CALL: Roberta Smith, Criticism: A Life Sentence

On November 5, 2009, Roberta Smith delivered the 2009 AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School. From her vantage as senior art critic of the New York Times, she shared her thoughts on art criticism in general and, in particular, as it relates to her twenty years at the Times. She both embraced and challenged the concept of art journalism for a daily newspaper that caters to a broad general public, and elaborated on the primary importance of the art object, distinct from the cultural, political or economic context in which it might be situated.

RESPONSE: Laura Auricchio, Responsibility

Laura Auricchio is the Assistant Professor of Art History at Parsons The New School for Design. Auricchio has written extensively for both scholarly and general audiences on topics in the disparate fields of eighteenth-century French visual culture and contemporary art. She is the author of several dozen exhibition and book reviews that have appeared in publications ranging from The Art Bulletin to Art Papers to Time Out New York. Her first book, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution, was published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2009. She is currently working on a visually-informed biography of Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution.

During the heated 2008 campaign season, Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin sought to downplay Barack Obama’s experience as a grass-roots organizer by contrasting it with her own past as the chief elected official of Wasilla, Alaska. The mayor of a small town, Palin famously pronounced, “is sort of like a community organizer, except with real responsibilities.”

Listening to Roberta Smith discuss her thirty-seven years as an art critic, more than twenty of which have been spent writing for the New York Times, I found myself returning to an underlying, if unintended, question implied by Palin’s invidious comparison: does every profession come with its own set of responsibilities? If so, what are the responsibilities of an art critic? And does the act of speaking from a platform as powerful the Times add to her load?

By responsibilities, I do not mean tasks, though Smith surely wrestles daily with a to-do list of epic proportions. (As she explains to a questioner, it is only through obsessive list-making that she manages to maintain her bearings on New York’s high-speed carousel of gallery, museum, and alternative exhibitions.) Rather, I mean responsibility in the sense of “moral accountability,” in the words of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary. To whom, and for what, is an art critic responsible?

Smith apparently believes that art critics do indeed carry a certain burden of responsibility. Mid-way through her presentation, she proposes that all of us who are “lucky enough to have a feeling for art” have an obligation “to give back.” “You can’t be proud about where art will take you,” she insists, suggesting an equivalence among the art world’s varied career choices. Whether your professional relationship to art involves making it, curating it, writing about it, or selling it, the fundamental responsibility, Smith believes, remains the same: to “put [the love of art] back into society.”

As a critic, Smith understands herself to be primarily responsible to her “readership.” But who, precisely, is the reader?

At one point, Smith suggests that her readership may be composed of frequent exhibition-goers. Noting that her reviews are “written in the moment,” she observes that they are also “used by people that way, very quickly.” To a certain extent this is true. For a cultured New Yorker or an out-of-town visitor with a bit of spare time, a Times review may offer little more than casual guidance on which shows to catch and which to skip. In this view, criticism is fleeting, with few enduring consequences.

Elsewhere in her talk, however, Smith implies that responsibilities may run deeper. Lamenting that “our visual lives in this country are more or less unexamined,” Smith seems to propose that a critic might serve as a model whose approach to works of art, designed spaces, and other visual features of our environment could be emulated by others. Everyone has a response to the visual, she avers, and everyone has a “critical ability” – the capacity to “analyze and judge.” Yet when faced with Art, which seems always to begin with a capital A, many otherwise confident viewers feel unprepared, intimated, and so fail to engage with their reactions. The world might be a very different place, Smith muses, if this vast but underutilized resource of critical potential could somehow be tapped. She is quite clear on the point that museums have a role to play in fostering visual literacy among the public. Perhaps critics also share some of this burden.

I wonder, though, whether a critic’s constituency might be much smaller than this vision would suggest. As a very part-time writer of exhibition reviews for Time Out New York, I have been known to share Smith’s hopeful attitude towards the power of criticism to open eyes. I’ve aspired to reach out to a broad public, to persuade just one person to give art a chance. But in moments of more sober reflection I have to concede that a reader who finds art uninteresting is not likely to spend any length of time with an exhibition review. Those who turn to the art section are already hooked. In that case, maybe the best I can do is to provide a bit of historical insight or comparative context that will enable readers to see the art in new ways. In other words, maybe the critic’s responsibility is to educate the educated.

Of course, exhibition-goers are not a critic’s only readers. Artists, curators, dealers and collectors also read reviews. In fact, they can be affected quite profoundly, and in lasting ways, by their contents. Is the critic to be held accountable for these effects? Should potential consequences influence a critic’s writing?

Smith responds with a resounding “no.” She is the viewer’s advocate, pure and simple. “I’m not doing it for the artist,” she states. “They can take my response as evidence of how their broadcast is being received,” or they can ignore it. On the subject of commerce, she demurs. “I don’t really know what effect I have on the market because I don’t really pay any attention to it.”

Does anyone? Should anyone? If so, who?

An audience member hints at this line of inquiry by asking how exhibitions are selected and assigned for review at the Times. Evidently, as the critics with greatest longevity, Smith and Holland Cotter wield considerable power in this regard. But Smith hastens to add that they are not omnipotent. Ultimately, the critic reports to her editor, who reports to someone else, and so on up the ladder. At some point, the paper’s bottom line – a matter of particular urgency in these difficult economic times – must come into play. After all, the Times is a commercial enterprise, albeit one that adheres to a code of journalistic ethics. The critic is an employee. She is, in the cold parlance of an increasingly web- and numbers-driven world of journalism, a “content provider.” Neither more nor less.

Still, I think the question is worth pondering. To whom, and for what, is an art critic responsible?

Joshua Simon is a curator and writer based in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. He is the co-editor of Maayan Magazine for Poetry and The New & Bad Art Magazine and editor of Maarvon – New Film Magazine, all based in Tel Aviv. Among his projects in poetry is Red: Poems of the Working Class, an anthology in Hebrew and Arabic he co-edited (May Day, 2007). Recent curatorial projects include Internazionale! (Left Bank, Israeli Communist Party Culture Club, Tel Aviv 2008), Come to Israel, It’s Hot and Wet and We Have The Humus! (Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York Times 2008), The Rear at the First Herzliya Biennial of Contemporary Art (2007), and Sharon (Tel Aviv 2004). The book The Aesthetics of Terror (Charta, 2009) which he edited, is based on a group show on censorship he co-curated in New York City.

