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Review of "Making Waves: Female Activists in Twentieth-Century Florida"

The historical essays contained in Making Waves: Female Activists in Twentieth-Century Florida illustrate a wide variety of female political praxis. While it is not until the final essay by Giardina that the phrase “the personal is the political” makes an appearance, all of the essays within show how the reconceptualization of the arena of women’s activity as a result of the Women’s Voting Act and changing social mores helped to alter Florida’s environment, polis and oikos in various ways. Working class women engaged in unionization activities, benefitted from paternalistic education while more financially secure middle-class women facilitated the growth of clubs that would provide skills and networks valuable for political leadership. Nominally independent women, such as the Marjories, were able to use their career paths as a position from which to advocate reform or the conservation of nature that would be lost due to short term logic of capitalist development.

One essay which addresses the role of working-class women is Rieff’s article Home Demonstration and Rural Reform. The author shows how it is that the federal government sought to demonstrate better practices of home economics through extension classes and minimal investments in canning machinery, to thus allow the continuation of existent capitalist practices by increasing the capacity for workers to reproduce. Class was, as always, informed by race and the ever-marginalized black population didn’t receive equivalent amounts of government funding. In the account of Tampa cigar industry workers, female retirees fighting against Air Pollution in areas affected by extractive and refining industries and Civil Rights Activists in northern Florida there is also evidence of the extension of the “women’s sphere” into the larger body politics. Women’s lacking access to land struck so that their pay would be of such a level that they were not forced into relationships with men simply to be able to live and in order to obtain increased power in the housing and food market.

They sought the restriction of industry such that their housing investments wouldn’t be destroyed by industry externalization, that their rights following the nullification of the separate but equal ruling would be enforced and that the inheritance of slum-conditions be ameliorated to better black communities. As the essays show, women resisted the limitation of their roles within the nexus of increased market exchange by striking, pleaing to local, state and national government and, if their council was not sufficiently listened to, entering into legally protagonistic relationships with them as well. As the cases of Elizabeth Virrick and Ruth Owen shows, once mobilized and able to find a constituency that was able to financially and morally support them, the women were subject to judicial contests. Owen was able to be seated as Florida’s first Congresswomen and Virrick was able to effect slum clearance, however this was not accomplished without entrance into the legal areana.

Review of "From Yellow Dog Democrats to Red State Republicans"

David Colburn’s From Yellow Dog Democrats to Red State Republicans: Florida and Its Politics since 1940 narrates the political transition of Florida from party monopoly to a limited competition electoral regime. As Colburn points out on page 13, “From 1900 to 1950, Florida voted for a Republican only once, and that was to support Republican presidential candidate Herbert Hover against Al Smith… (who) represented everything they opposed” (13-14). Prior to this voters consistently, powerfully and successfully resisted the attempts of urban oriented politicians to enact new legislation and thus were oriented to rural, segregationist politics. The increased mobilization of under-represented groups, migration to the state by people living in regions associated with Republican party policies, the limited capacity of the state Democratic party to maintain discipline resulted and growing dissatisfaction with their national party created an atmosphere of increased political polarization and transformation of state voting patterns.

Governor Collins was a prime example of politicians caught within the turbulence of the times. While a gradualist in his approach to dismantling Jim Crow policies, accusations of being a progressive and of kowtowing to federal rather than state influence tempered his elected capacities. The conflict throughout the state found reflection in the blood-letting of the Democratic primaries and shifting of voting patters. The former issue of intra-party polarization caused subsequent gubernatorial candidate Carlton to refrain from getting Collins endorsement until late in the campaign, a mistake repeated later by Al Gore, causing him to lose to Bryant, who represented the parties segregationist wing. As the new governor’s ability to substantively shape racial policies was limited by the Federal government, the vote for Bryan’s segregationist rhetoric was more symbolic than substantive –this didn’t prevent the Republicans from capitalizing upon the division and general discontent.

On issues of policy, the discourse surrounding busing and the legal framework created by the Brown I and II rulings came into effect, how both parties responded lead to shifts in voting patterns. Though the state was now mandated to institutionalize the equality of blacks on a time schedule determined by the external political actors, local resistance to it continued via economic and community-oriented arguments. Whites held that the quality of social investment instilled via the school system would be degraded by the introduction of black students and teachers while blacks held that the community-oriented institutions that they had developed would now be dissolved. State Republicans were able to capture more votes as a result of this issue due to the fact that the party imposing this at the national level was the Democrats and compounded this advantage by advocating for a low property tax. Another nationa-oriented concern being felt at the polls was via the new Cuban vote, who largely rejected the velvet glove approach of Democrats to Castro. As Republicans found competent candidates with name recognition and their power to mobilize the “Cincinnati” electorate increased, the Democrats individualist approach candidate primaries and increasingly right of center policies lead to party flight evidenced by the last three governors.

Review of "Old South, New South, or Down South?: Florida and the Modern Civil Rights Movement"

The essays edited by Irvin D. S. Winsboro and collected in Old South, New South, or Down South?: Florida and the Modern Civil Rights Movement illustrate the trajectories of various civil rights battles held in the streets, schools, stores, public spaces, churches and courtrooms of Florida. In various ways the authors depict a series of status based contestations. Blacks were no longer going to “stay in their place,” as evidence via battles won in several Supreme Court Rulings, nor leave it at a pace dictated by the local whites.

The collection suggestions that the nature of African-American struggle changed as the primary mode of economic reproduction shifted from agricultural to service oriented work. As they transitioned from farming towns with small population density to larger towns and cities, the greater concentration of people with similar experiences or disenfranchisement caused a number of a qualitative shifts. First was the abandonment of the gradualist approach to social uplift exemplified in the yeomanry ethic of Booker T. Washington. As most of those in these regions were no longer agricultural producers but were wage laborers such a ideology was no longer as applicable to their experiences in the cities. Instead a number of ideologies were formed that were the beginnings of various forms of black power. Based upon this increasingly militant class-consciousness, a number of groups formed to place demands upon the state that approximated struggles occurring in other locales. Due to Florida’s heterogeneous composition of industry, previous settlement and migration patterns, the intensity of open political conflict varied from country to county. The response to these contests was, however, largely the same. Institutional violence, token desegregation, electoral dispossession through districting that gave more electoral power to rural, racist bastions over those areas more open to accelerated integration, and the legal tactics of delay that would have likely made the wording in of the Brown ruling “with all deliberate speed” mean never were the responses to these collective contestations.

The articles in Winsboro cite a number of local civil society organizations that worked on their own and in conjunction with national groups and branches of the Federal Government to overturn the laws and help reshape the attitudes that maintained the Jim Crow regime. While there is a dearth of information on the actual composition, charters, membership numbers and structures of the organizations themselves, the story which emerges is that these grass-roots militants connected to activist churches spread across the state were sufficient to remake the laws which had chained them down to an inferior caste. Despite these gains, however, institutional discrimination persisted. Though KKK rallies were no longer considered socially acceptable, group membership persisted and maintained a degree of control via their entry into police forces. Thus while the legal standing of racial status was eventually changed, purposive targeting continued. Additionally, commensurate economic gains were not accomplished due to their being categorized such as communism, which was deemed a crime greater than being born black.

Review of "Coming to Miami"

On page ten of Melanie Shell-Weiss’s Coming to Miami: A Social History, the author state her intent to broaden the regions historical latinization by broadening the epoch to show the tensions which existed prior to their migration, and to develop that history with concern to extra-regional developments (those things impacting Miami but not necessarily originating there) as well as the role of race, labor and sexual relations. The net effect of such a process is the progressive unfolding of how it was that capitalist social relations developed and underdeveloped Miami and how it was that various communities attempted to resist such exploitation.

Shortly prior to Miami’s incorporation, Malthusian pressures encouraged a number of Bahamians to leave the islands and make their way to Miami. Initially the Bahamian population benefitted from their education within the British colonial system, greater capacity to obtain investment capital and familiarity with natural conditions that initially made them invaluable in the assistance of the burgeoning agricultural industry. These boons, which had the effect of making them the small business owners in the non-white neighborhood and a somewhat decreased capacity for Floridian police to used naked force against them put them at odds with the African Americans already living there. Racial alliances were tenuous and at moments when they did exist, as in the UNIA, there were disconnections between leaders and the rank and file which even when attempted to be corrected highlighted the middle class nature of the movement – a position most often held by the Bahamians.

These tensions within the highly qualified “black community” was slight compared to those that existed with between the African Americans and whites of Western European descent. Thought they literally made the structures of Miami and Miami Beach, they were prohibited from owning land these, visiting if not working and were generally placed within a system of etiquette where violations could result in gross bodily harm. Lacking the capacity to earn from land speculation and paid barely above the level of self-reproduction the infrastructure of the areas allotted to them were of much lower quality than those found in the white areas. Beachfront mansions were thus predicated on unpaved streets and shotgun housing with ad-hoc sewage facilities. The poverty that existed in these communities was a rare sight to visitors, who normally stayed in the white-capital created tourist facilities.

