review: lilley et al on catastrophism

Review: Sasha Lilley, David McNally, Eddie Yuen and James Davis, Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth (PM Press, 2012)

     This is the end. My only friend: the end. - JM

Capitalist governance is hardly thinkable today outside the shifting contours of the politics of fear. Terror pulses and surges within the global social process, and anxiety shapes the very forms of contemporary subjectivity. The logic of accumulation dominates through a flexible mix of enjoyment and enforcement. Under the pressures and miseries of social and ecological crises, fantasies of doom animate both the dream machines of the culture industry and the political imaginaries of divergent social movements. To experience collective self-destruction as a supreme aesthetic pleasure, Benjamin noted back at the opening of the new era of terror, is bad politics.

Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth offers a superb and needed critical overview of current tendencies toward an aestheticizing politics of doom. Evolving out of discussions catalyzed by Iain Boal and the Retort collective, these essays by Lilley, McNally, Yuen and Davis survey and analyze the traps and delusions involved when catastrophe scenarios are deployed as a mobilizing political figure. Clearly, we need to understand these pitfalls, for as Yuen observes, our moment ‘is saturated with instrumental, spurious, and sometimes maniacal versions of catastrophism – including right-wing racial paranoia, religious millenarianism, liberal panics over fascism, leftist fetishization of capitalist collapse, capitalist invocation of the “shock doctrine,” and pop culture cliché’(pp. 15-16).

Catastrophism typically takes on different shapes and tones according to the political impulses behind it. Following on Lilley’s introduction, each author contributes a chapter delineating and exploring the specific forms associated with more or less familiar positions on the political spectrum. Yuen leads off with an analysis of ‘environmental catastrophism’ and its defective assumptions about how and why people become actively politicized. In chapter two, Lilley surveys the history of catastrophism on the political left and critiques the leftist ‘couplet’ of determinist and voluntarist collapse scenarios. Next, Davis scrutinizes the political right, finding a broad willingness to view the gains and remnants of leftist social movements of the past as unmitigated disaster; this ‘disease catastrophism’ is linked to a potentially violent ‘cure catastrophism’ that welcomes apocalypse as the remedy. McNally’s closing chapter reminds us that capitalism has always been an everyday catastrophe for the exploited; reading the horror genre of monsters and zombies against the grain, he traces the cultural expressions of a history of rebellion and resistance from below.

As Lilley makes clear in her introduction, Catastrophism ‘does not focus primarily on how catastrophes are used by the state and capital’(4), as does, for example, Naomi Klein. Instead, the authors ‘look at the role that catastrophe plays in the political rhetorics, and political choices, of the left, greens and the extraparliamentary right’(4). The book’s own position and the shared worries of the authors are also made unequivocally clear: ‘As partisans of the radical left, we are particularly concerned with how catastrophic politics can backfire on leftists and radical environmentalists.’(2) The critical propositions and often trenchant arguments advanced in the book are to be understood as an invitation for further reflection and debate, in particular among those who share the authors’ political impulses: ‘This book is a political intervention, designed to spur debate among radicals.’(4) My responses here are offered in the same spirit, as another friendly press of the ‘spur.’

Lilley and the other authors do not deny that processes now unfolding either will become or already are catastrophic on global levels. So the critique of catastrophism is not grounded in some version of denialism. Much depends, then, on how the term ‘catastrophism’ is understood – especially since it is a political tendency the authors observe in movements and orientations that are openly antagonistic (‘the left, greens and the extraparliamentary right’). Introducing the concept, Lilley makes no attempt to formulate a one-stop analytic definition. Instead, she indicates some typical aspects and tendencies, which are then contextualized and developed in more detail in the chapters: catastrophism plays on a presumption that society, civilization or the planet is ‘headed for a collapse’(1); catastrophists tend to believe that fear of such a collapse will stir people to action, so they feed this fear through scenarios that, perhaps paradoxically, ‘emphasize panic and powerlessness’, or else ‘a vanguardist politics of the few’.(3) Because the authors conclude that the politics of fear ‘play to the strengths of the right, not the left’, the political effects of catastrophism in its leftist forms are seen as counterproductive (3), leading too often to ‘quietism’ or ‘adventurism’.(7)

There is one paragraph in Lilley’s introduction that seems to come closest to a summation of the critique advanced here:

‘By its very nature, capitalism is catastrophic. There should be no doubt that the multiple social, and especially ecological, crises of our time are genuine and cataclysmic. We are suggesting, however, that politics embedded within the logic of catastrophe – that the catastrophe will deliver a new world, or that it will create the conditions under which people automatically take action – do not serve the left and environmental movement. An awareness of the scale or severity of catastrophe does not ineluctably steer one down the path of radical politics, in spite of received wisdom on the left and many great – albeit frequently dashed – expectations. Those who believe that the system will crumble from crises and disasters lose sight of the ways that capitalism uses crises for its own regeneration and expansions. Likewise, a focus on spectacular catastrophes typically overlooks the prosaic catastrophes of everyday life that are the sediment upon which capitalism is constructed.’(2)

These are very important observations and reflections, which reject two assumptions long entrenched on the left: the idea that awareness leads automatically to appropriate action; and the axiom ‘the worse, the better’, since catastrophe brings with it the needed opportunity for radical social change. I wonder, though, if a rigorous problematization of these two assumptions is preferable to a simple or outright rejection. For there is clearly a kernel of truth to be rescued in both: even if awareness does not always lead directly to effective actions, surely maximizing awareness is a better strategy than rationalizing ignorance or disavowing what is fearful; and although welcoming the worst may be the peak of foolishness, we may still need to seek the openings for liberating alternatives within unfolding catastrophe – indeed we must do so, if catastrophe is already unfolding. So Lilley’s sketch of ‘bad’ catastrophism suggests to me that there would also be something like a ‘good’ catastrophism: to look soberly and with open eyes at the tendencies and risks that are actually emerging, to acknowledge the urgency of avoiding the worst, and to call for collective self-rescue by all appropriate means would seem to be the minimum that responsibility demands of us.

However, as Lilley points out, we would also need to add to this minimum some crucial qualifications. First and foremost, catastrophes must be linked to their social causes – the logics and processes that initiate and drive them. In this regard, catastrophe cannot be projected into some distant future (or past), or displaced from the violence and misery of everyday social reproduction. Even such awareness does not automatically lead to the best actions, but must be mediated by the collective processes of social struggles and movements. And those processes, if they are to be adequate, would need to be self-critical enough to reject vanguardist or insurrectionist short-cuts to robust movement-building. If the essence of bad catastrophism lies in the delusion that the catastrophe itself and/or fear about it can ever be sufficient, in themselves, to produce anything better, then the critical rejection of presumed automatic causality would go far in exorcising the seductive temptations whose political forms Lilley, Yuen, Davis and McNally so cogently warn us about.

But two rather tricky problems still remain. One concerns capitalism and its ability to regenerate itself in the face of biospheric constraints. The question of ultimate ecological limits to capitalism as a system of domination is an arguable one, and only in retrospect will the argument be settled with certainty. In the meantime, we have to draw conclusions and take positions based on our best estimation of tendencies and probabilities. The subtleties and qualifications are typically lost in the translation into political rhetoric and calls to action. That said, the destruction of its own bio-material conditions of possibility may be the one real and self-undoing automaton of accumulation. If so, there are no guarantees that systemic breakdown will arrive according to any predictable timetable, that anything better will automatically follow, or even that all processes of ‘common ruination’ will be survivable. But clarity about the possible, or probable, biospheric limits to even the creative destructions of disaster capitalism belongs to awareness and contributes to the de-naturalizing critique of the logic of accumulation. The other problem is that any inoculation against the cynical manipulations of the politics of fear also has to acknowledge, in a more than merely token way, that social and ecological reality has become fearful on multiple levels, as well as in sum: fear demands its due, and ignoring or dismissing that will also make for disastrous politics. I return to these points later.

Green Catastrophism

In his chapter, titled ‘The Politics of Failure Have Failed: The Environmental Movement and Catastrophism’, Yuen grapples with the challenges of awareness building and politicization. He begins with a very clear acknowledgment of ‘what is unquestionably a genuinely catastrophic moment in human and planetary history’: ‘Of all the forms of catastrophic discourse on offer, the collapse of ecological systems is unique in that it is definitively verified by a consensus within the scientific community. The growing body of evidence is alarming. In addition to the well-known crisis of climate change, leading scientists have listed eight other planetary boundaries that must not be crossed if the earth is to remain habitable for humans and many other species. These interrelated calamities include ocean acidification, the disruption of the nitrogen cycle, and the sixth mass extinction in planetary history, all of which are truly apocalyptic. It is absolutely urgent to address this by effectively and rapidly changing the direction of society.’(15)

Lucidity about this may be a necessary condition for the needed social transformation, but it certainly is not a sufficient one: the assumption that either ‘apocalyptic warnings’ or sober knowledge of ‘the facts’ will lead to political action of any kind, let alone to effective and appropriate actions, is unjustified. Yuen cogently criticizes the failure to distinguish between the facts about biospheric meltdown and ‘their effects on social, political and economic life.’(16) He cites studies showing that the more Americans know about global warming, the less they feel obligated to do anything about it. The rejection of responsibility and the need to change anything, Yuen argues, is the cumulative product of numerous factors, including ‘catastrophe fatigue, the paralyzing effects of fear, the pairing of overwhelmingly bleak analysis with inadequate solutions, and a misunderstanding of the process of politicization’.(16) To these, he adds all the false predictions of scarcity and limits, such as Y2K and ‘peak oil’, in the long history of Malthusian doomsday prophecies posing overpopulation (read: the poor) as the primary cause of all suffering and imminent collapse. Yuen develops these self-defeating tendencies through a vigorously written and argued survey of the follies of apocalyptic environmentalism.

It helps to see that non-apocalyptic environmentalism already exists, in the daily practices and struggle politics of commoners, North and South. In the movement for climate justice, as well as the everyday experiments of ‘intentional communities, sustainability projects, permaculture and urban farming, communing and militant resistance to consumerism’, Yuen sees non-catastrophist ‘efforts toward a bottom-up and egalitarian’ passage beyond accumulation.(38) To the extent that such efforts are blocked, repressed or marginalized as loony or regressive, the way is open for fear to be channeled into quietism, and global elites and their technocrats have a free hand to shape the conditions for their own exclusive salvation. Yuen concludes that only self-organized movements from below, generating solutions that are ‘prefigurative and practical as well as visionary and participatory’ can counter the militarized ‘lifeboat ethics’ and ‘triage of humanity’ being planned for from above.(38) ‘A central lesson to take from the failure of catastrophism is that such a movement must make a positive appeal to community and solidarity, rather than a moralistic plea for austerity and discipline.’(42) In any case, ‘unless some differentiation is made between antagonistic human communities, classes and interests, environmental catastrophism may end up exacerbating the very problems to which it seeks to call attention.’(16)

Left Catastrophism

In her chapter, ‘Great Chaos Under Heaven: Catastrophism and the Left’, Lilley ‘traces the contours and consequences’ of what she calls ‘the left catastrophist dyad’(44), within the traditions of Marxism and anarchism in the Global North: ‘Expecting predestined forces to transform society for the better forms one half of the couplet of left catastrophism, which has shaped the radical tradition for well over a century. The other consists of the idea that the worse things get, the more auspicious they become for radical prospects.’(44) Translated into positions or actions, this dyad or couplet produces two political tendencies, both of which are counterproductive, if not self defeating. The first of these is a determinism that favors quietism: why risk struggle now when the system will come crashing down on its own anyway? The second is a voluntarism that takes various forms but today encourages insurrectionist fantasies of cataclysmic revolt. Moreover, Lilley argues, the two tendencies are not necessarily mutually exclusive: ‘Rather than functioning in stark opposition, determinism and voluntarism can overlap, their adherents oscillating between the two in a dialectic of disaster.’(45)

Marx, of course, the is the ur-source for the expectation that capitalism will be undone by its own contradictions. Lilley rejects this as a misreading: ‘His writings in Capital on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall did not presume an inexorable path to a final collapse of the system, but rather a continuous back and forth between such a tendency and countervailing forces.’(47) Marx, she holds, believed that only class struggle and collective action could bring an end to these cycles of crisis and reorganization. Nevertheless, the emphasis on the contradictions of capital led to long traditions of waiting for inexorable collapse or reformist evolution. Lilley provides a nuanced critical reading of these, from Rosa Luxemburg to Henryk Grossman, to determinism’s most prominent contemporary advocate, Immanuel Wallerstein. Of the latter, Lilley dryly observes: ‘He has long prognosticated the demise of the capitalist world system along with the decline of US hegemony. Its death date, however, has been moved forward a number of times.’

