Ah, the humble cigarette. It’s Nature’s little way of exacting revenge on Europe for the whole smallpox-blanket thing in times of yore, a wondrous little abstract machine for killing off people with little interest in living. (And don’t get your hackles up already. I’ve had a family member die of lung cancer just like the rest of us, and I know what it’s like to watch them fade. It’s sad, but it doesn’t make them any smarter: I stand by my statement, and all the increasingly ‘offensive’ ones which are to come.) Given that our economy is still founded more or less on the productivity of living individuals, it’s become understandably fashionable in liberal countries to hate on these little tobacco-sticks. Don’t think that I buy your trumped-up moral arguments for even one second, you anti-smokers. You’re just buying into the ‘healthful’ dogma that you’ve been fed by the powers that be, who for the time being want us living and breathing (at least well enough to show up at work). And so the health nuts haven’t stopped at banning smoking from restaurants (understandable), but have moved on to bars (less so) and are beginning to set their sights on cars, open spaces, and perhaps even prohibition in general. The British have even proposed this absurdity called a ‘smoking licence,‘ while at my university a number of overzealous health nuts are trying to ban cigarette sales in the campus variety store. Maybe smokers will soon have to hide out in a secret room in their basements smoking hydroponically-grown tobacco: it won’t be all bad though, maybe it’ll give tobacco smokers the same appreciation for their hobby that pot smokers have today.

I bet that last paragraph sounded like the diatribe of a seasoned smoker, irritated that he’s having more and more trouble getting his fix. Wrong. I haven’t smoked (tobacco) in years, after a fortunate incident in which I had half a Marlboro and puked violently for about twenty minutes, giving me an entrenched hostility to the scent and flavour of this acrid smoke. So, I hate smoking just as much as the vitriolic anti-smoking crowd. It’s smelly and idiotic: everyone who’s not in denial about their addiction knows this. It’s supposedly twice as addictive as heroin, and certainly only a fraction as interesting. Smoking cigarettes alone does not a Kurt Cobain produce. And the pitiful arguments that smokers use to rationalize their addiction are the worst. “It keeps me thin.” Yeah, well, so does eating less and exercising. “It relieves stress.” Yeah, well, so does pot and beer, not to mention simply not being an uptight idiot. Moreover, it seems that finding time for another smoke is the principal cause of stress among smokers. Smoking is really the perfect addiction for our capitalist society. Not only is it a hilariously expensive habit, it’s impossible to figure out why people acquire the habit in the first place. Smokers start smoking because they want to be cool (or, in my case, because that nicotine headrush in the early years is a great addition to being stoned and drunk out of your mind). But eventually all coolness and pleasant headrushing fades, and you’re just straight-up addicted to something for no good reason. Smoking a cigarette is indeed incredibly satisfying for a smoker, simply because it relieves them of the desire to smoke a cigarette for a little while. In this, it’s just like any number of other consumer goods, producing a desire which it then temporarily satisfies. At least when you’re a habitual drinker or pot smoker, you still get a little buzzed while you’re slowly killing yourself. So once again, we can see that cigarette smoking is a perfect fit for the capitalist lifestyle: its psychotropic effects are so mild that you can be incredibly addicted and still functional and productive. It’s not the kind of addiction that makes you miss work, it’s the kind that you can bring with you to work.

Anti-capitalist musings aside, it should be clear that I don’t think there’s any rational argument for cigarette smoking. It’s something that you start doing and continue doing for profoundly irrational reasons, reasons which lie in the addictive processes of the unconscious. Conversely, there are rational arguments for banning smoking in certain places, particularly in places where people might be exposed to carcinogenic smoke against their will. This is doubly so when one thinks about the rights of employees: customers can always choose a different location if they don’t like the smoking, but employees who might like to save their lungs don’t generally have that privilege. There is no rational argument for why smokers should be allowed to foist their preferred means of amortized suicide upon an unwilling group of people, whether it’s founded in a business logic or a libertarian one. (And never mind the multiplicity of equally carcinogenic industrial pollutants already in the air: there’s still no need to make a bad situation worse.) Even the strictest libertarian ought to recognize that their rights end where my nose begins. So I think it’s great that society has taken up a more enlightened stance on smoking in these contexts, and abandoned the old paternalistic attitude (a pater who smoked, obviously) which demanded that non-smoking customers and employees simply suffer in silence. Likewise, I would also say that I recognize the need for a punitive tax rate on tobacco products, not only to discourage potential new smokers, but to recoup some health care costs (especially in a country with socialized medicine – but I’ll come back to this health-care question shortly).
Where the anti-smoking crowd and myself diverge is when this enlightened attitude toward smoking law turns into a new paternalism, the same paternalism which has always been deployed to justify prohibition. Weak-kneed anti-smoking lobbyists won’t usually claim that the practice ought to be completely illegal, instead falling back on an increasingly complex system of restrictions and quasi-prohibitions with the intention of making it more and more difficult not only to become a smoker, but to remain one. Economic disincentives and other market-based measures are one thing; to think of every smoker converted to a non-smoker as some sort of victory for humanity is another thing entirely. I got my very hostile attitude toward the concept of smoking from my father. Nevertheless, said father, a good liberal to the end, can be incredibly irritating once he gets on to the topic of smokers and their vanishing rights. Like most anti-smokers, he seems to positively revel in trashing the concept of smoking, in his deep ressentiment that other people continue getting away with what he believes himself morally compelled not to do. Vigorous campaigners for anti-smoking regulations, like most dogmatic liberals, are always wallowing in this kind of ressentiment, and attempting to entrench their own moral principles in law. Like I said, some anti-smoking laws are reasonable. But such resentful and dogmatic liberals always seem to think that if a little bit of legislation is a good thing, then a lot of legislation will be a great thing. (Not incidentally, we might observe that this will never be a credible belief, and it will always give ammunition to conservatives, whether principled or otherwise.) The drive to institute an effective prohibition on all smoking is based upon a fundamental misapprehension of the function of anti-smoking legislation. Justifiable anti-smoking laws are the ones which prevent non-smokers from being unwillingly or unwittingly exposed to carcinogenic smoke. Paternalistic anti-smoking laws are the ones which seek to prevent smokers themselves from enjoying their vice, even when they aren’t harming anybody but themselves. These sorts of paternalistic laws can only have outright prohibition as their ultimate aim, which is not only unjustifiable from the perspective of individual liberties, but profoundly ineffectual as a disciplinary method.

Paternalism is always ultimately based on economic necessity. Daddy wants you, more than anything, to be productive. As long as smokers seem just as productive (or more so) than non-smokers, smoking will remain a non-issue. (Likewise, if overpopulation ever becomes a serious drain on the economy, you can bet that the institutionalization of ‘healthfulness’ will fall by the wayside). As the Cancer Society reminds us, “For each pack of cigarettes sold in 1999, $3.45 was spent on medical care caused by smoking, and $3.73 lost in productivity, for a total cost to society of $7.18 per pack.” Apart from the incredibly spurious nature of these sorts of ’statistics,’ we can clearly see their paternalistic appeal: smokers need to be stopped from smoking, not just for their own health, but for the greater good. This has, of course, been the argument deployed by all authoritarian regimes in order to justify the unjustifiable, abrogating individual rights for the perceived good of the collective. I’m not going to scapegoat the Russians, Italians or Germans in this respect: every government that enforces a prohibition on an act which harms only the individual actor (or nobody at all) is in this sense authoritarian and paternalistic. And thanks to Harry Anslinger’s remarkably successful (albeit poorly-named) Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, this list includes approximately every nation-state currently in existence.
Here, a good-ole-fashioned libertarian would be ready to end his or her discourse on smoking: smokers, like all individuals, have liberties, and they oughtn’t be hindered from enjoying them unless they are themselves hindering someone else from enjoying theirs. This seems like a pretty solid moral foundation for legislation, and in most respects it is. But I’m no ole-fashion libertarian, and I’m not really happy just appealing to the liberties of smokers as a value in and of themselves. After all, they’re stupid enough to continue being smokers, so I don’t see why we really ought to respect their liberties all that much. This is more or less the implicit claim of paternalistic legislation, after all: those unfit to govern themselves must be governed by law. So I’d like to take up this paternal claim on its own terms, and demonstrate its essential absurdity. Essentially, what’s at least a bit ‘radical’ about my take on smoking law is that I wholly agree that smokers aren’t really fit to govern themselves, and for this precise reason they ought to be allowed to continue doing so. Smoking, far from being a practice which needs to be prohibited for the greater good, in fact contributes to this ‘greater good,’ however it may be defined.
Let’s start this section with a little thought experiment that’ll hopefully get your hackles up again. (What are hackles, anyway?) In your head, I want you to rank-order the following four hypothetical individuals in terms of how much they deserve to die. If you’re uncomfortable with this formulation, then just rank them in order of how upset you would be to hear they’ve died:

1) A 25-year, pack-a-day smoker.

2) A morbidly obese individual who simply overeats.

3) A morbidly obese individual with a hereditary thyroid condition.

4) A healthy baby in Central Africa.

I’ll give you a second.

All done?

I’m willing to bet that, once you got over your initial distaste at the premises of this thought-experiment, 95% of all you hypothetical readers didn’t change the order, and not just because you’re very suggestible.

Why? Because there’s a huge difference between the first two hypothetical individuals and the second two. The first two are individuals who, whether or not they know it, have made life choices which are almost certainly going to entail a shorter lifespan. The second two are individuals who, through no fault of their own, are likely going to have a shorter lifespan. In setting up your ordering, you’ve relied on an implicit ethical principle: people who die because of choices they’ve made are more deserving of their death than people who die because of an accident of birth.

What does the death of a pack-a-day smoker have to do with the life of a baby in Ethiopia? Simply put: Everything.

Everyone knows it, but nobody is willing to come right out and say it: the human race is multiplying out of control. Malthus recognized this as far back as the eighteenth century, while in our own century Paul Ehrlich derived some rather silly predictions from this underlying principle. What does ‘out of control’ really mean in this context? (NB, for those of a very philosophical bent, my thoughts on these issues are strongly influenced by the late Garrett Hardin and his always-irreverent take on ethics) It simply means what it says: populations of animals are generally controlled by a variety of natural factors, including food supply, predation, and climactic catastrophe. We human animals, however, have placed ourselves not simply ‘atop’ but outside the natural food chain by constructing our own artificial food chains (wheat-truck-mouth/hay-cow-mouth/etc.), while our technologies have made us incredibly resilient in the face of natural catastrophes. This not only allows our population to grow and grow, uncoupled from any natural control factors; this growing population and its increasingly complex techno-society are in themselves an apparently inexhaustible resource for solving future population problems (as outlined by Julian Simon). And so, as humanity continues to push the carrying capacity of its planet to the maximum, it also continues to find new ways of expanding this global capacity.

It seems to me that the debate between Simon and Ehrlich over whether and when humanity will one day run up against some fixed carrying capacity and simply collapse, is not only a bit overblown, but profoundly misses the point, especially in terms of what we might call ‘population ethics.’ If we look at the various means by which capitalist society has been able to expand the global carrying capacity of the human race, one thing should be clear: from a local perspective, these mechanisms are often profoundly unequal (and therefore unjust). Farmers in America get subsidized to grow corn nobody wants to buy, while on the other side of the world, millions starve to death. The fastest-growing problem in the developed world is obesity, while the developing world is still stuck on the same old problem of malnutrition. If this doesn’t strike you as the most evil irony of the contemporary world, then you are not only lacking a sense of irony, but a moral sense.

What the hell does this have to do with smoking, and the thought experiment above?

It’s simple. All the noble efforts to feed the starving masses of the world can only go so far. The only sustainable solution to the problem of overpopulation is simply population control. We need to overcome our selfish instinct to be fruitful and multiply as much as Nature will allow, because we don’t live in Nature anymore: we live in an accelerating industrial culture that has latched onto an unsustainable spiral of growth. The particular time is irrelevant: we need to solve this problem of growth for ourselves, or Nature will reassert her power and solve it for us. Not only do we need to rethink our lust for growth, but we need to rethink the incredibly unequal distribution of this growth: individuals born in developing countries are more likely to die simply by the accident of their birth.

And so, paternalistic legislation against smoking is not only an affront to liberty and a colossal waste of time, but grotesquely misguided to the point of becoming immoral. Why the hell should we fight to save the lives of individuals who are ready to pay for a chance to throw theirs away, when millions of individuals starve to death every year, even as they desperately fight to survive? Even the economic arguments ‘for the greater good’ are a bit silly. In a study with wonderfully contrarian conclusions, the Danish Institute of Health concluded that the lifetime “health-related costs of smoking are balanced by smaller expenditure due to shorter life expectancy.” When you think about it, smoking is in fact a wonderfully democratic system of population control. Thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, less and less people (in developed countries) die each day, but just as many people get born. This progressive elimination of natural selection from human existence can only exacerbate the problems of overpopulation and their concomitant inequalities.
Population control is the only solution to overpopulation, but it’s an extremely problematic one in almost any form. After all, everybody wants to live, and they at least want their families to live (beyond that, it seems, many people don’t really care that much). So how does the ‘controller’ of population decide who gets to live and who is allowed to die? Essentially this is the problem of deciding who deserves to live, and who deserves to die: this is a problem suitable for a god, not a man. The solutions proposed by ‘eugenics’ are so profoundly repugnant that they barely deserve a mention. Controlling the birth rate through legislation is another option, but there remains the ethical problem of what to do with babies in excess of the limit. Garrett Hardin’s solution – ‘don’t help the poor!’ – is equally problematic, insofar as it assumes that those who are born into poverty have less right to life than those born into wealth. The moral quandaries of population control by legislative fiat have led most liberals to cast the idea aside, to proclaim that all life is sacred and that we have a sacred right to protect life: in this respect they’re not far from ‘right-to-lifers.’

But liberals still support abortion rights, for good reason, and for the same good reason as they ought to allow smokers to keep on smoking. Abortion and smoking are passive, ‘democratic’ modes of population control, modes of control which in fact reintroduce some semblance of natural selection into the sphere of human existence. People who choose an unhealthy life get sick and die; embryos whose mothers don’t want them and so won’t raise them well, simply don’t get born. (The net effect of this second fact seems to be, on the whole, positive.) These notions might be repugnant to the liberal mind. If so, fuck the liberal mind. I think liberals should learn to stand up for principles, even when it means they have to tolerate a few repugnant conclusions and cast aside their paternalistic impulses. Save paternalism for the familial sphere, where it belongs: if you’ve got a child who smokes, you can and should go right ahead and pressure them in whatever fashion you’d like to stop doing so. But in the legal sphere, we need to bow to a higher principle of liberty, whereby others are free to do whatever they want so long as it doesn’t directly affect us. This doesn’t even demand that we liberals give up the desire for a better world, or the hope to improve humanity. Quite the contrary: I should say that if smokers are dumb enough to continue smoking, while fully aware of the consequences, then their deaths ought to be continually improving humanity’s aggregate intelligence. If they’re wealthy and irrational enough to sustain a smoking habit, then their share of the earth’s carrying capacity should go to somebody more deserving, like the starving Ethiopian from the thought experiment above. Maybe as we start to think about smoking in this context, we’ll even start to reconsider the disproportionate investments that are made in lung cancer research, and start to think about simpler (and less profitable) things, like malaria and malnutrition.
So, as non-smokers, let’s forget the pipe dream of a non-smoking society and say to smokers: light up! Be proud of the sacrifice you’re making for the greater good!

