On Monday evening, Simon Stephens‘ Sea Wall premiered at the Bush Theatre in West London. Consisting of a thirty minute monologue by actor Andrew Scott, the play works perfectly in the theatre’s intimate setting. Scott’s performance was adroitly adapted to the theatre’s location in which a steady stream of traffic stage left and rumbling overground trains stage right inevitably compete with the performer for the audience’s attention.

It is difficult to say much about the contents of the play without giving too much away, but the notion of the sea wall – what I think is more properly referred to as the shelf break, the area where the continental shelf meets the continental rise and the sea rapidly becomes considerably deeper – has a tremendous metaphorical value.  One thinks that life moves along gradually, with relative smooth transitions between phases, but occasionally there are steep, dramatic drops that plunge you into the dark icy depths.

Sea Wall will be at the Bush Theatre until October 17th. Tickets can be bought at the theatre’s website.

We always send it to the wrong address
And now that buoys even our most impersonal days. Everyone is beautiful!
And then almost everyone. C’est cool-ça, the shift that enchants the world
Or at least the afternoon of the world before it’s off
To meet Chris and all at glimmering Colleen’s
Arriving southside early and so twenty min for Lyn’s The Fatalist
Amidst the superlit video store on the corner. It’s funnier
In French: superlit but not much else. One is haunted
By the suspicion that one is in a society
Composed of people one will never meet for example
The Society That Thinks About Someone Named Anne-Lise
Occasionally. So I walk back around and up
The stairs and Chris puts on either/or. Elliott Smith 20th Cen. American
Is nonetheless a star in the constellation
Our Romanticism and we have been hanging out
A lot there recently. A keener melancholy
About the music for a week or two afterward may be obvious
But something has to be done with the excess flowering inside death
Or is it just apotropaic? We’ll see. The most awful thing
About the phrase “Every Germinal must have its Thermidor”
Is that one never gets to say so anymore
And really mean it. We lie down in categories
And wake up in concepts but must there be so much of the day spent
Tracking stray remarks and others’ hearts
And maintaining a casual balance between OxyContin and “poetic prose”
So new sensations emerge? Meanwhile but I am happy
To see you! It’s enough but not of anything.

This poem is taken from Joshua Clover’s book The Totality for Kids (University of California Press, 2006). He is also is the author of Madonna anno domini (1997) and the book of film theory The Matrix (2005), as well as Associate Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, Davis. “Poem” was taken from the publisher’s website.

The following text is the introduction to The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection, published this month by Semiotext(e) and available online as a pdf. The book was originally published in France following the riots in the Parisian suburbs, and across Europe, in 2005.  Almost two months ago we posted an incredible clip of Glenn Beck of Fox News attacking this “dangerous book”.

Everyone agrees. It’s about to explode. It is acknowledged, with a serious and self-important look, in the corridors of the Assembly, just as yesterday it was repeated in the cafes. There is a certain pleasure in calculating the risks. Already, we are presented with a detailed menu of preventive measures for securing the territory. The New Years festivities take a decisive turn—”Next year there’ll be no oysters, enjoy them while you can!” To prevent the celebrations from being totally eclipsed by the traditional disorder, 36,000 cops and 16 helicopters are rushed out by Alliot-Marie[1]—the same clown who, during the high school demonstrations in December, tremulously watched for the slightest sign of a Greek contamination, readying the police apparatus just in case. We can discern more clearly every day, beneath the reassuring drone, the noise of preparations for open war. It’s impossible to ignore its cold and pragmatic implementation, no longer even bothering to present itself as an operation of pacification.

The newspapers conscientiously draw up the list of causes for die sudden disquiet. There is the financial crisis, of course, with its booming unemployment, its share of hopelessness and of social plans, its Kerviel and Madoff scandals. There is the failure of the educational system, its dwindling production of workers and citizens, even with the children of the middle class as its raw material. There is the existence of a youth to which no political representation corresponds, a youth good for nothing but destroying the free bicycles that society so conscientiously put at their disposal.  

None of these worrisome subjects should appear insurmountable in an era whose predominant mode of government is precisely the management of crises. Unless we consider that what power is confronting is neither just another crisis, nor just a succession of chronic problems, of more or less anticipated disturbances, but a singular peril: that a form of conflict has emerged, and positions have been taken up, that are no longer manageable.

Those who everywhere make up this peril have to ask themselves more than the trifling questions about causes, or the probabilities of inevitable movements and confrontations. They need to ask how, for instance, does the Greek chaos resonate in the French situation? An uprising here cannot be the simple transposition of what happened over there. Global civil war still has its local specificities. In France a situation of generalized rioting would provoke an explosion of another tenor.

The Greek rioters are faced with a weak state, while being able to take advantage of a strong popularity. One must not forget that it was against the Regime of the Colonels that, only thirty years ago, democracy reconstituted itself on the basis of a practice of political violence. This violence, whose memory is not so distant, still seems intuitive to most Greeks. Even the leaders of the socialist party have thrown a molotov or two in their youth. Yet classical politics is equipped with variants diat know very well how to accommodate these practices and to extend their ideological rubbish to the very heart of the riot. If the Greek battle wasn’t decided, and put down, in the streets— die police being visibly outflanked there—it’s because its neutralization was played out elsewhere. There is nothing more draining, nothing more fatal, than this classical politics, with its dried up rituals, its thinking without thought, its litde closed world.

