the distance between spaces, individual is able to create the kind of self that individual with whom we interact, with whom globalization heightens anxieties concerning she wants. While Giddens recognizes religious we enter into specific kinds of relations. What bodily integrity, more specifically, anxieties fundamentalism as a response to the unease characterizes the stranger is a kind of distanced stemming from the transmissibility of infectious generated by the condition of late modernity, nearness. As Simmel puts it: diseases. At any number of levels, then, the logic of globalization dramatically underscores the he rationalistically suggests that such The stranger is close to us insofar as fundamentalism is, ultimately, untenable increasingly fragile nature of ontological security we feel between him and ourselves and, thus, individual and collective identity. inasmuch as its adherents would be forced to similarities of nationality or social recognize such a world-view as merely one position, of occupation or of general 4. Sovereignty choice amongst others. What this account human nature. He is far from us insofar as So far, I have suggested that globalization leaves out is the possibility of a return of atavistic these similarities extend beyond him and deepens the experience of anxiety that is a key forms of identity that don’t simply view tradition us and connect us only because they dimension of the various geo-political, as one choice amongst others, but seek to negate connect a great many people (Simmel economic, political, cultural, physical effects of the very reflexivity that constitutes the modern 1971:143). globalization. I have also suggested that the figure self. Such fundamentalism, in other words, seeks of the stranger, as defined by Simmel as that to do away with choice altogether. The stranger is strange precisely because of his familiarity; he participates in social interactions individual who is simultaneously close at hand Third, as alluded to above, the self isn’t as a member of a given society, yet at the same yet distant, becomes the concrete manifestation simply a reflexive project—that is self-conscious time represents a normative order beyond the of globalization anxieties. That is to say, if and constantly revising its projects—but non- local contexts he inhabits. In crossing “globalization,” as contested and unsatisfactory identical with itself. What I mean by this is geographical borders—in moving from what the concept is, signifies the interpenetration of simply that there are aspects of the self that resist Friedman refers to as the “over there” to the “over the global and the local in an infinite set of reflexivity; such aspects of the self can never be here”—the stranger takes up a more distanced, combinations, then the figure of the stranger can eliminated no matter how strong what Jessica objective view of normative codes and the social be said to embody this logic in an extremely Benjamin calls the “bonds of love” established identities they solidify. To put it in Giddens’ immediate way. At all the levels that I have between the infant and her primary care-giver. terms, the stranger represents the crisis of the identified above the stranger is potentially On the contrary, as Julia Kristeva has argued, “natural attitude”; the very presence of the implicated. The stranger is a potential source of the primary care-giver (the maternal function) stranger serves to unsettle the taken-for-granted economic anxiety as he represents cheaper labor- not only represents a source of comfort, of patterns of the every-day. Thus, the stranger power; he is the potential source of geo-political nourishment and protection, but also a source represents a potential challenge to the anxiety, i.e. terror; the stranger can be found of anxiety that originates in the threat of being ontological security of the self. As suggested concentrated in urban environments; the overwhelmed and the borders of the self called above, anxiety and freedom need to be viewed stranger is a source of cultural anxieties inasmuch into question. In a patriarchal society, the as two sides of the same coin: anxiety arises as he is the source of norms incompatible with, “maternal function” is “abjected” that is, viewed because modern practices are radically even antithetical to, that of host community; at as the negation of the self and therefore terror contingent and open-ended. Otherness is the the level of security of the body, the stranger and disgust. (Kristeva 1982) Kristeva argues, condition for the possibility of the very represents the threat of transmissible disease. It moreover, that this excessive aspect of the dynamism and freedom of the modern self is no surprise that a central axis along which psyche—the unconscious—isn’t just repressed, (Kymlicka 1996, Parekh 2000). The image of globalization anxieties are organized, as alluded as in the classical Freudian account, but projected the stranger is thus necessarily doubled: he is to above, is that of migration. Migration is, onto the other (see also Horkheimer and simultaneously an opportunity and a threat. indeed, constitutive of the stranger’s identity. As Adorno 1972: 168-208). The strangeness of the While post-modern feminism and post-colonial Simmel suggests, the stranger is ”the man who stranger is, in this sense, this overwhelming theory and multi-cultural conceptions of comes today and stays tomorrow—the potential anxiety that has to do with what the self citizenship view the relation to the other as an wanderer, so to speak, who although he has gone experiences as a threat to the integrity of its very opportunity for the creation of new emancipatory, no further, has not quite got over the freedom of boundaries. To put it another way, it is the denial hybrid forms of subjectivity, right-populism coming and going” (1971:143). What is of the otherness of the self (in the form of the views the stranger as a threat. especially noteworthy about this experience “of unconscious) that transforms the other into coming and going” is that it historicizes, renders something strange, dangerous and potentially At this point, it is possible to quickly identify contingent and ultimately disrupts the “natural fearsome. any number of ways in which ontological attitude” (the taken for granted patterns of the security has been further undermined by the everyday) and in the process represents an Despite these criticisms (binary framework processes of globalization by which the local is and the over-emphasis on reflexivity and identity crisis at both individual and collective increasingly penetrated by the global—what level. By virtue of his very difference, the stranger rationality), I would suggest, nonetheless, that happens “over here” has its roots in the “over Giddens’ concept of “ontological security” could permits those fundamental questions— there.” At the economic level the re-making of concerning existence or the nature of the good indeed serve as the basis of an analysis of the the global economy in the image of the Anglo- emergence of right-populist politics. The reason life—that are normally bracketed or held in American model, de-regulates economic life and abeyance, to be posed anew. The self’s feeling for this is that Giddens ties the question of heightens competition between firms and ontological security closely with the very of being unable to organize its experience into a employees creating a pervasive climate of coherent narrative unifying past, present and dynamism of modernity. Thus, as we have seen, uncertainty. At the geo-political level the end of “ontological security” forms the basis by which future, correlates, according to Giddens, with the the Cold War has created an increasingly feeling of being overwhelmed. potential threats to the self—at its incipient as unstable, multi-polar order one which, far from well as mature stage—are warded off and kept eliminating has only exacerbated the nuclear This is not, in and of itself, enough to suggest at bay. Now, if such security is increasingly threat. Such threat puts in question not simply the connection between anxiety and the politics undermined by the acceleration of the processes the existence of the individual but of planetary of right-populism. The reason for this is that inherent in modernity, itself—dynamism, the life as a whole. At the level of urbanization, cities anxiety remains, by definition, objectless and under-cutting of routinized forms of action and play increasingly important roles as nodes in the politics requires specific objects. While certain constant tendency towards dis-embedding— organization of the network society, yet given processes, as I have just described them, can give then we can expect a corresponding rise of the decoupling of the “space of flows” from the rise to anxiety, it is constitutive of such anxiety anxiety (see Putnam 2000). As Giddens puts it, that they are without determinate objects. Right-

