On Security Culture: A Critique

       This another in a line of articles that I wrote for the Arise! journal during the period of the anti-globalization movement.  For those who haven't read the earlier entry, the journal was a periodical tied to the collectively run bookshop.  My interest was to move the newsletter to take a more critical role, to become a space in which activists could critically discuss the practices and ideas of the movement, possibly an untenable goal given the public format of the journal.  This entry was the most discussed and provocative of the essays that I wrote.  It led to a number of conversations, as well as a very angry and incoherent rant on my voice mail.  I've left it largely untouched with the exception of cutting out a footnote on primitivism that I feel is largely polemical and unproductive at this point.

      In addition, this article shouldn't be taken as a critique of security culture, per se.  There are many moments when the techniques developed under that name allow for more productive actions, and the legal ramifications of direct action have only become more drastic since the article has been written.  The article is a critique of the way that those often necessary and productive techniques were used to legitimate micro-structures of exclusion and domination.  I think these are not simply faults that a small group of bad people possess.  Instead, they indicate a set of behaviors that we are all capable of.  In that, it's part of a process of considering the importance of the means of how we engage in activism, a set of practices that invariably shape the ends of what comes out of that organizing and activism.

On Security Culture: A Critique

     Within a number of activist circles, the concept of security culture has become an important one in regulating the behavior of activists. This creates a series of practices that are legitimized on the logic of preventing an external threat from disrupting the efforts of activists to resist the current state of things. There are a number of arguments that examine the question from this angle, asking whether this culture is sufficient in achieving this end, whether the methods of security culture are being used properly, etc. In effect we have a discussion that works within the ideological logic of security culture itself.

     These are interesting questions and in the case certain types of illegal direct action, crucial questions, but I am interested in asking a different set of questions, that is what does the series of practices constituted under the rubric of security culture do to internal relations within activist communities? I will argue that in effect, that security culture acts to produce privileged and unprivileged actors within activist projects. That the privileged actors to some extent constitute an inside, and those who are unprivileged acts as an outside. This process operates by the control of information, those who are trusted and inside are allowed to know more of what is happening than those who are outside. The last premise is that this mode of security culture allows for those inside to have a number of means to punish those on the outside.

      So, how does a series of practices that are designed for a single expressed purpose, to avoid prosecution and infiltration, become, in effect, an informal methodology of sovereignty? Well to understand that, we need to first look at what constitutes an inside and an outside within this logic. In effect, we need to look at the cultural formation that the activist circles that adopt security culture take.

     Within this article, I am interested at looking at security culture within the confines of two overlapping formations. The first formation is a type of anarchist politics that emphasizes spontaneity and illegal direct action politics. The second formation is a type of DiY punk culture. So in effect, the individual who is inside is marked by a number of signs that are based on a manner of dress, age, and political expressions. These signs form a simultaneous dress and speech code that demarcates the individual in question as legitimate.

     This inside is in some ways a far more exclusionary one than within traditional left politics through its very informality. After all, there is no party doctrine or code to critique. Instead we are left with a certain form of cultural and political sameness that constitutes a certain hegemonic formation. And this formation can be seen to have two distinct qualities, 1. It is very young. One rarely finds individuals over the age of 25 at the informal social gatherings of said communities 2. It is primarily white. It is not that there is a de jure exclusion of individuals that fit those patterns; rather it is a more insidious de facto exclusion. What constitutes a ‘militant’ or a ‘radical’ is constituted within very narrow categories.

      It is at this point that security culture steps back in. It acts as a sort of enforcement device of this inside. To point to a rather extreme example of this type of enforcement, a friend of mine was trying to become involved within some of the organizing around Mayday. The trouble was that he was middle-aged, dressed in a manner that made him look not that much different than the average person on the street, and he had a mustache. This immediately gave him the label ‘cop’. Now this individual, who is an anarchist, and had been involved in direct action politics when his accusers were in grade school, simply threw up his hands in disgust and left.

     I would argue that the example that I gave is the phenomenon at its most pathological, but it can be seen in a number of everyday examples that are considerably more naturalized. Instead of looking at any number of activities that I was to some extent outside of, I’ll examine something that I was involved in at a privileged inside position, the formation and the organizational politics of ROAR (Radical Offensive Against Racism). ROAR was formed when a number of individuals (primarily anarchists) wanted to be involved in protesting the Ku Klux Klan/Neo-Nazi rally occurring late in the summer of 2001, but had no interest in the official organization because of the personalities, ideologies, and tactics of its lead organizers. Ironically, when I initially started discussions with others in forming what would become ROAR, my ideas of what the group should become were open and democratic. The moment of the Klan rally should be used as a rallying point to push white radical anti-authoritarian activists into realizing that anti-racist activism had to be built on actual relations with activists of color in the context of concrete political projects. This of course, failed miserably.

     Instead, ROAR became a creature of insiderism and security culture. The meetings were effectively structured within a layered manner. First there were the open public meetings. Obviously these were limited as well, being that one had to go to the locations where they were advertised, street or internet, but anyone could walk off the street and come in. The second layer was the meetings that occurred afterwards over pizza and beers that were primarily designed to discuss tactics of the day itself. These were events that you effectively had to be invited to attend the later meetings. The third layer consisted of a number of small gatherings to come up with details on security or tactics. This layout is a bit schematic and doesn’t capture the nuances that were involved in planning, but it works as an approximate overview.

     This type of layering organizing can be seen frequently at the organizing of these types of anti-authoritarian protests. They in effect act as a sort of informal parody of the Leninist model, moving from the mass meetings of the popular front group to the meetings of the party subaltern to the inner-sanctum of the central committee. The fact that it is organized informally, based on friend networks and cultural markings doesn’t make it any less exclusionary.

     The tactics that were envisioned at those meetings followed the same logic. They were in fact a logic of putschism. The tactics that we theorized were built on a model that showed no confidence with the greater attendees of the demonstration. After all, every outside face is a potential police officer waiting to pop out. In that we came up with increasingly elaborate strategies of stopping the klan rally before it even started. We came up with structures that had no members to them. More significantly, because of our informal closed-door system, we wound up terrifying the hell out of a number of the demonstrators because they only saw the militancy of our propaganda, which emphasized attacking the klan rather than disrupting the event.

     Most depressing was the fact that we neglected the things that were most built upon mass participation. For instance, we had planned a concert for the day before the protest, but only a couple members did the work, and many neighborhoods were not fliered for the event. The discussions around the event only took place at the initial public meetings, and only briefly at that.[1] It would be a mistake to call the show that we had a failure, but it certainly held more potential than was actualized.