In France, our most exalted socialist bureaucrats have never been anything other than shriveled husks filling up the halls of the Assembly. Here everything conspires to annihilate even the slightest form of political intensity. Which means that it is always possible to oppose the citizen to the delinquent in a quasi-linguistic operation that goes hand in hand with quasi-military operations. The riots of November 2005 and, in a different context, the social movements in the autumn of 2007, have already provided several precedents. The image of right wing students in Nanterre applauding as the police expelled their classmates offers a small glimpse of what the future holds in store. It goes without saying that the attachment of the French to the state—the guarantor of universal values, the last rampart against the disaster—is a pathology that is difficult to undo. It’s above all a fiction that no longer knows how to carry on. Our governors themselves increasingly consider it as a useless encumbrance because they, at least, take the conflict for what it is— militarily. They have no complex about sending in elite antiterrorist units to subdue riots, or to liberate a recycling center occupied by its workers. As the welfare state collapses, we see the emergence of a brute conflict between those who desire order and those who don’t. Everything that French politics has been able to deactivate is in the process of unleashing itself. It will never be able to process all that it has repressed. In the advanced degree of social decomposition, we can count on the coming movement to find the necessary breath of nihilism. Which will not mean that it won’t be exposed to other limits.

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. An 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 own vibrations, always taking on more density. To the point that any return to normal is no longer desirable or even imaginable.

When we speak of Empire we name the mechanisms of power that preventively and surgically stifle any revolutionary potential in a situation. In this sense, Empire is not an enemy that confronts us head-on. It is a rhythm that imposes itself, a way of dispensing and dispersing reality. Less an order of the world than its sad, heavy and militaristic liquidation.

What we mean by the party of insurgents is the sketching out of a completely othercomposition, an other side of reality, which from Greece to the French banlieues[2] is seeking its consistency.

It is now publicly understood that crisis situations are so many opportunities for the restructuring of domination. This is why Sarkozy can announce, without seeming to lie too much, that the financial crisis is “the end of a world,” and that 2009 will see France enter a new era. This charade of an economic crisis is supposed to be a novelty: we are supposed to be in the dawn of a new epoch where we will all join together in fighting inequality and global warming. But for our generation—which was born in the crisis and has known nothing but economic, financial, social and ecological crisis—this is rather difficult to accept. They won’t fool us again, with another round of “Now we start all over again” and “It’s just a question of tightening our belts for a little while.” To tell the truth, the disastrous unemployment figures no longer arouse any feeling in us. Crisis is a means of governing. In a world that seems to hold together only through the infinite management of its own collapse.

What this war is being fought over is not various ways of managing society, but irreducible and irreconcilable ideas of happiness and their worlds. We know it, and so do the powers that be. The militant remnants that observe us—always more numerous, always more identifiable—are tearing out their hair trying to fit us into litde compartments in their little heads. They hold out their arms to us the better to suffocate us, with their failures, their paralysis, their stupid problematics. From elections to “transitions,” militants will never be anything other than that which distances us, each time a little farther, from the possibility of communism. Luckily we will accommodate neither treason nor deception for much longer.

The past has given us far too many bad answers for us not to see that the mistakes were in the questions themselves. There is no need to choose between the fetishism of spontaneity and organizational control; between the “come one, come all” of activist networks and the discipline of hierarchy; between acting desperately now and waiting desperately for later; between bracketing that which is to be lived and experimented in the name of a paradise that seems more and more like a hell the longer it is put off, and repeating, with a corpse-filled mouth, that planting carrots is enough to dispel this nightmare.

Organizations are obstacles to organizing ourselves.

In truth, diere is no gap between what we are, what we do, and what we are becoming. Organizations— political or labor, fascist or anarchist—always begin by separating, practically, these aspects of existence. It’s then easy for them to present their idiotic formalism as the sole remedy to this separation. To organize is not to give a structure to weakness. It is above all to form bonds—bonds that are by no means neutral—terrible bonds. The degree of organization is measured by the intensity of sharing—material andspiritual.

From now on, to materially organize for survival is to materially organize for attack. Everywhere, a new idea of communism is to be elaborated. In the shadows of bar rooms, in print shops, squats, farms, occupied gymnasiums, new complicities are to be born. These precious connivances must not be refused the necessary means for the deployment of their forces.

Here lies the truly revolutionary potentiality of the present. The increasingly frequent skirmishes have this formidable quality: that they are always an occasion for complicities of this type, sometimes ephemeral, but sometimes also unbetrayable. When a few thousand young people find the determination to assail this world, you’d have to be as stupid as a cop to seek out a financial trail, a leader, or a snitch.

Two centuries of capitalism and market nihilism have brought us to the most extreme alienations—from our selves, from others, from worlds. The fiction of the individual has decomposed at the same speed that it was becoming real. Children of the metropolis, we offer this wager: that it’s in the most profound deprivation of existence, perpetually stifled, perpetually conjured away, that the possibility of communism resides.

When all is said and done, it’s with an entire anthropology that we are at war. With the very idea of man.

Communism then, as presupposition and as experiment. Sharing of a sensibility andelaboration of sharing. The uncovering of what is common and the building of a force. Communism as the matrix of a meticulous, audacious assault on domination. As a call and as a name for all worlds resisting imperial pacification, all solidarities irreducible to the reign of commodities, all friendships assuming the necessities of war. COMMUNISM. We know it’s a term to be used with caution. Not because, in die great parade of words, it may no longer be very fashionable. But because our worst enemies have used it, and continue to do so. We insist. Certain words are like battlegrounds: their meaning, revolutionary or reactionary, is a victory, to be torn from the jaws of struggle.

