The following is a conversation between two members of the Friendly Fire Collective.
I
Dearest ian,
There are some related but elementary fragments that I wanna talk through with you. You can scramble through and scavenge pieces you wanna expand on. Presto!
Our conversations have inspired me. Lately, I’ve been realizing more and more how many anti-authoritarian organizers are also artists. We all struggle with how we use our artistic forms within our organizing—beyond just making flyers for meetings or writing a poem for an event. I’ve been thinking more and more about how to balance creativity and urgency, artistic form and practical needs, collective expression and getting food on the table…I mean, we all are fighting for liberation and what better way to vision that liberation than through the beauty of our imaginations, and what role is there for our art within our movements beyond the supplementary?
You said something yesterday that struck me, something along the lines of: “artists have always been on the fringe of society, but it’s always been understood and acceptable.” I can’t help but think of our good friend Michel Foucault here. His work mapped out those whose lives were completely displaced to the margins of society: those labeled mad, criminals, sexual deviants, the colonized, etc. How can we think of Foucault’s span of work in relation to the work that we do as artist-organizers. I guess I’m particularly thinking of organizing and creating in an increased state of surveillance, policing, and govern-mentality…and, if we consider ourselves on the margins of society (which many of us radicals do), than how does this place us in direct solidarity with those on the fringes with us, and how does the mobilization of our work function under the ever-seeing lens of those always watching?
Sorry for the rant…you know how I get carried away.
Besos,
-sam
II
Sampada,
As always, your thoughts are much appreciated and inspire in me new ways of thinking about things which over time become dangerously familiar and normalized. I agree that we cannot talk about the margins or the fringe outside of the matrix of Foucault’s writings, and to place artists on the margins of society allows us to rethink the role of the artist as an agent in the struggle to decolonize everyday life. However, I think that I spoke too generally during our conversation the other day in asserting that all artists inhabit the fringe, and instead should have said dissident artists. There certainly are artists in the service of empire that have an interest in preserving the status-quo for their own profit, just like any other forms of labor which have establishments at their center. For artists, this center consists of the museum, the university and in some cases the city itself.
I think you raise an interesting point in revealing the desire of insurgent artists to produce work not necessarily in the service of struggle, but rather to see the production of their artwork as a feature of the struggle itself. I think this is an important and too often overlooked distinction. Just as the technologies of control have changed in post-fordist societies, so must the technologies of resistance. You mention the increase in surveillance as having an effect on the nature of resistance, and I agree. I think the increase in surveillance, coinciding with the proliferation of spectacle has shifted how we view ourselves as members of society as well as how we view others. It’s of great significance that the French state, after failing to contain the race riots of 2005 through sheer police violence, instead forced French media outlets to stop reporting the riots altogether. This proved a frighteningly effective strategy in squelching the riots, and the spontaneous uprising that had beaten the police in the streets for weeks died out within days after being denied the right to be a part of the national spectacle. How have we all internalized the gaze of authority? When the state surveys us, do we begin to look at ourselves and others in the same suspicious and dehumanizing ways?
I think one of the key strategies of the insurgent artist is to defamiliarize the normalcy of empire. For example, a lot of my work focuses on taking the everyday workings of empire and colonialism and through recontextualization, revealing the horror of these ‘normal’ mechanizations of conflict. Knowing of your involvement and engagement with performance studies, I’m always interested in hearing your thoughts on what it means to spectate and what it means to perform in political contexts where power is at hand. How do we as organizers and resistors perform for society, and how can we subvert power by doing so? How do we relate to our audience when we do decide to perform in the grammar of spectacle? These are questions I have no answer for. I look forward to your response a great deal.
With Stolen Flowers,
-ian
III
Dearest ian,
Once again, we’re stuck within the very mechanism we’re trying to dismantle: the spectacle. I mean, the most disturbing part about living in a society that has normalized capitalism, violence, sexism, homophobia is that, for the most part, there is nothing that remains “spectacular” or “extraordinary”. This is something that I constantly struggle with when I think of performance. How can we think of performance in a way that acknowledges and subverts the numbing of everyday life and where can we intervene?
