Over the coming year, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics website will host the development of a bibliography related to the Center's theme for 2009-1010, Speculating on Change. The project was initiated by and will be guided by Robert Sember, recipient of a Vera List Center 2009-2010 Fellowship, working in collaboration with members of the Center. Robert is a member of the sound art collective, Ultra-red. The bibliography project is part of Ultra-red's multi-year initiative, The School of Echoes, an examination of procedures of collective investigation and social change.
The bibliography lists a selection of "classic" texts as well as lesser known works that address philosophical, theoretical and ideological conceptions of change, with particular emphasis give to political and social change and shifting approaches to art and cultural production. While we hope to build a generous and wide-ranging bibliography, it is neither our ambition to be comprehensive nor our desire to propose a canon.
In addition to guiding the development of the bibliography, Robert Sember is reading and writing brief annotations for selected texts. The annotations summarize shorter works and offer an overview of the contents of longer texts and complete books. They also include brief extracts from the selected texts. These annotations are neither an appraisal of nor a critical reaction to the works.
Updates to the bibliography will be made approximately once a month. New annotations will also be added each month. Where possible, we will also provide links to on-line copies of the items included on the bibliography. Your recommendations for additions to the bibliography are welcome and can be forwarded to the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
PROGRESS Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader (edited by Rolf Tiedemann). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 126–45.
The attitude of those who defame the concept of progress as insipid and positivistic is usually positivistic itself. They explain the way of the world, which repeatedly thwarted progress and which also always was progress, as evidence that the world plan does not tolerate progress and that whoever does not renounce it commits sacrilege. In self-righteous profundity one takes the side of the terrible, slandering the idea of progress according to the schema that whatever human beings fail at is ontologically refused them, and that in the name of their finitude and mortality they have the duty to wholeheartedly appropriate both of these qualities.
In the final paragraph of this text, Adorno writes: “Progress is not a conclusive category. It wants to cut short the triumph of radical evil, not to triumph as such itself.” This suggests that questions of the future are epistemological (category), moral (evil), and political (triumph) concerns. His guide through the contradictory and arguably irreconcilable conceptual landscape defined by these considerations, is a historically specific concern: given its recent past, is humanity, in “the age of the bomb,” capable of preventing catastrophe? In light of this as yet unresolved concern, the one consistent definition of progress in the text is of progress as negation, the negation of this possible future of annihilation. Hence the formulations: “progress occurs where it ends,” “one cherishes hope solely [when] no support for hope is in sight,” and, progress is resistance to “the perpetual danger of relapse.” As such, the essay is a gesture of hope wrestled from a history that “allows the possibility of redemption to flash up” precisely because history is not “organized unequivocally toward reconciliation.”
Using Kant’s dialectic, which teaches that the antagonism or contradiction in a concept is the condition for its advancement—“the conditions for the possibility of freedom are unfreedom”—Adorno unsettles established ideas of progress, most notably appeals for or against humanity, nature, transcendence, and freedom. He rejects none of these terms outright, but disabuses us of temptations to treat them as either synonymous (e.g., man is of nature therefore nature and humanity are one) or transcendent (e.g., the belief that nature is eternal sanctifies its ends). For example, having undone the notion that developments in skills and knowledge are human progress, he offers the possibility of progress as “the very establishment of humanity in the first place, whose prospects open up in the face of extinction.” This corrective has its political corollary in his observation that bourgeois cynicism regarding progress conceals how capitalism’s unjust exchange system benefits those in power. “Exchange,” he notes, suggests “mythical ever-sameness,” which would be true if the exchange were just. However, if as those in power claim, exchange is truly equal, it would disappear. This paradox provides the conditions for progress. Thus, for Adorno, change is not a smooth, forward progression. In fact it proceeds by negating or resisting such triumphant claims.
IDEOLOGY AND IDEOLOGICAL STATE APPARATUSES (NOTES TOWARDS AN INVESTIGATION) Lenin and Philosophy. New York: Monthly Review Press, 85–126.
Althusser described his work as supplementing the Marxist theory of the state. In this essay, he considers how ideological mechanisms help reproduce the status quo from generation to generation. He theorizes how ideology shapes individual relationships to the state and how ideological state apparatuses—churches, families, trade unions, arts institutions, schools—perpetuate these relationships. The dominant apparatus and critical site of class struggle, according to Althusser, is the educational apparatus, which transmits through the “great themes” of humanism, nationalism, moralism, and economism the ideology of the ruling class.
The first part of the essay examines the Marxist theory of state structure: (1.) the distinction between infrastructure (economic base) and superstructure (politico-legal institutions and ideology); and, (2.) the coordination of repressive state apparatuses (police, military, etc.), which operate by violence, and ideological state apparatuses, which operate by ideology. A commitment to the ideology of the ruling class unifies state apparatuses. The final section is a psycho-analytically informed speculation on how ideology works at the individual level. Althusser presents two theses: (1.) Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of experience; and, (2.) Ideology has a material existence.