Just don’t blow that shit in my face.

“I know I’m lookin’ for something, but I can’t even tell you what it is… I’ve had this feeling for a long time, and, it’s like I’m standing outside myself, watching me do things I don’t want to do. You know? Just seeing me like I’m somebody else, but never ever bein’ able to stop the show. I’m tired.” — Dennis “Cutty” Wise.

It should be pretty obvious to any informed viewer that the Wire is the most Foucauldian show on television. Of course, there are some cheesy reality shows which might enact some of the more paranoid visions inspired by Foucault’s work, but as a drama which undertakes an actual investigation of the problems he considered, especially in Surveiller et punir (S&p for convenience), The Wire makes a fascinating case study.

What exactly does this imply, though?

We can begin anywhere, really, but let’s start from a superficial reading: the wire represents a tremendously panoptic phenomenon. The metaphorical wire of the show’s title refers to phone taps, which are central to the show’s development, and although not particularly ‘optic’ they nevertheless mirror the ‘listening tubes’ of Bentham’s schema. On the whole, the show is a fantastic study in contemporary surveillance techniques and the functioning of the disciplinary apparatus that is the police department (For those unfamiliar, the show, on this same superficial level, is a fairly straightforward ‘police procedural’ show, but with standard HBO depth of character, production values, etc. The actual structure of the show will be examined in more depth as we proceed). The gaze of the Baltimore police department, though falling well short of the ideal implied by the ‘pan‘ of panopticism – and far more complex in its functioning – bears many other interesting similarities to that of the hidden watcher in Bentham’s prison design, and the ethic of ‘enlightenment’ from whence this ‘reformed’ penitentiary model was derived. Equally significant are its divergences from that model: the most obvious being the fact that while the surveillant gaze of the panoptic penitentiary is directed inward, at incarcerated criminals, the surveillance of the police department is directed outward. We can and should draw the standard conclusions here that modern technology has turned the entire society into a sort of panoptic assemblage, with the necessary caveat that, for the time being, the simple quantity of information which can be collected precludes any comprehensive monitoring.

As the show proceeds, however, one’s understanding of the main disciplinary assemblages featured in the show (the police department, the drug gangs and crooked stevedores they surveill and interpellate, the political sphere of Baltimore) grows deeper, in a manner which follows a more nuanced reading of Foucault’s work in Surveiller et punir. Two notes should be made here. Although I’m hesitant to start flipping through the book to recall his exact terminology, I’m fairly sure he would have called the police department and the city government institutions rather then assemblages, and he — as far as I know — never said much of anything about violent drug gangs. Institutions are certainly a form of assemblage, but by referring to them in general as assemblages, we can tie Foucault’s thought on institutions and discipline to Deleuze’s ideas about assemblages, and deLanda’s more recent developments of those ideas. Since I want to stick to Foucault for a moment, suffice to say that an assemblage is, roughly, any grouping of heterogeneous components. These groupings have more interesting properties which should hopefully become clear, but this definition will suffice for now. Second note: we ought to gesture at least briefly to the author’s intent: although we shall certainly depart from it to some extent, this reading is far from incompatible with the vision of the show’s creators. One of the show’s main writers, David Simon (a former police reporter), says that despite the show’s presentation as police procedural, it is “really about the American city, and about how we live together. It’s about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how… whether you’re a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge [or] lawyer, you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you’ve committed to.” Whether or not Simon knows his social theory, a quote like this shows that he is certainly interested in the same questions as Foucault takes up in S&p.

Simon’s words speak to a deeper reading of Foucault than the previous focus on panopticism. Surveillance is central to The Wire and Foucault alike, but in a sense the English translation of the title as ‘Discipline’ does help to elucidate the original intent of both. The necessary emphasis in the first season on the outward gaze and ’surveillant’ qualitites of the police department gradually gives way to a deeper study of the internal dynamics of the disciplinary institution itself. Every character in the show — except for, on the most part, the drug addicts (but we’ll return to that later) — is part of at least one cohesive institution or assemblage. They are attracted to these institutions for varying reasons, but once they enter, they are taken up by a regime of training and progress which seeks to shape their subjectivity according to the imperatives of the institution. The genius of the show is that it dissects the overwhelming power of the disciplinary institutions without failing to show the equally ‘powerful’ loci of resistance: both in the form of standard human impulses and overt forms of counterpower practised by ‘individuals’ and competing assemblages. Unlike those of the standard police drama, characters in The Wire are rarely motivated by ‘good’ or ‘evil’ impulses. Rather, they are motivated by standard human drives — greed, will-to-power, horniness, laziness, and so on — which are channeled in various ways by disciplined institutions. The young hoodlums enter the drug gangs out of a basic laziness and greed bred and compounded by a general lack of opportunity. The seeming ‘hero’ of the show in its early stages, Detective McNulty, joins the police department out of what appears to be a basic fascination with pursuit and dominance, a will to exert his own ostensibly ’superior’ intellect over the criminal underworld of Baltimore. McNulty is no model police officer, however, and his drives express themselves in constant resistance to the impulses of the institution, echoed by a general self-destructiveness in his love for beer and women. Other police officers — the successful ones — exhibit far greater self-restraint, and indeed ‘compromise’ their own desires far more readily in order to ’succeed’ according to the standards set out by their institution. McNulty is driven by a fantasy of the ideal case, which will somehow ‘prove’ his dominance over the criminal mind; in the process he constantly runs into conflict with those whom he calls ‘the bosses,’ career-focused professionals who are themselves driven by a general desire to uphold the status quo, and thereby rise in the ranks of the department. Foucault discusses at length the essential role of this sort of ranked progress in a military and educational context as a means of ‘administering’ and constructing subjects. The Wire, however, constantly enacts his maxim that ‘Where there is power, there is resistance,’ not only in the dialectical battle of the police and criminal institutions, but in the resistances of individual subjects to the exigencies of their chosen (and less chosen) institutions.