Deserting classical politics means facing up to war, which is also situated on the terrain of language. Or rather, in the way that words, gestures and life are inseparably linked. If one puts so much effort into imprisoning as terrorists a few young communists who are supposed to have participated in publishing The Coming Insurrection, it is not because of a “thought crime,” but rather because they might embody a certain consistency between acts and thought. Something which is rarely treated with leniency.

What these people are accused of is not to have written a book, nor even to have physically attacked the sacrosanct flows that irrigate the metropolis. It’s that they might possibly have confronted these flows with the density of a political thought and position. That an act could have made sense according to another consistency of the world than the deserted one of Empire. Anti-terrorism claims to attack the possible future of a “criminal association.” But what is really being attacked is the future of the situation. The possibility that behind every grocer a few bad intentions are hiding, and behind every thought, the acts that it calls for. The possibility expressed by an idea of politics—anonymous but welcoming, contagious and uncontrollable—which cannot be relegated to the storeroom of freedom of expression.

There remains scarcely any doubt that youth will be the first to savagely confront power. These last few years, from the riots of Spring 2001 in Algeria to those of December 2008 in Greece, are nothing but a series of warning signs in this regard. Those who 30 or 40 years ago revolted against their parents will not hesitate to reduce this to a conflict between generations, if not to a predictable symptom of adolescence.

The only future of a “generation” is to be the preceding one. On a route that leads inevitably to the cemetery.

Tradition would have it that everything begins with a “social movement.” Especially at a moment when the left, which has still not finished decomposing, hypocritically tries to regain its credibility in the streets. Except that in the streets it no longer has a monopoly. Just look at how, with each new mobilization of high school students—as with everything the left still dares to support—a rift continually widens between their whining demands and the level of violence and determination of the movement.

From this rift we must make a trench.

If we see a succession of movements hurrying one after the other, without leaving anything visible behind them, it must nonetheless be admitted that something persists. A powder trail links what in each event has not let itself be captured by the absurd temporality of the withdrawal of a new law, or some other pretext. In fits and starts, and in its own rhythm, we are seeing something like a force take shape. A force that does not serve its time but imposes it, silently.

It is no longer a matter of foretelling the collapse or depicting the possibilities of joy. Whether it comes sooner or later, the point is to prepare for it. It’s not a question of providing a schema for what an insurrection should be, but of taking the possibility of an uprising for what it never should have ceased being: a vital impulse of youth as much as a popular wisdom. If one knows how to move, the absence of a schema is not an obstacle but an opportunity. For the insurgents, it is the sole space that can guarantee the essential: keeping the initiative. What remains to be created, to be tended as one tends a fire, is a certain outlook, a certain tactical fever, which once it has emerged, even now, reveals itself as determinant—and a constant source of determination. Already certain questions have been revived that only yesterday may have seemed grotesque or outmoded; they need to be seized upon, not in order to respond to them definitively, but to make them live. Having posed them anew is not the least of the Greek uprising’s virtues:

How does a situation of generalized rioting become an insurrectionary situation? What to do once the streets have been taken, once the police have been soundly defeated there? Do the parliaments still deserve to be attacked? What is the practical meaning of deposing power locally? How do we decide? How do we subsist?

How do we find each other?

— Invisible Committee, January 2009

[2] Banlieue—French ghettoes, usually located in the suburban periphery.

After finishing Chris Petit’s wonderfully dark 1993 novel Robinson – as wet, grim, and seedy depiction of London as I’ve come across – in which the title character attempts to make “the Citizin Kane of porno movies, I’ve begun to try to think of other works of fiction in which the author attempts to imagine an experimental cinema unlike anything actually existing, but the only two novels that come to mind are William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and Paul Auster’s Book of Illusions. 

I read the following montage passage from Robinson, in which the book’s narrator searches through tapes of footage for the title character’s film, a dozen times:

I saw a woman swinging out her right arm.  William Blake walking down Poland Street, shadowed by a dog.  The gunmen waiting on the grassy knoll. I saw all the doors in my life (save those with her). Blind Borges wrote: I saw a tattered labyrinth (it was London). I saw myself as a child standing at a window and the shadow of my mother, her voice saying, ‘Come away now’; Cookie and the sly look of the wild, feral girl. A moving walkway at Gatwick airport; tank manoeuvres in the desert. I saw the children I never had; Marlene Dietrich telling Orson Welles, ‘Your future’s all used up.’ Traffic lights changing in empty streets. Lee Marvin walking through LAX, his footsteps like gunshots. I watched a game show host position his guests on the camera mark. A Texaco station on a road out of Felixstowe, overhead a jet plane on its penultimate flight before crashing. I saw Germaine Greer Fuck Warren Beatty; Lotte and Iain on the sofa; a first edition of For Love and Hunger. I saw Princess Diana’s sideways look to her husband on her wedding night. Broken glass on the hard shoulder, train tracks running east to Poland. I saw a photograph of Rainer Werner Fassbinder directing Veronica Voss, watched George Best send a goalkeeper the wrong way. In the wake of a power cruiser, children run on Hampstead Heath. Test crash footage of wired-up dummies in cars. Brendan Behan drunk and roaring, ‘At least I don’t fuck my own dogs.’ The wall against which the Ceausescus were shot. Weeds on a building site; the rolling credits of a TV comedy (the last one); the slap of the Thames against London Bridge. Cars cruise high above the narrative. The pavement outside the Magdala Tavern. Robinson in Dresden. Dirk Bogarde shopping alone. A dropped glove. The only person not laughing in an audience. A tie my father wore. Engine oil stains and painted white lines on concrete. A line of poplars on Bredon Hill. A woman hoovers in a tower block. Shop dummies float in the Grand Caledonian canal. The hum of an empty refrigerator. Ruth Ellis’s botched hanging, the one that Pierrepoint wouldn’t talk about. A smile of invitation never followed up. A politician lying. Tweezers on a dressing table. I saw the false entries in Donald Crowhurst’s log. A line from a song: Much older now, with hat on, drinking wine. The white chalked outline of a body once mine on a pavement, from on high the chalk blurring in the rain.