     This actually does relate back to the issues of security culture directly. It does because security culture is a logic that emphasizes keeping out the outsider, the “other.” There is a certain logic to it off course when one is about to do something illegal, but the trouble is that is has leaked into a whole range of other activist practices. In this case, it led to less emphasis to what could be a way of bringing people outside of traditional activist communities into the project of anti-racist politics.
     The ironic thing about this whole series of events is that ROAR’s role in the demonstration was fairly successful, but only because of the utter failure of our plans. Instead of playing at guerilla war, we wound up forming an ad hoc group that pushed out klan supporters out of the demonstration, working with a group of Latino punks, old ARA folks, and a kid who terrified the Nazis by speaking to them in German. We, in effect, did what I originally intended to do in the end, but all the hours of planning that we did, were completely wasted.

     What I wanted to capture in my discussion is the way that security culture legitimized and even created a climate of exclusion. Within this context, security culture created something along the lines of a slightly more sophisticated clubhouse, with the sign “keep out” firmly in place. I’ve seen this numerous times within activism. All it has managed to do is alienate people, keep number small, and spawn a whole series of unproductive demonstration and actions. The meeting of ROAR primarily succeeded in creating a closed community, with its own pathologies and hierarchies. This circled wagon approach also lead to attacks on activists who were critical of the project of ROAR, following in the tradition of ARA who also often took a similar, “you’re either with us or against us attitude.”
     I use the example of ROAR precisely because it doesn’t contain any of the excesses that I have heard around security culture. To point to those moments would be to allow security culture off the hook. After all, one could say that security culture within the day to day lives of activism is acceptable, but not under the excessive terms that the moments in the article suggest, but I want to go farther and argue that with few exceptions[2], security culture is far more damaging than it is productive. I think that ultimately security culture has been a hindrance upon us, as that it has kept us limited to a small community. We will need to take considerable risks, with personal issues, with security, etc. in order to expand beyond it.

     But beyond that, perhaps the most dangerous phenomenon connected with security culture is the exteriorriolization of problems. This has had comic effects such as the blaming of undercover police for the failure to raise the tripod at Mayday 2000[3], but it has had much more serious impacts on the practice and organization of the people engaged in security culture. It has allowed for the serious contradictions lying at the heart of our projects to flourish unnoticed and unexamined. We must recognize that ‘the enemy’, the society we so pathologically try to keep out, is already there. We were raised in its schools, families, and other institutions. We must recognize it in ourselves.
     This construction of the other also allows for certain individuals to accumulate the power to control through these mechanisms. For instance, security culture puts a great deal of emphasis on the policing of language, ranging from what is permissible to say to who one can speak to concerning these issues. These rules are frequently manipulated in order for individuals to quiet others, and enforce certain orthodoxies.

     Just as frequently, this mechanism becomes an isolating one, freezing people’s speech concerning controversial and dangerous topics. For example, the disastrous ISAG[4] protest was heavily marred by the use of security culture.[5] There was a lack of communication on the part of tactics; trainings were canceled because of police presence, etc. The result was that the protest was under-prepared and chaotic. Also, the large amount of allies that were sympathetic to the anarchist community, although not a part of it (what the old Leninists referred to as “fellow travelers”) were notably absent as they were in abundance at the Mayday demonstration earlier in the summer. This drastic use of said tactics also didn’t keep 50 undercover police officers from participated in the protest. And afterwards, criticisms of the demonstration were frozen out of discussions within large gatherings, and tended to occur within personal discussion. It took over a year to admit that the demonstration was a complete failure.

     But more significantly, shot through the ISAG protest and beyond, this logic became extraordinarily exclusionary. Protests were organized by small cliques of individuals who left out any outside participation same small, grainy, photocopied fliers that demanded attendance. One could see both ‘security culture’ as control and ‘security culture’ as universal fear could be seen in abundance. It became a way to enforce certain cultural and ideological codes, and a way freezing any criticism of those codes. The height of security culture became perversely, the culture of insecurity.

     There is a certain irony in this critique as that the era of security culture as a cultural dominant has come to an end, but I still think that the critique has value. The more militant tactics taken up between the Seattle WTO protests and their suspension after 9-11 point towards far stronger possibilities than the older, more traditional formations of protest. However, as old assumptions were questioned within that period, new assumptions were created and were often as destructive as the old ones were if not more. The point is that as we return to militancy, we challenge and do not replicate the forms of hierarchy and exclusion that were allowed under the cloak of security culture. The question will our militancy be based on the sprawling potential power seen in Seattle, Washington D.C. and other places, or will it be based on the closed sad militancy of the terrorist cell.


[1] There is another way of approaching this critique that would focus on the overemphasis on confrontational politics on the part of contemporary anarchist politics, but that will have to wait. There is also a critique that can be made concerning the neglect that activists often make concerning more boring and prosaic activities that nonetheless are essential, this will also wait.

[2] Those exceptions dealing with illegal direct action sabotage, I should note that, overall, my experience with the use of security culture tactics at large demos has been one of failure.

[3] For those not at the event, a number of activists tried put up a tripod in the middle of an intersection during the Mayday march of 2000. The attempt failed because neither the blac bloc nor the rest of the protesters were warned about the raising of said tripod. Typically, at the time, this was blamed on shady characters instead.

[4] The International Society of Animal Genetics held its conference within the Twin Cities in the late-summer/early autumn of 2000. Direct action street protests were organized in response. The expected national turnout didn’t pan out, and there were very few demonstrators, perhaps 150. The disaster around this protest lead to the freezing of the militant spirit that had came out of the Mayday demonstration.

[5] I should note that there was very little chance of ISAG being a successful protest. Some 600 police officers were at the demonstration, dressed in full riot gear, armed with batons, tear gas, beanbag guns, and pepper spray. However, I will still argue that if the preparations were more open, the event could have attracted more people, and simply could have been less disastrous.

A Talk on AMM

This is a talk that I gave on the improv group AMM for a visual studies conference some time in 2004, I think. It's interesting going back to one's earlier work. Re-reading this, I can see some bad habits I had as a writer at the time. (I suspect that I will feel the same way when I go back to this work.) I have a tendency to put large sections of quotations into the work without providing the analytical work necessary. In addition, I don't think that I pushed the theoretical implications of failure as far as I could have pushed them. The paper is a little too neat for the topic at hand, and there are questions around subjectivity, collectivity, and authorship that could have been pushed further. A last note, the quotations from Prevost are drawn from his text, No Sound Is Innocent. The Chakrabarty Quote is from Provincializing Europe, and the Judith Butler Quote is from Precarious Life. This is obviously not a formal academic setting, but I thought I would cross some of my t's, at least. Here goes:

“Be reasonable—demand the impossible!”
--Paris Slogan, 1968.