These theoretical questions lead nicely into the question of how Foucault’s concepts might generalize to other forms of assemblage; conveniently, the fourth season of the show, which I am starting into at the moment (much to the woe of my course reading), directly sheds some light on these issues. In this season, the conflict of police and criminal recedes to some extent, although the disciplinary power of the Department continues to unify disparate elements of the plot. The show’s gaze seems to zoom out, focusing less specifically on these two ‘institutions’ and examining more generally the various interconnected assemblages which constitute the city of Baltimore. The seeming difficulty of characterizing drug gangs — assemblages which are, at least towards the bottom levels of their loose hierarchy, quite informal and deterritorialized — as ‘institutions’ makes clear the usefulness of a Deleuzian concept of the ‘assemblage’ (recall: a grouping of heterogeneous components) as a more general way of thinking about institutions. The addicts themselves are the most interesting examples of assemblages, since they are the essential consumers for the capitalist assemblage of the drug trade, but have themselves generally turned away or been driven away from all of the other assemblages in their lives: family, community, the law, etc. (by contrast, Bubs — the show’s main addict character — is always trying to form a kind of substitute assemblage for himself: taking younger addicts under his ‘apprenticeship,’ teaching them the ways of petty theft and con games, and thereby constituting a little two-member ‘community’ of his own). By thinking of the groupings into which individual – or, following one of Deleuze’s more poetic turns of phrase, ‘dividual’ – subjects are gathered as ‘assemblages,’ we can begin to make sense of the various new assemblages which come into view in the fourth season, as well as their many reciprocal and promiscuous interactions. The introduction of a plotline following an even younger generation of children growing up in the extreme poverty of Baltimore’s ‘Western District’ makes an already fascinating drama even more remarkable. As a counterpoint to the relatively well-formed assemblages of organized crime and the police department, we see a loose group of eighth-graders, and we begin to understand some of the dynamic processes at work by which we choose assemblages and make sense of the ones which are in a way ‘pre-chosen.’ These children — even more ‘larval’ than the ‘larval subjects’ which Deleuze argues we all remain — are caught between the conflicting impulses of every assemblage previously featured on the show, and a few new ones. They have to negotiate their identities in the spaces between (generally single, always poor, and often drug-addicted) parents, the underfunded school system, their friends, and the gangs and police at war in their neighbourhoods. Each of these assemblages form ‘attractors’ of sort in a space of interconnected assemblages, with sympathetic and oppositional effects: the children of drug addicts, for instance, are likely to become addicts themselves, while the child of one incarcerated gang member in this season is put out on the street by his mother with a ‘package’ and forced to take up where his father left off. This concept of assemblage makes the process by which poverty and circumstance creates dropouts and criminals painfully clear, without resorting to the standard ‘moral’ arguments of conservatives. For a wealthy child, the sympathetic effects of educated and well-off parents guide children relatively smoothly into the educational assemblage and then on to some sort of productive capitalist assemblage; for the children of impoverished parents who place little to no value on education, and for whom the most prominent productive assemblage in their neighbourhood is the drug trade, the force of that trade as ‘attractor’ can be overwhelming. Conversely, some children are driven by their own internal drives to fight against these sympathetic effects and break off into other ‘basins of attraction:’ either way, they choose certain assemblages for themselves, for whatever reasons, and are then guided down a certain path largely predetermined by the structure of that assemblage.

This analysis is beginning to sprawl to an almost absurd extent. To punctuate this discussion, I shall lay out, as best as I can recall, the general line of reasoning taken, and then in best Deleuzian fashion gesture towards a more productive statement of the underlying Problem at hand. The Wire is such a great show for reasons which extend far beyond the standard critic’s glosses on production values, conventional ’social commentary,’ ‘realism’ and the like: it sets out to undertake a serious critical analysis of the dominant processes by which our modern social life is structured. It plays with many of the same issues laid out in Foucault’s work on institutions, but has developed even further into something which can best be described in Deleuzian terms: as a meditation on the city as social assemblage. The show is incredibly entertaining for a critically-minded viewer, dramatically compelling in itself and for all of the ‘theoretical’ reasons cited. It also gestures beyond itself, however, to a fundamental problematic of the assemblage: The Wire investigates assemblages from the lowest (hierarchically-speaking) and least formal ‘larval’ assemblage of a group of teenage boys, to the high-flown rhetoric and gamesmanship of the city’s political sphere in which city councillor Tommy Carcetti maneuvers his way into the mayoral seat. How are all of these assemblages connected, however; how do they interact with each other and create new emergent assemblages; and indeed, how do these assemblages emerge at a base level from physical and biological assemblages? These problems imply numerous questions for further investigation, and numerous tentative hypotheses. It seems obvious in The Wire that each stratum of assemblage interacts with the assemblages immediately above and below, or those to which they stand in direct opposition; assemblages can also interact, however, in even more complex and nonlinear ways, facilitated by the technological assemblages of communication and transport. Reversing McLuhan’s rudimentary usage of the terms, we might think of human subjects as the extensions of these assemblages, or as assemblages formed in reciprocal interaction with all of these other extensive assemblages. The questions of a theory of assemblages are the essential questions of our time, and perhaps of any time; put differently, the essential questions of our time all fall under the purview of a generalized theory of assemblages. In closing, this Deleuzian hypothesis or problematic as a gesture to the breadth of this fundamental problem: the mind and body are heterogeneous assemblages of human cells, microbes, and microcosmic assemblages of communication and transport; the mind is a virtual assemblage which emerges from the actual assemblage of the body, and which incrementally reconstructs, constructs and is constructed by actual social assemblages in the external world.

Phew. That’s more than enough for now.
Acknowledgements:
Though lacking in direct citations, this piece evidently works from the texts cited in the body, as well as Deleuze’s early philosophical work and expositions of his ideas in deLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy as well as A New Philosophy of Society.

Allan Sekula proposes that ‘every proper portrait has its lurking, objectifying inverse in the files of the police” (5), and thereby equates the idealistic representational mode of photography with the more repressive. Sekula’s “Body and the Archive” is a particularly provocative piece, insofar as it refuses to consider photographic practices in isolation: police photography and artistic photography are not two discrete modes of expression which coincidentally make use of the same apparatus, but rather, along the lines described by Flusser, the apparatus in effect produces both modalities of its use. “The freedom of the photographer is a programmed freedom;” thus, the program of the camera implies the contemporary artistic and penal programs alike. Following Flusser’s philosophy of photography even further into Sekula’s piece, we might state that the production of the categories of the ‘criminal’ and ‘ethnic’ other were only the beginning. Existence is defined by difference, and thus it would make sense that society should devote itself first to cataloguing its ‘others,’ by way of the photography of the criminal, the ethnic, and those other subaltern groups in opposition to which ‘respectable’ society forms its identity. And yet, with the world of ‘otherness’ thoroughly catalogued, it seems that Western society is now led inexorably on to the cataloguing of itself.

This is perhaps part of Flusser’s objection to amateur photography; the cataloguing of the other is certainly problematic, as Sekula’s piece outlines. This is not a new development, however. As Sekula states, “‘the potential for a new juridical photographic realism was widely recognized in the 1840s, in the general context of systematic efforts to regulate the growing urban presence of the ‘dangerous classes’” (3). The desire to regulate the other has been a human impulse for all of recorded history. It is only with the rise of modernity, however, that the instigators of social regulation realized that regulation could be far more efficiently implemented not through spectacular manifestations of power, but through surveying, cataloguing, and disciplinary institutions, as described by Foucault. The medieval was a time of myths, of symbols, and of men; modernity is a time of maps, of signs, and of subject-positions. This is why Sekula argues that ‘photography is modernity run riot’ (3). Photography is neither cause nor symptom of modernity, but rather the cultural practice which is most symbolic of the character of the modern age.

I am not referring to ’symbolic’ here in the conventional sense, so derided by Walter Benjamin is his ‘Origin of German Tragic Drama,’ by which one calls anything which represents another thing a ’symbol.’ For Benjamin, the ’symbolic’ mode of expression is one in which the ’symbolized’ object is immanent within the symbolic object; this sense of the ’symbolic’ is derived from a theological sense, and thus demands representation immanence along the lines of the immanence of the divine within the profane. Of course, with our growing uncertainty towards the divine, and the notion of divinity in general, this particular form of symbolism is in decline, supplanted by allegory. Allegory, by contrast to the symbolic, is a form of representation signification in which the ’symbolic’ objects only symbolize by way of their position within an ordered construction. As such, this would cover nearly any instance of ’symbolism’ as we moderns tend to use the term, since, lacking a belief in divine immanence, one only has the structure of language to appeal to for representational purposes.

I will return to the concept of the allegorical in a second. First, however, I should like to unpack why I propose, rather anachronistically, that photography is symbolic of modernity, and perhaps in the process make the distinction between these two modes more clear. The camera is a ’symbol’ of modernity in the conventional sense, that is, we can interpret the rise of photography as an allegorical representation for the character of modernity: as a modern technological apparatus, and one whose usage determined much of the character of modernity, photography is an allegory for modernity. However, modernity is also in some sense immanent within the camera. The rise of modernity would not have been what it was without photography, while photography would not have developed as it did in any context but the modern. Photography neither ‘represents’ modernity, nor ‘constitutes’ it, but rather, modernity is immanent to the program of photography, and vice versa.