Organized attempts at correcting this took the form of civic and church associations rather than through economic groups such as unions as following such attempts accusations of communism could be made with their implicit threat of American Legion, KKK or police violence. With the increase of first Jewish and then Hispanic migration there were additionally considerations that complicated that already highly pressurized communities. While these two groups also faced discrimination, they were to become seen as if not allies than as preferable partners with which to exploit for labor. The transition to civil rights discourse and with its increased solidarity-oriented political consciousness changed this to a degree, but the damage done due to the previous physical isolation of these communities and their political marginalization made the effort a largely uphill battle.

Review of "Venezuela: Revolution as Spectacle"

Venezuela: Revolution as Spectacle presents a highly critical account of the Chavez regime as populist, militarist, and collaborationist with international capitalism. Uzcategui utilizes Guy Debord’s concept of spectacle as a means of explaining how it is that the Venezuelan population and leftists on the international stage buys into the “protagonistic” democracy. The thesis is at time very compelling, though at times not so much. In the latter case, it’s usually not for the information itself but due to the context of Uzcategui’s analysis.

One of the main reasons for Chavez’s categorization as a “spectacular fool” for international capital is his decision to pursue mixed ownership enterprises, as per Article 112 of the Constitution, within the extractive sector rather than outright nationalizing the process. While the, it seems to overlook Chavez’s basic recognition that to outright nationalize the industry would lead to the type of bloating that dragged down the company previously. Allowing market logic, albeit partially controlled by Chavez’s appointment, thus allows for Chavez to have greater amount of profits with which to spend on discretionary projects rather than increasing the membership of “the state within the state”. Chavez does, however, seem foolish in Uzcategui’s accounts of the ridiculous floating-monetary policy with it’s various prices, thus allowing some people with government access to make large amounts of money for doing no real “work”. A relation of this to the need for the government to stem capital flight would have made this section more compelling.

Uzcategui criticisms of the mission is some of the most compelling writing of the book. The missions are not novel but replicate many of the former spending pattern prior to the lost decades of the 80s and 90s, have duplicated processes, obfuscated formerly clear issues and have often not matched up to their aspirations. With regards to the housing problem, simply put not enough has been made. To address this issue, the government has passed out accumulated leaflets on how to “properly” build barrios – a rather poor option considering the potentially non-informal jobs that could give a boost to the economy. As regards Mercal, there have been a number of irregularities found in distribution lines, there’s been shortages of food, the workers there are still without contract and there’s been little investment in the facilities thus leading to spoilage. The Mission Barrio Adentro has not kept up with it’s goals for creating primary health care modules and has often faced shortages of medicines and supplies.

In regards to Chavez’s populist, militarist character Uzcategui lays out the appointment of many members of the armed services within both the PDVSA and various government enterprises. While Richard Gott saw this as a means in which Chavez could maintain a certain level of oversight over potentially opposition-sympathetic political actors, Uzcategui sees this as an atavistic return to the militaristic tradition in Venezuelan culture with its cult of Bolivar. Because of this, the language against perceived enemies is very antagonistic (or in the usage of Chavistas “protagonistic”) and polarizing, has lead to an organization of society along military lines (seen in the various popular militias). These are issues that are important in the assessment of the Chavez regime, however they are then placed along with claims that a brief increase in the armed forces budget signifies that the government prefers military expenditure to social enterprises. This is done so by making comparisons between national defense spending and sports and also not contextualizing the region. As a percentage of expenditure of GDP, Venezuela is behind Peru, Paraguay, Brazil and Bolivia. This wrong emphasis should not, however, take away from the Uzcategui’s insight on how it is that Chavez’s strong role in the delegation of duties and delineation of policy had a negative effect on the political culture. By the overwhelming polarization which occurred and his enlargement of political power through quasi-legal means has meant that the PSUV has a certain level of disconnect from it’s base. Steve Ellner’s Rethinking Venezuelan Politics complicates this simplification, but the general co-optation of the social movements by the state and subsequent prioritization of the states needs over previous organizational actions seems valid as other commentators point this out.

The constitutional planks recognizing Venezuela’s indigenous population and their allowance of them to organize politically at a movement was widely seen as being a positive, progressive aspect of the new Bolivarian constitution. Uzcategui, however, shows how it is that these people have at times been forced to face relocation in order to fulfill various extractive or transportation endeavors. While the Wayuu were not forced to move from their homeland, they were offered large buyouts, an allowance not likely to have been given to them under previous regimes, and their

A particularly amusing and insightful section included the author’s recounting of a visit by “parecon” economist Michael Albert. I, like Diogenes Laerties was, am very much interested in the “lives” of modern thinkers and so found Uzcategui’s description of Albert insisting that his brief period with the government gave him more insight into the goings on in the country than the activists he was with and that his book being widely distributed in Venezuela would assist in the revolution. For one, it’s a compelling scene of the manner in which international leftist activists have turned the heart of the matter into a tabula rasa in which to read their own aspirations and as it shows the intellectual febrility of Albert when faced with counterfactuals.

One of the recurring problems of Uzcategui’s analysis is the placement of subjective factors normally attributed as outside the realm of government control as emerging from their authorship. For instance the high number of trade unionists killed in the country for reasons speculated to emerged from workplace issues is seen as he fault of Chavez’s government. He alludes to this but does not specifically say that this is a conspiracy. This is just one of several examples of the contrast between the how objective information to be found in the book about circumstances in Venezuela is often shown through a decontextualized, anti-statist prism that gives too much credit to the government in causing some of the problems that are functionally explained in other ways. Considering the author’s embrace of Bakunin’s theoretically model of the state this isn’t surprising, however one can’t help but wonder what the old plotter and revolutionist would actually say about Chavez.

A final thought, unrelated to Uzcategui’s general take on Venezuela, is the idea that the author seemingly wants to “investigate and punish those materially and intellectually responsible for these crimes” (45). While the point made in the quite relates to workplace crimes, it’s mentioned earlier as it related to the Amparo massacre. In there two places the punishing of those “intellectually responsible” for the crime is a legalistic burden of proof, that for an anarchist, is a rather strange one. The case of the Haymarket martyrs ought to come to mind, being that all those that were placed under indictment and later judged guilty were all known to not be involved in the actual bombing but were the bombers “intellectual inspirers”. While the author likely means that those that are acting against the interests of el pueblo should be held accountable, as a legalistic doctrine it is of course very dangerous and something the other should consider jettisoning given it’s historical misuse.

Review of "Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida"

Gary Morimo’s Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida is concerned primarily with the manner in which Florida transformed from a barely inhabited region in 1900 to the state with the fourth largest population in 2000. Connected with this story of growth is the manner in which Florida formed a distinct identity distinct from its northern, more established neighbors. To accomplish this Morimo shows how it is that since the 1960s “Florida was more climate controlled, technologically inclined, and also older, more ethnic, more religiously and racially diverse, wealthier, whiter and less agrarian than the rest of the south” (7).

Florida’s beaches were early recognized as a place of beauty to be areas of repose and restoration by elites, leading to various real-estate booms and busts in Miami, the lack of transportation infrastructure, the real threat of hurricanes and the fetid and mosquito filled natural environment meant that most of the states economic activity in the beginning of the 20th century was agricultural and located in the interior of the state.

It was not until the onset of World War II that the conditions would be present that would lead to Florida’s rapid coastal development. First was the transition to Fortress Florida. Federal investment into the region for military bases brought with it service sectors, better roads and infrastructure to be used by the counties after they abandoned it. The many barrier islands were ideal for practicing amphibious assaults, such as the ones that would occur in the Japanese peninsula, and it is the state closest to the Caribbean. It thus was ideal as the base for operations to quell communist organizing in places such as the Dominican Republic following the capture of Cuba by Castro.

Morimo additionally illustrates how new technologies shaped the patterns of habitation, economic investment and culture of Florida. The creation of refrigerated rail cars and that capacity to make juice concentrated enabled agricultural barons to expand their market share and their income. Interstate highways led to the decline to smaller tourist attractions and restaurants and the increase of large tourist operations and chains. Air-conditioning made Florida an acceptable place to live year round to more people, while dredging operations made more land available for housing. It was not just technological innovation that helped create the state, but financial innovation as well.
Much of the mid-twentieth settlement of Florida was accomplished via financial instruments that made paradise affordable to northern retirees. Low down payments on homes facilitated a gray invasion of retirees while insurance policies were founded on political rather than economic rationales. Later came the Marielitos and shortly after them narcos, crooked bankers, dictators and their cabals from South and Central America brought with large amounts of money and a distinct culture that helped distinguish South Florida from “the south”. These factors that shaped modern Florida continue to do so and in ways that are not always clear – be they environmentally devastating or otherwise – however the image of Florida as an aspirational place to live continues despite it’s many peculiarities.