They portray us as DUDS, and that is what we are.

We are nothing, we mean it, NOTHING AT ALL, and we intend to be of NO USE.

“Respectable people” harp on: ”WORK! BUCK UP! SUCCEED!”  SUCCEED IN GETTING WHERE? IN DOING WHAT? IN WHAT CONDITION?

Our motto: IN ORDER TO ARRIVE, ABOVE ALL, DO NOT LEAVE.

All you, INCAPABLE, USELESS, IDLE, RAGGEDY BARFLIES!

Come and acknowledge one another and assert yourselves at the

GRAND MEETING OF FAILURES

to be held at the House of Learned Societies

8 Rue Serpente, Paris 5

15 March 1950. 8:15 p.m.

The following will discuss “The Merits of Impotence”:

Serge BERNA: left-wing syphilitic

Maurice-Paul COMTE: individual

Jacques PATRY: former Dominican

A free buffet will be served along with Madeleine AUERBACH.

Evening dress required!

Taken from Jean-Michel Mension’s The Tribe, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, City Lights Books, 2001.

“For anyone not already hardened by the emptiness of life, there is in this world, which seems to have at its disposal limitless resources, a confusion remedied only by a kind of lazily accepted general imbecility. Even poverty seems at the very least less incurable than this stupid distress. A beggar whose broken voice cries out a song one can barely hear in the rear of a courtyard seems at times to have lost less in the game of life than the human matter arranged in buses and trains during rush hour…. The opium of the people in the present world is perhaps not so much religion as it is accepted boredom. Such a world is at the mercy, it must be known, of those who provide at least the semblance of an escape from boredom. Human life aspires to the passions, and again encounters its exigencies.’ – Georges Bataille

Søren Keirkegaard claimed that “Boredom is the root of all evil.” Here though, boredom, or perhaps the fight against boredom, is framed as the generator of invention. If boredom is indeed evil, it is to be struggled through and grappled with, not simply sidestepped or repressed. If their passion had been destroyed momentarily and boredom temporarily triumphed, it is here reborn in the passion for destruction.

The creators of ‘Rube Goldberg Nutshot’ attempt to recapture the legacy of Fischli & Weiss’ video after its much-lauded corporate recuperation by Honda a few years back (Fischli & Weiss had threatened legal action). Moreover, against Honda, it can be read as a neo-luddic critique of the mechanization of labor and everyday life, the lesson being that no matter how creatively one utilizes machinic technology, it always ultimately de-vitalizes its human appendage. The Honda ad ends with a smarmy corporate voice exclaiming, ‘Isn’t it nice when things just work.’ The message of ‘Rube Goldberg Nutshot’ is clear: not always.

The dull thud and muted groans of the contraption’s victim echo Johnny Rotten’s iconoclastic cackle at the beginning of “Anarchy in the UK” or perhaps more appropriately the laugh of Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) when beaten into a bloody pulp by the gangster in Fight Club.  This has nothing to do with laughter per se as what is striking about the video is that no one really laughs, there is just awkward coughing and someone advising, “Put [the fire] out.”  Instead of the machismo of the testicle thwacking torture scene from Casino Royale, the video feels more masochistic and one can imagine all of the participants in the contraption’s creation lining up to be struck, one after another.

Ultimately, however, beyond these themes of subjective destitution, for anyone not already hardened by the emptiness of life, ‘Rube Goldberg Nutshot’ is a paean to creativity and innovation – the embodiment of what idle hands can produce.

The above quote is taken from Georges Bataille’s “Popular Front in the Streets”, Visions of Excess, University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

On Wednesday Fox New’s Glenn Beck launched into a wonderful tirade against The Coming Insurrectionby the anonymous Invisible Committee, a “dangerous book” about to be published in English by Semiotext(e)/MIT Press.  Originally published in French in 2007, it has since been used as a crucial piece of evidence against the so-called Tarnac 9 in a controversial anti-terrorism trial in France, with the accused having received support from a myriad of intellectuals including Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben (whose work, particularly The Coming Community, has been influential for the group), and more.  Over a month before the book is actually published, an unauthorized launch at the Union Square Barnes & Noble a few weeks ago came to the attention of the NY Times.

Europe is on the brink of social collapse and/or revolution while the Japanese are forming unions!  While Beck was trying to work his viewers into a frenzy over the growing danger of the ultra-left, his rant was an incredible advertisement for the book, which I immediately download as a pdf here.  As Savonarola at the Institute for Conjectural Research put it to me in an email: “As Neocons go dada, detourning the detourners – my mind is blown. Is Glenn Beck part of some kind of situationist ‘sleeper cell’?”

