Notes for Zamyn, Seminar Two

John Hutnyk

In my academic research I have been concerned with three main topics or themes: Technology, understood through the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s essay ‘The essence of technology’ and his critical encounter with Marx in the ‘Letter on Humanism’; Representation, in film, television, art and music – extensively in relation to a critique of cultural ‘ownership’ and the politics of music/ethnicity, more recently in relation to ideology and film; and thirdly Communism – with specific reference to Asian communism, alternate public spheres, and the political futures envisioned in a reconfigured future that does not take Das Kapital as a blueprint for the good life, but as a guide for the critical questioning of everything.

My work in these areas has inexorably tended to both overlap and intermingle and to rearrange my priorities in a kaleidoscopic fashion. My current project around film, race and technology has returned me to the history of the Left and to the ephemera of political identities – souvenirs, objects, paraphernalia and so on. My interests engage a critical approach to disciplinarity – anthropology, cultural studies, philosophy – in the context of party political involvement that refuses to be cowed by party discipline by fiat.

As I was invited to this seminar just a few days in advance, it is not possible to provide five definitively new pages. I offer instead the following notes or ‘obliques’ related to the set themes:

On inoculations – “Apocalypse Now” There is a scene in the film Apocalypse Now where Kurtz (Brando) is telling Captain Willard (Sheen) of the incident where a South Vietnamese village’s children had been inoculated against smallpox by the US forces. When the marine medics had left the village, the Viet Minh returned and hacked off each inoculated arm. A pile of little limbs in a heap in the middle of the village. The ‘sheer genius’; of that, says Kurtz. ‘We will never defeat them’.

Remember that Kurtz, and Willard, are on a wholly western quest. Upriver, towards ‘the Horror’ (Conrad’s manual replaced by special ops documentation). What book does Kurtz throw at the spaced out photographer (Hopper) to silence him? An anthropology text – The Golden Bough – by the consummate armchair anthropologist, Sir James Frazer. Famed for never having gone on any quest, ‘heaven forbid’, he is reputed to have said at the prospect of meeting the savages he wrote about. Something here stands for the futile arrogance of those questing inoculators who, surely, just want to help the other (to health, to democracy). To want to help in this way is the same complicity that anthropology always had as handmaiden of colonialism, only nowadays this is reconfigured so that the social sciences, and culture, is to be reworked in the service of globalisation.

On cultural nationalism – Slavoj Zizek has recently debated Geoff Boucher in the pages of Telos, and from their discussion its possible to glean a revealing set of connections between the Symbolic or Law and how it is supplemented by the real, or ‘solicited excess’.

Enlightened cynicism is supplemented by ideological enjoyment of ethnic nationalism such that cynical distance through to protestations of support for democratic politics are supplemented by the perverse or obscene excess of bureaucratic enjoyment, such that liberalism, multiplicities, even ‘alliance politics’ are the symbolic forms that are secured through the unacknowledged superego support of the obscene. The meaning of the former is secured by the latter – the secret dependence of democratic politics upon national enjoyment takes varied forms, whether it be the novelty of the ‘third way’ politics, the love-thy-neighbour posturing of multicultural tolerance, or ‘radical’ reforms (drop the debt campaigns perhaps), even ‘Struggles for cultural recognition …[are] secretly supported … by compliance in deed, if not in words, with nationalistic rituals’ (Boucher 2004:160). The best these modes of ‘politics’ can claim is to be the human face of the obscene enjoyment generated by the capitalism-nationalism nexus. Zizek points to the need to break from these supplements to destroy the logic of their excessive unconscious attachments – discursive unity is secretly supported by venal enjoyment (Zizek 2004:164) and he would have done with this kind of ‘rainbow coalition’ against populist fundamentalism in order rather to ‘aggravate’ class difference into class antagonism (Zizek 2004:186).

On the ‘digital divide’ – Charity, liberal piecemeal tinkering, the ‘management’ of culture for good – these perhaps are the symptomatic manifestations of eurocentrism and racism against which a radical solidarity, redistribution of wealth, and undoing of the trick of democratic inequality might be enacted.

