Guest Editors’ Introduction: Debating Capital, Spectacle, and Modernity

Alex Jeffrey, Colin McFarlane, and Alex Vasudevan

“Crisis” is a repeated trope of spectacle itself, always flashing up the doom and fascination of modernity in some anguished new shape on the screen.

— RETORT, Afflicted Powers

On first inspection, we see an image of a crammed kitchen, unwashed dishes carelessly stacked on an aluminum stove and in a half-filled sink (fig. 1). A pink plastic pitcher, an empty egg carton, an unfinished bowl of soup, and a discarded orange peel suggest a banal still life. Yet what reads like a prosaic domestic scene is, on closer inspection, itself a reconstruction, a paper model whose minute imperfections — an exposed edge, a visible pencil mark — draw attention to the very mechanisms of its making.1 Thomas Demand’s Kitchen derives from a news photograph of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s hideaway near his hometown of Tikrit, where he was forced to take refuge during the American invasion in 2003. Like all of Demand’s large-format mural-size images, Kitchen is based on a three-dimensional life-size sculpture that Demand himself constructed from colored paper and cardboard. While Demand’s approach to photography draws heavily on images culled from mass-media spectacle, “the architecture he finds within [them],” as one author opines, “is completely unspectacular.”2

To be sure, numerous commentators have already highlighted the complex affiliations between the “aesthetic” and the “political,” which have increasingly come to underwrite the contemporary war on terror.3 “We are living,” writes T. J. Clark, “through a terrible moment in the politics of imagining, envisioning, visualizing,” a moment increasingly characterized by the dismantling, in Clark’s words, “of so many forms of resistance to the image — so many of the forms of life in which the image-life of power could once be derided or spoken back to.”4 Demand’s unique working method would seem, in this respect, to “speak back” and resist the very terms of a revivified, emboldened alignment of “spectacle” and “violence” and its particular configuration of aesthetics and politics. Kitchen is, we would argue, completely at odds with terror’s scopic regime, whether it is the spectacular collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11, the grainy videos of kidnapped hostages in Iraq, the photographs of tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib, or the MTV-inspired videos made by American soldiers on YouTube.

Revisiting the relationship among violence, capital accumulation, and image control is a central aim of RETORT’s Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. Described as “venomous and poetic” by Michael Hardt and as “part analysis, part manifesto” by Noam Chomsky, the book is a polemic that combines key Marxist concepts (e.g., primitive accumulation) with notions of spectacle and violence.5 RETORT is a collective, based for the past two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area, comprising Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts. In Afflicted Powers RETORT draws on the work of Guy Debord and the Situationist International to argue that “the present condition of politics does not make sense unless it is approached from a dual perspective — seen as a crude struggle for material dominance, but also (threaded ever closer into that struggle) as a battle to control appearances.”6 In charting the material and spectacular rationalities of U.S. foreign policy, RETORT suggests that Debord’s twinned notions of “the colonization of everyday life” and “the society of the spectacle” need to be urgently recast in terms that do full justice to their original intent. RETORT’s purpose is to “make them instruments of political analysis again, directed to an understanding of the powers and vulnerabilities of the capitalist state” (AP, 17). Where Debord’s analysis was often world-historical in its totalizing remit, RETORT counters with a more contingent and matter-offact version of the spectacle (AP, 19). In the collective’s own words: “We wanted to find ways of taking spectacle seriously as a term of political explanation without turning it into the key to all mysteries. In a word, the concept needed to be desacralized. It needed to be applied, locally and conjuncturally — to dirty its hands with the details of politics.”7 We believe that such a realignment of the material and the visual necessitates engagement and response. The following commentaries emerge from a panel discussion examining Afflicted Powers at the 2006 Association of American Geographers conference in Chicago. These essays provide a challenging set of observations concerning RETORT’s analysis of the contemporary geopolitical moment, in particular its theorization of the spectacle, the nature of U.S. imperialism, and the politics of modernity.

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Notes

We thank two anonymous referees for useful feedback on both this introduction and the dossier as a whole and Claudio Lomnitz and Ron Jennings for helpful editorial support. We are grateful to RETORT and to David Campbell, Cindi Katz, Gearóid Ó Tuathail, and W. J. T. Mitchell for their enthusiastic participation.

1. Roxana Marcoci, “Paper Moon,” in Thomas Demand (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005), 10.
2. Beatriz Colomina, “Media as Modern Architecture,” in Thomas Demand, Serpentine Gallery (London: Serpentine Gallery; Munich: Mosel, 2006), 19.
3. Dora Apel, “Torture Culture: Lynching Photographs and the Images of Abu Ghraib,” Art Journal 62 (2005): 88 – 100; Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004); Allen Feldman, “The Actuarial Gaze: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib,” Cultural Studies 19 (2005): 203 – 26; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004); Derek Gregory, “Vanishing Points: Law, Violence, and Exception in the Global War Prison,” in Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence, ed. Derek Gregory and Allan Pred (London: Routledge, 2006), 205 – 36; Wendy Hesford, “Staging Terror,” Drama Review 50 (2006): 29 – 41; W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Unspeakable and the Unimaginable,” English Literary History 72 (2005): 291 – 308.
4. T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 121; “In Conversation: T. J. Clark with Kathryn Tuma,” Brooklyn Rail, November 2006, brooklynrail.org/2006/11/art/tj-clark.
5. “Incisive Retort: Michael Hardt on Afflicted Powers,” ArtForum 44, no. 2 (2005): 2. The quotation from Chomsky comes from the cover of AP.
6. RETORT, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (London: Verso, 2005), 31. Cited throughout this dossier as AP.
7. RETORT, “An Exchange on Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (with Hal Foster),” October, no. 105 (2006): 3 – 12.