Atrocity Exhibition. Brad Evans
with subjective prejudices about our worthiness.
This series of writings and discussions was written across what seems to be the longest “short decade” (2011–2019) with all its disorientating speeds and intensities. Beginning with the ongoing and calamitous wars that were predictably declared following the collapse of the Twin Towers up to the political catastrophe that is Trump (with his own presidentially gilded towers, brutally marking with their unapologetic modernist presence the same scarred New York skyline), it represents an exercise in writing from the reality of our dystopian shadows, covering a period in which terror has become normalized and war such a part of the everyday fabric of a global existence it no longer even needs to be declared. I owe it to the brilliant series editor for this Los Angeles Review of Books “Provocations” imprint, Tom Lutz, for capturing this moment and the various forms of violence this anthology has responded to when proposing the subtitle “Life in the Age of Total Violence.” The word total invariably has a fraught and impassioned political history that arouses sensitivities, from the brutally oppressive ideas of totalitarianism’s Total State to the devastating reality of Total War, whose physical and philosophical cuts deep into the body of earth are still all too apparent. Let’s not forget here what Hannah Arendt discovered in her still-important The Origins of Totalitarianism: “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” The “everything” Arendt wrote against was the total liberation of every prejudice and the total denial of every right to be classed merely human.
Our age and its violence are undoubtedly different than the violence of the 20th century and its willful slaughter of millions in the name of some European ideological supremacy. We can only try to imagine what World War II might have looked like, or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, if our immediate social media platforms had been available. It would certainly have tested Judith Butler’s theorizing on the powers of mourning and the aesthetics of its performance. And yet if we understand the totalizing condition to be one that suggests no alternative, then we can purposefully deploy the term “total violence” as a conceptual provocation to describe the contemporary moment — despite the sleepwalking delusions of the “enlightened” Steven Pinker. Because violence continues to shape all social relations in the world today, its ubiquitousness — as possibility and as fact — defines the age.
Violence comes in many different forms, every form of violence should be taken and critiqued on its own terms, and indeed, given its unique victims, every instance of violence demands ethical rigor and contextualization. But we also need to consider violence and its history as a whole, and it is here that representing violence as “inescapable” is unacceptable; it would mean we have already surrendered to the most totalizing of human claims: that we have accepted our species’ annihilation.
The brilliance of Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition lies in its fragmentary and non-teleological narrative. The very idea of sequential time now belongs to an outdated past, and chronology no longer appears to be sufficient for explaining the unfolding of the historical present, where space and time have been undone by the powers of the digital and information communications revolutions. Ours is the time of the event — the fleeting exhibition — which we can barely grasp due it to recombinant forms and unlocatable centers. And yet the fragmentary still presents to us the promise of a certain critical entry. Life in an age of total violence is life in fragments. How we pick up the pieces remains part of the task — or, as Anton Chekov once wrote, “don’t tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
Nobody understood or developed the fragmentary method more completely than Walter Benjamin. He understood that through the cracks of history, what remains are fragments of truth. This requires the assembling, juxtaposition, and conversation among things that on the surface may not appear connected. This anthology follows in a similar vein, providing commentaries and analysis on fragments of violence, not to bring out something of the universal or to naturalize a position, but to insist upon the need to critique violence in all its forms — all while looking at the ways common logics appear — whether we are talking about victims of state-sanctioned violence or the murder of a young female Mexican student who died alone.
To that end — or perhaps (as explained in the piece that appears towards the end of the essay section titled “Violence, Conflict at the Art of the Political”) in a search for an alternative beginning — the hope for this set of writings is to foreground the problem of violence through a fragmentary series of responses such that the need for us to rethink the political itself in more poetic and conversational ways can become the mobilizing force against the new tide of fascism in the 21st century.
Barbarians & Savages
Brad Evans & Michael Hardt
Saturday, 10 July 2010
BRAD EVANS: One of the most important aspects of your work has been to argue why Deleuze and Guattari’s Nomadology needed to be challenged. With the onset of a global war machine that shows absolutely no respect for state boundaries, matched by the rise of many local fires of resistance that have no interest in capturing state power, the sentiment that “History is always written from the victory of States” could now be brought firmly into question. On a theoretical level alone, the need to bring the Nomadology treatise up to date was an important move.
But there was something clearly more at stake for you than simply attempting to correct and canonize Deleuze and Guattari. One gets the impression from your works that you were deeply troubled by what was taking place with this newfound humanitarianism. Indeed, as you suggest, if we accept that this changing political terrain demanded a rewriting of war itself — away from geopolitical territorial struggles that once monopolized the strategic field, towards biopolitical life struggles whose unrelenting wars were now to be consciously fought for the politics of all life itself — then the political stakes could not be higher. For not only does a biopolitical ascendency force a reconceptualization of the war effort — to include those forces which are less militaristic and more developmental (one can see this best reflected today in the now familiar security mantra: “war by other means”) — but also, through this process, a new paradigm appears that makes it possible to envisage, for the first time in human history, a global state of war or a civil war on a planetary scale.
While it was rather easy to find support for this non-State paradigm during the 1990s — especially when the indigenous started writing of the onset of a fourth world war that was enveloping the planet and consuming everybody within — some have argued that the picture became more clouded with the invasion of Iraq, which was simply geo-politics as usual. The familiar language that has been routinely deployed here would be of US exceptionalism. My concern is not really to attend to this revival of an outdated theoretical persuasion. I agree with your sentiments in Multitude that this account can be convincingly challenged with relative ease. Foucault has done enough himself to show that liberal war does not demand a strategic trade-off between geopolitical and biopolitical aspirations. They can be mutually re-enforcing, even, or perhaps more to the point, especially within a global liberal imaginary. And what is more, we should not lose sight of the fact that it was when major combat operations were effectively declared over, that is when the borderlands truly ignited. My concerns today are more attuned to the post-Bush era, which, going back to the original War on Terror’s life-centric remit, is once again calling for the need to step up the humanitarian war effort in order to secure the global peace. Indeed, perhaps more worrying still, given that the return of the Kantian-inspired humanitarian sensibility can now be presented in an altogether more globally enlightened fashion, offering a marked and much needed departure from the destructive but ultimately powerless (in the positive sense of the word) self-serving neo-con. What do you feel have been the most important changes in the paradigm since you first proposed the idea? Is it possible to detect a more intellectually vociferous shift taking place, which is rendering all forms of political difference to be truly dangerous on a planetary scale? Would you argue that war is still the permanent social relation of global rule?
MICHAEL HARDT: The notion of a global civil war starts from the question of sovereignty. Traditionally, war is conceived (in the field of international