1.
Roee Rosen’s insightful “The Law is Laughing: Fragments Following the War in Gaza” traces a variety of pathologies through their symptoms expressed in the Israeli media. The self-explanatory mechanisms of the Israeli media disavow any criminality on their part. The Israeli media presents its case from the standpoint of the victim.
In order to render the logic of the unconscious, Freud cites a joke about the impoverished man who borrows 25 florins from a well-to-do acquaintance, assuring him at some length of his distress. The very same day, his patron comes upon him in a restaurant with a plate of salmon with mayonnaise before him. He reproaches him: “What, you borrow money from me, and then you go and order salmon with mayonnaise. That’s what you used my money for?” “I don’t get it,” answered the accused, “when I’ve got no money I can’t eat salmon with mayonnaise. When I’ve got money, I mustn’t eat salmon with mayonnaise. So tell me, when can I eat salmon with mayonnaise?”

Freud’s delightful reading of this joke puts the impoverished bon vivant’s claim in an existential context: while the benefactor believes the impoverished man should be compelled not to even think of delicacies such as salmon with mayonnaise in his situation, the impoverished man knows that tomorrow he will be in the same situation, therefore he should enjoy today. In many ways, the Israeli self-explanatory mechanisms, both those of the government and those of the media, use the same logic of the accused in this joke, but in a very different way: a series of claims by Dutch, British, Norwegian, and Swedish organizations right after the attack on Gaza were answered with Israeli counteraccusations regarding these countries’ demeanor during the Second World War and during their Colonialist and Imperialist past. Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Avigdor Lieberman’s responds frequently to the accusations by saying something along the lines of: “I don’t get it. Our actions are nothing compared to what you did in the past centuries. Had we have done what we are now doing back then, it would not have even been regarded as crime at all.” In the spirit of the joke, this Israeli mechanism of justification against any criticism of its actions echoes the logic of the impoverished man: “When we didn’t have our own state we couldn’t do it. Now that we do have a state, we mustn’t do it?”

2.
Having the privilege to publish Rosen’s “The Law is Laughing” in Hebrew in Maayan Magazine was a learning experience—the text enabled a reading into the Israeli civil society as constantly oscillating between mobilization as citizenship and citizenship as mobilization. The regime of segregation has taken its toll on the privileged as well as on the oppressed. By making of the Palestinians non-citizens, Israeli civil society condemned itself to have no civilian life. One of the ways this toll manifests itself is a pathology of eccentric normativity: Only in Israel (and maybe North Korea) can one find on the front page of the most popular daily newspaper a rating of high schools based on the number of graduates volunteering to elite army units. Another example for the eccentric normativity of Israeli civil society is the “business as usual” manner with which the Israeli military’s video-on-demand TV channel was received by viewers; during the first days of the attack on Gaza the military spokesman launched a TV channel in which re-runs of aerial documentation of recent shelling on Gaza were shown, together with more “arty” videos with footage of blindfolded detained Palestinians dissolving to landscapes with swarming soldiers and of armored vehicles passing in slow motion. This same eccentric normativity enables the military to occupy a vast area right in the center of Tel Aviv-Jaffa (it owns the most desired real estate lots in the heart of the business district, spread over approximately a hundred acres), and to have its chief command facility hover over the city, making the 1.5 million residents in the surrounding area actual human shields of a military compound.

Contrary to Apartheid, the occupation is a system of denial. As a regime of segregation it differs from Apartheid in that the privileged do not admit its existence. This is a disavowal Apartheid. Eyal Weizman has claimed that today, the concept of the banality of evil, introduced by Hannah Arendt, has been updated to the paradigm of the lesser evil. Today political and ethical debates revolve around a management of evils. This would be one of the ways to explain the Israeli consensus surrounding the attack to which they subjected Gaza.

3.
In the months since the attack on Gaza in December 2008, Israeli media has ignored the city’s existence—there isn’t a word about the hunger and impoverishment of the population. In many ways it is as if the whole Gaza Strip had disappeared. This, while the war has continued by other means: as the military operation, killing approximately 1,400 people, was just phase one of the attack, phase two is the control of the reconstruction of Gaza, or more accurately, the prevention of re-building. Reconstruction is a form of destruction; the aim was to dethrone Hamas through the reconstruction. From the Israeli viewpoint, the battle now is over who will reconstruct Gaza and what elite will be consolidated through the distribution of foreign funds.

Almost ten months after the attack, the first report on the situation of the population in Gaza in Israeli media was a story about the Gaza zoo; after the zebras in the zoo were killed during the Israeli attack, the manager invited an artist to paint stripes on a number of donkeys. This sad story of deprivation and creativity was regarded as a funny anecdote by Israeli commentators, and experts on animal rights were rushed to the studios to explain how inhuman the Gaza zoo staff was.

During this whole period of silence since the attack, the front pages of Israeli papers were bleeding with headlines to stories of random violence: an ultra-orthodox pregnant woman arrested for starving her toddler son, later diagnosed in her psychiatric evaluation as suffering from Münchausen syndrome by proxy; a hate crime, directed against a gay youth center in the center of Tel Aviv, that killed two teenagers; a group of drunk teenagers beating to death a man on the beach in front of his wife and daughter; a TV celebrity, Dudu Topaz, going on a revenge spree, ordering attacks on TV executives after his show was taken off the air and rival channels rejected him—waiting for his trial in a detention facility, Topaz hanged himself in the shower using the cord of an electric kettle; a young divorcé drowning his daughter in the bathtub and cutting his wrists—while waiting for his trial he jumped to his death in the detention facility’s courtyard from a ten-foot-high wall, cracking his skull and breaking his neck.

At the same time Israeli media highlighted these gruesome stories, they were silent on the conditions in devastated Gaza. Since January 2009, after the Israeli military resumed its invasion, Gaza has continued to be enclosed from all sides and under a strict embargo of rations and quotas of food, clothes, medication, and building materials. In the face of the media’s inability to acknowledge their responsibility and unwillingness to report this collective abuse of a population of more than 1.5 million people, one cannot but define their hysteria over this series of random stories of violence in the past months as a symptom of repression and projection. These headlines are a confession: we are the starving mother, we are the drowning father, we are the ones committing hate crimes, we are the ones who are killing the innocent, we are going on a revenge spree.

