Expect Anything, Fear Nothing

Coming up on Saturday 22 September,  8:00pm - 10:00pm,  at the Mayday Rooms, St Brides Yard, outside 88 Fleet Street, London:

'An evening including interventions from Stewart Home, Peter Laugesen, Fabian Tompsett, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen to mark the UK launch of the anthology Expect Anything Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere edited by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen.

This volume is the first comprehensive English-language presentation of the Scandinavian Situationists and their role in the Situationist movement. The Situationist movement was an international movement of artists, writers and thinkers that in the 1950s and 1960s that strived to revolutionize the world through rejecting bourgeois art and the post-World War Two capitalist consumer society.

The book contains articles, conversations and statements by former members of the Situationists’ organisations as well as contemporary artists, activists, scholars and writers. While previous publications about the Situationist movement almost exclusively have focused on the contribution of the French section and in particular on the role of the Guy Debord this book aims to shed light on the activities of the Situationists active in places like Denmark, Sweden and Holland. The themes and stories chronicled include: The anarchist undertakings of the Drakabygget movement led by the rebel artists Jørgen Nash, Hardy Strid and Jens Jørgen Thorsen, the exhibition by the Situationist International “Destruction of RSG-6” in 1963 in Odense organised by the painter J.V. Martin in collaboration with Guy Debord, the journal The Situationist Times edited by Jacqueline de Jong, Asger Jorn's political critique of natural science and the films of the Drakabygget movement.

Contributors: Peter Laugesen, Carl Nørrested, Fabian Tompsett, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Jacqueline de Jong, Gordon Fazakerley, Hardy Strid, Karen Kurczynski, Stewart Home, Jakob Jakobsen'

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Revolution as resonance

Following on from Negri and Hardt's recent reference to 'low frequency' communication between struggles, here's another example of bass as radical metaphor:

'Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance. Something that is constituted here resonates with the shock wave emitted by something constituted over there. A body that resonates does so according to its own mode. A insurrection is not like a plague or a forest fire – a linear process which spreads from place to place after an initial spark. It rather takes the shape of a music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythm of their ownvibrations, always taking on more density' (The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 2007)

Low Frequency Struggles

'Early in 2011, in the depths of social and economic crises characterized by radical inequality, common sense seemed to dictate that we trust the decisions and guidance of the ruling powers, lest even greater disasters befall us. The financial and governmental rulers may be tyrants, and they may have been primarily responsible for creating the crises, but we had no choice. During the course of 2011, however, a series of social struggles shattered that common sense and began to construct a new one. Occupy Wall Street was the most visible but was only one moment in a cycle of struggles that shifted the terrain of political debate and opened new possibilities for political action over the course of the year...

Each of these struggles is singular and oriented toward specific local conditions. The first thing to notice, though, is that they did, in fact, speak to one another. The Egyptians, of course, clearly moved down paths traveled by the Tunisians and adopted their slogans, but the occupiers of Puerta del Sol also thought of their struggle as carrying on the experiences of those at Tahrir. In turn, the eyes of those in Athens and Tel Aviv were focused on the experiences of Madrid and Cairo. The Wall Street occupiers had them all in view, translating, for instance, the struggle against the tyrant into a struggle against the tyranny of finance. You may think that they were just deluded and forgot or ignored the differences in their situations and demands. We believe, however, that they have a clearer vision than those outside the struggle, and they can hold together without contradiction their singular conditions and local battles with the common global struggle.

Ralph Ellison’s invisible man, after an arduous journey through a racist society,developed the ability to communicate with others in struggle. “Who knows,” Ellison’s narrator concludes, “but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” Today, too, those in struggle communicate on the lower frequencies, but, unlike in Ellison’s time, no one speaks for them. The lower frequencies are open airwaves for all. And some messages can be heard only by those in struggle'.

Source: Declaration by Antonioi Negri and Michael Hardt, 2012

(see also Revolution as Resonance)

On Copyright and Capital

Well I was going to join today's 'internet strike' and close down the site for the day in solidarity with the movement against SOPA  - the proposed US Stop Online Piracy Act with its repressive measures against file sharing. Maybe I would even leave a cool message like this one from Libcom:

But I couldn't work out how to do it on Blogger, so instead I'm just going to write a little about it. One of the features of the 'enterntainment industry' campaign to reinforce copyright on the internet and elsewhere is the obligatory wheeling out of musicians to argue that they need punitive laws like SOPA to protect their livelihood. It may be true that in some cases the enforcement of copyright means that musicians earn more money, and like everybody else they have to make a living. But copyright laws aren't there to protect musicians/artists/cultural workers, they are there to protect the interest of property owners - record companies rather than musicians. The copyright laws also work against musicians, as many discover when they realize that their contracts mean that 'their' work actually belongs to the company.

I was reminded of this when I came across this story today from Zimbabwe:

'Gospel musician Kudzi Nyakudya was last Friday arrested after he was found selling 200 pirated CDs of his own music. The diminutive Kuwadzana-based gospel artiste spent the weekend in police cells and was only released yesterday after his recording company, Diamond Recording Studios, withdrew the charges. Selling pirated CDs is illegal as it contravenes the Copyright Act, which makes it a criminal offence to duplicate or photocopy CDs, books and any form of intellectual property without permission. In an interview yesterday, Kudzi confirmed the arrest, but said his actions were largely influenced by the recording company’s weak distribution strategies... “Look, I have been getting a raw deal from the company (Diamond Studios), and I just could not starve, so I ended up duplicating my own CDs for resale,” he said' (Nehanda Radio, 17 January 2012).

For the musician, what starts out as free activity can be turned into labour for the record companies in which the musician becomes a 'cultural proletarian' whose 'product is from the first subordinated to capital and intended only to utilize capital' - or to give the full Marx quote:

'The same sort of work can be ‘productive’ or ‘unproductive’. Milton for instance, ‘who did the Paradise Lost for £5’, was an ‘unproductive’ worker. The writer, however, who turns out factory hack-work for his book-seller, is a ‘productive worker’. Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason as that which makes the silk-worm produce silk. It was an activity wholly natural to him. He later sold the product for £5. But the cultural proletarian in Leipzig who churns out books (such as compendia of economics, for instance) under the direction of his book-dealer, is a ‘productive worker’; for his product is from the first subordinated to capital and intended only to utilize capital.  A singer who sells her singing on her own initiative is an ‘unproductive worker’.  But if the same singer is engaged by an entrepreneur who lets her sing in order to make money for him, then she is a ‘productive worker’: for then  she produces capital’ (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. 1).

(quote via John Hutnyk, whose lectures on Capital I am currently attending; for a few more Marx and Engels quotes on music see this article by Mark Lindley - there aren't that many)

[Incidentally it is interesting that Marx describes labour for capital as 'productive' as opposed to 'unproductive' free activity - since it is common today to fetishise 'productive' as good as as opposed to the negative 'unproductive']

The Art of Parties

This article 'Retort Goes to a Party' by Holley Cantine was originally published in the Autumn 1951 issue of Retort, a journal of anarchism, poetry, literature and essays edited by Cantine, with contributors including Paul Mattick, Kenneth Rexroth and Paul Goodman. It was reprinted in the Portland-based journal Communicating Vessels (Fall/Winter 2008-9). There are more Retort articles here - it was published in New York in the 1940s and 50s.

A 1950s report of a 1920s retro party might seem obscure even for this site, but there are some interesting reflections on the art of parties.

'On last March 24th, in Greenwich Village, a party, was thrown for the ostensible purpose of commemorating the 1920s. The editors of Retort, being at the time on one of their occasional visits to New York, attended. It was a fairly large party — upward of 100 people, most of them costumed in the styles of the period — either authentic or reasonably faithful representations. There was a competent Dixieland jazz band and an adequate amount of drink, the price of admission being a bottle. The party was held in a commodious sculptor's studio on the top floor of a loft building in a non-residential section of the Village, so there was both plenty of room and sufficient isolation to permit complete freedom from the usual urban inhibitions about noise.

Yet, in spite of all these manifest advantages, the party, as a party, and especially as an attempt to recapture the spirit of the '20s, didn't really come off. There was a good deal of boisterousness, some fairly wild dancing, and a determined effort on the part of the sponsors to keep things moving, but the atmosphere was not at all that of the period that was supposed to be commemorated, and the level of intensity that a really good party attains was never observable. The present writer, who has a very warm feeling for the '20s, perhaps because he was just a little too young to take part in the revels of that era, but old enough to have witnessed some of them, stayed on to the bitter end, hoping that  something might turn up, but unfortunately the evening just wilted away, and when at 3 or 4 in the morning the last remaining revelers began looking for their coats, it was as if nothing had happened.

