Author: Simon Hammond

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Conditional Tense

The history of feminist filmmaking in Germany is multifaceted, even messy. The career of its eminence grise, Helke Sander, subject of a recent documentary, is a case in point. Cleaning House (Aufräumen) captures Sander in reflective spirit, endeavouring to ‘tidy up’ (aufräumen) both memories and possessions. Directed by a former student, Claudia Richarz, the film made its debut at the Internationales Frauenfilmfestival in Dortmund to an audience of grey heads; alumnae, one imagined, of the German women’s movement (younger viewers were notably absent). It was an appropriate venue: the festival originated as a counterpart to the journal Frauen und Film, which Sander founded in 1974. An interplay between criticism, feminist research, activism and filmmaking has characterised Sander’s career across the decades, though her avowed desire was always singular: to make films.

A member of the first cohort at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, Sander’s classmates included future luminaries of the New German Cinema, Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky, alongside Holger Meins, later a member of the Red Army Faction. Her approach, mixing documentary and fiction, the personal and the sociological, was a product of this milieu. She was in her late twenties when she joined the academy in 1966, having already worked as a theatre director in Finland, where she had a child and married a Finnish writer. Her work would draw upon these experiences. In her best-known fiction, The All-Round Reduced Personality – Redupers (Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit – Redupers, 1977), Sander herself plays Edda, a young mother and photographer. Short of time and sleep, having to juggle childcare, work and activism, Edda’s is a familiar struggle to balance domestic labour, financial stability and personal or creative fulfilment.

Edda’s romantic relationship unfolds in the gaps between these different kinds of work. In one scene she reads the newspaper in bed while sharing an orange with her lover. In her characteristically dry tone, Sander’s voiceover tells us that her attraction to him consists primarily in his being ‘so minimally exhausting that she can just barely tolerate him’. The gendered economics of art making are brought into focus. Edda’s photography collective at one point reflects on an assignment they have received from the city government. The politicians and bureaucrats want to demonstrate their openness to ‘women’s perspectives’, but the collective is aware that the commission is driven by another factor: the low cost of women’s labour. In Sander’s films, political reflection happens on many levels, often taking the form of meta-commentary; here, the precarious situation of female artists draws our attention to the limited resources available for the production of the film itself, on its director’s creative ambitions.

Political agitation within the film world came to seem a necessity during this period: the subjects and stories that interested Sander and her feminist co-thinkers did not appeal to the predominantly male committees that made funding decisions. Women simply did not have access to the same resources. In 1973, Sander and fellow director Claudia von Alemann organised the first edition of the Internationales Frauenfilmseminar in Berlin, which showed forty films on topics such as women’s struggles for workers’ rights, their representation in the media, abortion, sexuality and the dynamics of the feminist movement. The event not only inspired women all over Germany to organise screenings, but also helped to form new networks. Frauen und Film became a focal point for feminist discussion of film in Germany and beyond. To be a militant within film politics, however, had never been Sander’s ambition, as she makes clear in Fantasie und Arbeit (2009), a joint autobiography she co-wrote with East German director Iris Gusner. Becoming an activist was necessary in order to create the conditions in which she could become a filmmaker.

Sander’s organising within German film was, nevertheless, of a piece with her earlier participation in Berlin’s feminist and student movements. In January 1968, Sander, with a group including Marianne Herzog – also later a member of the Red Army Faction – established a network of Kinderläden. A hundred women turned up to the first meeting, and the first five childcare centres were set up across the city. ‘It was like a Big Bang’, Sander recalled, ‘the scales fell from our eyes. Nothing like this had ever happened before: women gathering to solve a problem without first seeking advice from a man.’ In an infamous episode that same year she confronted the men of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund: the lens of class struggle should be applied to relationships between men and women; action to redress this could not be put off until after the revolution. When the next speaker, a man, tried to proceed without responding to Sander’s point, a female member of the SDS threw ripe tomatoes at him (the incident became known as the Tomato Speech).

The dynamics of the student movement were at the centre of Sander’s second feature film, Der Subjektive Faktor (1980). Anni, the protagonist, moves into a commune with her child. The experience politicizes her, but she comes to realise that not only do women play a minor role in the movement, but their inequality is also considered merely an ‘additional contradiction’ (‘Nebenwiderspruch’), expected to resolve itself once the class struggle is won. Like most of Sander’s films, Der Subjektive Faktor presents one defined perspective – that of the protagonist – but many voices. These emerge primarily through dialogue and voiceover, but also through posters and flyers, diegetic video playing on a TV screen, and in documentary material woven into the film’s narration. In a long travelling shot, the film registers the various reactions – of women and men, ranging from disgust to disinhibited laughter – to the protagonist’s suggestion that women must be considered a ‘class’. A montage of documentary footage of men responding to the demands of the women’s movement follows. The combining of different materials and different aesthetic registers to present a set of political questions is characteristic. What does it mean to raise a young child in this politicised environment? What new forms of community are possible?

Though recognised as a pioneering filmmaker, today Sander is better known in Germany for her activism, in particular the Kinderläden project, which was foundational in the development of a nationwide network of childcare centres (the initiative was brought to completion by Ursula von der Leyen). The legal right to childcare – instituted in 2013 – is a great achievement, but it was only a part of what Sander and the West German women’s movement were fighting for. As a filmmaker, meanwhile, Sander remains little known outside of Germany. One factor may be her documentary Liberators Take Liberties: War, Rape, Children (1990) (Befreier und Befreite. Krieg, Vergewaltigung, Kinder) detailing women’s experience of rape in Germany at the end of the Second World War. Sander was accused of historical revisionism, of wanting to weigh these rapes against Germany’s atrocities (an objection she anticipated). What drove her was the realisation that a huge number – an estimated 2 million, according to her research ­– of the generation of women before her had been raped after the war, but had remained silent.

What of the conditions for feminist filmmakers in Germany today? The network ProQuote Film, founded in 2014, demands gender parity in funding committees as well as in the distribution of funds, echoing the demands of Frauen und Film. Today ‘female stories’ and plots with ‘diverse casts’ have become marketable, and while the crisis of cinema is ongoing, streaming platforms overflow with content featuring ‘strong women’. Yet while women filmmakers in mainstream cultural production have been able to increase their share of a shrinking industry, for more experimental, political filmmakers, seeking to work with less commodified aesthetics, the situation has hardly changed. Activism to create the conditions to be a feminist filmmaker remains an urgent task. Sander’s work – both her political activism and her filmmaking – prompt us to continue this struggle.

Read on: Frigga Haug, ‘The Women’s Movement in West Germany’, NLR I/55.

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Denegation

For three months now, I have had my breakfast amid the rubble. I sip my coffee as the agony of the injured blares from the TV. At supper, I take a forkful of greens as the bombs rip children to pieces. I peel my apple to the sound of women’s desperate cries. Perhaps all these horrors will make us put on weight – for we are becoming, unawares, followers of Dolmancé, the master of ceremonies whom de Sade puts in charge of Eugénie’s immoral education, and who closes La philosophie dans le boudoir (1795) with the immortal words: ‘It’s been a good day; I never dine better, I never sleep so peacefully, as when I have sullied myself sufficiently with what idiots call crimes.’

We are growing habituated to the savagery, day by day. Then we wonder how the Germans could have ignored the genocide that was being perpetrated all round them. We, unbending guardians of Western values, implacable defenders of international law: we dine on mass murder bien chambré. We are deeply pained by the deaths of ‘innocent civilians’, of course, saddened by the hospitals razed to the ground. Our hearts go out to the ragamuffins with no future who assail the few aid trucks that reach the Strip. We are distressed by the number of journalists being slaughtered. But the ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ in Gaza does not stop us sleeping at night, even as the situation worsens week by week.

The structure of this ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ recalls that of the climate emergency. The helplessness of the UN and NGO workers amid the ruins of Gaza bring to mind those environmental activists who try to clean up the oceans a teaspoon at a time – faced with the impossibility of alleviating what they should instead be preventing from taking place. Just as the will of governments to deal with the climate emergency is expressed by organising conclaves in the world’s biggest oil potentates, attended by 2,456 lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry, and presided over by presidents of its largest companies, so too it is the president of the state that organizes airlifts of weapons to Israel that urges ‘restraint’ and warns against ‘indiscriminate bombing’. According to CNN, at least 22,000 of the 29,000 bombs dropped on Gaza up to 13 December were supplied by the USA. This is a close cousin of greenwashing: we supply the bombs and we feel sorry for their victims. Call it compassionate bombing.

It is little wonder that the global South finds the West hypocritical. This would be less apparent if the Israeli government and its supporters would simply state outright that Israel has the right to take revenge for the attack it suffered. Revenge has an ancient if inglorious tradition, enshrined in the Bible itself – ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ – and, one might add in this case, ‘a child for a child’. And vengeance defines its own limits: by definition, it must be commensurate with the offence suffered. Instead, we are now reaching almost twenty Palestinians killed for every Israeli killed. For proclaiming that the goal is not revenge but defence evades the problem of magnitude, of measure: one can continue to kill ad libitum because one is merely ‘defending’ oneself, with armoured vehicles and total air superiority against an enemy that has no heavy weaponry.

The truth is that is has become impossible to state publicly a desire for revenge. Revenge is the narrative engine of endless action films (the peaceful citizen who transforms himself into a ferocious executioner to avenge the massacre of his family and so on); but beyond the culture industry it has become taboo, unspeakable, excised from public discourse. This is key to what Bourdieu calls denegation. Denial is exercised when actions can only be performed if we deny to ourselves that we are doing them. Denegation can be exercised in fields such as the art market: the artist can only obtain financial reward for their work if they convince themselves that they are motivated purely by artistic concerns. But in other areas it is far less innocent. The concentration camp guard cannot do his job properly if he thinks he is human scum. Even the SS officer must be able to look at himself in the mirror in the morning while shaving. In kinder terms: to be a good warden, you must have assimilated the Foucauldian critique of disciplinary systems.

My personal experience with political leaders – however sporadic and superficial – allows me to say that the cynicism hypothesis (that politicians are cynics who lie knowing they are lying) is often too laudatory, it gives them too much credit. Politicians almost always end up believing their own bullshit. In many situations, cheating oneself is the only option. There is a stage where the hypocrite lies to himself to such an extent that he is no longer aware of his own hypocrisy. He really thinks he possesses the virtues he affects, defending the values that he tramples. Hypocrisy allows us to reconcile ourselves to that part of ourselves that we do not like but which we cannot do without. And what is valid on a personal level is valid on the terrain of ideology – it pertains to what is socially sayable and what is not. Hypocrisy becomes all the more necessary when it comes to public opinion – its growth has been a fruit of the formation of public opinion, and has become an indispensable tool of politics.

Although La Rochefoucauld’s definition (‘Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue’) is more acute, let us proceed with the conventional one provided by Webster’s dictionary: ‘Hypocrisy. The pretence of having a virtuous character, moral or religious beliefs or principles etc, that one does not possess’. The hypocrite is thus not simply a liar. Con men lie but are not hypocrites. The Prince as Machiavelli describes him lies all the time but is not a hypocrite. The spy who pretends not to understand Chinese in order to gather information dissimulates but is not a hypocrite. The hypocrite is one who performs immoral acts while claiming to defend virtue: who unleashes war in the name of peace.