This symbolic anachronism is paradoxically responsible for turning the world into allegory. When Sekula states that “‘for Bertillon, the criminal body expressed nothing” (28), he is in fact describing the allegorization of the human body. In the classical mode of thought, as evinced by discredited pseudosciences like phrenology, the human body was taken to be symbolic of the human character: one’s character was not determined by the slope of one’s forehead or the bumps on the skull, nor vice versa, but rather the criminal character was taken to be immanent within the cranial geography. With Bertillon’s allegorization of the criminal body, however, the body was no longer a symbol of the character: the character was in no way necessarily ‘present’ in the structure of the body. Rather, the body was merely a sign which, by way of its position within the structure of society and history, could point to any particular character type. No longer was there a general theory of the criminal physiognomy: on the contrary, the key to the criminal psyche took up residence in the particular. The only way to gain control of the criminal element within society was therefore to catalogue its position within the larger structure. Just as a dictionary catalogues the linguistic sign, so did Bertillon’s photography of deviance catalogue the ‘criminal sign,’ that is, the criminal body.

It is impossible, however, to catalogue one pole of an opposition. The attempts of penal reformers like Bertillon or Bentham were ‘flawed’ in that they restricted themselves to the criminal. The problem with this approach is that one can only catalogue deviance by simultaneously cataloguing that which is deviated from. In Sekula’s terms, “”for Bertillon, the mastery of the criminal body necessitated a massive campaign of inscription, a transformation of the body’s signs into a text” (31): note that the mastery of the criminal body necessitates a transformation of the body’s signs. In order to catalogue criminality, one must catalogue corporeality in general.

And thus, in perhaps the most telling proof of Foucault’s theories with regard to the ‘internalized gaze,’ we see in modernity a simultaneous explosion of photography for artistic and disciplinary purposes. As Sekula argues, photography constitutes “a system of representation capable of functioning both honorifically and repressively” (4); few other cultural phenomena fit this description. One does not go to a prison for recreation, or create art with an MRI machine: why, then, do we catalogue ourselves for fun? It seems this must necessarily be a consequence of the allegorization of the body. The categories which we create for the Other have a tendency of reproducing themselves in unwanted contexts: if the criminal body could no longer be symbolic of ‘evil,’ no longer could the law-abiding body be symbolic of ‘good.’ Allegory gives us a way to make sense of the world without recourse to divine organizing principles: we can interpret the allegory according to the laws of its own structure, rather than any externally-imposed order, and thus the objects within the allegorical constellation are elevated. The signification of the allegorical object lends it a certain secular sanctity, as in the “look up at one’s betters” Sekula describes (8); it also implicitly devalues the individual object, since it only signifies with reference to a larger whole. And thus we have the obsessive impulse towards systematization, cataloguing, categorizing. The only means by which the allegorical body can interpret itself is for it to perceive the structure of which it forms a part, and thus it travels around ripping fragments from reality to perceive the construction of the whole. The ‘public looks’ (Sekula of the photographic serve to situate our own subjectivity with regard to the subjectivity of others: we interpret our positions within the public sphere by determining who we stand above, and who stands above us. By cataloguing our reality with photographs, we can create for ourselves a hierarchy from these panoptic fragments, and thereby seize some provisional meaning from the absurd system that is the modern world.

“While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth.” – Susan Sontag (6)

“The very ‘truthfulness’ of the new medium encouraged its deliberate use as a means of propaganda. The Nazis were among the first to use systematic photographic propaganda.” – John Berger (49)

Until the rise of the photograph, ‘realism’ was the dominant mode of art. Why did the photograph change this? Because it underlined the contingency of ‘the real.’ No longer were the laws of perspective and the basic rules of isometric projection considered to be accurate tracings of the real; why fiddle with vanishing points and figure-ground relations when the work of the artist can be done directly by photons? With the rendering of images graven by light, the enlightenment ideal of the absolute vitrification of reality in art could finally be obtained. If light itself cannot accurately and truthfully depict the images off which it reflects, then perhaps we ought to question more closely the nature of this enlightenment ideal.

Which is, of course, what Sontag, Jay, and Berger are all doing this week. The camera is a pure, instrumental, and empirical device. A crude automaton of the human eye, a motionless cyclopean monument to the values of the enlightenment. If there is truth to be found in images, then it is to be found in the photograph. And yet it seems that the problem toward which our erstwhile theorists are gesturing is that the ‘commerce between art and truth,’ insofar as it may exist, is a particularly troublesome commerce. In the realm of the photograph (and perhaps elsewhere), Truth is Art’s banana republic or its maquiladora.

Photography in particular could not survive without its illusions of verisimilitude. And yet truth enters into the photograph only, as Sontag rightly states, in the most rudimentary, documentary sense: “something exists, or did exist, which was like what’s in the picture” (5, and with digital photography, even this is not the case). Apart from the simple documentary nature of the image, it makes no claim to truth. The denotational content of a photograph is a minuscule element of the composition as a whole, even in the case of documentary photography. Otherwise, why is a James Nachtwey photograph of a young boy amidst the rubble of Mogadishu any more compelling than the camera-phone shot taken by the child’s brother? Why are some shots of poverty, famine, and the like, more compelling than others? The answer can only lie in the connotational qualities of the photograph; these qualities are the subject of photographic criticism, and these qualities are what prevent the artistic (or propagandistic) photograph from having any claim to veracity. I will be exploring the shady commerce of art and truth through a series of photographs of that German dictator whom the National Portrait Gallery named as one of the ‘world’s most photographed‘ people.

Consider this photo, or the opening photograph a few paragraphs above. Their pure denotational content is almost certainly true. Adolf Hitler, at one point, visited a troop of smiling and happy Hitler-Jugend, and, at one point, left a church. Of these facts, we can be as certain as we can ever be in the age of Photoshop. And yet can we really believe that these simple facts constitute the entire content of these photographs, as though they were snapshots from spring break? Certainly not. They are propaganda photographs. As for the first, its evident connotations are that Hitler is a caring and thoughful leader like any other, that the National-Socialists care for their (Aryan) children, and support all the same decent values as other decent people. Indeed, when we carry it even further, one cannot help but associate the uniform of the Hitler-Jugend with that fine bastion of social discipline, the Boy Scouts; by juxtaposing Hitler with the scoutlike HJ, one might reasonably assume that the photographer hoped to play on some of the positive associations with that quintessentially American institution (which was, of course, British, and had been banned with the rise to power of the Nazis). As for the second image, its religious connotations are so evident as almost not to bear mentioning: “Hitler, like you, goes to church! So Fascism isn’t ‘godless’ after all!”

Are any of those connotations ‘true’? Of course not. But can we with any confidence assert them to be ‘false’? This is a particularly troubling philosophical issue which is brought to the fore by the perfect realism of photography. How can a connotation be false? Indeed, on what grounds can we decry any image as ‘false.’ The truth-claim implicit to the graven image proclaims simply (to paraphrase Debord), ‘what is, is there, and what is there, is.’ With painting, this assertion can often be disproven. As Berger proposed, a painting of a horse does not have to be ‘particular horse;’ if we can show that there was never such a horse as was painted, then perhaps that makes the painting ‘false.’ But this potential falsity is so wrapped up in the nature of manual reproduction itself, that it seems almost superfluous to proclaim a painting as untrue. With photography, unless an image is retouched, the photograph’s actual content is necessarily a selective capturing of reality. And yet the process of selection involves any number of rhetorical processes that create a connotational weight. This connotational meaning is neither true nor false; indeed, it has no commerce whatsoever with truth or falsehood. One cannot agree or disagree with an effect of imagery or a photographic connotation, because there is no actual claim being made. When it comes to the connotations of a photograph, one can simply accept them, deny them, or (more likely) have them go altogether unnoticed. This is the treachery of the photographic image: the absolute veracity of its denotative content obscures the pure fiction of its connotative meaning.