Before I plunge into existential crisis, I just have to remind myself: it’s in the everyday that we all resist. I think of even in the most extraordinary historical moments of revolution—Algeria, for example—it was in the movement from marketplace to home, school to bus stop, work to cafe that resistance became most alive. The film Battle of Algiers shows this moment beautifully. But to make more sense of it, I turn to Fanon and his account of revolutionary women’s contribution to the fight for liberation in Algeria: “It is without apprenticeship, without briefing, without fuss, that she goes out into the street with three grenades in her handbag or the activity report of an area in her bodice” or “it may be that the Algerian woman is carrying in her bag or in a small suitcase twenty, thirty, forty million francs, money belonging to the Revolution” (from “Algeria Unveiled” in A Dying Colonialism). In both cases, Fanon shows the strategic interplay between Algerian women at one moment mobilizing the veil to conceal weapons, resources, or information from the enemy and then at another, dressing as the ideally converted Algerian, dressed in European dress and using her handbag to do the same revolutionary task. If nothing else, this is a performance at best—but one that is tied to nothing short of radical change. I mean, what is more revolutionary than risking your life behind the opaque performance of Algerian/French-Algerian, revolutionary/French citizen, agent/assimilationist? It is precisely in the interplay between these multiple identities that performance enacted a potential for liberatory change—revolution in the streets.
This is not to say that the only type of performance that indicates radical potential is the kind that solely mobilizes around guerrilla warfare. There are still more subtle, nuanced performances of the everyday—from workers “playing dumb” in order to sabotage their desired efficiency in the workplace to youth ducking in street corners to freestyle between classes. Or to move even closer, within our own communities.
When I really think of the spectacle, it becomes too overwhelming. Realistically, it is quite impossible for me to even think of the spectacle in accessible terms. Just as it is supposed to, it overwhelms me so much that I can’t even make sense of it anymore. So instead, I turn to these local and regional sites of performative dissonance. This, to me, seems to mark the moment of real rupture. When the Billboard Liberation Front started in 1977, they looked to the effects of advertising as it affected their geographic terrain—the signs over freeways, on bus stops, on store fronts. Then, they took these specific locations and made them open canvasses for succinct and clear disruption. It spurred an international movement that has since attacked corporate advertising for over 30 years. These are the moments of spectacular resistance that engage all parts of me that will and can never be made numb.
ian, the work you do does successfully call attention to the normalization of things. When looked at critically, these things are quite spectacular: war, militarism, sexism, violence, capitalism. And for me, I think of the (albeit partial) success of everyday performance in making those same kinds of interventions. But I’m still left at a loss. How do we bring the theories, desires, intentions, and hopes of our work forward for those who experience it? I mean, how do we offer these interventions in a way that is intelligible and articulate? Or, does this kind of work meet people where they are at, and not where we want them to be? Or is this, somehow, just reaching the folks that are familiar with the need for radical change? Can our work move within our communities in a constructive and urgent way?
Once again, I’m leaving the hard questions in your hands.
Towards a rebirth,
-sam
IV
Sampada,
You’ve raised two important questions for me which will take some thought in order to untangle. The first seems to be about how performance relates to ‘action’ in the streets. The second seems to be about our audiences, and how our performances can create dialogue with them (or how they can fail to). I think that these questions become even more complicated when we try to separate action and performance, as if they are somehow distinct and autonomous from one another. How can something like action in the streets not be performative, and how can performance not be seen as having similar effects as action? I would rather propose that the measure of the quality of a performance is how much effect it manifests.
Fanon writes in The Wretched of the Earth that the colonizer above all else is an exhibitionist. What are we to take from this? I think that what Fanon was trying to say with this one line is that social control, or the power exerted by the colonizer onto the colonized, is largely maintained through a web of sophisticated performances. Power is not maintained through the barrel of a gun, but rather through the marches, parades, uniforms and patrols of the colonizer. In equal, as you described, the resistance was largely successful because of its deployment of performance as well, through the complex dance between genders, classes and races the resistance was able to smuggle weapons and resources through police checkpoints and create a spectacle of their own through dramatic attacks. Even the FLN’s bomb attacks on the social events of the colonizers were a way of ‘performing’ and ‘demonstrating’ their resistance, no? These bombings did not attempt to sabotage the machinery or infrastructure of the colony, but rather were meant to disrupt the image of it. While the FLN’s guerrilla campaign collapsed due to heavy repression from the French, these performances later lead to the large-scale revolt which won Algeria its independence from France. I think when we look back at struggles like the one for Algerian independence we can assert that it was successful because of the synthesis of action and performance. I believe this is what separates groups like the FLN from other militant groups like the Weather Underground in the U.S. which failed to create a stage for larger-scale actions.
