Category: Performance

• Mapping as Militant Research

  

  The Counter Cartographies Collective (colloquially known as ‘3Cs’) have a new piece in ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies (freely available to download). It’s part of a theme issue on ‘Anarchist and Autonomous Marxist Geographies’.

  Much of the 3Cs work is inspired by Deleuze’s comments on mapping:

  Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the point into a line! Be quick, even when standing still! Line of chance, line of hips, line of flight…Make maps, not photos or drawings. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004 [1980]: 27)

  Their form of ‘autonomous cartography’ is intended to  discover new political and geographical horizons – challenging existing representations of everyday spaces. Most of this work has come in the form of some fantastically rich campus maps of UNC-Chapel Hill where the 3Cs is based. These maps have aimed to contest the way in which the university is positioned as an ‘ivory tower’ and an elitist institution, and also to make connections between the many different people who live and work on the campus itself.

  The partial cancellation of the annual Labour Day holiday by the UNC administration (2005) brought the collective together, however unknowingly at that point. In the article, they say that they ‘were frustrated with the continual talk among activist scholars on campus about their own geographically disparate interests’ (450) and wanted to instead provide an opportunity for all staff (research, support, maintenance, catering) and students (UG, PG, part-time, full-time) to provoke collective discussion on the ways in which the UNC-Chapel Hill campus was organized. It was a process of exploration and reflection, getting passers-by to fill in questionnaires, draw maps and participate in interviews on their work experiences (450).

  These events were, in their words, kinds of situated ‘drifts’ or dérives intentionally and awkwardly straddling the divide between protest and research, confusing enough for those who approached them (450). One of the main aims of this initial Labour Day event was to discover the extent of precarious labour at UNC-Chapel Hill. That is, the number of people in temporary, insecure, or piecemeal employment. Research staff, catering assistants, short-term lecturers etc. anyone who might otherwise be unable to participate in organized labour protests.

  They drew inspiration from a Spanish feminist group Precarias a la Deriva (Precarious Women Adrift – an introduction to their initiative is here) – an organization who visit sites of precarious labour (domestic, self-employed, per-hour) and ‘picket-survey’ (446) women with the question; ‘what is your strike?’ in order to help connect those at the fringes of the labour market. The 3Cs evoked these attempts at involving the precariously employed in the art of collective protest on their own university campus.

  Other projects followed. The DisOrientation guide – a collaboratively mapped tool for campus activism – was borne out of the Labour Day event and, according to the article, was distributed to students, through activist networks, in undergraduate classes, and local community centres (455), helping people to understand the complex nature of UNC-Chapel Hill, the jobs people undertake, and the spaces they create (versions 1.0 and 2.0 downloadable here). Moreover, to encourage people to imagine an alternative university campus aside from universalized, sanitized or hegemonic understandings.

  In the 3Cs own words:

  By producing maps as militant research, autonomous cartography constitutes a conceptual framework for understanding and creating geographic and political change in the post-Fordist economy. This work is premised on the idea that geographic knowledge and spatial innovation are created from movements and people engaged in struggle, thus giving rise to autonomous politics within the collective. 3Cs’ experiences with autonomous cartography illustrate how mapping can function as a form of militant research, producing new knowledges and subjectivities, while also investigating and instigating political change. The mapping process itself enacts a different form of knowledge production that creates new social relations and geographies. (461)

  Whilst it may be a truism amongst critical cartographers that maps are political, it still remains difficult to provide empirical evidence for their use – let alone production – in specific circumstances. The work of the 3Cs gifts those working at the intersection of mapping and political action (myself included) some very real examples of how best to proceed in using mapping as a potentially empowering tool for knowledge production, spatial imagination, self-awareness and political change.

  2013.01.07

• Mengele’s Skull

  I posted back in August about Keenan and Weizman’s upcoming Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics and have now got round to reading it. Firstly, it’s a small and short book with a fair number of colour images. It is these pictures that are critical to Keenan and Weizman’s narrative. Although I don’t want to spoil it for those who maybe haven’t had the chance to read it (an earlier version can be found in Cabinet here), or have not been acquainted with the Forensic Architecture project more broadly, I do still want to say a few things.

  The exhumation of (supposedly) Josef Mengele’s body inaugurated (page 11) a rather unique form of war criminal investigation. One different to that of either the testimony of the witness (of which Adolf Eichmann was sentenced under), or that of the textual document that many traditional criminal investigations are centred upon (Nuremberg Trials). That of the forensic.