4.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt suggested the Dreyfus affair to be a “foregleam” of the twentieth century, a grand rehearsal of the rivaling ideological powers of twentieth century Europe. With the help of Karl Marx’s analysis of the fall of the Second French Republic and the raise of Napoleon III in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (which was first published in the U.S. in the spring of 1852, one hundred years before Arendt’s book), one can borrow this “grand rehearsal” idea and apply the grave mishaps of the Second French Republic to twentieth- and twenty-first-century parliamentary regimes, or better, “dictatorships of the bourgeoisie.” Marx is giving an insightful report on the recent history of his time, describing how the logic of lesser evil and (almost) free general elections results in proto-Fascism. In his text, Marx shows how the Revolution, calling for universal manhood suffrage, resulted in just a few months in the election of a “grotesque mediocrity” of a president (on December 10 that same year). Louis Bonaparte was elected President of the Republic with almost 5.5 million votes—75% of the total). He would later on eliminate the Second Republic and restore a Second Empire on December 2, 1852 (What Marx refers to as his Eighteenth Brumaire). Marx would have probably agreed with Deleuze and Guattari when they say: “No, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted Fascism.”

5.
Nowadays in parliamentary regimes governance is often synonymous with corruption, and Israeli politics is no exception. Under parliamentary regimes of the past decades we have been subjected to the rule of capital’s technocratic Fascism—a bureaucratic elite of economists and political practitioners. Yet, in Israel one notices how the traditional “junta” of military elite (Yitzhak Rabin, Commander in Chief turned Prime Minister; Ezer Weizman, Air Force Commander turned President; Ariel Sharon, Head of Southern Command turned Prime Minister; Ehud Barak, Commander in Chief turned Prime Minister; Shaul Mofaz, Commander in Chief turned Cabinet Minister and candidate for Prime Minister in the primary elections of Kadima Party—this genealogy of militarism in government established its dominance with the Israeli military victory of 1967) joined forces with the technocratic Fascists (Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni—and prominent Israeli politicians who are linked to the genealogy of neo-liberalism that swept the country since 1991, all with strong ties to key business figures who benefitted immensely from the ongoing wave of privatizations they have been implementing in the last two decades) to construct together a corporatist Fascism.

In 2006 Roee Rosen created the illustrated figure of Shit Boy and the drawing Shit Boy Showers (Suicide). In this touching and hilarious drawing, Shit Boy is showering in his own pee, and by doing so bringing about his own demise. Rosen’s Shit Boy is our Angelus Novus—it calls for an allegorical reading of the age of “Anal Capitalism” (as Kaja Silverman coined it) and is a poignant image for our political horizon. Walter Benjamin saw Paul Klee’s 1920 watercolor Angelus Novus as depicting “the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” Rosen’s Shit Boy presents a perpetual circulation of destruction and reconstruction. This is an animation of an ungrateful privilege—being captive of yourself, being hostage of a logic of which you yourself are the cause. The “shit boy showers pathology” is self-inflicting. Jewish Israelis are held hostage by their own logic. They are trapped by their privileges.

6.
In his fragments, Rosen refers to war crime as a political qualification and to criminality as a sought-after characteristic of the Israeli leadership. It seems even more so today with the Israeli response to the investigation of international human rights and humanitarian law violations related to the attack on Gaza, which was assigned by the United Nations Human Rights Council and headed by Richard Goldstone. After the Goldstone report, Israeli Welfare Minister Isaac (Buzi) Herzog of the Labor Party suggested constructing a special internal bureau to deal with allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity by high-ranking Israeli officers and politicians. Herzog was quoted saying: “Israel is going through a harsh judicial campaign that undermines its sheer existence, and therefore it has to recruit the best jurist minds to support it in its battle.” In a bitter irony, the Welfare Minister turns the state that was supposed to protect the victims of crimes against humanity into a state that protects war criminals. By suggesting the construction of this bureau, the minister has proven that Israeli leadership forms its constituency through incrimination. We are all accomplices. Harboring war criminals, Israel has turned to be a very bad Holocaust joke.

CALL: Birth and Rebirth of a Nation, colloquium and film screening, September 26, 2009
Centered on D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation, this day-long event reconsidered the notorious white supremacist manifesto in the context of the Obama call for change. The speakers, among them Douglas A. Blackmon, David W. Blight, Bill Gaskins, Margo Jefferson, Michelle Materre, Paul D. Miller (a k a DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid), Miriam J. Petty, and Michele Wallace considered questions of race and representation and asked whether today’s racial imagination can be reconciled with that of nearly a century ago when Griffith’s film became the first blockbuster in American cinema.

Watch Birth and Rebirth of a Nation on YouTube: Parts 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

RESPONSE: Chris Johnson, Ways of Seeing
Chris Johnson is a musical anthropologist and Assistant Professor in Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts. Johnson has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar, in Germany for one year, and a Fellow at the Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. He is also an Apple Computer Distinguished Educator and a graduate of New York University’s American Studies Doctoral Program.

His interests include African American culture, as related to Jazz as a black art form specifically, and performance practices generally, and the role of images in the shaping of ideas in society, historically and in our time. Johnson teaches using images, film, and sound and promotes digital technology as a teaching tool.

As an alternative to seeing The Birth of a Nation at the public screening on September 26, I viewed clips of it on YouTube to refresh my memory of the content of the film.

Watching it on my laptop, I wondered how Americans could ever have accepted the white actors in blackface as African American? Their makeup does not appear to be very well done at all. This observation leads to more questions and other observations. Since “Birth” was the first blockbuster in American film, many moviegoers had not seen blacks or blackface on screen before. Also, Americans were mainly familiar with minstrelsy, where makeup at best was sort of a simulation of blackness. In The Birth of a Nation, the performers in blackface were juxtaposed with African American actors which truly jilts the mind. Is it possible, I thought, that Americans were so racist as to buy into this poor theater? What does it mean that “Birth” operated within this visual charade?

In his introduction to African-American Performance and Theater History (2001), Harry Justin Elam presents race in theatrical terms. Race, according to him, is a “device” that is only one of a set of other props that are  “co-constructed” by actors as well audience members.  Belief is both created and suspended in performance. In the same book, in a chapter entitled “Deep Skin: Reconstructing Congo Square,” Joseph Roach describes how white observers of live performances were habitually distracted by the actors’ skin color from the “cultural productions” that they observed. The authors take on the nature of observation suggests that the meaning of performance itself becomes “essentialized”—or condensed—by  the connotations of race. Art cannot be separated from social values, in fact, Roach goes so far as to propose that history and memory are rooted in performance.

If we apply this set of ideas to “Birth,” the theatrical device of the constructed character explains how audiences could have readily accepted blackface performers—alongside African Americans. Arguably, audiences knew the difference and reveled in the imitation, the racial lampoon. To the extent that certain performance is “essentialized,” the makeup serves as a prop to reinforce the actor’s role. The distraction of darkened skin is enough to propel a caricature. This thinking also explains the necessary segregation in the shooting of the film as audiences could only be comfortable with actors of the same race in intimate scenes. Thus “acting black” became a trope.