The canonical expression of this attitude is found in Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’. In it he presents a horizon of virtuous reforms intended to prevent the children of Irish paupers from being a burden on their parents or their country. His proposed solution is touted as ‘a fair, cheap and easy method of making these children sound and useful members of the commonwealth’; it has the great advantage ‘that it will prevent those voluntary abortions, and that horrid practice of women murdering their bastard children, alas! too frequent among us, sacrificing the poor innocent babes’. Swift goes on to list its other advantages: it would give ‘a great inducement to marriage, which all wise nations have either encouraged by rewards, or enforced by laws and penalties’; it would increase the care and tenderness of mothers towards their children, as well as restore the national accounts and balance of trade. That the plan is to sell one-year-olds as piglets or lambs to be cooked (in various recipes) becomes only a technical detail.

Swift’s black humour is not an end in itself. He tells us that what we call hypocrisy should not be judged by moral criteria, which is how hypocrisy demands to be understood and judged. The modest proposal implies instead that hypocrisy should be judged by its success or failure. Recent studies devoted to the subject – for instance David Runciman’s Political Hypocrisy (2008) and Martin Jay’s The Virtues of Mendacity (2010) ­– have taken a similar view. In what does the success of hypocritical behaviour consist? In not being revealed as such. A lie is effective if it is taken as true. Hypocrisy is useful as long as and only if it does not appear hypocritical. We are familiar with the usefulness of ‘good hypocrisy’ from everyday life, as in the relationship between two people who detest each other, but in public behave civilly. This fiction lightens the atmosphere and makes social interaction easier: better than a world where people start beating each other up as soon as they disagree on something. When a tyranny is fiercely despotic, it fools no one if it merely pronounces itself humane: the pretence of humanity must be accompanied by at least a sprinkling of it.

For Jay, hypocrisy is essential to political life. We see its application everywhere. The claim that a regime need only hold elections to be democratic, for example, is clearly false. As can be seen from James Madison’s account of the drafting of the constitution, the founding fathers of the United States did indeed want to establish a republic, but not a democracy (remember that for much of the 19th century the word ‘democracy’ had the same subversive and criminal connotations as the term ‘terrorism’ has today). This hypocrisy is plain for all to see: just consider the case of central banks, which are guaranteed the strictest autonomy and ‘independence’ from political power, i.e. from the popular vote. In such parliamentary (or presidential) republics, the people theoretically have power over everything except the most important economic decisions.

In reality, alternation in a liberal electoral regime simply constitutes a limit on political violence. It ensures that whoever loses the contest does not end up being thrown into the ocean from a plane (as the South American military did in the 1970s), that the opponent is not locked up in prison, his property confiscated, his family sold into slavery, as happened for millennia in countless societies. Hence the merit of representative republics: they bring us out of the Hobbesian state. The problem is that the limitation of force holds only as long as the political struggle is restricted to a clash between different factions of the dominant social bloc. Rather than establishing majority ruling, it ensures protection for the ruling minority. As soon as its power is challenged, this no longer applies. That is why opponents were locked up in stadiums in Chile or disappeared in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil. The hypocrisy of the ‘democratic’ set-up becomes plain when the myth of the ‘sovereign people’ is exposed. Indeed, those who do not countersign the treaty limiting political violence and ensuring the same ruling bloc stays in power are accused of ‘undermining democracy’.

Similar reasoning applies to today’s humanitarian imperialism. It must provide at least some semblance of benefit for the subaltern nations, just as the elective republic must grant the ‘people’ a sphere, however narrow, secondary and irrelevant, in which they are free to decide. But here there is an added complication. In the words of Erwin Goffmann, this play has to persuade two different audiences; one is the imperialists (persuading them that it is worth investing resources in this ‘imperial-humanitarian’ mission); the other is the subjects, to convince them that this is the best of all possible empires, the most humane, the one that most alleviates poverty and suffering. Sometimes these are simply incompatible. When Gladstone spoke of ‘liberal imperialism’ in the late 1800s, it sounded convincing to British ears, making them proud to shoulder the burden of civilising its ungrateful subjects. But it certainly did not convince the Indians and other colonised people, exterminated by the colonial famines famously recounted by Mike Davis.

The fiction that the empire rules for the benefit of its subaltern nations has proven more convincing at certain moments. After the Second World War and throughout the Cold War, to secure its loyalty and avoid defections the US ensured unprecedented prosperity for its vassals. It developed the strategy of ‘success stories at the borders’: the empire’s frontiers (South Korea, Germany, Japan, Italy) presented as veritable economic miracles. But once the Cold War ended, this narrative began to falter. It has been more than 30 years since the GDPs of Japan and Italy grew by a tenth of a point in real terms. The sullen face of empire has begun to show itself, through the blackmail of debt, the use of sanctions, and the increasingly frequent recourse to arms.

The narrative of the state of Israel is also addressed to distinctly different audiences (though never to the Palestinians who have, et pour cause, always rejected it, from the 1948 Nakba to the 1967 and 1973 wars, to Sabra and Shatila in 1982, to the Intifada, and on to today). One is the G7, which includes the countries involved, in one way or another, in the Shoah. The exemplary case is Germany, where as Moshe Zimmermann writes, the Holocaust has paradoxically become an effective public relations tool:

Germans discovered yet another surprising advantage of relating to the Holocaust as a part of their evolving present: the intensive work of memory and repentance, the ubiquitous presence of the memory of the Holocaust (for example, the Stolpersteine, or the commemoration of the Kristallnacht on 9th November every year) are interpreted by the observers of this society as clear signs of strength, respectability and honesty. Even in China there is widespread admiration for Germany thanks to its policy of “coping with the past” and reconciliation with the historical victims of the Germans, the Jews. Chinese thus wish that Japan would behave in the same way towards China, Korea or any other victim of Japanese belligerence in the first half of the twentieth century. In other words, as paradoxical as it may sound, the Holocaust is at the present an instrument of good public relations for the Germans.

The other audience is the Israelis themselves and the Jewish diaspora, particularly in the US. Here it has another objective. As Zimmermann writes: ‘Accepting the monocausal connection between antisemitism and the Holocaust not only supports the argument that criticism of Israeli policies must be automatically categorised as antisemitism, but that its predestined outcome will be yet another Holocaust’. The current crisis is exposing the hypocrisy underlying such narratives. In a sense, this hypocrisy is revealing itself because it has ceased to be sufficiently hypocritical, because behind the right to defence it has shown the ruthless right to endless revenge. Palestinians will never forget this ongoing attempt to wipe an entire people off the face of the earth. For diaspora Jews and Israelis alike, it will now be difficult to see themselves as the descendants of the ‘righteous’. I remember how moved I was by André Schwarz-Bart’s novel The Last of the Righteous (1959), all the more so because my mother had been interned in Dachau. But today, the Israeli reaction has challenged the legitimacy of this kind of defence of Israel. Germans are forced to question whether the thesis, enunciated by Angela Merkel, that Israel’s existence constitutes the Staatraison of the German federal state still holds up under the bombs of Gaza. And perhaps today Westerners, and not only Germans, should start asking themselves why on earth, almost 80 years later, it is the Palestinians who have to pay for Hitler’s crimes.

Read on: Alexander Zevin, ‘Gaza and New York’, NLR 144.

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Without End

The historian Arno Mayer recently died at the age of 97. His career began with a book scrutinizing ten months of diplomacy during the First World War. It ended with a pair that ranged from ancient Greece to modern Israel. It’s not unusual for scholars to start small and finish big. But Mayer’s was no journey from narrowness and caution to largeness and risk. From the get-go, he took on the deepest questions and widest concerns, finding a vastness in the tiniest detail. Political Origins of the New Diplomacy (1959) discovered in the fine print of the months of diplomacy from March 1917 to January 1918 how the Russian revolution transformed the war aims of the contending powers, leading to Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and inspiring ‘the parties of movement’ to act against ‘the parties of order’. The follow-up, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles (1967), which covered, again, roughly ten months, this time from 1918 to 1919, charted a reverse movement: the triumph of right over left.

But something did change for Mayer over that half-century of writing history. He discovered the bookend truths of Jacob Burckhardt and W.E.B. Du Bois – that you can never begin a work of history at the beginning and can never bring it to a satisfactory end. You’re always in between. Mayer liked to attribute his in-betweenness to being born Jewish in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The child of a marginal people in a marginal country, Mayer was repelled by nationalism and drawn to cosmopolitanism like those other great historians of Europe from small countries: Pirenne (Belgium), Huizinga (the Netherlands) and Burckhardt (Switzerland). That inheritance led him to diplomatic history, a world in between states. Mayer told this origin story so often – and the story has so often been told ­– that I’ve come to think of it as the equivalent of a family myth. I see his in-betweenness differently.

I was introduced to Arno as an undergraduate at Princeton by my roommate, the son of the European intellectual historian Stuart Hughes. I don’t know if it was my personality or my connection to Hughes, but for whatever reason, Arno immediately made me feel like family. His writing gives the impression of an old-world Jewish sophisticate, but in his being and bearing, he reminded me of nothing so much as my very non-academic Jewish American family from the suburbs of New York. Arno always asked about parents, children, and grandparents first, before he talked politics or scholarship. He was affectionate, demonstrative, warm. His feelings were as strong as his opinions were sharp. He had passion and presence. He loved to gossip and plot, especially at academic conferences. He kvelled, he complained, he was stocky and short.

That was Arno. That was also his work. If it was in-between, it was not because he hewed to or hailed from the margins. It was because Arno, by disposition and temperament, was always trying to get inside, to get to the centre of things, to connect across the perimeter. Other diplomatic historians studied the relations between states. Arno looked inside of states, at the domestic relations and power struggles within. When he wrote about the French and Russian Revolutions, he turned not to Marx or Lenin but to The Oresteia and the Hebrew Bible, master texts of familial violence and personal vengeance. Where other Marxist historians of the twentieth century spoke of the transition to finance capital and the corporate form, Arno was more impressed by the staying power of the family firm.

His most daring and enduring ideas – that the First and Second World Wars were like the Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century; that the history of modern Europe is not one of a rising bourgeoisie but of a regnant aristocracy; that the Holocaust might be compared to the pogroms of the Crusades, a work of detoured ambition, in which a marauding army from the West, crazed and stymied in its quest for the lands of the East, acts out its zeal and frustration on the helpless Jews caught in the way – are not the creations of a contrarian. They are reflections of a spirit seeking to dispel the depersonalizing aura and bureaucratic myths of modernity in favour of more intimate, domestic, familial, and lineal, but no less tractable or terrible, examples from the past.