The axiom of ‘the worse, the better’ has long animated the voluntarist stream of Marxist and anarchist revolutionary politics. In fact, Lilley notes, periods of heightened labor militancy and working class struggle have often coincided with economic expansions and rising expectations, rather than conjunctures of crisis, high unemployment and generalized immiseration. ‘The point’, as she summarizes it in her introduction, ‘is that one cannot read the fates of social movements in the tealeaves of economic booms or busts. There is no automatic relation to be found between the two.’(7) Insurrectionist strategies of ‘heightening the contradictions’ or ‘bringing the war home’, from the anarchist ‘cult of the deed’ to the Weather Underground and Red Army Faction, have in Lilley’s estimation been signally self-defeating. The so-called strategy of tension has in truth always been the terrain of the para-state far right: ‘sowing fear among the public to elicit a general clamor for law, order, security and a strong, authoritarian state to take matters in hand.’(68) Nevertheless, the imaginaries of insurrection are circulating strongly in the current climate of crisis and austerity, especially in Greece, Italy, Spain and France. Exemplary here, Lilley notes, is the post-situationist pamphlet The Coming Insurrection, by the Invisible Committee. If the determinist tendency reflects a secret despair about the prospects of class struggle, then insurrectionist voluntarism ‘inverts despair, with an isolated and small number of committed activists acting on the moral imperative to create change regardless of the limits of the possible.’(75)

Lilley concludes that while the motivations of left catastrophism are understandable, its usual practical forms do not usefully advance a radical emancipatory project: ‘On the contrary, they often do great harm to its prospects. No amount of fire and brimstone can substitute for the often-protracted, difficult, and frequently unrewarding work of building radical mass movements, even under situations of the utmost urgency. When they deploy catastrophic rhetoric, radicals overlook the diminishing returns and distorting effects it has on the forms of organizing that it does manage to inspire. Fear is corrosive. It is especially corrosive within the left.’(76)

Right-Wing Catastrophism

In chapter three, ‘At War with the Future: Catastrophism and the Right’, Davis probes the politics of apocalypse, as it circulates through the formations and movements of the religious and extraparliamentary right. ‘Catastrophe itself takes on two forms in right-wing imagination’, he notes. ‘The first is that catastrophe is the inevitable ongoing result of any gains by the left.’(78) ‘Disease catastrophe,’ as he calls this reactionary tendency modeled on conservative denunciations of the French Revolution, ‘or that which sees the advances made by social movements of the left as catastrophic, is universal in right-wing ideology.’(80) The disease, unsurprisingly, calls for a drastic cure: ‘The second version of this ideology expounds a catastrophist antidote whereby enemies are confronted and vanquished in a final apocalyptic conflagration through race war, insurrection, Armageddon, civil war, or in its purest form, biblical apocalypse, and the rapture.’(78)

As Davis compellingly clarifies, the disease-cure binary of right-wing catastrophism operates in a very close and supportive relation to the national security state. While cure catastrophism, especially in its religious forms, is probably too extreme and violence-prone to ever become openly official, we of course are aware that more than a few individuals holding such views are elected, appointed or promoted to positions of power in the agencies and war machines of the capitalist state. But the more troubling and dangerous effects of this relation, Davis argues, are impersonal and opportunistic. The fears propagated by the catastrophist right open the social and political space for repressive expansions of the security-surveillance apparatus: ‘By intensifying paranoia and division about immigrants, welfare, external and internal security threats, fiscal crises, morality, and minorities, the organized right works to generate a climate in which the state can “react” to various supposed crises.’(79) Paradoxically, while the right rants against the state as the alleged vehicle of leftist revolution, it works continuously to strengthen and expand the state qua instrument of enforcement. Border politics and the scapegoating of immigrants is the demonstration of what right-wing catastrophist agitation can do: ‘Border security is just one example where agitation from the right has contributed to the state’s militarization of the US-Mexico border, and the growth of a massive internal security apparatus.’(79)

For both disease and cure catastrophists, all the gains of leftist struggles are felt as a damaging assault on the bedrock of traditional identity. In the right-wing world view, the agents of civil rights, feminism and ‘cultural Marxism’ have taken over the state and academy and are busy using these institutions to overturn the treasured privileges of the status quo. The neoliberal pulverization of the welfare state and labor movement does not register at all to this subjectivity. On the violent extremes of cure catastrophism, hatred and resentment are put into practice. Anders Breivik’s murderous 2010 rampage in Sweden, accompanied by a manifesto demonizing Muslims and the Frankfurt School, is the latest indication of how far these militants of apocalypse are willing to go.

Catastrophism, then, is central to right-wing identity politics, as channeled and amplified through diverse networks of security analysis, hate media, survivalism and rapturism. For the right, the mobilization of doom simply ‘is the fight against equality and for war, hierarchy, and state violence.’(106) ‘Catastrophism’, Davis concludes, ‘is a less ambivalent strategy for the right than for its adversaries on the left. From a rhetorical standpoint, catastrophism is a win/win for the right as there is no accountability for false prophecy. On the one hand, it rallies the troops and creates a sense of urgency. On the other hand, though, fear and paranoia serve a rightist political predisposition more than a left or liberal one. Authoritarian politics benefits more than left politics from fear.’(106)

The Everyday Catastrophe of Capitalist Life

In the book’s concluding chapter, ‘Land of the Living Dead: Capitalism and the Catastrophes of Everyday Life’, McNally puts the closing focus firmly back on the continuing catastrophe of a social process grounded in exploitation and violent domination. At the center of his cultural study of monsters and zombies, historical and contemporary, is the body wounded by capital. But the monster is also a cipher for latent powers of revolt surging behind the enclosures and enforcements of contemporary accumulation processes. In an illuminating reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankensteinthat draws fruitfully on the work of Peter Linebaugh, McNally exposes the corpse economy that supplied plebeian bodies to surgeons and students engaged in medical research. As he shows, it is this gruesome commodification of cadavers harvested from gallows, vaults and charnal houses, following logically from the reification of laboring bodies in life, that forms the specific horror of Shelley’s gothic novel, for Viktor Frankenstein’s monster is sutured together from ‘body parts stolen from corpses and bits of dissected animals.’(110) In the slang of the corpse economy, McNally informs us, a cadaver destined for dissection was revealingly called a ‘Thing.’ Such a creepy linguistic acknowledgment of reification in practice recalls the more recent dehumanizing slang of the Nazi genocide, where the bodies of those murdered by industrial administration were simply ‘dolls’ (Puppen) to be processed and recycled, as far as possible, back into the wartime economy.

McNally offers similarly insightful discussions of the figure of the zombie, as it emerged from its context of slavery and revolution in Haiti, took on new resonance under the US military occupation of the island from 1915 to 1934, and finally was remade into the lurching Living-Dead of Hollywood and pulp fiction. The zombie ‘was definitively transmuted into a figure of extreme reification – a living laborer capable of drudgery on behalf of others, but entirely lacking in memory, self-consciousness, identity and agency.’(115) The zombie, then, is the pure form of the body stripped of personhood and reduced to a quantity of labor-time – ‘time’s carcass’, as Marx nicely put it. In the neoliberal era, however, the zombie reemerges as a figure for the manic and cannibalistic consumer, as McNally shows in an engaging reading of George A. Romero’s 1968 cult classic Night of the Living Dead. In this guise, however, the subversive potential of the zombie class returns. The revolt of legions of flesh-eating zombies, like that of Frankenstein’s monster, is the truth-moment in this horror genre: ‘After all, the monster’s capacity to resist, indeed to overturn the social order, constituted its threat to bourgeois authority. And in that figure of rebellion we find the utopian element of late capitalist catastrophism – the faint but persistent image of zombies on the march, awakening to consciousness, and turning the world upside down.’(123)

These brilliant interpretations may strike some as cold comfort today, but McNally correctly reminds us that parsing the truth and untruth entangled in social facts and the documents of culture, in order to release their truth content for a practice of liberation, is the basic procedure of critical theory. Citing Benjamin, the master of reading against the grain, he concludes: ‘The problem for critical theory and practice is to redeem the truths embedded in monstrous tales while translating them into languages and practices of social and political action.’(126) To read zombies and monsters in the context of everyday exploitation and dispossession is to rescue them from the realm of the apocalyptic and to return to the reified body its own capacities for consciousness and agency. ‘We need, in short, to uncover the social basis of all that is truly horrifying and catastrophic about our world, as part of a critical theory and practice designed to change it.’(127)

Going Through the Politics of Fear

The same point, however, should be made with regard to catastrophism itself and, indeed, to the catalyzing potentials, as well as the paralyzing effects, of fear. I have already suggested that, even according to the critical conceptualizations of catastrophism advanced in this admirable volume, there may be a ‘good’ catastrophism, as well as the ‘bad’ one rejected so forcefully. I want now to suggest a few ways in which more dialectical handling of the political problem might produce a slightly different result.

In general, there is little doubt that fear is the coin of the right, and the authors are persuasive in arguing that the risks abound for any leftist attempt to mobilize it as a vector of politicization. At this point, however, I think it is necessary to be more precise. The tendency so far, as should be clear from the above, has been to bring fear into the analysis in a fairly vague and abstract way. But in truth, fear always has a specific object. The absence of a clear and conscious object would mean that we are dealing not with fear, but with anxiety, which arguably produces related but ultimately different political effects than the ones treated in Catastrophism. Shifting the optic a bit, and asking what, precisely, we may be afraid of – or, better, what is being offered to us as an object of fear, and by whom and for what ends – would enable us to make some more nuanced differentiations and ultimately help to distinguish good catastrophism from bad.

I believe this is necessary, because the general thrust of this book, or at least the strong impression it leaves, is that fear has no place in leftist or radical environmental politics. This notion leaves me uncomfortable. To the extent that certain things in the world actually are threatening, fear is both rational and a justified somatic response to reality. While courage may be more vivifying than fear, we don’t get to choose one rather than the other just because we would like to. In the face of a real danger, the encouraging injunction ‘Don’t be afraid!’ may be reassuring on some level, but makes thin ground for a critical politics. Moreover, ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ and like pieces of rhetorical trickery partake rather deeply of contempt and manipulation. False optimism or the strategic underestimation of risks and dangers is also a poor bet for radicals. Fear in the abstract may well be ‘corrosive’, as Lilley puts it. In the concrete, however, it may be a necessary part of a rational evaluation or a real factor in a situation. If so, it would need to be acknowledged and addressed, if it is justified, or confronted and critically dissolved, so far as possible, if it is not. Every valid politics – and especially one that rejects condescending deceptions on principle – has to assess realities as accurately as possible; that means acknowledging when it is appropriate to understand certain forces, processes, tendencies or agencies as valid objects of fear.

We also need to think more about the different fears that are being fed in various catastrophe scenarios and fantasies. I would suggest that what is most fearful in forms of bad catastrophism is probably the prospect of change as such: the normality that we know and that grounds our identity is going to be radically disrupted and displaced by a new situation that we don’t know. The crisis of this transition and possible loss of control, then, is above all a threat to the stability of our identity, our constructed sense of who we are and how we fit in the world. As Davis showed, this is certainly the main object of fear in right-wing catastrophism: various external forces are specified as threats to traditional identity and the perceived privileges inseparable from it. Fear of change and loss of identity is fanned into paranoia, hysteria and panic, and channeled into rage, resentment and aggression at those onto whom the problem is projected: the cultural left, Muslims, immigrants, the racialized other.