To the connoisseur of parties — and in the '20s, the party was an art form with many zealous devotees, not a few of whom gave their lives as a result of their single-minded dedication to art — a party is not really successful unless something happens other than the usual banalities of passings out, corner seductions, et al. Exactly what is supposed to happen is impossible to foresee (this is the chief charm of the party as an art form). At some point in the evening, usually well after midnight, when the more inhibited guests have gone home and the rest are sufficiently liquored up to be ready for anything, a sort of spirit of the party begins to take over, fusing the participants into a spontaneous organic whole which is capable of very curious and memorable acts.

At the party in question, the focal point of the evening was the so-called Charleston Contest, and had the party been sufficiently alive, this could have been the spark that started things moving. As it turned out it was merely an exhibition of rather extreme dancing (none of it the Charleston) with most of the people reduced to spectators while a dwindling number of couples competed. I can recall parties in the '20s when an event of this nature suddenly evolved into a mock revival meeting or voodoo ceremony, with everyone taking part, or at least experiencing the excitement — a sort of pseudo-religious ecstasy that could be quite breathtaking.

Of course, such a performance is only possible in an entirely spontaneous andabandoned atmosphere, and the heavy aura of self-consciousness that hung over this party was a serious detriment to even bogus spirituality. Perhaps we who have endured the terrible '40s are unable to recapture the fine, free and essentially naive gusto for wickedness that characterized the lighter side of the '20s. The '20s, despite the fond belief of its Flaming Youth, was — at least in perspective — a very innocent period. There was something ingenuous and good-natured about its revolt against Victorianism. The bottomless pit that the First World War had opened up before the Lost Generation was a shallow ditch compared to that which our generation has witnessed, and the consequent cynicism was childlike and lighthearted, in comparison to the numb apathy that is characteristic of the more advanced youth of today.

The "wild" party was the perfect vehicle for expressing this spirit, especially since, as the result of Prohibition — that last desperate stand of the forces of Puritanism — the simple act of taking a drink was transformed into a wicked and excitingly illegal event. (Today, the youth must resort to the more deadening narcotics to achieve a similar thrill). A party in the '20s that commemorated the '90s was a lively, good-natured spoofing of the previous generation's foibles; we of the '50s, with our prevailing atmosphere of doom and disintegration, are hardly in the proper mood to give the same sort of treatment to the youthful follies of our parental generation'.

Swing as Surrealist Music

Cultural Correspondence (1975-83) was a remarkable US-based radical journal with a particular focus on popular culture. Its entire archive is now available online and is a real treasure trove. I've been browsing through a 1979 special on surrealism, which has lots of music and dance related content. The following text is by the American philosopher Horace Meyer Kellen (1882-1974), an extract from his 1942 book Art and Freedom. I would certainly take issue with its association of jazz and swing (and by implication black people) with the 'primitive' - these developed as modern urban musics created by sophisticated virtuoso musicians. But the text does express very well the enthusiasm of its followers in that period for a music that seemed to embody liberation:

SWING AS SURREALIST MUSIC

'The musical equivalent of surrealism in painting and literature is not obviously connected with either its theory or practice. It develops as a practice entirely innocent of theory, as an unwilled expression of alogical spontaneity, of irresponsible, personal invention unenchanneled by form, unchecked by musical knowledge or learned tradition; develops thus with all the differentiae which the connoisseurs ascribe to surrealist creations. The name for it is Swing. Its native habitat is the United States of America, and it is indigenous to the southern portion, especially to the Mississippi riverfront at New Orleans. Unlike its literary and pictorial parallels, which sustain a local life already below the level of subsistence among selected groups of intelligentsia, Swing has attained a world-wide diffusion among all classes and occupations. The event is natural enough. Verbiform and graphic symbols require interpretation; sheer sonorous rhythm does not. Swing is caused in a medium which issues from and speaks to Dr. Freud's Unconscious direct, without disguise, without distortion...

...Swing arrived as the latest phase of a progression from Ragtime through Jazz. The trick of heightening emotional tension by opposing one rhythm to another became conspicuous as a practice about the same time that post-impressionism made its start. The matrix of Swing is said to have been opposed and mixed body-rhythms of the pasmala as danced in New Orleans bawdy-houses and honky tonks. The manner of mixing and opposition was carried over from dancing bodies to  sounding musical instruments. Popular songs so treated were said to be "ragged," and the treatment came to be called Rag-time. The singers and dancers and players who devised Ragtime were American Negroes with remnants of an eroding African culture in their body-rhythms, in their social habits and in their personal outlook. They were primitives indigenous to industrial civilization, with its timeclocks, its rigid divisions of the hours of the working day, its patterns of machine-logic and rationality. Negro Ragtime was the beginning of a break from that. In less than a generation the Negro's social heartbreak was absorbed into Ragtime's terpsichorean breakdown and Ragtime transmuted to Jazz. The vehicles of the American Negro's heartbreak is the Spiritual and Jazz, which is said to derive from jaser, an Acadian word meaning to gabble, to chatter, is the compenetration of the rag and the spiritual. Body, voice, wind and percussion instruments are its vehicles.

Jazz began to spread through the great industrial cities of the North American continent about the same year that the First International Exhibi-ion of Modem Art began its epoch-making trek across the States. This exhibition, which for the first time brought before the unaccustomed eyes of Americans the works of all the schools and cults that Europe had bred in two generations, had been arranged under the auspices of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. Ragtime, which might be said to correspond to the cubist phase of the pictorial and verbiforrn arts, spread to Europe while modernist painting and poetry were acquiring a vogue in America. The four years o' the First World War were a plowing of a cultural soil wherein Jazz could take deep roots, and when the War ended it flowered indeed. . . .

The metronomic noises of the railroads and factories, the monotonous roar of the cities de-manded their rhythmic compensation. Even  formal music brought them forth. Percussion and wind instruments — brasses, saxophones, trombones, xylophones, bells — became more noticeable in orchestras. To atonality or to polytonality, which dropped modulation, which set key against key and scale against scale, was joined a continuous shift of rhythm or a contrapuntal opposition of many rhythms. In 1893, Dahomey Negroes, beating tom-torns for the entertainment of gaping Americans at Chicago's World Fair, had, by using feet and heads as well as hands, produced a triple cross rhythm which constituted an unconscious counter-point of rhythms. . .

Formal professional music, however modem, somehow failed to release the emotions which the industrial workday blockaded and starved. Night, that so long had been the time, not for living, but for sleeping away the fatigues of the living day, became conspicuously the time for living. The existence of the folk of the industrial cities is now a cultural schizophrenia of day-life and night-life. Day is the time when they earn their livings, night is the time when they live their lives. During the day most people are producers, disciplined to the machine, their bodies held to its rhythm, their minds constrained to its motions. By night, they are consumers; their body-rhythm seeks to recover its native physiological patterns, their movements search to resume the human form appropriate to autonomous human function. The extraordinary spread and influence of Swing testifies that in it the seeking and searching come to a haven; that it owns the power of gratifying the needs which launch them. Also its well-spring is the Negro of the urban jungle in New Orleans; also its centers of power are the great industrial areas — Chicago, New York, London, Berlin, Moscow, Shanghai, Tokyo.

Atonal, polyrhythmic, Swing cuts itself loose from every rule and canon that tradition has brought down or craftsmanship confirmed. It asks of the performer two things, a maximum of virtuosity on his instrument, a maximum of spontaneity in his performance. That must needs be sheer, unrestricted improvisation, the free, the anarchic expression of his Unconscious, undisguised and unashamed. Nor is the expression sonoriform only. His whole body collaborates: as he plays, he dances, he acts, he sings, he leaps and twists and weaves like an acrobat, and the different behaviors pass seamlessly into and out of one another. He becomes the leader, not only of his band, but of his audiences: they step from their seats into the aisles and dance with him in an ecstasy — orgiastic or mystical or both according to the observer's lights — of release and self-recovery. It is the liberation of Dionysos from Apollo, of the living organism from the automatic machine, an insurgence of the depths into a conscious experience without connection and without analogue, though perhaps revivalist religious gatherings do enfold likenesses wherein convert and jitterbug are one under the skin. Swing might with good reason be called surrealism in excelsis'.

(full text below- click to enlarge)

Agit Disco Book Launch

Agit Disco has just been published by Mute Books, compiled by Stefan Szczelkun, edited by Anthony Iles  The launch takes place on 8th December 2011, 6.30pm – 9.00pm at The Showroom, 63 Penfold Street, London, NW8 8PQ.

I have a chapter in the book so will be going along, maybe see some of you there  (details here, including how to order a copy).