SRB 13.3 (2003) - 4 wing populism, as a political discourse, doesn’t the border, the place where I am not and (89). Muslims in Europe, “nest in the ganglia of passively express shifting constellations of which permits me to be, the corpse, the our technology. Worse: they live in the heart of globalization anxieties that surround the figure most sickening of wastes is a border that a society that hosts them without questioning of the stranger, but, rather, these movements and has encroached upon everything their difference” (97). And, in a familiar echo of parties must transform a diffuse often incoherent, (1982:3). the far right’s refrain, Fallaci refers to the unconscious anxiety into an articulated, Ab-jection, then, is the re-establishment of propensity of migrant workers to “breed and determinate fear of a particular object. borders that have somehow been threatened by multiply gloriously” (138). (In Germany, the In a path-breaking lecture entitled “Angst the appearance of that which should have refrain is “Kinder statt Inder”—German children und Politik” (1986:261-91), Franz Neumann remained hidden away but now has come out instead of Indian immigrants.”) distinguishes between “real anxiety” of a into the open. Such a re-establishment of borders Fallaci’s language of abjection reaches its concrete danger and “neurotic anxiety” that comes about by way of an act of repulsion and crescendo, however, in her description of a results from a “persecution complex.” He argues exclusion. I would suggest that contemporary demonstration of the Somali community in Italy: that the transformation of the former into the right-populism can be understood in terms of an An enormous tent erected by Somali latter is produced by way of identification with ab-jection, an expulsion, of the stranger precisely Moslems…to blame the Italian a strong leader or what he calls “Caeserism.” because of the stranger’s inherent ambiguity. government that for once hesitated to While Neumann’s strong reliance on the Thus, “it is not lack of cleanliness or health that renew their passports and to accept the concept of neurosis as well as the fact that his causes abjection but what disturbs identity, hordes of their relatives. Mothers, fathers, central frame of reference was Nazism constitute system, order. What does not respect borders, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, certain limitations in his analysis, it is positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, pregnant wives, and possibly the relatives nonetheless possible to use his framework to the composite” (1982: 4). of their relatives…A tent furnished like a identify a crucial mechanism of right-populist To summarize the argument so far, I have small apartment: tables, chairs, chaise- discourse. This is the mechanism that transforms suggested that the economic, cultural and longues, matelas to sleep and to fuck, a real, if at the same time diffuse, anxiety into political processes that characterize the ovens to cook and to stink up the square. fear of the stranger. In the process, identification phenomenon of globalization should be thought Therefore open to every show…And, along takes places with an emphasis not so much on of as deepening and intensifying processes that with all this, the yellow streaks of urine the leader as with the people as a whole. By are inherent in modernity itself, namely, the that profaned the millenary marbles of the transforming diffuse and multiple forms of often dialectic through which fixed identities are baptistery as well as its golden scarcely articulable anxiety into the fear of the unable, ultimately, to sustain themselves. The doors…With the yellow streaks of urine, stranger, right-populist discourse accomplishes process by which “all that is solid melts into air” the stench of the excrements (sic) that two things simultaneously: first, it transforms the produces ontological insecurity or an blocked the main entrance: the exquisite social stranger from a debating partner or an environment of pervasive anxiety. The strategy Romanic church (ninth century) that economic competitor into the political “enemy”; of right-populism, despite its considerable stands near the square and that the sons secondly, it is able simultaneously to define the internal differences, turns on translating such of Allah had transformed into a latrine like identity of the “people.” amorphous anxiety into a determinate fear of a the churches of 1982 Beirut. (128-29; The enemy, as Carl Schmitt wrote in his particular object by way of a process of ab- emphasis added). influential book The Concept of the Political, is jection. This object, I am suggesting, is the figure Here we come to at least a provisional answer to he who represents a danger to a collectivity’s who is strange in his familiarity: the stranger. the question that we posed at the outset, namely: “whole way of life” (1996:27). Significantly, Obviously these reflections have been How do we account for the particular affective Schmitt argues that the political as based on the articulated at a high level of abstraction. In order power of right-populist discourse? The answer fundamental, existential opposition between for this set of theses to be fully defended they must lie in the mechanism of abjection. Here the “friend and enemy” can be seen as running would need to be redeemed, as hypotheses, in Somalis are depicted as a horde that, literally, parallel to, but irreducible to the aesthetic detailed empirical terms that would engage with threatens to, as Fallaci puts it, “cancel our culture, opposition between “the beautiful and the ugly,” the subtle differences between various forms of our art, our science, our identity, our morals, our the moral opposition between “good and the populist discourse in their social and historical values, our pleasures” (84). More than that, they evil,” and the religious opposition of “the sacred specificity. are depicted as literally threatening to drown the and the profane.” While irreducible to these Nonetheless, I shall try to make my thesis a great monuments of Western civilization—a distinctions, Schmitt suggests when some or all little more concrete by referring to a book that civilization that pre-dates Islamic civilization— of these oppositions line up in a particular way, caused something of a scandal in Europe. I am in shit. Thus, Fallaci’s language ab-jects the they can reinforce the basic political distinction referring to the book written by an Italian stranger; it constitutes the stranger as that which between friend and enemy. journalist living in New York, Oriana Fallaci, arouses immediate disgust and revulsion in I would suggest that the particular force of entitled The Rage and the Pride (2001). Like recent individual bodies and, ultimately, in the body right-populist discourse lies in the manner in novels by Michel Houellebecq (1998) and politic as a whole and must, as a consequence, which these oppositions between the beautiful Martin Walser (2002), Fallaci’s book in an be jettisoned. Abjection is the mechanism by and the ugly, the good and the bad, the sacred uncanny way manifests the logic of right-populist which the stranger becomes the very and the profane and, of course, friend and foe discourse precisely in its rhetorical manifestation of the ugly, the evil, the profane are made to line up in a specific way. The transformation of the social stranger into the and, as a consequence, that which must be violently mechanism through which the social stranger political enemy. The actual argument of the book excluded. becomes transformed into the political enemy is is of little consequence, consisting as it does of a If what I have been arguing is correct, then what Kristeva calls “ab-jection.” In superficial tirade against Islam as such. The the question that must be confronted has to do psychoanalytic terms, ab-jection is the violent central thesis is that the West is unable to with the implications of right-populist political expulsion—as in vomiting—of that which recognize the danger that its civilization faces in discourse for liberal-democracy per se. In seeking within the body pushes against the border the form of a “Reverse Crusade” from the Muslim to translate globalization anxieties into fear of between “inner” and “outer.” The abject, in world. strangers, right-populism doesn’t simply represent other words, is the death that inhabits life in Of interest, however, is not so much the what one intervention in liberal democratic politics the form of the body’s fluids and waste products. as the how. That is to say, Fallaci’s language amongst others, that is to say, to reduce if not As Kristeva explains: overflows with figures of abjection: bodily fluids, eliminate immigration, force the integration of These body fluids, this defilement, this wastes, ripe and foul odors, swarming vermin. immigrant communities, withdraw from the shit are what life withstands, hardly and Invoking her barbed interviews with Yasser European Union, crack down on crime, etc. with difficulty, on the part of death. There, Arafat from the early 1970’s, Fallaci argues that Rather, right-populism seeks to fundamentally I am at the border of my condition as a the Palestinian leader, with his “smelly saliva” redefine the nature of the relation between living being. My body extricates itself, as (2001:63, 93), “keeps his people in shit” (65). contestants in the game of politics. That is to being alive, from that border. My wastes Fallaci calls Saudi Arabia “that stinky bank vault” say, the real challenge of right-populism lies in drop so that I might live, until, from loss (69). She writes derisively of the “idiots who did its attempt to re-define the nature of the political to loss, nothing remains in me and my not smell the bad smells of a Holy War to come” itself. It is important to resist the temptation— entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, (85). She claims that “the mosques of Milan and richly indulged in by the French media, for cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of Turin and Rome simply overflow with terrorists” example—to situate right-populism somewhere