Why am I against Charity? Not only because Bob Geldolf annoys me. In the Rumour of Calcutta I focussed on the way gifts of charity were structurally primarily geared to the benefit of the giver. Derrida – no such thing as a pure gift etc. See also Mauss, Bataille, Frow.

When it comes to the distribution of technology, the ‘digital divide’ is often cited by western NGOs who would donate kit to the poor. I wonder…

From a footnote in Critique of Exotica (Pluto 2000):

“Not that I would ever want to deny anyone electrification, something that seems useful and necessary indeed. We have to agree that the relentless extension of electronic media across the webs of our lives is there to be used, enjoyed, captured, redeployed. But sometimes the speed-hype that is in fact a sales pitch blurs possibilities. Sometimes new media work may require different speeds – slower reading, longer planning, temporal depth… An overdetermined image of net-activism, faxivism, and the like, has all too often been singled out for attention by the mass media in ways that furthered a conspicuous liberal cause. What was the underlying agenda? Of a continuity with the Californian Ideology, it seems no accident that faxivism so neatly fits the ongoing communications transition – the extension of a new mode of production to the entire social fabric. Everyone – even those who make it their business to resist – now needs to buy a computer, sign up for provider account, set up a website, and dedicate themselves to net time (time on the net, not just the list). In this context, celebrations for the Internet as a ‘public discussion’ forum are somewhat hollow in the face of economic constraints. The question of ‘access’ is not simple, and never without convolutions. In many cases even the most media active NGOs are unable to participate in this discussion without considerable investment which simultaneously acts to limit activity. The investment is not only in terms of hardware, but also the software of person-hours required to read, and reply to, digest and regurgitate net correspondence (or editing time making documentary news for global media). It must be considered that it is also a ‘cost’ that time spent engaged with new media is also time disconnected from other activities of organising that may be of greater priority for the organisation (a fact far too often overlooked by the organs of well-meaning solidarity who request ‘news from the front’ reports from under-financed groupings). There needs to always be a dedicated person in an organisation who will feed information to the rest. Is this practical? What mechanisms might facilitate this work? Resource requirements for participation in net activism are sometimes beyond the capacity of a small ‘third world’ organisation. In addition there is the fluctuation cost of net access at levels accepted at an ‘industry standard’ which always seems on the move. Add to this the exponentially growing cost to the organisation in time and person hours to respond to requests for information in the ever increasing ‘online world’ and webification of the struggle seems a decreasingly appealing option. A second order of problem has to do with discursive reach. Whatever the level of ‘crisis’ which may be recognized from near and from afar, and whatever the solutions proclaimed or ordained by the lap-toppers and webucated elites, if the general population have no access, no time, no resources or no habit of making sense of the discourses of ‘crisis’, responses, or mobilisation, then net activism feeds only itself. The danger of the big hype of the new media and Internet is that it is wide open to a tendency to distract attention from the immediacy of political and organisational practicality. There may or may not be all sorts of alternative news and counter hegemonic communications and reporting advocated by net activists and those who proclaim the need for a ‘free media’, but without a political base for developing a context for these claims, this can be nothing but fantasy. Clearly more education and more organisation are more important than more information. Though of course the new media and the need to organize come together – it would be absurd to suggest that the information resources of new media are not to be embraced, but as with all technologies, the point is to utilise these to best effect. (I’d like to acknowledge Anna Har with whom I wrote an article along the lines argued for in this book, but in that case specific to Southeast Asian struggles. It was rewritten for the ‘Workbook’ of the N5M3 conference, Amsterdam 1999, see where some of the marks of that context remain.”