Those and other ideas once made Arno the most heterodox of Marxists, a practitioner of what he called social history from above. Today, they read like dispatches from the daily news. Take his most important work, The Persistence of the Old Regime (1981). From the moment of its publication, specialists challenged Mayer’s claim that the landed interests of the European nobility, including Britain’s, remained economically and politically hegemonic up through the First World War. Despite those challenges, the book, well, persists. It contains multiple provocations that have come to seem only more pertinent with time.

In his analysis of Europe’s states and empires, particularly their political structures and institutions, Mayer drew inspiration from Engels’s famous claim, in Anti-Dühring, that as early modern Europe came to be ‘more and more bourgeois…the political order remained feudal’. We might take similar instruction from Mayer (and Engels) today. The United States has one of the most archaic constitutional orders of the world, designed originally to protect the interests of the landed, monied, and enslaving classes, the white and the wealthy, from the majority. Not only does that constitutional order still, today, protect and enhance, through the state, older, whiter, more conservative, and more privileged sectors of society. It also is almost completely impervious to the forces and demands of demographic and social change, particularly young people, people of colour and newer immigrants. Of all the constitutions in the world, the American is the most difficult to amend. While scholars and journalists lavish attention on the social dysfunction of America – the racist and other pathologies of the white working class, the refusal of evangelicals to accept truth and facts, the toxic influence of television and social media – they pay less attention to what Schumpeter called the ‘steel frame’ of the political order. That was Mayer’s great theme: the archaic holdover of the social and economic past, how it takes shape and form in the state and its institutions, inviting reactionary, elite but declining, forces to find refuge, succour, position and space. It should be our own.

Nor can the family capitalism discussed in The Persistence of the Old Regime be treated as a European holdover of a feudal past. Thanks to the work of Thomas Piketty, Steve Fraser and Melinda Cooper, we now see family or dynastic capitalism as a fixture of our neoliberal present, a deliberate recreation of a form that was supposed to have been destroyed by two world wars and replaced by the multinational corporations and investment banks of the global economy. Imagined in different ways by Mises, Hayek, and Schumpeter ­– scions of that fading central European imperium that Mayer continuously anatomized in his work – dynastic capitalism is the product of elite political moves and countermoves that Mayer thought were intrinsic to all forms of capitalism. Political capitalism, in his telling, is the only kind of capitalism.

Where we imagine today’s city as the home of the left, The Persistence of the Old Regime reminds us that the city can be the natural space of the right. At the turn of the last century, European cities, particularly imperial capitals, employed vast numbers in the tertiary sector of commerce, finance, real estate, government and the professions. Members of those sectors, which included much of what we today would call the PMC, often outnumbered the more traditionally recognized ranks of the urban proletariat. Far from generating a cosmopolitan or metropolitan left, they were a breeding ground of the radical right.

Until recently, Mayer’s political geography of the city might have seemed of historical interest only. With Israel’s war on Gaza, it bears re-reading. An alliance has emerged, or simply become visible, in metropolitan centres across America – of wealthy donors from tech, finance and real estate, and their underlings; government officials; university administrators and employees; philanthropists; cultural movers and shakers; local politicians from both parties; and pro-Israel politicos and campus groups – exercising increasing sway over urban spaces of culture and education. These are not the obvious forces of Trumpist reaction – the small business owners or independent car dealerships that leftists have emphasized or the white working class that liberals love to hate. Indeed, many of these individuals contribute to the Democrats and voted for Biden. But they are Mayer’s prototypical sources of reaction, claiming the mantle of victimhood as they enhance the imperial projects of some of the most powerful nations on earth. And they may help put Trump back into office.

Perhaps Mayer’s most proleptic ­– and, not coincidently, least discussed – idea is that of vengeance. It emerged late in Mayer’s career, I think, in his work The Furies (2000). Seeking to counter the revisionist consensus on the French and Russian Revolutions, which held that ideological utopianism fuelled their descent into violence and terror, Mayer claimed that each side of the struggle, the revolution and the counterrevolution, was inspired by a desire for vengeance, to retaliate against longstanding injuries and more recent acts of violence. While the revolutionary side sought to impose what Michelet called a ‘violence to end violence’, to create a new form of sovereignty that would stop the wilding in the streets and bloodshed in the countryside, it soon discovered what Clytemnestra and Orestes realize in The Oresteia: every attempt at one final act of violence only sets the stage for the next.

For years, I read Mayer’s account of vengeance as merely an attempt to salvage utopian thinking from the dead hand of the Cold War. More recently, I’ve come to think of it as an uncanny description of what was to come, of what solidarity and animosity look like after the Age of Ideology or the Age of Revolution or the Age of Utopia has come to an end. Every day, on the internet or in the streets, people are called upon to avenge an act taken against themselves or their team. Every day, a new litany of historical injuries is amassed to explain the previous day’s excess. Every day, a history of mutual loyalty or diffident trust is dissolved to make way for the next day’s excess. No conflict is resolved; no congress is achieved; no constitution is drawn. It is fury without end.

Arno dedicated his life to opposing that world, to finding coherence amid chaos, to extracting a story from sound, to identifying the path forward for the party of movement. That he failed, in the end, to do so, that he wound up reverting to the most ancient texts to explain our most modern predicaments, is a sad and sobering thought. Yet his example may still offer us a way forward. Sartre said that ‘a victory described in detail is indistinguishable from a defeat’. It would be foolish to think that we could simply reverse the predicates and proceed to victory from there. Perhaps we might try a different tack. Might not a defeat described in detail offer the left something akin to what Rosh Hashanah offers the Jews? Not a chance to begin – Burckhardt (not to mention the rabbis) warned against that delusion – but a chance to begin again.

Read on: Perry Anderson, ‘The Figures of Descent’, NLR I/61.

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A Communist Life

‘The free person thinks least of all of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.’ Toni Negri, who died in Paris at the age of 90 on 16 December, turned this dictum of Spinoza into an ethical and political lodestar. The conclusion of the third and final instalment of his intellectual autobiography, Storia di un comunista, features a moving reflection on aging as a rejoicing in life and a paring down of action. Negri offers the overcoming of death – a resolutely atheist and collective idea of eternity – as the substance of his thought, politics, and life. He writes: ‘And yet the possibility of overcoming the presence of death is not a dream of youth, but a practice of old age; always keeping in mind that organising life to overcome the presence of death is a duty of humanity, a duty as important as that of eliminating the exploitation and disease that are death’s cause.’

Drawing perhaps on the distant memory of his own youthful Catholic activism, Negri extracts the materialist and humanist kernel of the resurrection of the flesh against all the miserable cults of finitude and being-towards-death. Negri’s lifelong war on the palaces was founded on the conviction that power, potestas, is nourished by a hatred of bodies and fixed in the threefold fetish of patriarchy-property-sovereignty. Its apparatchiks and administrators love that empty syllogism ‘every man is mortal’, which, Negri contends, is at the root ‘of the hatred of humanity, of that hatred that every authority, every power produces in order to affirm and consolidate itself: power’s hatred for its subjects. Power is founded on the introduction of death as an everyday possibility into life – without the threat of death, the idea and practice of power could not obtain. … Power is the continual effort to make death present for life.’

For Negri, freedom was a collective struggle against this lethal power, a fight against the fear of death, against terror, power’s currency. As the communist poet Franco Fortini had it in his rendering of the Internationale, chi ha compagni non morirà: those who have comrades will not die. Beyond the scholarly mastery of the history and theory of philosophy, law and the state, beyond the interminable yet urgent search for the revolutionary subject, beyond the hugely influential phenomenologies of capital’s power – from planner-state to crisis-state to Empire – at the core of Negri’s life and work was the idea that philosophy is inseparable from a practice of collective liberation, or from communism understood as a ‘joyous ethical and political collective passion that fights against the trinity of property, borders and capital’. This passion was something that Toni radiated. If anything marked him out among both militants and scholars, it was a kind of boundless curiosity, a generous desire to learn, in detail, from anyone genuinely involved in a struggle for liberation, which he always saw in the most capacious terms. His was not the cliché of a pacified wisdom – he could be combative, convoluted, contrary. But an irrepressible enthusiasm for liberation granted him a rare unruly youthfulness, even in old age. If wisdom entailed a joyful scorn for the powerful, what Spinoza called indignation, ‘a Hate toward someone who has done evil to another’, then Toni was wise indeed. That joy and that indignation saw him through a decade of captivity and fourteen years of exile, caricature and calumny, as too many from his generation turned state’s witness, literally and figuratively.

Both in print and in person, Toni had a reputation for optimism verging on fancy, especially when it came to his vision of the multitude – forged with his close friend and co-author Michael Hardt in a quartet of books that marked a season in the global left’s intellectual life. Many devotees of the party-form neglected that for Hardt and Negri the multitude is a new name both for mass organisation and for the working class beyond the assembly line. Accusations of naivety also overlooked that Toni – unsurprisingly for someone who experienced the ravages of war as a child and the brutalities of prison as an adult – nursed a deep belief in the need to confront the realities of spiritual and bodily suffering. His essay on the Book of Job and his study of Giacomo Leopardi were both aimed at thinking through poetry’s materialist ability to confront tragedy, pain, nihilism, and to make worlds from the experience of meaninglessness, failure, defeat. While Toni’s Marx was above all the one of the Grundrisse – of ‘real subsumption’ and the ‘General Intellect’ – there is a line from the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 that resonates with this materialist poetics of the body, when Marx writes that man is ‘a suffering being, and because he feels his suffering, he is a passionate being’.

This passion for a common freedom, lived through suffering but oriented towards a joy defying death, is the point where communism and philosophy, liberation, and ethics, met for Negri – in his writing as in his life. It is no accident that he devoted the very last pages of his autobiography, his parting words, to the fight against the far right that engulfed his own childhood and now threatens to return. The multitude’s weakness and fear, he tells us, is once again making room for a terror that wants the apotheosis of property, patriarchy and sovereignty, that wishes all expressions of joy prohibited. ‘Fascism’, Negri tells us, ‘rests on fear, produces fear, constitutes and constrains the people in fear’. Against fascism’s watchword, ‘long live death’, Toni built a life of thought, comradeship, love and struggle. I can’t think of a better way of honouring it than transcribing the final paragraph of his autobiography:

In the resistance to fascism, in the effort to break its domination, in the certainty of doing so, I have written this book. All that is left, my friends, is to leave you. With a smile, with tenderness, dedicating these pages to the virtuous men and women who preceded me in the art of subversion and liberation, and to those who will follow. We have said that they are ‘eternal’ – may eternity embrace us.

Read on: Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, ‘Empire, Twenty Years On’, NLR 120.

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In Praise of Tati

1. Each of Tati’s films marks at once (a) a moment in Jacques Tati’s oeuvre, (b) a moment in the history of French cinema and society, and (c) a moment in the history of cinema. Since 1948, the six films he has directed are the ones that have best kept pace with our history. Tati is not only a rare filmmaker, the director of few films (which all happen to be good); he is a living point of reference. We all belong to a period of Tati’s cinema: the author of these lines belongs to the one that extends from Mon Oncle (1958: one year before the New Wave) to Playtime (1967: one year before the events of May ’68). Since the beginning of sound film, only Chaplin has had the same privilege, that sovereignty of being present even when he wasn’t filming and, when he was filming, of being exactly on time, which is to say just a little early. Tati: a witness first and foremost.