In his essay “Narrating Black Music’s Past,” (Radical History Review, 84, Fall 2002) Ronald Radano describes a dilemma in how black history has been presented. He writes of “the language of white supremacy in constituting ‘black music’” and asks the question “how might we engage simultaneously in black music’s deconstruction and its affirmative reconstruction?” Radano finds troubling the reality of African American culture’s mediated story. Our participation in the Vera List Center’s event “Birth and Rebirth” is of great importance as a means of articulating a new path for the construction of racial images while acknowledging the setting, ideology, and technical apparatus that created The Birth of a Nation in the first place. Such creative displays as “Rebirth of a Nation” challenge the force of the original piece by taking possession of the content, sampling it, and revaluing the film for our time. Through this process we take control of our destiny even in the face of continued bias.

“Birth” and “Rebirth” on the Web
If you search the phrase “Birth of a Nation” (in quotes) on YouTube, the top hit is for a trailer for the film with 140,825 views. The trailer was posted two years ago. It has 832 comments the first dozen of which were posted “2 days ago” and up to a week ago. One user has posted the entire film in twenty approximately nine minute segments. There are 2,890 results in total for this search on YouTube.

After viewing a few scenes from the film, I wondered about the fact that this controversial work can be viewed at any time and that we can all add our interpretation of the piece. The first page of comments vary in length and direction, ranging from one-liners such as “this movie is really disturbing” to responses that consist of full paragraphs. One response to a post ends with “attitudes like yours are not helping.” I am interested in the implications of having archival media at-the-ready in our time. I am concerned about the risks and dangers of misinterpretation of such work. Without context such items can be misread. In fact, isn’t YouTube racist for allowing such films to be posted? Well, no. But I do believe that context matters.

Searching “Rebirth of a Nation” on YouTube immediately brings up Paul D. Miller’s film with 24,143 views. There are five comments on the trailer posted one year ago with a total of 60 hits for the search phrase. Public Enemy’s 2006 rap album of the same name is second in prominence for listings on the first YouTube page for this search. On the first and on the following pages are many versions of Miller’s trailer and sections of the piece. It is interesting and ironic that “Rebirth” is so popular compared to “Birth.”

Jay David Bolter, in his essay “Digital Media and Art: Always Already Complicit?” (Criticism, Winter 2007, Vol. 49, No. 1), speaks of media archaeology when considering the  broad assemblage of film online and its study. Karen Gracy, in “Moving Image Preservation and Cultural Capital” (Library Trends,Vol. 56, No. 1. Summer 2007), makes a series of arguments regarding the need to reimagine the moving image archive. She speaks of the moving image as a form of “objectified cultural capital” that on the Internet is both user appropriated and user created. Moving images are recycled into “new works” and as part of “creative acts.” The growing meta-archive is tagged and linked within and beyond particular video hosting sites. My interest in this topic begins with the global community’s attraction to African American culture and the dissemination of that cultural capital.

Tagging and linking suggests promotion, not unlike the way Digg.com works where often tagged items become identified as particularly significant. The manipulated versions of the original clips, their posting and viewing, have established a unique archive. Whether this leads to an anarchic Internet is debatable, but it certainly is available to a large and ever growing audience. It is fascinating how, through access and distribution, a discussion of old material has found new life.

Classic Film
Not long ago I purchased the DVD version of Stormy Weather, the Hollywood produced, all-black-cast music and dance film from 1943. It has only recently become available in digital form. In the film, the African American star Lena Horne sings the title song with full orchestra; the film also features dance interludes with the Katherine Dunham dancers. There are two dance scenes that set off Lena’s position from a window where she begins the song to a down-stage position where she performs the core of the piece. I was amazed to see that in a close-up mode Lena is shedding a tear as she sings. It wasn’t until I saw the digital version in full screen modus (I use this film in class), that I noted this moving expression of emotion. In the 1947 film New Orleans Billie Holiday sings the song “The Blues are a Brewin’.” She is with trumpeter Louis Armstrong and his orchestra. Holiday plays the role of both the maid of the white woman with whom the main protagonist has fallen in love and the girlfriend of real life jazz artist Louis Armstrong. She is young and beautiful as she sings in a sequined gown, wearing her trademark gardenia in her hair. This is a high-class setting with a white and well-dressed audience. In this clip Holiday also gets her close-up: her eyes and jewelry sparkle as her face fills the screen. In both these examples, the digital versions of the films show us more than viewers have ever seen in the original versions. We are arguably seeing more than was originally intended to be seen.

It seems to me, conventions of seeing are at play in both the film experience described above and my earlier observations regarding blackface. The concept of “how we see” has undergone a profound evolution since the last century. These changes are in equal parts a metaphor for the changes the values attached to our vision  have undergone as well as the changes in the technologies that advance it. Above I suggest a set of ideas that have been a part of that change.

CALL: Inaugural Lecture, Speculating on Change
The inaugural lecture on “Speculating on Change” was delivered by Michael A. Cohen, Director, The Graduate Program of International Affairs at The New School on October 16, 2009. Cohen discussed cities both as sites of the greatest impacts of global change, but also as sites providing solutions to some of the challenges that result from such change. Four specific “paradoxes” – dealing with issues of economy, geography, politics, and sustainability – provided entries to a discussion of cities as both spaces of hope and sites of vulnerability.

RESPONSE: William Morrish
The response is offered by William Morrish, Dean of the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons The New School for Design. Trained as an architect, Morrish comes to Parsons from the University of Virginia School of Architecture, where he taught and led research in the areas of sustainable urban infrastructure, new housing models, and global urbanization and climate change. In that role, he focused on interdisciplinary work addressing what he calls the “second generation of sustainability”: the design of cultural ecologies. He is a nationally recognized urban designer whose practice encompasses inter-disciplinary research on urban housing and infrastructure, collaborative publications on human settlement and community design, and educational programs exploring integrated design, which are applied to a wide range of innovative community-based city projects.

Michael Cohen’s lecture focused on the discrepancy between emerging ideas on sustainable urban development and the realities of implementing them on the ground, in the growing global city. The four points of his lecture identify the reasons that capacity cannot be delivered, namely the lack of adequate research, tools and models. His lecture points to the disturbing fact that most of our urban development skills are based on outdated concepts that identify master plans and large projects as the cure for urban ills. Cohen began to sketch the challenge faced when transferring stimuli for change from to the top to a middle zone, where local economic, social and ecological activities can aggregate into more sustainable urban networks of support. The sobering conclusion of his lecture was that we have little time to change practice and behavior. As the polar ice caps melt, cities are being flooded with new social, cultural and environment realities.