Review of "Miami"

Joan Didion’s book Miami is a New Journalism account that delves into the relationship between the large Cuban exile and Anglo communities in Miami and Washington D.C. While the type of political assassinations that were making headlines at the times of the book’s first publication is no longer a normal occurrence, the book is still insightful for understanding Miami’s official as well as their “underwater” history. As a caveat, however, Didion also engages in an unfair essentialization of Latins by framing their exile politics, as anyone familiar with 19th century radical exile politics London knows is always full of passion and intrigue, as being “Spanish” and a product of a hot environment. Her connection of their militancy to these, in the end, imperialist and orientalist notions is a mar on an otherwise compelling work.

The notion of the underwater narrative refers to the manner in which Cuban-American’s interact with the Federal government, specifically how the state deals with a body of foreign nationals which seeks to overthrow a neighboring country’s government during the Cold War epoch. Didion doesn’t examine many archival documents or policy proscriptions, but instead infers the underlying beliefs of policy advocated by the Cuban community and the American’s tasked with handling them. Handling their passionate excesses is seen as “disposal problem”, especially following the Mariel boat lifts when tens of thousands of refugees, normal, mentally disabled and criminal, were now considered “American citizens”. This problem of disposal is both one of housing, a la the tent cities created in the parking lots and empty spaces along stadiums, as well as how to deal with groups that, now free from the Cuban police, want to provoke a war between the two countries by attacking Soviet bloc ships in the Miami port and hit-and-run incursions into small Cuban ports. The solution to the first problem, how to house tens of thousands as fast as possible, isn’t mentioned but the latter is given an accounting. Simply put, the militants that left are given further training at the Ejercito Cubano Anticomunista camp in Homestead and other places around the Everglades.

At this point, the US backing of a foreign for to ostensibly invade another county, runs into a problem with this style of writing. Specifically, the paucity of sources allows for subjective inferences which may be far from the objective reality. While Didion can correctly claim that JMWAVE existed, that in the early 1960’s Miami the CIA had assembled the third largest Navy contingent of battle and retro-fitted ships in the event that they wanted to invade Cuba, she also states that there may have been anywhere from 15,000 to 150,000 anti-Castro operatives fielded by the CIA. While it is unlikely that she would have access to actual numbers so close to the time period she’s writing, the result is that the account only gives a small picture of the events rather than a larger, more coherent narrative. She drifts from inference to inference in a highly suggestive manner that feels true to life, but it’s still hard to say how much of it is true and how much of it is a reading of her own fears of the situation onto it. Instead of deep investigative reporting that gives detailed descriptions of the actors involved, she relies mainly on what is reported in the newspapers and is “known on the street”. People drop in and out of the book, only mattering insofar as Didion is able to get a point she wants to make across – usually how this group of exiles has led to a third-worldization of politics in Miami. The picture that she presents is one filled with conspiracy, martial ideas of political behavior, killing of people open to dialog with Castro and wealthy Cuban’s fundraising for la causa. It is a dark, paranoid and ultimately tragic portrait, but one can’t help but wonder if the focus on a small, sensational and militant contingent of people leads to a distorted view. Because while Didion shows that this group is able to gain a significant modicum of local political power and can gain access to upper-level bureaucrats in Washington DC, the latter’s instance on IR realism always checks the “poeticism” and volunteerism of the Cubans.

One of the poetic metaphors that Didion uses several times that I found fitting was the the manner in which Washington D.C.’s vacillating policy towards Cuba, indeed all of Latin America, leave traces on the board. People, the moving pieces on the board, end up resenting and feeling antagonism to their handlers for their perceived lack of commitment. This is especially clear in the section detailing the manner in which media strategy has come to dominate the presidency. This need to address the variety of issues prevalent in the United States disallows the type of intensive attention and concern that the Cubans would like to see given to their sense of purpose. As Cuban-American and American interests overlap only at limited points, especially towards a stable government widely perceived as legitimate by their own people, the American willingness to act is seen as weak as their capacity to act and change the government is seen as definitive. Such sentiments are shown in Didion’s excerpt from conversations with the elite, in the volunteering and fundraising for the Nicaraguan contras compartmentalized in the slogan seen on stickers at anti-Castro businesses “Hoy Nicaragua, Manana Cuba”. Additionally, these traces are visible in the varied treatment of the policing apparatus to Omega 7 and Alpha 66. Sometimes they are considered acceptable and given access to advanced military training and weaponry while at other times the membership is prosecuted for crimes. Salon has an article on their website that updates some of Didion’s writing. Most important as it relates to Didion’s work is the manner in which these groups changed when no longer coddled or assisted by the CIA and the American government’s prosecution of individuals in the United State which were arrested for attempting to gather information on these groups to prevent their action or to help arrest and prosecute them following actions.

Another interesting point that Didion makes is in hinting at the similarities between the former ruling class of Cuba’s beliefs and those of Castro. Perhaps it is because of an unrecognized fear of retribution that she is never heavy handed in pointing it out, but at several scenes the parallels between them are clear. The violent retribution against collaborators and the disruptive counter-demonstrations to silence “non-Cuban” speakers highlight the qualities which the exiles exhibit yet claim as cause for the Cuban regime to be overthrown. This dissonance finds itself in other places as well. One of the ways in which she speaks of correcting Castro’s unacknowledged or repressed presence is in the corrective she makes to other’s claims by pointing out that Castro has had a big if not one of the biggest effects on the development of South Florida as a community. As none of the people she interviews would likely be there if not for him, she does this to show how it is that their ideology has scrambled their worldview to the point that the conditions which lead to the revolution and his role in it is simply transformed into a target that, once killed, would solve all of their problems.

Review of "The Savage Detectives"

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño recounts the lives of two aspiring poets, Ulisses Lima and Arturo Bolaño, along with their circle of poets that, for poets, spend a surprisingly small amount of time writing or publishing poetry. Despite the paucity of presses willing to accept their work, however, the poets still continue in their roles as seekers and the narrative takes the two protagonists on a series of trips or varying adventures.

The first and third sections of the book are set in Mexico City and told from the third person while the substantially larger middle portion of it approaches those characters from the perspective of strangers and friends, not always in chronological order, which they encounter in Spain, Nicaragua, France, Israel and Monrovia. The split sections are not just changes of style, but in time as well. Chronologically the first sections is first, the third section is second and the second section is the third. This break-up of the events is at a significant point, just after the boys have spirited away a prostitute from her pimp, and the results of this, which surely inform the subsequent chronology, isn’t learned until the end. I’ve not normally liked the results of the authors that have written in such a vein, what immediately comes to mind is Nabakov’s Pale Fire, Bolaño’s work isn’t as purposively alienating though he too does have his moments of seemingly excessive erudition.

Moving from this issue of time and going back to the protagonists, Lima and Bolano’s lives, just like those that in one way or another look up to them, are tragic. It’s not just the poverty of many of the characters, such as Luscious Skin who lives in a shack on the roof of an apartment building, but the manner in which they all seek for a truth leads them to be so far alienated from those around them. They are tragic people, largely outcasts from society with limited capacity to feel connected to it, they have tragic loves, obsessing over people that they can’t have, they are tragic actors, who flirt with death and wandering as a coping mechanism over their variance and even antagonism to official Mexican culture and preference for the classical and avant garde. It is in fact their love for the latter that informs the name of the poetry group that consolidates around Lima and Bolano. They call themselves the “visceral realists”, as an ode to another group of Mexican poets who went by the same name forty years before and they connect it to the Flores Magon, Tristan Tzara and the stridentists.

Lima and Bolano are seekers after poetry in a religious sense. Their obsession is not just with reading the works of various famous literary circles but in learning all of the history between the authors. This is evident later in Belano’s life in his deep reading of the Generation of ’98 once he is in Spain, but is first seen with his concern in learning about and interviewing the surviving members of the Mexican stridentists and seeking to learn about one of their members Cesarea Tinajero. The search for her takes up the majority of the third section and is almost a quixotic tale as for all intensive purposes she has published only one poem in a small run journal and this poem consists solely of three lines without text – a straight line, a wavy line and a jagged line. The energy which they exert and the results they end up getting is highly telling of their tragicomic embrace of the literary arts. As such a polyphonic work ought to suggest just by such a categorization, their perspective is not the only one highlighted and this anomie and aimlessness, at times excruciating detailed in Belaño and Lima’s account outside of Mexico highlights their general aimlessness and anomie following the discovery of Tinajero, and they are contrasted with several other poets of people whose politics is not limited to poetry. There are numerous Trotskyites, the fault them for their lack of real political commitment, there are the peasant poets, followers of Octavio Paz, publishers and just normal people for whom the literary world is not so much of a drive which all mock them for their pretensions and posturing.