“Let us speak plainly. Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.”
--Rosa Luxemburg


     “Failure,” as Cornelius Cardew states, “is an interesting concept. He links it with goals, with intentional qualities. Intention produces failure. The products of the processes that we go through will never quite match up to the initial expectations that we have for them. The question then becomes what do we make of this gap? Do we see a lack in the situation, or do we see a lack in the forms that are used to engage in that situation? In his discussion of subaltern history, Dipesh Chakrabarty opens up a space for a need for a politics that pushes at the boundaries of known discourses, a “struggling, or even groping, for nonstatist forms of democracy that we cannot not yet either understand or envisage completely.”[1] Chakrabarty in part links this to a politics of despair, that is to say a politics that recognizes the limitations of its own forms and looks for its own demise in its experimentation. I want to look at the practices and the theories of the improvisational group AMM as a way of thinking through what that might mean.

     I suppose if I was to begin anywhere, it would be within the current situation. After all, Michel Foucault insists that all histories are in some way histories of the present. The present that haunts me is the state of the anti-war movement, a movement which flashed so brightly for such a brief moment and then disappeared just as quickly. It was a movement that was a profound failure, not because it failed to literally stop the war, but because it failed to produce a new form of politics that could deal with the current state of things. That failure, the failure to produce new forms, comes out of the fear of failure, or perhaps more precisely that the results of that politic will spin out of control of the grasp of its organizers.

     This question, that is the question of the production of new forms, is one that preoccupies me. If I were to express the project for most of my intellectual work, it would be the relationship between artistic movements and revolutionary movements. This interest focuses on the question of form, or to put it another way, what I am curious about in this intersection is the way that the explosion of new forms of revolutionary movements make unspoken demands on the way art is made. We can see this in relationship to the 1848 revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, and the revolution of 1968 to just name a few examples. These movements put artists in a position where their former approaches to their craft becomes meaningless, or at least needs to be extraordinarily modified. I have no doubt that the ways they create new forms of art and of life also interfere with the formation of those political revolutions, but I emphasize the former given the radical size disparity between the mass movement of revolution and the relatively small size of artistic movements.

      This is particularly evident in the 1968 revolution, the first revolution, at least on one of its poles, that started from a demand for new forms of life, rather than out of the desperation of poverty or tyranny. This revolution was not only against capital and the state, but also against the older forms of counter systemic movements. It constitutes both a great crisis within communities of artists and intellectuals, and also a great burst of creativity. This can be found in film, painting, theater, etc. Perhaps the best example is the radical shift that occurs in the films made by Jean Luc Godard, which embrace the notion of producing a cinema that cannot be recognized as cinema. Music obviously wasn’t exempt from this process.

     We can draw two major sources of artistic transformation that produce the thought and practice of AMM. The first occurs in the field of modern classical music. The cultural dominant of the 1950’s in this field is serialism, which simultaneously challenges the musical forms of progression created in older forms of classical music, and simultaneously demands its own forms of crushing conformity. The response to this form primarily comes from the United States in the form an outside art that puts more and more emphasis on forms of aleatory sound, sounds that are not necessarily consciously constructed by the composer, such as Cage’s producing score on chance, etc. This trajectory also increasingly emphasizes the production of music as an arrangement of sounds rather than as notes.

      The second source can be found in the transformations that are occurring within jazz at the same time. This transformation can broadly be placed under the rubric of ‘free jazz’, although it had many other titles at the time and since then, such as fire music, the new thing, etc. Within this movement, there contained the same aleatory elements, but it also had another element that one could not necessarily find in the first. This focuses on a shift in cultural politics which sought to engage in the black cultural nationalism that was beginning to be emphasized in the mid-60’s. The other interesting trend was towards producing new forms of collectivity. The most interesting and long lasting of these was Chicago’s the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, but it was only one of many such artists’ collectives formed at the time. These were not only directed towards organizing concerts, but also took on pedagogical and political functions that tied into both the civil rights movement and the new left.

     AMM brought these two trends together within the context of the postwar welfare state of England. The earliest members of the collective, Keith Rowe, Edwin Prevost, Lou Gare, and Lawrence Sheaff all came out of the jazz scene in one form or another. Whereas composer Cornelius Cardew came out of the environs of the avant-garde of classical music, first working with Stockhausen at Darmstadt, and later working within the vein of the American scene. Their combination was driven by a desire for new forms on both sides of the discussion. Prevost argues that, “In 1965, AMM began a radically different kind of music-making. The prevalent notions of musical theory, practice, hierarchy, and structure…were replaced by the creation of, and engagement with, a sound world in which there was not even a formal beginning and ending. And, and from its first raucous explosions, it knew too that it was not only speaking in a new language but that it was talking about things not perceived in any musics the member-musicians had heard elsewhere.”[2]

     These are, of course, bold claims, but in the wake of Richard Wagner, not unusual ones. I think that the interesting innovation on AMM’s claim to a unique status in the development of the avant-garde was its linkage of this claim to radically new democratic practices. That is to say that AMM didn’t link its status to the position of the genius, which has haunted so much of avant-garde practice. Instead, the players produced this new form through collectivity, and more precisely, new forms of collectivity. This precisely links the concern with aleatory practices of the avant-garde with the forms of collectivity and cultural memory that are emphasized within radical jazz circles. But it takes the form of an interference between the two that produces a completely different form altogether, that will later be described by Prevost as a mode of dialogical heurism.

     This notion is developed by Prevost to come up with a way of describe dialogic relations between music that go beyond the structures of call and response that are developed by folk and blues forms and later get taken up by jazz. He describes it in the following terms; “Dialogue is the interactive medium in which the products of heurism are tested. Sounds are placed: placed in contrast to, in parallel to, in imitation of, in respect of, without regard to, other sounds. Minds struggle, coalesce, defer or acquiesce. Inner debate meets outer debate. Instant decisions dictate the immediate direction of the music…” This creative dialogue is directed towards finding new sounds, new possibilities. This can only be found in open forms of dialogue.

     Perhaps it would be best to give a brief description of the practices of AMM in its early incarnation. The group would play for about an hour and a half to two hours and a half. These performances were frequently defined by large sections of silence as the musicians engaged or stopped engaging with each other in any number of combinations. These concerts were free. There is some debate over the roll of the audience within this experience. Promoter Victor Schoenfeld felt that “the original relationship with the audience was dictated by AMM: “we’ll let you listen, but only if you let us play.” This presents the audience as being dictated to in a way. Whereas drummer Prevost tends to emphasize the engagement of the audience with the music, going as far as to point out the “almost proprietary relationship” that some members felt towards the music. I tend to find Prevost’s view more productive, as that it emphasizes the sense of interconnectivity that is felt within the improv community.