Yet within this maelstrom of global urban change, communities such as Bogotá, Columbia, and Rosaria, Argentina, are overhauling the old the rules of planning, governance and management procedures. Civic leaders and neighborhood activists are learning how to turn the principles of sustainable development into new models of integrated design, inclusive operations, and regenerative practices. These transformations focus on the mid-size scale of the cities and combine it with basic everyday economic and social transactions, for instance by expanding mobility options, connecting micro-business networks, and designing open and transparent civic facilities as cultural centers.

It might be useful to start with differences. Had Richard Sennett not fallen ill and participated, as intended, it would have been easier. After all his work is representative of a very learned but moderately progressive critique of the current problems of labor and it would have provided a more clear-cut counterpart to the more radical and transformative approaches of Andrew Ross and Tiziana Terranova (from now on AR and TT). In their cases, difference might be too strong a word. It might be more appropriate to talk about degrees of emphasis. Yet, I am going to highlight a few areas where, in my opinion, they diverge in the hope of adding some clarity to the current discourse on the nature of labor and on its possible political ramifications.

There is a strong sense of continuity, almost inevitability, in AR’s picture of the current restructuring of labor, particularly in the case of the so called creative industries and new media industries with working conditions of a high degree of flexibility and precariousness. AR explicitly claims that such restructuring is but the latest stage of a trend that started in the 1920s under the managerial practices of Human Relations. I find this assertion rather problematic because either it is too general a statement about the constant attempt on the part of capital to regiment its workforce by force or inducement (and in this case it can be applied to the history of capitalism even before the advent of Human Relations), or, if it is the result of a comparative analysis of specific managerial strategies, it misses the important point that the current capitalist turn in regards to labor is a repudiation of Human Relations’ theories and practices of the past. In fact, at the risk of simplifying, one can say that the break between Fordism and Post-Fordism consists, to a great degree, in the substitution of Human Relations with what it is often called distributed management or self management, and therefore with an entirely new conception of what management and labor are.

Historically, Human Relations were developed to respond to the failure of Taylorism and Scientific Management in order to create a docile work force that could be molded to fit the dictates of standardized mass production (the assembly line being the epitome of such arrangement), and to deal with workers’ subjectivity and their rebellion to work rules and work rhythms. Thus, Human Relations began to consider the work force as a counterpart to be dealt with through some form of communication and negotiation. It led eventually to the recognition of shop floor representation albeit with a clear separation of management from waged labor. More broadly, it corresponded to the dialectics of classes of the Keynesian system and of the welfare state.

The neoliberal turn and the Post-Fordist mode of production have drastically changed the terms of engagement. In rethinking the enterprise, to the point of envisioning its disappearance in a series of distributed entities, current management theory tries to capture the realities of drastically reconfigured labor dynamics characterized by work teams, temporary employment, flexible skills, and amateur “free labor.” For AR, these new realities are but an extension of old Human Relations strategies. The difference today is only in the degree of “permissiveness” (AR). It is not by chance that for AR Harry Braverman is a paradigmatic author. Capitalism leads inevitably to a progressive impoverishment of the quality of labor and to the socialization of alienation and exploitation, a sort of proletarianization of the whole society that might not take the form of deskilling, as Braverman claims, but that leads to even worse conditions of sacrificial labor and self exploitation.

For TT, the importance of the present restructuring consists instead in the novelty and discontinuity that they represent in relation to the previous social economic formation. TT is interested in understanding the current changes in managerial practices, but also in reading these changes against the grain, so to speak, from the other side of the relationships of production. Thus, she is interested in analyzing not only the new forms of extraction of value from labor, but also the new subjective practices that accompany and shape those relations, and in drawing implications for a new political strategy.

Interestingly enough it is Marx that provides a guide to understand the current shift in the nature of labor. Marx shows that there are always two inextricably connected sides of the labor process: the side of exploitation and alienation, and the side of cooperation. In general, the Marxist tradition has emphasized the former and left the latter to the realm of politics and consciousness, beyond the labor process. Yet, the changing nature of labor in Post-Fordism has shifted the balance of productive forces towards the side of cooperation. Increasingly, it is social engagement, both in the sense of interpersonal relationship and symbiosis with technological artifacts, that pushes innovation and creativity to the center of production by transforming machinery into media.

But cooperation is also the site of subjective practices of resistance, and here is where TT sees the opening of new possibilities for alternative forms of production. We could say succinctly that where AR is describing the new conditions of labor as a social factory, TT sees them as a factory of the social. Work in the new productive landscape is increasingly characterized by communication, symbolic interaction, affective engagements. It entails less and less fabrication and more social cooperation, something that TT and others call “immaterial labor.” And these are the material conditions that give rise to new subjective practices.

The difference between the two approaches becomes even more evident when their proponents envision future developments and formulate alternatives. In my view, AR’s analysis leads ultimately to a very defensive position. It seems that his main concern is to alleviate the deteriorating working conditions of the labor force and to fight the onslaught of neoliberalism’s restructuring, which indeed has created, particularly in the present crisis, massive unemployment, the increase in precarity and the abolition of safety nets. To respond to such devastating dislocations, much more has to be done in terms of providing adequate income maintenance programs (see for instance the current push on health care) or developing new forms of labor organization that expand across economic sectors and global fragmentation. But if we follow TT’s perspective, these struggles have a much greater strategic value to the extent to which, in addition to being defensive measures, they prefigure new productive arrangements and alternative social configurations.

Take, for instance, the proposal of guarantee income. Whatever the difference between Europe and the U.S., in terms of historical circumstances and short term feasibility, it appears to be an proposal that is gaining ground and could be central to a policy debate in the near future. However, guarantee income can be conceptualized quite differently and have different political implications: For AR, guarantee income is a remedy for the instability and flexibility of employment. By providing income security it increases the chances of finding adequate employment. For TT, guarantee income is, in a larger context, a stepping stone in the direction of severing the relation between income and work. Guarantee income that is based on life needs and not productive performance goes a long way in prefiguring and giving sustenance to experiments of non-economic productive arrangements. The political value of a struggle around guarantee income is in linking of immediate defensive measures to the strategic new institutions of cooperation, what TT calls the commons. Seen from this point of view, the path from the guarantee income to the commons is part of the process that, in the Italian Marxist literature that TT refers to, is called the “exodus.” In other words, the potentials expressed by the current social dynamics point to the opening of areas of self valorization and autonomous social practices that are quite different from the preceding dialectics of classes.