'Agit Disco collects the playlists of its 23 writers to tell the story of how music has politically influenced and inspired them. The book provides a multi-genre survey of political musics, from a wide range of viewpoints, that goes beyond protest songs into the darker hinterlands of musical meaning. Each playlist is annotated and illustrated.

The collection grew organically with an exchange of homemade CDs and images. These images, with their DIY graphics, are used to give the playlists a visual materiality. Almost everyone makes selections of music to play to themselves and friends. Agit Disco intends to show the importance of this creative activity and its place in our formation as political beings. This activity is at odds with to the usual process of selection by the mainstream media - in which the most potent musical agents of change are, whenever possible, erased from the public airwaves. Agit Disco Selectors: Sian Addicott, Louise Carolin, Peter Conlin, Mel Croucher, Martin Dixon, John Eden, Sarah Falloon, Simon Ford, Peter Haining, Stewart Home, Tom Jennings, DJ Krautpleaser, Roger McKinley, Micheline Mason, Tracey Moberly, Luca Paci, Room 13 – Lochyside Scotland, Howard Slater, Johnny Spencer, Stefan Szczelkun, Andy T, Neil Transpontine, Tom Vague'.

1980 mods: reaction or rebellion?

(click on images to enlarge)

In January 1980, London-based radical magazine The Leveller tried to come to terms with the mod revival that had emerged in the previous year. After the explicit social critique of the post-punk period, some saw it as a retrogade if not outright reactionary movement, as Ian Walker argues in his article here:

'The union jack, in 1979, is a fascist symbol. The red white and blue chic is the perfect accessory to the white power sticker the young lads wear on their parkas down at the Bridgehouse in the East End on a Friday night. Mod is white historical romance. It is the disco before the pollution of minorities. It is the high street before the smell of Asian food. It is instead the smell of pease pudding and the public baths where the whites come out whiter (this is the scenery of Quadrophenia). It is the land of hope and glory before the advent of feminist social workers, gay pop stars and black footballers. It is the glorious proletarian past to be recreated in the fascist vision of tomorrow. How did we trip from ripped'n torn to neat'n tidy, from punk to mod? From avant garde to retrograde, subversion to incorporation?...

We want mods to be dissidents in knife-edge creases, dredge up some anti-Thatcher quote for that cover, but really we know they are more interested in pulling power than workers' power. We want to make important-sounding statements about the corruption of street culture into consumerism, just to show we've still got all our ideological marbles (What the fuck can we do?). We dream about the council estates shaking to the rhythms of Madness and then we read the news stories about blood and glass and hospitals, the Boreham Wood mods have beaten up the Stevenage mods. We want to think the kids are alright, even if they might just now be saying they're fascists. We want to be loved by those kids, not derided as wimps and social workers (but of course we know fascism has always stressed manhood and valour). I want never gets...

The youth culture is the safety valve. Let's have surfers fighting heroin addicts in the downtown benefit disco for the astronaut asbestos mob who were ripped up by the flower power razor gangs. Let's have a permanent war of the working classes. The Glasgow experiment worked: ship the bastards out to housing projects on the dark side of town and let them kill each other, protect the law abiders with barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements. Three cheers for the classless society. Hip, hip. Grandad was a ted, Dad was a Punk, grandson is a space cowboy. But what the fuck?'.

David Widgery is more ambivalent, finding the scene wanting in comparison to its predecessors: 'Ian Page [of mod revivalist band Secret Affair] is a fair trumpeter but intellectually he makes John Lydon look like Walter Benjamin'. But still 'every genuine new culture is part of a guerilla war in the entertainment industry. New Mods have elevated the originals to stylistic deities and taken the sheer elan of the Mod explosion in the era of affluence as a disguise for the new depression'.

Red Saunders reflects mainly on his experience as a first wave mod in the 1960s, critical of its later representation in the 1979 film Quadrophenia:

'I was so disappointed with the racism in 'Quadrophenia' because it just wasn't like that. All that stuff about the blacks off the banana boat. It was the other way round on the original Mod scene. Like I first got onto Blue Beat through a black bloke who was a despatch rider in our office. I was cool because of him. If a black GI would say 'Hey man, alright' in the club you'd fall over yourself as you sweated it out in your Madras jacket. 'Cos the Flamingo was 110 degrees. But you could never take your jacket off. Never.

See we were all new. Just out of school. And your head was full with a straight middle of the road type racist, imperialist type education. More or less Brittania Rules the Waves. And suddenly it wasn't on. You suddenly thought twice. And black music was the first thing that had hit you. And you weren't supposed to friendly with Blacks. So you were. Because anything you weren't supposed to do, yuu did. Rather than that you were seriously friendly, you did it first of all because it was Cool. But then out of that came a very solid anti-racist feeling. That's why I'm anti-racist. It stems from the early Mod days.

But our political consciousness was very weird. I was a West End Mod because I lived in Paddington. I remember going home after the all-nighters through Marble Arch pissing In the litter boxes and drinking up their milk bottles. And if any figure of authority like a Park Attendant came up had a go, you'd say 'They're still dying in Vietnam man. Its alright.' In the days when no one used to hardly know about the war in Vietnam. I don't know what it meant. It was just something we started to say. And we used to say things like 'Gas house Baby'. It was the Youth Rebellion I suppose. You weren't supposed to be popping pills, so you did that too.

But we thought CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] were just dirty beatniks. You'd have a good time down Trafalgar Square at the end of the Aldermaston March to 'check out the birds'. But you wouldn't go on the March. Not unless you were very conscious. But we used to wear the Ban the Bomb badge. Very cool. On my Beatle jacket. But you were much more interested in clothes. I used to be a real dresser. I queued for 4 hours outside Anello and Davide in Drury Lane to get my red Cuban heeled boots. Superb. We never had wheels. The scooter people were more suburbs. Every now and again we'd go down this Mod Mecca called The Orchid Ballroom Purley. There'd be a million scooters outside. We'd think 'What a Bunch of Peasants'. 'Quadrophenia' was a bit over the top on the suits as well'.



Then there’s interviews with Mods themselves. Mark, a 20 year old from Yorkshire, explains the tension between the scooterist Northern Soul fans and the fans of the new mod bands: 'When it started up here it was totally to do with scooters. In ‘76 you could near enough say every scooter kids in the North was a Northern Soul fanatic. It was an underground scene, unheard of in the South. To be a Northern Soul fan was to be something different. We organised a run to Brighton to try and bring North and South together and to try and get Mods without scooters there and Mods with scooters. It turned out a bit of rivalry sprang up. They thought we wore stupid clothes and no good because we didn’t follow the new mod bands. Sixties soul is what I listen to and funk, Wilson Picket, Otis Redding, a lot of Tamla Motown'. Vic from Huddersfield concurs: 'Down there they spring up and say they are Mods but I don’t think they are. I think they are just punk bands with suits on'.

Sally Player (19) from Edmonton discusses racism at gigs: 'The NF types are a load of hypocrites. Listening to ska and Blue beat and then turning round and say they hate blacks. I can’t understand them. The BM [British Movement] and NF [National Front] come to concerts where people are performing songs that were originally made by black performers and do Seig Heil and Movement Movement. I just can’t see why they’ve paid money at the door just to do that…'

What's being played out in these articles is an age-old tension between the strategies of 'counter culture' and 'street culture'. The former, generally but not exclusively more middle class, emphasises 'alternative' values, dropping out, critiquing 'materialism' and 'fashion' (even though there is usually just as much of a dress code as any other scene). The latter, a more proletarian dandyism, emphasises dressing up, style and working class assertiveness but is often less overtly 'political'. Still, against those who would set sub-cultures in aspic, the boundaries between these currents are always shifting. After all many of the first generation 'mods' went on to be 'hippies' and within a few months of leftists agonising about whether ex-skins turned mods in the late 1970s were the harbingers of fascism, similar people were writing excitedly about the latest mutation of that scene: 2 Tone, with its explict anti-racist sensibility.

(I don't agree with Ian Walker's stance here, but he did write some other interesting articles in that period about 'The Other Britain', some of which have been reproduced by Inveresk Street Ingrate).

See also: Mods, Rockers and Revolution.

Anti-National: Love Techno, Hate Britain?

A global economic crisis is leading to global austerity - yet paradoxically in places at the sharp end populist nationalism is resurgent amidst the demonstrations and riots. A recent survey of the situation in Greece notes that 'Nationalism (mostly in a populist form) is dominant, favoured both by the various extreme right wing cliques as well as by left parties and leftists. Even for a lot of proletarians or petty-bourgeois hit by the crisis who are not affiliated with political parties, national identity appears as a last imaginary refuge when everything else is rapidly crumbling. Behind the slogans against the “foreign, sell out government” or for the “Salvation of the country”, “National sovereignty” and a “New Constitution” lies a deep feeling of fear and alienation to which the “national community” appears as a magical unifying solution. Class interests are often expressed in nationalist and racist terms producing a confused and explosive political cocktail'.