SRB 13.3 (2003) - 5 beyond the pale of liberal-democracy. In is nothing other than the methodical and Foster, Hal (1996) Return of the Real: The contrast, an insightful analysis of the problem implacable attempt to fill the split that divides Avant-garde at the of the Century. Cambridge, of fremdenfeindlichkeit (hatred of the other) in the people by radically eliminating the people Mass.: MIT Press. the German case has been set forth by Christoph of the excluded” (33). Friedman, Thomas (2000) The Lexus and the Menke who argues that, far from posing a The real challenge of right-populism lies in Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. NY: challenge to liberal democracy from outside, this the fact that it breaks with a tradition of liberal Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. phenomenon constitutes liberal-democracy’s political theory based on the idea that the own “dark zones” (2001). Because liberal- Gandesha, Samir (2002) “Safe Streets” in legitimacy of the state is simply the formalization democracy insists upon its own neutrality—that Crime and Ornament: The Arts and Popular of consensual relations that already exist in the it is possible, indeed necessary, to separate Culture in the Shadow of Adolf Loos, edited by communicative contexts of civil society. This questions of justice or the right from those of Melony Ward and Bernie Miller. Toronto: YYZ tradition finds expression in the work of Jürgen the good—it is blind to its own implicit Books. Habermas and John Rawls and goes back to normative claims. And, following Foucault, Giddens, Anthony (1991) Modernity and social contract theory of Locke. Against this Menke contends that the “normal” is Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern tradition is a form of conservative political inextricable from the production of the Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. theory that emphasizes conflict and insecurity “abnormal” or what is other. and, accordingly, grounds the legitimacy of the Hall, Stuart (1988) The Hard Road to Yet, one might ask, if the liberal-democracy state, above all, in its ability to establish order Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. is an order that, always already, produces and and security. Representatives of this tradition, London: Verso. excludes the “other,” how is it possible to which stretches back to Thomas Hobbes, include Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire. account for the mobilization not just within but, Carl Schmitt, Samuel P. Huntington, Henry Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. ultimately, against liberal-democracy by way of Kissinger and Hans Morgenthau (Cf. Strong in Haraway, Donna (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, a strategy that seeks to turn the social stranger Schmitt 1996). The crucial difference between and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: into a political enemy? I would argue, in these two traditions is that while the latter Routledge. contrast, that the production of the normal and recognizes the political nature of the state “all the abnormal has its basis in the very the way down,” so to speak, the former rests on Harrison, Trevor (1995) Of Passionate foundations of democratic legitimacy: namely the fiction that power is in some way subordinate Intensity: Right-wing Populism and the Reform popular sovereignty. In a manner that has to law. Party. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. escaped analyses of the phenomenon, populism Heidegger, M (1962) Being and Time. trans. exploits the slippage in the very term in which Samir Gandesha teaches in the Department of J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson San Francisco. the legitimacy of the democratic order is Humanities at Simon Fraser University in Horkheimer, M and Adorno, T. W. (1972) grounded. In contrast to the ancien regime, Vancouver. Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming. grounded in the idea of divine right, democracy New York: Continuum Press. is founded in the will of the people. Now, such a popular will can be said to embody a particular References Houellebecq , Michel (1998) Les particules élémentaires. Paris: J’ai lu. claim, that is a political will, to universality (as Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, Else et al. in the case of the French nation) or, conversely, (1969)The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Kitching, Gavin (1989) Development and it can be said to embody a universal claim to Norton. Underdevelopment in Historical Perspective. particularity as in the case of the Romantic London: Routledge. Agamben, Giorgio (2000) Means without revolts in the wake of Napoleonic domination Kristeva, Julia (1982) Powers of Horror: An of Europe. In each case, and against the liberal Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. V.Binetti and C.Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New fiction that natural law governs political power York: Columbia University Press. by being translated into the forms of positive Minnesota Press. law, namely, a constitutional order, each Althusser, Louis (1971) “Ideological State Kymlicka, Will (1996) Multicultural contending claim is political through and Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. through. Brewster. London: New Left Books. Oxford: OUP. What I would suggest, then, is that the Arendt, Hannah (1973) The Origins of Laclau, Ernesto (1977) Politics and Ideology appeal to the “people” works at two levels Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace. in Marxist Theory. London: Verso. simultaneously: it constructs a relation between Barber, Benjamin (1996) Jihad vs. McWorld: Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal (1985) “friends” and “enemies” in the service of How the World is Both Falling Apart and Coming Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso. protecting “our way of life” against those who Together—And What this Means for Democracy. Loch, D and Heitmeyer, W (eds.) (2001) would seek to destroy it; and, consequently, NY: Times Books. Schattenseiten der Globalisierung. Frankfurt am returns to the roots of liberal-democracy in Main: Suhrkamp Verlag: 11-40. popular sovereignty, in the will of the people. Betz, H.G. and Immerfal, S (eds.) (1998) The Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich (1978) The In other words, the potentially explosive nature New Politics of the Right: Neo-Populist Parties and Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Marx- of the discourse right-populism lies not simply Movements in Established Democracies. NY: St. Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker. NY: Norton. in its mobilization of the abject, but also in its Marti’s Press. ability to exploit a crucial equivocation lying at Bhabha, Homi (1994) The Location of Menke, Christoph (2001) “Dunkelzonen der the heart of liberal-democracy as Hannah Culture. London: Routledge. Demokratie,” Die Zeit 15. Arendt (1973) and, more recently, Giorgio Butler, Judith (1993) Bodies that Matter: On Mouzelis, Nicos (1985) Politics in the Semi- Agamben (2000) have noted. This is the the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge. Periphery. London: Routledge. equivocation between the people as the Castells, Manuel (2000) The Information Age: Neumann, Franz (1986) “Angst und Politik,” oppressed and the people as an organic entity; Economy, Society and Culture: Vol. I: The Rise of in Demokratischer und autoritärer Staat. Frankfurt the part and the whole. “The people” signifies the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. am Main: Fischer: 261-91. two contradictory things: (1) an integrated body politic as a whole, as in, for example, the US Davis, Mike (1990) City of Quartz: Parekh, Bhikhu (2000) Rethinking Constitution’s language of “We the people”; and, Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. NY: Vintage/ Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political (2) as a part of the body politic, a multiplicity Random House. Theory. Basingstoke: MacMillan Press. of needful and excluded bodies. While Die Zeit 37, 2002 Patten, Steve (1999) “The Reform Party’s historically there had always been a way of Dubiel, Helmut Die Zeit 37, 2002. Re-imagining of the Canadian Nation” Journal naming the semantic split, for example the of Canadian Studies 34/1 (Spring). Esping-Andersen, G (1985) Politics Against Roman distinction between plebs and populus, — (1999) “Citizenship, the New Right and with the French Revolution sovereignty comes Markets: The Social Democratic Road to Power. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Social Justice: Examining the Reform Party’s to be rooted in a single entity. When Discourse on Citizenship,” Socialist Studies sovereignty becomes so invested, the poor, the Fallaci, Oriana (2001) The Rage and the Pride. Bulletin 57-58 (July-Dec). marginalized, the “wretched of the earth,” New York: Rizzoli. become an “intolerable scandal in every sense” (2000:33). According to Agamben: “Our time

SRB 13.3 (2003) - 6 Putnam, Robert (2000) Bowling Alone: The Schmitt, Carl (1996) The Concept of the Theweleit, K (1987) Male Fantasies Vol. I: Collapse and Revival of American Community. NY: Political, trans. George Schwab. Chicago: Women, Floods, Bodies, Histories, trans. S. Simon and Schuster. University of Chicago Press. Conway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pzeworski, A (1986) Paper Stones: A History Simmel, Georg (1971) “The Stranger,” On Press. of Electoral Socialism. Chicago: University of Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald Walser, Martin (2002) Tod eines Kritikers. Chicago Press. Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.