     This is a question that Prevost deals with explicitly in an interview. He explains that new listeners of improvised music have been produced as listeners in the rules structures of their former listening experiences, whether this is classical music, rap, etc. In his words, “The suffer what I call an aesthetic mismatch.”[3] There needs to be some way of allowing for that listener to understand the rules of the conversation that is occurring through sound. There is a “kind of specific analytical framework for free improvisation, as there is for every other kind of music. To deny this fact is in a way to deny entry for others into this world, and it also hampers the music’s development.”[4]
 
     Within that physical context, the musicians developed very distinct ways of engaging with each other. Prevost states, “There are, of course, no traditional roles in AMMmusic…. Decision-making and identity comes from the manner in which AMM treats its own history. It is beholden to each player to find a role within AMM. No specifics of performance are ever discussed. There is no formulated logic of direction; no particular encouragement to do a particular thing. AMMmusicians prefer not to know if a fellow musician has a strategy for a particular performance.”[5]

     This creates a condition where the collectivity of AMM is placed in hands other than the conscious wills of those involved in its production. This frees it up from coagulating into any particular form. It plays emphasis on ‘potentiality.’ There is no way of knowing whether the concert will be an enormous failure or a spectacular success. But at the same time, this music was produced in an atmosphere of a certain continuity. Unlike the practice of fellow improvist, Derek Bailey, AMM continued to work with each other over a long period of time, and that practice was dependent on a long series of conversations over matters of philosophy, religion, and politics. But, at the same time within that context, there was an emphasis of taking the music out of the hands of a sovereign individual, whether individual or collective.

     This moved to produce a form of music that sounded considerably different than other forms. This frequently came out of the use of instruments in non-traditional manners, or the use of random debris within the production of sounds. Prevost points out that frequently listeners would have difficulty labeling which instrument produced the sound. This lead to a frequent negative interpretation of their project, that it was not music at all. As Prevost notes, “I was first alerted to the idea that ‘free’ or ‘total’ improvisation was different from all other music-making when told what I did was not music! (In retrospect I am astounded by so impoverished a perspective: though it hardly discouraged me or my peers; quite the reverse.)[6]
 
     What is so fascinating in that statement, is the ‘failure’ of AMM to produce something that would be recognized as music was considered a matter of success, even a matter for excitement amongst the members. AMM was concerned with pushing this as far as possible, introducing any number of aleatory elements to the music. “Indeed, seeking failure itself was a possible route to success! For AMM these ‘controlled accidents’ were practiced variously: through random radio frequency switching: rolling empty tin cans across (and often off) the stage: testing the bowing qualities of an unknown metal sheet.”[7] The possibility for new sounds was no longer in the hands of the genius or even the craftsman; rather it was in the hands of the detritus produced within the context of a consumerist post-war welfare state. The material conditions of the collective are always at play within the production, and we are always aware that we do not choose the stage that we act upon.

     Cardew captures the goals of this process best in a comment in his essay, “Towards an ethic of improvisation. “We are ‘searching for sounds and for the responses that attach to them, rather than thinking them up, preparing them and producing them. The search is conducted in the medium of sound and the musician is at the heart of the experiment.”[8] This statement sets up an understanding of the production of music that cuts across the binary of the individual/collective. The individual becomes the site of experimentation and creation, but this individual, who is both experimented and experimenter can only exist within the context of a collective formation. After all, it is precisely the intervention of the unknown in the form of an exteriority that allows for change to occur, for the experiment to be meaningful.

     I think that we can think about the meaning of this within two conceptual frameworks. The first is the idea of undoing the subject that gets developed in the latest work of Judith Butler, particularly in her thoughts on a politics of mourning. This may sound counterintuitive, but both the music practices of AMM are tied into a certain notion of ecstasy in the sense that Butler invokes it. “To be ec-static means, literally, to be outside oneself, and thus can have several meanings: to be transported beyond oneself by a passion, but also to be beside oneself with rage or grief.”[9] The great joy that is desired through the collective improvisations of AMM and the mourning that Judith Butler describes both describe a situation where the subject is moved somewhere else.

     The process of grief or of mourning that Butler describes is an incredibly difficult one. We can see this in her description of the process, “one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, but finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen. One is exhausted but does not know why. Something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan, one’s own project, one’s own knowing and choosing.” It is a process of transformation that one is never in full control of, which will bring the subject somewhere that cannot be predicted in advance. And contrary to common sense notions of mourning, it should be a process that is communal and political.

     This expresses an idea very similar to Prevost in his practice of training musicians for improvisation. “No one is instructed or commanded, and the only recommendations are to put focus upon the instrument or material they are using in a fresh way…. And as a consequence each time in the moment of making music to try to do something—no matter how minor—that they have never done before: to move away from their normal habitual responses and to explore this environment. It is then suggested that they uses their own investigations in a progressive dialogue with the other musicians with whom they are playing.”

     I think that both of these processes point to a vulnerability that is crucial to a genuinely radical politic, but a vulnerability that is all too often refused by those within radical politics. There is no real possibility of transforming the world, without simultaneously transforming yourself. I don’t think that this is easy. It means being swept up by your work, by the movement. It means giving up the illusion of your autonomy as an individual. The experiences of a genuinely radical movement, whether artistic or political, are at times joyful to an inexpressible level, but they are also defined by despair, paranoia, and exhaustion. What the common trope to these affects is that they cannot be contained comfortably within the logic and reason of the liberal individual.

     This process is obviously not an isolated one, and is tied to collectivity. Even the loss of an individual exposes the profound interconnectedness of an individual with an other, but we are discussing the situation of music being produced in an ensemble. In her other latest book, Butler links this idea of undoing the subject to the broader topic of democracy. “Democracy does not speak in unison; its tunes are dissonant, and necessarily so. It is not a predictable process; it must be undergone, as a passion must be undergone. It may also be that life itself becomes foreclosed when the right way is decided in advance, or when we impose what is right for everyone, without finding a way to enter into community and discover the “right” in midst of cultural translation. It may be that what is “right” and what is “good” consist in staying open to the tensions that beset the most fundamental categories we require, to know unknowingness at the core of what we know and what we need, and to recognize the sign of life—and its prospects.”[10]

     The old social democratic politician, Edward Bernstein, loved to say, “The process is everything, the goal is nothing.” While I don’t think that Butler is precisely saying that, I think that it is pointing to a relationship between ends and means that sees the ends of a process being produced precisely through its means. This exists in a constant open constitutive process, one that is precisely productive because of its multiplicity, its antagonisms, its contradictions. This goes against even the contractual minimalism that rational choice insists upon. It means leaving those goals open to this in all of its ambiguity.

     This dissonance isn’t something exclusively linked to a hostile outside to the warmth of the interior of the group. AMM isn’t precisely a Janus faced structure. The agonistic structure of the music has played out within group dynamics. There were extreme tensions within the production of the group itself. Lawrence Sheaff was encouraged the leave the group just after the first album was produced. There was a brief time that the group played as two units due to the conflicts between Rowe/Cardew and Prevost/Gare over Maoism and the direction to go in response to that philosophy. Just recently, there has been another split in the group between Rowe and Prevost over the very texts that I have quoted.

