tbyfield on Sun, 11 Nov 2018 23:52:05 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> Nein, danke [was Re: Inhabit: Instructions for Autonomy]

I'd be happy to be wrong about that site, and if I am I'll acknowledge it as plainly as I answered Angela's question about fascist recruiting.
If a cartoon neo-nazi posted a message to this list saying "I'm a fascist and I'm recruiting!" there wouldn't be much need for debate. But someone actually did post a manifesto C&Ped from a site put together by people who find Nazi aesthetics somehow 'resonant' or 'inspiring,' and a bunch of nettimers want to have scholastic debates. 

Ian Alan Paul wrote:
Unfortunately I don't have the time to fully respond to every claim of this 
larger analysis/investigation except to simply say that I think the
projection of a white male subject onto a collectively written text (which has happened twice now) is a tired critique of militancy that isn't helpful 
in the sense that it actively erases the explicitly feminist movements
which have adopted and practiced similar kinds of political thought. Of course it's fine to be critical of militant politics, and indeed we must be having these kinds of debates more often, but to do so on the grounds that there is something irrevocably masculine about militancy is to simply echo 
right wing talking points about gender.
Ian, if you want to argue that I projected white male subjectivity onto a picture of two white guys crouching in the dirt with binoculars and a rifle, go for it. If anything, that criticism is a better description of your own assumption that a white male sniper is somehow benign. Why don't you show that picture to people in an African-American church in Charleston or a yoga studio in Tallahassee and see what they think? Or you could just ask me. When I'm in Tallahassee, which is fairly often, I pass that yoga studio ferrying my daughter to and from school. Was I affected by the shooting? No, not directly. But her school conducts active-shooter drills, and just weeks ago went into real lockdown. So, yes, it affects her — and that affects me. Your theoretical posturing has nothing to say to or about any of this.
Whatever the authors' intent may be, their decision to include that photo is a sign of their profound blindness to one of the most visible and terrifying developments in the US: the asymptotic growth of mass murder by white guys with guns. But it's not just that one photo. The site doesn't show white men as many see them — as tyrannical bosses, abusive partners, racist cops, exploitive gringos, or monstrous colonists. There's are reasons for that, of course, and one of them is good: the site presents what its authors see as a positive vision. It 'includes' others, but mainly as tokens, props, foils, objects, veils, and references. What it doesn't include — in other words, what it *excludes* — is any frank depiction of the horrors of white violence. 

But more than that, as even Brian acknowledges,
The really weird thing here is the typeface, for sure. I think that in the 
age of atrophied thought and controlled imaginations there is an
unconscious sexualized attraction to the passions of war, symbolized by the 
aesthetics of the 1930s. In this sense I agree with the gist of Ted's
analysis: the intention is that of normalizing a largely fantasmatic
violence, without realizing how enabling the practice of that fantasy can 
be for the hard right.
Let's add 2 + 2, shall we? We have a site largely organized around white subjectivity and visuality that plays footsie with fascist aesthetics. But that's supposed to be OK because the authors' attraction to "the passions of war" — what a turn of phrase — is unconscious, sexualized, or somehow symbolic. Anyone who buys that might want to brush up on their Klaus Theweleit.
But, again, it's not just the typography and graphic design. Of the sites 20 or so photos, *half* imply some kind of violence: guns, training camps, burning cars and debris, etc. The object of that violence isn't specified: we don't know who the punching bag stands for, what mission the two motorcyclists are on, what conflicts are obscured by the smoke and fire. (Well, actually, we do because I went to the trouble of tracking down the photos. But less committed people looking at the site — i.e., everyone else of the face of the earth — wouldn't know that.) If the victims of this imagined violence were black, latin, or muslim, this site would be a warm-fuzzy version of the Turner Diaries, which surely isn't what the authors believe or intend. So let's assume that the victims would all magically be white. What we have then is basically a white vision of a white world erupting in white violence, from which 'others' are excluded because the authors can't be frank about who'd be doing all that fighting — and *we* don't need to be frank about it because it's all just unconscious and symbolic. 

Jamie King wrote:
I will say this though -- a bunch of the dodgy fashers I follow on Twitter (maybe 6-7 accounts) follow them. But calling for violence and and all that doesn't make anyone fash. Nor does fooling with fascist aesthetics. What 
about Tiqqun and all of that?
This is the Bryan Ferry defense: "My comments on Nazi iconography were solely made from an art history perspective." 

Brian also wrote:


Its production values are within reach of anyone who can afford a
laptop, an Amazon bucket and a domain name. Its imagery is of a piece with 
the rest; and by looking around on the web you can see that it was
originally published as an orange-tinted book, so maybe the pseudo-print 
aesthetic has a simple explanation.
The idea that it's a psychologist's honey-pot crafted to catch the naive is 
far-fetched. This is anarchy. The positions codified by Tiqqun and
popularized by the Invisible Committee have become widespread through the experiences of Exarchia, the ZAD, Standing Rock and many others, with the Palestinian resistance and the Kurdish war of independence blazing in the background. The elemental question to be asked is, do I make common cause with these authors? A corollary line of questioning would be: Is civil war inevitable in the capitalist democracies? Could it have positive effects?
Brian, you're right that generic high production values are within reach of many now. But the question isn't 'does it look professional?', it's what *kind* of 'professional' does it look like? What specific cultural references does it make, and what do they say about the authors?
If you encountered someone spouting lines from Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee dressed in a razor-sharp black suit and sporting a red-and-white armband, you'd raise an eyebrow. And if that person said "no, silly, my suit and armband are just a style that's OK because, hey, *this is anarchy*," you'd raise the other one.
<...> The serious threat of civil war comes from the extreme right, they have both the numbers and the guns. Throw gasoline on that fire and it will 
explode in your face.
Here are some other things the extreme right has: serious network savvy, a penchant for infiltrating and subverting, coordinated efforts to muddy the distinction between left and right, and ties to established rightists who've spent decades misleading popular discontent to further their agenda. These things pose a much greater threat than gasoline metaphors. 

Cheers,
Ted

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