2. A demanding witness, then an inconvenient one. Very quickly, Tati rejected the easy way. He doesn’t play on his public image, he doesn’t keep tight control of the characters he created: the postman in Jour de fête disappears and even Hulot winds up scattering himself – fake Hulots roam all over Playtime. Tati runs the ultimate risk for a comic: to lose his audience by taking them too far. But where? However admirable it may be, his artistic conscience would move us far less if it only consisted of aristocratic loftiness or the haughty retreat of a man angry with his era and with cinema. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. If one considers as a group the six films Tati has made since Jour de fête (1948), one notices that they form a line of flight that is the line of flight of all of postwar French cinema. Perhaps because a comic is given less of a right to separate himself from his era than anyone else, even and especially to criticize it, it’s in Tati that one best perceives, from one film to the next, French cinema’s characteristic oscillation between populism and modern art. Who today is able to pick up and imitate the most quotidian gestures (a waiter serving a beverage, a cop moving traffic) and at the same time incorporate these gestures in a construction as abstract as a Mondrian canvas? Tati, obviously, the last of the theorist-mimes. Each of his films is also a marker of ‘how it’s going’ in French cinema. And it’s been this way for thirty years. While Jour de fête bears witness to postwar euphoria and Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday and Mon Oncle maintain the continued existence of a very French genre (social satire) in the context of a ‘quality’ cinema, Playtime, a great anticipatory film, builds the La Défense business district before La Défense exists, but already says that French cinema can no longer deal with the gigantism of French society, that it’s no longer ‘up to it’. It says that French cinema will deteriorate by opening itself up to internationalization – in other words, the Americanization that already threatened the postman in Jour de fête. Sure enough, Tati’s two subsequent films are no longer entirely French (Trafic is a coproduction, a very European film), or entirely cinema (Parade is a commission from Swedish television).

3. Tati is not only the exemplary and disconsolate witness to the decline of French cinema and the degradation of the trade, he takes cinema in the technological state that he finds it. And curiously, though he has so often been accused of being backward-looking, all he thinks about is innovation. People are starting to realize that Tati didn’t wait for anyone’s permission to reimagine the film soundtrack starting with Jour de fête. It’s less well known that thirty years later, Parade is an extraordinary probe into the world of video. In fact, the major theme of Tati’s films is what we now call ‘the media’. Not in the restrictive sense of the ‘main means of mass communication’, but in the sense McLuhan gave the term: ‘specialized extensions of human mental and psychic faculties’, extensions of all or part of the human body. Jour de fête was already the story of a postman who keeps refining the delivery of the message to the point that he loses it. It’s a child who inherits the message (a mere letter) but who, distracted by a traveling circus, doesn’t pass it on: a beautiful metaphor for the intransitivity of modern art. But at that point, the viewer has understood that the real message is the medium – it’s the postman, Tati. The media is also the premature and accidental setting off of fireworks at the end of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, transforming Hulot into a luminous scarecrow, prefiguring the brilliant culmination of Parade where everyone – meaning anyone at all – becomes the luminous trail of a colour in an electronic landscape. And in Mon Oncle the media was also that surprising decision for the time to resist making spectators laugh at the expense of the programmes on the television set bought by the ‘modern’ couple, but to reduce this television to the abstract, nearly experimental spectacle of the sudden changes in intensity of the pale light irradiating the ridiculous garden. The list is endless, one could mention a hundred other examples. The most important thing is that at every moment and for all and sundry (in a kind of democratization-generalization of comedy that is the big gamble of Tati’s last three films, and probably the acknowledgement that we’ve all become comical), there’s a possible media becoming [devenir-média]. From the doorman in Playtime who becomes the entire door when the window pane is broken to the maid terrified at the idea of going through the electronic beam that opens the garage door behind which her bosses have foolishly locked themselves in (Mon Oncle), there’s the (threatening or comical) possibility that the human body will also become a limit, a threshold (and no longer, as is the case in burlesque comedy, a scatological depth). Modern art if ever there was one.

4. Tati doesn’t condemn the modern world (botch-ups and waste) by proving that the old world (economy and human warmth) is better. Other than in Mon Oncle, his films don’t praise what is old: one can even say, without being too paradoxical, that he’s interested in only one thing, which is how the world is being modernized. And if there’s a logic in his films, from the country roads in Jour de fête to the highways in Trafic, it’s the one that continues to irreversibly lead humans from the country to the city. Tati shows, in a way that’s in keeping with the recent (schizo-analytic) descriptions of capitalism, that the human body’s media-becoming works very well insofar as it doesn’t function. There are no burlesque catastrophes in Tati (the kind one can still see in American films such as Blake Edwards’s The Party) but rather a fatality of success that evokes Keaton. Everything that is undertaken, planned, or scheduled works, and when there’s comedy, it’s precisely in the fact that it works. Watching Playtime, one has a tendency to forget that all the actions one sees undertaken are ultimately relatively successful: Hulot finally meets the man with the Band-Aid on his nose whom he had an appointment with, he fixes the street light, is reconciled with the manufacturer of silent doors, and at the last moment even manages to get an admittedly piddling gift to the young American woman. Similarly, the opening of the royal garden is a success: the vast majority of customers dance, dine, and pay. Nothing really goes wrong in Playtime, though nothing works.

5. Cinema has made us so accustomed to laugh at failure and get off on ridicule that we wind up believing that we’re also laughing against something when we watch Playtime, though that isn’t the case at all. For in Tati there are no pratfalls or punchlines [chute]. Or else it’s the opposite: there’s a punchline but we haven’t seen the gag get set up. This isn’t a crafty and elegant way of making people laugh by playing with ellipses, it’s something far deeper: we’re in a world where the less things work, the more they work, therefore in a world where a punchline wouldn’t have the demystifying, awakening effect it has where failure is still conceivable. The same is true with the other meaning of the French word chute – ‘fall’. We’re dealing with bodies that aren’t made comical by the fact that they can fall. This is the nonhumanist side of Tati’s cinema. The ‘human’ part of comedy has always been to laugh at the one who falls. Laughter is only proper to man (the spectator) if falling is proper to the human body (as a spectacle). Chaplin is the archetype of the one who falls, gets up, and makes someone else fall, the king of the trip. In Tati, people practically never fall because there’s nothing ‘proper to man’ anymore. For me, one of the most beautiful moments in Playtime is when a woman customer, thinking that a waiter has held out a chair for her, goes to sit down without looking back (she’s a snob) and collapses in slow motion. A very funny gag, a beautiful ‘pratfall’ [‘chute’] but what exactly are we laughing at? And what are we laughing at in Parade, during the number when spectators are asked to mount an obdurate mule? Or the one where the clowns are constantly falling over each other as they stumble over a pommel horse? Here, falling is just one body movement among others. As a nonhumanist filmmaker, Tati is quite logically captivated by the human species, that animal which Giraudoux described as standing up ‘to get less rain on himself and to pin more medals on his chest’. The source of comedy for him is that it stands up and that it walks/works [marche], that it can walk/work [marche]. Infinite surprise, inexhaustible spectacle.

Rather than a dialectic of high and low, of what is erected and what collapses (a carnivalesque tradition and a situation that Buñuel illustrated: from the camera at insect level to Simon of the Desert at the top of his column), Tati would introduce another kind of comedy where it’s the fact of standing up that is funny and the fact of being unsteady (Hulot’s gait) that is human.

‘In Praise of Tati’, translated by Nicolas Elliott, appears in Footlights: Critical Notebook 1970-1982, published this month by Semiotext(e). The text was originally published in book form as ‘Éloge de Tati’ in La Rampe: Cahiers critique 1970-1982 published by Cahiers du Cinéma/Gallimard in 1983. 

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What About…

It is 1988, Santiago. Chile is on the cusp of a popular repudiation of the world that Henry Kissinger helped to make scream. Throngs of international observers have come to witness the plebiscite on Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. I am part of the US delegation organized by the National Lawyers Guild. At the first meeting in our precinct, local people introduce themselves by name and political identification, too many socialist tendencies to remember. They are good-humoured, optimistic, organized for getting out the vote. As has been said ever since mass protests began in the capital, ‘the people have lost their fear’. A cinema in the city centre is showing Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, the marquee illuminating the title in large letters.

Pinochet’s collaborators have been defecting by the day. None of this was supposed to happen. The 1973 coup against Salvador Allende – backed by the United States, fortified by international lenders and elaborated by the Chicago Boys’ economic violence programme – had been engineered for permanence. State terror was supposed to take care of internal opposition. The plebiscite itself – Yes or No, do you approve of our handiwork? – was intended as a bit of legitimating latticework. But after years of murder, disappearance, imprisonment and torture, the right’s plans have fallen to history’s penchant for surprises. ‘Joy is coming!’ announces the slogan of the No campaign.

I am staying with a working-class family involved with one of the socialist parties. Every night the power goes out. Every morning a little girl named Alejandra comes to my room, disciplined, intent on teaching me Spanish. She climbs onto my bed and points to the pictures in her primer, instructing me to sound out the words for animals, cooking utensils, common things. In the afternoon her grandmother takes me downtown on public transit. These tracks, she says, lie over mass graves.

In the aftermath of the coup, armed men came to her home one night and dragged her son away. Right there, in the kitchen, through the same door we use to enter and leave the house, in the same blackout conditions that now seem a reminder or a threat whenever the lights go out. For a long time, he was a desaparecido. For a long time, his mother haunted the entrances of police stations, prisons, hospitals, morgues. Eventually a prison sentry – sick of seeing her? moved by pity? – handed her a list of inmates. She found her son, alive but scarred by torture. Somehow she got him out; somehow he fled the country.

In 1975, Pinochet’s foreign minister visited Kissinger to discuss a problem. The junta had released a couple of hundred prisoners, trouble-makers, but couldn’t find countries willing to take them off Chile’s hands. ‘You will know what to do’, Kissinger said, as memorialized in official documents declassified years later. My host doesn’t need to know the numbers – which by 1990 will total 3,216 people killed, 38,254 imprisoned or tortured by official count, thousands more exiled. Somehow, she saved her son. Somehow other women and men like her mustered the courage for defiance. Alejandra’s grandmother has her outfit planned for October 5, the day of the plebiscite, the red and black of her party.

In his memoir, White House Years (1979), Kissinger describes early 1970 – the year Allende’s election accelerated Washington’s counterattack on the Latin American left, Nixon invaded Cambodia, and the National Guard shot student protesters dead at Kent State – as ‘those faraway days of innocence’. Oh, there was a bit of ‘propaganda’ and ‘spoiling activities’ in advance of Allende’s election. Not enough: ‘I should have been more vigilant.’ Naturally, the US did some sniffing around among the Chilean military to test the feasibility of a coup before Allende’s inauguration, but it was slapdash. In any case, ‘we played no role whatever’ in the ‘conception, planning and execution’ of the coup three years later. Really, the US is a victim of its own benign incompetence:

Of course, covert operations have their philosophical and practical difficulties and especially for America. Our national temperament and tradition are unsuited to them. Our system of government does not lend itself spontaneously to either the secrecy or subtlety that is required. Those eager to dismantle our intelligence apparatus will have little difficulty finding examples of actions that were amateurish or transparent.