In the case of left and green catastrophism, the objects of fear are more difficult to pin down. Probably, here, too, some fear of change and loss of control and identity is part of the mix. Presumably, though, critical processes are available to leftist and green subjectivities that would be able to dissolve such fears and immunize them from the standard right-wing trajectory. What other fears are operative on this side of the political spectrum? There are, I guess, many looming threats to life, limb, family, friends, home and community in all collapse scenarios, whether social or ecological. At the extreme, survival of the species or even life on earth is felt to be at stake. But here the question of temporality becomes important. If such a collapse is not imminent and does not require immediate action in response, then we are likely, so far as we can, to avoid it and rationalize inaction. Who would choose to leave the comfort zone of the familiar if they don’t have to? But then, is it really appropriate to speak of fear or a politics of fear in that case? With regard to some aspects of the biospheric meltdown – namely, extinction and the loss of biodiversity – it would seem to be more a case of grief and outrage over the destruction of life forms and habitats that as ends-in-themselves are felt to have ethical or political standing. If those with whom we feel solidarity are threatened, while we ourselves are not in danger, how does fear enter the problem, if it does at all? How and why does fear of extreme weather, for example, become support for a call for stronger borders to keep out climate refugees, rather than the basis for an expansion of solidarity? A critical, radical politics should take up and address the objects of fear concretely, one by one, in context, with attention to how, and by whom, they are being translated into calls for action.

The problem of enjoyment needs to be taken into account as well. From a Lacanian perspective, there are always gaps between a subjective identity and the social positions that subjects actually attain and occupy. These gaps are covered over, rather than filled in, by fantasies and object choices that form robust structures of unconscious enjoyment. In these structures, to which we become extremely attached and indeed addicted, there is no such thing as a contradiction: in the unconscious, pain and pleasure, truth and unreality, can enjoyably coexist. This, in fact, is what Benjamin warned us about: it is through the structure of enjoyment that we can experience our own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure. Capitalism, as a system, has ingeniously mobilized and valorized this structure, as addictive over-consumption. Our unwillingness to give up these enjoyments supporting our identity helps to explain the persistence of a social process that becomes ever more uncontrollably self-destructive – and our difficulty in organizing a passage beyond it. The psychoanalytic lesson is: these structures are very resilient and practically immune to critical rationality. To work through a fantasy invested with enjoyment is a long-term process that requires considerable maturity and openness to change. That is already asking a lot, I know. But there are no substitutes or short-cuts on the way to critical autonomy. Catastrophism undoubtedly operates an enjoyment structure, and this can be seen most clearly in the popularity of disaster films and similar cultural forms. We can and should use critical reason to expose the follies of accumulation. But its grip on us, which of course is the ultimate stake of radical politics, will only be broken when we can underwrite our critiques with robust alternative social visions that promise new and better structures of enjoyment. This is probably the key to the last door leading out of capitalist relations.

Toward a ‘Good’ Catastrophism

If these points are granted, then one way to carry further the critique launched in Catastrophism would be to specify, with a finer grained resolution, the many components that combine to form the diverse scenarios, scientific risk assessments, imaginaries and fantasies of various catastrophisms (in the plural). It was well and necessary to distinguish between leftist, green and right-wing forms and sub-forms, but we will need to go further if we hope to grasp fear not as a merely abstract force, but as a concrete affect triggered by specific processes, or by the probable outcomes and consequences of those processes. Approaching the problem this way would gain us more clarity about which fears are valid and must be worked with. Justified fears simply cannot be dismissed on the argument that they aren’t likely to lead to action. An appropriate action, I would argue, must be appropriate and persuasive even, and especially, in the face of risks or threats that are justifiably fearful. The more difficult challenge for a critical radical politics is to pry these fears away from the enjoyment structures they may be embedded in, in various catastrophe scenarios, so that their objects can be recognized as addressable social problems.

I readily grant that, sharing more or less the same radical and critical political impulses, we may still diverge in our respective assessments of reality and its threats. That in fact is inevitable. I myself feel sufficiently impressed by the genocidal potentials of the global social process – namely the tendencies of state terror actualized in Auschwitz and Hiroshima and consolidated in the post-1945 national security-surveillance state that performs the bulk of global enforcement – to be convinced that a critical reinvention of ‘struggle’ forms and processes is a condition of any survivable global transformation. Having said that, it is the biospheric meltdown that, for me, emerges as the game-changing new factor. If we were not faced with the evidence of this in daily experience, backed up by the testimony of what is now a strong scientific consensus, then, yes, I too could accept the assumption that capital will be able churn on endlessly, using crises and disasters as the launching pads for new rounds of accumulation - ad infinitum, absent some successful revolutionary intervention from below. But I am no longer sure at all that this is the case.

Biospheric parameters look to me very much like absolute limits on the valorization-accumulation process. Moreover, since processes of ecological degradation are causally linked to the master logic of capitalist production and consumption, biospheric meltdown is very much a social process and product of domination. True, in this race to the bottom, capitalist relations may ride us all the way down. All too clearly, a better society will not automatically emerge to save us. However, that insight is different from the reasoned conclusion that we have no choice but to seek the openings for collective self-rescue from within the operative antagonisms of this process itself. For me, the self-rescuing passage out of capitalism can no longer be separated from the rescuing conservation of the biosphere: collective self-rescue in this sense isthe struggle against domination, and I put my trust in nothing else. Yet it will also be clear that the position I have just sketched is close enough to the general schematic of catastrophism to be worrisome. Either I, too, am a bad catastrophist, then, or I will have to indicate more clearly the conditions of a ‘good’ one – that is, one sufficiently critical and radical, while not dismissive of justifiable fear.

In this light, we can recognize some differences in the subtleties of each author’s way of conceptualizing catastrophism. On my reading, Yuen’s scrupulous inventory of unfolding biospheric catastrophe entails a position that is grounded somewhat differently than those of his co-authors. Like the others, Yuen acknowledges capital’s dynamic powers of regeneration through creative destruction and reorganization. He does not state explicitly that climate change and ‘eight other planetary boundaries [described by scientists] that must not be crossed if the earth is to remain habitable for humans and many other species’(15) constitute a new and absolute limit to the accumulation process, but this conclusion seems strongly enough to follow. This would have to be contrasted to the details of Lilley’s position, which begins by explicitly rejecting the idea that any external factor, or indeed anything other than class struggle, could undo the capitalist system: ‘The belief that it will come crashing down without protracted mass struggle is wishful thinking.’(44) To that I believe there is an adequate answer: to hold that, short of revolution, capitalism will always survive the crossing of every planetary parameter, dominating the scene and improvising a renewal of accumulation, entails an absolute faith in the capacity of technology and technocrats to successfully lead an accelerated human adaptation process through every ecological bottleneck. I at least find that highly implausible – in fact, a very dubious risk, given the growing record of disastrous unintended consequences of past techno-fixes and modernization schemes. Certainly there is much to discuss or debate here: how one assesses the bisopheric meltdown and relates it to the self-regenerating powers of capital (that ‘inspirited monster’ of ‘self-valorizing value,’ as Marx put it) will be fairly decisive in shaping how one views ‘fear’ and makes strategic projections about the future. But I am convinced that Benjamin’s famous assertion, that capitalism will not die a natural death, now has to be rethought and qualified in light of ecological parameters.

Davis and McNally do not consider this problem as such, finding it sufficient to their analyses to emphasize the aspect of struggle and agency. But Davis does offer a passing definition of catastrophism that I find helpfully problematic: ‘Catastrophism – defined as a political orientation premised on the assumption that society is on course for an economic, environmental, social, or spiritual collapse due to forces internal or external to us, out of which a new society may emerge – is central to the propaganda and ideology of the modern right.’(78) Put like this – and this is perhaps reason enough to avoid attempts at such definitions – catastrophism is also central to Frankfurt critical theory and many other versions of critical Marxism. As formulated, I would, without hesitation, subscribe to this orientation as well.

This would seem to be a problem, since numerous approving invocations of Benjamin and a few of Adorno indicate that the authors do not tend to see the Frankfurt theorists as exemplars of catastrophism. And yet they are indeed catastrophists, in a sense that goes far deeper than any infelicities in Davis’ definition. For both Benjamin and Adorno, the catastrophe is neither an event that is over and done with and which we need only prevent from recurring, nor a possible future disaster that we can hope to avoid. For both, the catastrophe is ongoing and we are already in it: it is the disaster of a knotted, triple domination (of man by man, and of nature, external and internal). With that logic and practice, we urgently need to break. McNally’s Benjaminian epigraph to his chapter acknowledges precisely this: ‘That things are “status quo” is the catastrophe.’(108)

The Frankfurt position, unsurprisingly, suggests to me the basic elements of a ‘good’ catastrophism. The Frankfurt emphasis on the complex dominations of the current social process is already sufficiently opened to the problems of ‘natural history’ and the possibility of ecological limits to domination. And the Frankfurt theorists acknowledge both the instrumentalization of terror and its real, objective basis in social fact. Their psychoanalytically-informed approach helps us to see that it is wrong to pose a hard choice between politicizing and rejecting fear: since fear is always already politicized, the question rather is in the details of how, by whom and for what ends it will be channeled and translated into political terms. Fear and terror are givens from which we have to work, rather than trivialities we can leap around or dissolve with mere rhetoric. Attempts to avoid or disavowal fears that are real and justified, on the argument that fear hobbles or complicates political organizing, can only end badly. To confront the enjoyment factor of bad catastrophism in its cultural forms, while at the same time giving justifiable fear its due, would be the special task and challenge of a good catastrophism. Such an approach, I would argue, has the best chance to address the problem of fear without short-circuits that would also prove problematic to a radical, emancipatory political practice. ‘Catastrophism,’ Lilley sums up in her introduction, ‘clings to the desire for a better world, while halfheartedly expecting to reach it through shortcuts.’(12) With the qualifying addition of the word ‘bad’ at the beginning, I would find this formulation compelling. Open eyes and full awareness are not enough, agreed: but we won’t make the passage to something better, either, if we struggle with half-closed eyes and a crippled awareness that always shuts down where fear begins. No short cuts.

GR

More about PM Press. 

on the mattering of silence and avowal

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Arman, untitled combustion, 1964

Plight of the After: Further Notes on Cage, Silence, Arman, Beuys, Adorno, Beckett, Trauma, Rememoration and Negative Presentation in Post-1945 Visual Art

by Gene Ray

Beuys, Plight, 1985

Two works by Joseph Beuys, or more precisely, two contrasting moments in his output: the first, a proposal for a Holocaust memorial produced in 1958, a feeble misfire; the second, the installation Plight, made and exhibited in 1985, a forcefully effective work of historical avowal. These two moments document the impressive development of one German artist. But more than that, they indicate the whole painful struggle within the visual arts to confront and respond to the Nazi genocide, a crime of state terror for which the place-name ‘Auschwitz’ has come synecdochically to stand. For visual artists willing to risk such a confrontation, the means and strategies with which to do so were by no means clear or obvious in 1958; if, after 1985, such means and strategies were established and available, that was due to the work of many, in a collective development that was absorbed and synthesized in Plight.

    

Beuys’ proposal for a memorial at Auschwitz-Birkenau, submitted in March 1958 to the juried competition organized by an association of camp survivors, was a failure by any standard. His offer to overshadow the camp with a monumental ‘monstrance’ derived from Roman Catholic ritual was wildly, monstrously inappropriate. I register this moment of misfire only to establish Beuys’ relatively early concern with the meaning, legacy and representation of Auschwitz. Beuys was one of 426 artists who submitted proposals to the jury convened in 1956 by the Comité international d’Auschwitz. For it, he produced numerous drawings and models in wood, pewter and zinc. None are compelling or evince much insight. Some were later incorporated into various installations and vitrines, including Auschwitz Demonstration 1956-1964; the dates in the title of the latter indicate the artist’s retrospective desire to establish his continuous engagement with the Nazi genocide and the problem of its artistic representation. This desire is significant, especially given Beuys’ evident reticence with regard to Nazism and its crimes. These early sketches and models, loaded with the Christian symbolism of sin, guilt, sacrifice and forgiveness, may betray the stirrings of the artist’s own unresolved conflicts in facing this history. They certainly illuminate a profound confusion before the crisis of representation imposed on art ‘after Auschwitz’, to use the phrase of Theodor W. Adorno. This confusion was hardly unique at the time; it marks a moment when the dialectic between genocidal history and representation was felt by some European visual artists as the pressure of a still unclarified problematic.