      In this sense, we get a reflection of the very ‘failures’ that are so often found within the political practices that occur in the new left. The experimentation leads to incredible rifts and fractures between and within groups.    One can only think of the many permutations that come out of the Students for a Democratic Society for instance. This is traditionally read as the weakness of the new left. While I don’t want to downplay the real sense of frustration and pain that came through these moments, I also suggest that we see this in productive terms as well. These splits represent moments of difference and experimentation as well. One should remember what Dutch Communist Anton Pannekoek said on this issue, that there is no particular reason to unite behind a losing strategy
     The second conceptual framework can be linked to a notion of the unconscious. The production of the new, ‘the wonderful configurations produced by failure” come out of a collective process that linked to a structure of alterity. As drummer Eddie Prevost puts it, “Any creative act works towards an otherness. You experience it a few times and hope that it will come back, but you don’t know if it will. The playing is sometimes just a ritual and if you’re lucky you get beyond it. You have to build into the ritual the possibilities of that happening.”[11]

     The unconsciousness that is being expressed here is not the unconscious of Freud or of Lacan, although it doesn’t preclude their existence. Instead I would like to read it in terms of an unconscious of practice. This is a space in which I feel least sure of my ground. I would be tempted to focus this unconscious in a firmly Marxist footing, with the concepts of Luxemburg, Lenin, etc., and I wouldn’t be wrong. But for the members of the group, this concept is also tied to any number of non-Western practices such as Buddhism, Taoism, etc. The importance of this form of alterity is clearly important to the group and remains a horizon for my understanding.

     These two elements combine to produce a sense of sociability and a politic that creates other possibilities. Prevost continually links this to the broader conditions of the society that artists and their audiences live in. He discusses “Every peer group, faction, gang, party, etc., share life experiences and ensuing expectations; they are the substance of a sense of belonging. Together with this goes a language, necessarily created to express nuances of meaning and limit comprehension to those within the group. This semi-secret language not only conveys messages to group members and excludes those not sympathetic, but it also offers an alternative to the perceived established means of expression and the cultural priorities which dominate and control it.”[12]

     This reading is in part in a sociological mode, but I think that it has more possibilities than this. I am tempted to read it back upon the practices of Prevost and AMM itself. This ‘semi-secret language’ can be a form of art, a form of politics, or perhaps something that is outside of both of those. It points to a form of opposition that doesn’t operate in the sad logic of a statement such as “in the service of”, which constitutes so much of what constitutes politics and political art today. Instead, it reads the formations of subculture as an opposition that occurs in its own modes of sociability and language. Prevost insists upon this even for groups that fall out of his aesthetic tolerance, such as punk.

     Prevost reads the political possibilities of art immanently in its practices, rather than in the ways that it can be submitted to any politic. As he states, in an interview with Wire magazine, “I repudiate ‘politics first and art later’, an idea which has surfaced again understandably in these threatening times. Politics arise from our view of the world and what world and what kind of world we live in. Art is a powerful tool and a powerful cipher in making such choices. The way musicians play, the way they interact with each other, where they take their material from, their relationship to the materials for sound making, as well as how and where they place their music in the world, are all features of ‘the artwork’.

[1] Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 107.
[2] Prevost, No Sound Is Innocent, 9
[3] Ibid., 4
[4] Ibid., 4
[5] ibid., 25
[6] Prevost, No Sound Is Innocent, 1
[7] ibid., 19
[8] Prevost, 9
[9] Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics”, Precarious Life, 24.
[10] Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, 227.
[11] Eddie Prevost, No Sound Is Innocent, x
[12] Eddie Prevost, No Sound Is Innocent, 172

An Old Arise article I wrote on Protest and Media during the Anti-Globalization Era

One reason I've started this blog is to put some of the stuff that I've written over the years back into public circulation. This is an article that I wrote for a small, free, leftist publication, the Arise! Journal. The Journal was associated with an all volunteer bookstore that I was involved with for a number of years, which recently closed. (The bookstore recently closed, not the journal, which has been defunct for years, now.) This piece gives a good sense of my thoughts on critique and activism at the time of its publication, although I will leave it up to you to determine its present relevance. It was written in response to the coverage of the anti-globalization protests, focusing on independent media. I had evidently discovered Weiss' play Marat/Sade around this time, but decided to falsely attribute the quote to the old revolutionary, rather than the playwright. I've corrected that. Here goes....



Protest Narrative/Protest Praxis


Jean Paul Marat: The important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair. To turn yourself inside out and see the world with fresh eyes.
--Peter Weiss (Marat/Sade)

      There is an interesting phenomenon that is worth discussing within the realm of what I will call the 'post-Seattle era of activism which seems to be upon us, that is the phenomenon of independent media. Its imagination has been captured by a series of non-contiguous mass based protest internationally acting as a counterpoint to a totalitarian narrative of globalization. I'm not interested in discussing the merits of those events in and of themselves (whether they are the proper tactics, the issues of various tactical uses of non-violence, etc.). Rather I want to discuss the literature produced in the aftermath of these events in an attempt to legitimize and explain the events that occurred within the protests.

      Within the mood and logic of the movement at this time, a mood in which valorizes and emphasizes action and spontaneity above all things, it may seem strange to put so much emphasis on an activity that is at best deemed marginal within the dominant themes of activism today. The best example of this exists in the fact that we no longer “have protests”, but rather “engage in actions”. But I believe that the production and distribution of a body of “protest narratives” is as important an element to the movement as the protests themselves.

     The vast majority of us weren't at Seattle. And if we were at Seattle then we missed D.C. or L.A. or Prague, but this didn't change the fact that these events were monumental in our lives as activists. We confronted them through a myriad of narratives that were reproduced on the Internet, on various fanzines, magazines, and even the occasional radio or television show. The perceptions that we take from these narratives had and continue to have a deep impact on activism.

     The dominant large media’s narrative on these actions is well known. It goes something like this: There is a protest, it starts off peacefully. At this point in the presentation of the narrative there will be a number of shots of happy people walking on the street, puppets, etc. But as things go along according to the story, people get tired, tempers flare, AND VIOLENCE ERUPTS. This violence is generally attributed to a few violent troublemakers amongst largely peaceful protesters. The police then have to respond to this and the conflict ensues. Eventually the police are able to get things under control and the media discusses with the police on how things went, and occasionally there is a rebuttal by an activist.

    It’s remarkable that the diversity of protests manages to follow such an established pattern: Mayday is ISAG is Seattle is a police brutality rally. And marches and rallies that don’t get into conflicts with the police, well they don’t occur by and large within the narrative of the dominant media. This amnesia is true of truly explosive events as well. For instance, is the coverage of the remarkable events in Argentina?