In Santiago, no one we meet has illusions about US innocence. An American warship is cruising off the coast. ‘Jakarta’, some say, has begun to appear scrawled on city walls, as it had in 1973, though I haven’t seen this prophecy of extermination myself. At a press conference at the US Embassy, The New York Times’ Shirley Christian, prototype media quisling of US policy in Latin America, asks a question about possible Cuban-backed plans to sabotage the referendum. On cue, other scribblers demand, Just what do we know about Cuban saboteurs? This happens to be the scenario that the former mistress of a general close to Pinochet related breathlessly the night before to a room of anti-Pinochet organizers in a middle-class high rise: if the outcome is looking bad for him, Pinochet will create some type of explosion, blame Cuba and Chilean leftists, and cement his position as supreme leader. Former exiles, recently returned, are popping tranquilizers at a luncheon with Bianca Jagger. Some are staying in safehouses guarded by men in sunglasses who lead us through confounding passageways to meet them.

There’s just one problem with Pinochet’s scheme, to which the working-class people who’ve lost their children are savvier: conditions have changed. In virtually every sector of the population there is opposition to the junta, including within the junta itself. The military is fractured. Reagan is a lame duck, his administration still reeling from the Iran–Contra scandal. The likely inheritors of the Chilean government are not radical. The global neoliberal order has constricted the room for economic manoeuvre, for now anyway. Early that morning, the White House summoned the Chilean ambassador; Pinochet appears to be done for. If not, militants in La Victoria and other precincts of the poor have been preparing Molotov cocktails.

*

Years of Upheaval, volume two of Kissinger’s memoirs, was published in 1982. It was five years since he left government, and Kissinger busily made the rounds, proffering his views on world affairs. Alexander Cockburn wrote in The Wall Street Journal at the time: ‘I had thought Mr Kissinger’s chosen mode, that of international superstar, café society’s preferred oracle would not for long endure; that the decline would be rapid, from special adviser to NBC, to guest on the Johnny Carson show, to final apotheosis on the Hollywood Squares. Not so.’ Volume three, Years of Renewal, arrived in 1999. Its publication may well have been the occasion of my only encounter with Kissinger.

It is night-time in front of the Barnes and Noble on Union Square in downtown Manhattan. Kissinger is to be interviewed, on camera, by Charlie Rose. A call has gone out for the indignant to distribute flyers. We are a small but peppy band. The flyers are brightly coloured and provide a counterpoint to Kissinger’s deceptions about US foreign policy. As the show begins, we figure it is foolish to stand in the dark talking among ourselves and head in to watch.

Inside, the store’s second floor has become Rose’s stage set: a round table with chairs on a riser; the two men under bright lights; some rows of chairs below for the audience; and, surprisingly, a substantial crowd of people seated on the floor and standing among the long bookshelves. I take up a position among the books, stepping up onto the lowest tier of a shelf so that my chin just clears the top.

The cameras roll and Rose leans in, unctuous as ever. Kissinger is absurd. He has been out of the game too long – there’s no inside baseball, none of the winking, I’m loathe to discuss covert ops but just this once, for you… (though that hasn’t stopped the obsequious entreaties from candidates, presidents and their advisers, ‘humanitarian interventionists’, even supposed policy rivals, seeking his counsel). Every answer is a platitude or the mumbo-jumbo of phony statecraft. Every question is inane. I feel a rumbling coming from my toes, an electric, involuntary quiver rising.

And then Kissinger says something akin to America is the most honourable country in human history, and as if in a slow-motion movie I have raised my hands to form a megaphone around my lips, and now I am raging: What about Chile… Vietnam… Cambodia… Laos… What about… What about… Bangladesh… East Timor… Argentina … Angola… What about…? I’m citing dates and statistics and bloody incidents in an unbroken chain of What abouts.

I’m hard to spot, with my head barely visible, and among so many other heads along so many rows of shelves. Another voice, coming from somewhere else in the room, begins chanting low and steady, like a death drum, ‘War Criminal… War Criminal…’ Only as the security guards have escorted me, still ranting, to the escalator do I realize that the bass line to my treble of indictment came from a friend, who is also being removed and didn’t know the other voice was mine.

*

Protest politics, whether heroic or, in the scheme of things, paltry, merited two phrases in the front-page obituaries that The New York Times devoted to Kissinger on successive days: ‘Hey, Hey, Henry K, how many kids did you kill today?’; and ‘While protesters at his talks dwindled…’ Daniel Ellsberg gets no mention. The newspaper’s own publication of the Pentagon Papers serves but to illustrate Kissinger’s fury and obsession with leaks. Third World peoples count only in bulk: 300,000 killed in what would become Bangladesh; 10 million refugees driven into India; 100,000 East Timorese killed or starved to death; 50,000 Cambodian civilians killed by carpet-bombing (silence on the genocide it sparked); 3 to 4 million dead Vietnamese, whose armies and determination, at least, the paper cannot ignore. ‘I can’t believe that a fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point’, Kissinger is quoted as telling his staff.

‘Critics’ abound in these tributes, to comment on the man’s ‘defects’ as well as his ‘brilliance’, on his strategies for supposedly managing the Cold War, and on ‘everything else’ – that is, the world beyond superpowers. ‘It was the everything else that got him into trouble’. This isn’t surprising (though an editor might have anticipated readers cringing over who was in trouble), but it’s nevertheless important to acknowledge that, loathsome as he was, the man was never the principal target of his opponents on the left, just as the Cold War wasn’t ever primarily about superpowers but about that ‘everything else’. Kissinger was a symbol, a servant, a latter-day ‘racketeer for capitalism’, in the words of Marine general Smedley Butler. He was also a failure. The objective of his foreign policy approach, he boasted, was order not justice. The world he’s credited with shaping has neither.

Read on: Marco D’Eramo, ‘American Decline?’, NLR 135.

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Course Correction?

The extreme centre in Germany is resented and outnumbered. In the Bavarian and Hessian state elections of early October, all three parties in the governing ‘traffic light coalition’ suffered a significant blow, with Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) plummeting to their worst ever result in both states. The much-diminished Die Linke performed poorly, too. Having failed to meet the 5% threshold for representation in parliament in 2021, surviving in the Bundestag only due to the technicality of retaining three independently elected constituencies, the party lost all its seats in Hesse. The rightist Alternative for Germany (AfD) emerged as the unambiguous success story, securing nearly 20% of the vote in Hesse, where it came second – a first for the party in a western state. By the end of the month, the AfD was polling nationally at an unprecedented 23%, behind only the main opposition Union bloc.

Last week, however, a new challenge to Germany’s ailing political establishment emerged. At a press conference on 23 October, Die Linke’s Sahra Wagenknecht announced she was founding her own independent party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance – for Reason and Justice (BSW). On the evening of the announcement, anticipated for some time, her new party, which includes nine other MdBs formerly of Die Linke, was already commanding the support of 12% of the electorate, poaching its largest share from the AfD (which fell by 5%) and small parties; the SPD, CDU, Greens and Die Linke also lost support. Expected to launch as a party next January, ahead of the European elections in June, polls suggest the BSW could win up to 20% of the national vote. Wagenknecht’s initiative has shifted the weight of national politics further away from the centre, and, for the first time in years, significantly to the left.

The basis for a broad opposition programme is clear. Germany is once again in a recession, less than a decade after its putative second economic miracle was to be the model for the rest of Europe, if not the world. The temporary conditions that enabled its relatively good economic performance from 2010 to 2019 – world-historic growth in the export markets of Brazil and China, above all – are now exhausted. Yet in today’s straitened circumstances, Berlin has not even gestured towards shoring up the well-being of its citizenry. Instead, it has obediently signed up to Washington’s project of relentless militarization and endless war to the east. This posture has not only undercut Germany’s access to the cost-effective energy essential to its industrial competitiveness, but has also detonated another historic refugee crisis which, for many in the deindustrializing areas, is seen as compounding the effects of the economic slowdown.

The political opening Wagenknecht is hoping to exploit is equally glaring. The public has good reason to regard the current government as continuing the ruling-class attack on its living standards, pioneered, in 2003, by Gerhard Schröder’s Agenda 2010 programme, and pursued since by centre-right and centre-left governments alike. Two decades of austerity have led to a rise in poverty, general insecurity and deteriorating public services. As a consequence, there is a wellspring of opposition to further retrenchment of the social state. The Greens’ efforts to shift the cost of environmental measures onto individuals – such as replacing domestic gas heaters – have also been broadly unpopular, stirring dissent from a consensus that is in reality supported mainly by the affluent and highly educated.

Wagenknecht addresses these concerns more directly than any other politician on the right or left. Yet despite her broad popularity, in the Berlin Republic she is often regarded as a controversial figure, notably within the shrunken ranks of her former party. For her critical interventions – on the war in Ukraine and NATO’s part in it, on the contradictions of the government’s Covid policy, and on immigration, as well as on the ‘left-liberal’ politics of a self-satisfied Bildungsbürgertum – she has been denounced as a Putin sympathizer, a conspiracy theorist, an anti-immigrant populist and a treacherous ‘diagonalist’ blending left and right. Her East German formation – she was brought up in Jena and Berlin – combined with her intransigent Communist politics lasting into the 1990s, has in the past even attracted the attention of the state’s internal security services.

Intellectually superior to most members of the Bundestag – she is the author of several books, including an economics dissertation on savings and a critical study of the young Marx – Wagenknecht delivers her arguments in a direct, sober communicative style that has earned her regular invitations to Germany’s television talk shows, despite their hosts’ hostility to her views. Presenting herself as a ‘left-conservative’, though her politics might better be characterized as ‘left-realism’, she has positioned her breakaway formation as a response to the Repräsentationslücke – representation gap – in contemporary Germany, where nearly half of the population does not see its perspective reflected in the party system. She has set out four domains encompassing the BSW’s proposed reforms. 1. ‘Economic rationality’ – ‘innovation, education and better infrastructure’; 2. ‘Social justice’ – ‘solidarity, equal opportunity and social security’; 3. ‘Peace’ – ‘a new self-image in foreign policy’; and 4. ‘Freedom’ – ‘defending personal freedom, strengthening democracy’, which includes widening the Meinungskorridor, or spectrum of opinion.

