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Every
articulation is a montage of various elements - voices,
images, colors, passions or dogmas - within a certain
period of time and with a certain expanse in space. The
significance of the articulated moments depends on this.
They only make sense within this articulation and
depending on their position. So how is protest
articulated? What does it articulate and what
articulates it?
The
articulation of protest has two levels: on the one hand,
it indicates finding a language for protest, the vocalization,
the verbalization or the visualization of political
protest. On the other, however, this combination of
concepts also designates the structure or internal organization
of protest movements. In other words, there are two
different kinds of concatenations of different elements:
one is at the level of symbols, the other at the level
of political forces. The dynamic of desiring and refusal,
attraction and repulsion, the contradiction and the
convergence of different elements unfolds at both levels.
In relation to protest, the question of articulation
applies to the organization of its expression - but
also the expression of its organization.
Naturally,
protest movements are articulated at many levels: at
the level of their programs, demands, self-obligations,
manifestos and actions. This also involves montage -
in the form of inclusions and exclusions based on subject
matter, priorities and blind spots. In addition, though,
protest movements are also articulated as concatenations
or conjunctions of different interest groups, NGOs,
political parties, associations, individuals or groups.
Alliances, coalitions, fractions, feuds or even indifference
are articulated in this structure. At the political
level as well, there is also a form of montage, combinations
of interests, organized in a grammar of the political
that reinvents itself again and again. At this level,
articulation designates the form of the internal organization
of protest movements. According to which rules, though,
is this montage organized? Who does it organize with
whom, through whom, and in which way?
And
what does this mean for globalization-critical articulations
- both at the level of the organization of its expression
and at the level of the expression of its organization?
How are global conjunctions represented? How are different
protest movements mediated with one another? Are they
placed next to one another, in other words simply added
together, or related to one another in some other way?
What is the image of a protest movement? Is it the sum
of the heads of speakers from the individual groups
added together? Is it pictures of confrontations and
marches? Is it new forms of depiction? Is it the reflection
of forms of a protest movement? Or the invention of
new relations between individual elements of political
linkages? With these thoughts about articulation, I
refer to a very specific field of theory, namely the
theory of montage or film cuts. This is also because
the thinking about art and politics together is usually
treated in the field of political theory, and art often
appears as its ornament. What happens, though, if we
conversely relate a reflection about a form of artistic
production, namely the theory of montage, to the field
of politics? In other words, how is the political field
edited, and which political significance could be derived
from this form of articulation?
Chains
of Production
I
would like to discuss these issues on the basis of two
film segments - and to address their implicit or explicit
political thinking based on the form of their articulation.
The films will be compared from a very specific perspective:
both contain a sequence, in which the conditions of
their own articulation are addressed. Both of these
sequences present the chains of production and production
procedures, through which these films were made. And
on the basis of the self-reflexive discussion of their
manner of producing political significance, the creation
of chains and montages of aesthetic forms and political
demands, I would like to explain the political implications
of forms of montage.
The
first segment is from the film Showdown
in Seattle, produced in 1999 by the Independent
Media Center Seattle, broadcast by Deep Dish Television.
The second segment is from a film by Godard/Mieville
from 1975 entitled Ici
et Ailleurs. Both deal with transnational and international
circumstances of political articulation: Showdown
in Seattle documents the protests against the WTO
negotiations in Seattle and the internal articulation
of these protests as the heterogeneous combination of
diverse interests. The theme of Ici
et Ailleurs, on the other hand, are the meanderings
of French solidarity with Palestine in the 70s in particular,
and a radical critique of the poses, stagings and counterproductive
linkages of emancipation in general. The two films are
not really comparable as such - the first is a quickly
produced utility document that functions in the register
of counter-information. Ici
et Ailleurs, on the other hand, mirrors a long and
even embarrassing process of reflection. Information
is not in the foreground there, but rather the analysis
of its organization and staging. The comparison of the
two films is therefore not to be read as a statement
on the films per se, but rather illuminates only one
particular aspect, namely their self-reflection on their
own specific forms of articulation.