Look too at Egypt where the army seized power by posing as the guardian of the nation in the revolutionary upheaval there; or at Libya where 'foreign national' migrant workers have suffered abuse and worse as potential 'mercenaries' during the revolt. Adrift on the ocean of debt and recession the ship of the nation state seems to be a place of safety even as it sinks... the dream of returning back to an imaginary time when our lives weren't at the mercy of abstract, impersonal forces.

There are a number of ways to respond to this. One is to go with the flow and try to put a postive spin on it, to imagine a kind of politically correct patriotism - see for instance Billy Bragg's advocacy of a 'Progressive Patriot' position [insert standard Orwell quote about patriotism being good, but nationalism being bad, whatever the difference is]. But loving the place you happen to know is no basis for any kind of politics - that doesn't make it any better than all the places you don't happen to know.

Another approach is an abstract internationalism which simply affirms a global solidarity without getting hands dirty criticising the prevalent nationalism of where you live. In Berlin earlier this year, on the other hand, I was struck by the continuing virulence of the anti-national position: a total refusal to have any truck with celebrating Germany or German culture. Here's some images from that current:

'Keing tag fur die Nation' ('No day for the nation').

'Staat, Nation, Kapital. Scheisse' (State, Nation, Capital. Shit') - demonstration against day to celebrate German reunification.

Fight the Empire, Destroy Germany

Deutschland Abschalten (Shut down Germany)

'Everybody loves Germany. We don't'

'Love techno, hate Germany'

There are some problems with parts of the 'anti-national' tendency, especially when German exceptionalism is over-emphasised. The point isn't to be just 'anti-German' as if other people's nationalism is OK - and indeed in Germany many people in that current moved on from describing themselves as 'antideutsch' to 'antinational'.

What would an 'anti-British' imagery look like? What is it we would be against - the nation state? The political formation? The notion of supremacy of British culture and history? Would it be worthwhile? Just thinking aloud here, but if you want to have a go at some stickers let's see what you come up with!

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Dancehall and church hall

Robert Beckford's 'Jesus Dub: theology, music and social change' (London: Routledge, 2006) offers a 'dialogue between the cultural production of dancehall and theology of the church hall', drawing on his own experiences in African Caribbean Christianity and of sound system culture.

In respect of the latter, Beckford recalls his first encounter with dub courtesy of Coventry's Conquering Lion sound system in the 1970s:

'What immediately struck me when I entered the converted class-room masquerading as an urban dance floor was the sheer intensity of the event. It was corked full of young people and the events were conducted in pitch dark. It was also boiling hot due in part to the reggae dance floor chic of wearing winter coats with matching headwear. However, overpowering all of my senses was what Julian Henriques terms sonic dominance of the sound system. There was a throbbing, pulsing bass line ricocheting through the bricks, mortar, flesh and bones. The sonic power was tamed in part by the DJ's improvised poetic narration or 'toasting' over the dub track. Playing on the turntable was a dub version of MPLA by a reggae artist called 'Tappa Zukie' (David Sinclair). As the DJ 'toasted', the silhouetted bodies moved in unison to the bass line: the heat, darkness and body sweat adding to the sheer pleasure of this Black teen spirit... These rituals of orality, physicality and communality were also acts of pleasure and healing'.

Beckford is also good on the sound systems as means of cultural production: 'Sound systems consist of far more than just turntables and speakers. Such is their size and complexity that they require a crew of people to run them' (operators, selectors, DJs, drivers etc), and 'this is an important point of departure from the current trend in mainstream popular DJ culture where DJs travel with records and play on sets already pre-prepared and with which they have no relationship... As well as being a community, the sound sysyem's division of labour provides an opportunity for artistic development'.

If the theological aspects of the book sound like a turn-off I recommend sticking with it. Beckford attempts the ambitious task of 'dubbing' pentecostalist Christianity with a bit of help from 'Black liberation theologies of the Black Atlantic' (James H Cone, Gutierrez etc.) as well as Paul Gilroy, Deleuze and Guattari.

If you think it's stretching it a bit to describe Jesus as 'a dubbist involved in taking apart and reconstructing. human life and transforming unjust social structures and practices', you should at least be open to having some of your prejudices challenged. It certainly gave me pause for thought and made me a bit more sceptical of the assumption that proliferating black churches are simply a sign of political quietism if not reaction, even more so of the assumption that the leisure choices of white middle class urbanites (arthouse cinemas, restaurants) should always be given precedence*.

(*Obviously I'm referring here to the typical local liberal campaign that goes 'omg that long derelict building is being turned into an African church we must start a campaign to turn it into something we like instead'. I don't dispute that some churches are money making rackets with dubious practices in relation to child 'possession' etc. but that's hardly the whole story!)

The Star Trek Myth: towards a historical materialist critique

The following text is still one of the best things I've read on Star Trek. It was originally published in a magazine called Melancholic Troglodytes by somebody who I had some ultra-leftist adventures with back in the day. While respecting their anonymity, I don't think it will be giving too much away to say that they may have had something to do with the remarkable book Zones of Proletarian Development. Later in 2002 I published it on Red Giant, a radical space site that was killed off when the Death Star obliterated Geocities - some of it still exists on a mirror site, but as that is rather precarious and this text doesn't seem to anywhere else I'm going to stick it up here.

The Star Trek Myth: towards a historical materialist critique

by Fatemeh Faza-navard

Abstract: Where Donna Haraway (1985) holds, "the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion", the Trekkician (Trekki Dialectician) boldly goes where no academic has gone before: sci-fi (and in particular, Star Trek), s/he contends, is the indispensable tool for demystifying capitalism (and in particular, US capital). The text starts off by analysing the mythological aspects of Star Trek using Levi-Strauss and Barthes. It then offers a conceptual map of Start Trek based on Debord's differentiation of the spectacle into concentrated, diffuse and integrated. Finally, it looks at how labour power and class struggle are mystified by the Star Trek saga.

Introduction

The mythological aspects of the Star Trek phenomenon (i.e., the whole shebang, five TV series, movies, comic books, novels, computer games, ritualised acts of celebrity-worship, etc.), resemble a Levi-Straussian bricolage, an assembly of disparate factors which "using the disarticulated elements of the social discourse of the past ... creates structures out of events". The signs that the bricoleur collects are already shaped by their particular history and previous uses. It is not inconceivable that what myths say collectively, and in a disguised form, "is a necessary poetic truth which is an unwelcome contradiction" (quoted in Leach, 1970). In this sense, they can have a positive role to play.

Alternatively, according to Barthes (1979), "in every society various techniques are developed intended to fix the floating chain of signified in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs". This is the "repressive" value of myth, and "it is at this level that the morality and ideology of a society are above all invested"(ibid, p 40). This repressive impulse is magnified during times of structural and cultural transformation. This explains why Star Trek is prescribed viewing at some American psychiatric wards! (Zerzan, 1995)

Barthes's work could also be used to demonstrate how Star Trek's constant allusions to the troubled past work as inoculation, "by holding out the promise that the issues of the past (and the present) will eventually be solved by the same system that engendered them" (Boyd, in Harrison, 1996). Viewers are de-memorized by being inoculated with a harmless version of history. This de-historicization is one of Star Trek's most pernicious strategies for dealing with the resurgence of a collective proletarian memory.

Star Trek's civilizing mission is encapsulated in the 'Prime Directive', which is Starfleet's moral code of conduct for dealing with primitive species. The Prime Directive reveals itself for a non-too-subtle privileging of a positivist model of development. This model of development has a 'modernist' and a 'post-modernist' phase. Within its 'modernist' phase, it opts for barefaced expansionism (as seen in Enterprise with the hopelessly wooden Captain Archer and the Original Star Trek with Kirk and co). Later, in its 'post-modernist' phase, it employs a more sophisticated policy of post-colonial 'non-interference' (as seen in The Next Generation and Deep Space 9).

Star Trek (ST) can perform successfully as myth, bricolage, and inoculation against subversion, precisely because of its ability to be a cocoon of warmth and security in an increasingly turbulent world. Following Benedict Anderson (1983:16) we could call ST an imagined community, "because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in it, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship". This false community is at evidence most explicitly in Voyager, where the crew stranded behind enemy lines, has to battle not only for its physical survival but also for its very identity. In the journey home, captain Janeway forges an extended family identity and then uses this group identity to secure the royalty of her crew.