Nowhere has Wagenknecht’s departure from orthodoxy been more pronounced and consistent than in matters of war. For a time, the Ukrainian flag adorned every official building in Berlin, and any questioning of the conflict – even invoking the postwar taboo against exporting weapons to warzones, much less mention of the right-wing orientation of much of Ukrainian ‘orange’ nationalism, NATO’s eastward expansion or the danger of escalation – was essentially proscribed as partisan alignment with Moscow. Despite this prevailing Gleichschaltung, Wagenknecht’s dissenting line in near-weekly interventions appears to have enhanced rather than hurt her standing. She has also been forthright in attacking the government for its conspicuous incuriosity concerning the sabotage of the country’s energy infrastructure in the probable US attack on Nord Stream 2. She deftly connects foreign policy to domestic issues – linking, for example, the shortfall in Germany’s domestic capacity for producing medicines to the government’s commitment to manufacturing ammunition for Ukraine. More recently, she has criticized Tel Aviv’s offensive against Gaza, a rarity in a country which has banned peaceful demonstrations of sympathy for Palestinians.

The other stance that has attracted criticism, especially from the left, is Wagenknecht’s position on immigration. Yet its significance to her political outlook is often exaggerated. The issue is given minimal emphasis in her public addresses; her weekly bulletin and video lectures almost never mention it. Her position is also hardly an outlier on the German political scene. As she noted at the press conference last month, she supports the full right of asylum-seekers to live in Germany, as well as legal protections for immigrants; she is opposed to what she describes as immigration’s present unregulated form. This is also now Scholz’s revised position; it was the de facto position of Merkel, too, after she reversed twice on the question. Neither is Wagenknecht’s view particularly unusual historically within the trade union and socialist left of West Germany and elsewhere. It is in effect a guild perspective, favouring the regulation of the labour market.

Wagenknecht’s politics are not without theoretical limitations and inconsistencies, of course. As with most left-parliamentary oppositions of the last decade, the economic vision put forward by her Alliance – especially the enthusiasm for reviving industry – is implicitly predicated on an upturn in profitability in the national economy as the basis for a more egalitarian redistribution of wealth. Not only does this framework fail to register the persistent troubles facing the world economy, it also ignores the difficulties of attempting to increase German manufacturing competitiveness while at the same time improving working-class living standards (Germany’s expansion during the 2010s, after all, came at the expense of its working class, as well as the south of the Eurozone). In the context of a chronically weakened global economy, the shallow recoveries states have mustered have been reliant on neoliberal measures that precipitated the erosion of living standards abhorred by Wagenknecht and the majority. Still, whether or not her economic agenda will be able to arrest the deindustrialization of the country and reverse its worst effects, it cannot be denied that the current path of unending war is hastening it gratuitously, as Germany’s resource-poor and export-oriented economy is battered by higher energy costs.

The major weakness of Wagenknecht’s initiative at present is not primarily theoretical but practical: her Alliance lacks an active social movement. In place of cadres, there is an inchoate mass of opinion which remains to be organized through mobilization. Wagenknecht has in the past appeared somewhat reluctant to transform the enthusiasm for her politics into something more disciplined and embedded. She has avoided speaking at events of the university left, or at those which she herself has not convened. Aufstehen (Stand Up), the movement she launched in 2018, fizzled quickly. Loosely modelled on Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, it has now been reduced to an email newsletter. The February 2023 anti-war protest she organized, which drew tens of thousands to Brandenburg Gate, was never followed by further calls for public demonstrations. The party’s theoretical shortcomings and contradictions will likely only be transcended through increased political association outside of the videosphere. Parts of the new platform – especially its commitment to greater democratic participation – may indicate an awareness, post-Aufstehen, of the importance of an active membership. This will be especially critical given the probable fallout for Die Linke, which is likely to be gravely weakened by Wagenknecht’s departure; here the left risks losing significant institutional linkages to the past.

Some view Wagenknecht’s Alliance as a cynical and potentially damaging attempt to appeal to AfD voters. Oliver Nachtwey, for example, has argued that in ‘trying to conform and adapt to the New Right’, Wagenknecht risks ‘legitimizing’ its discourse, which could ‘further normalize and even strengthen the AfD’. But this concern gets the sequence of events the wrong way round. The rise of the AfD, and more broadly of the so-called ‘populist’ right, was itself largely a symptom of the failure of the left generally, and Die Linke in particular, to maintain a credible opposition to the governing coalitions (often because it held out hope of joining them), and so to sustain the confidence of broad layers of society. Only then did much of the polity become available to the right, which capitalized on justifiable indignation against the extant parties. Far from signalling a ‘normalization’ of the AfD, the BSW’s efforts to win over those who have drifted away from Die Linke and other parties potentially points the way back to a more formidable and dissident left, one which foregrounds its opposition to war, and ties this to domestic concerns.

Rather than representing a lurch to the right, then, Wagenknecht’s is a call for a return to popular sovereignty over foreign affairs, set against a political centre which courts nuclear conflagration from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Black Sea to the Taiwan Strait. The test for her Alliance is whether it can inspire the popular action needed to realize its platform, and overcome the many objective constraints faced by any government in contemporary Germany – let alone an opposition party – aiming to change the country’s course towards prosperity and peace.

Read on: Christine Buchholz, ‘Germany Re-Divided’, NLR 116/117.

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Imperial Designs

[title not known] 1967 Frank Stella born 1936 Purchased with assistance from an anonymous donor 2000 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/P78387

Since Al Aqsa Flood on 7 October and the ensuing assault on Gaza, the Biden administration has performed what is euphemistically described as a ‘balancing act’. On the one hand it praises the collective punishment of Palestinians; on the other it warns Israel against overreach. Its support for aerial bombardment and targeted raids is steadfast, but it has posed ‘tough questions’ about the ground invasion that started earlier this week: Is there an achievable military objective? A roadmap to release the hostages? A way to avoid untenable Israeli governance if Hamas is extirpated? Washington is pressing the Israelis on such issues – and sending its own advisers to help solve them – while also giving the green light for the ongoing massacre. Its response to the crisis has been driven by a confluence of factors, including the desire to outflank Republicans and the reactive instinct to ‘stand with Israel’. Yet it can also be placed in the context of its broader vision for the Middle East, which crystallized under Trump and was consolidated by Biden.

Aware of the chaos wrought by its regime change efforts, and eager to complete the ‘pivot to Asia’ initiated in the early 2010s, the US has sought to partially disentangle itself from the region. Its goal is to establish a model that would replace direct intervention with oversight from a distance. To contemplate any real reduction in its presence, though, it first needs a security settlement that would strengthen friendly regimes and constrain the influence of nonconforming ones. The 2020 Abraham Accords advanced this agenda, as Bahrain and the UAE, by agreeing to normalize relations with Israel, joined a wider ‘reactionary axis’ spanning the Saudi Kingdom and Egyptian autocracy. Trump expanded arms sales to these states and cultivated connections between them – military, commercial, diplomatic – with the aim of creating a reliable phalanx of allies who would tilt towards the US in the New Cold War while acting as a bulwark against Iran. Obama’s nuclear deal had failed to stop the Islamic Republic from projecting its influence. Only ‘maximum pressure’ could do so. 

Once in office, Biden adopted the same general coordinates: using the Negev Summit to deepen ties between the Abraham countries and suing for formal relations between the Saudis and Israelis. The JCPOA remained a dead letter and efforts to contain Tehran continued, through a combination of sanctions, diplomacy and military exercises. As Brett McGurk, the White House Coordinator for the Middle East, put it in a speech to the Atlantic Council, the premises of this policy are ‘integration’ and ‘deterrence’: building ‘political, economic, security connections between US partners’ which will repel ‘threats from Iran and its proxies’. Having developed this programme and presided over a trade boom between Israel and its Arab partners, Biden began to make good on the ‘drawdown’ promised by his predecessor – executing the pullout from Afghanistan while reducing troops and military assets in Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

The incumbent also refined the US approach to Palestine. Whereas Trump had choked off aid to the occupied territories and tried to gain assent for his delusional ‘peace deal’, Biden simply accepted the imperfect reality – in which Israel, despite having no workable plan for the Palestinians, seemed to enjoy relative security thanks to the collaborationist authorities in the West Bank and the military stranglehold on Gaza. In the abstract, he may have wanted to revive the ‘two-state solution’, of a nuclear juggernaut flanking a defenceless and bantustanized Palestinian nation. But since that was a political impossibility, he learned to live with the situation that Tareq Baconi describes as ‘violent equilibrium’: an indefinite occupation, punctuated by periodic confrontations with Hamas which were small-scale enough to be ignored by the Israeli population.

This regional blueprint always suffered from serious problems. First, if its raison d’être was Great Power politics – stepping back from the Middle East to sharpen the focus on China – it proved partly counterproductive. For in signalling its diminished appetite for interference in the region, the US conveyed to its allies that they would not have to make a zero-sum choice between American and Chinese partnership; hence the PRC’s increasingly warm welcome in the Arab world: its construction of a military base in the UAE, its brokering of the Iran–Saudi rapprochement and its network of technology and infrastructure investments. Second, in pinning its imperial strategy on the Israeli normalization process, the US became especially reliant on this settler-colonial project just before it was captured by its most extreme and volatile elements: Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, Galant. If American support for Israel has historically exceeded any reasonable political calculus, under Trump and Biden it acquired a coherent rationale: to place its ally at the centre of a stable Middle Eastern security framework. Yet the Israeli cabinet that came to power in 2022 – addled by eliminationist fantasies, and determined to draw the US into war with Iran – proved least able to play that role.

Now, in the wake of October 7, this equilibrium has been shattered and those fantasies activated. Hamas’s attack aimed to unravel a political conjuncture in which the apartheid regime had become convinced that it could repress any serious resistance to its rule, and in which Palestine was rapidly becoming a non-issue in Israel and beyond. That intolerable state of affairs was its primary target. The leadership in Gaza anticipated a ferocious response, including a ground incursion. It also expected that this would cause problems for the Abraham settlement by sparking regional opposition, at popular and elite levels, to Israeli atrocities. All this has so far been borne out: the Saudi–Israel deal is delayed, the next Negev Summit remains on hold, the Arab nations are roiled by protests and their rulers have been forced to denounce Netanyahu. What does this mean for Washington’s overarching policy ambitions? The final answer will depend on the trajectory of the conflict.

As many onlookers have noted, Israel’s stated aim of ‘destroying Hamas’ poses a risk of continual and protracted escalation. In planning an urban war against an embedded guerrilla army, the national unity government has contemplated various endgames, including the depopulation of the northern Strip and mass expulsions to the Sinai. Any such strategy is liable to cross the ambiguous thresholds that could trigger major reprisals from Hezbollah and – potentially – the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. (Yemen’s Houthis have already launched missiles and drones at Israel, and are primed to send more over the coming weeks.) Biden’s deployment of warships to the Mediterranean and Red Sea, plus Blinken’s shuttle diplomacy, are intended to avert this outcome. It is too early to assess the impact of their efforts, but failure would see the hegemon drawn deeper into this bloody quagmire. The effect would be to widen fissures in the Arab–Israeli axis and distract America from its priorities in the Far East.