I haven’t gotten a chance to read the actual book yet, but Alberto Toscano’s analysis and critique from the journal Radical Philosophy, which also provides a history of the court case, is highly recommended.

In the late 1970s a group of people living in the borough of Hackney in East London began building a structure on a derelict lot in their neighborhood and continued building until this January. The story of the project’s origins are shrouded in mystery. What is known is that because the residents couldn’t decide on what they wanted to build, they made three rules. The first was that not only would they build without any plan or blueprint, they would not discuss the direction of the project at all. Second, when they were on the building site, no one was allowed to speak. Third, the building would never be completed in that anyone at any point could decide to take it in a new direction. So the structure was built for thirty years until last autumn when the council sold the land to a developer who tore it down in January.

The structure is occasionally the subject, occasionally the inspiration for an ongoing project, The Rest is Silence, by the London-based artist Emanuel Almborg. Almborg began by photographing the structure in the months prior to its destruction and has been compiling an archive of sorts of its history. His project is soon set to culminate in Sweden, but he is being as coy as to what this will entail as the anonymous builders of the structure in Hackney.

When did you first come across the structure?

I’ve lived in Dalston and Stoke Newington for the past few years and I used to pass the structure on my bicycle every once in a while. I had stopped and taken photographs one night but I didn’t know what it really was though until I read about it in an unusual article in the Hackney Gazette riding on the 149 bus one day.

I’ve lived in East London for several years and have never heard anyone even mention this. Why do you think it has remained outside of the London art world for so long?

Not many people know about it. It is unusual how little attention this project has received, particularly when someone like Banksy was receiving so much attention. You’d at least have expected it to have been covered by Iain Sinclair on have entered the annals of Hackney mythology together with the Mole Man or whatever. Why this is I couldn’t really say. I suppose there are people in France who have never heard of Postman Cheval’s Palais Idéal, and urban planners and sociologists in the States who have never seen The Wire. At the same time I don’t want to give the impression that no one knew about the structure. Many people in the neighborhood used it as a playground or even enjoyed it as an artwork, perhaps without knowing the full story behind it.

Is the ongoing process of gentrification that’s taking place in Hackney at the moment relevant to the project?

The latest wave of gentrification is largely responsible for the structure being torn down. There are of course models from the past of residents taking over a piece of derelict land and turning into a proper park, People’s Park in Berkley, California being perhaps the most well known example, but it often takes a degree of political mobilization and organization that was probably beyond the residents at the time. That being said, a project like this could also be incorporated into the gentrification process – “luxury flats with a direct view of outsider art” – but it would at the very least prevent the space from becoming condos or a Tesco or whatever.

Is the location of the structure important to you at all or would it be equally interesting anywhere?

The project would inevitably be different if it was realized on an island in Stockholm’s archipelago instead of a densely populated and incredibly diverse, urban area like Hackney, but I don’t know if I would consider it less interesting. On a very basic level, what I find inspiring about the project is that a group of people, largely strangers, came together to continually build this structure without a blueprint or objective goal. The space it creates is inevitable heterotopic, to borrow a concept from Foucault. It is a counter-site, a place freed from the rationality of the market and any kind of instrumentality, a pure means without a predetermined or predictable end.

What are your main concerns in this project?

I think part of my initial fascination with the structure was the fact that I knew so little about it. Like I said, it’s the kind of thing you would expect to have been photographed and written about endlessly, and that it remained obscure for so long is extraordinary. My intention was never to do an exposé on the construction or to decipher the participants’ motivations. I’m not just documenting the structure: its history, creation, and demolition. I wanted to capture the mystery that always cloaked the structure for me: its stillness and its silence. I have never seen anyone actually working at the site so at times the structure has felt like an ancient ruin left by a distant civilization.

Why do you think they made the rule about silence? Was it just to prevent squabbling or was their rationale more profound?

When I mention the project to people it is usually the silence that people are most curious about: usually the extent to which this rule was enforced and what the exceptions might be. Could they use sign language or make gestures to each other? What if someone hammered their finger, could they scream? Didn’t they inevitably discuss it with fellow builders if they ran into each other on the bus or at the pub? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions. The idea of working in silence seems to connote a kind of asceticism (vows of silence, etc.), but I’m not sure how much it was simply a practical question in the project’s early days.

Do you see the project as a social experiment or a sculpture or both?

It is certainly a social experiment in that it is, as far as I know, a completely novel method of constructing something collectively. Occasionally I see it as sculpture and sometimes more as architecture (in that it could be used as a jungle gym, or as a shelter), if that is a meaningful distinction. Of course since the architects/sculptures/carpenters decided not to speak about it (at least as far as I know), their intentions, or what they’ve accomplished and how they feel about it, it is difficult to say what exactly the results of this experiment have been.

Why do you think it was built?

I wouldn’t want to speculate. A large number of people took part in its construction over decades and I’m sure their motivations varied considerably. The participants’ agreement not to speak about the project prevented any kind of consensus from emerging and I don’t feel as though it’s my place to impose a justification or a rationale for the project. This is perhaps something for the viewer to ponder.