Even when an image is retouched, we cannot always specifically place its falsehood. The image on the left circulated through a number of newspapers in the early 1930s, and was widely proclaimed to be a photograph of the infant Adolf Hitler. The hoax persisted despite the protestations of the German embassy in the United States, until, as is often the case, the owner of the original photograph (the one on the right) recognized the similarities between the two images. By darkening the shadows on the baby’s face and removing the bonnet, the retoucher was able to give just the right look of menace to the infant on the left; one assumes, of course, that Hitler was menacing even as an infant. The presentation of the image, we can say with certainty, was false. The ‘Hitler Baby’ was not the infant dictator, and thus the captions that ran with the image were incorrect. But is there anything truly ‘false’ about the image, even in the strictest denotative sense? Certainly, the shadows have been darkened somewhat, and the child’s bonnet cropped out. Yet the child itself ‘was there,’ and thus the documentary evidence of the photo is in some sense correct. Even the connotational weight of the image (the darkened shadows) has no real effect by itself. Indeed, captions were the only real reason that readers of the era had to think that the image on the left was Hitler, further underlining the contingent nature of photographic ‘truth.’

If one is still looking for reasons to question whether painting and photography are truly such different media, one has only to consider the above image in comparison with the next.

In the painting, we see an idealized Hitler, carrying the standard of the swastika, framed by the Sun and a Roman eagle, and surrounded by SA delivering the fascist salute. In this photograph, immediately following his Sept. 1, 1939 declaration of war in the Reichstag, we see a realized depiction of an almost identical indoor scene, Hitler standing at the speaker’s desk, below the Nazi standard, being saluted by the entire Reichstag. Both images have extremely similar denotative and connotative meanings, and yet we are likely more apt to disregard the first as propaganda, and the second as an accurate depiction of the scene. Why? To be sure, the denotative meaning of the photograph is likely more accurate. Certainly, all of those men of the Reichstag did deliver their fascist salute following Adolf’s stirring address, whereas the scene of the painting likely never happened.

When we examine the connotations of the two images, however, it becomes clear that the two are equally propagandistic, and perhaps equally distant from ‘the real.’ Both images bear all the hallmark connotations of fascist propaganda. They emphasize the unity and strength of a homogeneous community, the ’symbolic restatement’ (Sontag 9) of ancient images to establish historical continuity (with Rome, the Aryans), and they seek to convey the illusion of a populace marching in lock-step with the dictates of a powerful leader. This sort of propaganda is perhaps most problematic, because neither side has any reason to discredit it. The Nazis benefited from seeming like an all-powerful, absolutely unified society, while their enemies deployed this sort of propagandistic imagery as a tool to build military support. While it served the Allies no real purpose to reproduce the humanized propaganda images of Hitler with boy scouts or at church, it most definitely served their purposes to depict the uncanny order and frightening devotion of Nazi rallies. Will we ever know exactly how far the society of the Third Reich corresponded to the monolithic totalitarian society depicted by fascist art? It seems to me doubtful. The excesses and illusions of Nazi imagery will always corrupt any real understanding of the true nature of Nazism. As when we adopt the Nazis’ own term, ‘Third Reich,’ when we think of these propaganda photos as documentary evidence, we are in effect taking the fascists at their word — or at their image.

As the first true innovators of photographic propaganda, the Nazis were perhaps the first to really recognize the connotative potential of imagery. By selectively manipulating the framing, composition, and context of photographs, Goebbels and other propagandists were able to manipulate the connotative power of the photograph in order to create a false impression without ever lying. Sontag proposes, in a statement which sounds somewhat archaic today, that ‘the contribution of photography always follows the naming of the event’ (19). Perhaps this is still the case to a certain degree, but it seems rather that in our ‘image-choked’ (Sontag 15) culture, the distinction between the photographic image and its context is being collapsed. Sontag herself recognizes this when she states that ‘an event has come to mean, precisely, something worth photographing’ (19). The photographic image is always an interpretation rather than a transcription of the captured reality. This is a simple truism. However, as our culture moves increasingly away from things and towards imagery, the captured reality is supplanted by the image of reality. Criticisms of photographs as inaccurate depictions of reality miss the point that our contemporary Western reality is a photographic one.

And as the progression continues, even the most despicable of images can be resurrected as pure symbolism, as imagery without referent, as in the case of this unfortunately (but, it must be said, purposefully) named Mumbai restaurant….

“from small bites to mega Joys!”

Indeed.

 

“The reality shows are only side-effects, and moreover mystifying, because in indicting them as manipulation, the critics assume that there is somewhere an original form of life … This criticism is over, as is every Situationist criticism of the ’spectacle’ and the concept of ’spectacle,’ as also in substance all criticism of ‘alienation.’ Unfortunately, I would add. Because the human abstraction of the spectacle was never hopeless; it always offered the chance of disalienation. Whereas the operation of the world in real time, its unconditional realisation, is really without alternative. Radicality has changed, and all negative criticism, surviving itself, actually helps its object to survive.” – Baudrillard, “Aesthetic Illusion and Virtual Reality”

1. Of the spectacular society, and why it demands our disobedience. 

Debord and the Situationists have revealed for us the spectacular society’s true character. The years have not dated their description of the spectacular society, but rather, society has grown into its description with the continued refinement of capitalism and its accessories. In the 21st century, far more than in the twentieth, ‘everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.’ No longer is there a ‘real’ life against which we can determine the nature of the ’spectacle.’ Representationalism is a basic human conceit, and yet the society of the spectacle exaggerates the primacy of representation to the point that it becomes absurd, it supplants the real. The map of mass culture no longer refers to, nor covers the territory, but rather it is the territory which lies in rotting tatters scattered across the map. All that once existed as free and fluid human creativity is undergoing a condensatory congealing into its inferior commodity forms. Commodity fetishism — the domination of human relations by the relations between things — ‘reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence.’

The society of the spectacle demands our disobedience because it assumes our obedience as given. The spectacle in-itself ’says nothing more than ‘that which appears is good, that which is good appears.” In a society beholden to the spectacle, to be other than a spectator is to be deviant, to subject oneself to reproach, punishment, retribution. Why should we take issue with a society that makes us all into spectators? Because when the only ability is to spectate, the act of creation fades off into the mists of the memory. To be human is to create; thus to spectate is to be inhuman. The attitude demanded by the spectacle ‘in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.’ To rage against the spectacle is to be human, to affirm one’s humanity in the face of its constant televised refutation.

2. Of situationism and the worker: preposterous pandering to a past proletariat.

Even as the Situationists recognized the cultivation of proletarian idiocy on the part of the spectacular, they remained blinded by dogma. The spectacular breeds passivity, and the countless screens of spectacular capital are at the ready to drown out the pitiful yelps of theoretical solipsism. Why, then, are these students and intellectuals so caught up in the ‘emancipation of the proletariat?’ The spectacle has already ensured that the proletariat have no interest in their own emancipation, nor at they aware that they need to be emancipated (or that they are proletarian). Debord and his contemporaries called for revolution — a fine and noble goal, to be sure. But every revolution is but a rotation. How could the Situationists deluded themselves into hoping for revolutionary change, when such change could only but be built on the mass mobilization of the spectacle’s dupes? Indeed, how could such a mobilization ever take place but by the deployment of the spectacular? The backwardness and self-contradictory nature of the Situationists’ Marxism is clear: the worker is the slave of the spectacle, therefore to mobilize the workers one must speak the language of the spectacular, and yet the spectacle is inherently an incitement to passivity.