SRB Insight Becoming-Revolutionary By Paul Patton

t the end of “Class Struggle and codification of social processes. Social codes sense but also in a broader sense which includes Postmodernism,” Slavoj ðZizekiðek suggests determine the quality of particular flows, for a juridical and a political as well as a technocratic Athat the problem for today’s politico- example prestige as opposed to consumption apparatus. Capital as an economic system forms philosophical scene is to reassert the value of goods, thereby establishing indirect relations an axiomatic but so does capitalist society: “The political action that aims “seriously to change between flows of different kinds. They also true axiomatic is that of the social machine itself, the existing order” (ed. Butler 2000: 127). This determine the manner in which, within certain which takes the place of the old codings and entails rupture with the reformist consensus limits, a surplus is drawn from the primary flows: organizes all the decoded flows, including the shared by otherwise opposed philosophers such in code-governed societies, surplus value flows of scientific and technical code, for the as Derrida, Habermas and Rorty, for whom invariably takes the form of code surplus. Finally, benefit of the capitalist system and in the service revolutionary ideals are dangerous precursors of because they are extrinsic to the processes of of its ends” (1977: 223). There is a tension totalitarian politics. It implies giving up the idea production and circulation of goods, systems of between these two dimensions of modern that revolutionary politics are doomed to failure codification imply the existence of forms of society, since capital itself is not in the first and reaffirming the ambition of changing “the collective belief, judgment and evaluation on instance an apparatus of capture like the State very fundamental structural principle of society” the part of the agents of these processes. but a non-territorially based axiomatic with an (2000: 93). By contrast, capitalism has no need to mark immense power of deterritorialization. The Where do the writings of Deleuze and bodies or to constitute a memory for its agents. capitalist axiomatic generates new social forces Guattari stand in relation to this liberal Since it works by means of an axiomatic intrinsic and flows of matter and energy while at the same consensus? On the one hand, they clearly signal to the social processes of production, circulation time repressing the very flows which are the basis their dissatisfaction with Rorty’s “Western and consumption it is a profoundly cynical of its restless and cosmopolitan energy. Deleuze democratic, popular conception of philosophy” machine: “the capitalist is merely striking a pose comments in his interview with Negri (“Control (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 144) as cultural when he bemoans the fact that nowadays no and Becoming”) that what he and Guattari dinner conversation. They outline a conception one believes in anything any more” (Deleuze found most useful in Marx was “his analysis of of philosophy as the creation of untimely and Guattari 1987: 250). capitalism as an immanent system that’s concepts that is the antithesis of Rorty’s view constantly overcoming its own limitations, and Deleuze and Guattari assert that it is “the then coming up against them once more in that “Western social and political thought may real characteristics of axiomatics that lead us to have had the last conceptual revolution it broader form, because its fundamental limit is say that capitalism and present-day politics are Capital itself” (Deleuze 1995: 171). needs” (Rorty 1989: 63). On the other hand, an axiomatic in the literal sense (1987: 461). they take their distance from traditional Chief among these characteristics is the In this sense, capitalist society is torn (Leninist?) conceptions of revolutionary difference between an axiomatic system and a between two conflicting tendencies. On the one politics, advocating not so much the aim of code. Whereas a code establishes a systematic hand, as Marx and Engels pointed out in The revolution but the pursuit of revolutionary correspondence directly between the elements Communist Manifesto, capitalism threatens to becomings at all levels and in all spheres of of different signifying systems, an axiomatic sweep away all the values of civilised social individual and social life. But is this a recipe for system is defined by purely syntactic rules for existence and replace them with the ‘cash a reformist politics that does not extend to the generation of strings of non-signifying or nexus’. The circulation of capital through the challenging the order of global capitalism? Or uninterpreted symbols. The resultant strings of differential relation between the flows of finance does it imply a politics oriented towards change symbols may be given an interpretation by the and the flows of personal income, along with in the “fundamental structural principle of specification of a model and the assignment of the circulation of information through the society”? In other words, the question I want to significations to elements of the formal electronic circuits of mass communication, address is: what is the force of “revolutionary” language. In these terms, capital may be propels the entire world towards a society in in the phrase “becoming-revolutionary”? supposed to function as “an axiomatic of which all the signs of the past are detached from abstract quantities” (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: their origins and written over with new signs, and the motley representatives of the present 1. Capitalism 228). As a universal equivalent, money is a purely quantitative measure that is indifferent appear as “paintings of all that has ever been Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the to the qualitative character of flows of different believed” (1977: 34). fundamental structural principles of capitalist kinds. Commodity production under capitalist On the other hand, capitalism constantly society might appear to support the conclusion conditions generalises this formal equality of all approaches this limit only to displace it further that they favour a reformist politics. In Anti- social goods and relations. Factors of production ahead by reconstituting its own immanent Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, they develop appear in the balance-sheet of an enterprise relative limits. It is as though there were a their own account of capitalism as a unique form simply as units of monetary value. Objects distinction to be drawn between capital of economic and political capture of the social produced under non-capitalist regimes of code understood as a general axiomatic of decoded field. Whereas Marx proposed to explain the may also be drawn into the global market, where flows and capitalism understood as a mechanism nature of society in each epoch in terms of the they are exchanged equally as items of value or set of mechanisms for the maintenance of a mode of production, Deleuze and Guattari alongside capitalistically produced goods. To the relatively stable assemblage of the social factors propose to “define social formations by machinic extent that they are subsumed under the required to sustain the extraction of flow surplus. processes and not by modes of production (these exchange relation, objects produced under the on the contrary depend on the processes)” The State bears the burden of this latter most diverse regimes of code, such as artefacts function. A principal function of the State is (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 435). The of indigenous handicraft, and products of fully machinic process peculiar to capitalism on their the reterritorialization of the mutant flows automated production systems, may be “formally generated by the dynamic of the system as a account is the capture of social production and united” within the capitalist axiomatic. reproduction by means of an intrinsic axiomatic whole. The State reterritorializes those flows so regulation of those processed. Previous social Deleuze and Guattari speak of the capitalist as to prevent them breaking loose at the edges machines operate by means of the extrinsic axiomatic in a restricted and primarily economic of the social axiomatic” (1977: 258). As a result,

SRB 13.3 (2003) - 7 terms, becoming-woman does not involve Deleuze and Guattari argue, modern capitalist 3. Deterritorialization societies are caught between the two poles of imitating real women but rather creating a an extreme futurism and an archaism, between molecular or micro-femininity in the subject A Thousand Plateaus is an ontology of a deterritorialization which, if left unchecked, concerned by reproducing the characteristic multiplicities or assemblages which are defined might carry them towards an absolute threshold features, movements or affects of what passes for by their “cutting edges of deterritorialization” and “the Urstaat that they would like to “the feminine” in a given society. (1987: 88). It is also a work of political philosophy, an ethics, not in the sense that it resuscitate as an overcoding and However, while this analysis works for provides tools for the justification or critique of reterritorializing unity” (1977: 260). becoming-animal and becoming-woman, it does political institutions, but in the sense that it not sit well with other types of becoming such as This function of the State points to another privileges these processes of mutation and becoming-imperceptible. Whereas becoming- feature that justifies Deleuze and Guattari’s metamorphosis. Deterritorialization is both the animal and becoming-woman are defined in adaptation of the concept of an axiomatic system overriding tendency in the world that Deleuze terms of an alliance with an imaginary body which to describe capitalist society. Subject to certain and Guattari describe and the key to their produces or facilitates deterritorialization, overriding constraints such as consistency or the understanding of revolutionary politics. generation of surplus value, there is considerable becoming-imperceptible is of a different order. scope for variation in the axioms which may be This is a becoming which Deleuze and Guattari In Plateau 15 “Conclusion: Concrete Rules appropriate for a given model. The history of define in terms of an individual being reduced to and Abstract Machines,” deterritorialization is capitalism has involved experimentation and an abstract line that can connect or conjugate defined with deceptive simplicity as the complex evolution with regard to axioms, its successive with other lines thereby making “a world that movement or process by which something escapes crises each provoke a response which may take can overlay the first one, like a transparency” or departs from a given territory (1987: 508). This the form of the addition of new axioms (the (1987: 280). It involves a movement which is process always involves at least two elements, incorporation of trade unions, centralised wage infinite and therefore imperceptible. It is a namely the territory which is being left behind fixing, social welfare etc.) or the elimination of becoming in which everything changes while or reconstituted and the deterritorializing existing axioms (the elimination of trade unions appearing to remain the same. In effect, element. A territory of any kind always includes and currency controls leading to the becoming-imperceptible stands apart as an “vectors of deterritorialization,” either because the deregulation of banking, finance and labour absolute becoming, the pure form or immanent territory itself is inhabited by dynamic movements markets). None of these axioms is essential to end of all becomings. I want to suggest that this or processes or because the assemblage which the continued functioning of capital as such, difference in kind between becoming- sustains it is connected to other assemblages. any more than are the axioms of bourgeois social imperceptible and becoming-animal should be Marx’s account of primitive accumulation life. Economic activity is increased when family understood in terms of the conceptual provides an example of one such vector of members dine individually at McDonalds. relationship between becoming and deterritorialization in relation to the social and deterritorialization. economic space of feudal agriculture, namely the The political lesson that Deleuze and development of commodity markets and the The becomings which interest Deleuze and Guattari draw from this analysis is that, at the manner in which this encouraged the shift to Guattari are minoritarian becomings. They define macro-social level of economic and political large-scale commercial production. The minority in opposition to majority, but insist that institutions, it is always possible to modify or conjugation of the stream of displaced labour with the difference between them is not quantitative replace particular axioms. While the capitalist the flow of deterritorialized money capital since social minorities can be more numerous economy may constitute an axiomatic system provided the conditions under which capitalist than the so-called majority. Both majority and inseparable from the fabric of modern social life, industry could develop. this does not mean that particular axioms cannot minority involve the relationship of a group to be removed or replaced by others. Moreover, it the larger collectivity of which it is a part. Given The typology of processes of is important to do so since people’s conditions any socially significant distinction between two deterritorialization at the end of A Thousand of life depend upon such changes. But this groups, the majority is defined as the group which Plateaus exposes further complexities within the suggests that Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of most closely approximates the standard while the concept. Firstly, deterritorialization is either the structural principles of modern society can minority is defined by the gap which separates relative or absolute. It is relative in so far as it only support a reformist politics of piecemeal its members from that standard. Majority can take concerns only movements within the actual - as social change. In fact it supports more than this, many simultaneous forms within society. In so opposed to the virtual - order of things. Secondly, but in order to see how we need to examine the far as the subject of modern European society and deterritorialization is always “inseparable from ontology of processes such as becoming and political community is human, adult, masculine correlative reterritorializations” (1987: 509). deterritorialization which inform their social and predominantly white, then animals, women, Thirdly, relative deterriorialization can take theory. children and non-whites are minorities, and either a negative or a positive form. It is negative becoming-animal, becoming-child, becoming- when the deterritorialized element is immediately woman and becoming-coloured are potential subjected to forms of reterritorialization which 2. Becoming paths of deterritorialization of the majority. enclose or obstruct its line of flight. Elsewhere, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between the The concept of revolution is not developed A liberal politics of difference might simply connection of deterritorialized flows, which refers in Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy defend the right of the minorities to figure in the to the ways in which distinct deterritorializations but the concept of becoming is elaborated in majority, seeking to broaden the standard so that can interact to accelerate one another, and the the course of Plateau 10 in A Thousand Plateaus. it becomes male or female - European or non conjugation of distinct flows which refers to the This plateau is devoted to the analysis of a European - hetero or homosexual etc. But this ways in which one may incorporate or “overcode” variety of different kinds of becoming: relies on a conception of social minorities as another thereby effecting a relative blockage of becoming-animal, becoming-woman, outcasts but with the potential to be included its movement (1987: 220). In either form, becoming-intense, becoming-imperceptible and among the majority. Deleuze and Guattari reterritorialization does not mean returning to the so on. In Deleuze and the Political, I suggested propose another way of conceiving of minorities, original territory but rather the ways in which that becomings may be regarded as processes of namely as the agents of process of becoming- deterritorialized elements recombine and enter increase or enhancement in the powers of one different from the majority. Understood in this into new relations in the constitution of a new body, carried out in relation to the powers of manner, minorities are collectivities of an entirely assemblage or the modification of the old. It is another, but without involving appropriation of different kind endowed with the potential to positive when the line of flight prevails over those powers (Patton 2000). One way in which threaten the very existence of a majority. Thus, secondary reterritorializations, even though it bodies can increase their powers is by entering to become-minoritarian is to embark upon a may still fail to connect with other into alliances with other bodies that serve to process of divergence from or deterritorialization deterritorialized elements or enter into a new reinforce or enhance their own powers, but of the norm, while applied to the majority itself, assemblage with new forces. these alliances can be with actual, material minoritarian-becoming involves the subjection bodies or with the virtual, non-material bodies of the standard to a process of continuous By contrast, absolute deterritorialization that inhabit the social imaginary. The processes variation or deterritorialization (1987: 106). refers to a qualitatively different type of movement that Deleuze and Guattari call becoming-animal Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming is which concerns the virtual as opposed to the and becoming-woman involve alliances of the thus intimately linked to the concept of the actual order of things. This is the state in which latter kind, namely with the mythical powers minoritarian, and through this to the processes there are only qualitative multiplicities, the state and capacities attributed to animals or with the of deterritorialization which define a given of “unformed matter on the plane of consistency” affects traditionally assigned to women. In these qualitative multiplicity. (1987: 55-6). Whereas relative