  Each type of investigation, say Keenan and Weizman, operates in a particular space or ‘forum’. Or better still (as the space does not pre-exist it’s operation) is constructed through a set of investigative performances, where disputed and otherwise fractious entities (human/non-human; scientist/skull) are brought together for a particular purpose. In this case, an inversion of the perhaps now standard CSI approach; an interrogation of the skeleton with different presumptions and inverse purpose.

  It was not a case of asking the skeleton “how did you die?”, but – with the identity of the person in question: “who are you?” (17-18). As Keenan and Weizman point out, “the Mengele investigation was conducted in much the same way as a missing persons investigation would be” (19). Perhaps ironically, the many people who were ‘forcefully disappeared’ by dictatorial forces in South American during the 1970s were re-identified using the very same techniques employed during the Mengele investigation. In doing so, this ‘methodological proximity’ helped to move such investigation “beyond the ethical categories of victim and perpetrator” (61), and establish it firmly within a material forum (with identity the only aim).

  The success of the Mengele investigation was in many ways down to German forensic scientist Richard Helmer, who had developed a technique he called ‘electronic visual mixing’. In essence, an apparatus whereby Helmer could superimpose an image of the individual (Mengele) onto a clay cast (Mengele’s skull) and work a video camera between the two to establish a match between photo and cast. These image overlays could be produced in different splits so as to produce a rather haunting image of the skull cast complete with pictorial facial features from the photograph (even with Mengele’s felt hat perched upon it). In doing so, Helmer was able to persuade, quite decisively, many of the other forensic scientists and anthropologists involved in the investigation. Moreover, it was this process that also persuaded the many other victims, witnesses, state officials and media personnel eager to hear of the results of the investigation. This analytical method served as a foundational moment in forensic anthropology, and the construction of a faithful ally in the pursuit of now-dead war criminals (the skeletal object or ‘super-subject’ as a truthful witness[66]), whom in death had escaped the legal, juridical, bodily and political repercussions of their crimes.

  But of course, this notion of the truthful ‘super-subject’ has something of a twist. Whilst one of the most prominent members of the Mengele investigation, Clyde Snow, said that “[b]ones make good witnesses” (quoted on 66) – it is indeed this construction of the truthful object that forms the most crucial point of this event. Snow, Helmer and all the other scientists were present to do one thing: persuade. It was up to them to persuade all relevant parties as to their level of doubt. Previous to the introduction of Helmer’s techniques, the doubt, arguably, would have been much higher. How would the skeleton otherwise have been interrogated? If they had not succeeded in persuading all parties how would forensic anthropology look now? Would forensic anthropology even exist? Moreover, how would the witness and textual investigations fare considering this apparent failure in a new investigatory technique? As Keenan and Weizman say:

  Something which was not perceivable, which did not count, made its way into the domain of evidence and judgement, and in doing so had to alter the stage on which it appeared. (68)

  Helmer’s ‘electronic visual mixing’ not only transformed the field of forensic science/anthropology, but also radically changed the shape of war crimes fora. The assignation of the bones of Mengele with an agential – and legal – force the scientists in the Mengele investigation allowed them, as Snow says above, ‘to speak’. Not only a political act of expanding such fora to include the otherwise non-human but also a transformation of the protocol, discourse and procedure within. Alongside the witness and the textual document stood the object; imbued with all the power to speak (or, more correctly, be spoken for), to be discussed and to be disputed.

  2012.12.28

• Constant Nieuwenhuys, New Babylon and Henri Lefebvre

  

  I’m in the process of putting together a research presentation for January. It’s something all first year PhD students in sociology at the University of Warwick have to do, and it’s a nice way to introduce your thesis to the other students, as well as helping formulate your own plans. I’ve started to put the bulk of it into MS PowerPoint but decided I’d have a little play about with Prezi, which is great for adding a few neat visual touches and is far more flexible than PowerPoint.

  After trying a couple of their pre-formatted designs I decided I’d search for a suitable background image. I first typed in something general like ‘digital maps’ and ‘map game boards’ because I wanted to re-create the sequential format Prezi seems to like, with arrows and frames and also play on the urban exploration side of mapping. Then I had a bit of a brainwave and searched for some Situationist artworks/maps; the perfect combination of maps, play and ‘flow’. The classic image of the cut-out map segments with red arrows darting from section to section seemed perfect (see a selection here). Alas, I couldn’t find an image with a good enough resolution for the levels of zooming Prezi requires so I had to ditch them.

