Black Bloc, White Riot

However, despite activist claims to the contrary, history reveals that both social movement action and terrorism share a common provenance. In their modern forms, both social movements and terrorism arose in the late eighteenth century and came into their own during the nineteenth century. Both were made possible by the contradictory dynamics of the bourgeois public sphere. Both are the bastard children of a political world the bourgeoisie created in its own image. That world was shaped first and foremost by the problem of representation. During the nineteenth century, because “the public” was viewed as a political object that was not yet a for-itself political actor, the trick was to relate to it in a manner that would compel it to yield desired outcomes.

In this arrangement, wherein political claim-makers arise from the public and conceptually distinguish themselves from it, a threefold process arises: The public is subject to the whims of constituted power and passes this experience on to the claim-makers that arise from within its midst but who are conceptually distinct from them. The claim-makers then act upon constituted power and, by passing through the film of representation, upon the public as well. Once acted upon in this fashion, the public sometimes responds by reversing the cyclic dynamic of the process in order to act upon constituted power. For its part, constituted power sometimes acts on the claim maker at this point.⁴⁸

The public sphere was necessary for the consolidation of bourgeois rule. It enabled the bourgeoisie to displace the feudal aristocracy. However, the necessary inclusion—even if only nominal—of “the public” meant that bourgeois rule was marked by a conflict between their political means and their mode of political development. Social movements—and socialism itself—crawled into the world through this breach.

However, unlike socialism (which, by virtue of its emphasis on production, began to develop a post-representational conception of dual power), social movements became contentious actors within the representational paradigm of the bourgeois public sphere (cf. Tilly 2004: 138). Whether or not it was their intention (although often it was), social movements encouraged people to identify with the bourgeoisie’s legitimating structures. Or, to put it another way, social movements legitimated the “is” of the public sphere by demanding that it live up to the promise of its “ought.” Although their methods were different, terrorists gravitated toward this same point of ambiguity.

Recounting the actions of Auguste Vaillant, an anarcho-terrorist who threw a bomb in the French National Assembly in 1893 and said “the more they are deaf, the more your voice must thunder out so that they will understand you,” Alex P. Schmid and Janny de Graaf explain how “the unequal chances of expressing oneself, brought about by the rise of the big press, contributed to the rise of terrorism as ‘expressive’ politics” (1982: 11). Both social movements and terrorists sought to affect the public by launching assaults on constituted power in order to intervene in political processes to which they had no direct access. Both perceived the public in representational terms.

Initially, both social movements and terrorists were able to produce significant effects within the bourgeois public sphere. Perhaps one of the most significant victories (and one of the points at which social movements and terrorism most fully overlapped) came from the struggle for women’s suffrage. However, the suffragettes’ move away from representational to spectacular violence corresponded to a shift in the optimism that movements felt about the opportunities afforded by the public sphere. As that sphere began to narrow through the course of the twentieth century, both social movements and terrorism became estranged from the public.

This situation produced an impasse. Having accepted the public sphere as their terrain of struggle, and having acclimatized to its later spectacularization, both social movements and terrorists—despite their radical programs—became ensnared in the representational machinery of bourgeois politics. Although they contested the content of bourgeois rule (and although they critiqued the moribund character of the representational apparatus), they nevertheless started by taking the bourgeois commitment to representational politics as self-evident.

By refusing to identify the significant continuities between the activist and terrorist orientation to the representational politics of spectacular capitalism (by failing to consider the continuity between activist and terrorist orientations to “the public”), social movements have forfeited the possibility of engaging in a form of auto-criticism that could significantly enhance the consequences of our political activity.

The proposition that activists should turn their critique of terrorism into an auto-critique should not be understood as an attack on the occasional use of violent tactics to which movements have sometimes felt entitled. Just the opposite: the critique of social movement allegiances to bourgeois representational “politics” enables activists to engage more completely and more productively in forms of political violence. The critique of terrorism as bastard inversion of bourgeois representational “politics,” when extended as auto-critique, enables us to begin envisioning our violence in the “pure” or productive form considered by Walter Benjamin in 1921. Paradoxically, contemporary activists are closer to terrorists when we choose to make our interventions in the register of the spectacular rather than engaging directly in productive violence.