In the event that the invading army manages to demolish Hamas politically and militarily, the US would also have to grapple with the problem of succession. At present it hopes to corral Arab states into providing a force to govern the territory so as to relieve Israel of the burden. US officials are reporting that American, French, British and German soldiers could be dispatched to defend this hypothetical dictatorship. But if regional powers refuse to cooperate, as seems likely, alternative proposals include a ‘peacekeeping’ coalition modelled on the Sinai’s Multinational Force and Observers – to which the Pentagon currently contributes almost 500 troops – or an administration under the auspices of the UN. Such schemes would effectively restore the US to the status of neo-colonial authority in the Middle East, despite its years-long attempts to fill the role with local subordinates. They would turn American forces into a visible target for the rage and resentment created by the Zionist war – an unenviable legacy for Biden to leave behind.     

But it may not come to that. There are other foreseeable scenarios that would be more favourable to the White House. Given Egypt’s refusal to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the banishment of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents seems unlikely in the short term. This, combined with American diplomatic pressure, has evidently caused Israel to modify the plan for its invasion, choosing an incremental approach over a rapid sweep. Whether this will reduce the chances of intervention by Hezbollah or Iran remains unclear. But the first is mindful of its precarious standing in Lebanon, which could be further harmed by a military conflagration, while the second is anxious to avoid the perils of direct involvement. The Saudis, though outwardly critical of the US position, are no less keen to prevent a conflict that would consume the entire Middle East and derail their ‘Vision 2030’. In each case, a number of domestic political imperatives are at odds with the regionalization of the war. A ray of hope for the declining empire?

Whether or not the violence is contained, however, Israeli success is hardly assured. Hamas’s 40,000 hardened fighters, adept at hybrid warfare and capable of ambushing the enemy via underground tunnels, are a stark contrast with the Israeli reservists who just received their refresher training. As the streetfighting begins, the numerical and technological asymmetries between the two may seem less decisive. One can therefore imagine a timeline in which the militants fight Netanyahu to a stalemate, the taboo on a ceasefire is lifted, and both sides eventually declare victory: Hamas because it repelled an existential threat from Israel; Israel because it can claim (however disingenuously) to have inflicted irreparable damage on Hamas and precluded any recurrence of its attack.  

Thereafter, Gaza would slowly emerge from the rubble and return to something resembling the status quo ante – yet with worse humanitarian conditions, as well as a wounded neighbour that is even more obsessed with its destruction. Although the US claims it wants Hamas to perish, it would stand to benefit from this situation in several important respects. It would save it from coordinating the post-war governance of the Strip; it would allow Israeli normalization to resume after a necessary hiatus; and, in the best-case scenario for Biden, it would place limits on further escalation while also undermining Russian and Chinese attempts to straddle both sides of the Israel–Palestine conflict. The Abraham paradigm could thus be reinstated, at least until the next major flare-up. Rather than transforming the Middle East, then, the war may leave intact the ‘security architecture’ built by Trump and Biden. Yet the instability of this edifice has been proven. It would only be a matter of time before it buckles once again.

Read on: Perry Anderson, ‘Jottings on the Conjuncture’, NLR 48.

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Landscapes of Contestation

‘In the autumn of last year, there were four cases of homicide committed in four cities using the same handgun. This spring, a 19-year-old man was arrested. He became known as “the handgun serial killer”.’ So begins Adachi Masao’s A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969), an experimental documentary that retraces the steps of Norio Nagayama, arrested in Tokyo on 7 April, 1969. Linguistic narration is otherwise scarce in the film, restricted to a handful of isolated statements supplying biographical details in a matter-of-fact voiceover. In place of conventional plot and character, the film offers a cascade of landscape images shown without commentary, accompanied by a careening free jazz soundtrack. Crisscrossing Japan, Adachi uses long takes to capture the locations of Nagayama’s life, from his childhood in Tōhoku’s Aomori Prefecture, a move to Tokyo as part of a mass-hiring initiative at age 15, and finally a disaffected drift across the country that culminated in murder. Trains, highways, ships, streets: whether desolate or crowded with people, these images are haunted by the troubled young man who perhaps once passed through them. What relation exists between Nagayama’s deeds and these impersonal spaces? Why tell his story in this way?

Adachi Masao / Iwabuchi Susumu / Nonomura Masayuki / Yamazaki Yutaka / Sasaki Mamoru / Matsuda Masao, ‘A.K.A. Serial Killer’, 1969, 4K Single-channel projection (original 35mm), Collection of Tokyo Photographic Art Museum

A.K.A. Serial Killer is the central work in ‘After the Landscape Theory’, on view from 11 August to 5 November at Tokyo’s Photographic Art Museum. Curated by Tasaka Hiroko in collaboration with film scholar Hirasawa Go, this fascinating presentation of moving images, photographs and documents situates Adachi’s film as a key node within a diffuse, multi-faceted engagement with landscape in lens-based Japanese art from 1968 to the present. At the entrance of the exhibition is a copy of The Extinction of Landscape (1971), an essay collection by Matsuda Masao, a film critic who collaborated on the production of A.K.A. Serial Killer and was a central figure in the articulation of fûkeiron, or ‘landscape theory’. Resolutely rejecting the idea of landscape as a pictorial form devoted to the contemplation of natural beauty and severing any connection it might have to nationalist sentiment, this discourse posited that the power of the state and of capital can be rendered visible in commonplace images of the built environment. It recognized that power is everywhere: not only in spectacular moments of violence, as when police clash with protesters, but in everyday life. Forces of domination are present in transportation infrastructures and norms of bodily comportment, in the ways cities are constructed and local specificities effaced. So often this is overlooked, naturalized. But when caught on film, the petrified surfaces of the world can be defamiliarized and opened to scrutiny.

Matsuda Masao, ‘Fukei no Shimetsu’, Tabata Shoten, 1971, Private Collection

Matsuda’s thinking took shape during a period of tremendous economic growth and social tumult, in the twilight of the so-called ‘season of politics’ of the late 1960s. It was a time when anti-authoritarian sentiment ran high in Japan – whether in university struggles, protests against the renewal of the United States-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo), or the conflicts surrounding the construction of the Narita International Airport at Sanrizuka. It was also when, as Hirasawa puts it in the exhibition catalogue, ‘the entire Japanese archipelago was being transformed into one gigantic metropolis’, with intense development and new transport links eroding the distinction between city and countryside. The turn to landscape in A.K.A. Serial Killer was, then, a way of placing Nagayama’s killing spree within the larger frame of these social transformations rather than seeking individual, psychological explanations for the working-class teenager’s crimes. As Matsuda wrote of the film, ‘We became very conscious of that very landscape as hostile “authority” itself. It is very likely that Nagayama shot bullets to tear apart the landscape. State power recklessly cuts through the landscape to clear the way, for instance, for the Tomei Freeway. As we enjoy a pleasant drive on that highway, at that very moment the landscape possesses us, and “authority” entraps us.’ Looking at the built environment entailed turning one’s back on media spectacle to mount a critique of capitalist modernity through the typically spectacular and eminently modern art of the cinema. It meant producing a counter-image, a counter-cartography.

Following the initial display of Matsuda’s book, ‘After the Landscape Theory’ pivots to the present. This reverse-chronological organization has the felicitous effect of loosening the hold of historical material over the interpretation of the contemporary works. The notion of being ‘after’ the landscape theory has two possible implications: the simple fact of coming later, or a more direct relation, be it of homage, imitation or critique, as in the convention of titling a work as ‘after’ the style of a master. The curatorial decision of presenting more recent works first encourages the former approach, avoiding notions of origin and derivation, and circumventing claims to influence that may be tenuous. The presence of Sasaoka Keiko’s photographic series PARK CITY (2001–) in the exhibition’s first room is striking in this regard, as these images of Hiroshima challenge the conceptions of visibility and legibility upon which landscape theory as deployed in A.K.A. Serial Killer depends. The series title, which refers to the Peace Memorial Park, places Sasaoka’s images unmistakably in the shadow of nuclear aggression. Eight photographs of exterior spaces made between 2001 and 2009 are so dark that the distant bodies within them are scarcely discernible. Blackness floods these frames, with the white socks of uniformed schoolgirls in one picture dotting the obscurity like beacons. Elsewhere, Sasaoka shoots plain streetcorners and the interiors of the Peace Memorial Museum. Across these different approaches, she confronts the limits of what can be seen of history’s wreckage, as if to echo the famous line from Alain Resnais’s 1959 film: ‘Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima’. Where A.K.A. Serial Killer considered how one might produce knowledge of a traumatic event, Sasaoka’s landscapes evoke muteness and unknowing. They hint at the possibility that images of the built environment might conceal as much as or more than they reveal. Theories, after all, are not facts; they are liable to fall short of their explanatory aims, and landscape theory is no exception.

Sasaoka Keiko, from the series ‛PARK CITY’, 2001-2009, Collection of the artist

Endo Maiko’s X (2022) and Takashi Toshiko’s 12-part Itami series (2005–10) are both serial moving-image works that approach landscape in a distinctly personal register. Made during the pandemic as an online project for the 14th Yebisu International Festival for Art and Alternative Visions, X was initially updated with new footage each day, producing an unfolding chronicle of the artist’s life. Itami similarly embeds the production of images in quotidian experience, such that the landscape is aligned with habit and intimacy, while the changing seasons provide a means of marking time. Such emphatically subjective approaches contrast sharply with not only Adachi’s film but also with the rule-based form of Imai Norio’s 8mm work Abenosuji (1977). An artist previously associated with the Gutai group, Imai filmed a series of traffic lights as they changed from red to green in a neighbourhood of Osaka. By allowing the presence of red lights to dictate where and when to make an image, he mitigates intentionality. This constraint intensifies the presence of contingency within the work, since all else that might appear in the frame besides the artist’s privileged motif is left to chance. Notably, traffic lights are responsible for regulating the movement of the masses at specified intervals; they tell Imai when to stop and film, just as they tell everyone when to stop and go. The concern with how social control manifests itself in urban space that so deeply marks A.K.A. Serial Killer resurfaces here in altered guise, as part of the relinquishing of authorial agency that is a hallmark of some strains of conceptual art.

Imai Norio, ‘Abenosuji’, 1977, Single-channel projection (original 8 mm), 22 min, Collection of Tokyo Photographic Art Museum

A pristine 4K projection of A.K.A. Serial Killer leads to the exhibition’s final room, which presents an array of documents, photographs and film clips from when landscape theory first took hold – including Nagayama’s handwritten journal and a copy of the book, Tears of Ignorance, that he published from prison in 1971. Rather than shore up Adachi’s film as an origin point, this room emphasizes that the discourse on landscape lacks a single authoritative formulation; it was a dispersed and contradictory debate occurring across diverse films and publications. On display are a trailer and stills from Oshima Nagisa’s The Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970), in which an activist filmmaker who is being chased by the police jumps to his death. The ‘will’ he leaves on film depicts the cityscapes of Tokyo; his friends wander the metropolis in search of those same locations, as if in search of their elusive meaning. Since A.K.A. Serial Killer was not released until 1975, it was Oshima’s film – originally titled ‘Tokyo Landscape War’ – that was initially taken to be exemplary of landscape theory; meanwhile, Matsuda first used the term in relation to the pink filmmaking of Wakamatsu Koji, also present here in the form of excerpts and stills. In 1971, Adachi and Wakamatsu went to Beirut to make Red Army/P.F.L.P.: Declaration of World War, which marries the strategies of A.K.A. Serial Killer with the agitprop newsreel, depicting Palestinian fedayeen and members of the Japanese Red Army amidst landscape images. Three years later, Adachi would leave Japan to join the struggle in Palestine, abandoning filmmaking for nearly three decades.