Having just read The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide before this I completely agree with James Wood’s comments on the novel that despite these divergences from character and form it is in Many ways like Gide’s work in that one of it’s major themes is what exactly does it mean to be a writer. Chapter 23 specifically, is where I believe that Bolaño accomplished some of the best of his writing in this regard, not as letters to a young poet a la Rilke, but as Diogenes Laetrius. Bolaño even puts in a Marxian-Hegelian twist in the ending of all of their stories by rewording the famous “first as tragedy, second as farce” line in what I think is one of the most compelling sections of the book. Here we can see not just fragmented details of the journey of the spirit of these two poets, but how it is that the others writers relationships to society, their notion of truth, etc. informs their station in life.

Post-Cold War Film’s Representation of Domestic Political Antagonists

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, no more could scheming communists provide legitimate filmic antagonists whose political orientations threatened the existential character of the American way of life. History was the prize won by liberal capitalism and having emerged victorious in the bi-polar standoff, the vacuum left was quickly filled a series of “lesser evils”. One of the main forces to fill this hole has been terrorists of Arabic or Islamic identity. The filmic framing of these antagonists political orientation often emptied them of any rational, historically based or sympathetic politics. They were simply so many bodies to be killed by so many bullets. However, they were not the only replacement for the stock characters once provided by the Evil Empire. Anarchism has lately increased its representation in film, especially since the 1999 November, 30th WTO conference shut down by an alliance of strikers and black bloc groups, as well as a crypto-leftism divorced from Soviet orientation. In a manner very similar to the representation of Arabs and Muslims, these characters and groups have been similarly structured to present characters that aren’t felicitous to these two groups theoretical or practical philosophies. In writing this essay I hope both to identify the tropes of misprision and to outline a theoretical analysis for a distinctly anarchist film aesthetic. To accomplish this two-fold task I will analyze several films which explicitly or cryptically represent the aforementioned categories and I will speculate on how a specifically anarchist form of aesthetics will relate to the representation, production, distribution and an audience’s reception of a film.

The reason for injecting clearly defined and crypto anarchists into the plot lines in the manner described is reminiscent of the anti-communist films that provided cultural justification for the ejection of communists and militants from union ranks and their jobs, the criminalization of the Communist party and the public inquisition of communists or those suspected of sympathizing with them. The purpose of opening up such a cultural front is clear – as wealth inequalities become more aggravated and environmental concerns become a growing topic of daily life, motions must be made to discredit ideologies that holistically reject the current model of American representative democracy, its neoliberal economic policies and cavalier attitude to the environment. Rather than engaging in any form of debate as to the merits of particular ideologies, mass media casts anarchism as antiquated, too idealistic, juvenile, incompatible with the advanced level of industrial society and only suited to a small agrarian communities or hunter/gatherer societies, terroristic, or a facile justification for anti-social and psychopathic behavior within cultural productions. Their image within pop-culture as wholly anti-statist furthermore helps to prevent members or sympathizers to certain organizations, specifically labor unions and social justice NGOs, from recognizing the historical alignment of interests between reformation oriented laborers and social anarchists.

Given the stereotypical presentation of Hollywood as liberal/leftist this seems to be counterintuitive, especially as Hollywood films have consistently endorsed anti-authoritarian philosophies within their plots. However, such narratives have a particular goal: they wish not only to resolve the conflict within the various characters for the sake of aesthetics, but also to exempt from criticism the entirety of the super structure from which such conflict emerges, propagate the idea that positively reforming tendencies are always expressing themselves within and thus cryptically proclaim that no radical change is needed. By particularizing the failures of social institutions and turning endemic social maladies into exceptional circumstances that can be overcome if only a person with the right balance of defiance and deference to authority is inserted into the dysfunctional dynamics, Hollywood films propound a profound conservatism even when seeming to pose a different stance. Thus as anarchism gains ascendancy within global justice circles, it has taken the space left by the communists for opprobrium in cinema and recycles many of the same tropes used against it in early 20th century literature.

The first major film to contain anarchists after the Battle in Seattle was xXx. Distributed to theaters in 2002, the film’s protagonist is Xander Cage, heretofore referred to as XXX, played by Vin Diesel. XXX is a heavily tattooed extreme sports-enthusiast, and is first shown stealing the car of a congressman that has endorsed legislation restricting violent video games as part of an elaborate spectacle to illustrate that such laws shouldn’t be created. After several assistants of XXX install crash-protected cameras in the car he drives off a police blockaded bridge. XXX safely parachutes to the bottom, the cameras attached to the car are removed for use in an online viral video and the group escapes in a van with the Norse rune signifying Chaos inscribed upon it. Not five minutes into the film we see that XXX clearly disdains authorities in favor of his own pleasure. At a party celebrating the stunt later that night, XXX has his boho style loft swarmed by a SWAT unit and he is shot with a tranquilizer dart. After waking he passes two tests proctored by a secretive government agent, played by Samuel L. Jackson, that then offers him a choice between going to jail for life or working for the government agency. Like Nikita before him, he agrees to join this secret agency. While the situational context is drastically different, there is a clear parallel to G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday and the message that the greatest rebellion is orthodoxy, in this situation the orthodoxy is American interests and power.

Now deputized as a secret agent, XXX flies to Prague to infiltrate a terrorist organization made up of former Russian soldiers known as Anarchy 99. Their name signifies an explicit political orientation while the group is run by Yorgi, who like everyone else in the group has the same stereotypical physical features of the cold war enemies. In contradistinction to historical anarchist groups that were financed by donations, selling news papers and hosting balls, as has historically been the means by which anarchist groups have financed themselves, this group uses money made from prostitution, drugs and selling stolen items. Additionally, their understanding of class conflict is not the encouragement and production of union and party militant but the production of unmanned ships containing chemical weapon delivery system. The reason that such a weapon has been created is not related to killing a specific class of people involved with government or business, as some insurrectionary anarchists would propound but simply because they want to cause chaos by indiscriminately killing people. They are not holding anyone hostage for pecuniary gains to finance the group for further revolutionary activities and they are not interested in revenge for wrongs committed during class conflict. Their version of attendat contains no message they are trying to disseminate to the populace, they simply want to attack major European cities with chemical weapons because they hate society. Thus in a manner reminiscent of political caricatures in the late 18th and early 19th century, these anarchists are thus depicted as violently nihilistic, sadistic, and without a political purpose other than to create social unrest, chaos and disorder.

In order to broaden the political significance of xXx as an anti-anarchist film, it is worthwhile to provide a close analysis of a particular scene which occurs after XXX has ingratiated himself with Anarchy 99 after provided them with a number of stolen cars. A bumbling and inept Czech policeman, XXX’s liaison, accidently makes it known that he is spying on Anarchy 99 and XXX. A short car chase ensues and XXX shoots the policeman in the back with a special bullet containing red dye and a tranquilizer. This fools Yorgi into believing he killed the policeman and this is seen as a final test for XXX to gain membership into to the group. This scene clearly depicts the ineptitude of other countries security apparatus, the superiority and necessity of American policing forces and the need for American forces to play an intervening role in the internal affairs of other countries. If Rambo is a signifier of the Reaganite epoch that required vigilance from the Soviet threat, then XXX is his neoliberal signifier dealing with the aftermath where there is no singular hegemon to be battled. And in the end of this film it is clear that the terroristic anarchism is and should be defeated by a morally righteous if at times ambiguously so neo-liberal order.

Given his physique it is not surprising that Vin Diesel would play a morally. In Fast & Furious, Vin Diesel reprises his role as Domenic Toretto. While the plot of the movies doesn’t bear any sort of thoroughgoing analysis it is worth noting that

The next film produced in the wake of the 1999 Battle in Seattle whose storyline featured anarchists as major characters was the 2002 B-movie The Anarchist Cookbook. The film is at base a bildungsroman where the protagonist played by Devon Gummersall, Puck[1], begins as an anarchist and becomes a conservative who works at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library as a result of his experience with Leftists of various stripes and the influence of a Young Republican. The film opens with Puck stitching together a series of anti-consumerist platitudes claimed as anarchism as he goes through his daily routine. The camera settings change with each critical thrust and are timed to illustrate his practice of these in his daily life. As he articulates a rejection of upward mobility as a goal in life the film focuses on someone smoking marijuana through a gas mask. As he says, “Anarchy is a way of life” he opens up a refrigerator that is barren of food. When the setting changes to a toy store where Puck is playing with merchandise, he then defines anarchism as “pure undiluted freedom, liberty out of bounds” and states that “we might not know what we’re for, but we know what we’re against.” While it is likely that it is impossible to give a legitimate definition of a system of political beliefs within five minutes, in this opening monologue sequence it is clear that anarchism is associated with juvenile aimlessness.