ST achieves its civilizing/domesticating mission through many mechanisms, chief amongst them the practice of marking and transcending frontiers. These frontiers are conceived of as both internal markers in our imagination and external signposts in the galaxy. Internally, Deep Space 9 (DS-9) and Voyager, play upon the insecurity of the boundary between 'I' and the 'not-I' and present the 'Other' (be they alien, Arab or Communist) as a threat to identity (Jameson, 1981:115). This groundwork then permits "the surfacing of social norms as personal traits and desires"(Donald, l992:92). Externally, "it constructs a limit-text, an imaginary frontier in space where rationalization of colonialist practices take place" (Harrison, 1996:158). The Original Star Trek and Enterprise specialize in this type of missionary colonizing.

The de-memorizing agenda of Star Trek alluded to above is linked to the acceleration of the effects of history. Baudrillard (1994:6) talks of the acceleration of the effects of history, as its meaning is slowing inexorably. "Right at the heart of the news, history threatens to disappear. At the heart of hi-fi, music threatens to disappear...Everywhere we find the same stereophonic effect, the same effect of absolute proximity to the real, the same effect of simulation". History disappears by becoming its own dustbin: "History has only wrenched itself from cyclical time to fall into the order of the recyclable"(ibid., p 27).

It is precisely this simulated recycling of history that ST is so good at. Haraway attests to its power when she writes, "We have all been colonized by those origin myths, with their longing for fulfilment in apocalypse". And as Barthes (1993:121) says, "Myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear". However, the "mode of presence" (Barthes) of a mythical concept is not simply literal, it is also memorial. John F. Kennedy and Reagan's theories of a 'Communist' offensive, and Bush's warnings of annihilation at the hands of Iraqis "rang true because many voters had heard -and seen- it all before" (Carter, 1988:141). Star Trek treats the viewer like the Macintosh game Deja-vu, "where the player 'awakes' as an amnesiac, and where part of the task involves the rediscovery of identity and the recovery of memory" (Stallabrass, 1993:95). Only what is 're-discovered' is the bourgeoisie's version of history whilst the collective memory of the proletariat is fragmented, ignored and distorted in various ways.

For nearly four decades, ST has been the perfect vehicle for disseminating the US bourgeoisie's message worldwide. It does not so much imagine the future, as to "defamiliarise and restructure our experience of our present" (Jameson, quoted in Bernardi, 1998:12). And yet its success masks a deep rnalaise. For "the universalization of facts, data, knowledge, and information is a precondition of their disappearance. Every idea and culture becomes universalized before its disappearance" (Baudrillard, 1994:104). From within, a culture seems immortal. Thus the insolent triumphalism of ST fails to recognise itself as the bourgeoisie's protracted and spectacular death agony. The suicide of the New World Order, serialised!


Myth: Levi-Strauss's version

Myth and racism

Levi-Strauss (1990) argued, "there is more structure to a myth than the mere narrative succession of episodes". He also suggested that resemblances are not the only close links between them, inversions typify another link. The mythic bricolage is a mode of representation and not a mode of explanation. The Egyptologist, Gerald Massey (1995), understood this a century before Levi-Strauss.

The racism permeating Star Trek requires easily recognisable stereotypes for the smooth transfer of prejudice. Masks and make-up allow the sign to adopt a hybrid position, "at once elliptical and pretentious, which is then pompously christened nature" (Barthes, 1993: 28), as with the wearing of fringe in Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar. Such masks, says Adorno, "which freeze what is most living in the real face, are 'emblems of authority' - allegorical combinations of image and command" (quoted in Stallabrass, 1993:87).

In The Way of The Masks, Levi-Strauss (1975) made a further contribution. By concentrating on three types of masks, he showed "each individual mask was, from a formal point of view, a transformation of another mask in the system". The technological invention of 'morphing' (e.g., the Dominian changelings) takes this to extreme and "codifies the similar function of extra-terrestrials and non-white humans as threats to whiteness" (Bernardi, 1998: 89). The Dzonokwa mask, for example, is an inversion of the Swaihwe. The former is painted black, eyes half closed with a rounded mouth, the latter the exact opposite. These masks should be seen as part of a structural relationship, reinforcing each other through inversion and similarities. Their authoritarian and stereotypifying tendencies are due to them being part of a closed system of representation.

Similarly the masks in ST are the result of multiple series of semantic associations that relate to their specific cultural contexts. The human visage is the norm and the other species represent deviations from this 'perfection'. The rigid forehead of a Klingon signifying aggression, the heavy jaw and projecting eye ridges of a Cardassian signifying criminality, and the large nose, ears, bad teeth and protruding cortex of a Ferengi signifying greed (the unacceptable face of usury capital). This, of course, is phrenology at its crudest, a pseudo-science that having been thrown out of the party (Rose, 1984:53), tries to crash it through the back door.

This racism is connected to the binary opposition between sacred and profane. Mary Douglas (1970), in a structuralist analysis of Leviticus, observes that etymologically, holiness means 'set apart': "Holiness requires that individuals shall conform to the class to which they belong. And holiness requires that different classes of things shall not be confused". Hybrids are, therefore, impure and unclean, because they confound the general scheme of things.

Likewise Edward Leach pointed out in 1966 that "in England the only common fish subject to killing and eating restrictions is the Salmon"- an "anomalous" fish as it is red blooded as well as being both a sea fish and a fresh water fish. Leach postulates that: "We make binary distinctions and then mediate the distinction by creating an ambiguous (and taboo-loaded) intermediate category". The close, domesticated animals are usually denoted by monosyllables, the wild ones distinguished by giving them semi-Latin names- elephant, hippopotamus, and so forth. For example, house animals like dog and cat are inedible, farm animals (pig, cattle) are edible if sacrificed, forest animals (deer) are edible (no rules), and remote/wild animals (tiger) are inedible. The hybrids in Star Trek are always under greater scrutiny for acts of disloyalty.

Myth and morality

Racism and the sacred/profane axis are closely related to secular morality and Star Trek is certainly permeated by morality. A book like Star Trek Speaks (Sackett: 1989), a compilation of quotes and axioms from the Original ST, is the concrete manifestation of this home-spun (common-sensical in Vico's vocabulary) philosophy. The book contains chapters on Universal Truths (e.g., Kirk: "All your people must learn before you can reach for the stars"); Emotions and Logic (e.g., Spock: "it would be illogical to kill without reason"); The Military (e.g., Kirk: "I'm a soldier, not a diplomat. I can only tell the truth"); On Women (e.g., Spock: "Extreme feminine beauty is always disturbing"); On Government (e.g., Lokai of Cheron: "You're from the planet Earth. There is no persecution on your planet"); On Religion (e.g., Kirk: "Mankind has no need for gods. We find the One quite adequate").

This 'secular' morality seeps into every nook-and-cranny, including the architecture, the food and the fashion on display. Nothing escapes its malevolent influence. For instance, in The Original ST and The Next Generation (TNG), occasions arise where essence and appearance are at odds. The Trekki knows that under the enlightened guidance of Kirk/Picard, the 'essence' of the problem will eventually emerge out of the shadows. The modernist and liberal-humanist assumptions in such a narrative are explicit. Accordingly, the architecture of the Enterprise is open, bright and pristine like the interior decor of any modern office block (Altman: 1 994). The division of labour amongst the crew is likewise, sharply delineated. By the time the movie Insurrection came out, the naivety, optimism and heroism associated with Kirk's humanism has degenerated into Picard's halting, humbled and self-conscious humanitarianism (see Paul Mattick for further clarification of the difference between humanism and humanitarianism, 1978:158).

The decor of Deep Space Nine (DS9), on the other hand, is hard, dark and angular. The sets have more contrast, reflecting the shadowy nature of characters and alliances conceivable. Quark's holo-suits (recreational offspring of today's virtual reality equipment), which merge the sharp distinction between reality and simulacrum, play a more prominent role in the 'postmodernist' DS9. On Voyager the copy/simulations frequently pose a threat to the crew's survival, as the "skin-jobs" in Blade Runner threaten the status quo.

The architecture of ST is mythic partly because its inhabitants identify themselves as users and not creators. Everything is already available through technological sophistication. As Barthes (op cit, p 146) says: "There is one language that is not mythical, and that is the language of man as producer'. The tension between production and consumption is embodied in contrasting attitudes towards the replicator - a device capable of creating food/clothes, "out of thin air". In one episode, Picard's brother chastises the good captain for eating too much synthetic food. Captain Sisko (and his father) on DS9 and Neelix on Voyager are accomplished chefs. Food preparation in ST is a ritualistic act of familial bonding, which the ubiquitous replicator challenges.