SRB 13.3 (2003) - 8 deterritorialization takes place on the molar that fundamental social change happens all the case, there is a relation to the pure event of dimension of individual or collective life, time. Sometimes it occurs through the eruption revolution which is not reducible to the absolute deterritorialization takes place on the of events that force a break with the past but particular forms of its incarnation and which molecular plane of social existence. Absolute sometimes by imperceptible changes of axioms guarantees the possibility of other kinds of deterritorialization “connects lines of flight, raises that open up a new field of possibilities for action. revolution. This relation to the pure event or them to the power of an abstract vital line or A legal decision, a technological innovation or a the concept of revolution as such allows us to draws a plane of consistency” (1987: 510). sudden widespread but imperceptible shift of imagine the possibility that new forms of However, talk of absolute deterritorialization as loyalties might set in train processes that do lead positive deterritorialization might emerge. It is an event or process which takes place or happens to “revolutionary connections.” Since absolute on this more optimistic note the Deleuze’s is potentially misleading if it suggests that this is deterritorialization is the immanent condition of Dialogues with Claire Parnet conclude: since a further stage or something that comes after relative deterritorialization in both its positive and outcomes are always uncertain we need not relative deterritorialization. On the contrary, negative forms, and since there is no overriding assume “the eternal impossibility of revolution.” absolute deterritorialization is always present and logic to the manner in which these processes Instead, we can assume that all kinds of manifests itself only in and through relative unfold, there is no telling in advance which mutating machines are being developed and deterritorialization. For this reason, Deleuze and processes of deterritorialization will rupture the interacting with one another, tracing a plane Guattari suggest that there is “a perpetual fundamental structural principles of the present of consistency which has the potential to immanence of absolute deterritorialization social order. This is the force of Deleuze and undermine the plane of organization within relative deterritorialization” (1987:56). Guattari’s assertion that societies are defined less constituted by the forms of State capture. As a Elsewhere, they describe absolute by their contradictions than by their lines of flight result, “why not think that a new type of deterritorialization as “the deeper movement ... or deterritorialization. There are no guarantees revolution is in the course of becoming identical to the earth itself” (1987: 143). of progress with regard to the outcome of a given possible?” (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 147). It follows that absolute deterritorialization is form of deterritorialization. Does this political expressed in both positive and negative processes philosophy entail a pessimism or nihilism about Paul Patton is Head of the School of of relative deterritorialization. It is expressed in the human condition, a certain tragic note as Philosophy, University of New South Wales, positive form when there is recombination of Negri suggests? Deleuze replies that it does not in Sydney, Australia. This paper was delivered deterritorialized elements or different processes and that, on the contrary, the fact that at The Erasmus Summer School on Social of deterritorialization in mutually supportive and movements can always become bogged down in Ontology, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, productive ways. In the terms of Deleuze and history or that revolutionary processes can turn 10-12 June 2002. Guattari’s earlier distinction, this occurs when out badly implies the need for a permanent reterritorialization involves assemblages of “concern” or vigilance with regard to the fate of References connection rather than conjugation. In this case, the lines of flight along which movement is they suggest at one point, we are dealing with possible. Deleuze, Gilles (1995) Negotiations trans. “revolutionary connections in opposition to the Deleuze tends to invoke the idea of Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia conjugations of the axiomatic” (1987: 473). becoming-revolutionary in response to concerns University Press. How do the different kinds of becoming relate about the historical fate of revolutions (Deleuze Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix (1977) to this distinction between absolute and relative 1995: 173). For example in his interview with Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, deterritorialization and the positive and negative Negri he argues that the claim that revolutions trans. Robert Hurley, et alia, New York: The forms of the latter? I suggest that becoming- always turn out badly confuses two things which Viking Press. ought to be considered independently of one imperceptible should be understood as the form —(1987) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian another, namely, the historical fate of revolutions, of becoming in which absolute Massumi, Minneapolis: university of Minnesota the way they turn out historically, and the deterritorialization attains its fullest and most Press. positive expression. Moreover, becoming- “becoming-revolutionary” of people, people’s —(1994) What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh revolutionary should be understood along similar revolutionary becoming: “It is not the same people Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: lines, not as a becoming defined by virtual in the two cases.” It is not the same people Columbia University Press. alliance with the imagined powers of political or because the historical case concerns other kinds of revolution, but as a higher form macropolitical or molar individuals, constituted Deleuze, Gilles and Parnet, Claire (1987) of becoming which involves the expression of as subjects on a given social, political and affective Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara absolute deterritorialization in positive form. plane of organisation, while the case of becoming Habberjam, London: The Athlone Press. concerns individuals understood as micropolitical Patton, Paul (2000) Deleuze and the or molecular assemblages constituted on a plane Political, London: Routledge. 4. Becoming-Revolutionary of consistency and defined by their possibilities Rorty, Richard (1989) Contingency, Irony, This analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s for transformation or lines of flight. and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge concepts shows that they do envisage the In other words, Deleuze distinguishes University Press. effective transformation of a given field or between the agents of revolution understood as assemblage. Moreover, it enables us to appreciate a macropolitical event and the “agents” of a ðZizekiðek, Slavoj (2000) “Class Struggle and the sense of ‘revolutionary’ in the phrase micropolitical process. In the one case, there is a Postmodernism,” Contingency, Hegemony, ‘becoming-revolutionary’. For the lesson to be relation to the particular historical form in which Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, drawn from the theory of deterritorialization is the event of revolution is actualized; in the other ed. Judith Butler et alia, London: Verso.

Cathode Ray Cages Olivier Razac, L’Écran et le zoo: spectacle et domestication, des expositions coloniales à Loft Story. Paris: Éditions Denoël, 2002.