Now again, I feel like I must step back. I think it’s always too easy for us to focus too much on the material effects of our actions and ignore the psychic effects. I think the power of Fanon’s and Foucault’s contributions, which have now been labeled postcolonial theory, is that we are able to talk about very material things like economics and politics within the frameworks of psychoanalysis and semiotics. We can see this new way of thinking about resistance manifest in the Zapatista’s war for autonomy in the South of Mexico. Perhaps one of the most iconic examples of this is Subcommandante Marcos wearing ammunition across his chest which isn’t the right calliber for his gun. In the same way, how do we make sense of indigenous peasants marching into military compounds with toy guns and sticks? This militant spectacle, which in this case has manifested as the Zapatistas engaging in armed struggle in the jungles of Chiapas while at the same time performing for the international media, shows how a synthesis of both action and performance has been able to fend off entire military units. I think this is how we can begin to think about the ideas that were perhaps born in Algeria being deployed in a new kind of post-modern warfare. The Zapatistas have been so successful because of their deployment of hybrid identities which play upon Mexican history (referencing Zapata, etc) and popular culture(referencing Che, etc), and thus become accessible to large sectors of Mexican society and the world.
But I think that this way of thinking still leaves us at some sort of crossroads. Is there some sort of harmony that can be struck between performance and material gains? The militancy of the Zapatistas has created space for new societies to exist, but at the same time this militant image has quickly become appropriated and has lead to such things as the absurd advertisements for Zapatista condoms appearing on billboards. And how do our performances of the everyday, between family and friends and lovers, relate to greater struggles? I think it is easy for us to fantasize about militants in Algeria and Chiapas, and much harder to imagine what it means to be an insurgent and militant at home. I believe we can agree that walking down the streets of a small midwestern town in drag is just as militant as smashing a window in St. Paul, no? If we are to move forward, perhaps it’s time to think about ways of moving between these two types of militant resistance. Your thoughts?
From somewhere between AKs and lipstick,
-ian
V
Dearest ian,
I completely agree: it is time for us to imagine our conditions of possibility as militants here at home. And I believe that we do. I know that I am constantly negotiating the delicacy of strategic performance—how to use performance as it is tied to my overwhelming commitment to destroy capitalism, destabilize heterosexism, racism, homophobia, and build a world based on freedom and liberation. And for me, using performance strategically does not just mean for the material needs we struggle for. A successful deployment of performance strategy (like your work) makes people think—it makes us question the structures of power that we normalize, interrogate the ways in which we enact forces of oppression, and reflect on our everyday conditions of life.
I do think that the example you brought up about someone dressed in drag in a small Midwestern town and a black bloc-er throwing a brick through a storefront raises some interesting questions. I think the key determinant for a successful performance rests in political analysis. For me, the person dressed in drag walking down the streets of a small town is a complicated example. Is this a person of color walking in a mostly white neighborhood? Are they working class? Is their desire to express their individual relationship to gender and identity? Or is it to destabilize the idea of gender itself? And the black bloc-er with a brick in hand: Is the brick intended to throw a seemingly insignificant wrench in the totalizing aesthetic of global capital? Or is it merely a mindless will to fuck shit up by some white middle class boy with absolutely no analysis of the consequences of white supremacy, sexism, and capitalism?
Or even deeper: Do these questions even matter in the streets?
I believe we have to make them matter in the streets. We need to integrate a radical anti-authoritarian analysis that activates generative art, performance, and direct action. The power in these performative acts rests in the fundamental anarchist notion of praxis. It is in our actions, reflections, and analyses that we find our politics. Without the courage to align our politics with our art, we are left with the capitalist-individual venture for “art for art’s sake”. Where does that leave us? We have to leave behind the idea that radicalism as something solely grounded in organizing communities towards revolution. Radicalism is also realizing our collective possibilities by enacting performance, dance, music, and other generative artistic forms in order to ground our anti-authoritarian politics in its courage to dream of the new.
Towards the hard questions,
-sam
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As students and radicals, we are constantly negotiating between our position within the university, our committment to liberatory movements, and our desire to actualize and integrate our creative work in the everyday. This piece emerged from several conversations within our communities which we felt deserved more intentional exploration. We are dedicated to the struggle for radical social change, and for us, our art is integral to that process. We hope that this piece participates in the spirit of praxis by creating a space inhabited by both theory and action.
Sampada Aranke is currently a member of the Friendly Fire Collective and student of Performance Studies at UC Davis.
Ian Alan Paul is an artist, writer and student currently living in San Francisco and is a member of the Friendly Fire Collective.