A postmodern situationism takes the Society of the Spectacle as its point of departure, and necessarily (but reluctantly) leaves the proletariat behind. We have no interest in inciting revolution, nor in pandering to a proletariat that has long ago been induced to no longer identify itself as such. 21st-century workers have all but lost interest in the patently conventional ‘workers’ union,’ much less in violent struggle against some supposed capitalist oppressors who provide them with all they (believe themselves to) need. This is not to say that we have forgotten the worker, but merely that we have accustomed ourselves to the worker’s having forgotten us. Nor do we lay the blame upon the shoulders of the worker! Being continuously admonished in the workplace, the last thing we might expect the worker to respond to would be further admonishments to revolution in the leisure-place. Such incitement might seems noble to the naïf bourgeois, but to the ‘real’ worker (such that this hypothetical construct even can be said to exist) the revolutionary is merely a new boss, and one who pays poorly at that. A postmodern situationism must forget its ‘negative criticism’ and seek its own positive jouissance before it can hope for acceptance.

3. Of the revolution, and its infinite postponement.

The revolution is at once impossible, inevitable, and irrelevant. It is impossible in that we will never be able to incite its occurrence; it will begin when it begins, and it will end when it ends, and that will be that. It is inevitable because we can be sure that it will begin, even if we might not be sure of when or what form it might take. And it is irrelevant, in that a full revolution always returns from whence it came: ‘the vision comes to life in the moment of uprising – but as soon as ‘the Revolution’ triumphs and the State returns, the dream and the ideal are already betrayed.’ Revolution, when it does come, will as likely as not speak the language of the spectacle, and it will replace one set of spectacles with another. Of this we cannot be a priori certain, but only ex posteriori vindicated. It is not our concern to incite yet another rebellion which will more deeply enshrine the dominance of the spectacular, but to reshape our relation to the spectacular so that if and when the revolt does arise, it will be a productive one. As Vaneigem tells us, ‘Hierarchical power, which has been with us for millennia, furnishes a perfectly adequate explanation for the permanence of rebellion, as it does of the repression that smashes rebellion.’ In order to reshape this repressive interaction, we must remake our idea of revolution.

Our postmodern situationism abandons not the ‘hope-for’ a social revolution, but the ‘attempt-at.’ We seek no abstract revolution, but rather to enshrine rebellion as an essential social value. Why have we abandoned revolutionary ideology? The western Marxist has been repeatedly confronted with the paradoxes of proletarian revolution. Where its seeds have taken root, true revolution has necessarily been thwarted by those states and traitorous ‘leftist’ organizations still deeply invested in capitalist oppression. And where ‘socialism‘ has truly flourished, we have seen the development, not a workers’ free states, but quasi-fascist oligarchies, socialist in name alone. Since roughly Gorky, even the most dogmatic of intellectual Marxists have affirmed by their patterns of residency that they would much prefer the bourgeois legality of a comfortable democratic-capitalist state to a repression which masquerades as proletarian. And yet many of these same intellectuals go on proclaiming the ideals of revolution, as though this proclaiming in-itself was somehow sufficient to bring about a true Marxist revolution. Only a fool blinded by spectacular society could hope to enshrine Marxism through the force of idealism, of all things! Today, the revolutionary is even less likely to succeed: watched, heard, and scrutinized by an assemblage of hidden cameras and microphones, the overt revolutionary has only the repressive state apparatus itself as audience.

4. Absurd responses to an absurd society: Dérive, détournement, déconstruction.

Vaneigem tells us also that ‘anything that does not kill power reinforces it, but anything which power does not itself kill weakens power.’ All of this development leads to a central concern: what is the radical alternative to revolution?  The spectacular society is necessarily an absurd one; it accepts no logic not of its own. We live in ‘a topsy turvy world where people do the opposite of what they wish, pass the time away in self-destruction and venerate that which destroys them, obedient to abstractions and sacrificing their real lives to those abstractions.’ Marxism in a spectacular society is no different. Revolutionaries agitate when they would rather be playing, sleeping, making love. They venerate their ridiculous idols in the fetishized author-personae of Marx, Trotsky and Mao. They are obedient to the abstraction of Marxist dogma, and their lives are certainly sacrificed to that abstraction. Leaving dogma behind, we have constructed against this pattern our irrevolutionary response to a society that refuses to recognize the possibility of revolution.

We refuse to enslave ourselves to unfree labour of any sort which does not beget immediate, tangible, and comprehensible benefits to ourselves; where we are compelled to labour within the theft-structure of capitalism, we will replace our surplus labour with our own play. We will appropriate the technologies of capital to suit our own ends: in an originary coup, this manifesto was covertly written in a workplace for pay. (The ideal act of disobedience is performed on company time!) In short, we accept capitalism as fundamentally enshrined in the Western ego, and yet we refuse to obey the structures which capital provides for our work and for our leisure.

Through situationist détournement, we reappropriate the undifferentiated mass of cultural commodities to suit our own ends. We wish to express ourselves with pastiche, reinterpretation, parody, and satire; nevertheless, this postmodern collage, ‘far from aiming to arouse indignation or laughter by alluding to some original work, will express our indifference toward a meaningless and forgotten original.’ Indeed, we wish to recognize the fact that the spectacle has become the simulacrum: the question of ’the original’ has become irrelevant. Nor do we consider détournement as a hermeneutically-sealed, artistic project. Indeed, we refuse to recognize these bourgeois distinctions between art and labour, between labour and leisure; our labours are both art and leisure. Nothing could be more anathema to our art than a gallery! This institution of the oppressor cannot be tolerated: our gallery is the street and the sidewalk, our canvas, the high-rise and the highway! If art does not provoke a repressive response from the institutions of capital, then it is little more than a dessicated husk, a throwback to a previous order of simulacra.

The dérive is an implicit refusal to accept the categories of spatiality imposed by capital. Our geography is to be a dipole interaction between our psyches and our lived environment; we refuse to allow this intimate psychogeographical awareness to be mediated by consumerism, or by the structures of industrialism and commercialism. We will treat the shopping mall as a park, the industrial plaza as a shopping mall, and the park as a canvas. Through psychogeography, we will uncover and transgress those hidden, soft boundaries of urban existence and break free of the tyranny of a corporate-administered habitus: “We must replace travel as an adjunct to work with travel as a pleasure.” Instead of travelling in the traces of capital, we wish to forge through its ‘extended and indistinct bordering regions’ and recover the geography that is rightfully public.

In both of these (and other) relations to capitalism, there is an implicit deconstruction of its dictates. We strive to carry this deconstructive spirit with us always; this is the essence of the irrevolutionary struggle! Culture is a socially-made and individually-performed decision. Capitalism persists by the individual free choices of an mass citizenry unfree in its ideology; in the face of this, we wish always to reaffirm the freeness of our choices. This is the paradoxical revolution at the core of our irrevolutionary manifesto. By never accepting the dictates of a capitalist culture as given, and by questioning always the hidden assumptions of an oppressive economic régime, we hope to institute a new paradigm in the citizen’s relation to capital. As deconstruction speaks from within the text to uncover its inherent contradictions and excluded conclusions, we speak from within a spectacular society to unearth its contradictions: its basic unreality and its hegemonic function.

5. The revolution of everyday play.

There is, deftly concealed in our ‘irrevolutionary’ manifesto, a revolution (or perhaps we had better say, a ‘rebellion’ or ‘revolt’). Baudrillard and others have demonstrated the incoherence of supposing to criticise the society of the spectacle from some privileged position outside its symbolic order. The futility of negative criticism against the spectacle, however, requires us to make some positive contribution to our lived experience of the spectacle. Our sanity demands it! We cannot incite revolution against the spectacular, but must first radically reshape our relation to the spectacle. By adopting our deconstructive stance toward the spectacle, one takes the first step in performing the long-awaited revolution.

