Beyond political satire
Tom Lehrer did say that “the awarding of the [Nobel peace] prize to Kissinger made political satire obsolete”. We had to wait for the beginning of the 21st century to see a better show.
It seems that while I was away from my terminal, George Galloway, leader of the Respect Coalition, figurehead of the international anti-war movement, and MP for Bethnal Green & Bow, is taking part in the latest Celebrity Big Brother show. While he is being demolished outside, by the mainstream press, by pariementary attendance and cost revelations, but also (and most amusingly) radical circles, in the show he pretended to be a cat and drank milk out of Countess Rula’s hand (video here — god bless google).
At this point I would love to provide some political critique, or even crack a clever joke. But this situation is such a parody of itself that it has left me speechless.
The price of freedom?
I am a bit tired hearing, after the attacks in London, that the invasion of our civil liberties (in the form of retention of traffic data) is the “price of freedom”. Surelly the true price of freedom, even from the point of view of liberal ideology is to just accept that, in a liberal democracy, there are limits to how easily the state can catch terrorists. At the end of the day the true price of “freedom” is to take the risk of living in such a context, even if the price could be high. As Zizek, points out in “Welcome to the desert of the real” (written a year after 9/11):
What makes life ‘worth living’ is the very excess of life: the awareness that there is something for which one is ready to risk one’s life (we may call this excess ‘freedom’, ‘honour’, ‘dignity’, ‘autonomy’, etc.). Only when we are ready to take this risk we are really alive.
Using the media?
It is quite amazing that after many months of recorded media hysteria or liberal wishy-washyness about the G8 meeting and protests, finally an article depicting the radical side of the movement has broken into the mainstream press. Kay Summer and Adam Jones (both involved in Dissent!) in their comment piece “The first embedded protest “, in the Guardian, explain that the Live 8 “protest” concerts are to protest what embeded journalism is to proper journalism — a parody that serves only the status quo.
Blair and Brown do not want a repeat of Seattle, or Genoa, or any of the other summits that have been accompanied by mass acts of disobedience. They want a stage-managed, benign spectacle, and so they play along with Live 8 and Make Poverty History, creating the world’s first “embedded” mass protest.
This article opens two questions, one of political substance and one about political tactics. The question of substance is to what extent something that looks like protest is by itself a protest. Or in other words what is the substance, the beating heart of protest — beyond the mere actions that protesters perform. This debate is only a slight generalisation, of the “I cannot see the point of marching from A to B type protests” discussion, repeated many times in the anti-war movement.
I would attempt to answer this question: it is a question of who is in control. If at any point an organisation’s hierachy or the state itself is in control of the protest then the protest has effectivelly been already neutralised. If on the other hand decision making structures have been set-up for protester themselves to decide all aspects of the protest it has some liberatory potential. Of course this devialtion is exactly what the state fears, and for this reason, in the UK, it stamps out even minor digressions (i.e. playing Samba in a street without permission) to regain control. Not by coincidance Sarah Young has already spoken about this “control doctrine”, in a different context:
Whenever our protest deviates from what the state has decreed as being acceptable (i.e. writing to MPs or marching from A to B), we inevitably come into contact with the forces of the state.
The second issue concerns the difficult relation of the protest movement with the media. So far we have reclaimed the media, mainly for communication inside our movement. We have also abused the media, by learning how to run stories that are often a bit exagerated or doctored for the audiance. The Guardian article though shows that there might be a possibility to put messages accross in their pure form, without ‘toning down’. Still just one example in 6 months of crap journalism…
Welcome to the airport
What made the school, the hospital, the prison and the factory so potent subjects of study for Foucault was the everyday exposure that people had to them. They were not exceptional places, as one could consider today Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo,and were therefore able to propagate and become models of social control at a massive scale. Only looking at spaces of such ubiquity would lead us to a critique that illuminates the way in which social control is maintained today - along with the values the elites attempt to propagate.
One of the clearest such spaces, that is modeled in the purest way after the values of the elites, yet we are familiar with its ways, is the airport. Sure it has a material/functional nature: to act as a landing, take-off and boarding zone. But a whole network of other unrelated social relations has also been built around it. Its planned nature has made it a fertile ground for experimenting about ‘contemporary models of community’.
The new social control is before all, more of the same: Security requires CCTV, even in countries that do not deploy such technology in the street. Identification is required, planned and random searches can be expected. Recording is of course prohibited! Less obviously it is a deeply private space: there is no public space in it, no commons, no corner where anyone has the ‘right’ to be in. Each spot you might sit is owned, and exploited by the usual corporate suspects — there is no small business in the airport; it is all multinational. Instead of a town developing around it, like ports in the past, outside it there is a human desert, inside it only franchises.
Given all this its rather unremarkable feature is the lack of any sort of community. Thousands of people go through it every day, and most of them will, by design, never speak to each other — yet they are crammed into queues, waiting halls and plane seats much closer than in many other environments. Why? Do you ever need anyone else in the airport? No - you can go through it without actually talking to anyone, show tickets, show passport, remove coat and shoes, give pass, board, … you are part of a process not life. And you are fully consenting! The need to ask for your way, or help by a bystander would be seen as a sign of disorganization.
Finally, and to some extent because of the above, the airport is a space where social inequalities are celebrated. Under the guise of social efficiency people are sorted into first, second, economy class. Those that can afford it can skip security and hassle, others recognize that it is after all meant for them: plutocracy rules and it is not ashamed of it! So lets stop having nightmares about nuclear holocausts, concentration camps, coal mines. We have to just close our eyes and picture the whole world run on the principles of an airport.