Standing in this final room, it is possible to glimpse Sasaoka’s PARK CITY photographs back at the start: an architectural loop linking past to present. Why revisit all this material today? For a start because, as the exhibition demonstrates, the bond between landscape and power endures as a concern in artistic practice. In the catalogue, Hirasawa notes that, ‘Since the turn of the 21st century, a re-evaluation of landscape theory has taken place internationally, and it is likely not perceived as a specifically Japanese discourse.’ If it ever was: a programme of film screenings accompanying the exhibition gestures to the longstanding interest in landscape on the international left through the inclusion of works made between 1969 and 1981 by the Dziga Vertov Group, Jean-Luc Godard/Anne-Marie Miéville and Danièle Huillet/Jean-Marie Straub. Yet Hirasawa is correct in emphasizing contemporaneity. Today, landscape films comprise a vital current on the global circuit of festivals and biennials and, as a corollary, historical works of this kind have been the subject of renewed interest. Sometimes the connection to this past work is explicit: for instance, French-American artist Éric Baudelaire has produced a trilogy of films made with and ‘after’ Adachi, culminating in Also Known as Jihadi (2017). Meanwhile, the looser notion of coming after encompasses an avalanche of work. Whether in relation to concerns with climate, ecology and extractionism, out of a desire to move away from anthropocentrism, or as part of an effort to unearth traces of marginalized histories, landscape films have proliferated. As critic Leo Goldsmith has proposed, they ‘persist at a significant moment…in which the planet’s physical spaces are subject to increased quantification and abstraction on the one hand, and transformations to its geography accelerated by capitalism-driven human activity on the other’.

The present context is different to that which fuelled the debates in 1960s Japan, but there are affinities. Although, as works by Endo and Takashi show, landscape films can be tethered to first-person expression, their contemporary manifestations generally seek to transcend human perspectives and temporalities. The durational work of James Benning or Nikolaus Geyrhalter, for instance, is best understood as a response to crisis – to a ruined world in which ‘nature’ is a chimera. These are films for a time when anthropogenic changes to the environment are violent and ubiquitous, when rampant individualism must be refused, and when structural diagnoses are needed. Whether or not landscape theory produces the knowledge it promises remains an open question. What is certain is that it endures as a resource for filmmakers who seek to contest their present and, in turn, as a provocation for spectators for whom cinema is not only aesthetic but political and epistemological.

Read on: Jeremy Adelman, ‘The End of Landscape?’ NLR 126.

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Maspero’s Legacy

Late summer was marked by the loss of influential French publisher François Gèze. How should he be remembered? Born in Casablanca, trained as an industrial engineer, member of the Parti socialiste unifié and close to Parisian third-worldist circles, Gèze joined Éditions Maspero in 1977. Founded at the height of the Algerian War and linked to much of the then flourishing far left, the house was the principal Francophone publisher of Marxist theory and an emblem of anti-imperialist militancy. Six years later, amid straitened economic circumstances, François Maspero sold his stake for one nominal franc and transferred the directorship of what would henceforth be known as La Découverte to Gèze. At the time, the young publisher told anyone who would listen that ‘the Maspero catalogue was worthless’. Forty years later, we must assume the share of La Découverte in the €789 million annual sales of the Editis group is considerably larger than a symbolic euro.

In the world of books, where symbols are decisive, there is something more than a little disheartening about the Maspero list being in the hands of Vincent Bolloré, figurehead of a renascent, reactionary Catholic right. How did it come to this? La Découverte began publishing two years after Mitterrand’s election, as the government announced its U-turn on fiscal austerity and the official conversion of the PS to neoliberalism. Few doubted that the post-war epoch of political and social struggle – stretching from the great workers’ strikes through the campaigns against the war in Algeria, May 68 – had come to a definitive close. In Serge Halimi’s diagnostic, the left had stopped trying; in their stead the ‘intellectuals against the left’ of Michael Scott Christofferson’s description, spawned in the ideological slough of ‘anti-totalitarianism’, now took centre stage. France underwent a veritable ‘dégringolade’ in the words of Perry Anderson, an author who had been important for Maspero but who would not see a single book of his published by La Découverte.

The Mitterrand years: burial of egalitarian ideals and Marxist theories accompanied the terminal decline of the PCF as a mass party. ‘Worship of careerism, the Bomb, raison d’état, big business and the Mammon of cash-rackets-media-lies’, in Guy Hocquenghem’s summary. A terrible ordeal for a publishing house encumbered with the Maspero millstone. If the need to adjust the editorial line had already been on the agenda, Gèze made this the priority of La Découverte. Ever realistic in his approach to publishing, he refocussed the list on the humanities and social sciences (less politicized, more mass-market oriented) together with books by journalists dealing with hot-button cultural issues. To illustrate the evolution of the catalogue under his watch – an outpouring of more than 130 titles a year – it may suffice to consider two elements. First, the travesty of Maspero’s revolutionary anti-colonialism, dressed up in identitarian themes to please the taste of the cultivated petty bourgeoisie. The most emblematic example remains the metamorphosis of third-worldism into post-colonial hucksterism propagated by Pascal Blanchard and his co-thinkers, whose latest opus, Sexe, race et colonies (2018), packages the ‘domination of non-European bodies’ as coffee-table erotica. Second, the dumbing-down of social science, flagrant in the case of Michel Pinçon and Monique Pinçon-Charlot, authors of the crossover hit Le Président des ultra-riches (2011), whose most recent offerings are more or less unabashed exercises in tabloid voyeurism.

Gèze assumed the role of the rising entrepreneur, in tune with the social-liberal turn of a large portion of his readership. Symptomatically, he joined a host of other intellectuals associated with the ‘Second Left’ in signing the petition circulated by Esprit and the reformist CFDT trade union in support of the Juppé government’s plan to ‘modernize’ the French retirement and social security system. Algeria continued to occupy him: the 1990s were coloured by his campaign against the military regime in Algiers, accused of seeking to crush popular opposition by cultivating a climate of terror. Antipathy to Islamic radicalism caused many on the French left to hesitate in condemning the brutality of the Algerian government; Gèze’s engagement contrariwise led him to embrace an emergent form of cultural leftism, structured around faintly religious appeals to identity and denunciations of the ‘colonialist imaginary’.  

Perhaps no one attests more pungently than Hugues Jallon to the tragedy of the retreat of the publisher from post-68 idealism. Recruited by Gèze in 1997, Jallon referred to Malcolm X’s Le Pouvoir noir and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s Textes politiques, both published in French translation by Maspero, as ‘unreadable’ and ‘out-of-date’, belonging to ‘a past which is well and truly defunct’, literally: ‘Appalling!’ What of the bottom line? In 1995, La Découverte was bundled up with the Éditions ouvrières and Syros in a holding company capitalized by the CFDT. Three years later, following a bitter dispute from which it emerged victorious – with the dissolution of Syros and the departure of Éditions ouvrières – La Découverte was sold to the Havas group, itself on the cusp of being bought by the Compagnie Générale des Eaux, soon to become Vivendi and then Vivendi Universal. At last, Maspero featured on the Monopoly board of Parisian publishing, and Gèze’s career could truly begin. Three years after the spectacular collapse, in 2002, of Jean-Marie Messier’s megalomaniacal assemblage at Vivendi, La Découverte and three other Vivendi houses were snapped up by Hachette, which turned around and sold it off again the following year as part of a package deal, under the name Editis, to the Wendel investment company. Roller coasters and merry-go-rounds.

In 2005, now CEO of La Découverte in a group controlled by the boss of bosses, head of the Mouvement des entreprises de France ‘Baron’ Ernest-Antoine Seillière, Gèze not only affirmed that ‘I continue to publish exactly the same books as before, and no one has ever interfered with my editorial choices’, but concluded, ‘Now I have the peace of mind to edit, thanks to the economies of scale of a large group. Before, I spent more time working with my banker than with my authors’. When asked if he saw any contradiction between this cavalcade of owners from the ranks of France’s wealthiest men, and his loyalty to the ‘engagement’ of the Éditions Maspero, Geze replied: ‘Only the catalogue counts’.

Is this entirely true? It has often been reported that publishing attacks on the rich by José Bové, Michael Moore and their ilk greatly amused Seillière. A 2007 editorial innovation of Jallon’s also suggests that it’s not only the catalogue that counts: the creation of the ‘Zones’ imprint, intended to ‘renew the militant approach’ of La Découverte by ‘reconnecting with the third-worldist dimension of the Éditions Maspero’ through books that address the ‘problematics of the Global South’. Why pretend that a book series is published independently unless it is more politically coherent to construct ‘a site of editorial resistance’ – calling on partisans of ‘counterculture, activism and new forms of contestation’ to ‘whet their swords for new offensives and acts of resistance’ – independent of capitalist conglomerates?

As Jallon was promoted upwards, and learned the ropes as CEO, Gèze continued to exercise his talents in schemes concocted by the employers’ publishing union – in partnership with the French Ministry of Culture and the Centre national du livre – to shepherd the book business through its ‘digital transition’. When he retired in 2014, Jallon naturally was appointed his successor, with the agreement of the principal shareholder. Yet only four years later, the new CEO could not resist an offer from Vincent Montagne, recent owner of the Média-Participations cartel, to take the helm of Seuil and its subsidiaries. Jallon’s colleagues all congratulated him, if not so heartily as they congratulated his new boss – ‘representative of a moderate, even enlightened right’ in the words of one – for hiring this ‘authentic man of the left’. To replace Jallon, Gèze proposed Stéphanie Chevrier, who had started out as an editor in the Hachette and Flammarion groups before earning her spurs creating a bespoke ‘independent’ imprint, Don Quichote, at La Martinière. Once again, a left-wing publisher ensconced in a large corporate group striving to pass off the financier as a cobbler. The shareholders agreed. The mergers and acquisitions continued. A year after Chevrier’s arrival, Bolloré bought Editis from Planeta, which had purchased it from Wendel in 2008. In 2021, Chevrier’s boss was so pleased that he proposed she also take charge of the Éditions Julliard. At the time of writing – as part of his consolidation of the French media landscape – the sale of Editis to the tycoon owner of Le Monde, Daniel Kretsinky, is on the cards.

The conspicuous absence of Gèze, and any mention of La Découverte from the commemorative ceremony organized for Maspero after his death in October 2015, suggests that the handover thirty years earlier did not go altogether smoothly. By contrast, the tributes of Jallon and La Découverte to Gèze, ‘comrade, friend and fellow traveller’, leave no doubt as to the success of this latest bequest.

Read on: Emilie Bickerton, ‘Paper Empires’, NLR 76.