Luke Myer and Andrew Neel’s New World Order opened at New York’s Cinema Village on Friday.  The film follows various so-called ‘conspiracy theorists’ and activists as they pass out flyers outside Ground Zero, cover a Bilderberg Group meeting in Istanbul, and prepare for the imminent collapse of American Civilization in Idaho.  Without narration, New World Order allows the theorists and activists to speak for themselves, for better or for worse, and never attempts to debunk or counter their claims.  The result is disappointing. 

Part of the reason why the film is so underwhelming is that the filmmakers make the choice to not pass judgment, yet simply by grouping these individuals together they affectively classify them as conspiracy theorists, albeit in different shades.  As far as I can tell, there is no real thread linking the film’s subjects other than that most would consider them conspiracy theorists, as one doesn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to talk about the emergence of a New World Order – the term’s recent popularity come from a George Bush Sr speech in 1991 following the first Gulf War. The film attempts to humanize its subjects but its participants are essentially labeled cranks by association.  The result feels hypocritical and it would have been better if they took their subjects seriously enough to engage them in debate or juxtapose their pronouncements and arguments with those of equally passionate, and sometimes no less bizarre, mainstream commentators. 

Coming to a definition of ‘conspiracy theory’ is difficult.  The dictionary definition is: ‘1. a theory that explains an event as being the result of a plot by a covert group or organization; a belief that a particular unexplained event was caused by such a group. 2. the idea that many important political events or economic and social trends are the products of secret plots that are largely unknown to the general public.’ The first definition is neutral and could be used to characterize both something like the official 9.11 Commission Report (19 hijackers conspired with Bin Laden) and someone who thinks the events were orchestrated by Cheney from the White House.  The second definition is not really broad enough to cover the various theorists in New World Order.  Michael Barkun, author of A Culture of Conspiracy, claims that most conspiracy theory has three main principles: nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, and everything in connected.  He also differentiates between three types of conspiracy theory.  Event conspiracies, which seek to explain a single event by positing a conspiracy of some sort (JFK, 9.11); systemic conspiracies, which try to explain a series of important events by identify a certain group behind the scenes pulling the strings (Bilderberg, Jews, Masons); and super conspiracies, which see certain, sometimes shifting, organizations or cabals to be molding the development of history over a considerable period of time (Illuminati, reptilian humanoids). 

New World Order stars exponents of at least the first two of Barkun’s types.  Mike Edgarton, a 9.11 skeptic from Florida states in the film that he doesn’t care who shot JFK or whether or not NASA astronauts walked on the moon, but is adamant that 9.11 was an inside job. Timuçin Leflef (writer and director of the “cult classic” A.D) and Big Jim Tucker both focus on the Bilderberg Group’s control over recent history.  While some of New World Order’s participants may very well believe in super conspiracies, it is never revealed.  Alex Jones seems to come the closest as one gets the impression that there aren’t many theories of conspiracy he doesn’t buy into (or perhaps sell).

Alex Jones is the dominant presence in New World Order and is perhaps the biggest celebrity of the so-called ‘lunatic fringe.’  He has featured in two Richard Linklater films and through his radio show and Prison Planet and Infowars websites and films, sells books and dvds on everything from how Obama is here ‘to con the American people into accepting global slavery’ to the sex gods worshiped by the Illuminati. Alex Jones describes himself as a paleoconservative and wears a Ron Paul shirt for large portions of the film.  One of the highlights of the documentary is a single shot close up on Jones during his radio show where he does his Officer Jackboot routine to an audibly uncomfortable caller for what feels like three minutes. 

One of the most frustrating aspects of New World Order is that while it certainly achieves its goal of getting the audience to listen to many theorists that most people would dismiss outright, it never deals with many of the most pertinent questions surrounding conspiracy theory. Each participant is asked how they came to dedicate such a large portion of their lives to exposing power, but other than an espousal of a vague will to knowledge generated by a certain traumatic moment of awakening – for Alex Jones it was Waco, for Jack McLamb it was Ruby Ridge, while for others it was their encounter with alternate explanations for the 9.11 attacks like Loose Change – New World Order provides little insight into the origins of these activists and theorists’ positions. 

Christopher Hitchens has claimed that “Conspiracy theory becomes an ailment of democracy.  It is the white noise which moves in to fill the vacuity of the official version.  To blame the theorists is therefore to look at only half the story, and sometimes even less.” Conspiracy theory is here not only associated with the vacuity of the public sphere or the distance of political elites from ‘ordinary’ citzens, but the rise in secrecy in all branches of life: as secrecy multiplies so does the fear of conspiracy. While conspiracy theory can obviously be found everywhere, conspiracy theory theorist Peter Knight theorizes that it can perhaps be felt stronger in the US because of American liberalism’s obsession with rugged individual agency and the fear of ‘big government’ and the state in general. I would suggest that it also has to do with the country’s size (both in terms of population and geography) and great disparities of wealth and power.

None of this is covered, never mind elucidated, by New World Order.  Furthermore, very little of the footage cannot be found elsewhere.  These activists are media savvy and a simple youtube search will reveal numerous instances of them saying more or less exactly what they say in the film.  Jon Ronson’s Secret Rulers of the World series on Channel 4 in England met with many of the same theorists (Alex Jones, Jim Tucker) and engaged them with considerable more nuance and humor (the episode David Icke: The Lizards and the Jews, for example, covered the links between conspiracy theory and anti-Semitism while also documenting what Jack Bratich has called ‘conspiracy panics’ was particularly excellent).  Ronson and Alex Jones, both with their own sets of film crews, tried to infiltrate the infamous Bohemian Grove gathering outside of San Francisco and the watching their respective programs is extraordinary.