     

Beuys, Auschwitz Demonstration, 1964

The negative presentation of Auschwitz through the indirect material linkages and evocative strategies deployed so effectively in Plight– the environment he installed in the London gallery of Anthony d’Offay in 1985 – was only possible after the investigation of negative presentation in the visual arts had reached a certain point of development. The artistic strategy evident in this work manifests an understanding of the potentials of negative evocation to respond to historical trauma and catastrophe, as well as an at least minimally conscious control of the sculptural means for such evocation. With regard to artistic means, all the techniques used by Beuys in Plight had probably been developed by other artists by the end of 1961, although their potentials would not have been immediately clear to all.[1] The necessary historical disclosures no doubt took longer to circulate and fully sink in; the critical processing of those disclosures is by no means complete today.

Plight is a culminating work, in the precise sense that it consolidates this collective investigation and development that took place in the visual arts between 1945 and the end of 1961 in a way so compelling that it establishes a new standard for artistic approaches to Auschwitz. The negative memorials that in the 1990s would become the institutionally preferred model for monumental public remembrance are prefigured by Plight and are, by and large, merely echoes or variations on it. I am not concerned in this essay to treat Beuys’ personal development or career in any detail, beyond what I have done elsewhere.[2] Here I focus on Plight, in order to unfold from this one work the outlines of a larger history – the discovery and development, in the visual arts, of negative, dissonant strategies for representing catastrophic history in the aftermath of World War II.

    

Any such outline necessarily takes up problems articulated after 1945 by critical theory, namely, the very specific predicament or indeed plight of art ‘after Auschwitz.’ Critical reflection on the meaning and implications of Auschwitz, and indeed on the whole social context of violence that produced it, emerged and circulated relatively slowly. Of the few sustained reflections in the early postwar period, only Adorno’s attempted to articulate fully the implications of Auschwitz for music, literature, philosophy and all forms of serious cultural production. A detailed study of Adorno’s reception has yet to be written, but his critique of traditional culture in the aftermath was probably disseminated first in fragments and echoes. It would be surprising, though, if partial, more or less distorted forms of Adorno’s complex arguments were not beginning to penetrate the visual arts in Europe by the late 1950s, given a push no doubt by the impact of Alain Resnais’ 1955 documentary Nuit et brouillard. Literature and music led the way in developing new means and strategies for responding to Auschwitz, as even Resnais’ film confirms: much of the force of Nuit and brouillard comes from the dissonance generated between the images qua visual evidence and the critical glossing of those images by Jean Cayrol’s voice-over text and Hanns Eisler’s score. Indeed, Adorno’s thinking about dissonance was strongly stimulated by postwar developments in literature, music and theater. About the visual arts, he wrote relatively little. But as I show, visual analogues of dissonance and negative presentation emerged in sculpture and installation art as well beginning in the late 1950s.

The Elements of Plight: Installed Forms, Materials and Objects

Stepping through a doorway or passage, the spectator enters a rectangular room lined floor to ceiling with standing felt columns: two columns of equal size stacked vertically, one on the other, so that two closed ranks of standing columns extend horizontally, wall to wall. Each constituent column is about a meter and a half in height, and roughly the volume of a person. The repeated felt forms affect the space as an echoing lining that both isolates and insulates. Sound from outside is suppressed, temperature inside is conserved, and light seems to be absorbed by the rough gray tactility of the felt. Toward the back of the room, an opening in the lower row of columns on the right wall leads to a second room, also lined with felt columns. To navigate this opening, most spectators will have to bend down and pass beneath the upper row of columns. Having gained the second room, which in the original London installation contained no other openings, one finds a grand piano.[3] Both its case and keyboard are closed. A chalkboard lined with musical staves lies flatly on top of the piano; no notes are written on it. Lying on the staff board is an ordinary fever thermometer. From the dead end of the second room, the spectator’s line of sight to the outside is severed, and the suppression of outside sound increases. An L-shaped, felt-columned cul-de-sac, then, containing three objects.

The wall label or equivalent signage identifies all this as the work of Beuys, a German artist. A certain history necessitates that we qualify this nationality rather severely. Beuys was eleven years old when, through no fault of his own of course, the Reichstag Fire Decree and Enabling Act of 1933 handed vast powers to the new Nazi Chancellor and his party. Subsequently, we know, Beuys was a member of the Hitlerjugend and served in the Wehrmacht. These facts do not permit us to think of Beuys the artist as just any ‘German’. Encountering or considering his art, we are enjoined to remember that he was a boy scout and combat veteran of the Nazi regime. As such, he is indelibly marked as a member of the so-called perpetrating generation.[4] These facts are not a warrant for arrest. They cannot be construed in a way that would fix or freeze Beuys beyond any growth or change, or would deny to him any possibility of critical understanding or agency. And they certainly do not suffice to indict or automatically discredit his art. But neither can they be forgotten or blithely avoided. The work is not reducible to the life, but neither can it be isolated from it, behind a cordon sanitaire. Beuys’ position within a certain, extremely violent and disastrous history is a social fact that is objective in a very unanswerable sense.

    

The title, Plight, constitutes the artist’s concise statement about the work. A title is a linguistic tag, hence a conceptual anchor, tied to the work by a rode of intention. As such, it cannot be read naïvely. ‘Plight’, an English noun, denotes a dangerous, difficult or unfortunate situation. A verb form, marked as a secondary meaning of archaic origin, means to make a solemn pledge or promise. This semantic range points, if it is not ironic or deceptive, to some danger, difficulty or misfortune still to be specified. Alternatively or perhaps additionally, there may be some pledge or promise operative in or activated by the work.

     

The three objects installed in the work – piano, staff board and thermometer – are so-called found objects, the authorized presentation of which in art spaces was long established by 1985. The selective principles of montage and assemblage reach back to Cubist collage, which around 1912 first opened the door to invasions of visual art by bits and pieces of empirical life. Passing through Dada and the readymades of Duchamp, such object-choices were given additional psycho-erotic charges by the Surrealists. In the postwar period, empirical reality once again flowed undigested into works and galleries, this time in the service of divergently developing artistic agendas that tended, even in their divergence, to erode the borders between art and life and to subvert the stability of mimetic representation. The ambiguity and disruptive potential of found objects have undoubtedly been diluted with institutional acceptance and widespread use; today their appearance troubles no one. But they still carried some force when, in the 1950s and 1960s, the arts were overflowing the demarcations of traditional media and were recombining globally into new streams of pronounced performativity. Relevant here are Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, largely a movement of New York painters spurred by the pressure of Jackson Pollock; the Gutai Art Association of Japanese painters and sculptors; and Fluxus, a network of composers and poets largely inspired by John Cage and active in Europe. The latter, along with Nouveau Réalisme, gave strong impetus to Beuys’ artistic development. If, as we will see, he learned a great deal about the sculptural possibilities of found objects from Nouveaux Réalistes such as Arman and Daniel Spoerri, it was through his participation in events organized by or around Fluxus that Beuys was able to assimilate Cage’s deconstruction of music and to work out his own more symbolist and allegorical approach to performance.

    

Beuys has gathered and configured three specific objects into an assemblage installed in the dead-end of the felt-walled space. The grand piano and the staff board clearly allude to music. But the piano is closed and no musical notes have been written on the staff board. So there is actually no music. Music is evoked by negative presentation, called in as it were, not by naming but by the selection and presentation of two found objects with specifically musical associations. Here, in the installation, the evocation avows that there is, or at least was, music, at the same time that it refuses, blocks and occludes the actual acoustic phenomenon of music. The grand piano alludes to concerts and concert halls, the practice and recital of sonatas. But no sonatas, or any other form of music, will be performed on this piano. The possibility is foreclosed by the shutting of the case and keyboard: music as such has been silenced. The staff board, a pedagogical device, evokes scenes of musical instruction. But the lesson here is: no notes, no music. Silence and silencing, then, are the common associations of these musical found objects. Irony? Possibly. But what of the third object? The household thermometer evokes domestic scenes of illness. Does silenced music have a temperature or fever? A joke, perhaps? While such questions cannot yet be answered, their posing is made more insistent by the sound absorbing and temperature conserving character of the thick felt columns.

Silence and Demolition

It was John Cage, of course, who famously investigated ambient and found sounds – indeed, the very sounds of silence audible in the negation of formal or traditional music. Cage’s best-known composition, the provocative 4’33” (1952) was precisely a score, in three movements marked tacet, for the performed silencing of a piano. Experiments with an anechoic chamber in 1951 convinced Cage that so-called silence does not really exist. Music, he was proposing by 1955, is a duration of intended sounds and silences, while what we call silence is merely all the sounds we do not intend.[5]

    

Perhaps because Cage himself exuded a benign and serene gentleness and great personal generosity, the violence of his gestures vis-à-vis the Western musical tradition often goes unremarked. His experiments and compositions for prepared piano, dating back to 1938 or 1939 but intensifying between 1942 and 1948, enact mutilating interventions on the piano qua traditional instrument. Notes and harmonies are in effect disappeared and deflected into new and uncanny sounds, through the distorting insertion of screws, bolts, weather stripping and other objects and materials between the piano strings. Cage, a former student of Arnold Schoenberg, was schooled in dissonance. But his investigations of ambient and chance sounds eschew even that tradition. His subversion of artistic intention, linking up to heretical streams of automatism and aleatory gaming, goes far beyond the rigorous combinations of twelve-tone composition. With regard to the whole context of traditional music and its performance, Cage is quietly demolitionist. And his demolitions resound beyond the medium of music as such, to challenge the other arts as well.  How much more devastating is Cage’s silence, for example, than Duchamp’s fictional turn to chess and ‘silence’, or the automatic poems of Surrealist aesthetes.

Cage’s demolitions of tradition are not usually understood as responses to the violence of World War II. Such a reading runs against the tenor of Cage’s own words and his well-marked indifference to history. In an interview published in 1955, Cage refused the suggestion that his suppression of intention must still maintain some hidden lyric concern. He flatly cut off the interviewer’s question (‘Do not memory, psychology – ‘) with a demonstrative ‘—never again.’[6] In a text from three years later, he repeats this refusal, ventriloquizing Kafka in a question that nevertheless endorses it: ‘Do you not agree with Kafka when he wrote, “Psychology – never again”?’[7] If this refusal of memory and psychology, which might be suspected of protesting too much, reflects an avant-garde grasp of some real crisis of the subject under pressures of modernity, then, as we will see below, any such crisis itself throws us back on history. For how else could we explain it, or an art already looking beyond it? It is the violence of the mid-twentieth century, Adorno will argue, that demonstrates in specific and irrefutable ways, the crisis and fate of the autonomous – that is, the lyrical, psychological – subject.[8]

    

In the Beckett-like ‘Lecture on Nothing’, first delivered at the 8th Street Artists Club in New York in 1949 but not published until a decade later, Cage makes a rare but revealing mention of the war. ‘The most amazing noise // I ever found / was that produced by / means of a coil of wire / attached to the // pickup arm / of a phonograph and then / amplified. / It was shocking, // really shocking, / and thunderous / . / Half intellectually    and // half sentimentally / , when the war came a-long, / I decided to use /  // only / quiet sounds / . / There seemed to me // to be no truth, / no good, in anything big / in society.’[9] (The lecture was reprinted in 1961, in Cage’s collected texts, under the title Silence.)  Wars of course do not just ‘come along’, and the close proximity of shock and thunder, insistently repeated, suggests that it, the war, rather than the fabricated sound, is what Cage really ‘finds’.[10] These lines, including their passing naturalization of social violence, can be read symptomatically as the registration of a general, globalized trauma – one that Cage is working-through, or better, playing-through, as method, in his opening of a new line of artistic experiment. In this light it is not irrelevant that 4’33”, first performed by David Tudor at Woodstock in 1952, was conceived in the immediate postwar period, as Cage was working on the Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (1946-48). Even his famous turn to Zen and chance did not really begin until 1946.[11]