Finally, there is a class dimension to eating in Star Trek that often goes unnoticed. In The Culinary Triangle (1966), Levi-Strauss observes, "Boiling provides a means of complete conservation of the meat and its juices, whereas roasting is accompanied by destruction and loss. Thus one denotes economy; the other prodigality; the latter is aristocratic, the former plebian". This is precisely the reason the ex-Borg (Pleb), Seven of Nine, has difficulty grasping the significance of a "hearty meal".

Myth and Barthes

Racism and civilization

The Negro soldier in French military uniform on the cover of Paris-Match, analysed so perceptively by Barthes (1993:116), finds its Star Trek counterpart in the shape of the 'liminal' Lt. Commander Worf. "Liminality" is a postmodernist term for the social position or state of being "betwixt and between" cultures. Postmodernism portrays this as a malaise and a loss. In fact, the way capital works, it cannot be anything else. Consequently, the signifier of Worf's language-object (his meaning as a Klingon in Starfleet uniform) signifies the greatness of the Starfleet (American) empire.

As meaning (the signifier of the language-object) passes toward form (the signifier of metalanguage), "the image loses some knowledge: the better to receive the knowledge in the concept (signified part of the meta-language)". The knowledge contained in a mythical concept is made deliberately confused, a matrix of "yielding, shapeless association". Myth, after all, is "speech stolen and restored", a "brief act of larceny...which gives mythical speech its benumbed look" (ibid.). Picard's soliloquy on the eve of an impending Borg attack imbues Starfleet's cause with eternal legitimacy and at the same time links racism with the survival of white, Anglo-Saxon civilization. This is an example of "myth as depoliticised speech":

"I wonder if the Emperor Honorius watching the Visigoths coming over the seventh hill truly realised The Roman Empire was about to fall ... Will this be the end of our civilisation?"

Worf, of course, is a far more complex character than Barthes's Negro soldier. The Star Trek narrative usually invites implicit metaphorical parallels between him and stereotypes of African American, Native American and Japanese samurai (Harrison, 1996:59). Worf functions as a site where racial/species, national and cultural tensions collide and are always resolved in favour of cultural assimilation by Starfleet values. Picard employs "inferential racism" (Hall, 1990) in his dealings with Worf, inviting the latter to constantly prove his loyalty to Starfleet. This stereotyping always functions to buttress hierarchy in Star Trek. In fact, this ritualistic avowal of loyalty is expected and enacted in most American narratives as the high percentage of 'immigrants' in U.S. society demands a stricter coherence to the concept of an imagined community than is required in more secure forms of nationalism. Thus 'minorities' are routinely urged to prove their allegiance to their adopted U.S.A. (e.g. the sacrifices made in The Deer Hunter).

In an episode of DS9, the Dominion forces in the Gamma quadrant capture Worf and a number of other Starfleet/Klingons. Worf has to fight his Jem' Hadaar captors in bouts of ritualised combat in order to give his colleagues time for completing their escape attempt. The scene combines the characteristics of wrestling as a noble sport (i.e., Greek/Olympic wrestling where feudal concepts like honour determine the conduct of champions), and wrestling as a spectacle (here analogous to the Elizabethan Masque based on bull-fighting and pantomime).

The wrestling protagonists have a "physique as peremptory as those of the characters of the Commedia dell'Arte, who display in advance, in their costumes and attitudes, the future contents of their parts"(Barthes, op cit, p 17). Dario Fo's (1991) Pantaloons and Harlequins, therefore, allow an immediate reading of juxtaposed meaning. This spontaneous pantomime allows suffering, defeat, and justice to be exhibited in public and in the form of a secularised passion play.

Worf fights honourably the first eight cornbatants. Battered and bruised, he is only spared defeat (i.e., death) by a reciprocal act of honour from his Jem' Hadaar captor. Honour here functions as exchangeable gift, as African potlatch, oiling the wheel of human transactions in what is basically a capitalist world.

A relatively recent example could illustrate the point more cogently. The wrestling tournament between the USA and Iran, referred to euphemistically by journalists (Hirst, 1998) as 'wrestling diplomacy', re-enacts the stylised rituals of Worf's escapade. The competing media apparatus of both states used techniques such as 'rhetorical amplification' (Barthes), in order to build up the event, with each side vying for the role of the gallant Worf. There was a great deal of honour at stake and honour, although a feudal concept can still generate wealth in terms of cultural capital.

The contradictions inherent in oiling capitalist development with residual cultural concepts such as honour can be viewed from a slightly different angle. Levi-Strauss makes a useful distinction, which deserves attention here. Rituals, he argues, are the opposite of games. "Games -an activity characteristic of 'hot' societies- use structures (the rules of the game) to produce events (victories or defeats). They are fundamentally disjunctive, as their aim is to separate the winner from the loser. Rituals are conjunctive- their aim is to bring together".

'Hot' societies employ hierarchy and linear time. The Next Generation (TNG), for example, "constructs its utopian future by drawing on a nineteenth-century faith in progress, human perfectibility, and expanding frontiers" (Harrison, 1996:95). This is an example of 'celebratory' or 'whiggish' historification (Harris, 1997). Social conflict is supposedly superseded. Money, wage-slavery abolished, at least, implicitly. Alienation and racism a thing of the past, or so it seems at first glance. Comte's three types of progress are exemplified by various TNG crew members: Practical Progress whose agency is 'Activity' embodied in First Officer Riker or Chief O'Brien; Theoretical Progress whose agency is 'Intellect' personified by the android Data; and Moral Progress whose agency is 'Feeling' typified by the female 'care-taker' characters, Troi, Guinan and Crusher. Only the paternalistic Picard is allowed to synthesize the three traits.

'Cold' societies (non-hierarchical and with a cyclical conception of time and usually no writing), on the other hand, use rituals and classificatory systems to resist change. The disjunction between spectators and officiators, sacred and profane is overcome. This is precisely why 'cold' societies pose a threat to Star Treks ideological hegemony and why they are nearly always depicted in a caricatured manner. American viewers may be encouraged to pity and patronise the primitive 'cold' societies but the identification must fall short of sympathy and solidarity.

Myth and taste

For Pierre Bourdieu (1997: 49) each social class is characterised by a set of "social competencies, a set of intellectual skills and sensibilities acquired through social background and educational environment and expressed through taste". Taste is externalised through signs but significantly, the same sign may carry different meaning for opposing social classes.

Wine used to be associated with the bourgeoisie in Britain but now it is also popular with proletarians. Iranian peasants and proles indulged in wine copiously throughout their history, whereas today they sip the occasional glass in secret for fear of Islamic punishment. Alternatively the same class may represent and mediate its social encounters through different drinks. For instance, "for the (French] worker, wine enables him to do his task with demiurgic ease", as lager used to be an essential dietary requirement of the London river-worker, and tea an indispensable method of pacification/forced relaxation.

Picard's fondness for Earl Grey is by contrast a "social gesture" (Barthes), as wine-drinking helps the French intellectual "demonstrate his control and sociability". Here, wine is the foundation for collective morality. Klingons' predilection for blood-wine and blood-pie represents a crude form of biological determinism ("you are what you eat"). The fanatical Jem' Hadaar (Iranians) neither eat, drink or bother with procreation, but are kept permanently drugged, as the historical assassins were by the 'Old Man of the Mountain'. As for changelings/shape-shifters (in this context, sufi masters), by contrast, have no need for nutrients or physical contact, because they have evolved beyond mere "solids"(i.e., humans).

On ST "fashion is often used not necessarily to distinguish between classes but between species". To be fashionable in ST is to be able to "stand out and fit in simultaneously" (Harrison, 1996: 117). Troi, Dax or Seven of Nine who undergo various degrees of 'striptease' (Barthes) during the show, advertise sexual promiscuity better to impede and exorcise it. The public are "inoculated with a touch of evil, the better to plunge it afterwards into a permanently immune Moral Good". Kirk and Uhura's famous inter-racial kiss, Dax's bi-sexual tendencies, Worf and Dax's sadomasochistic relationship, Kes's lolita impression, and Seven of Nine's aggressive man-hunting technique, all reveal themselves as acts of recuperation.

Myth and Debord

If the five series of ST represent a Debordian spectacle, then the relation between its elements can best be analysed as different phases of the spectacle. Not only that the various series follow different models of warfare. We will try to combine these two facets below.