From this opening manifesto Puck then introduces a motley cast of roommates. Puck first introduces us to his failed love interest Karla, a siren who is shown as obtaining pleasure by seducing married men in order to break up their marriages. Then the audience is presented with Johnny Red, a stereotypical 60s radical who idolizes Sweden and is later shown to be a repressed pedophile, Sweeny, a rakish DJ whose major political commitment is against monogamy and finally Puck’s closest friend “Double D”, a hapless nitwit whose initials mean Dumb and Dumber. This motley assortment of radicals are all employed at a radical bookstore and in their free time they engage in spectacular campaigns designed to get media attention to specific issues such as animal rights or the environment. None of them are shown as having any commitment to being a part of trade-union struggle nor any commitment to some other organizations concerned with economic inequity. The limits to their practice of class warfare is petty theft, that is until Jack Black arrives. As the person who disrupts this groups pseudo-anarchist torpor and drives the plot, Black is a charismatic and sociopathic nihilist who “doesn’t even believe in nihilism” yet judges that The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell is like The Bible[2]. As should be apparent, the film did not so much have characters as flat caricatures that were so negatively stereotypical it caused one indignant writer in the Winter 2004 edition of Green Anarchy to state that: “To be blunt, there are no anarchists in the film… To put it simply, this film is a pathetic stereotype of anarchists, meant to make us look stupid”. Indeed, all of the supposed anarchists of the film are libertines appealing to non-codified notions of freedom and liberty in order to justify their selfish actions.

This changes as Black’s entrance into the communal house accelerates the frequency and gravity of their political actions. Though this does not always occur without some level of resistance. While the other members of the house almost immediately give way, Puck oscillates and is simultaneously appalled and enthralled by Black’s political analysis and willingness to “take things further”. As Puck increasingly comes to question whether or not Black embodies the logical extension of his political philosophy a police officer comes into the apartment after a burglary, he witnesses Karla snorting cocaine. The entire group is arrested and the communal house they were all squatting in is boarded up. This eventuality marks the point wherein Puck seemingly decides that Black does not represent his beliefs. This is shown geographically, as Puck is sent to the suburbs to live with his parents as part of his sentencing, in his embrace of the bourgeoisie game of golf and also as while on parole he begins to enjoy working for a living at a call center rather than dumpster diving and scamming. In one of his scenes at works we see an explicit disavowal of the form of anarchism that he once claimed when his boss calls him into his office after Puck set up an impromptu party in order to brighten the spirits of a co-worker who has been depressed over a dead dog. His boss asks him: “Is that what anarchists do? Take matters into their own hands? Every person responsible for themselves?” to which Puck’s responds “More or less” and the bosses response of “Sounds good to me.” This dialogue demonstrates that Puck’s true political positionality is not that of an anarchist/libertarian-communist but an anarcho-capitalist.

Johnny Black is released shortly after this and convinces Puck to come to a new squat that he and Johnny Red have found and turned into a drug-manufacturing site in order to fund their anarchist operations. Puck wants to leave, but decides to stay in order to make sure that his friend Double D is safe, as he’s become addicted to the drugs that Black cooks, and as despite his newly blossoming romance with Jody, a girl in the young Republican party, as has Karla, who exchanges sexual favors with Black for drugs. The purpose of the drugs sales is to purchase weapons that Black plans to use with in a multi-group action founded on an alliance with Neo-Nazis and a Texas Nationalist militia. Their purpose is to target a university by spiking trees scheduled to be cut in an Earth Liberation Front style operation and assisting the Neo-Nazis/Texas Nationalists to blow up an almost completed Black Studio Union building named after Malcolm X. Anarchists are thus no longer simply correlated with soft drug use, but are seen as hard drug manufacture distributors which, condone violent racism have no code of honor to protect their members. The film thus reproduces the Cold War trope wherein communists “more dangerous and more brutal than ordinary criminals, who at least adhere to their own code of honor” to anarchists in a post-Cold War setting (Whitfield 135). Puck, disturbed by this, decides to drug all of those that are going to participate in the action, knocks Black unconscious with an iron skillet and then calls the police to turn them all in.

After Puck learns that he is going to be financially rewarded for narcing on the group, he decides to go to California to work with Jody at the Reagan Library and renounces his nickname. This radical shifting of political identity reemphasizes the superiority of neo-liberal logic as seen in xXx. Anarchism is depicted as a libertine, juvenile ideology at best and an anti-social, pathological one when its presuppositions are extended. Johnny Black’s “anarchism” illustrates merely that he is a sociopath and thus this political commitment is classified as reflective of a deranged mind and thus a wholly unacceptable form of political action.

The next two movies I’ll address, V for Vendetta and I Am Legend, differ from the previous two in that reference to characters embodying a deformed anarchist/communistic political commitment are not explicitly labeled within the films but are merely implied. The thematic struggle in both films is between collectivism and a permutation of capitalism. Both are concerned with reintroducing heterogeneity into a political system that has developed to a level of excessive homogenized. Additionally both films have protagonists which are messianic heroes able to near single-handedly bring an end to the films conflict and usher in a new age of peace.

V for Vendetta was released in 2006 and presents a divergence from the other films thus far mentioned as it is the only one based upon a graphic novel with an explicitly anarchist message[3]. Set in a dystopian future London, V for Vendetta opens a young girl, Evey Hammond, being rescued from the clutches of salacious bobbies by the films eponymous protagonist, V. After dispatching the police, V convinces Evey to accompany him to his musical performance and they go to a prime vantage point to witness the timed destruction of the Old Bailey on at the arrival of Guy Fawkes Day, November 5th in an act of Propaganda of the Deed. After the news stations spin the event as a planned demolition, V forces his way into the station with explosives on his chest and transmits a message claiming responsibility for the act, the need for political change, the need for people to take more responsibility for the current state of political affairs, promises to hold those highest up most responsible and finally issues an invitation to come to Parliament in a year to participate in its destruction. Were the context framed slightly differently then V could easily be a politician running for office and requesting his supporters come to a speech. Indeed, every four years modern American political parlance is filled with references to the need to destroy the culture of corruption in Washington D.C. V thus becomes a referent for change, but a change that is an undeterminable signifier that is able to translate into all of the grievances for the populace but presents only abstractions.

During V’s escape from the building, which has been surrounded by SWAT police on the tail of Evey due to a camera capturing her face while with V, she rescues V, and is later rescued by V. He takes her to his secret hideout and through a series of flashbacks it is shown how the Big Brother-esque Chancellor Sutler and his Christian Nationalist, homophobic henchman came to power. Concurrently, through a series of scenes with V as an assassin and a master manipulator of information, we see him entrapping and killing those that did viral medical testing on V (as well as other undesirable parts of the British population such as Arabs, gays and political dissidents) and helped Sutler come into power. The anatomy of a revolutionary takeover of power is reflective of historical examples, however, the film posits that it is simply a specific cabal of evil people that has gained control of the government that caused totalitarian control to be instituted – not that it is an essential aspect of bourgeois democracy faced with a real or manufactured crisis. Furthermore, the depicted method of combating such forces, individual acts of violence, while effective when tied with a broad based movement combating fascism and advocating an alternative, as in the time of the CNT-FAI, is shown to be transcendentally effective through a lone person2. V is capable of single handedly acting as a highly organized and well funded cabal and thus reproduces the messianic logic of authoritarian dictators divorced, as V is, from the interests and desires of the working class exactly like Sutler.

This paucity of V’s tactics is claimed by some critics to be ameliorated in the final scene, where a mass wearing Guy Fawkes masks on Guy Fawkes Day comes to witness V’s promised destruction of Parliament. This is the moment where Hardt/Negri’s concept of the multitude is found and in a moment of solidarity, despite the presence of military forces and the threat of being fired upon, tens of thousands gather to watch the explosion. The soldiers back down due to the lack of orders from the executive and as the building explodes people in the mass remove their masks and a multi-cultural diversity is shown underneath. However, the framing of the message is clear in that it states that one can be totally apolitical in one’s daily life, but if one listens to the dictates of the “revolutionary authority” the yoke of totalitarian government can be overthrown; provided, of course, that a hero has neutralized the leaders. This mass of people does not represent political actors, but an audience participating in a spectacle. Rather than adopting active roles to resist the methods of control used against them, they rely upon a messianic figure with super-human strength and abilities to signal when the revolution should happen. This pitiful web of relations, and more importantly the failure of the film to enunciate an alternative to the repressive form of government that will surely resurface, vastly overshadows the fact that the film illustrates the simple need for revolutionary forces to adopt some of the methods of the government that they desire to overthrow. What ought to be anarchism in the film is thus just a fable about the need for citizens to be passive until they are told be some authority other than their own to do something.