Even stronger confirmation of such a reading is found in the gestures and production of Cage’s students in and around Fluxus. Clearly understanding something else or more in the master’s lessons, Nam June Paik, La Monte Young, Benjamin Patterson, George Brecht, Philip Corner, George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Emmett Williams and others, including Wolf Vostell and – yes – Joseph Beuys, radicalized Cage’s relatively subtle and symbolic demolitions into often aggressive enactments of literal violence and destruction. Paik was the driving force.[12] In his notorious Étude for Piano, performed in Cologne in 1960, Paik leapt from the stage and attacked his watching ‘fathers’, Cage and Tudor, cutting off Cage’s tie and pouring shampoo on both composers before fleeing the concert. In June of 1962, the symbolic violence was literalized onstage in Paik’s One for Violin, at the event Neo-Dada in der Musik in Düsseldorf. Grasping a violin by the neck with both hands and raising it above his head, the artist suddenly swung it down, shattering it on a tabletop.[13] In September of the same year, a Fluxus gang in Wiesbaden performed Corner’s Piano Activities.  A photo shows Maciunas, Higgins, Vostell, Patterson and Williams cutting into a grand piano with a tree saw. Crowbars and hammers were also inflicted on the hapless instrument. In the following year, at Paik’s Exposition of Music Electronic Television in Wuppertal, three prepared pianos and thirteen prepared television sets were demolished. At the opening, Beuys took an axe to one of the pianos.[14]

     

 

Such demolitionist tendencies are by no means limited to music, or the overlapping of music, performance and visual art in Fluxus. We could trace a certain family resemblance across all of the arts in the wake of World War II. Two streams or tendencies are entwined, converging and diverging with a pulsing ambivalence: one, more cautious, forsakes or abandons traditional object-making and makes a leap into performativity, which then becomes a new object of investigation; the other, less restrained, attacks traditional culture, at first symbolically but soon enough literally. Both streams are globalized.[15] The Lettristes in Paris liquidate first poetry and then cinema. Fontana stabs and slashes the canvas in Milan, while in Japan, Shozo Shimamoto punches and kicks through stretchered paper and Kazuo Shiraga wrestles mud. Neo-Dada here and there cries havoc and raises hell. And so on. Nouveaux Réalistes Daniel Spoerri and Arman carried the demolition into sculpture. In 1961, Spoerri made two works of real menace: Hommage à Fontana, which carries the painter’s slashes into an image of actual throat-cutting, and Les lunettes noires, a blinding booby-trap that jokes grimly on the optimist’s rose-colored glasses, even as it raises the stakes of Man Ray’s Gift.[16] Also in 1961, the year before Paik destroyed a violin onstage, Arman began his colères (tantrums or rages), in which beautiful stringed instruments of traditional music were systematically smashed to pieces, instrument by instrument – a violin, a bass, a mandolin, a piano, a harp – and the gathered bits and splinters affixed to boards. Three years later, in 1964, he varied the gesture in the combustions series; this time he burned the instruments to crisps and hung the charred remains on the gallery walls. This cursory highlighting would of course need to be backed up by close readings of specific works in context. But it suffices to indicate how far such attacks on the media and body of art can be grasped in general as mirroring displacements of the violence and trauma of the war.

‘This radically guilty and shabby culture’ (Adorno)

The bulk of postwar art was undoubtedly restorative and accommodating. But even if it is granted that the examples I have cited do constitute countertendencies of hostility and a crisis of faith in art’s traditional authority, why should we think they are responses to World War II? The period indicated, from 1945 to the mid-1960s, is after all complexly full of momentous transformations, antagonisms and struggles. What about the Cold War and nuclear arms race, whose shadows fell constantly on the economic miracles of reconstruction culture? What about the anti-colonial struggles and wars of national liberation flaring across the so-called Third World? Was there not always much to be worried, anxious and angry about? Was not the traumatic ferocity of the Algerian War, for example, the more potent context of Nouveau Réalisme? Such questions are valid and point to factors that were no doubt operative, but the tumults and stresses of the postwar period unfolded within a global social process that was itself radically and irreparably altered by the violence of World War II. It is Adorno who announces and clarifies this.

    

Auschwitz, for Adorno, is not, strictly speaking, the catastrophe. The catastrophe is rather the global social process founded in and reproduced by antagonism and violence. All societies structured around the division of manual and intellectual labor and the domination of man and nature are doomed to ‘perennial suffering’.[17] Capitalist modernity is the latest and most totalizing form of such a class society. Nor did Soviet-style ‘actually existing socialism’ offer any liberating alternative. In both ‘late capitalism’ and its stunted rivals in ‘the East’, Adorno saw the same two dominant tendencies unfolding: ‘integration’, or the tightening of social control and increasing elimination of difference under the reign of identity-thinking, and ‘administration’, or the expanding powers of bureaucratic concentration and managerial direction. In a globalizing society of expansive states and corporations tending toward ‘total administration’ and ‘total integration’, the scope for autonomous subjectivity, capable of spontaneous experience and feeling as well as a practice of critical thought, is progressively restricted. Dominated individuals are trained to accommodate themselves to social and economic forces indifferent to their happiness and beyond their control. Their anxiety and repressed rage over this apparent fate predispose them to fascistic appeals and ensure that episodic genocidal eruptions will be a perennial feature of contemporary life.[18] In this light, Auschwitz was only the ‘first test piece’ (erstes Probestücke), the proof that the tendencies of integration and administration contain within them the logic of genocide: ‘Genocide is the absolute integration.’[19]

     

The industrial murder of whole categories of individuals, then, was a latent potential within capitalist modernity that was actualized under the specific conditions of Nazism and war. Racism and anti-Semitism were unquestionably central to the conception and execution of the Nazi genocide. However, the essence of Auschwitz, the fully globalized meaning and implication of this actualized potential, cannot be located in or reduced to anti-Semitism.[20] Once demonstrated, this potential haunts all forms of contemporary society, as a deployable power of state terror. Auschwitz was a qualitative leap in violence that reaches into and changes – must change – the very meaning of life, humanity, society, the future. Nor was it the only such leap, in the context of World War II. Hiroshima, the other threshold-crossing event of violence, demonstrates a different potential: the terminally genocidal power of weapons systems produced under the merger of science and war machine. Adorno takes note of Hiroshima in numerous places, but does not develop its implications in a way comparable to his meditations on Auschwitz.[20] Nevertheless, it follows relentlessly and necessarily from his arguments that Auschwitz and Hiroshima must be thought together, as historically-demonstrated genocidal potentials that remain entangled in the tendencies of the contemporary social process.[21] The meaning of the change that this imposes on us all, without exception, is that the future of humanity, in any form at all, is now in question and fully open to doubt. We may not survive our own social process.[22] Auschwitz and Hiroshima are the end of the myth of automatic progress, full stop. ‘No universal history leads from savagery to humanity, but one does lead from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.’[23] For Adorno, then, the catastrophe is emphatically not in the past, an event that happened once and now is to be avoided. We are in the catastrophe and it is ongoing.

    

The implications of this for art, Adorno argued, are intimidating. With modernity, the arts had acquired a new autonomy, claiming their place, along with letters, learning and autonomous science, within an honored production of ‘spirit’ (Geist). But such ‘culture’ remains the luxury of an extracted social surplus, conditioned on the division of manual and intellectual labor and thus implicated in domination. Emphatically differentiating itself from ‘life’, art nevertheless remains bound to it. As flaring promise of happiness, art cannot become the praxis that would realize what is promised. And this constitutive frustration converts art’s very refusal of function into functioning affirmation of the given social reality. Art’s ‘double-character as both autonomous and fait social’ is thus an antagonism that ‘announces itself unceasingly from the zone of its autonomy’.[24] And the same antagonism haunts all autonomous culture conditioned on the splitting off of spirit in the division of labor, tainting its claim to enlightenment: ‘all culture shares society’s nexus of guilt’.[25] As the social process of modernity unfolds, and its totalizing tendencies of integration and administration undermine the very autonomous subjectivity on which culture depends and for which it alone can have any redeeming meaning, art’s predicament becomes increasingly acute. Under the heading of ‘culture industry’, Adorno and Max Horkheimer describe how the market, mediating these social pressures, tends systematically to undermine art’s autonomy and, behind the mirage of diversity, to reduce culture to conformist ‘Ähnlichkeit’ (sameness).[26] Even before Auschwitz, a crisis of faith would merely have reflected an accurate registration of social reality. After it, art’s ‘very right to exist’ is in question, as the opening sentence of Ästhetische Theorieannounces.[27]

    

These critical reflections and arguments, developing and deepening in the period from Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944) to Adorno’s death in 1969, are the context in which we have to read his assertion that ‘after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric’ – and indeed has become ‘impossible’ (unmöglich).[28] Written in 1949 and first published in 1951, at the end of the programmatic essay ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’, this infamous provocation only began to circulate widely in 1955, as the lead essay of Prismen. Adorno would subsequently revisit this claim, moderating and qualifying it, but pointedly leaving it in force.[29] If, as we have seen, the social process in general is tending to restrict and eliminate the very conditions of autonomous subjectivity, then the subject of spontaneous experience and feeling who could write or read lyric poetry is disappearing with it. And if Auschwitz is the demonstration that this tendency carries within it a genocidal potential, then the meaning of Adorno’s provocation emerges clearly: poetry, already becoming ‘impossible’ through the loss of autonomous subjects who are its necessary condition, now becomes barbaric, if, failing to register the social catastrophe, it attempts to carry on as if nothing has happened. This first formulation, then, is a demand for self-reflectivity, a wake-up call that challenges art to attain full awareness of its own plight.[30] 

    

Summing up in Negative Dialektik, Adorno insists that Auschwitz is the unanswerable proof of ‘culture’s failure’ (das misslingen der Kultur):

‘After Auschwitz, all culture, along with the urgent critique of it, is garbage. In restoring itself after what took place in its own landscape, it has become entirely the ideology it was potentially, ever since it presumed, in opposition to material existence, to inspire that existence with the light that the separation of spirit from bodily labor withholds from it. Whoever pleads for the preservation of this radically guilty and shabby culture makes himself its accomplice, while whoever refuses to have anything more to do with culture directly promotes the barbarism that culture revealed itself to be. Not even silence gets out of the circle.’[31]

Art and the whole tradition of enlightened culture, then, must bear the ordeal of this predicament, reflecting on its own failure, origins and continuing dependence on injustice, brought to a head by its impotence in preventing or resisting genocide. It can neither permit any uncritical restoration of its ostensible authority, nor flee the field before the tightening knots of a hostile and totalizing system.

Adorno’s critique of traditional culture helps us to understand the gestural violence of the artists and works I have cited. Struggling to find their way to the clarity eventually expressed in Adorno’s late texts, these artists at first more or less blindly ‘acted out’ the predicament Adorno specifies.[32] Later on, we will see, some of them were able to work it through to moments of lucidity. The demolitionism that some artists directed toward art is misplaced, but is at least understandable. Moreover, we note that Adorno’s first formulations of the ‘after Auschwitz’ problematic set out a general, structural predicament that argues from the tendencies of a global social process and an analysis of art’s position within that process. It is not yet a question of representing the catastrophe in art.

Endgames

In the 1962 radio talk and essay ‘Engagement’, in the context of a running polemic against committed art, Adorno begins to grapple with the issue of artistic representation.[33] Considering the various strategies by which artists have tried to represent Auschwitz and the larger social catastrophe to which it belongs, Adorno begins to theorize and advocate for a form of dissonant and hermetic production grounded in negative presentation. Adorno concludes that Brecht’s and Sartre’s committed representations are too direct, distorting and trivializing. As he later summarizes this critique in Ästhetische Theorie: ‘Artworks exert a practical effect, if they do so at all, through a barely apprehensible transformation of consciousness, and not by haranguing.’[34] Kafka, Schoenberg and, above all, Beckett become his favored models.

