Radical Publishing: What Are We Struggling For?
ICA, Saturday 19th March
You have to formulate a response somehow. The absurdity of the result should be a measure of the difficulty of the task.
We have wedding panels, presented one after another. Everyone gets
their water glass filled. The ceremony is in its dark theatre, the
tables draped with black according to custom. There are anticipatory
remarks about poorly articulated demands, but there is also an avoidance
of directly discussing the role of print – it is enough to marry off
those who work at publishing houses it seems. The panels are
disproportionately male, not to mention white – but looking at the
guests, it’s a white wedding. A first speech is made in a lilting
accent, according to a lyrical pace, pressing a weirdly smothering
effect into what is said. These word are the first to grace the
ceremony, it is announced, before the speaker intones “rage… rage” into
the microphone, claiming this as the basis for all that should follow.
This is all very well, but these nuptials have been pre-announced – we
all know why we are here. Our resentment sits on our stomachs like bile,
ready for the moment when it will blow out of all these ceremonial
blackouts. And if it the case, as one guest will later spout, that
ideology dictates which of our behaviours count, we all already
feel that we are here to knock it back, obsessed with but isolated from
a dark, marauding cuticle of ideological vandalism, a blatant looting
and profit mongering. We can hear them outside. Still there is something
about this dark ceremonial chamber that also feeds the anger, which
underlines the lack of any applicable vocabulary of action.
Yet, even if it is easy to agree with much of what is said early on,
these general sentiments risk falling into a sentimentality that is
better suited for later in the evening. The courting of applause gets us
nowhere. Already there are coiled criticisms seeding in the stalls,
somewhere toward the back aisles, dressing down the appeal that familial
relations can act as a springing resistance to capitalism – woo yeah,
we don’t buy that – we already get the picture that we’re attending a
ceremony where there is going to be no effective marriage. We have been
tracking this engagement for some time and we’re sceptical. It’s not
likely we will witness lasting bonds this afternoon. We might secretly
know that the system outside the walls is crumbling, or so it goes, from
the start instituted as an unworkable slant toward the privileged, and
in fact slowly consuming itself, making its way to an abyss to await the
next crisis through which it will spin down, crying for a bail out. But
first we must sit through a slightly soft-eyed appeal for resistance
against the rule of money, good advice for any young couple, even if
they are phantoms here and now, in this darkness. Bride and groom are
nowhere to be seen. Yet can it be claimed that moments such as those
that bring us here today, our shared concern and outrage, addressed to
our spaces of personal relation – all our declarations of trust and love
this seeks to protect or resemble – are instances where capitalism is
abandoned according to more fundamental communistic interactions. Are we
in such a state of emergency that necessity will dictates that
monetary exchange value has no place here, begone! we won’t
allow those jackals here, on our wedding day…that such dictates of value
and accumulation are unwelcome here, as we wait for solidarity to take
its place.
But it’s not polite to discuss finances on the special day. Even if
we think that the rule of money has momentarily been refused, here in
the dark, so the barman (perhaps) will suggest that these instances of
so-called communistic behaviour are not genuine points of resistance
against capital’s relentless flow (but, he spits, lifting ice, could they not become so?)
but merely surface effects of fully functioning, unchecked
neo-liberalism… He takes a lime up in his fingers, describing bruises on
the skin which nonetheless point to underlying, undamaged flesh. Yes,
he says, these interruptions we attend, these spaces of non-capitalist
modes of production, are crucial to its continuing dominance. We should
recognise this, he calmly states, as he places a circular mat underneath
the ordered glass. His immediate task is complete and he shuts up as he
computes the done deal, wiping the bar with a towel as he retreats. He
has a long night ahead of him.
Of course, it is a recurring theme of the ceremony – a theme which
appears in a different form in every successive speech – to express the
desire and necessity for transforming and rehabilitating terms in order
to move forward. But there are always those who purposely start an
argument, albeit not unreasonably, this time according to a pattern of
provocation that many other guests won’t adhere to. A younger figure –
but is he a guest of the bride or groom? – suggests that a ‘dictatorship
of the people’ can be reclaimed, rescuing the unfortunate word by
emphasising its role in defending the ‘outline’ of a ‘city’ (which is,
we mutter, the living diagram of the coming insurrection…), and that
what is needed is the force to push through revolutionary
ideals, actions. Still, he appeals to violent incidents in the past,
reigns of terror and blood baths, even going so far as to invoke other
ceremonies conducted in Jacobin dress. The crowd smells the odour of
reenactment societies. The young man has surely cracked a black joke, in
all seriousness, and has almost emptied the room. In-laws might get
upset. When he is out of earshot, sections of the crowd will criticise
him for being backward looking, toying with dangerous ideas and failed
precedents. Yet these critics themselves will almost immediately suggest
their own outlines for who or what needs to be revisited and
re-examined in the light of what is outside the walls of the theatre.