This film differs from xXx and The Anarchist Cookbook in that V’s political orientation is close to that of the anarchist, but he plays the role neither of bugbear or political ingénue that learns to recognize the absurdity of anarchism. In the film there is no vocalization or exposition of the word anarchism. V, while acting in the tradition of anarchist assassination of political figures, cryptically alludes to Emma Goldman when spouting bombastic, quasi-revolutionary rhetoric and acting with general disdain for the law, rather represents an anarchism recuperated into capitalist ideology. It is an anarchism that has been captured, shorn of its history and philosophy, that has had its values, analysis and illustrated potential tortured out of it, that has been disemboweled so that finally it can be stuffed and sold as a commodity.

Containing many of the tropes used at the height of government/media collusion during the Cold War in order to ideologically reinforce capitalism and delegitimize alternatives, I Am Legend, released in 2007 and directed by Francis Lawrence and starring Will Smith, also shows the shifting forms of political antagonists in post-Cold War films. However I Am Legend distinguishes itself from the aforementioned films on several levels. Whereas the first two films made explicit connection between anarchism and villainy and V for Vendetta showed anarchism as myth, I Am Legend disavows such immediately facile connections and instead adopts a more nuanced approach. The antagonists here can be collectivists of any variety – be they anarchists, socialists or communists – as there is no direct allusion to political ideology. Here the political implications are manifested in the bodies and daily practices of the films heroes and villains. With such historical specifics removed, the film is able to operate at a higher level of abstraction as it less connected to a historical-material understanding and make itself more susceptible to a conceptual interpretation. With this circumstance the film is not only able to functionally discredit collectivism of any kind as a political ideology, but it also encourages epistemological positivism and associates historical, dialectical materialism with monstrosity. At this point I will note that this particular film does not originate this type of symbolic hierarchicalization. Rather Will Smith’s 2004 film I, Robot accomplishes much of the same ordering as does the 2010 film Tron: Legacy. However given the manner in which this particular film immediately provides a symbolic system of relations with which to decode its anti-collectivist stance I will focus on this and save the others for a longer piece.

I Am Legend opens with a news interview that provides the basis for interpreting the symbolic content of the Krippen virus (KV), the cause of the dystopian future and thus a means for reading the film as a whole. While it is not revealed until later that we learn that KV has caused the death of 90% of humanity, leaving 12 million unaffected and 588 million transformed into Darkseekers it is important to read this into the content of the opening dialogue, the entirety of which is as follows:

TV Personality: So, Dr. Krippen, give it to me in a nutshell.

Dr. Alice Krippen: Well, the premise is quite simple – um, take something designed by nature and reprogram it to make it work for the body rather than against it.

TV Personality: You’re talking about a virus?

Dr. Alice Krippen: Indeed, yes. In this case the measles, um, virus which has been engineered at a genetic level to be helpful rather than harmful. Um, I find the best way to describe it is if you can… if you can imagine your body as a highway, and you picture the virus as a very fast car, um, being driven by a very bad man. Imagine the damage that car can cause. Then if you replace that man with a cop… the picture changes. And that’s essentially what we’ve done.

 

In this exchange there are three major points that require identification, contextualization and exposition. First worth looking into is the manner in which the cure for this cancer is created by engineering the measles virus to do its opposite, help people rather than causing injury. Such a conceptualization of life and matter as simultaneously being and becoming, defined within a system of relations rather than unto itself and understood as being interpenetrated with its opposite, susceptible to qualitative metamorphosis (especially when these changes are based upon scientific guidance) has its intellectual origin in dialectic epistemologies. That said, just as a dialectical movement is visible within this particular moment doesn’t mean that that this is necessarily what it means. Though other epistemologies recognize and attempt to explain social, biological and technological change in a different formulation from the above, perhaps this is not enough evidence for us to immediately accept the interpretation that KV can be seen as embodying dialectics so hopefully subsequent analysis will do so.

The second means of furthering this interpretation of KV as dialectics is illustrated in the disease that Dr. Krippen seeks to cure with her applied research: cancer. While one cannot use the abstraction of capitalism to explain all social ills, cancer is specifically related to environmental, commercial, dietary, social and other changes linked to the spread of the industrial modes of production that contain with them capitalist systems of social relations. This connection is furthered made when factoring in the analysis of John McMurty. In his book The Cancer Stage of Capitalism McMurty puts forward the thesis that the never-ending quest for surplus value required by capitalist modes of production leads to growing levels of social conflict and environmental destruction of those that “host” it. As such the best metaphor for understanding capitalism is as a malignant form of cancer. The attempt to end cancer is thus symbolically linked to the attempt to end capitalism. While the actual form any revolutionary politics would take in order to achieve a post-capitalist society is up for debate, the historically revolutionary role of dialectics and historical materialism is undeniable. Thus extending this metaphor we can see positivistic, reformist politics would be conceptualized as treating cancer whereas dialectic, collectivist politics is curing it. As Dr. Krippen seeks to eradicate cancer, KV is dialectics and those that are not immune to it are dialecticians.

The third enunciation made in this exchange that allows the astute audience member to identify KV infection as indication that that body embodies dialectics occurs when contextualizing Dr. Ripens’ statement of how a bad person driving fast in a car gives you “one image” and exchanging that bad person with a police officer presents a more desirable picture. Immediately after these words the film transitions to three years into the future. An extended shots of Manhattan, arguably the current center of capitalism, shows the city absent of human activity but with flora and fauna overtaking the city. The sound of a car rises and we see Dr. Robert Neville speeding down a highway with Samantha, a German shepherd. As the dog is widely known for being a police dog and Neville holds a military rifle on his lap, we are encouraged to associate him with the “good man” in Dr. Krippen’s exchange. However this is not the case as we learn later in the film that he is immune to KV. Additionally we learn that the U.S. Army – the historical foe of dialectics and historical materialist epistemology, a.k.a. Marxism – previously employed Neville. Conceiving itself as an exceptional country immune to class conflict and enforcing any attempts to prove otherwise, social conflict was often attributed to “outside agitators” that embodied a foreign social philosophy. Thus Neville represents a positivistic epistemology, the cancer that is capitalism and antagonist to the Darkseekers, who live in appropriated housing, in a seemingly consensus form of government and display radical solidarity when attempting to rescue a female Darkseeker kidnapped by Robert Neville.

Now before furthering this line of analysis as it relates to the films symbolic order it is important to note that the conceptualization of dialectics in I Am Legend isn’t of the Marxian/Hegelian variety but an oversimplification which uses binary categorization of thesis (measles virus/harm) and antithesis (Cancer cure/help) which results in a synthesis (Darkseekers/pandemic). While this binary opposition demonstrates sublation into the virus’ third development this totalizing shift in human subjectivity is seen as a devolutionary and foreclosed development which needs to be turned back as in life there is death, humanity or Darkseekers and neither are able to co-exist or evolved. Such a non-continuous logical/developmental triad is Jungian in conceptualization and shows that the virus and those affected by it are vulgar dialecticians. Additionally, dialectics is marked within this symbolic framework as the cause of death of ninety percent of the world population and those that embody it are transformed into monsters meant to evoke horror in the audience.

Moving from this coding to the film we find that throughout the film the vantage point centers on Neville, making the audience empathize and identify with him and the loss of his family, his feeling of responsibility for the pandemic and his aspirations to fix it, a fact compounded by their horrifying physical appearance and voicelessness of the Darkseekers.His quest to right wrongs and the tropes of romantic individualism structure sympathetic sentiments in his favor despite the fact that he is kidnapping and performing medical experiments on humans. Neville’s inability to see the world dialectically and apply Reason to the new situation that he is in is not seen as a weakness but as part of his indefatigable strength. Combating dialectics as an embodiment of positivistic epistemology, Neville naturalizes and is valuated as heroic for embodying the imperialist drives of capitalism to consistently obtain new bodies to be placed under allocative and authoritative controls and repress resistance to its restructuring of subjectivity and social conditions. We see this most poignantly in Neville’s lab, where there are 72 Polaroids on the wall showing the faces of the Darkseekers he has kidnapped and killed as a result of his attempts to transform their bodies. This doesn’t bother Neville as their lives have been emptied of intrinsic value, they have been turned into a means for obtaining Neville desires been subjected to a paternalistic discourse framed as an objective, medicinal one that allows him to circumvent moral reflection. This doesn’t seem intended to cause the audience to question the legitimacy of such claims as the Darkseekers are consistently presented as more animal than human[4]. Giving his own assessment of the creatures, Neville himself states in one of his log entries “social devolution appears complete” and “typical human behavior is entirely absent”. While Neville eventually wavers in his commitment to curing KV after his dog is killed in a trap orchestrated by the Darkseekers, he eventually reaffirms it and demonstrates his essentially redemptive nature in a Christ-like act of personal sacrifice in order to “save humanity”.