Showdown
in Seattle
The
film Showdown in Seattle is an impassioned documentation
of the protests revolving around the WTO meeting in
Seattle in 1999.
The days of protest and their events are edited in chronological
form. At the same time, the developments on the street
are grounded with background information about the work
of the WTO. Numerous short statements are given by a
multitude of speakers from the most diverse political
groups, especially unions, but also indigenous groups
and farmers' organizations. The film (which consists
of five half-hour single parts) is extraordinarily stirring
and kept in the style of a conventional reportage. Along
with this, there is a notion of filmic space-time, which
could be described in Benjamin's terms as homogenous
and empty, organized by chronological sequences and
uniform spaces.
Toward
the end of the two and a half-hour film series, there
is a segment, in which the viewer is taken on a tour
through the production site of the film, the studio
set up in Seattle. What is seen there is impressive.
The entire film was shot and edited during the period
of the protests. A half-hour program was broadcast every
evening. This requires a considerable logistic effort,
and the internal organization of the Indymedia office
accordingly does not look principally different from
a commercial TV broadcaster. We see how pictures from
countless video cameras come into the studio, how they
are viewed, how useable sections are excerpted, how
they are edited into another shot, and so forth. Various
media are listed, in which and through which publicizing
is carried out, such as fax, telephone, WWW, satellite,
etc. We see how the work of organizing information,
in other words pictures and sound, is conducted: there
is a video desk, production plans, etc. What is presented
is the portrayal of a chain of production of information,
or more precisely in the definition of the producers:
counter-information, which is negatively defined by
its distance to the information from the corporate media
criticized for their one-sidedness. What this involves,
then, is a mirror-image replica of the conventional
production of information and representation with all
its hierarchies, a faithful reproduction of the corporate
media's manner of production - only apparently for a
different purpose.
This
different purpose is described with many metaphors:
get the word across, get the message across, getting the truth out, getting
images out. What is to be disseminated is counter-information
that is described as truth. The ultimate instance that
is invoked here is the
voice of the people, and this voice is to be heard.
It is conceived as the unity of differences, different
political groups, and it sounds within the resonator
of a filmic space-time, the homogeneity of which is
never called into question.
Yet
we must not only ask ourselves how this voice of the
people is articulated and organized, but also what this
voice of the people is supposed to be at all. In Showdown
in Seattle, this expression is used without any
problematization: as the addition of voices of individual
speakers from protest groups, NGOs, unions, etc. Their
demands and positions are articulated across broad segments
of the film - in the form of "talking heads".
Because the form of the shots is the same, the positions
are standardized and thus made comparable. At the level
of the standardized conventional language of form, the
different statements are thus transformed into a chain
of formal equivalencies, which adds the political demands
together in the same way that pictures and sounds are
strung together in the conventional chain of montage
in the media chain of production. In this way, the form
is completely analogous to the language of form used
by the criticized corporate media, only the content
is different, namely an additive compilation of voices
resulting in the voice
of the people when taken together. When all of these
articulations are added together, what comes out as
the sum is the voice of the people - regardless of the
fact that the different political demands sometimes
radically contradict one another, such as those from
environmentalists and unions, different minorities,
feminist groups, etc., and it is not at all clear how
these demands can be mediated. What takes the place
of this missing mediation is only a filmic and political
addition - of shots, statements and positions - and
an aesthetic form of concatenation, which takes over
the organizational principles of its adversary unquestioningly.
In
the second film, on the other hand, this method of the
mere addition of demands resulting together in the "voice
of the people" is severely criticized - along with
the concept of the voice of the people itself.
Ici
et Ailleurs
The
directors, or rather the editors of the film Ici et Ailleurs,
Godard and Mieville, take a radically critical position
with respect to the terms of the popular. Their film
consists of a self-critique of a self-produced film
fragment. The collective Dziga Vertov (Godard/Morin)
shot a commissioned film on the PLO in 1970. The heroizing
propaganda film that blusters about the people's battle
was called "Until Victory" and was never finished.