The new elaborations of a negative art of dissonance, I have argued at length elsewhere, are Adorno’s rewriting of the traditional sublime – or, more precisely, his attempt to understand how Auschwitz has made the old sublime impossible and replaced it with something radically different.[35] The traditional sublime had marked a passage from terror and disturbance to a pleasing self-admiration. The imagination’s distress before the power or size of nature was rescued by reason, which reminds the subject of its supersensible destiny, as a free moral agent. But after Auschwitz and the dead letter of automatic progress, the saving recourse to human dignity is foreclosed. The terror of the social process supplants that of nature as the trigger of the sublime, but now the terror remains in force. Indeed, autonomous reason, if that can be found at all, now confirms precisely this. In the negative art Adorno favors, any feeling of enjoyment, any pleasure still generated by the mimetic structure of artistic semblance, is pulled back into terror when scrutinized. The subjects of this sublime are damaged, remnant subjects; they can only watch, as from barrels in the maelstrom, their own slow orbiting descent around the sucking trauma of history. The forceful dissonance of unreconciled artworks, Adorno argues, triggers the emphatic ‘anxiety (Angst) that existentialism only talks about’.[36] In Ästhetische Theorie, he will call this effect ‘Erschütterung’ – ‘shudder’.[37]

     

Kant had introduced the notion of ‘negative Darstellung’ (negative presentation) in connection with the sublime in the Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790). In a passage famously including an admiration of the image ban of Jewish Law, he notes that abstract notions, such as the ideas of infinity or God, can be represented negatively, and that the feeling of the sublime loses nothing by a negative approach.[38] Similarly, Adorno argues, the ‘abstractness of the objective law prevailing in society’ cannot be captured in positive pictures or the simplifying fables of committed art.[39] Like the God of old, the social catastrophe can only be evoked and avowed negatively in art. Even Schoenberg, Adorno implies, does not always remember this. Criticizing The Survivor of Warsaw, Adorno suggests that it is still too positive. The remnants of enjoyment that still cling to even the most ascetic and rigorous artworks, as the structural effect of semblance as such, have to be resisted. Such remnants threaten to turn art ‘about’ Auschwitz into a new violation of the victims. Only the most indirect, coded and hermetic representations of the victims’ suffering generate adequate resistance and counter the enjoyment intrinsic to art. For Adorno, Beckett shows the way. He evokes the catastrophe in its essence, not by direct invocation or committed haranguing, but by showing just how little is left of the autonomous subject in its crisis. In Endgame, the catastrophe comes onstage as the news that Hamm has run out of painkiller.[40] ‘Beckett responds to the situation of the concentration camp in the only way fitting – a situation he does not name, as if it were subject to a Bilderverbot. What is, is like the concentration camp.’[41] Or again, from Adorno’s 1961 essay on Endgame: ‘Only in silence is the name of the catastrophe to be spoken.’[42]

     

Adorno took a long time in coming to a position on the poetry of Paul Celan. For his part, the poet wrestled courageously with Adorno’s challenge. Celan’s Engführung, his radical 1958 reworking of Todesfuge (1945), was written in a full awareness of Adorno’s works and arguments.[43] At the end, in the unfinished Ästhetische Theorie, Adorno granted Celan a place on his small list of those deemed to have successfully responded to the plight of art after Auschwitz. Arguably, this is the closest Adorno ever came to a real retraction of his 1951 stricture: ‘In the work of the most important contemporary representative of German hermetic poetry, Paul Celan, the experiential content of the hermetic was inverted. His poetry is permeated by the shame of art in the face of suffering that escapes both experience and sublimation. Celan’s poems want to speak of the most extreme horror through silence.’[44]

Negative Evocation and Avowal in the Visual Arts

In the visual arts, negative presentation had to develop in a different way. Found objects are fully positive presentations, rather than mimetic representations, of selected fragments of empirical life. But we have already seen that found objects can also function as negative presentations of other things that are withheld: the piano and staff board in Plightare direct and positivepresentations of these objects but are negative presentations of music. The negative evocation works because the association of these objects with music is established and instantaneous. This suggests that negative presentation depends, and perhaps always depends, on a positive image or association that stands behind or underwrites it.

     

Before it would be possible to attempt a negative visual presentation of Auschwitz, for example, it would be necessary for positive images to circulate widely, deeply and long enough to become burned into public consciousness – and presumably to do so against strong resistances and tendencies toward forgetting, avoidance and disavowal. Their establishment in public awareness would not at all suffice to demonstrate that either the Nazi genocide or the catastrophe in Adorno’s larger sense had actually been worked through and processed; it would indicate only that the minimal awareness necessary for critical processing was at least in place. Once the positive images are so established, however, once it can be taken for granted that most people have been exposed to and carry the trace of such images, then it is possible to work with them without showing them. The release of Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard in 1955 was the vehicle of this dissemination and, as such, had a profound impact not just on public consciousness, but on European artists. It seems in fact to have opened and stimulated the investigation of negative presentation, as a specifically visual strategy for evoking and avowing traumatic history. The film’s form itself, alternating and contrasting archival still and moving images with newly shot color footage of camp ruins in pastoral landscapes, poses the problem of representation, which Cayrol’s text then articulates explicitly at several points. If Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film Shoa is now recognized as a landmark of negative presentation in film, his ‘fiction of the real’ probably depends, more than Lanzmann would care to admit, on the impact of Resnais’ earlier documentary. Lanzmann criticized Resnais’ film for showing too much, too positively, while the actual genocide of millions, taking place in gas chambers, are terror scenes of which no film exists and to which no image could be adequate.[45] Without denying the truth of this, the force of Lanzmann’s combination of rigorous refusal of documentary images and a devastating accumulation of testimony is only intensified by our past exposure to positive images. Indeed, this exposure is necessary if we are to grasp, through Lanzmann’s work, how inadequate such images must be.

     

After just a few years, in which implications of Resnais’ film were evidently absorbed and translated into an agenda for further research, the investigation of negative presentation as a means for the visual avowal of traumatic history began in earnest in Paris, where Nuit et brouillard received its primary reception. From 1959 on, the dots were connected very quickly within the group of Nouveaux Réalistes. Issues that previously were of artistic interest only as problems of form, such as the relation between performance and trace in mark-making, were revisted under the pressure of a growing awareness of catastrophic history and its grounding in an ongoing social process. When Yves Klein returned to figurative painting with his anthropemétries in 1960, he would recover ground already explored by Robert Rauschenberg, for example in his negative figures made with floodlit blueprint paper in 1949. But Klein had now seen the shadows burned onto walls and sidewalks of Hiroshima during the atomic bombing. In 1961, the year after France exploded its own atomic bomb and Resnais’ and Marguerite Duras’ feature film Hiroshima mon amour opened in cinemas, Klein’s anthropométries made a sharp topical veer toward the real: in the sequence from People Beginning to Fly to Hiroshima, a potential of negative presentation has become lucid. History forces the dialectic of form and content, and figuration after 1945 cannot be what it was before.

    

More pertinent here were the sculptural investigations of Spoerri and Arman. In his tableaux pièges (snare pictures), begun in 1959, Spoerri fixed the objects found on everyday tabletops, shifted them in situ onto the vertical plane and hung the result on the wall. In their negative reconstruction of specific scenes of conviviality, his piègesof meals and shared tables in effect turn the trace into historical evidence, and the assemblage of found objects into forensic exhibit. In the same year, Arman made his first poubelles(rubbish bins), boxes and vitrines filled with found garbage and refuse, as well as his first accumulations, serial collections of specimens of the same or similar object. As Benjamin Buchloh’s analysis of these works and their context establishes, Arman’s cumulative reflections of commodity culture and its garbage transform the tradition of found object and readymade and announce ‘the end of the utopian object aesthetic’.[46] Quite clearly, the hope and optimism that Duchamp and other artists from the early avant-gardes had sometimes invested in industrialized objects have been objectively liquidated along with the myth of automatic progress. Readymades are no longer optimistic exactly to the degree that optimism in general is no longer possible, and this is an objective problem, as Adorno made clear, that is not alleviated at all by the reconstructed pseudo-optimism of commodified abundance. With eloquent precision, Spoerri’s Lunettes noires make the same point.

     

I am less convinced that Arman’s selection and manipulation of found objects under postwar conditions empty these objects of every kind of charge and aura, as Buchloh’s account in places also suggests. If we supplement his account by tracing the thread of negative presentation, as I do here, then the story becomes more complex. Arman’s portraits-robot registered the fact that the invisible charge connecting individuals to their things exceeds and survives a mere relation of possession. Individuals can be evoked negatively in a very precise way by the presentation of things that are linked to them, and Arman shows this in those ‘portraits’ of his dealer and friends that seem merely to sample each one’s garbage. These jokes in poor taste also look to the stage properties of Beckett’s Fin de partie, which premiered in London in April 1957 and was playing in Paris three weeks later: in that dismal work, Hamm keeps his elderly parents, Nagg and Nell, in two dust bins.[47] Yet, even the exhibited misery and obsolescence of a subjectivity facing its historical endgame carries a certain pathos that we, the crippled remnants of subjectivity still clinging to damaged life, are able to feel and register. Similarly, as we have seen with the colères and combustions of musical instruments, the destruction of these very auratic objects, with their fragile wooden bodies and warm patinas, produces a secondary aura: the flaring halo of a traditional culture that, like the subject, is in the process of disappearing – and only dimly grasps the objective ground for its demise. For sheer, shocking antihumanism, the smashing or burning of violins and pianos is on a par with the burning of books; even as artistic gestures, all these acts implicitly threaten the body itself with violence. It is wrong to assume or conclude that there is no pathos at all generated by culture’s crisis, even if the operative feelings fluctuate unstably between terror, rage, dismay and shame. It is not a matter of no aura at all, then, so much as a need to specify exactly what kind of auratic charge is structured, if even as potential, in Arman’s objects.[48] In this direction, we must be painfully precise.

It is now established, and known by those who have taken the trouble to inform themselves, that Auschwitz and the other Nazi murder factories were the scene of a theft so immense and systematic that it recalls Marx’s famous account of violent, ‘so-called original accumulation’ (sogenannte ursprüngliche Akkumulation). At these camps, the victims were not just killed; their bodies and personal property were plundered without restraint, in ways so gruesome and appalling that it defies belief. At Auschwitz, where alone a million victims were murdered, ninety-percent of them Jews, the stolen property was carefully sorted and stored in special warehouses, sardonically called ‘Canada’ by the prisoners forced to carry out this criminal labor. When the Nazis evacuated Auschwitz before the advancing Soviet army in January 1945, they blew up the crematoria and attempted to burn or destroy all obvious evidence of the genocide. But much evidence still remained, and Soviet cameramen on scene at the camp’s liberation recorded immense pyramids of sorted clothes, suitcases, eyeglasses, shaving brushes, everything of any possible value to the Nazi war economy – even dentures stolen from corpses as the teeth of victims were ransacked for gold caps and fillings. Nearly an hour of archival film footage exists, and excerpts were shown as evidence at the War Crimes Trials in Nuremburg. Excerpts were also utilized for some of the montages of Nuit et brouillard, which shows stolen eyeglasses, bowls and clothing. Stills taken from the reels of moving image may have had a wider circulation that remains unmapped.     

     

Two of Arman’s works in particular are exact reconstructions, on a much smaller scale, of these documentary images. La Vie à pleines dents, from 1960, is a disturbing accumulation of dentures; and Argus extra myope, from 1961, gathers and boxes found spectacles. Both are negative presentations of the individuals, whose personal belonging these dentures and eyeglasses actually were. At the same time, by reason of a visual linkage to history that is far too precise to be dismissed, these works evoke other people whose dentures and eyeglasses were stolen in the course of their administered murder. By this second evocation, these works of Arman avow the Nazi genocide. The artistic potential uncovered and mobilized here, then, is very clear. This is how visual negative presentation works and how it ‘remembers’: these works avow – they assert that these evoked people existed but were murdered, and that this crime was perpetrated. And this avowal is indeed charged with an awful aura.