By Ron Harpelle

n a zoo, we do for animals what we In the Life of Pi, the protagonist argues that the loss of freedom. Accordingly, animals in cus- have done for ourselves with houses: because of the protection and nurturing af- tody are provided with “a lookout, a place for Iwe bring together in a small space forded animals in a zoo, their quality of life is resting, for eating and drinking, for bathing, what in the wild is spread out.... A house better and life expectancy longer than that of for grooming” and they soon adapt to the con- is a compressed territory where our basic their counterparts in the wild. Pi states that the fines of their enclosure (Martel 2002: 44). Once needs can be fulfilled close by and safely. “heart of the art and science of zookeeping” is an animal is comfortable with its new surround- A sound zoo enclosure is the equivalent getting the captives used to being observed by ings, the difficult task of reducing its “flight dis- for an animal....” human beings and this calls for the need to pro- tance” is undertaken in order to put them on Yann Martel, Life of Pi (2002:19) vide a suitable living environment in order to display. Knowledge of the animal, and guaran- minimize the psychological damage caused by

SRB 13.3 (2003) - 9 teeing its comfort and protection, are the tools quered people on exhibit. However, unlike kid- with one another. The variations on the theme used to diminish its flight distance. With care napped aboriginal peoples from distance conti- seem endless, but Razac offers a sound analysis and consideration a zookeeper can produce “an nents, or the occasional slave whose life of drudg- of why so many people around the world are emotionally stable, stress-free wild animal that ery was diverted from the plantations of the attracted to this kind of programming. The au- not only stays put, but is healthy, lives a very long Americas to the households of the European thor builds on his earlier discussion of the art of time, eats without fuss, behaves and socializes in elite, the Laplanders were put on display in a zookeeping and human exhibition in Europe as natural ways and – the best sign – reproduces,” natural setting and customers were led to be- a means of deconstructing the mechanisms of preferably in the presence of observers (Martel lieve that what they were observing was real. In presentation used by the makers of reality TV. 2002: 19). A zoo is a controlled environment Hagenbeck’s garden, the people were real, the Razac shows how human fascination with the where people can safely observe wild animals and reindeer were real and the setting was “natu- exotic has translated into a billion dollar indus- where animals are given a better life. ral.” The exposition not only helped establish try and a cultural phenomenon. Like the pro- The art and science of zookeeping has a long Hagenbeck’s credentials as a zoologist, but it cre- tagonist in the Life of Pi, Razac delves into the history, but the modern verison was pioneered ated the foundation for all subsequent displays “needs” of the animals on display in a reality in the late nineteenth century by Carl of the human animal. In this new realm of zoo- TV show and provides insights into how broad- Hagenbeck, a renowned German zoologist, ani- logical exhibition, people’s curiosity about the casters, the modern zookeepers, maintain their mal dealer and trainer. Hagenbeck collected world around them was satiated by the absolute exhibits so as to keep them popular with patrons. animals in the wild, bringing them back to Eu- power afforded Europeans as the conquerors of One of the main points made by the author rope where he conducted eugenic experiments the world and a new form of voyeurism is that although zoos, and reality TV shows, are on some of them, crossing such things as lions emerged. places where animals can be observed, the spe- and tigers, and where he pioneered new ideas The first part of L’Écran et le zoo explores cies on exhibit also study the observers. To see in animal exhibition. In 1907, Hagenbeck be- the reception in Europe of government spon- and be seen suggests that the animals on both came the “father of the cageless zoo” for his de- sored exhibitions of colonized peoples. Razac’s sides of the cage act and react in accordance with sign of the Hamburg Zoo, a revolutionary park discussion of exhibitions of humans in Europe their perception of how they should respond to where moated exhibits and technological inno- in the decades that bridged the 19th and 20th the presence of other beings. Like Foucault’s dis- vations like the use of artificial concrete centuries, much like Pi’s descriptions in Martel’s course on the prison, Razac argues that a zoo rockwork were combined with exotic looking novel, focuses on the function and methodol- enclosure or a reality TV set are one in the same plants to create “naturalistic simulations” (Hyson ogy of zookeeping. The difference is that Razac’s in that they create a context and expectations 2000: 32). In Hagenbeck’s zoo, animals roamed analysis of the zoo demonstrates how human to which animals must adjust and adapt. Ani- and socialized more freely in an environment beings were zoomorphised by the people who mals on exhibit change their habits to conform that was designed to be “realistic” in order to put them on display and by those who came to with their new surroundings, which are a prod- make them feel at home and give the observer watch. Razac presents exhibition as a self-fulfill- uct of zookeepers’ desires to provide “naturalis- an idea of the animal’s natural habitat. In some ing prophesy for the observers who wanted Af- tic simulations” of environment and to ensure cases, predators and their prey were placed in ricans to be uncivilized and therefore incapable that observers can see the captives. Therefore, the same enclosure. Hagenbeck’s objective was of ruling themselves. This is because the ethno- the act of observation automatically alters that to make visitors and animals alike “imagine graphic exhibitions discussed in L’Écran et le zoo which is being observed. Flight distance is less- themselves in the wild” (Hyson 2000: 32). As a were a function of the rapid expansion of colo- ened as a matter of course and everyday activi- result of Hagenbeck’s efforts, zoos everywhere nialism at the end of the nineteenth century ties like feeding, sleeping and sex become part began examining the aesthetics of their exhibits which gave impetus to European government of the spectacle. Observers, whether looking at and soon the small cages that characterized ani- efforts to justify the “burden” of conquest. These Laplanders in the 19th century or a group of mal displays prior to 1907 gave way to the mod- exhibitions, that also found their way North young people in the 21st century, expect behav- ern zoos we know today. America, became a common part of the celebra- iour consistent with what they understand to be Olivier Razac’s L’Écran et le zoo: spectacle et tions of empire. the truth and, as long as what they are looking domestication, des expositions coloniales à Loft Story, Conquered peoples were presented to audi- for is present, they will accept everything they begins with a look at a much less celebrated as- ences in their “natural” and obviously non-West- see as being real. The people who “volunteer” pect of Carl Hagenbeck’s career. In 1874, ern state. Marquees advertised the exhibition (compete for the positions advertised by televi- Hagengeck introduced Europe to “exotic” mem- of Dahomey Warriors, Cannibals and Head sion producers), to have their daily lives re- bers of the human family, one of the most ubiq- Hunters at a time when European armies were corded, edited and diffused as part of a reality uitous animal species on earth. This little known fanning across Africa and venturing into the TV program, have an understanding of both episode was an innovation in zookeeping because Indian Ocean and Orient in search of raw ma- what they want to present to the observer and the event was welcomed by the people who had terials and secure markets for industrial goods what they expect people want to see. An unlikely read descriptions penned by the adventurers who (65). In this way conquest provided entertain- grouping of individuals, with varied ethnicities, ventured to the distant reaches of the planet in ment and the entertainment provided justifica- sexual orientations, class backgrounds, education lock step with European imperialism. tion for further conquest. Anthropologists be- levels and whatever else advertisers want their Hagenbeck’s first exhibition of “savage” human came the apologists for world domination and clients to see, are put in (sur)real situations and beings took place when he placed a family of the vanquished became prizes to be put on dis- viewers accept what they see because they get Laplanders and a few reindeer in his garden and play. Consequently, the zoological display of hu- what marketers know they are looking for. charged people admission to observe them. The mans remained popular through the first dec- However, “Loft Story” is only one contribu- family lived in a hut in the garden, going about ades of the twentieth century and culminated tion to the rapidly growing phenomenon of re- their daily lives under the scrutiny of anyone who in the 1930s when the “burdens of empire” be- ality TV. Demand for the genre spread quickly could afford the price of admission. The family came too great and a changing world spelled and, like the offspring of Hagenbeck’s eugenic demonstrated such things as the construction of the end of an era. The decline of interest in experiments with animals, were crossed with a sleigh and lassoing of reindeer, but in the end, human exhibition coincided with the decline other reality programs to produce similar, but the breast feeding of the baby was what patrons of colonialism, but people’s desire to observe different versions of the same thing. Some are liked most. Just as they would for the feeding the intimate lives of others continued and found like game shows, others present physical chal- time for seals or other programmed activities at expression in other forms. lenges and they all invite viewer participation any zoo, people lined up to see a woman nursing Several decades after the last “ethnographic through the Internet. Among the more inno- her child. (29-30) Like the animals found in any exhibition,” “reality TV” has filled the airwaves vative is a Dutch program, set in a restaurant, other zoo, the intimate aspects of the daily lives and, in the second part of L’Écran et le zoo, Razac that combines profit with voyeurism and the of the people on display were subject to public examines this new form of voyeurism. In almost desire for fame by asking viewers to drop by, scrutiny and his exhibition was a financial suc- every country in the world people are placed in order a meal and be part of the show. L’Écran et cess. defined spaces with complete strangers and le zoo prepares the reader to better appreciate Hagenbeck’s exhibition was not the first time asked to go about their daily business under the this new genre of human exhibition, but Razac Europeans had seen “exotic” foreigners, but it watchful eye of surveillance cameras. One of does not stray beyond an analysis of “Loft Story” was a novel way of presenting them. During the the most popular reality TV programmes to hit and does not link reality TV to the documen- 400 years after Christopher Columbus brought Europe is “Loft Story,” a show allowing viewers tary films that bridged the gap with the colonial back the first human “specimens” from the to observe a group of young people thrown to- exhibitions of the past. Americas, Europeans saw a steady flow of con- gether in an apartment and simply asked to live