By now, it must be quite apparent where my preferences lie. The conceptual framework and the practice of the new commons, however, are still in their infancy. Thereare some fundamental political and theoretical issues that have to be addressed and clarified. What is the nature of commonality that it is detected in current subjective practices and proposed for future institutional forms? For instance, it is not clear to me to what extent there is a direct path from immaterial labor to the commons. Is the commons a realization of labor, albeit a labor based on cooperation rather than competition? Is it the old Marxist notion of emancipation of labor through labor? And, if so, how does it differ from the historical experience of Soviet and workers’ councils, in other ways than the heightened sociality of immaterial labor? Could it just be another version of industrial democracy, a democracy for the social factory?  If, on the contrary, it means not just exodus of labor but from labor – and from its connotations of productivity, utility and efficacy – then it would be nothing short of a redefinition of praxis itself. And maybe that is what is required today.

CALL: Changing Labor Value
Changing Labor Value, a panel discussion on September 29, 2009, examined the nature of work in the digital era, focusing on the relationship between invisible labor, play, exploitation, pleasure, and the production of value. The speakers, Andrew Ross and Tiziana Terranova, considered the impact of corporate expropriation of value from millions of net users and offered some alternatives. The panel was accompanied by an installation of Web-based projects by Burak Arikan, Ursula Endlicher, Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott, Aaron Koblin, Stephanie Rothenberg and Jeff Crouse.

The Internet as Playground and Factory on Vimeo

RESPONSE: Paolo Carpignano
The response is offered by Paolo Carpignano, Associate Professor of Sociology and Media Studies at The New School and coordinator of the Masters/Ph.D. program in the Sociology of Media. A writer, consultant and producer for production companies in the United States, Brazil, and Italy, Carpignano has published articles on sociology, social history and media theory. He is the co-author of Crisis and Workers’ Organization and The Formation of the Mass Worker in the USA, and the author of the online project Televisuality. He is currently working on a book on the relationship between work and media.

Where does conflict come from? The answer to this question is becoming ever more elusive, even in cases where we appear to know the answers, the protagonists and the situations well enough. Roee Rosen’s text, “The Law is Laughing: Fragments Following the War in Gaza,” asks what role the law occupies in a protracted conflict. The question itself is structured around the over-determination of protagonism and on an understanding of conflict that revolves around a narcissistic and negative doubling of the protagonist. Rosen’s mode of interpretation is itself both comedic and comic, banking on the startle response of the reader, familiar with and worn-out by terms of the situation to which he refers.

In his essay “Laughter” (1900), Henri Bergson proposes, broadly, that a situation that is comic is structured around the coexistence of contradiction within a singular situation without one element of the combination ever overwhelming the other, except in a punctuated manner.¹ These punctuations are revelatory moments that elicit release in the form of laughter. For Bergson, the reigning contradiction is a mechanistic arrangement that gives off the illusion of life. If the procedural matrix of the law is a form of such mechanistic arrangement, then we might read Rosen’s fragments as identifying those moments in which the law seems, perversely, to come to life as though through the periodic and repeated lifting of a veil.

The first instance of this unveiling is in the parsing of the names of various military operations whose cheerful meanings carefully and meaningfully veil the horror of the operations themselves. These names do not conceal any hoped-for outcomes, but in fact provide semiotic cover for enacting certain forms of destruction. The reading of those names through the veil of that semiotic cover is a process rich with revelation, especially insofar as it points to the contradiction between meaning and action, between nominal and verbal forms. As Bergson puts it, in comedy, one is faced with “manner seeking to outdo the matter, the letter aiming at ousting the spirit.”

The fragment itself bears testimony to the punctuated temporality of a protracted civil war that in turn bears the enormous weight of a fundamental contradiction, that between ethical and unethical forms of militancy. The law imagines itself to be on the side of sovereignty and professional soldering and against terror and un-civility, yet the lines between the ethical and unethical are continuously blurring within the spaces of conflict.

Each episode, each action, in this protracted conflict is marked by the law’s negation of itself, that is to say, its violation of norms upheld as sovereign, by sovereign authority. This self-transgression that turns the lawgiver, the state, into a criminal, results in confounding the boundaries of sovereignty. When the state itself thus negates the concept of the law, what is happening may be read as a simultaneous and, of course, contradictory expansion and contraction of the scope of the law and sovereignty under the guise of a singular set of procedures. “An effect, which grows by arithmetical progression, so that the cause, insignificant at the outset, culminates by a necessary evolution in a result as important as it is unexpected.” (Bergson, 113) Rosen suggests that events progress in a punctuated fashion and their effects are ejected values. If the comedic effect lies in maintaining an illusion of life in relation to a mechanistic arrangement, then the zombie is the perfect choice of metaphor—neither fully living nor fully dead, the zombie periodically returns to haunt the scene of the crime, thus revealing the law’s transgressions.

Through each fragment, each punctuation, we can discern the increasing urgency of understanding the comedic structure of sovereign law, the chief protagonist in this protracted civil war. Rosen writes: “When the law is constituted on its own negation, its comic mode is not set against the law (as Deleuze understands humor and irony). This comic mode is not driven by a discontent with what is (for instance, as a defiance against wrongdoing or a reaction to fear or horror), but is rather prompted by a paradoxical attempt to stabilize and preserve the law in its condition of self-negation. (…) The comic resonance is thus the result of a condition by which the state itself negates the concept of the law.”

This self-negation takes myriad forms: the benign and even cheerful naming of events; the multiplication of forms of illegality that might be legal and legalities that might in fact be illegal; the negation of the border and the disavowal of sovereignty as a means of maintaining an occupation; the consequent confusion of who belongs as a citizen; and, finally, the refusal even to simulate ideals of justice and good-will as required by the norms of nationalism.

How then does the law maintain itself as law? Rosen’s fragments suggest that the comedic mode is critical to sovereign self-maintenance. In this mode, life itself is negated while its illusion is maintained through the perpetuation of mechanistic arrangements. In this mode, the law imposes its sovereignty while provoking suspicion about its own seriousness. But its effects are realized primarily in its performative dimension. Linguistic anthropologists and poststructuralist critics suggest that performative acts are a special genre of speech or other behavior that are constitutive of meaning in and of themselves. While the law presupposes the citizenry as its interpretive community, its constant violations of its own normative limits open a space of uncertainty about this community. The law’s performative violations of its own limits speculatively seek out an alternative community, constituted by and therefore accepting of its violations.

What is inherently comedic about this mode of operation is its episodic but profound engagement with normative limits, at once presupposing and constituting those limits. The law is not humorous but comedic, laughter is not just a release but constitutive of the citizen. The sovereign laughs at and laughs with the citizen thus negating the oppositional dimension of laughter instead, bringing to the fore its focus on contradiction, the mixing of mechanistic form with the episodic illusion of life.