By “imaginary relationship” he does not simply mean a form of illusion or delusion. Rather, just as language brings us into discourse, so ideology makes us subjects recognized by the state, and as subjects, “we make the gestures and actions” that ensure we submit “freely to the commandments of the Subject [the State and ruling class].”
The performative character of ideology, its gestures and actions, is the concern of the second thesis, which asserts that ideology is not merely ideals or ideas. Ideology exists in material practices, such as education. The implication is that change arises from ideological actions. Hence his suggestion that ideological state apparatuses “may be not only the stake, but also the site of class struggle.”
I WRITE WHAT I LIKE (edited by Aelred Stubbs C.R.). Johannesburg: Picador Africa.
I WRITE WHAT I LIKE contains selected writings by the anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, and a personal biography by the editor, Aelred Stubbs C.R., tracing Biko’s life from his childhood to his trial under South Africa’s Terrorism Act and murder in September 1977 while in police custody.
In articles written in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Biko explains why a Black Consciousness movement in South Africa is necessary. In “Black Souls in White Skins?” he critiques white liberalism for approaching the oppression of blacks as little more than “an eye sore spoiling an otherwise beautiful view,” whereas for blacks the struggle is “to get out of the situation and not merely to solve a peripheral problem…. That is why blacks speak with a greater sense of urgency than whites.” This theme of black-specific experience is expanded in “Some African Cultural Concepts,” in which he celebrates the “joint community oriented action” of African culture as opposed to “the individualism which is the hallmark of the capitalist approach.” While a committed socialist, Biko makes clear in the essay “The Definition of Black Consciousness” that a simple class analysis will not accomplish this end, for “the greatest anti-black feeling is to be found amongst the very poor whites whom the Class Theory calls upon to be with black workers in the struggle for emancipation.” Black Consciousness rather than class solidarity must guide the struggle.
In interviews and court transcripts collected in the final selections of the book, Biko describes specific emancipation strategies. These are designed to counter the sense of defeat felt by black South Africans, to guide the analysis of their situation, and to inspire hope. Achieving this goal, Biko notes, requires defeating the extreme and persistent fear felt by blacks, which, in a final interview, “On Death,” he describes doing in his own life: “You are either alive and proud or you are dead…. So if you can overcome the personal fear for death, which is a highly irrational thing, you know, then you’re on the way.” Thus, change becomes possible for black South Africans when personal and collective conscientization engenders hope, builds an analysis of the conditions of oppression, and guides resistance.
ON NATIONAL CULTURE The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Widenfeld, 206–48.
In this paper, presented at the Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers, Fanon asserts the interdependence of transcontinental African Consciousness movements and national liberation struggles, yet emphasizes that it is only by establishing national consciousness that international movements are possible. He argues that the role of “native intellectuals” is to help develop national cultures within national struggles.
Fanon begins with a critique of “negritude,” the young colonized intelligentsia’s attempt to rescue a positive African heritage from theories of pre-colonial barbarism. In the era of liberation the intellectual’s effort, “to rehabilitate himself … [is] logically inscribed from the same point of view as that of colonialism.” That is, by proclaiming an autonomous African culture, the intellectual employs the very cultural logic used to justify colonialism. To sustain his attachment to a consistent and homogeneous African culture, the intellectual must cut himself off from national struggles and become “a stranger in his own land,” while “the people” mobilize behind nationalist parties in the name of independence.
In the next section, Fanon outlines the phases the individual intellectual or artist must go through to develop national consciousness. Following a period of assimilation, in the first phase, in which the intellectual demonstrates a facility with the culture of the occupying power, “he decides to remember what he is.” Since he does not live in a present struggle shaped by the conjunction of colonial and pre-colonial elements, the literature of phase two is nostalgic, essentialist, and melancholic. It is, writes Fanon, “a period of distress and difficulty, where death is experienced, and disgust too.” The third phase is characterized by a revolutionary and national literature. The intellectual realizes that “you do not show proof of your nation from its culture but that you substantiate its existence in the fight that the people wage against the forces of occupation.” Change is the result, therefore, of a collaborative struggle, from which, unlike the idea of culture, a national consciousness is forged.
ANARCHISM: WHAT IT REALLY STANDS FOR Anarchism and Other Essays. New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 53–74
ANARCHISM: WHAT IT REALLY STANDS FOR is a response to criticisms of anarchism as impractically idealistic and violently destructive. Goldman dismisses the latter claim as intellectual laziness, noting that ignorance is the true violence, which anarchism replaces with investigation and analysis. Critics of anarchism's idealism define "practical" as conforming to the status quo. Anarchism, in contrast, offers a set of practices by which change is practically accomplished.