The Enterprise, the original ST and TNG represent colonial and post-colonial tendencies of Debord's concentrated spectacle (l 987:64) respectively, a backward form of bureaucratic capitalism associated with authoritarian societies like Fascist Germany or Leninist USSR, or the liberal humanism of turn of the century USA. These three series typify the expansionist wing of the US bourgeoisie, and belong to the Errol Flynn genre of naval imperialism and the switch from piracy to patriotism. The military engagement against the cold war foe (Klingons/Russians) or the post-cold War foes (Borg and Romulans/Russians and Chinese), are based on modern models of warfare, where civil society is temporarily suppressed in favour of a total political mobilisation (Clausewitz).

Deep Space 9, which re-enacts the western genre of the besieged army outpost surrounded by hostile Indians, typifies the diffuse spectacle and favours the isolationist wing of the US bourgeoisie. The model of warfare on DS9 is based on the Arab-Israeli conflict (or Eastern Europe), setting the "measured anti-terrorist operations of Captain Sisko against the terrorism of the slimy Cardassians (Nazis/Iraqis/Palestinians) and the jihad of the pious Jem' Hadaar warrior-assassins (Iranians), fulfilling the grand plan of their changeling gods (Ayatollahs). In Marxian terminology, the jihad is the expression of civil society (camouflaged by a false religious unify), in pursuit of political society.

Finally Voyager, which plays on the anxieties of the American public over losing their soldiers behind enemy lines, is an expression of Debord's integrated spectacle (in existence in France and Italy since the 1980s and Russia since the 1990s). In Baudrillard's (1994: 31) less rigorous vocabulary, this phase is characterised by the "retrospective transparency of all the signs of modernity, speeded up and second-hand ... of all the positive and negative signs combined: that is, not just human rights, but crimes, catastrophes and accidents". Captain Janeway, having defied the Prime Directive, is stranded in a distant quadrant of the galaxy, forced to fight/negotiate her way through a maze of complex tribal allegiances. Tribal war is a mode of regulation through exhibition, a forced movement towards preventing the separation of political society (state power) from a nascent civil society.

Myth and space

In The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat, Barthes (1993:65) observes a crucial point about Jules Verne's self-sufficient cosmogony: "Imagination about travel corresponds in Verne to an exploration of closure, and the compatibility between Verne and childhood stems from a common delight in the finite, to enclose oneself and to settle". He further notes, "the basic activity in Jules Verne is unquestionably that of appropriation. The image of the ship, so important in his mythology, in no way contradicts this ... the ship is an emblem of closure" (ibid. p 66). Barthes posits Rumbaud's Drunken Boat, the boat which says 'I' and proceeds towards a "genuine poetic exploration", against Verne's Nautilus.

We could map this onto the Star Trek terrain. The ideologically christened spaceship Enterprise is obviously an updated version of Vern's Nautilus- more a habitat than a means of transport. Bakhtin would have called it a chronotope, an "intrinsic connectedness" of space and time. "As a chronotope the Enterprise is simultaneously a spatial marker, a curvaceous curvature of matter, and a temporal indicator, guiding diegetic adventure and assimilating history in the process" (Bernardi, 1998: 75). The space station on DS9 is a version of 'Gunsmoke' and the ship Voyager resembles a mobile Camelot.

The emblematic ship of concentrated spectacle, TNG's Enterprise, encloses as it appropriates. Its positivistic philosophy requires a philosopher-king at the helm in the shape of Jean-Luc Picard. Its relative simplicity of plot and characterization evokes "an age of pure belief, or regression to childhood simplicity" (Stallabrass, 1993: 90). That is why there is minimal conflict amongst its crew. The DS9 station by contrast sits at the edge of 'civilisation' beyond which is the 'Pale'. It encloses its inhabitants and settles. Its more complex imperatives (diffuse spectacle) demand the arbitration of a prophet-warrior, Captain Benjamin Sisko. And finally, the ship Voyager encloses as it takes flight toward its holy grail (i.e., magical technology or worm-hole capable of sending it back home), and mixes the positivist and mystical facets of TNG and DS9 as the integrated spectacle combines the worst of concentrated and diffuse forms of the spectacle. Kathryn Janeway as embodiment of a matriarchal Amazonian Queen.

The spatial code (Levi-Strauss's term for the changing location of mythic heroes), and the social code (Levi-Strauss's term for relationship pertaining to parenthood, marriage, chiefship, friendship, etc.) outlined above, form a system - a 'matrix of meaning'. Levi-Strauss's (1970) basic hypothesis in The Raw and the Cooked is that "myths come into being through a process of transformation of one myth into another". It is the adaptability of sci-fi, which facilitates this transformation and makes it the perfect vehicle for the intermingling of spatial and social codes. Thus The Raven (an episode of Voyager) is an updated version of the Searchers, and the movie Outland (starring Sean Connery) is flexible enough to re-enact Gary Cooper's High Noon. In fact, the latter fulfils all the defining criterion of a (western) genre as proposed by Edward Buscombe (1970: 43), namely: iconography (e.g., sheriff's badge, shoot-out with real bullets, and the ever-present clock), structure and theme. Just like the chain of McDonald restaurants littering the globe, a successful mythic film "depends on a combination of novelty and familiarity".

Concluding remarks

One of the main themes running through sci-fi concerns the re-molding of labour-power, through re-coding the chromosomes, the neural system and time-compression techniques. A process of scientific engineering that ironically goes hand in hand with the revival of religious obfuscation. "That the holy trinity of God/Work/Family is always crucial in times of repression is a well-tested truth capital has never forgotten" (Caffentiz, ibid. p 58). Arnold (1998) concurs: "...the cinematic apparatus provides a partial means of integrating people who are violently subjected to the alienation effects of industrial capitalism into its social formation. This partial integration represents a dialectical process whereby the pleasure of its modernized subject is offered in exchange for new forms of subjugation". Similarly, Hugh Ruppersberg (1990) notes a close association between technological sophistication and religious exaltation in Close Encounters of The Third Kind: "Technology has redeemed the aliens from original sin, made them godlike..." .

Interestingly, whereas in Alien, there is a marked social hierarchy with the working class (Brett and Parker), "holding the least allegiance to the corporation" (Byers in Kuhn: 1990), Star Trek, seldom overtly discusses economic arrangements. Once class differences are denied, the only hierarchy left is a meritocratic one based on rank and experience. Star Trek is a bourgeois myth with the primary function of extending the spectacle into all facets of life. "A controlled reintegration of workers which unites the separate but unites them as separate" (Guy Debord). Lest we forget, Gene Roddenbury was a LAPD cop before turning to filmmaking. The liberal and populist aspects of Star Trek combine to suppress class struggle.

Open class struggle breaks out only very occasionally on ST, as for example, when the Ferengi, Rom, organises a trade union (and an impromptu strike) against his employer/brother, Quark. The conflict is portrayed as a sanitised family squabble, and ends in the predictable Langian handshake between capital and labour. The whole episode is no more than a 40-minute Barthesian inoculation against the virus of class hostilities.

Lack of reflection regarding complex issues is encouraged in the sci-fi viewer, through the adroit use of special effects. As Ben Brewster (1987) has pointed out, it is not merely disbelief that is "suspended", but often also knowledge and judgment. The camp element of sci-fi special effects is designed to protect the spectator both from disappointment, should the effects fail to convince, and also from genuine trauma, should the effects succeed too well (Christian Metz). Telotte (1990) believes that the attraction of Star Trek's special effects "attest to our urge to gain access to the meeting ground between the specular (everything we see on the screen), and the blind (everything that moves outside/under the surface of things)".

Stern has noted, "The simultaneous movement of foregrounding special effects while backgrounding effects not recognised as special, corresponds to the structure and role of other forms of discourse in advance capitalist society. News, for example, is taken to be what is not routine" (see Kuhn, 1990: 69). In the process, technologies of domination, phasers, photons, force fields, etc., are naturalised. A legalistic language borrowed from a future U.N. is imposed on other species, through the handy technological gimmick that is known as the Universal Translator. And, Warp Speed acts as a rubicon differentiating civilised planets from "primitive" ones.

Many scholars have attempted to read radicalism into star Trek. Jenkins (1992) has made a great deal out of 'poaching', which is defined as a "sort of nomadism in which readers read intertextually, drawing on various texts and discourses in constructing and extending the original text" (Bernardi, 1998). But even he is careful to point out that these resistant readings of many Trekkies, "ultimately fits within the ideology of the overall series". Or as David Morley puts it: "The message is 'structured in dominance', by the preferred reading" (ibid. p 149). The famous 'nomadic poaching' of ST fans may turn out to be no more fruitful than the medieval pastime of counting the number of angels that could fit on a pin top.