The particular contradictions that are brought together in the operations of the law prompt reversals of commonsense understandings—as when the assertion of good citizenship becomes an act of mutiny against a law-negating state rather than an act of conformity. Each episode begins to be measured in terms of possible reversals. Rosen’s fragments might be read similarly, mimicking the sovereign’s comic mode, they work as critique precisely because their seriousness is articulated in a veiled language—not of death and destruction alone, but of how the illusion of life is ostensibly maintained.

1. The Comic Mode of the Occupation
The name of Israel’s recent war in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, was taken from a Hanukkah nursery song that Israeli children know by heart. It was penned decades ago by Chaim Nahman Bialik who in Israel is known as the national poet (the complete line reads, “My uncle bought me a dreidel made of cast lead”). When a mass killing in which hundreds of Palestinian children are slaughtered in about three weeks has a name conjuring innocent childishness, we are faced with a vile joke. The comic bent of the occupation army and of Israeli law is persistent and has its own distinct literary style. Its poetics can be recognized in a long sequence of names offering a variety of reversals—a war being called “peace” in Operation Peace of the Galilee (the first Lebanon war, 1982); a destructive offensive rendered in terms of constructive defense in Operation Defensive Shield (2002); and the horror of assault on the city of Rafah in Southern Gaza cloaked under a name of faux pastoral lyricism in Operation Rainbow in a Cloud (2004).

To set into relief the uniqueness of this comical lyricism, one need only mention the American offensive Operation Desert Storm, an infantile, repulsive name inspired by war movies, but undoubtedly a name without concealed smiles. In Israel, these reversals of meaning are ubiquitous and go beyond the naming of wars, so much so that they are routine presuppositions of daily life. In 2003, for example, I wrote about how a news story was seen as “positive” because it reported on the reduction in the jail-time sentencing for what are called “administrative detainees,” prisoners who are never put on trial, and hence for whom a legal sentence actually doesn’t exist. This amounts to a legal action that contradicts its own premise – or a joke by which the law negates itself.

2. The Comic Mode and the Law as the Criminal
A philosophical insight to which I frequently return is Gilles Deleuze’s claim that the comic mode is the only way to destabilize the law. A law such as “thou shalt not kill” is premised on the possible action of the killing. Thus, on the structural level, crime affirms, justifies, and solidifies the mechanism of the law. The comic response to the law (for instance, the masochist’s eagerness to be punished regardless of his innocence or guilt) may confound, confuse, and undo the structure and the meaning of the law. How then can one reconcile the comic mode of Israeli law with the transgression of law that the comic mode is supposed to entail?

The answer lies in the fact that, with the advent of the occupation, Israel became a state whose law is based on its own negation. The occupation refutes the notion of the border as the basis of national sovereignty. Once the concept of the border has been negated, the state itself must diligently and persistently act to obfuscate its borders and disavow its sovereignty, from which follows the negation of the presupposition that the state’s inhabitants are its citizens, and thus the very concept of citizenship is negated as well. (It should be noted that, in Hebrew, the word “ezrakh” is used both for “citizen” and “civilian,” a subtle conversion that makes citizens into mere civilians distinct from military personnel.) The comic resonance is thus the result of a condition by which the state itself negates the concept of the law. The lawmaker—the state—is the criminal.

3. Without the Facade of a Law
National law, of course, is never innocent, but its rules and operations are premised on a simulation, appearance, and facade (of good will, justice, ideals, and values) that cannot be maintained once the negation of the foundation of the national law (the border) becomes the explicit appearance and the constitutive structure, that is, once certain crimes explicitly appear as law.

In this sense, I do not wish to claim that Israel’s crimes are worse than those of other nation-states (for example, the United States’ crimes in Iraq), but rather to understand the special pathologies stemming from this disintegration of the relation between appearance and action, law and crime, transgression and comicality. Thus, for example, one can imagine an American citizen who actually believed George W. Bush’s axis-of-evil rhetoric, but it is impossible to imagine an Israeli citizen who would be deluded enough to think that the Israeli government would like to turn the Palestinians of the occupied territories into Israeli citizens. This is why the murderer is unabashed when joking: there is no facade to keep.

4. The Unique Comicality of Criminal Law: A Nameless Comicality
When the law is constituted on its own negation, its comic mode is not set against the law (as Deleuze understands humor and irony). This comic mode is not driven by a discontent with what is (for instance, as a defiance against wrongdoing or a reaction to fear or horror), but is rather prompted by a paradoxical attempt to stabilize and preserve the law in its condition of self-negation. Such comicality, of a criminal sovereign, is akin to cynicism, but does not fully correspond to it. We are dealing with a nameless comic mode.

5. The Legal-Illegal and the Illegal-Illegal
In my novel Ziona™ (2006), there is a minor character, Ma’adan (formerly Gordon) Dukas, who settles in a caravan on hill number 547, which he calls Tel Or (Hebrew for Mount Light): “a one-man settlement of the illegal-legal-legitimate kind (to be distinguished from the illegal-illegal-legitimate kind, and from the illegal-illegal-quasi-legitimate kind).” When the law negates itself, it perpetuates a dynamic, ever-expanding system of legal activity aiming to establish comic distinctions between legally approved crimes (the crime that is not a crime), and between those crimes that are still defined as crimes. This legal bustle is characterized by dizzying hyperactivity, and even though, by its very nature, it aspires to remain discrete, its signs cannot help but pop up in the media. Thus one can read about the versatile actions of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), specifically the department of international law and its attorney’s office, whose prime goal is to render kosher those illegal military actions such as the killing of civilians (Haaretz magazine, January 23, 2009).

Then there is the plan to “incriminate,” after the fact, every house bombarded during Operation Cast Lead—the creation of a dossier for each target that documents its hostile use—a plan whose natural offshoot ought to be the incrimination of every murdered child. There is also the exposure in the media of a governmental database, deemed secret by the defense ministry, that documents the fact that the vast majority of the settlements in the occupied territories—“The Legal Illegal”—are unlawfully expanding, building with no authorization on a massive scale, often on private Palestinian lots (Haaretz magazine, January 30, 2009). This database reveals that which is still “Illegal-Illegal” aspiring to become a “Legal-Illegal” as well, an activity in which practically all Israeli governments have engaged since the occupation, with varying degrees of concealment.