It consisted of several parts with titles such as: the
armed battle, political work, the will of the people,
the extended war - until victory. It showed battle training,
scenes of exercise and shooting, and scenes of PLO agitation,
formally in an almost senseless chain of equivalencies,
in which every image, as it later proved, is forced
into the anti-imperialistic fantasy. Four years later,
Godard and Mieville inspect the material more closely
again. They note that parts of the statements of PLO
adherents were never translated or were staged to begin
with. They reflect on the stagings and the blatant lies
of the material - but most of all on their own participation
in this, in the way they organized the pictures and
sound. They ask: How did the adjuring formula of the
"voice of the people" function here as populist
noise to eliminate contradictions? What does it mean
to edit the Internationale into any and every picture,
rather like the way butter is smeared on bread? Which
political and aesthetic notions are added together under
the pretext of the "voice of the people"?
Why did this equation not work? In general, Godard/Mieville
arrive at the conclusion: the additive "and"
of the montage, with which they edit one picture onto
another, is not an innocent one and certainly not unproblematic.
Today
the film is shockingly up to date, but not in the sense
of offering a position on the Middle East conflict.
On the contrary, it is the problematizing of the concepts
and patterns, in which conflicts and solidarity are
abridged to binary oppositions of betrayal or loyalty
and reduced to unproblematic additions and pseudo-causalities,
that makes it so topical. For what if the model of addition
is wrong? Or if the additive "and" does not
represent an addition, but rather grounds a subtraction,
a division or no relation at all? Specifically, what
if the "and" in this "here and elsewhere",
in this France and Palestine does not represent an addition,
but rather a subtraction?
What if two political movements not only do not join,
but actually hinder, contradict, ignore or even mutually
exclude one another? What if it should be "or"
rather than "and", or "because"
or "instead of"? And then what does an empty
phrase like "the will of the people" mean?
Transposed
to a political level, the questions are thus: On which
basis can we even draw a political comparison between
different positions or establish equivalencies or even
alliances? What is even made comparable at all? What
is added together, edited together, and which differences
and opposites are leveled for the sake of establishing
a chain of equivalencies? What if this "and"
of political montage is functionalized, specifically
for the sake of a populist mobilization? And what does
this question mean for the articulation of protest today,
if nationalists, protectionists, anti-Semites, conspiracy
theorists, Nazis, religious groups and reactionaries
all line up in the chain of equivalencies with no problem
at anti-globalization demos? Is this a simple case of
the principle of unproblematic addition, a blind "and",
that presumes that if sufficient numbers of different
interests are added up, at some point the sum will be
the people?
Godard
and Mieville do not relate their critique solely to
the level of political articulation, in other words
the expression of internal organization, but specifically
also to the organization of its expression. Both are
very closely connected. An essential component of this
problematic issue is found in how pictures and sounds are organized, edited and arranged. A Fordist
articulation organized according to the principles of
mass culture will blindly reproduce the templates of
its masters, according to their thesis, so it has to
be cut off and problematized. This is also the reason
why Godard/Mieville are concerned with the chain of
production of pictures and sound, but in comparison
with Indymedia, they choose an entirely different scene
- they show a crowd of people holding pictures, wandering
past a camera as though on a conveyor belt and pushing
each other aside at the same time. A row of people carrying
pictures of the "battle" is linked together
by machine following the logic of the assembly line
and camera mechanics. Here Godard/Mieville translate
the temporal arrangement of the film images into a spatial
arrangement. What becomes evident here are chains of
pictures that do not run one after the other, but rather
are shown at the same time. They place the pictures
next to one another and shift their framing into the
focus of attention. What is revealed is the principle
of their concatenation. What appears in the montage
as an often invisible addition is problematized in this
way and set in relation to the logic of machine production.
This reflection on the chain of production of pictures
and sounds in this sequence makes it possible to think
about the conditions of representation on film altogether.
The montage results within an industrial system of pictures
and sounds, whose concatenation is organized from the
start - just as the principle of the production sequence
from Showdown
in Seattle is marked by its assumption of conventional
schemata of production.