On Sampling – Paul Simon. The demonization of Islam – which was established in the wake of Soviet Communism’s collapse. The early moves that manufactured a new enemy have now been replaced by the crusading ‘war on terror’, which targets Asians of all stripes within and beyond national borders and the rule of law, and irrespective of any consideration of allegiance to peace, civic life, evidence, coherence. With this context in mind, we might consider earlier skirmishes of the music market as little more than incidental. But politicized motivation was never more explicit than in the response of Paul Simon to Fun^da^mental’s ‘crossover’ efforts on the album ‘Erotic Terrorism’ (Nation 1999). The reconstructed world music impresario’s follow-up album after ‘Graceland’ (Warner Brothers 1987) was called ‘The Rhythm of the Saints’ (Warner Brothers 1990). It used recordings of a town square performance by the Brazilian percussion ensemble Olodum, which were taken back to New York where Simon ‘improvised music and words over them and added other layers of music’ (interview with Bob Edwards, quoted in Taylor 1997:64). Taylor adds that it is Simon who profits – his position in a powerful economic centre – the United States, a major corporation – means that he cannot escape is centrality, despite his assertion that he works “outside the mainstream”’ (Taylor 1997:203). It is then curious to compare the moment of appropriation – another key misleading term – with a parallel incident. When Fun^da^mental recorded a version of Mr Simon’s song ‘The Sounds of Silence’ for inclusion on ‘Erotic Terrorism’, their request to clear copyright for the sample was refused. Asked for permission once again, Simon was offered the publishing rights for the new version, with an additional backing vocal, but Mr World Music again said ‘no’, citing legal precepts and refusing further discussion (author interview with Aki Nawaz). Noting the power of some musician-entrepreneurs to own and control, and the cap in hand reliance on name stars and gatekeepers for those who might want to breach the conventions of music industry protocol, the track was renamed ‘Deathening Silence’, sample removed. The retelling of these conjoined tales about Mr Simon is not to make an equation between the selfish, or rather self-interested, conceits of copyright legalese and the more serious debacles of racism, anti-Islamic profiling and the anti-people pogroms of the state machine. But who would be surprised if someone did equate such ‘cultural’ power with the way the war on terror legislates special rules that permit detention without charge or trial in the USA, the UK, Australia, Malaysia, etc? Even though such a connection was anticipated in Fun^da^mental’s ironic album title reference: ‘Erotic Terrorism’. Thinking of the Detention Camps in Afghanistan and Iraq, certainly there is some credence to Fun^da^mental’s pre-September 11, 2001, prophecy that ‘America Will Go to Hell’ – in their anti-war anthem EP release from the same period as ‘Deathening Silence’ (America Will Go To Hell Nation 1999). The use of hip-hop to express a critique of American (and United Nations, NATO or British Military) imperialist activities makes Paul Simon’s legal enforcement of silence something less than neutral and this conjunction surely indicates also a more nuanced relationship between politics and content than the unidirectionalist historians of hip-hop might warrant. The ‘deathening silence’ here is not only a comment on record industry ownership of lyric and melody, but also references the ways commercial imperatives sanction quietude about the politics of so-called anti-terrorism and the inadequacy of romantic and liberal anti-racism. No mere hybridity, Fun^da^mental’s call is to fight against the seductive terrorisms of complicity and conformity, the manipulation of market and law, the destruction of culture and civilization in pursuit of oil.

What kind of change in the apparatus of the culture industry would be required to orient attention away from the industrial military entertainment complex? What would displace the ways people in the music press and mainstream academic community consistently deploy categories that are far removed from the actualities articulated in the Fun^da^mental discussion? These critics appear deaf to ideas. I think it is clear that many misconceptions come from well-intentioned deployment of arguments around terms like ‘visibility’, ‘appropriation’ ‘complicity’ and ‘commerce’. That it is no surprise that intentions and their effects are readily undone is almost a platitude. The solution is not to insist on the correctness of an alternate interpretation (see Kalra et al., 1998, Sharma et al., 2000) and it is equally not the case that insistence on fidelity to the source material will redeem all (but a listen to the albums and a check of the websites is worthwhile  – combating sanctioned ignorance advanced through media bias is an obligation we must all take up [The term ‘sanctioned ignorance’ is from the always-insightful Gayatri Spivak (1999) Critique of Postcolonial Reason Harvard. The ref to Kalra 1998 is a special issue on ‘music and politics’ of the journal Postcolonial Studies. Sharma 2000 is to a special issue on ‘music and politics’ of the journal Theory Culture and Society vol 17, no 3. These are probably the predictable moves that others have already made, but if raising questions about complacency in commentary adds impetus to the work of showing where a critique of unexamined complicity and marketing zeal restrict possibilities, then the opening is important.  (From an essay ‘The dialectics of European Hip Hop: putting the fun back into Fun^da^mentalism’, published in the most recent edition of the journal South Asian Popular Culture 2005).

John Hutnyk, July 28th 2005