    Within this narrative there are implicit messages that tie in with a liberal hegemony. The police enable two things within the narrative: The first thing that they do is to assure the liberal right of freedom of speech, but more significantly they control the demiurgic powers that try to push liberal rights into the power of the mob. This narrative is written to assuage the fears of a white middle class audience that is both bathed in the logic of a rights based discourse and trained to fear the ‘other’ in its gendered, racialized, classed, and cultured forms.

     So, we have a narrative in which the massive diverse energies and experiences of protests are shoved into a monolithic form to maintain the status quo in the moment of crisis. But these aren’t the only narratives constructed on this terrain. There are also the narratives of the email list serves, independent media, etc. It may have become a cliché to point out that the Independent Media Center rose during the protests of Seattle, but it is nonetheless still worth mentioning. So it’s worth asking, do these forms of minor media truly cover the protests in all their diversity and complexity? Looking at the evidence, I would have to say no: While there is a response to the dominant media within the minor media, this other narrative, by in large acts as reflection of it and only offer a very shallow alternative to it.

     What is this other narrative? We begin with the same image as the dominant media, the happy protester, et al. However there is a shift at this point, a shift in the blame for the conflict: Instead of being presented with a vision of the violent protester, we see the violent police officer. These officers are the ones guilty of the violence. The few violent actors within the protesters are still there, but they have been recast as agent provocateurs. In short the same middle class audience is being addressed, and the same attempt at domestication occurs.

     I am not suggesting that this mode of discourse should be abandoned completely. There are certainly moments when working on the terrain of liberalism is valuable if not essential, but these moments are not when we are producing our own media for ourselves. These opportunities occur in letters to the editor, call in talk shows on NPR, etc. and other moments of confrontation that are allowed or forced to occur within the dominant media.

     But what we discuss with ourselves should be different matter completely. Are we trying to be good liberal subjects, working within its logic? No. No matter our views on revolution or reform, it would seem that we are trying to do something much different than that. Our protests, our spaces, our communities should act as sorts of laboratories for the production of new kinds of being: The narratives that we produce should reflect back upon our experiments, their successes, their failures, and indecisions.

     I’ll try to unpack what I mean by that. It means, for example, that we need to stop acting surprised that the police attack us. This surprise may be a mask we put on for the liberal media, but we should stop lying to each other. Instead a confrontation with the police can be thought about and presented in different ways: What were some successful responses? Where were our weaknesses? Were there ways that we could have avoided a confrontation with the police, or at very least had that confrontation with the police on grounds that were more advantageous to us? In short, the series of questions that we ask ourselves in our own media needs to moves us from a liberal ideology into the process of a constitutive praxis.

     There may be discussions of the dominant media, but only on the terrain of tactics. For instance, what were interesting ways that the dominant media was positively utilized? In what ways, can there be improvements in utilizing this flawed resource, etc.? In other words, the act of not operating within the ideological norms of the dominant media doesn’t mean that we act like ostriches and pretend it doesn’t exist. Instead we should see it as another element operating within a very complex field of power.

     We also need to break away from the murky forms of mystification that occur within the dominant media. These events didn’t just occur. A complex series of interactions, including planning, advertising, etc. must occur in order for the possibility of the events of the day to even occur. These moments need to be explored as well if we are to create a tool that will aid in the constitutive process I discussed above. In many ways, this area of exploration is considerably more difficult than the day itself. Alliances are fragile and tempers run high. There is a considerable amount of paranoia on the part of many participants, both justified and not. But if we want to use independent media to open upon new possibilities then we need to start discussing the processes that will get us there in their failures and successes.

    There are examples of this type of reporting already. For instance, in the April issue of Z Magazine there is a very good article on the Pacifica crisis (Pacifica Radio Crisis Is Settled, By Andrea Buffa). The article moves beyond the easy territory of claiming victory for the progressive forces of Pacifica. It instead looks at the successes and problems that occurred within the process. It gives a very good history of the conflict and asks very difficult questions. For instance, it constantly examines the dimensions of race within the process. Why is it that the democratic processes of KPFA are so incapable of getting activists of color involved? Why is it that well-known activists of color were so often on the other side of the debate? In other words, it examines a contradiction that exists within many activist circles and points out the way that it operated in the Pacifica situation, while trying to think of ways of dealing with the contradiction.

     I recognize that what I am calling for is not easy. If it were easy, independent media wouldn’t fall back on recognizable narratives. In effect, I am trying to advocate an attempt to represent what is unrepresentable within traditional representational forms. I am advocating a course that will take alternative journalism from the safe course of abstract advocacy into the dangerous waters of playing a part in the process as a reflection on it. The traditional approaches to covering protests are not particularly contentious. They don’t challenge us or demand anything of us, and we need a media that does those things. New possibilities for action, alliances, and forms of being already exist. We need to excavate them from the morass of the dominant media and the logic of this society.


(The International Society of Animal Genetics held its conference within the Twin Cities in the late-summer/early autumn of 2000.  Direct action street protests were organized in response.  The expected national turnout didn’t pan out, and there were very few demonstrators, perhaps 150.  The disaster around this protest lead to the freezing of the militant spirit that had came out of the Mayday demonstration.  The earlier Mayday protest had been a highly successful and militant street demo, that had brought together anarchists, HERE Local 17 workers and activists, along with a large section of other Minneapolis activists.)

A Slightly Edited Version of an Earlier Talk on Tolkien

I gave this talk a couple years ago at U of M conference on fantasy. I was going to simply print it as is, making a note that it didn't take up the question of racialization as thoroughly as it should (still a problem), but I wound up having to add some material to the psychoanalysis section, which was incomplete to the point of incomprehension. I don't think that it's escaped that entirely, but it's certainly more comprehensible.

I want to open up my conversation about monstrosity and hybridity in fantasy in a slightly different manner than I initially intended, through a specific moment in Tolkien’s ring trilogy, the scouring of the shire. For those who don’t remember, the narrative of the trilogy goes well beyond the throwing the ring into the fire. Instead, we are told of marriage, the exodus of the elves, etc. The final incident occurs as the hobbits return home. As they reach its border, they realize that the Shire has drastically transformed since they had left.

We quickly discover that there has been both a change of production and governance in the shire. This consists of an increase of security forces, increased regulation, and formalized structure of authority moving from the chief (Lotho) down to the sheriffs and the population. This has been directed towards increasing the crop production of the Shire, primarily for export. At the same time, there is clearly a foreign influence on the Shire as well. This is marked by the ubiquitous presence of ‘sallow faced men’ who report to another boss, who has more influence over the Shire than Lotho. This individual, who is nicknamed “Sharkey”, turns out to be the wizard Saruman himself, revenging himself for the loss of his tower.