In Refractions of Violence (2003), Martin Jay recounts how the shipwreck can serve as the marker of epistemological moments. In ancient Greece, the shipwreck stood—for the witness, at least—as the mark of Nature’s irrefutability. Being torn apart at sea was a sober reminder of the relationship between man and his world. Later, for thinkers like Pascal, the shipwreck would provide the witness with a smug satisfaction. Good judgment and sure footing on dry land, Pascal intoned, would save some while others drowned. By the time of Nietzsche, all dry land had vanished. Cast adrift and lacking even a moral compass, the best one could do was to keep from being subsumed. The spectator and the shipwreck began to share an eerie proximity.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the spectator celebrated (or was forced to deal with) sensorial immediacy as a regular feature of everyday life. At the World’s Fairs, people were treated to the possibility of riding whirling contraptions that, in some instances, were meant to replicate the feeling of being seasick. Once the precondition for moral reflection, the mediated standpoint of the spectator had been totally supplanted by unadulterated presence. It is a state that shows no sign of abating. In hindsight, the story of the twentieth century may well be told as a story about the intensification of the simultaneous experiences of proximate distance and distant proximity. It was precisely this phenomenon that Guy Debord described in his Society of the Spectacle.

For Debord, even though the images that pervaded spectacular society ostensibly continued to represent the things they signified, the spectacle itself made it increasingly difficult for the viewer to reconnect the image of the thing to the thing itself. What was true in Debord’s time is even truer today; representation—as formalized in bourgeois epistemology—makes it difficult for people to experience themselves as participants in the world of the signified. Consequently, the signifier (the image emancipated from its referent) becomes everything. Unmediated experience, like the fear and trembling that the ancient Greeks felt before the shipwreck, begins to recede into a mythological past.

How can radicals work to heal the divide between signifier, representation, and consumption, on the one hand, and the signified, the real, and production on the other? Since the advent of the bourgeois public sphere (and especially since its mid-twentieth century spectacular transformation), political violence has often been marshaled to produce effects at the level of the signifier. However, violence as such corresponds more directly to the sphere of production and to activity at the level of the signified. Its attributes correspond to the attributes of the labor process outlined by Marx in Chapter VII of Capital. Reconnecting with violence as a productive act (an act where production happens directly and not by way of mediating proxy forces) will allow social movements to move away from terrorism and enable them to begin pushing against the representational limits of the bourgeois horizon.

In May 1968, students and workers took to the streets of Paris and nearly sparked a revolution. Among their other remarkable slogans was the wisdom “sous les pavés, la plage.” The point was simple, beautiful, and concrete. Underneath these cobblestones was sand. Underneath the order that constituted power has imposed was a world of unstructured time, a world of possibility. With every cobblestone ripped from the street and hurled at the CRS, demonstrators would come one step closer to uncovering what was possible. What was hidden would be revealed. The force of action would bring into view all that had been buried.

In April of 2005, a demonstration and street party called Karna[ge]val also took to the streets of Paris. These demonstrators also aimed to uncover what was hidden. The double entendre of the party’s name made clear what was at stake. The carnivalesque world of the spectacle had bracketed within it a moment of destruction. This bracketed ruin would be illuminated, however, by the carnival the demonstrators would unleash to confront it. And so, while the balance of the visible and the hidden had been flipped (in 1968, beauty needed to be uncovered; at Karna[ge]val beauty itself was the mask behind which carnage hid), the project appeared to be the same.

As I arrived at Place de la République on the afternoon of April 9, I was confronted with the beautiful site of thousands of people—mostly young and mostly crusty—taking over the park in the middle of the square. Circled around the edge of the park were dozens of vans rigged up with sound systems playing deep house music. The gathering stood out like a sore thumb in the middle of an otherwise well-behaved neighborhood. From the adjacent side-walks, onlookers gathered to gawk or shake their heads in dismay. As I got closer to the center of the action, someone handed me a leaflet.

Encore une fois nous devons reprendre le pavé pour une manifestation revendifestive, afin d’affirmer nos convictions artistiques et culturelles, de revendiquer clairement notre volonté de nous démarquer des logiques de consommation et de soumission aux ordres du marché, notre refus des dérives sécuritaires et démagogiques subies par notre société. Mettons en lumière le rôle créatif et social des groupes informels d’activistes, des sound-systems, des pratiques culturelles amateurs, des secteurs émergents bref, de tous ceux grâce à qui le mot culture ne se résume pas à quelques grandes institutions ou industries produisant de grands spectacles destinés à des consommateurs-clients…

“Once again, we must reclaim the streets to demonstrate and affirm our artistic and cultural convictions…” The action was aimed squarely at the depravity of market relationships and the opulence of consumption. In opposition to this paradigm, which the organizers claimed required both “demagogy” and a creeping “securitization” of the public sphere, the activists gathered on that day spoke instead of the creativity flourishing outside (or beneath) the market. Here, the leaflet explained, people were producing without a thought for the spectacle and its endless supply of consumer clients.