6. Values as Phlegm; Values as Zombies
When the law is its own negation, its comicality is like spasmodic coughing. The phlegm(s) secreted during such coughing fits are cherished values that are converted into refuse. In Operation Peace of the Galilee, the value that became refuse is the longing for peace. And in Operation Cast Lead, in its extraction of its name from a nursery song, the value/waste is the sensitivity to the lives of children. Values are the living dead—matter ejected that ever returns from within: an uncanny zombie. This explains why someone who holds the value as if it were fully alive (an Israeli mourning the murder of Palestinian children) might be intimidating and threatening, to the point of being called a criminal (a traitor). As zombie values resurge as the Unheimliche, there is a correlation between the Israeli psychological reactions used to cope with, for instance, the murder of children, and the major comic mechanisms described by Deleuze: disavowal as the mode of the masochist (e.g., we murder despite the terrible pain we feel; we murder because there is no choice; we kill as few as we can; our suffering and our attempt to save those we did not have to kill attest to our humanity; we, in fact, do our best to save lives by killing) and negation as the mode of the sadist (Hamas is responsible; it is the Palestinians who put the children in harm’s way; they murder themselves through the mediation of our weapons, hence, we do not murder).

Comic coinage in this situation is the zombie residue of values the law is supposed to affirm, that is, when it could still be “seriously” grasped as a law—the era when it could still be said without a bitter smile that Israel aspires to be a democracy, sovereign within its established borders. Think, for example, of a relatively bland product of the law, meant to signify humanism, abidance by international law, and the fear of hurting civilians: a procedure the IDF calls “knock on the roof,” that is, shooting “mild” ammunition at the roofs of people’s houses in Gaza before deploying heavy ammunition that will eradicate the house and kill those who stay inside it. The name “knock on the roof” cannot but be associated in the Israeli memory with the infamous “neighbor procedure” (the army’s use of Palestinian fighters’ family members and friends as human shields in the attempt to lure them out of houses during the second Intifada). These names remain as verbal comic loci of zombie values.

7. Measured Crime
The comic phlegm, as well as the crimes themselves, has a dimension of proportionality. Thus, for instance, exceedingly cruel and prohibited cluster bombs were used against the civilians of Gaza and phosphorous weaponry was used against Lebanon, however the criminal measures that will be taken against the demonstrators in Bil’in, Palestine, who protest weekly against Israel’s separation wall, will be more moderate (as many of the demonstrators are Jewish Israeli citizens)—with an occasional comic resonance. Among the diversity of such measures, the Israeli police recently introduced The Skunk, an armed vehicle splattering demonstrators with jets of noxious fluid. Thus, for humanitarian activists, the law reserves the more gentle reversal—that of treating protestors like criminals. This proportionality, however, is fluid, ever seeking opportunities to redraw its lines. War is such an opportune time. While the headlines were busy with Operation Cast Lead, tiny news items informed the Israelis that the Bil’in demonstrators were now being shot with 22 millimeter bullets, long declared illegal after their deadly potential was recognized.

8. Haaretz: The Criminal’s Expression
It is difficult to add much to Noam Chomsky’s exhaustive analysis of the way consent is manufactured by the media. Consent necessitates gaining the favor of those who perceive themselves to be critical and enlightened through a newspaper that has the appearance of integrity, criticality, and autonomy in relation to the law: in the United States, the New York Times (for example), rather than the tabloids, and in Israel, Haaretz.

During the war, the structures described by Chomsky were clearly reflected in the headlines of Haaretz. The daily number of Palestinians killed appeared customarily at the end of the bylines (if at all), and details of the killings were usually scarce and marginalized and accompanied by no images. The general composition of the daily, with the reports of Amira Hess (the only journalist who delivered substantial information from Gaza) relegated to page 8 or 9, reduced Hess’s contribution to almost that of an Op-Ed.

But what went beyond Chomsky’s reflections were instances in which Haaretz portrayed the imagined nation as a singular, unified entity with its own collective psychology—that of the criminal. This is how, for example, Haaretz framed the United Nations’ call for a cease-fire in a big headline on page 2: “Israel’s Friends Sarkozy and Bush Disappoint in the UN” (January 11, 2009). The “disappointment” over the fact that the “friends” do not approve of the crime and decline to oppose the UN’s resolution is not given in quotes. The disappointment doesn’t even reside in dismay over the position of a right-wing leader. The disappointment” is not a response to the news either (against which other reactions can be fathomed, such as relief and strengthened hope for a cease-fire). Rather, the disappointment itself is the news reported: “I” am disappointed¬—“I,” that is to say “we,” are disappointed, and we will to continue “our” war in Gaza by the criminal power that is the law.

9. Solemnity
From within the comicality of the law can be understood the radical dimension of the call of a thinker such as Ariella Azoulay who argues for a serious, willful return to the notion of citizenship, and for the active assertion of a civil domain. In relation to the law as such, the coinage “a good citizen” might indicate conformism, obedience, and a normative stance, but in a law-negating state, good citizenship might be seen as a mutiny.

10. War Crime as a Political Qualification; The Timing of War
If the state is criminal, it stands to reason that part of its leader’s job qualifications would include an ability to be a criminal, and since the problems at hand are no less than existential, white-collar crimes would not suffice: the leader should be a war criminal.

This is why Ariel Sharon epitomizes the “leader” in the national imaginary. Sharon is the leader who was found unfit by a federal committee to serve as a defense minister following the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon (1982), and became a highly popular prime minister, not in spite of his crimes, but because of his proven ability to negate the law. This sheds some light on the timing of massive killings right before or after national elections: the second Lebanon war left about 1,000 Lebanese dead two months after an election and Operation Cast Lead left at least 1,300 Palestinians dead (of whom at least 410 were children according to Be’Tselem data of January 28, 2009) two months before an election. During election time the burden of murderous proof lies with the prospective leader, especially if the suspicion can be raised that his or her heart is not cold enough.

Prompted by Israel’s invasion of Gaza in January 2009, the following text by artist Roee Rosen and the response by anthropologist Vyjayanthi Rao examine the public articulation of conflict, specifically the military acts in the current Israeli Palestinian conflict. Rosen posits that the comedic mode, which has yielded innocuous names for aggressive military actions, is a core trait of Israeli law in that it reaffirms itself by negating the premise on which it is built. Vyjayanthi Rao develops a narrative of the law as protagonist in a temporary situation. Both Rosen and Rao have participated in various VLC programs; the subjects of sovereignity, electoral processes and performativity were also alluded to in the exhibition OURS: Democracy in the Age of Branding.

Roee Rosen is an Israeli-American artist and writer, living and working in Israel.

Vyjayanthi Rao is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The New School.

Rosen’s text was written in late January 2009 before Benjamin Netanyahu’s election as prime minister in spring 2009.