We’ll return to Saruman eventually as he links the destruction of the Shire with the events at Orthanc, but first, let’s turn to a moment that best expresses the results of his work. This will also allow an insight into the process of degradation created through the various forces of evil in the books. This occurs at the moment that Sam discovers that the Birthday tree had been cut down. Ted Sandyman, the millworker, interrupts his sorrow.

“There was a surly hobbit lounging over the low wall of the mill-yard. He was grimy faced and black-handed. ‘Don’t ‘ee like it, Sam? he sneered. ‘But you always was soft. I thought you’d gone off in one o’ them ships you used to prattle about, sailing, sailing. What d’you come back for? We’ve work to do in the Shire now.’

‘So I see,’ said Sam. ‘No time for washing, but time for wall-propping But see here, Master Sandyman, I’ve a score to pay in this village, and don’t you make it any longer with your jeering, or you’ll foot a bill too big for your purse.’

Ted Sandyman spat over the wall. ‘Garn!’ he said. ‘You can’t touch me. I’m a friend of the Boss’s. But he’ll touch you all right, if I have any more of your mouth.” (Tolkien 296-7)

This passage returns us to the argument held between the two at the beginning of the novel. However, neither character is the same. Sam has traveled the world, and became the bearer of the ring for a time, while Ted Sandyman has replaced his earlier more traditional bonds of fealty and kinship for a place of employment in the factory of Saruman. What we see in this confrontation of servants, is in fact a confrontation of two systems of structuring society. Sam represents a system of naturalized and paternal authority. The relationship of Sam and Frodo is not only defined by employment and contract, but is also defined by tradition and affection. Whereas Ted Sandyman’s relationship with ‘the Boss’ is no longer defined by these natural structures of authority. Ted has already indicated that his subservience is only defined by the reciprocal modes of influence that he has on the boss. A system that once operated within tradition has been replaced by contract.

But we need to push this farther to understand its relationship to monstrosity. When we look at Ted Sandyman, we are presented with a figure that is ‘grimy faced and black handed.” His manner of speech also has transformed dramatically from the beginning of the narrative. It’s turned crude, taking on the inflection of the speech of the orcs. The unnatural system of the factory covers up Ted Sandyman’s natural pale skin with a dark coating of grime, changing his language, and his social role. We are already in a system of racialization. In order to understand this further, we need to look beyond the incident itself, to establish this connection between the figure of the miller’s son and the orcs. Earlier in the text, upon being told of the absence of both the comforts of inn and pipeweed, Sam remarks that instead of welcome, the travelers have received, "No welcome, no beer, no smoke, and a lot of rules and orc-talk instead.” (Tolkien 279) The figure of the orc allows Sam to present the current regime of governance as unnatural.

Why does the orc fulfill this role? To understand that, one needs to understand some of the broader elements of Tolkien’s world structure. For each of the races created in the world, Ents, Men, Hobbits, Elves, etc., Melkor created its opposite in the form of orcs, trolls, etc. The orc is in fact the imperfect copy of the elf. We can push this further, when it is further established that Saruman operates as the imperfect copy of Sauron, who in turn took the place of Melkor. What we find opposing ‘the men of the west’ is in fact a set of cheap mass produced commodities, copies of masters and copies of men. This structure of inauthentic relations is connected to the South and to the East. In attempting to take the place of Sauron, Saruman in fact creates his own replica of Mordor in Orthanc. This replication consists of both a production of a new hybrid of orc and man and of mass industrial production. When this is destroyed, Saruman then turns to the shire in order to replicate his order. This in turn transforms Ted Sandyman and enters him into the racial and economic order of Orthanc and Mordor.

The figure of Ted Sandyman allows us to understand something about this entire system through his racialization. The system of industrialization literally transforms him into the monstrous “dirty faced and black handed” body. This body is then placed into a chain of signification with both the bodies of the masses of orcs ready to produce factory warfare and the bodies of the criminals, who are described in similarly racialized terms, either. Saruman, in his robe of infinite colors, conjures them up to work in his factories, and his factories literally use the innocent figure of the hobbit to produce monsters. The threat of industrial capital is thus linked on one side with the figure of the inauthentic copy and on the other side with the grotesque, monstrous body. These figures are not only linked, but they collapse into one another.

How does this chain of signifiers, which both operate on both a level of association and show a strange ability to literally become one another, operate? We need to shift our attention to the literary precedents to this story structure. We can first look to the industrial novels of England. These novels focus on the risk of the construction of ‘two Englands.’ These novels both present the threat of the breaking up of the nation because of the rise of industrial capital, and generally the resolution of this crisis through marriage or other means. These texts generally establish this distinction linguistically, through the use of dialect. Naturalism follows through on this trend and extends it. The structures of society are linked to the biological, rather than the linguistic and cultural. Naturalism most obviously draws from the social implications taken by many writers from the discoveries made by Charles Darwin considering Natural Selection and evolution. More significantly, they gesture towards the intractability of the class structures of capitalism and the legitimacy of colonialism.

This can be pushed farther when we start considering the fantastic and science fiction texts produced in the same era. The short stories of H.P. Lovecraft expand the confrontation that operates in these earlier texts to universe itself. His philosophical system operates on a mechanical sort of materialism. An indifferent, if not hostile universe surrounds humanity. This is constituted through the monstrous figures of the alien. Within Science Fiction, H.G. Wells draws on this logic of Social Darwinism in his novel, The Time Machine. He follows through on the logic of naturalism, the notion that the factory system will produce a difference in race and makes it literal through the figures of the Eloi and the Morlocks. This work is curious as that it reverses the logic of social Darwinism. It is the children of the ruling classes who become weak and imbecilic, while the workers grow strong. But at the same time, the text holds a great phobia for those monstrous figures of the Morlocks, and despite the fact that they have access to advanced structures of instrumental reason, we are never given access to them as subjective creatures.

I don’t think that this is the end of a literary history that we could draw, but it points to some of the important texts the come before the Ring Trilogy, that seem to have similar figuration. We can see that something similar occurs in the fantastic stories and science fiction text we touched upon to the process that occurs in Tolkien. Various figures are not described metaphorically as monstrous, but they literally become monsters. What does this mean? I want to move from this discussion to a discussion of fantasy as a genre. This will give us greater access to monstrosity in Tolkien’s text.

When we look at the literature that tries to offer an explanation of the structures of the genre we get an emphasis on structures that blur between the space of the conscious and the unconscious. To begin almost every writer on the fantastic emphasizes that fantasy cannot be understood as conscious allegory, to the extent that there is a connection to the material world, this connection is metonymic. To continue briefly into some particular interpretations, Todorov in his structural analysis of fantastic literature puts a great deal of weight on the factor of undecidability. For Todorov, a work is fantastic because the text doesn’t offer a clear interpretation, whether the events of the novel are supernatural or whether mundane occurrences or madness can explain them. This puts it between the marvelous, which operates purely in the realm of the supernatural and the uncanny, which ultimately offers mundane explanations for Rosemary Jackson, on the other hand, puts a great deal of emphasis on transgression. Incest, violence, etc mark fantastic literature. All of these elements transgress normative limits of society. Throughout, the critics of the fantastic point to the fantastic as a place that tries to grasp at what is incomprehensible within the society itself.