Although it was not yet the festival of the oppressed promised by Marx, the gathering was nevertheless a striking counterpoint to the neighborhood in which it had assembled. Hundreds of kids gathered around sound systems and danced wildly in the middle of the street. Others climbed the austere statues in the middle of the park and, like spiders, began spinning colored ribbon in the wind. Below them on the grass, activists gathered in small and large groups and passed around bottles of beer and wine. Although the CRS could be seen at every corner of the square, they kept their distance.

Lacking a clear message or explicit goal beyond self-expression in the context of its general prohibition, Karna[ge]val encouraged people to create an alternative space within the constraints of the everyday. Although event organizers negotiated a parade route with the police, the gathering did not feel contrived. As an unruly presence within an otherwise tranquil neighborhood, it enabled a brief disruption in the immediate flow of what Debord had called the “common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished” (1983: 2). In this respect, Karna[ge]val exceeded the permits it had been granted.

But despite the possibility of energetic spillover, activists on the march made little effort to engage with the people on the event’s sidelines. Maybe the organizers and participants simply sought to create an alternative space in which to enjoy the initial approximations of a new kind of community. But if community was all that was sought, then the point of staging the action at Place de la République is not entirely obvious. Certainly, feelings of solidarity could just as easily have arisen in the darkened warehouses of the dance scene—spaces that had furnished the vast majority of participants for the day’s action. What did the disapproving gaze of the mainstream bring to this event that would not have been there otherwise?

In a kind of double move, where one invites the gaze of the public while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge it, the object of this demonstration became the participants’ refusal itself. Whatever the disruption to the immediate flow in the common stream in which the unity of life can no longer be reestablished, there remained a more important assertion of ontological distance. Karna[ge]val was an exercise in negating the bourgeois representational order. By trying to arrest the flow of the modern spectacle’s imperceptible immediacy, Karna[ge]val stood as a potentially important pedagogical opportunity. However, to the extent that its critique of the spectacle became spectacular (to the extent that it operated not at the level of the signified but rather at the level of the signifier), it’s doubtful that those pedagogical opportunities could ever be fulfilled.

In The Spirit of Terrorism, Jean Baudrillard advanced a now-familiar argument about the importance of images. Rehearsing positions established in his earlier work, Baudrillard argued that the visual had become central to the experience of terrorism. What remains in the aftermath of the attack are the images. The very experience of September 11, Baudrillard claimed, was the same as “the sight of the images.”

This impact of the images, and their fascination, are necessarily what we retail, since images are, whether we like it or not, our primal scene. And at the same time as they have radicalised the world situation, the events in New York can also be said to have radicalised the relation of the image to reality. Whereas we were dealing before with an uninterrupted profusion of banal images and a seamless flow of sham events, the terrorist act in New York has resuscitated both images and events. (27)

Baudrillard’s assessment says as much about the spectacular state of the present as it does about terrorism. Indeed, the “uninterrupted profusion of banal images and [the] seamless flow of sham events” seems to be derived from the same list of concerns that motivated Debord. However, for Baudrillard, it is in the terrorist act—and not “the situation”—that the power to rupture our cycle of endless repetitions is located. It is terrorism that elevates image and event to a new status. It is terrorism that brings image and event closer together. The disjuncture between signifier and signified is resolved in catastrophe.

Two accounts of epistemic and political resolution seem to be at work here. In the first, image and event come together and things and their names once again become inseperable. In the second, image and event come together because the image—through its expansive mutations—consumes the event entirely. It becomes its representational proxy (the copy for which there is no original, Baudrillard’s simulacrum). The experience of shock brought about by terrorism seems to promise the former resolution. In fact, it delivers the latter. However, because the latter (by its very logic) becomes all, it absorbs the former as a trace, a spectral possibility. In reality, there are not two strategies. There are only two phases of a single process by which the image is reenergized as a modality of representational politics. And so, while the content of people’s experience is transformed by representational catastrophe, their mode of experiencing is not.