Marxist theory after Marx has often reified capitalism to an unfortunate extent. Capitalism is portrayed by Marxists and capitalists alike as monolithic, powerful, and external to society (for it is in the interests of both to do so). “Capitalism” has dictates, and “society” has to accept them! This is a portrayal that suits the purposes of those who would maintain or undermine capitalism, but which has precious little correspondence to our lived reality. Indeed, it is this very myth which allows capitalism to persist. By avoiding it, we hope to avoid complicity in the continued dominance of a regressive economic system. The truth is: capitalism is chosen by you! Like any social structure, it exists, develops, changes, and (or!) persists on the basis of choices made by the individuals who find themselves in that structure. If we persist in obeying the dictates of the structure, then we are in effect ensuring its continued dominance. But what if we don’t? This is the proof that capitalism is up to us.

What if, like me, you go to work and write a manifesto for six hours? What if, far from contributing to the surplus labour pool of your employer, you fail to perform even that labour which is ostensibly ‘necessary’? Does that not undermine the basic principle of capitalism from within? And what if your overseers have no way of knowing that this fundamental tenet of oppression is being quietly phased-out? What if you sell a product to a customer for its use-value, or steal something and give it away? What if you cease to regard the dictates of capitalism as natural, or given, but you begin to question their basic premises and find them to be nonexistent?

Apart from the obvious — that you are reaffirming your fundamental human freedom and revelling in an oppressive regime’s deserved disobedience – you are also starting the rebellion. The radical nature of our irrevolutionary manifesto is thus: capitalism has colonized your life-space, stolen your labour and humanity, and removed any possibility of meaningful change within its structures . . . so you are to take it for all it’s got! Study its repressive mechanisms, its disciplinary apparatus, its cameras and its gatekeepers, and take advantage them all! Concern yourself with its asymmetries and its blind spots! Play with capitalism, and teach others to share in your playfulness. This is how the revolution will take place — not through the obscure jottings of a flaccid intelligentsia, but through the decisive example of those who refuse to accept repression as a given!    

6. Indebtedness.

Although a neo-situationist manifesto needs no repressive citation-apparatus to justify its intellectual pastiche, we recognize in this manifesto a debt to Guy-Ernest Debord, of course, as well as Raoul Vaneigem, Jean Baudrillard, Hakim Bey, and the students of U.N.E.F. Strasbourg, 1968, amongst many others. This manifesto was produced while its author was being compensated by one Sykes Canada Corporation for services-not-rendered. The radical tendencies outlined in this manifesto are not our invention, nor even particularly original. Rather they constitute an uncanny manifestation of an attitude toward the spectacle that is already long familiar to anyone who lives and works as a subject of the spectacular. Consider it a positive formulation of ironic detachment and postmodern sarcasm.

7. Onward!

You’re not still reading, are you?

This is a text to be performed, not contemplated.

“…we might now contemplate aesthetic actions which possess some of the resonance of terrorism (or “cruelty,” as Artaud put it) aimed at the destruction of abstractions rather than people, at liberation rather than power, pleasure rather than profit, joy rather than fear. ‘Poetic Terrorism.’ Our chosen images have the potency of darkness–but all images are masks, and behind these masks lie energies we can turn toward light and pleasure.” - Hakim Bey 

“CCTV catches criminals. It spots crimes, identifies lawbreakers and helps convict the guilty. The spread of this technology means that more town centres, shopping precincts, business centres and car parks around the country will become no-go areas for the criminal…. CCTV is a wonderful technological supplement to the police… One police officer in Liverpool likened the 20-camera system as having 20 officers on duty 20 hours a day, constantly taking notes.” (Clive Norris, 255)

What does it mean to say that CCTV is a supplement to the police? Language has the poor befuddled constabulary trapped. To supplement is always to supplant! In the most basic sense, if CCTV catches criminals, what role is left to the flesh-and-blood police officer? The once-romanticized detective becomes a mere felon-collector, a servant of an all-seeing eye rather than an autonomous investigator. The police regard the surveillant assemblage as a useful, but ultimately inessential tool added on to their already-complete investigative apparatus. The supplement always corresponds to a lack, however; the disciplinary institution that is the contemporary police department would be noticeably ‘incomplete’ without its ’supplement.’ 20 surveillance cameras are in fact quite different from 20 police officers ‘taking notes.’

Consider, for example, the archival information produced by these two different recorders. 20 surveillance cameras will produce a digitized, photorealistic, reproducible document for as long as they are left to record. Their catalogue of events will be regarded as objectively ‘reliable’ by all but the most paranoid and/or subjectivist among us. The data they produce can be stored, manipulated, cross-indexed, edited, and patched back together.

20 police officers watching the same scenes, by contrast, will produce conflicting accounts, perhaps tinged with bias, of a decidedly mixed quality, depending on their individual levels of hunger, fatigue, cynicism, and/or corruption. They will be likely to have missed some important things and noticed some insignificant ones. Even in the unlikely event they were to witness a crime take place, their accounts of the perpetrators’ appearances will often be unreliable, particularly if said perpetrators happen to be of a different race from said hypothetical police officer.

Of course, a human police officer is not all ‘bad;’ a camera, after all, can only deter crime to a certain extent, and can be fooled by the criminal in-the-know by any number of tricks-of-the-trade. A police officer in the flesh presents a much more imposing deterrent, and can often defuse conflicts before they begin – as Norris notes, the ‘restitution of order’ is a police officer’s main task in such situations, and this is almost invariably accomplished via face-to-face interaction (252).

But this increasing reliance by the police on CCTV implies some significant structural transformations in the role of the police officer. In a society policed by surveillance of this sort, the individual investigator’s role becomes increasingly involved with the manipulation of digital archive information. This is the ‘lifting out’ referred to by McCahill (in Norris, 253). By correlating the various tracks which individual subjects leave behind in digital space – credit card charges, web browsing patterns, purchased items, and of course, CCTV images – the police can reconstruct the suspect’s digital body from the distributed archive of the surveillant assemblage. Physical evidence is of course not ‘irrelevant,’ but many crimes in an electronic society are of such a nature that they traces they leave are exclusively digital.

Of course, the police are by no means uncritical celebrants of surveillance technology. This is perhaps similar to the paradox noted by Steve Mann (345) in his sousveillance experiments, when he noted that the institutions most likely to object to his filming on their premises were those with the most surveillance cameras of their own. The watchers, in effect, do not take kindly to being watched. Rodney King is really only the most immediately obvious example of this kind of sousveillance being targeted against the police. Police objections to the installations of cameras in their vehicles also illustrate the flexibility of their opinions regarding surveillance. Though I can’t find a citation at the moment, I recall the police officers’ associations in Canada made a reasonably-sized fuss about the issue of installing cameras in police cars to record police compliance with department protocols. Surveillance is acceptable when its gaze is directed on the Other, but unconscionable when one is subjected to it oneself.

Do I have a point with all of this? Does deconstruction ever have a point? Not in so few words. Essentially, I just wanted to think a little about the video camera and how its archive is a ’supplement’ to the police. These kinds of simple user/technology dichotomies characterize a lot of common thinking about surveillance technologies, often leading us to ignore how such technologies necessarily shape user behaviour in definite ways. The police don’t just ‘use’ CCTV, rather, the police – and disciplinary institutions in general – are in the process of being themselves transformed by CCTV’s ubiquity.

Works cited

Steve Mann, “Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments”

Clive Norris, “From personal to digital: CCTV, the Panopticon, and the technological mediation of suspicion and social control”