It is not just in the symbolic ordering of I Am Legend is it become possible to see an anti-dialectical, anti-radical message, but in its subsidization by the government. The films production was tied to the co-operation and partial funding of local and federal agencies – a consideration which Tony Shaw has definitively illustrated in his book Hollywood’s Cold War only occurs when a film aligns with the ideological interests of the government. Reporting on the production issues of the film, Joseph Steuer gives us the following information on the films most technically difficult scenes, the evacuation of Manhattan:

In addition to complying with the requirements of no fewer than 14 government agencies, producers had to bring in a crew of 250, plus 1,000 extras, including 160 members of the National Guard in full combat gear. They commandeered a flotilla of Coast Guard boats, grappled with hypothermia-inducing temperatures, coped with dozens of production-related injuries — and nursed a frozen helicopter.

Kramer [the director] says “I needed to get permission from the (Economic Development Corp.), (the Department of Environmental Conservation), the Army Corps of Engineers, the Coast Guard, the New York City (Department of Transportation), the New York State DOT, the Department of Small Business Services, the FDNY, the NYPD Harbor Unit, the NYPD Aviation Unit, the (Federal Aviation Administration), the U.S. Army, the National Guard and the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting.”

Such cooperation is not merely a gift, but get in return a narrative that reinforces the hegemonically dominant ideas and combats those that would contest it. Thus it is by relying upon Hollywood to recognize its mutual interest with the government, both are able to use each other to their advantage.

XXX and The Anarchists Cookbook both have characters claiming an anarchist social philosophy, while V for Vendetta has a crypto-anarchists but all three illustrate that in the end the choices of political intervention is invested with hegemonic rather than revolutionary interest. All of the characters in these films play roles that are one-dimensional casuistries that are ontologically unified with capitalism and thus reproduce its logic through the tropes of these films. Commentating on the manner in the form of revolutionary culture can in essence be its opposite, Herbert Marcuse called this unification of opposites “one of the many ways in which discourse and communication make themselves immune against the expression of protest and refusal” (Marcuse 81). When this is the case, whatever subaltern identity claimed is a mask that is discarded due to events that show that an unalterable human nature requires police states. Based upon these examples there are three potential roles for contemporary anarchism. Either it is depicted as a synonym for terrorism, a cause of fear and thus a legitimization of government as protector in the film xXx, or it is shown to be the domain of a middle-class rebellious adolescence that soon learns it’s correct place in society as in The Anarchist Cookbook. In the film V for Vendetta, the quasi-anarchist actions of V is actually a quixotic, insurrectionary pseudo-philosophy leading neither to freedom or liberty for those oppressed. This essentialist framing of anarchism within filmic culture as an undesirable goal and a stillborn approach to social change reinforces capitalist media pronouncements and deracinates potentially viable discourse and praxis for institutional change. While encouraging reactionary attitudes in viewers uninformed to anarchism’s philosophy and history, it reinforces the overwhelming misrepresentation in the media that allow for its pre-emptive and overpowering repression during times of public political contestation. Where I Am Legend, like I, Robot and Tron: Legacy differs from these films is only in form. Emptying explicit political signifiers allows for not merely anarchism to be maligned but a more broadly conceived scientifically oriented collectivism.

Despite the clearly propagandistic nature of the aspersions cast upon anarchism in these films, some of the criticisms that they present are indeed true. For one American social movements that claim anarchist inspiration are few and far between and small in number and are often divorced from working class movements. The tendency towards environmental and animal protection has increased as a result of long forming historical trends that have sought to separate this particular strain from the labor movement. Blaming history for the problems of today as a stance which absconds oneself from accountability is not an option and the contemporary, influential individualist anarchist thinkers such as John Zerzan, Bob Black, Hakim Bey, Derrick Jensen and Crimethinc Collective’s failure to place anarchist concerns within the realm of labor is equally problematic. While not all of the contemporary anarchist movements embody the same type of downward mobility as visible in The Anarchist Cookbook or are as insurrectionary as V or XXX, many of the people within such movements see themselves as opposing mores that lead them to fight an unnecessarily uphill battle when trying to convince someone that their political ideology is a viable option. Rather than going into a critique of these individuals and the groups to which I allude I will claim that one of the options to counter the continued misrepresentation of American anarchism as well as its schismatic relations with labor and other oppressed groups is through a distinctly anarchist film aesthetic.

The task of describing a specifically anarchist film aesthetic has been anathema to anarchist film critics such as Richard Porton, and the reasoning is understandable: how can a specific code of rules be made to determine what actually is or isn’t anarchist film? When considering the historical record of previous attempts by anarchists to use various art forms this position seems silly. More importantly than the ahistoricity of such a claim, however, is that such a statement reduces anarchism to a philosophy that is simply “against rules” rather than being “against rulers”. Anarchism imagines its own structure of economic and human relations, which it desires realized: in a reductively basic form, the rulers are not unaccountable representatives and material goods and the means of production are commonly owned. That there can be no possible description of anarchist aesthetics is simply infantile and an extension of the nihilistic motto “all is permitted”. A clearly defined aesthetic acting as a counterbalance to those cultural productions that reproduce the hegemonic values of capitalism is not enough to be called an anarchist aesthetic. An entire system of relations relates to the film qua film and thus such an aesthetic would not just consider reproduction but to production, distribution and reception and use-value. Before sketching such a system, however, I will analyze the film aesthetic of the Situationist Internationale as their theoretical writings have had a profound impact on the contemporary anarchist movement despite they’re being an avant-garde organization. After pointing out the weaknesses in their writings, I will give a brief outline on how such a form could be organized as well as the benefits of a broader system of relationships.

Guy Debord and the Situationist Internationale, which loudly proclaim themselves at the most radical filmmakers, were neither anarchists nor Marxists, The Situationists was an avant-garde organization of students and artists founded in the late 1960’s predominantly in Paris. Their films were supposed to be an extension of such writings as Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and their films were revolutionary in their use of new film techniques. However, it was their conception of what was revolutionary that was in fact part of the problem. Some of the “revolutionary” techniques within Debord’s films included 34 minutes of black screen and extended conversations with white screen. Such aesthetics were supposed to enrage the audience so much that a “situation” would be created, they would thus not want to be spectators anymore and turn from passive audience into active mob. The Situationists also pioneered the use of montage, sound-image discontinuity, negative sequences, flicker, white/black screens, and direct manipulation of the celluloid surface through tearing, writing and scratching. Another technique that the Situationists claimed to have pioneered was called detournement[5]. Such a practice reformed a particular cultural production, usually advertisements and film, normalizing capital and made it into one that was to cause the audience to question the capitalism and its social effects. The pinnacle of such an aesthetic is René Viénet’s film “Can Dialectics Break Bricks?” which took a kung-fu movie and, by voicing over all of the spoken parts, made it into a mouthpiece of Situationism and their brand of radical subjectivity while parodying the events of Mai 68. That this type of film was undesirable to the majority of the Parisian populace was known clearly by the producers of the films, however “the telos of his cinematic production had never been financial gain: even prior to its release, the hostility toward it’s violation of the syntax and economy of pleasure characteristic of spectacle was anticipated” (McDonnough 396). As can be imagined, the films had a very limited viewing audience not just due to their unpleasant nature, which made them a bore to watch but also due to the showing restrictions set upon them by their filmmakers. The Situationists, in essence, held that an aesthetic appreciable only by a “progressive” bourgeoisie to be something radical and revolutionary.

The problems with such an aesthetic are multi-faceted: it presumes an extremely high level of theoretical knowledge on the part of the audience, its incoherence and film techniques are alienating, it is designed to be unwatchable and its fear of recuperation and desire to resist representation lends itself to political inefficacy and the cultivation of a radical subjectivism that balks at the idea of any sort of unity offered by unions or political organizations. These self-imposed limitations on aesthetic practice are understandable given the Left political organization options available were limited to Stalinism, Maoism and a very marginalized Trotskyism. However the poverty of their philosophy is clear based upon their choice of non-filmic political tactics and history. Their tactic of detournement is the only tactic to have survived the Situationists disbandment and is illustrated in the groups inspired by the Situationists such as the Billboard Liberation Front, and while this group is looked down upon by the police it is because they are vandals and not because they represent a threat to the system. In fact, such an aesthetic is easily recuperable and marketable as the example of Adbusters show. Such aesthetic theory has had the effect of transitioning anarchist struggles from the traditional realm of labor and social justice struggles to one of mere cultural battles. While these are of course interconnected and inextricable, it appeals to a specific group of people which is not the working class. As the aesthetic and the political becomes tied together so strongly that the aesthetics triumphs as the sole medium of engaging in what becomes transmogrified into a vague “anti-capitalist” struggle we see how within its theoretical constructs it suddenly becomes a revolutionary act to deface advertisements, graffiti “counter-consumptive” messages and make movies that only a few people ever see. This is not to deny that this would happen in a revolutionary situation – however the greater part of time would be related to outreach, group building, advocacy, etc., which is much more “boring” than spray painting pithy phrases on government buildings. Modern day anarchists excessively enamored with the Situationists or ideas descended from them should work on deromanticizing the group and escaping the influence of their aesthetics. What an anarchist film aesthetics needs to do is to face the cultural hegemony inscribed with capitalist logic on its own playing field – the market – and form it accordingly.