Perhaps they silently admit, however, that something of this implied
violence is always there on the edge of the tongue; that we should all
acknowledge the prospect of defending revolutionary momentum in order to
allow for the possibility of it being sustained. In awkward
conversations in the toilets, there will be mention of category errors
and the dangers of trying to secure any perseverance of what is new by
unknowingly turning it into what is already old and forgotten.
But every one of the guests knows what is still going on outside the
dark walls, away from all this talk. One says that the noises are those
of blind, undirected attacks; but are they really without strategy?
Eavesdropping for a moment, it is possible to hear a discussion of
neo-liberalism as having only been ‘effective’ in its complete
annihilation of the imagination of those who oppose its tenets – i.e.
implicating the emptiness of ceremonies such as this, designed to
articulate a secure response or alternative to it. A back row that is
all too pleased with itself. Another voice pipes up, itself claiming
that advanced capitalism might well be on its knees, but it has worked
so effectively on snuffing out threats against it that it cannot be
dealt a killer blow. Guests feel they might suddenly be in a zombie
film.
Another guest, overdressed and confident, suggests that the problem
is actually how to make sure that revolutionary thinking, or a
believable testimony of the sicknesses currently being perpetrated,
penetrates into public discourse. It is difficult to reconcile these
ideas in the surreal rigmarole of the ceremony, what with everyone
dressed up, on their best behaviour (at least until the evening drags on
and tongues are loosened…), and when the language it is apparently
acceptable to use is largely esoteric, obscure, always held at a
distance to a common public. At this point a member of the band, in a
ill-fitting tuxedo, suggests that considering the inhumanity of
capitalism, what is needed are equally inhuman and impersonal
institutions through which to combat it – he is about to explain what
these would be, and how they would operate, but is forced back to the
stage to play. He can be seen for the rest of the evening, blowing
through a machine of burnished brass. There is usually a crank, a clever
cynic, at the back of the hall – perhaps one of those figures that has
escaped out the back, having a smoke sitting on a car bonnet – who
points out the ‘voluntary servitude’ of the masses, explaining between
puffs that domineering power relies on tacit acquiescence of the people.
His is all his own ego talk. He blows a ring and smirks, saying that
the revolution needs to be a physic and subjective one, triggering a
form of disengagement (an indiscipline, he says) where we all
must recognise and resist our complicity in our own domination. He is
drunk, no doubt, having lost track of which car is his, but goes on
insisting that if we work on ourselves, the domineering power that we
ourselves engender will inevitably transform. As soon as he finished his
cigarette, he lights another.
What else comes out of this but a sense of regret at the
insignificant scale of the ceremony? One last guest, lingering in the
doorway, affectionately describes another recent wedding, but that time
dominated by action and dancing, enormous crowds. That occasion was
apparently a mass event, pulled into focus on an Egyptian square
according to rumour; it was built around a ceremony not carefully
organised like this one, but was instead freewheeling, properly deadly,
displaying the emergent self-organisation of the masses. Certainly a
bloom was fought for, and it produced a city within a city – described
by the exhausted guest, his tie now removed and his shirt open, called a
“prototype commune” that embodied emergent systems of co-operation,
solidarity and self-governance. This man’s face is what lingers after
the event has come to an end and the evening extends for a few according
to stamina and constitution. In his face is read the feeling that
although there might have to be distinctions drawn between ‘revolution’
and ‘insurrection’, and that there will still be a need to gather
together in these dark spaces, to talk, to force the issue – to try and
marry each another off - the real ceremony is to come without being
called, without being addressed, somewhere outside in the continuing
chaos.
*An aside by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, one of the speakers at the above event, concerned the lyrics to a song written for the 1993 Emir Kusturica film, Arizona Dream. All images are taken from a scene deleted from this film.
