Luther Blissett

How do I look?

 

 

Maybe it was getting hit on the head by some cops when I was a teenager. Or maybe it was going to one too many (and one really is too many) meetings and rallies where the only role the organisers wanted me to play was of a body to be talked at. Maybe it was the nothing which was all I could do as my friends were getting stomped on by the cops at this or that demo, or watching the media explain how we were, in fact, to blame for the latter (the stubborn habit our heads have of getting in the way of police boots, etc), or maybe it was too many hours spent at University and reading books. Whatever it was, I found myself thinking more and more about our bodies— activist bodies—and their positions in, around and against power, especially media power.

There's a traditional way of thinking about these things, which is that activist bodies get in the way of power. Blockading, marching, occupying, obstructing, striking; always working by negating and criticising. But if activists sometimes think like that, it's just the flip side of the standard Herald-Sun/Young Liberals 'they're against everything, they're just knockers, they've got no positive contributions' line. My argument is that we should think (and are thinking) less like that; that contemporary activists increasingly treat the body not just as an obstruction to power, but as always already inside fields of power, negotiating weird and complex relations of complicity and resistance.

Similarly, the body is no longer seen as a static thing to be (mis)represented. We see more and more activities that short circuit the idea that representation is a linear relation between a speaker and an audience, a sender and a receiver. Activists develop protests, rallies, etc, that are expressive in themselves, independent of any particular means of expression (like placards and speeches). It's not what's said, but that what's done is the saying of what's said. How we fight is the fight. Felix Guattari put it like this: 'A child who plays, or a lover who courts someone, does not transmit information, she creates a richly expressive situation in which a whole series of semiotic components are involved.'1 In political terms, Brian Massumi summarises Toni Negri's work on such movements, writing that events as disparate as

the French student movement of 1986, Tiananmen Square, and the upheavals in Eastern Europe in 1989 [mark] the emergence of a new mode of collective action for change—one that is radically anti-ideological and nonpolemical (even silent: the French students not only refused to delegate media spokespeople or negotiators, but in their largest demonstration carried no placards and shouted no slogans)…2

My point is that this silence isn't at all the refusal of representation. It is, rather, a kind of constitutive representation, an understanding of bodies themselves as media events. Bodies are not raised up against representation, they're not external to power; on the contrary, this activist silence works on the principle that bodies are always already invested—therefore, intervening—in representational politics. It's not that innocent bodies are subjected to media colonisation, but that they take part in a mediation that imminently constitutes the events mediated. There's no need to speak, because the action is its own statement. The medium is, indeed, the message.

Take the black bloc, an anarchist organising tactic, as an example: groups of activists dressed in black, masked, armoured, ready to physically confront the cops at demos and fight for territory or against police violence. Reports and rumours from around the world have black blocs throwing tear gas grenades back at the police, destroying corporate property such as Nike stores and Starbucks cafes, carrying an uprooted chainlink fence to charge a line of riot cops and force their retreat. It's irrelevant whether these reports are exactly true; what's important is that the black blocs, in and as what they do, dissolve any distinction between event and representation. A terrorist-chic dress code draws on the most mediated conventions of resistance, the most stereotypical mass media visuals codes for political dissent, and works them into a radical, tactical system of expression. Their presence, obscuring any distinction between saying, doing and being, is already as comprehensive a statement as they could ever make in more traditional media (the manifesto, the essay, the banner or chant).

It's not that actions speak louder than words, but that, as the Zapatistas (from whom the black bloc clearly take much of their inspiration) say, words are weapons. And as in the Italian radical group Ya Basta!'s explanation of this concept, 'Words are weapons' does not mean that we are to pack only words, rather, it means that we have to rise up in order to speak.'3 The enunciative act or representative moment is in itself an active struggle. This opens the door on new kinds of tactics, some of which are being played out around the world already, some of which we still need to figure out. In a lot of ways, they relate to Giorgio Agamben's description of the contemporary State:

What the State cannot tolerate in any way… is that [individuals] form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging… The State, as Alain Badiou has shown, is not founded on the social bond, of which it would be the expression, but rather on the dissolution, the unbinding it prohibits. For the State, therefore, what is important is never the singularity as such, but only its inclusion in some identity, whatever identity (but the possibility of the whatever itself being taken up without an identity is a threat the State cannot come to terms with).4

This is the situation in which the mass blockade becomes a privileged activist strategy. Activism takes on characteristics of dispersed organisation based on the absence of any commonality among the activists; the affinity group model isn't just a pragmatic form of organising, but an expression of an anti-Statist politics of unbinding. And this is mirrored, of course, in the blockade itself, privileged not just for any tactical efficiency but because it forms a collective apparatus of enunciation, statements that refuses capital's logic of individualised, linear expression.

And so we see a blockading that isn't just about stopping people getting in or out of the target. The blockade presents itself as an a-mediated representational event, a form of resistance which constitutes itself as its own representation, in and as the gaps and cracks of the corporate media. It isn't about performing for the mass media. It resists the totalising logic of 'the Spectacle', asserting instead the specific and local relations of spectatorship that occur when we undermine the distinctions between speaking and appearing, doing and saying, seeing and being seen. Such relations, relations of dislocation—in their contingency, their destitution, their negation of any identity, and above all in their joy—amount to what Toni Negri calls 'the practice of the inconsistency of the social bond'.5

We've all heard the complaint that we're so alienated we don't even hear language anymore, just its endless reproduction in the service of stale ideas and bad politics. It's true, language is boring, we've heard it all before, but maybe that's not so terrible; maybe it's an opportunity. We can start sidestepping the straight lines of capitalist language, building new expressive ensembles that privilege sharing over consuming, discussion over understanding, the mobile over the static, the communal over the intellectual. Fighting the logic of separation that makes speaking something other than doing, our bodies become media in the sense that 'media' is just the plural of 'medium'. Our bodies become the site of a generalised resistance insofar as they are the site of a not-at-all generalised representation, insofar as they incarnate the terrible, tactical specificity of mediation divorced from any reifying notion of the medium's separation from its objects. This is, as they say, what democracy looks like.

1 Guattari, Soft Subversions:
2 Massumi, A user's guide to capitalism and schizophrenia: 196n.53.
3 Agamben, The Coming Community: 86.
4 Negri quoted in Massumi op. cit.: 196n.53.