To be sure, there would be extreme limitations to directly applying the methods of either Todorov or Jackson to Tolkien’s text. There is no question that there are supernatural explanations to events, and transgression can’t be found expressed in the manners indicated by Jackson. Indeed, for both critics, Tolkien doesn’t write fantasy at all, he is a writer of the marvelous. However, there are a couple important elements that can be drawn from this critical research to understand the work of the Tolkien. The first is the notion of metonymy. We can see this operate throughout the text, through both the figures of the orcs and the unfortunate men and hobbits that get dragged into the gears of the factory. This ties into the second notion, and perhaps the most important one, the emphasis that fantasy tries to grasp at what is in some sense incomprehensible to its contemporary society.
So what links metonymy to the incomprehensible? In order to understand that, we need to take a brief detour into the conception of the unconscious. Rather than depending on Todorov’s or Jackson’s reading of this concept, which are a little tethered to their understanding of the fantastic, I will offer my own reading, depending heavily on the concepts developed by Jean Laplanche and Jacques Lacan in their readings of Freud.

To understand the unconscious, I want to turn to the work of Jean Laplanche. Laplanche is both a close reader of Freud and an analyst himself. Laplanche argues that the unconscious is born in the care and feeding of the child by its caretakers. The child obviously receives a number of needs from the adult caretakers, nourishment, cleaning, etc. But the child receives something in addition to that, which is the unconscious sexuality of the adult. For the child, this constitutes an alien element, an ‘enigmatic signifier.’ The child cannot determine the meaning of these actions on the part of the adult, and therefore they cannot be incorporated into the child’s psychic structure.

The unconscious is then made up of these undigested, unsymbolizable signifiers. They collect together in random formations, forming any number of assemblages. In addition the psychic structure of the subject is constantly attempting to work through this material in order to comprehend it and integrate it into the conscious understanding of the subject. These signifiers are in constant rearrangement, thrown together any number of formations. This labor is constant and its results occasionally erupt into the consciousness. To make this a little more concrete, and to link this back into the conversation about the fantastic briefly, I thought I could draw an analogy with any number of fantastic creatures. When we look at creatures such as centaurs, griffins, etc., we can see how these apparently mystical creatures are, for the most part, strange assemblages of mundane creatures. In fact, when the Europeans explored, well, the rest of the world, there is an explosion of these representations, both in depictions of exotic animals and hybrids of animal and human. We can see that we have already returned to the metonymic process of the connections between the sallow faced men, the orcs, and the dirty industrial hobbit. Within that context, the unsymbolizable elements, the industrial worker and the colonial other are welded together through a logic of racialization

\Obviously, the emphasis on sexuality doesn’t help us much with comprehending this picture. Even if we do accept that there are sublimated forms of sexuality operating in the text, I don’t think it helps us with the linkages between racialization and industrial labor that we see operating in the text. In order to get at that, I want to introduce another psychoanalytic term, the symbolic. The symbolic is analyst Jacques Lacan’s attempt to deal with the new topography of the unconscious that Freud introduces in his later text, The Ego and the Id. This text argues that the unconscious doesn’t merely include transgressive elements, but also includes deeply embedded social structures, structures that Lacan links with the Law. For Lacan, this structure of the symbolic is linked to both the incest taboo and the oedipal structure. It operates as a limit space between the social and nature. We can see a type of racial symbolic in the work of Tolkien in the previously mentioned racial logic of the mythological structure of his world, a world defined by a binary of divine races and their illegitimate copies. The figure of Ted Sandyman introduces the threat of miscegenation into the mix, the threat of transgression of the racial symbolic. The ‘scouring’ of the shire is simultaneously a defense of this symbolic.

I think that this concept of an internalized social system is useful, but the centuries of capitalist domination have shown that these social symbolics are far more contingent than Lacan would ever accept. In the same way that Lacan naturalizes and dehistoricizes a set of institutions that create patriarchal heterosexuality, Tolkien implicitly erases colonial violence and social struggle. Instead, I would suggest we follow the critical work of Jean Laplanche and Judith Butler in understanding the symbolic as a set of social practices that congeal into unconscious norms through repetitive practice. Oedipus may offer some explanation for the family structure of Vienna in the 19th century, but not necessarily now. Marxist political theory emphasizes that capitalism operates through a continual process of incorporation of spaces outside its order. This historically has taken the form of both colonial expansion and the enclosure and destruction of the commons. In its utopian imagination, this takes the form of the dialectic, moving from thesis to antithesis to synthesis, allowing for a full and productive incorporation of its other.

However, this has never been fully successful, and we can see the resistance to this order both in the form of one, two, three, many anti-colonial movements and the organization of a workers movement that at times stretched the globe. However, these elements cannot be incorporated into the critical and conservative anti-capitalist visions of the world offered by Tolkien, Lovecraft and others. They are so invested in a nostalgic vision of the past as a naturalized set of human relations, defined by master and man rather than master and slave, that these transformations are incomprehensible to their symbolic conception of the world. Their response is to continually project back the violence of capitalist modernity back onto its victims. The orc combines the figure of the colonized subject who is outside the symbolic order of white Europe that is dependent on for its continued existence, and the factory worker who has been reduced to wage dependency through the destruction of the commons. Rather than operating as a model of intersectionality in this literature, these figures operate in a metonymic flow, constantly linking and delinking in failed attempts to revive a narrative rationality.

Perhaps, an alternative can be found in the work of China Mieville’s work on New Crobuzon and the figure of the remade. The Remade are produced within a criminal disciplinary system that has dropped any pretense of rehabilitation as a goal. Instead, through biothammaturgy, a combination of magic and science, the criminals are engineered to be monstrosities. They constitute a hated and degraded underclass of the city. This conception of monstrosity holds onto the critique of capital as brutal system of domination that is implied in Tolkien. If anything, its critique is far more rational and systemic. However, at the same time, we are offered a vision of an alternative within the outlaw pirate nation. This occurs precisely at the moment that the remade start to take their modes of monstrosity as a starting point. They re-appropriate their painful and monstrous bodies, and equip them for new possibilities. At the same time, they produce a social order that falls out of the social symbolic of the city that must position the transgressive within abject terms. This is the truly revolutionary moment within Mieville’s work. It points to an alternative system profoundly alien and opposed to capitalism that nonetheless is completely constituted by it. Perhaps we should end there.