In
contrast, Godard/Mieville ask: how do the pictures hang
on the chain, how are they chained together, what organizes
their articulation, and which political significances
are generated in this way? Here we see an experimental
situation of concatenation, in which pictures are relationally
organized. Pictures and sounds from Nazi Germany, Palestine,
Latin America, Viet Nam and other places are mixed wildly
together - and added with a number of folk songs or
songs that invoke the people from right-wing and left-wing
contexts. First of all, this much is evident, this results
in the impression that the pictures naturally attain
their significance through their concatenation. But
secondly, and this is much more important, we see that
impossible concatenations occur: pictures from the concentration
camp and Vnceremos songs, Hitler's voice and a picture
of My Lai, Hitler's voice and a picture of Golda Meir,
My Lai and Lenin. It becomes clear that the basis of
this voice of the people, which we hear in its diverse
articulations and at the level of which the experiment
takes place, is in fact not a basis for creating equivalencies,
but instead brings up the radical political contradictions
that it is striving to cover up. It generates sharp
discrepancies within the silent coercion - as Adorno
would say - of the identity relationship. It effects
contraries instead of equations, and beyond the contraries
even sheer dread - everything except an unproblematic
addition of political desire. For what this populist
chain of equivalencies mainly displays at this point
is the void that it is structured around, the empty
inclusivist AND that just keeps blindly adding and adding
outside the realm of all political criteria.
In
summary we can say that the principle of the voice of
the people assumes an entirely different role in the two
films. Although it is the organizing principle in
Seattle, the principle that constitutes the gaze, it is
never problematized itself. The voice of the people
functions here like a blind spot, a lacuna, which
constitutes the entire field of the visible, according
to Lacan, but only becomes visible itself as a kind of
cover. It organizes the chain of equivalencies without
allowing breaks and conceals that its political
objective does not go beyond an unquestioned notion of
inclusivity. The voice of the people is thus
simultaneously the organizing principle of both a
concatenation and a suppression. Yet what does it
suppress? In an extreme case we can say that the empty
topos of the voice of the people only covers up a lacuna,
specifically the lacuna of the question of the political
measures and goals that are supposed to be legitimized
by invoking the people.
So
what are the prospects for the articulation of a protest
movement based on the model of an "and" -
as though inclusion at any cost were its primary goal?
In relation to what is the political concatenation organized?
Why actually? Which goals and criteria have to be formulated
- even if they might not be so popular? And does there
not have to be a much more radical critique of the articulation
of ideology using pictures and sounds? Does not a conventional
form mean a mimetic clinging to the conditions that
are to be critiqued, a populist form of blind faith
in the power of the addition of arbitrary desires? Is
it not therefore sometimes better to break the chains,
than to network everyone with everyone else at all costs?
Addition
or Exponentiation
So
what turns a movement into an oppositional one? For
there are many movements that call themselves protest
movements, which should be called reactionary, if not
outright fascist, or which at least include such elements
easily. The movements this involves are those in which
existing conditions are radicalized in breathless transgression,
scattering fragmented identities like bone splinters
along the way. The energy of the movement glides seamlessly
from one element to the next - traversing the homogeneous
empty time like a wave moving through the crowd. Images,
sounds and positions are linked without reflection in
the movement of blind inclusion. A tremendous dynamic
unfolds in these figures - only to leave everything
as it was.
Which
movement of political montage then results in an oppositional
articulation - instead of a mere addition of elements
for the sake of reproducing the status quo? Or to phrase
the question differently: Which montage between two
images/elements could be imagined, that would result
in something different between and outside these two,
which would not represent a compromise, but would instead
belong to a different order - roughly the way someone
might tenaciously pound two dull stones together to
create a spark in the darkness? Whether this spark,
which one could also call the spark of the political,
can be created at all is a question of this articulation.
Thanks
to Peter Grabher / kinoki for calling attention to the
films.
Translated
by Aileen Derieg
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