through europe

This is where I was. Images taken not for their image; the file data from walking around the West Bank in 2012, a month before Pillar of Smoke started in Gaza, of spending weeks lying on my back looking at planes under the Jordan flight path, stupidly thinking they were drones. Or getting up at 5 in the morning to get a bus somewhere to go for a walk, either with people or without people. Of going to 5^th Century AD Greek Orthodox monasteries that ISIS would be burning today if they were there. Of badly avoiding being a tourist or NGO worker in one place and an interloping gentile in the other. Of not wanting to take any sense of identity with me, either as a colonial and especially as a privileged artist/ hired gun.

 

Images taken because of I have always distrusted the image and not because of the cultural value in critiquing the occupation of Palestine, or the cultural value in discussing remote controlled surveillance and targeted assassinations. Distrusting an image is one of the few rights that I have as a person and it is both my responsibility and job when I have to call myself an artist. Those positions are not immutable or fixed, and neither, I - or my emotions - are fixed. I wish I could be a better, more objective conceptual artist who is coolly detached from the shit of the world but that would be a lie. What is underneath the surface of an image or embedded into it is a part-rejection and a part-suspension of things, it started by rejecting the social pandemic of the question or assumption that in an image: quantity of labour equals quality of an argument. The social/ cultural obsession with production, labour, sheen and veneer... Now, the labour is in the data of an image.

 

Der Arbeiter

 

In 1932, Ernst Junger published the first edition of Der Arbeiter (The Worker), one of the most penetrating and controversial investigations of modernity to have appeared during the 20th century. At that time, Junger – later to become an anarchist – was one of the most prominent voices of the young German national-bolshevik movement, and one of the sources of inspiration for Adolf Hitler’s party. Decorated as a hero after WWI, Junger wrote Der Arbeiter both as a description of a future world in which the ‘form’ of the Worker (a new human ‘type’ which expresses itself through ‘technic’) would take dominion over the world, and as an invitation to take part to the ‘total mobilization’ operated by the new regime of ‘total work’.

Mixing a crystalline prose with ante litteram cyberpunk visions, Der Arbeiter reads today as a bleak premonition of the world that is unfolding in front of our eyes. Its prediction of the rise of a ‘new race of the Worker’, transcending nationality and ethnicity, finds its realisation in the human landscape of today’s metropolises. Its description of a future ‘cult’ of work - so deep as to invade every aspect of the daily, social or personal, rational or emotional life – loses its sci-fi tone if applied to the world we live in. Junger’s vision of a world ‘totally mobilised’ by work appears to have found a much greater application within contemporary capitalism, than it ever did during the brief experience of national-socialist Germany. It might not be a coincidence that Heidegger’s text The Question Concerning Technology – deeply inspired by the book of his friend Junger – only appeared in 1949, under the dawning light of the new world order.

 

Resistance

Humans seem to be inescapably bound to a position of double pressure. On the one hand, they are constricted by the limits of the mortality of their flesh, and by the finitude of the resources which surround them. On the other, they endure the weight of a system of abstract thoughts which, as well as ‘lifting’ them above the mortal world, also threatens them with sets of impossible demands. It is within this structure, I believe, that we should understand the meaning and practice of resistance.

At the same time stuck and enhanced by these two invisible neighbors, human life unfolds as constant negotiation between them. In its struggle to resist the pressure of mortality, and in their quest for what we could define synthetically as ‘health’, humans employ their ability for abstract thought. This is what is at heart, for example, of the development of science, technology, art and philosophy, but also, and most importantly, of politics.  Perhaps it is politics, understood as the management of all available resources with the aim of enabling the enjoyment of life, above any other human practice, that constitutes our way of resisting the uncanny proximity of death.

Memories.

 

On May 4, 2009, a few months before Barack Obama won his Nobel Peace Prize, a B-1 supersonic bomber dropped a 2,000 pound missile on the tiny peasant village of Granai, in Southern Afghanistan. About 140 people, mostly women and children, were torn to shreds and scattered in a range of hundreds of feet.

 

The Pentagon first tried to cover up what happened. But echoes of the massacre began to circulate among the foreign press, and the Army accused the Taliban of having used civilians as shields. The Afghan people reacted: a caravansary with the bodies of the victims stacked up on carts made its way to Kabul, with thousands of demonstrators shouting against the US occupants. The Pentagon then admitted that a few dozens of combatants and a few innocent people were killed. Finally, after a few weeks, almost no one outside of Afghanistan was still talking about Granai.

 

Whenever pro-intervention liberals excoriate me for ignoring what Syrians ask, as long as it furthers my political goals, I say they’re absolutely right. In a certain sense, I am less sympathetic to the Syrian population – especially when it’s the orientalist kind of sympathy – than I am ideologically motivated against USA and the NATO.

 

And why should it be otherwise? Aren’t we struggling against the Industrial-Military complex, against the politics of drones, against a pseudo-feminist Kissinger like Hillary Clinton? This must be first of all our struggle, our own interest, regardless of what other communities think or say. Whatever 'call for justice' invokes the trigger-happy arm of the State, the supersonic precision bombers of the Empire, the death penalty for the offender, we should reject it without any bogus sense of guilt.