Conspiracy theory is getting increased coverage as it gains more adherents (or vice versa) and as up to 36% of Americans believing in some government involvement in the 9.11 attacks, it is certainly no longer confined to the absolute margins.  As such, it deserves more seriously treatment than it gets in New World Order.  The trend of books, magazines, and television shows dedicated to debunking various conspiracy theories is probably a good thing, but much more has to be done to understand the attractiveness of these theories, their relation to scholarly standards of research (which is more complex than most people allow), and how one can balance a perspective that allows for the existence of really existing conspiracies within a larger systemic understanding. 

I just found out that Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo opened in New York on Friday and since it probably won’t be out for long I’m rushing this post.  I’m not familiar with Sorrentino’s earlier work and I saw the film too long ago to review it properly.  This is intended as more of a primer of sorts that introduces some of the background that made the film so fascinating for me.

Il Divo’s working title was ‘Untitled Giulio Andreotti Biopic’ and it’s full Italian title ‘Il Divo: La straordinaria vita di Giulio Andreotti’.  Andreotti has been one of the most dominant figures in post-war Italian politics, prime minister and head of the Christian Democratic Party on multiple occasions, and is still politically active at the age of ninety.  He has also been the subject of numerous criminal investigations: everything from corruption to mafia ties to murder.  He unsurprisingly walked out on the film, which in one of its best scenes shows Andreotti kissing a mafia boss, and his comments can be read here.

I had no idea what to expect when I want to see the film and from the beginning it felt like a heavily stylized political thriller.  The opening sequences shows the deaths or murders of a dozen or so of Italy’s prominent politicians, bankers, and journalists set to that Cassius track “Toop Toop.” It is often too self-consciously ‘cool’ for its own good and the framing and camera movement fall victim to the “empty aestheticism” named by Deleuze in his Cinema 1. I imagine the extent to which this affects the viewer’s enjoyment of the film varies considerably. I found it slightly annoying but I didn’t hold it against the film as a whole, which I continue to think about months after seeing it. 

Il Divo is more of a biopic, although certainly not a traditional one, than a political thriller and what is most interesting about it is the way it tries to make sense of three tumultuous decades of Italian politics.  Despite making an attempt to provide the viewer with some historical context, is largely incomprehensible without at least a basic knowledge of post-war Italian history, particularly the so called anni di piombo (“years of lead”), called so because of the staggering level of political violence in the long decade that stretched from 1969-1980.  While terrorism was highly visible throughout Europe and the world over this period, in Italy the sheer number of terrorist attacks is shocking: over 12,000 incidents of terrorist violence during these years, with 1,926 attacks in 1977 followed by 2,379 in 1978, perpetrated by both extremes of the political spectrum – at times with the assistance of elements within the state, especially the secret services.  Victims – 356 dead and over 1,000 wounded in the two decades following 1969 – included not only civilians but judges, lawyers, bureaucrats, bankers, and even a Prime Minister in 1978.  There is great difficulty in getting at what was actually happening, as one has to sift through a myriad of texts that read either like conspiracy theories or state propaganda.  One account seems reliable enough until it claims that Antonio Negri is probably a CIA agent, another until it claims that the state is incapable of engaging in anything nefarious. Rather than summarizing this long decade and its myriad cast of characters, a collage of some of its more colorful highlights bits should amply demonstrate its character. 

·     On December 12, 1969 a series of coordinated bombs go off at the Bank of Agriculture in Milan’s Piazza Fontana and in Rome, killing thirteen and injuring just under a hundred.  Over four thousand people are arrested in total: many of them anarchists.  One, Giuseppe Pinelli, dies in police custody after he ‘jumps’ out of a fourth-story window.  After he dies in the hospital an hour later the police declare him guilty.  Another anarchist, Pietro Valpreda, is arrested and sentenced despite constantly proclaiming his innocence, only to be exonerated almost twenty years later.  The whole time many on the left suspect the fascists in league with the police or secret services as having perpetrated the attack (until 1974 most of the left believed the acts of terror were right/state provocations).  It later comes out these sentiments were at least half right as the extreme right is eventually held responsible.  Their rationale was to frame the left and provoke the state into wielding its repressive powers. 

·     A bombing during a union and anti-fascist protest in Brescia on May 28^th, 1974 kills eight and injures 94.  In August of the same year the bombing of the Italicus express train kills twelve and injures just over a hundred. 

·     On March 16^th, 1978 Christian Democrat Party leader Aldo Moro is kidnapped with “military precision” and held for over a month and a half by the Red Brigades.  The recent Italian prime minister Romano Prodi, then an academic at the University of Bologna, takes part in a séance during which the ghost of the recently deceased Christian Democrat politician Giorgio La Pira tells the group three locations where Moro is being held – one of which turned out to be a Red Brigade hideout but not Moro’s prison.  The powers that be (including Andreotti) refuse to negotiate for his release and Moro’s correspondence shows he feels increasingly isolated and betrayed by his former friends and colleagues.  Moro had been lobbying for a “historic compromise” that would bring the Communists into a coalition government with the Christian Democrats and was on his way to announce this coalition when he was kidnapped.  On May 9^th, 1978, Moro’s body is found in the boot of a car in Rome, halfway between the Christian Democrat and Communists party headquarters.  The police and government investigations before and after his murder are filled with inadequacies, blunders, and suspicious decisions.  Andreotti has been linked to playing a role in the kidnapping.