    

Buchloh notes these echoes of Nuit et brouillard and concludes: ‘In their extreme forms, Arman’s accumulations and poubelles cross the threshold to become memory images of the first historical instances of industrialized death.’[49] But he hesitates to assign any interpretive primacy to this avowal or to explore the implications further. The ‘inevitably limitless choice of Arman’s object aesthetic’ points Buchloh rather to the new conditions for subject formation – the enforced identification with ‘sign exchange value’.[50] Taking all of Arman’s production into account, these two works and perhaps a handful of others that articulate a similarly precise avowal do seem to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume and randomness of the artist’s accumulations. This far, Buchloh’s point must be taken. Yet, it must also be said that the relation of these few works to Arman’s total output also, and crucially, mirrors and avows the position of industrial murder within the general, global logic of capitalist accumulation: it is there, actually, before our eyes, visible but not necessarily seen – a poorly understood potential or latency that we may well miss in the flux and flood of commodified life and spectacular culture. Buchloh’s claim, that a ‘dialectic of silence and exposure’ (or ‘of disavowal and spectularization’) forms the historical framework of postwar art, is unquestionably correct.[51] But in Arman’s case, we can see that it is by negative presentation that his work is able to avow the full catastrophe, in Adorno’s sense.

     

It is necessary at this point to insist that this efficacy of negative presentation does not depend on artistic intention. These visual linkages to history are irrefutably objective. Coded into these works are potentials for precise evocation and avowal that, as soon as they are activated, produce effects – including the hit Adorno called ‘shudder’.[52] This holds true even if these linkages were produced unconsciously – even if Arman was utterly blind to what he had done. Nevertheless, a few other works by this artist indicate that he in fact was quite lucid about it. Tuez-les tous, Dieu reconnaître les Siens, from 1961, is an accumulation of household insecticide pumps. The prominent brand-names of some – Fly-Tox, Flit, Projex – testify to the commodification even of poison. Here we have to remember Clov, in Beckett’s Fin de partie, who, discovering a flea has gotten inside his pants, doses his own genitals with poison. As Adorno noted, the scene is one of several in this work that point to the endgame of human domination of nature, which was always self-repressive and carried latently within it a reversal of the instinct for survival. Moreover, insecticide is historically entangled in the pre-history of Zyklon-B, the toxin used in the Nazi gas chambers: ‘Insecticide, which pointed toward the death camps from the very beginning, becomes the end-product of the domination of nature, which now abolishes itself.’[53] Arman’s title is a line imputed to the Abbot of Cîteaux, the Church official who commanded the massacre of the inhabitants of Béziers, in the south of France, in 1209, during the Albigensian Crusade. It expresses the moment in the escalation of administered violence when the jump is made to whole categories of people, all the members of which are to be targeted and killed indiscriminately. After Auschwitz, racializing translations of the slogan continue to circulate; one in English (‘Kill them all and let God sort ’em out’) seems to have been popular among US soldiers in Vietnam and, passing through the proxy wars of the South African apartheid regime a decade or so later, to have become a badge of mercenary culture.[54] To point quickly in passing to two more accumulations: Le village des damnés, from 1962, packs dolls of children into a glass vitrine as tightly as those deported to the camps were packed into cattle cars; Birth control, from 1963, echoes this, but this time the dolls are packed in a hinged cardboard box that evokes the suitcases of the deported.

     

One more aspect of the Nazi genocide must be attested before this constellation of references can throw its negative light on Plight. The makers of Nuit et brouillardproduced a German-language version, with Paul Celan’s translation of Cayrol’s text. Nacht und Nebel opened in German cinemas in late 1956, and in April 1957 was broadcast on German television.[55] In the sequences treating the Nazi plunder of victims, Resnais’ film takes note of the fact that the victims’ hair was shaven, collected in depots, and eventually turned into ‘cloth’ or textile (tissu). Several images show a pyramid of human hair, and another shows what is presumably raw human hair, in a column-like form wrapped in paper. The paper is marked: K[onzentrations].L[ager]. Au[schwitz] Kg 22. The voice-over for this sequence tells us ‘Rien que des cheveux de femme… A quinze pfennigs le kilo…On en fait du tissu.’ (Nothing but women’s hair… at fifteen pfennigs a kilo… it’s used to make textile). What the hair was turned into, actually, was felt. At Auschwitz, Soviet cameramen filmed the seven tons of human hair that was packed for shipment to German factories, where, other captured documents entered into the record at Nuremburg revealed, the hair of the victims was routinely turned into felt. In these sequences, which last more than a minute, we see 293 column-like sacks of hair, laid on their sides in two stacks, end to end. The sacks are roughly the size of the 284 felt columns used by Beuys to line the walls of Plight. The Soviet film footage was reissued in 1985, for the fortieth anniversary of the war’s end. In the same year, Lanzmann released Shoa and Beuys opened Plight in London.[56] In the Pompidou catalog, the full title of Beuys’ work, which presumably reflects the artist’s retrospective alteration of the dating, is: Plight 1956-1985.

The Avowal of Plight

We now have all we need to understand what this work is and how it does what it does. Beuys took a long time to attain this synthesis, which in its quiet, restrained precision and power is unequalled by anything else in his output. In the interval before: the Eichmann Trial (1961-2), the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials (1963-5), the German student movement and global uprisings of 1968, the trauma of the RAF. And several decades of playing the art game: haranguing from chalkboards, melting fat, wearing felt, wrapping pianos with it. By 1985, he was ready, whether or not he had full and lucid consciousness of what he pulled together there. In constructing a sculptural afterimage to enclose this space, Beuys in effect ‘snared’ the sacks in the hair room at Auschwitz and flipped them up from the horizontal to the vertical, just as Spoerri did with his pièges. In standing ranks, the felt columns now evoke the victims by negative presentation – this time through the inescapable specificity of an irrefutable material linkage. The thermometer, we can now see, evokes the crematoria and lies on the staff board and piano like a crushing weight or pressure that holds it closed and keeps it silent. 

    

We now have an avowal of the catastrophe that, at the same time, allegorizes art’s predicament after Auschwitz, just as Adorno theorizes it. Music, the medium of raw feeling and deep consolation, will not be adequate before the facts of what happened; art will have to shut up. Or rather, because not even silence gets us out of the circle, art will have to go on, bearing its shame and the challenge to break radically with its affirmative tradition. Only in silence can the name of the catastrophe be spoken, but still it must be spoken – if only through the dissonance of a negative, hermetic installation. This one, here, now, puts the spectator under the surveillance of a community of evoked victims, ranked along the walls, as if along fences of barbed wire. The title confirms the interpretation and takes its place within it: if the avowed trauma was that than which no worse can be conceived, it remains, in its urgent legacy for us, a situation of extreme danger and difficulty. Even the secondary meaning of ‘plight’ piles on, as a question that, given the tendencies of the social process, we must leave open: the situation imposes on us a duty and promise, but only insofar as we can still claim at all to be autonomous, ethical, political subjects. Maybe, in the trial and moment of truth, we earn that designation, maybe we do not. In this work, there is no trace of confident posturing, jester’s tricks, or the weird dancing of shamans. The work draws no conclusions about our capacity either to fathom the horror or save ourselves from it. It simply avows: that happened and so it is. The disturbance of this work – attested by the punches and kicks of spectators, imprinted into the columns of the second room – leads through the dead-end, to the shudder of the after-Auschwitz sublime.

To have said this is not to have said everything. One would like to say more, and should. Avowal is a moment only – of and in a social process that churns on in defiance of all avowals. What we do with our avowals, where we go with them and how we put them to work, with others, is another, more political matter. The sublime, in itself, is not self-rescue, any more than it ever was. We may think Plight, as synthesis and culmination, came rather late in the dialectic of avowal and avoidance. But the irony, if that is what we must call it, lies elsewhere: in Plight’s reception, which long managed to avoid what the work avows, and in the social factum brutum that all the accelerated proliferation of remembrance in art and official culture since has not resulted in any global public lucidity about the social process. Its powers of terror, far from being arrested, have only continued to grow. Rememoration is not always, not automatically, counter-memory. It is no longer 1985.

A German translation of this essay is forthcoming in Beuys-Brock-Vostell: Three Positions of Performativity, eds. Wilfried Dörstel, Eckardt Gillen, Franz van der Grinten, and Peter Weibel, in association with the exhibition of the same name at ZKM/Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe.

Notes:

[1] Dissemination is a process rather than a sudden event of universal transmission achieved with perfect success, once and for all, upon first exhibition or publication.

[2] See my 'Joseph Beuys and the After-Auschwitz Sublime' in Gene Ray, ed., Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy (New York: D.A.P. and The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 2001), pp. 59-61; and revised in Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 37-8.

[3] Photos published online indicate that the work on view in the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris is no longer the work Beuys installed in London. Some curatorial agency at the Pompidou evidently authorized itself to open an additional passage through the wall of the second room, permitting the traffic of visitors to flow smoothly through the work but undoing the cul-de-sac spectators would have encountered in London in 1985. This mutilation effectively produces a new and very different work. The London configuration is the main focus here.

[4] As far as I am aware, Beuys is not suspected of any direct participation in the Nazi genocide. How much he may have known about it, from within the Nazi war machine, is less clear and more open to controversy, but in the absence of irrefutable evidence remains unknowable.

[5] John Cage, Silence (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), pp. 13-4.

[6] Ibid., p. 17.

[7] Ibid., p. 47.

[8] Cage’s name appears only once, in passing, in Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie, but there Adorno aligns him with Beckett’s reduction of meaning to the absence of any redeeming meaning: ‘Schlüsselphänomene mögen auch gewisse musikalische Gebilde wie das Klavierkonzert von Cage sein, die als Gesetz unerbittliche Zufälligkeit sich auferlegen und dadurch etwas wie Sinn: den Ausdruck von Entsetzen empfangen.’ (‘Key phenomena may include musical constructions, such as the piano concert of Cage, which by imposing relentless chance on themselves as law thereby attain something like meaning: the expression of horror.’ Ästhetische Theorie [1970], eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 231; Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 154. Here and throughout, English renderings of Adorno are my modifications of the standard translations.

[9] Ibid., p. 117, my slashes (/) marking discrete measures, four to a line, and double-slashes (//) marking line breaks in Cage’s scored lecture. The text continues: ‘But quiet sounds /  / were like loneliness / ,  or // love / or friendship / . / Permanent, I thought // , / values, / independent / at least from // Life, Time and / Coca-Cola / .’

[10] What a shock it must have been, for example, when the full extent of the Nazi genocide was revealed, to have remembered his 1942 work for prepared piano, titled In the Name of the Holocaust, after Joyce’s pun from Finnegans Wake (‘In the name of the Holy Ghost.’). Such an accident might fuel anyone’s reflection on the relation of culture and chance. But for Cage the sensitive American, Hiroshima was probably the more traumatic detonation.

[11] In that year, Cage began studies of Zen with D.T. Suzuki and of Indian philosophy with Gita Sarabhai.

[12] Born in Korea, Paik finished a thesis on Schoenberg at the University of Tokyo in 1956. Afterwards in Europe, he studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne before meeting Cage in Darmstadt in 1958.

[13] Contrast this with Cage’s most extreme embrace of indeterminacy, 0’0”,  performable by anyone in any manner, composed in the same year.

[14] See Douglas Kahn, ‘The Latest: Fluxus and Music’, in Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss, In the Spirit of Fluxus (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 1993), pp. 100-121; on Beuys and Fluxus, see Joan Rothfuss, ‘Joseph Beuys: Echoes in America’, in Ray, ed., Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, pp. 37-53.

[15] For other readings of these tendencies in postwar art history, see Paul Schimmel and Russell Ferguson, eds., Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949-1979 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998).

[16] Spoerri’s father, Isaac Feinstein, was murdered by the Nazis in 1940.