  Then I came across a post on the [polis] blog on the Moscow Occupy movement. Their main picture was an image by Dutch painter Constant Nieuwenhuys (1920 – 2005). Taken from his New Babylon project, the image was part of a selection of “models, sketches, etchings, lithographs, collages, architectural drawings, and photocollages, as well as …manifestos, essays, lectures, and films” (Wigley 1998; text available here) that together formed a utopian vision of an anti-capitalist city. His work was strongly interconnected with the Situationists of the 1950s/60s.

  In two, perhaps not so, coincidental moves I found a translation of an interview with Henri Lefebvre on Nieuwenhuys, Guy Debord and the Situationists, and also a reference to the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga and his homo ludens concept. Nieuwenhuys wanted his utopian city to be populated with the ‘playing man’ (homo ludens) in opposition to the ‘bourgeois shackles’ (Goldhagen 2006; direct link) the working man had to contend with in the modern city.

  A subsequent image I found from Nieuwenhuys’ same New Babylon project was perfect for the background to my presentation. Good quality and a perfect colour scheme (here). Close up I think it looks like either a microscopic image of a biological cell or a computer circuit board. It also gives me an opportunity to pick out individual elements in the collage (as I think it originally was) and link them into the different sections in the presentation.

  If you want to know a little bit more about Constant himself there’s an interview by Linda Boersma at the art magazine BOMB here from 2005. I’d like to think my attempts to introduce the digital map (and mobile device) as a ‘new terrain’ for situationist-style explorations draws on some of themes Constant envisaged in New Babylon.

  2012.12.19

• Halsall Interviews Latour

  There is a new issue of Society and Space hot off the press which, amongst other things (including a heart-warming set of tributes to the late Neil Smith) includes a short interview with Bruno Latour as conducted by Francis Halsall. It’s mainly on art and his ongoing Modes of Existence project. Although it does turn nicely into a discussion of the Enlightenment and the Gaia hypothesis, which is the subject of his upcoming Gifford Lecture Series at University of Edinburgh, outlined below:

  Facing Gaia. A new inquiry into Natural Religion

  There could be no better theme for a lecture series on natural religion than that of Gaia, this puzzling figure that has emerged recently in public discourse from Earth science as well as from many activist and spiritual movements. The problem is that the expression of “natural religion” is somewhat of a pleonasm, since Western definitions of nature borrow so much from theology. The set of lectures attempts to decipher the face of Gaia in order to redistribute the notions that have been packed too tightly into the composite notion of ‘’natural religion’’.

  There will be 6 lectures in total from 18 February – 28 February 2012. The details of which can be found in this publicity PDF.

  2012.12.14

• 3 Deleuzian critiques of Hardt & Negri

  As Tampio (2009) says in ‘Assemblages and the Multitude: Deleuze, Hardt, Negri, and the Postmodern Left’ (direct link here), Deleuze has three issues with Hardt and Negri’s political endorsements.

  Tampio claims that Hardt and Negri have reinterpreted Deleuze and his many concepts (the multitude, rhizomatic networks, nomadology, organs without bodies, war machines) for their own ends. In doing so they have obscured Deleuze’s ‘distinct contributions to the contemporary left’ (385). So, those three issues below:

  1. The concept of the proletariat. Not because they don’t exist per se, but that categorizing people as proletarians risks preserving a rather outdated opposition between capitalism and communism (bourgeoisie and worker). The left needs to work beyond these distinctions.

  2. The concept of revolution. Every revolution ‘almost always’ (390) ends badly and rarely changes people’s minds. This is in opposition to what Deleuze calls ‘revolutionary becoming’ (Transformations 1995: 171) – a kind of experimentation of political change. It goes beyond thinking about revolution as a requirement for political change and supposes that change can be brought about through smaller interventions.

  3. The desire for an end to sovereignty. Deleuze wants to ‘strike [an] optimum balance’ (391) between the state (order) and the war machine (chaos). In calling for an end to sovereignty we risk damaging individual and collective life. ‘It is far better to use a ‘very fine file’ to open up the political body to new possibilities than to wield a sledgehammer to obliterate its contours’ (391).

  2012.12.11