·     On August 2, 1980 the Bologna railway station is bombed, killing 85 and injuring over 200.  Far right group Ordine Nuovo is accused of the massacre. 

·     In 1981, a police raid on the office of Licio Gelli uncovers the existence of Propaganda Due, P2.  P2 is a clandestine Italian section of the world’s largest secret society, the Freemasons.  A membership list is found listing nearly one thousand names including cabinet ministers, MPs, army officers, bankers, industrialists, judges, Silvio Berlusconi, newspaper editors, civil servants, the leadership – including the heads – of the secret services, and politicians of all the major parties except the PCI (Italian Communist Party) and the Radicals.  There were also known international, rightwing terrorists such as Stefano Delle Chiaie, who is connected to fascist bombings in Italy, as well as Operation Condor in South America.  Considered by many to be a “shadow cabinet”, “the real scope of the group was the creation of an organization, which would allow for the control of entire sectors of Italian life and the economy.”  It is linked to the control of newspapers, illegal arms and drug trafficking, Mafia hits, the corruption of magistrates (many of whom were members),  and many of the terror attacks mentioned above, among other things. Gelli, P2′s head, was invited to the inaugurations of Ford, Carter, and Reagan.

·     Roberto Calvi, head of Banco Ambrosiano, known as “God’s banker” because of his ties to the Vatican, is found dead, hanging underneath Blackfriars Bridge in London.  The police initially classify it as a suicide but later as a murder.  Considered by some to be P2’s financial arm, Calvi’s pockets were filled with five kilos of bricks and stones (i.e. masonry) and purportedly members of P2 refer to themselves as “black friars”.  His death has been linked not only to the Vatican, but the Mafia and P2.

·     In October 1990 Prime Minister Andreotti admits the existence of Operation Gladio, a so-called stay behind army created by NATO together with the CIA and MI6 in 1956 (the French version was called Rose des Vents).   Organized as a sleeper army of sorts that would spring into action only in the occurrence of a Soviet invasion, it was staffed largely with ex- and neo-fascists as their anti-Communists credentials made them to be considered trustworthy.  Gladio never really lay dormant and soon after its creation began targeting the left within Italy.  It is also linked with many of the terror attacks listed above. 

The two key concepts that need to be understood in order to build a narrative around these events are the “historic compromise” and the “strategy of tension”.  Italy had the largest communist party of any Western democracy but despite getting large percentages of the popular vote, up to thirty-four percent of the vote in 1976, they had never been part of a ruling government coalition.  In short, the historic compromise refers to the movement towards a coalition government in Italy between the Christian Democrats and the Communist Party, meant to save Italy from the social, economic, and political crises of the 1970s.  Opposition to this move came from both extremes of the political spectrum, as well as from the United States.  In a sense the opposite of the historic compromise is the “strategy of tension,” the existence of which, long disputed as a construction of paranoid leftists, is now more or less universally acknowledged.  With the growth in power of the left and the possibility of the Communists joining the government, “military circles began to fear the new climate, and forged closer links with the extreme right.  The strategy was predicated on the basis of spreading a climate of fear (through indiscriminate terrorist attacks), to provide a perceived necessity for a restoration of public order, either through a coup or through the political consequences following from an awareness by politicians of preparations for a coup.”  There were two main phases of the strategy of tension.  The first involved cooperation between the secret services in the far right and was encouraged by Washington (Fun Fact: the CIA’s first assignment after its creation was to make sure the Communists, who were Soviet-funded, didn’t win the 1948 Italian election).  The second began in the mid-seventies when the notion of a coup and institution of a far-right government seemed less appealing to both Washington and many Italian elites and the secret services half-heartedly attempted to reign in the indiscriminate terror.  During this period the extreme right found sanctuary in P2 as a part of Gelli’s ‘Plan for Democratic Renewal’, which also tried to create the conditions that would make a coup seemingly necessary. 

While Moro, Gelli, and Calvi all have bit parts in Il Divo, which is mostly concerned with Andreotti’s links to the mafia, these stories and scandals are so coupled to Andreotti’s Italy (Moro’s execution in particular) that they’re constantly lurking in the background of the film’s main narrative.  Il Divo  – intentionally or not – frames the tremendous difficulty, if not the impossibility, of knowing the truth of Italian politics.  Its building a narrative around on individuals and their relations – as opposed to historical forces and largely without revealing motivations, other than a vague thirst for power/money – reminded me of Mark Lombardi’s graph  Inner Sanctum: The Pope and His Bankers Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi, and trying to merely follow Il Divo without a familiarity with Andreotti’s biography is like trying to understand the Calvi affair during the three minutes one has to study Lombardi’s graph at a gallery opening. Sorrentino’s film does not have the trapping of an expose and seems to be aware about the fact that it will not be able to reveal the truth of Andreotti’s life and relationships.  Dozens of books have been written and several trials have taken place and Andreotti still sits in the Italian senate.  The film succeeds in drawing the viewer’s attention to the lack of transparency (which almost sounds like a euphemism all things considered) in Italian politics. You get the feeling that things cannot be as fucked up at Sorrentino has made them out to be but quickly remember that what he focuses on is just the tip of the iceberg.