The fact that this disruption can feel radical arises not from an epistemological break but a political one, where a short circuit in the representational sequence causes it to momentarily come undone. However, while the terrorist act suggests that the terrorist is engaged in what Benjamin described as law-making violence, the act nevertheless remains bound by the representational logic of bourgeois epistemology. It’s an action in excess of the law that serves in the end to reaffirm the law itself. The sovereign claim-maker who does not (and cannot) attain to sovereignty itself ends by being “enemy” and, in this fashion, provides the basis for the revitalization of constituted power. Consequently, Debord felt that the state itself invented terrorism as its representational negation, the enemy other that confirms it (1990). The same can be said, on a different level, of contemporary state responses to social movements.⁴⁹

Under late capitalism, the image is perceived not as distinct from—but rather as constitutive of—reality. Since this is the case, the interjection of the spectacular act will tend not to reconcile image and reality but rather to confirm (or further enable) the process of “resolution” whereby the image consumes reality itself. In this way, it reestablishes a kind of proxy form of epistemological unity. For Baudrillard, the experience of sensorial immediacy that overcomes a viewer considering an action movie appears to be the only remaining register of experience in a world where the liar has lied to himself.

In a world where action at the level of the signified is perceived to be the stuff of religion, the expert manipulation of the signifier becomes the sole stuff of politics. To the extent that those who planned the attacks on the World Trade Center spoke in a language their targets would understand (killing people without cameras would not have done the trick), they rearticulated the epistemological conventions of bourgeois “politics” in its spectacular-representational moment. In this moment, production is subordinated to consumption and the signifier becomes indistinguishable from the thing itself.

How do we account for the persistence of representation and its enduring role as epistemological substructure to bourgeois politics? How do we account for the fact that, even when shaken by events that brought the reality of the image to bear in all its visceral presence, representation (a concept that carries within it the spectral trace of the signified and, as such, is susceptible to immanent critique) has endured as the primary mode of political engagement? In order to answer these questions, it’s useful to consider the location of the terrorist act within the realm of experience. Specifically, it’s useful to delineate the way that terrorist acts intersect with and respond to the configuration of the public sphere in the period of late capitalism. Here, terrorism comes into view as a strategy aimed at disrupting the continuity of the exchange between the mass and the passerby.

Referring to the diagram, we can see how the mass is bound within the field of the social. As a result of the dissimulations of late capitalism, the social itself is only perceptible through distorted and once-removed traces. The mass is one such perceptual effect. It’s a representational achievement of its individual member, who distinguishes herself from the object of her contemplation by assuming the position of the passerby. In this arrangement, the mass (not yet rendered as such) is the condition of possibility for the passerby. At the same time, the mass as such only emerges through its recognition by the passerby herself. Even though it confronts the passerby as a coherent entity, the mass is in fact a perceptual object generated through contemplation.⁵⁰

The position of the passerby is a serial category denoting an epistemological habit by which the world is rendered representationally intelligible through contemplation. As such, the position of the passerby is generic and can be occupied by any single person within the mass. Consequently, the passerby—despite being enamored with the experience of individuality enabled by their contemplative standpoint—can never escape the responsibility of playing a component part of the mass for the other.

Embodying the spectral qualities of market relations, the mass is the base unit of late capitalist experience. Here, people are assembled on the basis of consumption, and in relation to market arrangements. With the advent of late capitalism, the mass itself begins to take on the attributes of a commodity in the market. Although, by virtue of their practical activity, people are part of this mass, they only dimly perceive themselves in the object itself. Describing this relationship, Debord wrote: “in the spectacle, one part of the world represents itself to the world and is superior to it.”

The spectacle is nothing more than the common language of this separation. What binds the spectators together is no more than the irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate. (29)

Here, what binds spectators together is their mutual imbrication in a social relation that cannot be reversed. This is rendered concretely in the diagram above where the mass is the condition of possibility for the passerby but also an effect of the passerby’s recognition. The social connection between Debord’s individuated spectators (who are equivalents to the passersby in the diagram) is achieved through their mutual but atomized relationship to the mass of which they all constitute a part for the other. The social, which is rendered invisible by this never-ending circuit of representation and recognition, corresponds to a signified that—from the standpoint of perception—can no longer be named directly. This perceptual occlusion arises from the very structure of capitalist social relations.