And finally…

To the disinterested outsider, the whole Star Trek saga may seem a tad infantile. There is some truth in this. Dieter Lenzen (1989) warns us that the status of adulthood is disappearing, "a phenomenon brought about by an expansion of childlike aspects in all spheres of our culture". This expansion contains a mythological element as it involves the deification of childhood and a corresponding acceleration of the apocalyptic element in our culture. I would like to suggest here that this infantilization is a direct attack on the working class, an attempt to pacify and domesticated us. The truth of the matter is that series such as Star Trek have been extremely successful in this process of infantilization.

To the devoted insider (the uncritical Trekki), Star Trek is akin to a Levi-Straussian "machine for the suppression of time". It provides certainty and hope, warmth and security. It provides Anderson's imagined community. This aspect of Star Trek is also completely anti-working class as it involves de-memorization and se-politicisation.

To the critical Trekkician (who is simultaneously inside and outside the myth), Star Trek is bourgeois mystification, as fascinating as it is repulsive. It mythologizes by distorting the past, entrenches by reifying the present, and seduces by desiring the future. However, its continuing appeal also reflects certain real needs and shortcomings that capital denies the majority of people in society. Radical critique must therefore demystify the past Star Trek continuously distorts, de-reify contemporary bourgeois relationships Star Trek suppresses and imagine a future superior to the fluffy capitalism it offers.

Bibliography

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The Worker-Dandyist International

Have posted here before on proletarian dandyism, and one day will get around to writing some more about Decadent Action, clean living in difficult circumstances and the ghetto fabulous politics of refusing austerity by dressing above your 'station' in life.

For now I merely note the existence (at least in the blogosphere) of The Worker-Dandyist International - 'For a working class with class' - with a manifesto that declares: 'Proletarian revolution is not, as enemies of the class insist, about universally lowering living standards to the level we plebs are currently forced to live at. It is about raising our living standards to the highest levels achievable... We define our Dandyism, in essence, as simply making as much of an effort as possible with the limited resources available. An effort in sartorial flair and individuality, an effort in civility, social responsibility and courtesy, and an effort in communal culture, welfare and hedonism. Our definition of Dandyism will most certainly conflict with the pompous elitists’ definition of Dandyism. Of course, we embrace and encourage popinjays, peacocks and coxcombs but we shall dispense with the conceitedness associated with such terms in favour of community and kindness'.

Dance before the Police Come in Datacide

My recent article for Datacide magazine, Dance Before the Police Come, has now been published on their website:

'Shut Up and Dance’s 1991 hardcore LP ‘Dance Before the Police Come’ was released at a time when the UK authorities were struggling to contain the massive explosion of raves. Thousands of people each weekend were playing a cat and mouse game with the police to party in fields and warehouses, and if the state was often outwitted by meeting points in motorway service stations and convoys of cars, it tried to keep the lid on the phenomenon by staging high profile raids. In 1990, for instance, an incredible 836 people were arrested at a Love Decade party in Gildersome near Leeds in the north of England.

Since then the global spread of Electronic Dance Music has generally been accompanied by the flashing blue light, the siren, and that moment when the music is abruptly turned off and the order given to clear the building. Indeed, let’s face it, the frisson of illegality has sometimes added a pleasurable edge to partying – the thrill of overcoming official obstacles just to get there, of getting one over on the authorities. And even the most mainstream of commercial club promoters like to pose as underground outlaws because they once got told to turn the music down by a man in uniform.

But police raids are serious business – often involving arrests which can lead to imprisonment, people losing their livelihoods and, in some parts of the world, social ostracism. People get injured, beaten and sometimes even killed. This article looks at a sample of police raids in recent times to get a sense of the current state of play between cops and dancers in different parts of the world'.

Read the full article here.

I note that Peverelist has just released a track called Dance Til the Police Come, very timely as he comes from Bristol:



Unlike the 1991 Shut Up and Dance track, Dance Before the Police Come, Peverelist doesn't sample Duran Duran in his version!

On (1997): Hierachies of Taste on the dancefloor

On was a free magazine put out in the mid-1990s by the people around the Big Chill - the editor was Pete Lawrence.

The 1997 'Winter Solstice' issue featured an article by Stuart Borthwick on 'Hierarchies... Taste... Hierarchies of Taste'. With more than a nod to Pierre Bourdieu, Borthwick denounced what he saw as the betrayal of 'the acid house revolution'. The mid-1990s was the time when dance music went supernova in the UK, and as Borthwick points out a time when some of the old baggage of the cultural industry came to the fore with super clubs and superstar DJs. Outside of the happy hardcore scene, hardly anyone talked about raving anymore - we were all clubbers instead. I agree with the thrust of what he says, though I always disliked the notion of 'you should have been there in 1988' - itself a brandishing of cultural capital - and I can assure you that in the clubs I was going to around this time there was still plenty of smiling and laughing! Not sure it's true either that previous 'style' scenes were just for 'middle class glamour-pussies' either - some of the key faces in the Blitz scene, like Boy George, were actually proletarian dandies. But some interesting thoughts here, and very resonant of the kind of discussions that were going on at the time.

Click on images to enlarge to read the full article - I have just transcribed extracts.

Hierarchies... Taste... Hierarchies of Taste - Stuart Borthwick

'The reason why I got in to the dance scene was because of its disruption of hierarchies, tastes, and hierarchies of taste. Let’s take them one by one. Hierarchies. The big one was class, but gender came a close second. Back in my teenage years, clubbing was something that was done by people with money. Look at the ‘significant’ club scenes prior to 1988. You’ve got eighties individualism and the style press working hand in hand, creating a vogue culture that only middle-class glamour-pussies could truly feel at home in. I was too young to go to Blitz, too young to get the nod from Steve Strange, but I never wanted to anyway. Too much posing. And then along came Acid House and, in the immortal words of the French academic Patrick Mignon, we witnessed the ‘democratisation of Bohemia’. Slipping into the dance void became a working-class thing to do. You didn’t need fancy clothes, you didn’t need a tailored suit, just something loose and baggy, something that would allow air to circulate whilst you were dancing, and might stand a chance of keeping you warm on the way home. Crucially you didn’t need lots of money or a record deal to be a fully paid up member of the scene. The modern dance audience doesn’t seem to understand what a relief this was, the extent to which this was a revolutionary change. As a young student in Liverpool I suddenly found myself no longer distinguishable, in either dress or attitude, from local youth, and it felt fantastic to be part of a new mass youth movement. The barriers were coming down between the increasingly divided youth tribes of the 1980s.

The relaxation of dress codes went hand in hand with the disruption of other specular hierarchies. Clubbing was no longer about looking, no longer about visual experiences, but about sonic architecture, about sound systems, about tunes and melodies and bleeps and blurps and the sound of a thousand nutters screaming. The chrome-filled spot-lit discos of the previous generation had been usurped in favour of tatty disused warehouses, basements underneath shopping centres, and the great British outdoors. Furthermore, we’d turned away from the stage, we had stopped looking for some ridiculous rock god, and started closing our eyes and dancing...'


‘The reason why I feel more and more disillusioned with, and alienated from, the contemporary dance scene is that I can see all the things that I thought had been destroyed in the late eighties coming back into existence… We’ve ended up with disastrous door/clothes policies, where you can’t wear what you want, even to the most underground of clubs. Door prices have gone through the roof, and top clubs have become the preserve of an employed elite. And with the focus on clothes we have witnessed the return of the gaze, clothing has been re-sexualised, and the old gender barriers re-erected...

We’ve seen the return of seriousness to dance clubs. Back in the late eighties and early nineties the dance floor was fun, everyone was giggling and laughing and blowing whistles and shouting and screaming. You simply don’t get that anymore, everyone is holding on and concentrating rather than just letting go… No one is smiling, no-one is laughing, everyone is paying too much attention to the mix, too much attention to the DJ…'


'All those hierarchies of taste inverted or destroyed in the late eighties and early nineties have been resurrected. Clubs full of poseurs, and anyone too prole-like knocked back on the door… In short the chin strokers have created a nice little enclave where hedonistic working-class folk are most definitely not welcome, because they’re simply tasteless, darling…

All musical tastes, and all hierarchies of taste, are social constructions. The distribution of ‘cultural capital’ invariably mirrors the distribution of ‘real capital’, and I’m on the side of the have-nots… I’m on the side of those who have no style, because style is seriously over-rated, because style is something that is used to keep people down. Style is, for want of a better word, ideology. I’m against dance snobs. I’m against the trainspotters. I’m against those who worship DJs, even brilliant DJs. I’m against those who think they’re somehow better than the next generation of dance music fans. I’m for those dance music fans who might not know much about Derrick May, but know what they like. I’m on the side of the oppressed'.