SRB 13.3 (2003) - 10 Although the title of L’Écran et le zoo sug- ing used to shoot dramatized “re-creations” of the observers are not isolated from the subjects gests it is a study of the evolution of and reaction events for programs like “Top Cops” and other on reality TV because the new specimens are to the public display of human beings from Eu- early reality TV shows. Then, with the advent of from somewhere down the street and they look ropean colonial exhibitions to “Loft Story,” the “Survivor,” “Loft Story” and other recent hybrids, just like us. Like Hagenbeck’s cageless zoo, real- book is primarily an examination of the similari- the current formulas for reality TV developed. ity TV makes us predators and prey in the same ties between the zoo and the TV screen. In These stages in the evolution of reality TV need enclosure. Razac’s book, the story of human exhibitions to be understood in order to better appreciate ends in the 1930s with the decline of colonialism the veracity of Razac’s analysis. Ron Harpelle is an historian and filmmaker and resurfaces nearly fifty years after the debut L’Écran et le zoo is important precisely because who teaches in the Department of History at of television. The leap forward does not detract it suggests new possibilities for the reading of texts Lakehead University. He is the author of The from the book, but an important stage in the like film, theatre and other entertainment that West Indians of Costa Rica (2000) and is the evolution of reality TV is missing. With Robert rely on the exhibition of human beings. Olivier producer/co-director of the documentary film, Flaherty’s release of “Nanook of the North” in Razac’s contribution to our understanding of hu- Banana Split (2002). 1922, the documentary film became a significant man exhibition is refreshing because he reminds medium for permitting the public access to the us that we are, in a sense, on TV all the time, References intimacies of other people’s lives. Filmmakers like and, in a world that is moulded by what program- Hyson, Jeffrey (2000) “Jungles of Eden: The De- Flaherty, a native of Thunder Bay, Ontario, and ming executives decide we should watch, the dan- sign of American Zoos, in Michel Conan, (ed.), the “father” of the documentary film, picked up ger lies in not being able to distinguish between Environmentalism in Landscape Architecture, where the colonial exhibitions left off. The film reality and the TV. Reality TV becomes real Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Research camera, directors and editors, brought viewers when it crosses the threshold of the television Library Collection, Vol. 22, Dumbarton Oaks into the villages and homes of people living in screen and becomes a part of our world. L’Écran Colloquium on the History of Landscape the most isolated regions of the earth. The docu- et le zoo warns us that reality TV, like colonial Architecture. mentary style touted by Canada’s John Grierson exhibitions of the past, distorts and confirms evolved and flourished as means of exposing perceptions of ourselves and the world around Martel, Yann (2002) The Life of Pi, Toronto: “truths” about the world and, in the 70s and 80s, us. The key difference is that unlike the people Vintage. the cross-over to reality TV began. By the late put on display in Europe a century ago, today 1980s documentary camera operators were be- Before Reality TV Jeffrey Ruoff, An American Family: A Televised Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

By Gary Genosko

efore reality TV was, well, reality TV. representations of class and gender than in issues American Family ushered in. The producer, That is, prior to the current flood of of social and ethnic identity” (17). Hence, a Baudrillard claimed, waxed absurd: “’They [the Breality programming was a “creative white, suburban family with five children, two Louds] lived as if we weren’t there’, which also nonfiction series,” an “observational dogs, a swimming pool, etc. fit the bill for an meant ‘they lived ‘as if you were there’ – a documentary,” a piece of “cinema verité” adapted examination of “what happened when a family message to the 20 million or so viewers who to the little screen: An American Family (1973), obtained the trappings of the good life” (17). The followed the series. It is difficult to ascertain the produced by Craig Gilbert for National end of such success would be ruin. truth of the Loud family: does it belong to the Educational Television and distributed by Despite the socio-technical influences on family or to TV?” (Baudrillard 1983: 52). member stations of the Public Broadcasting Gilbert, An American Family simply lacked Neither, it turns out, for the despotic gaze of the Service in the US. This twelve episode serial “historical context.” This grounding didn’t, Ruoff camera has been displaced, diffused, as the many documentary study of the Loud family of Santa explains, survive the proposal stage: “Craig watch the few; gone are the imperatives to Barbara, California is the subject of Jeffrey Ruoff’s Gilbert did not make the series he described in submit to the controlling gaze – you are the gaze, An American Family: A Televised Life. his NET proposal,” (22) which was full of you are the event: “we are all Louds, doomed Television and film historians will no doubt references to the mediascape of this family’s life not to invasion, to pressure, to violence and to contest this origin and produce evidence from as well as familial histories. In the end what won blackmail by the media and their models, but to Canada and the UK, as well as from the US, out was “the drama of the Louds’separation” (22). their induction, to infiltration, to their illegible suggesting earlier sources. Indeed, as Ruoff points The absence of historical context (“reality”) was violence” (Baudrillard 1983: 55). The truth of out what makes his choice seductive is the little made a topic in its own right: in the end, “Gilbert the Loud family is for Baudrillard indecipherable, attention, until very recently, that has been paid was satisfied to portray a family not directly yet post-panoptic. Some recent readers of to the series since its broadcast in 1973 (xx), and connected to the issues of the day in order to Baudrillard, especially New Zealand-based the failure of some scholars of TV families even claim that Americans were alienated from politics sociologist Victoria Grace (2000:98), have to mention it. Ruoff points to a further prejudice and active citizenship” (23). “Reality” was chased remarked upon these comments and related in the preference of historians of the documentary from the stage for the sake of the serialized drama them to Australian versions of reality form for film over TV, and “directors over of separation and divorce; “reality” was easier to programming such as Sylvania Waters that equally producers,” hence the neglect of Gilbert (6). Prior bear when its absence could become a symptom make Baudrillard’s point about the implosion of to An American Family, producer Gilbert was best of disenfranchisement. The absence of “reality” the distinct poles between viewer and viewed; known for his NET projects in the late 1960s was, then, actually an active condition informing even the medium itself has collapsed into its such as Margaret Mead’s New Guinea Journal, and its representation; curiously, the absence of messages and as a communication process the his Emmy award winning study of Irish novelist “reality” made the series a work of reality TV. poles of sender and receiver are henceforth untenable. Christy Brown. Ruoff quite rightly underlines that Gilbert’s The conditions that led to Gilbert’s writing sense of documentary method was a hybrid, In a more recent rumination on Loft Story, of the proposal that would result in An American bastard form that even included the Baudrillard (2002) has emphasized that at the Family were as much personal as professional: the “unorthodox practice” (27) of allowing the heart of reality TV is an uninteresting, non- shifting tide of cultural affairs programming at NET Louds to debate the content of any episode if original event, whose power is to generate the prior to its becoming chronically timid; Gilbert’s only to allay their fears. Among the ground rules fascination, first, of audiences, and second, of divorce; the influence of pop sociology of the set by Gilbert about how the filming would take critics. Baudrillard underlines, however, that this American family in ruins (Charles Reich’s The place is a remark that has been taken up nullity and banality is powerful, even if it only Greening of America) that marked American social elsewhere, although Ruoff doesn’t follow its allows for a differential viewing experience: the reportage in the early 1970s. As Ruoff explains, trajectory: “The [the Louds] were to live their viewer is always slightly less idiotic than the one of the neglected dimensions of documentary lives as if there were no camera present” (27). reality TV program on the screen. The question work is the equivalent of casting in film and the By the mid-1970s Jean Baudrillard had already that holds Baudrillard’s attention concerns the interests that inform the search for, in this case, a exposed the paradoxes of “TV verité” that An “experimental niches” of reality TV situations - family: “Gilbert was more interested in apartments, islands, and other micro-situations.