By simultaneously inviting the gaze and refusing to acknowledge it, the terrorist manages to momentarily disrupt the mass-passerby circuit. Nevertheless, the circuit’s condition of possibility—its material substratum—remains untouched. Without a decisive challenge to bourgeois epistemology, even the seemingly pure act—violence as an end in itself—can be recuperated as image. And while the intensified image heightens the experience of presence for the viewer, this presence is not yet direct engagement with the material world. For that, another kind of violence is required.

We thus find, in the attack on the World Trade Center, an intensification of the basic epistemological move underlying Karna[ge]val. The bastard children of the public sphere know how to torment their parents; what they can’t yet do is assume the responsibility of bringing to birth a new world from the ashes of the old. In the end, despite the severity of their respective tantrums, the actions of both activists and terrorists conform to the bourgeois politics of demand (“recognize us”) even as they deny the necessary allegiance to constituted power that such a demand entails.

What emerges from the momentary short-circuiting of the representational cycle brought about by activist and terrorist acts is an open question. On the one hand, the rupture can take the shape of an illumination, a moment when all the contingent activity that makes up the social world comes into view (a moment where crisis reveals the underlying ordering of social relations and the precariousness of their assembly). This is undoubtedly what activists hope for when they set out to break the spell of the spectacle. The new situation, although it emerges through spectacular means, is meant to demonstrate that there are never really spectators, only participants.

On the other hand, the rupture in the representational circuit can lead to a break with certainty that produces not illumination but atomization. To be sure, people’s experiences under late capitalism are already highly individuated. Nevertheless, the representational mass operates as proxy for prior forms of collectivity for which people still long. The abolition of the mass achieved by overloading the representational circuit momentarily deprives people of this index. Caught in the representational field without any intelligible reference point, the passerby retreats from the social. This outcome is of little use to activists.

If forms of representational action, no matter how critical (or how violent), have a tendency to reiterate the epistemological premises of the bourgeois world, what should activists do? How do we overcome the limits of the bourgeois horizon? One option is to cease conceiving our movements as claim-making agencies and to begin seeing them as modes of production instead. In order get our bearings while contemplating this transition, it’s useful to revisit the lessons conveyed in Walter Benjamin’s essay on violence.

Describing the emergence of the modern spectacular realm of parliamentary politics, Benjamin noted how “when the consciousness of the latent presence of violence in a legal institution disappears, the institution falls into decay. In our times, parliaments provide an example of this. They offer the familiar, woeful spectacle because they have not remained conscious of the revolutionary force to which they owe their existence” (1978: 288). Which is to say: to the extent that it remains sovereign, parliamentarianism rests not on law-making but rather on law-preserving violence. This kind of violence is managerial rather than productive. It commits people to custodial care for the existing world. In contrast to law-preserving violence, law-making violence entails a production, a contest between competing sovereign agencies. However, because the new reality is itself transposed post festum into law, it once again becomes representationally distorted.

Benjamin contrasts these forms of violence to what he calls divine violence. This violence is both productive and post-representational. It does not cede to law and is the preserve of neither activism nor terrorism. Its provenance is not the bourgeois public sphere. Its mode is not spectacular intervention. It does not seek to transform the meaning of the perceptually consumed object. Its vocation is an unending production that, at its threshold, yields an absolute reconciliation of subject and object.

This kind of violence is not available to anyone in the first instance. In order to acquire it, activists must renounce their parents and leave the house of representational politics. Because it necessarily entails the forfeiture of the state-granted rights upon which activism currently depends, it requires the willingness to assume all the duties and obligations of a usurper. But even by orienting analytically toward this kind of violence, activists could begin to draw a clear distinction between themselves and the representational sphere.

Since activists operating under current conditions in Canada and the US are not yet able to assume the responsibilities of the usurper (and since the forms of political activity in which we are currently engaged seem destined to infuse the representational cycle with a new vitality), it’s necessary to consider practical first steps in the direction of divine violence.

Provisionally, it’s worth contemplating what might be gained from a new asceticism of the act. What kind of unbearable energy might accumulate if we did not rely upon the cathartic resolution of representational action? If, instead of blowing off steam, violence was presented as an analytic device, as a means of breaking the posited identity between a concept and the thing it represents (if violence was mobilized not in the interest of a physical but rather an intellectual confrontation with the bourgeois world), then it’s possible that those of us engaged in activist struggles could—in some indeterminate future—envision forms of engagement that could transform activism from a mode of representation into a mode of production.