[17] Adorno, Negative Dialektik [1966] (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), p. 355: ‘das perennierende Leiden’; Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1995) p. 362. Cf. the variant, ‘das perennierende Unheil’, in ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’ [1951], in Prismen (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), p. 16; ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 25. Both mark the legacy of misery unfolding from the division of labor, ‘die tödliche Spaltung der Gesellschaft’, ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’, p. 15; ‘the deadly splitting of society’, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, p. 24.  Pertinently, the separation of spirit (Geist) from manual labor is the necessary condition and primal scene of all autonomous art and culture.

[18] See Adorno, ‘Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit’ [1959], in Eingriffe: Neun kritische Modelle (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1963), p. 139; ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 98.

[19] Adorno, Negative Dialektik, p. 355: ‘Völkermord ist die absolute Integration.’ Negative Dialectics, p. 362.

[20] Part of Adorno’s critical provocation is to insist that, essentially, Auschwitz is an absolute threat that exceeds its historic specificity. Auschwitz qua appearance-form (Erscheinungsform), to use Adorno’s Hegelian idiom, was driven by toxic and anti-Semitic fantasies of racial purity that took hold, with official promotion, in Germany, within a highly specific conjuncture of history. Auschwitz qua essence (Wesen), however, is the genocidal potential of social tendencies toward integration and administration. Behind the murder of Jews by Nazis, the logic of modernity itself is unfolding.

[21] To clarify this was a main aim of my Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory; see in particular chapters one and eleven (of the revised soft-cover edition), as well as my further elaborations in ‘Hits: From Trauma and the Sublime to Radical Critique’, Third Text 97, vol. 23, no. 2 (2009): 135-149.

[22] As Adorno puts it, the ‘threat of total catastrophe’ (‘der… Drohung der totalen Katastrophe’) has become ‘allgegenwärtigen’ – omnipresent, ubiquitous, saturating the contemporary. Ästhetische Theorie, p. 362; Aesthetic Theory, pp. 243-4.

[23] Adorno, Negative Dialektik, p. 324: ‘Keine Universalgeschichte führt vom Wilden zur Humanität, sehr wohl eine von der Steinschleuder zur Megabombe.’ Negative Dialectics, p. 320.

[24] Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, p. 16: ‘Der Doppelcharakter der Kunst als autonom und als fait social teilt ohne Unterlaß der Zone ihrer Autonomie mit sich.’ Aesthetic Theory, p. 5.

[25] Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, p. 26; ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’, p. 17: ‘alle Kultur am Schuldzusammenhang der Gesellschaft teilhat’.

[26] Max Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente [1944] (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Verlag, 2003), pp. 128-176; Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 94-136.

[27] Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 1; Ästhetische Theorie, p. 9: ‘nicht einmal ihr Existenzrecht’.

[28] Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, p. 34; ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’, p. 31: ‘[N]ach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frißt auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben.’

[29] In ‘Engagement’ [1962], in Noten zur Literatur, pp. 422-3; in English as ‘Commitment’, in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 87-8; Negative Dialektik [1966], pp. 355-6; Negative Dialectics, p. 362; ‘Ist die Kunst heiter?’ [1967] in Noten zur Literatur, pp. 603-4; ‘Is Art Lighthearted?’ in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, p. 251; and ‘Kunst und die Künste’ [1967] in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10.1, p. 454; ‘Art and the Arts’, trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 387.

[30] Both ‘Gedicht’ and ‘Gedichte’ are to be read here as synecdoche for all the arts, in the same way that “Auschwitz” stands for the Nazi genocide.

[31] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 366-7; Negative Dialektik, pp. 359-60: ‘Alle Kultur nach Auschwitz, samt der dringlichen Kritik daran, ist Müll. Indem sie sich restaurierte nach dem, was in ihrer Landschaft ohne Widerstand sich zutrug, ist sie gänzlich zu der Ideologie geworden, die sie potentiell war, seitdem sie, in Opposition zur materiellen Existenz, dieser das Licht einzuhauchen sich anmaßte, das die Trennung des Geistes von körperlicher Arbeit ihr vorenthielt. Wer für Erhaltung der radikal schuldigen und schäbigen Kultur plädiert, macht sich zum Helfershelfer, während, wer der Kultur sich verweigert, unmittelbar die Barbarei befördert, als welche die Kultur sich enthüllte. Nicht einmal Schweigen kommt aus dem Zirkel heraus.’ Cf. Adorno’s gloss on ‘Schuld’ (guilt) in Ästhetische Theorie, pp. 347-8; Aesthetic Theory, pp. 234-5.

[32] I of course am not claiming these artists were all struggling readers of Adorno. The dissemination of Adorno’s texts may have played a role, but cannot explain everything. It is the social process, unfolding as history that bears down on all, which both Adorno and artists responded to, in whatever ways they could.

[33] Adorno’s case against Brecht is stimulating, but not without serious problems. I examine these in ‘Dialectical Realism and Radical Commitments: Brecht and Adorno on Representing Capitalism’, Historical Materialism, vol. 18, no. 3 (2010): 3-24.

[34] Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 243;  Ästhetische Theorie, p. 360: ‘Praktische Wirkung üben Kunstwerke allenfalls in einer kaum dingfest zu machenden Veränderung des Bewusstseins aus, nicht indem sie haranguieren.’

[35] See my Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory, chapter one; and my summary discussion in 'Hits: From Trauma and the Sublime to Radical Critique.'

[36] Adorno, ‘Commitment’, p. 90; ‘Engagement’, p. 426: ‘Kafkas Prosa, Becketts Stücke oder der wahrhaft ungeheuerliche Roman Der Namenlose üben eine Wirkung aus, der gegenüber die offiziell engagierten Dichtungen wie Kinderspiel sich ausnehmen; sie erregen die Angst, welche der Existentialismus nur beredet. Als Demontagen des Scheins sprengen sie die Kunst von innen her, welche das proklamierte Engagement von außen, und darum nur zum Schein, unterjocht. Ihr Unausweichliches nötigt zu jener Änderung der Verhaltensweise, welche die engagierten Werke bloß verlangen. Wen einmal Kafkas Räder überfuhren, dem ist der Friede mit der Welt ebenso verloren wie die Möglichkeit, bei dem Urteil sich zu bescheiden, der Weltlauf sie schlecht: das bestätigende Moment ist weggeätzt, das der resignierten Feststellung von der Übermacht des Bösen innewohnt.’

[37] Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, p. 364: ‘Erschütterung, dem üblichen Erlebnisbegriff schroff entgegengesetzt, ist keine partikulare Befriedigung des Ichs, der Lust nicht ähnlich. Eher ist sie ein Memento der Liquidation des Ichs, das als erschüttertes der eigenen Beschränktheit und Endlichkeit innewird.’ Aesthetic Theory, p. 245: ‘Shudder, starkly opposed to the usual concept of experience, is no particular satisfaction of the ego, is not similar to desire. Rather, it is a memento of the liquidation of the ego, which, shaken to the core, becomes aware of its own limitedness and finitude.’ At this point, Adorno’s rewriting of the sublime intersects with Jacques Lacan’s rewriting of Freud’s theory of trauma in the 1964 Seminar, published as Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse  (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973), pp. 63-75, in English as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), pp. 53-64.

[38] Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Werkausgabe, vol. 10, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), p. 201.

[39] Adorno, ‘Commitment’, p. 90; ‘Engagement’, p. 425: ‘die Abstraktheit des Gesetzes, das objektiv in der Gesellschaft waltet.’

[40] Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 260; ‘Versuch, das Endspiel zu Verstehen’, in Noten zur Literatur, p. 303: ‘es keine Nährpillen mehr gebe’.

[41] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 380. Negative Dialektik, p. 373: ‘Beckett hat auf die Situation des Konzentrationslagers, die er nicht nennt, als läge über ihr Bilderverbot, so reagiert, wie es allein ansteht. Was ist, sei wie das Konzentrationslager.’

[42] Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, p. 249; ‘Versuch, das Endspiel zu Verstehen’, p. 290: ‘Schweigend nur ist der Name des Unheils auszusprechen.’

[43] See the correspondence between the two, published with an introduction by Joachim Seng in Frankfurter Adorno Blätter, no. 8 (2003).

[44] Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 322; Ästhetische Theorie, p. 477: ‘Im bedeutendsten Repräsentanten hermitischer Dichtung der zeitgenössischen deutschen Lyrik, Paul Celan, hat der Erfahrungsgehalt des Hermetischen sich umgekehrt. Diese Lyrik ist durchdrungen von der Scham der Kunst angesichts des wie der Erfahrung so der Sublimierung sich entziehenden Leids. Celans Gedichte wollen das äußerste Entsetzen durch Verschweigen sagen.’

[45] See Raye Farr, ‘Some Reflections on Claude Lanzmann’s Approach to the Examination of the Holocaust’, in Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman, eds. Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television since 1933 (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2005), pp. 161-167.

[46] Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘From Yves Klein’s Le Videto Arman’s Le Plein’, in Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 270.

[47] This seminal work was written in French and translated by Beckett into English; a German edition, however, translated by Elmar Tophoven with Beckett’s approval, appeared even before the English: Fin de partie(Les Editions de Minuit, 1957); Endspiel (Suhrkamp, 1957); Endgame(Grove, 1958). Adorno met and had long discussions with Beckett in Paris in 1958; he had already seen a production of Endspiel in Vienna. The dedication of Adorno’s essay on Endspiel reads, in English: ‘To S.B., in memory of Paris, Fall 1958.’ On the dustbins, Adorno comments: ‘Beckett’s trashcans are emblems of the culture reconstructed after Auschwitz.’ ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, pp. 266-7; ‘Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen’, p. 322: ‘Becketts Mülleimer sind Embleme der nach Auschwitz wiederaufgebauten Kultur.’ On Adorno’s meetings with Beckett, see Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), pp. 356-60. On the early production history of Fin de partie, see Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (London: Flamingo, 1997), pp. 458-66.

[48] Walter Benjamin taught that aura is a charge or effect of distance grounded in various kinds of authority – that invested in singular artworks, authentic experience or returning ‘lost time’. We may belong to the era of reproducibility, degraded experience and enfeebled memory, but even withered subjects can still suffer trauma. Traumatic history, evoked and avowed by negative presentation, would very emphatically have claim to a requisite authority.

[49] Buchloh, ‘From Yves Klein’s Le Vide to Arman’s Le Plein’, p. 274. Indeed, as a footnote (19, p. 283) to his discussion at this point indicates, he went to the trouble of confirming, in an interview with Arman, that the artist ‘saw the film upon its release and remembers its having a profound impact on him’.

[50] Ibid., p. 272-4.

[51] Ibid., p. 259.

[52] This is to say that only in reception does the subjective decisively reappear: only in specific spectators can such linkages be activated and effects produced. All the factors conditioning the encounter between spectator and artwork (namely the shaping of subjective disposition by the objective social process) then come into play. With regard to production, artistic intention is not necessarily fully conscious and cannot always be verified. Nor are moments of attained lucidity necessarily permanent. How such potentials were installed in specific works is finally not as important as the fact, which we can verify, that they are installed there. With Beuys, too, this is the case.

[53] Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, p. 270; ‘Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen’, p. 315: ‘Das Insektenvertilgungsmittel, das vom Anbeginn auf die Vernichtungslager hinauswollte, wird sum Endprodukt der Naturbeherrschung, die sich selbst erledigt.’

[54] The slogan was openly promoted in the pages of Soldier of Fortune, a magazine found on the racks of retail bookstore chains, and even today T-shirts bearing it can be purchased online from Amazon.com.

[55] On the German version and its reception, see Ewout van der Knaap, ‘Enlightening Procedures: Nacht und Nebel in Germany’, in van der Knaap, ed., Uncovering the Holocaust: The International Reception of Night and Fog (London and New York: Wallflower Press), pp. 46-85.

[56] The footage filmed by Aleksander Woroncow at Auschwitz in 1945 was reissued by Irmgard von zur Mühlen, with added voice-over commentary and a new interview with Woroncow, as Die Befreiung von Auschwitz(1985). The film has been available on DVD since 2005.