SRB 13.3 (2003) - 11 Are these enclosures, little theatres, cut-off and televisuality and hybridity. He provides a be neatly sown up (111). Sociologists, too, isolated in some manner, or do they jump their remarkable array of features: Gilbert reshot scenes deployed their methods and interests to dismiss experimental status as “universal metaphors” of in order to achieve synchronous sound recording the Louds as “untypical,” a strategy that doesn’t the osmosis, what he calls the “telemorphosis” (46); he used voiceover narration as well, in impress Ruoff. of the world: “Nothing any longer separates the conformity with television journalism; the series One enduring image continues to circulate screen and the world” (Baudrillard 2002: 484). had a signature montage repeated with each in the media in the age of reality TV: Lance Loud We are all extras on the next call for Idols; we episode, and a catchy jingle (67) that recalled whose coming out on television made him a are on both sides of the screen, playing our parts, television programs built around fictional celebrity in the gay community, even if he didn’t ready for a sudden notoriety for no good reason. families. Ruoff leaves his most acute observations come out in the series: “Lance Loud did not come We are all Trumans! For Baudrillard reality TV of hybridity undertheorized. He discovers out on American TV; American television came announces the end of merit: there is no need to authentic observational techniques in the bastard out of the closet through An American Family” earn 15 minutes of fame. form (73); yet witnesses the swerving from (127). The reversal of the force that would But there were still other factors at work observational cinema (“Gilbert occasionally subordinate Lance to his symbolic social role, between the claims of the producer and the flaunts his omniscience in the voice-over…” which today is repeated constantly in media millions of viewers. The filmmakers, Alan and [86]; voice-over has been rediscovered in accounts of the series, is perhaps neutralized by Susan Raymond, the proverbial “flies on the documentary but is still thought of as a refuge of the hallucination of this origin that permitted wall,” also had to live like Louds and “practically the incompetent, Ruoff claims 79); there are Lance Loud, longtime columnist for The became members of the family” (29); yet the detours through home movies (80) and a studied Advocate, to be greeted with thanks on the streets filmmaking demanded a level of social “betweenness”: “Thus Gilbert’s style falls of Los Angeles (128). Sadly, Lance Loud passed interaction and negotiation (Susan talking, between the overt reflexivity of French cinema away in 2001, a victim of HCV/HIV infections, Alan shooting) and technical sophistication in verité director Jean Rouch and the transparent but not before PBS had hired the Raymonds to the search for good footage, as Ruoff put it: “the observational style of Frederick Wiseman” (89). shoot his story (see Napoli 2003). PBS has filmmakers had to maintain a difficult dual Verité production values are adapted in a quite erected a virtual shrine of sorts to Lance on its consciousness, being both involved (interacting unsystematic way to televisual practices and web site. traditions (i.e., serial narrative form). Lance Loud and caring) and removed (observing and By the end of Ruoff’s book, readers are left recording)” (31). was, however, untouchable in the department of reflexivity: “Lance acts like a character from with the sense that it is easier to mock than In addition to factors relating to program an Andy Warhol film… Lance turns in one of document the real; that the reputation of a “weird conception and filmmaking, editing mitigates the great camp performances in the history of aberration” like Gilbert was not enhanced by An “reality”: “…the producers discovered that television” (90). In the end Ruoff leaves us with American Family. Ultimately, hybridity fails watching footage shot in real time was strangely the question: was the series a remarkable hybrid brilliantly, at least on television (i.e., as one wag unlike real life” (40). It was, in a word, boring. or compromise formation? put it, Survivor goes to Washington in the form But boredom was also an existing aesthetic of The American Candidate, but in so doing says inherited from Andy Warhol. Moreover, it was One of the great strengths of the book is nothing about practices for the sake of also fuzzy, as one editor David Hanser recalls Ruoff’s subtle appreciation of the sounds and combinatorial possibilities of content within TV the experience of viewing hours of film of Loud speech of everyday life and the problem of their itself, Cernetig 2002). The push of documentary son Lance and then seeing him in person: capture in observational film. Lack of directness, film into autobiography, first person, and intimate “Reality began to get blurred” (42). Here is a the ease with which a “virtual cacophony arises” forms, seems a relief. But the seduction of the sense of the vertigo of implosion à la Baudrillard, (78), the pitter patter of phatic speech that origin remains in the final sentence: “In its [An and a fall into a fuzzy, speculative universe. Ruoff maintains contact between persons, void American Family] aftermath, the American does not work out the implications of this operators regularly repeated (“You know”), the documentary would never be the same” (137). boredom in relation to what TV critics, for importance of providing nonverbal feedback, etc., This begs the question: would reality TV ever instance, point out about current reality are all accounted for. Additionally, music is be the same, again? programs such as Big Brother: the boring factor deployed in a variety of ways: as an affect generator, social commentary, editorializing (84). as legitimation and, quoting Walter Benjamin, Gary Genosko is SRB General Editor. “the threshold to great deeds,” which are in this The popularity of An American Family did case, usually nothing more than the flashes of not translate into a coherent critical reception. References love or hate: “The boredom was proof that the Indeed, Ruoff points to a cluster of factors that raw ingredients of the story were genuine” made interpretation difficult: the novelty of the Baudrillard, Jean (1983) Simulations, trans. (Teitel 2000: 19). series itself and its mixed codes; the poverty of Paul Foss, Paul Patton, Philip Beitchman, New If Big Brother occurs the first time as tragic television criticism in general; the crass and York: Semiotext(e). sensational publicity; and perhaps most dehumanization, it recurs today as farcical — (2002) “Telemorphosis,” in CTRL + importantly the absence of a shared code between entertainment. Dutch TV’s syndicated Big [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance fro Bentham producers and consumers. The result was a Brother translates totalitarianism into a game to Big Brother, eds. Thomas Y. Levin, Ursala “semiological free-for-all” (95). On the one hand, show format that pits inhabitants of a totally Frohne, Peter Weibel, Cambridge, MA: The MIT critical interpretations grasped the lack of the surveilled house against one another in the Press, pp. 480-85. manner of Survivor, without the simulated transparency of the real or the constructed Cernetig, Miro (2002) “American Idol meets primitivism and swimwear. A souped-up Orwell character of the series; on the other hand, many The West Wing,” The Globe and Mail (21 Sept.). tells us that exhibitionism is adventure and reviewers simply didn’t account for the privacy reduces adventure; indeed, privacy mediations. The Louds were in this latter case Grace, Victoria (2002) Baudrillard’s limits the production of celebrity and reduces treated as friends and neighbours. Further, the Challenge: a feminist reading, London and New the effects of hypervisibility. Reality TV is now “reality effect – was the belief that the Louds had York: Routledge. about “contestants” and contests, the game lived their lives on television and that television Napoli, Lisa (2003) “Reality, rough around show life, of turning oneself into an image. As was absorbing the real” (103). “Authorship” was the edges,” The Globe and Mail (4 March). Ruoff observes: “The Louds went from being attributed to the Louds (103). Family members Teitel, Jay (2001) “Watching me, watching real people to being images on celluloid, figures were criticized for what they didn’t do or say you,” Saturday Night (27 May): 18-19. to be watched, transcribed, occasionally (104). The gap between representation and the discarded, and eventually edited into twelve real collapsed. Aside from a few references to An episodes of a nonfiction television series” (37). American Family’s anticipation of postmodernist In the process the Louds outstripped the reality theories, Ruoff does not develop these insights. of their own lives and times. Instead, he continues to catalogue responses: which models did critics invoke? Everything from Ruoff embeds the series in a history of home movies, sitcoms, soaps, and sociology were documentary experimentation reaching back to compared to the series. Astute critics easily read the films made by Robert Drew (and Associates) how “the narrative drive of the show grated in the 1950s, underlining the “eliminat[ion] of against the realism of the handheld camera” overt devices of narration” (54). Ruoff is (110). By the same token, realism demanded, sensitive, however, to An American Family’s for some, that non-fictional narrative should not

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