Goldman's analysis of the status quo is that religion oppresses the mind, property constrains human need, and Government is enslavement. In place of religion, Goldman champions Emerson's concept of "true soul," which arises from individual creative instinct. These instincts include the demand for nutrition, sexual pleasure, and access to light, air and exercise. In place of private property, she proposes "free communism" in which work is in harmony with individual tastes and desires.
While religion and labor are discussed in a few paragraphs, Goldman devotes a good third of the essay to a critique claims that government is necessary to maintain social order and harmony, prevent crime and protect the productive from exploitation by the lazy. She notes that instead of fostering social order, State's oppress with violence. Rather than establishing harmony between individuals, governments support the monopolization of resources. Crime is a symptom of despair and poverty, which imprisonment exacerbates and laziness is an inevitable consequence of the deadening compulsion to work without joy, recreation and hope.
The essay concludes with a discussion of methods, which, she argues, must not be centralized--a form of "military drill and uniformity"--but should grow out of the economic needs of each place. Voting and parliamentarism are failures and should be replaced by direct action, which will, at times, take the form of revolt and revolution, the definition of which Goldman gives as "thought carried into action."
WOBBLIES & ZAPATISTAS: CONVERSATIONS ON ANARCHISM, MARXISM, AND RADICAL HISTORY Oakland: PM Press.
How, in light of the ascendency of late capitalist globalization, can we account for the robustness of labor movements, such as the International Workers of the World (Wobblies), and the struggles of the poor, exemplified by the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas? What do both the content and methods of telling the histories of these struggles teach us about the principles, theories, and practices used to organize radical movements? What are the strategies and struggles of the future? What is the role of the intellectual in direct action? These and other questions are addressed in this series of exchanges between Andrej Grubacic, an anarchist sociologist committed to anti-globalization struggle, and Staughton Lynd, a radical historian and labor lawyer engaged in anti-racist, anti-poverty, and prisoners’ rights movements.
Both write as committed activists rooted in specific struggles, and while they share extensive historical and analytical scholarship, their concern is to articulate the practical lessons these histories provide concerning strategies of change. Particular attention is given to assessing why the transnational anti-globalization struggle, initially so successful, has now stalled, and what in the Zapatista movement is specific to the historical, political, and cultural context of Chiapas and what is transferable. Their responses to these and other concerns bring to the fore the long history of disagreement between anarchists and Marxists concerning strategy. As an intervention into that history, the book is a call for cooperation and even synthesis. The points of connection are the practices of direct action and accompaniment.
According to Grubacic, direct action is the signature trait of the “new anarchism.” It is “an imperative that one practice what one preaches, or as a way of actively engaging with the world in order to bring change in such a way that means and ends become indistinguishable.” As introduced by Lynd, the practice of “accompaniment” emerges from Latin American popular movements and is exemplified in his own life as a radical historian by the “painful transition, away from seeing [the people or the poor] as romanticized visionaries or objects of charity, and toward viewing the world through the eyes of the people and the poor themselves.” For both methods, change is not and external goal. The practice is change.
ON SLOGANS Collected Works, Vol. 25 (4th English Edition). Moscow: Progress Publishers, 185–92.
What Lenin wrote as a pamphlet about a specific moment—the failure in July 1917 of Bolshevik demonstrators to realize the demand, “All power must be transferred to the Soviets”—we are now tempted to read as history. As the pamphlet title, ON SLOGANS, suggests, however, he lifts from this moment a principle and methodological point: “Every particular slogan must be deduced from the totality of specific features of a definite political situation.” In other words, slogans arise from specific historical conditions; as conditions shift, so must slogans.
The pamphlet progresses from “what might have happened” to the imperative to “look forward, not backward.” The slogan “All power must be transferred to the Soviets” was relevant in the period in early 1917 when state power was shared by voluntary agreement between the Soviets (delegates from armed workers and soldiers) and a Provisional Government established by liberals from Nicholas II’s State Duma. State power might have passed peacefully to the Soviets. However, as a result of disagreements over continued involvement in the First World War, power passed into the hands of counter-revolutionary forces. They are “shooting insubordinate soldiers at the front and smashing the Bolsheviks in Petrograd,” Lenin writes. What might have been became impossible. This is the background to the opening sentence of the pamphlet: “[Progressives] repeated slogans which had formerly been correct but had now lost all meaning—lost it as ‘suddenly’ as the sharp turn in history was ‘sudden.’” Repeating outdated slogans is “deceiving the people [and] nothing is more dangerous than deceit.”
Lenin’s methodological points are straightforward. He cautions against mistaking words for deeds and substituting the abstract for the concrete. That is, the slogan is not the struggle, and its idealism is not reality. The way forward is to tell the truth about who actually wields state power and how that power is being used. The strategy for the next phase of the revolution arises from the analysis of the conditions of the present.