Contrary to the logic of the Situationists, that a distinctly anarchist film aesthetic should appeal to a large section of the consumer marketplace is no paradox. Being that anarchism is a populist social movement it would not essentially be antagonistic to the mode of distribution of narrative Hollywood cinema, as it would be invested in gaining the widest possible audience for its messages. In fact a film that is able to so shows its cultural power.

One means of demonstrating the dearth of current modes of current anarchist film aesthetics is in its distribution. Most outlets of such films are relegated to online retail, occasional low-attendance film or political festivals and Bit Torrent websites such as OneBigTorrent.org. These areas of distribution presume either a particular political identity has been chosen or a certain amount of cultural and intellectual refinement that isn’t atypical of the non-bourgeoisie. Either way these films contain little outreach value for those not already converted. These films are typically documentaries and with few exceptions the production values match the small amount of money invested into making it. One manner of changing this static dynamic would be to attract investors, specifically those that could potentially benefit from propagating the anarchistic spirit.

Despite the fact that the “AFL-CIO willingly providing union cover to CIA operations enabling many a military junta”, it could be to the benefit of anarchists to ally and co-operate with these and other Hollywood Unions represented by the AFL-CIO in order to finance filmic projects. Doing so could mean pecuniary growth for both parties if mutually dividing the income for reinvestment into other projects and for use in class based projects (Smith 203). Such propositions would initially lead to internal controversies and resistance within the union leadership, but a case could easily be made that the mass distribution of anarchist cinema would lead to more political capital than simply throwing it in the direction of a Democratic party that takes its vote for granted and has historically cared little to assist the unions. Doing so not only financially helps the union and reintroduces anarchist currents of thought within them, but also is a manner of organizing and demonstrating an alternative to the current relations of capital. Given the conservatism and collaborationist history of this union to capitals interests it is unlikely that such an alliance is forthcoming and should such an event happen it would remain highly problematic, however the manner in which anarchist film aesthetics is currently limited by funding and technical ability in a market that has grown accustomed to slick production quality consigns anarchist film that fails to address this to the margins and are thus always just preaching to a very small choir.

The production of an explicitly anarchist film aesthetic would find itself in a great debt to post-colonial cultural analysis. Though some academic research has mapped out the manner in which Cold War politics since the Bolshevik Revolution has affected American cultural production – it has not obtained the same visibility of post-colonial theory. While it is important not to conflate historical anti-colonial and anarchist movements, it is also necessary to recognize the manner in which these two struggles overlap, shed light upon each other, encourage each other as well and at times antagonize each other. Anarchists qua anarchists are against government while anti-colonialists are merely against colonial governments. However the former views the American government as an occupying force and can in a way be seen as akin to a colonizer.

Like the colonized and as I have shown in the above film analysis anarchists are marginalized in all avenues of media representation except their own minor outlets. As such they must begin the task of cultural and political reinscription. For the contemporary anarchist filmmaker one could begin by applying Said’s statement that: “To achieve recognition is to rechart and then occupy the place in imperial cultural forms reserved for subordination, to occupy it self consciously, fighting for it on the very same territory once ruled by a consciousness that assumed the subordination of a designated inferior Other” (Said 210). Doing so would mean that the falsely depicted teleological unity between government/governed would be exposed, the American notion of classlessness exceptionalism and justified poverty would be excoriated and the popularized notion relating to the general stupidity of Americans and thus their need to be ruled over would be reversed. Building upon this initial charge, anarchist film is further responsible for articulating the Proudhonian “general idea of a revolution” by illustrating histories of struggle to their amnesiac audiences, negating the negative aspersions cast upon anarchism, affirming a positive vision of potential anarchist social relations by depicting current and possible socio-economic relations and destroying the logic of hegemonic domination propagated within cultural products. By striving to be a popular cultural referent, in the manner The Fountainhead has become for Objectivists and neo-liberals, they are able to counter the prevailing norms.

Like Ayn Rand’s novel turned film, the medium of socially active novels and agitprop offers a form that could be manipulated to creating movies today and further reputes such a juvenile notion that there can be no distinctly socially anarchist aesthetic. Books such as the unexpurgated version of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, The Iron Heel by Jack London, Haymarket by Martin Duberman, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, etc. are compelling, thus marketable stories and some of them contain the prophetic figures that is, quoting Georg Lukacs, “On the one hand, a historically authentic figure, true to life; and on the other hand anticipates those qualities… which will only emerge fully in… struggles” (Adorno 47). Put another way, as the heroes depicted in film are transformed from supernatural, adolescent characters fighting fantasies to anarchistic heroes there is likely to be an increase in a specific type of person: one who desires and wills to combat capitalism through organized struggle. Akin to this is the also Lukacasian notion that by reformulating cultural narratives to they act like fables there can be a true-avant-garde created. This notion has its basis in writers such as Gorky and Chernyshevsky and is currently being exploited by anarchists of the primitivist variety like Daniel Quinn. Reformulating some of Lukacs’ ideas to contemporary times does not mean reproducing a Stalinist or popular front approach to literature, but it does recognize the manner in which post 9/11 direct actions have been transmogrified into terrorism by repressive new laws and that it would benefit anarchists to help sway public opinion against such laws. This would be especially helpful for those anarchists who focus their advocacy on environmental issues. A contemporary film, with a scene similar to the courtroom monologue by Roark in The Fountainhead, containing a green-anarchist that is successfully able to defend his arson of a housing development in front of a jury and be found innocent would be meaningful leap forward both for anarchism and anarchist aesthetics.

These dynamic, alternative models to the reigning form of representation signify a social anarchist aesthetic incarnated as a positive, non-fragmented art occupying the dialectical space between the dimension of actuality and potentiality. That such an aesthetic need not be stylistically didactic and thus unpalatable is shown within the British director Ken Loach. While his works is of a vaguely leftist rather than particularly anarchist films he’s directed such as Land and Freedom and The Wind That Shakes the Barley display anarchistic sensibilities as they convey clear sympathy with workers, illustrates historically fecund moments for social change and shows the true situation for labor: struggle or subservience. Speaking of Loach’s film Bread and Roses, Andy Stern, the International President of the Service Employees International Union, says that the film “helps us to see and feel the urgent need for action. With the characters in the film, we learn again an old lesson: in the struggle for dignity and justice, working people can triumph when they stand together.”

It is not just the film itself that would lead to a properly anarchist aesthetic, but the attempt after the film to help create communities which can use the film as a referent for discussion. Rather than everyone leaving the theater as individuals, pamphleteers could wait outside the cinema to steer people to local action organizations or alternative spaces could be used to show the films akin to the way in which Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth set up showings in churches across the country and provided lesson plans for teachers when showing it in the classroom. Providing this productive capacity for anarchist films to imbue community relations rather then replicating the divisive individualism of capitalist films is one of the defining aspects of it. In this way an anarchist film aesthetic would be greatly inspired by Italian Communist Party founder Antonio Gramsci, who organized such events for Milanese workers along similar lines. By recognizing that an anarchist film aesthetic must not just be concerned with overthrowing the hegemonic values of cinema but turning it instead on its head, a true anarchist film aesthetic can be created.

Bibliography

Graeber, David. Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007

Lukacs, Georg. Aesthetics and Politics. New York, NY: Verso, 2007

Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001

McConnough, Tom. Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2004

Newitz, Annalee. Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York, NY: Vintage Press, 1994.

Smith, Sharon. Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2006.

Steuer, Joseph. Government Agencies Cover Filmmakers in Red Tape. http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/04/25/industry-newyork-legend-dc-idUSN2335654320070425?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0. Accessed May 15th, 2011

Whitfield, Stephen. The Culture of the Cold War. Baltimore, MA: John Hopkins University Press, 1996.

 

Footnotes

[1] Giving the protagonist the name of Puck is similar to the opening scene of xXx in that it establishes him as a character that is both related to chaos and mischief and that it relates him to a mythological ideology.

[2] Besides the 26-page introduction entitled Anarchism Today, which contains now outdated analysis as to the contemporary political situation, the book is composed of nothing but now outdated illustrations and diagrams of how to manufacture drugs, make black ops communications technology and improvised explosives.

[3] Also worth noting is the fact that it received laudable reviews within various Leftist online message boards and blogs after its release for “its spirit of rebellion” and ability to inject a revolutionary referent into popular discourse. However Alan Moore, the author of the original graphic novel, claimed that the film had gone so far from his authorial intent that he disowned the film. These divergent receptions the film evokes issues that will be answered in a later section.

[4] It’s also worth noting how similar this relationship is to other historical ones between the American government and various domestic groups and foreign nationalists subjected to violence.

[5] Such a claim is however baseless as the IWW had been rewriting popular hymns for songs fifty years beforehand.