Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

As a relative novice in the world of Critical Theory, I have decided that rather than embarrass myself attempting to debate the relative merits of theorists I almost certainly have not read (that shall come later) my first post should draw on something that I actually do have some knowledge of: obscure examples of cinematic detritus which are slowly becoming available through collectors sites like 5 Minutes to Live and Shocking Videos.

One of the most fascinating films I've come across is La Dialectique Peut-Elle Casser Des Briques? (Can Dialectics Break Bricks?), a 1973 French situationist film made by director Rene Vienet. The film redubs a Chinese martial arts film, Tang shou tai quan dao (The Crush, 1972) to transform the narrative into a conflict between the proletariat and the bureaucrats within state capitalism. In many ways, the film is reminiscent of the Woody Allen film What's Up, Tiger Lily? in that it reappropriates and recontextualises a work through overdubbing a completely new narrative. Reflecting the situationist technique of detournement (defined as "the reemployment in a new entity of preexisting artistic elements"), the film is actually remarkably similar to such recent phenomena as fan films and mash-up videos. And, as with all such media, it really does need to be seen to be believed:

Visualisations of Utopia (Part Two)

Continuing my brief foray into the many and various ways (available on the Internet) in which Utopia is imagined or visualised to publicise, conceptualise or legitimise art, advertising, fiction or film....

“The Man From Utopia.” Album by Frank Zappa, 1983. The

album is named after a 1950s song written by Donald and Doris Woods. The sleeve art features the work of Italian artist Tanino Liberatore, portraying Zappa on stage trying to kill mosquitoes. The cover represents Zappa’s disastrous performance in Palermo, Italy in July 1982 in which the firing of tear-gas canisters and live ammunition between the security forces and the audience forced the band to flee the stage. Tanino Liberatore also created RanXerox, or Ranx, with fellow Italian Stefano Tamburini in 1978. RanXerox is a science fiction graphic novel series featuring Ranx, a cyborg-punk creature made out of photocopier parts. The artists also worked on the comics Cannibale and Frigidaire.

Utopia Dive Village, Honduras, opened 2007. A scuba diving and luxury vacation resort in the Caribbean, on the island of Utila’s ‘pristine beachfront.’ The resort has a blog, ‘Building Our Place in the Sun,’ detailing its construction, the diving on Utila and the local Utilian carnival parade (http://www.buildingourplaceinthesun.blogspot.com).

“Road to Utopia.” Released in 1946 (but filmed in 1943) and directed by

Hal Walker, Road to Utopia is part of the “Road to…” series of musical films. Starring Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour, the film takes place on board a ship and in Alaska during the Gold Rush. Featuring songs such as ‘Good Time Charlie,’ It’s Anybody’s Spring,’ and ‘Welcome to My Dream.’

“Utopia 2516.” A musical by the Australian company Captivation Musicals performed in Plymouth in 2004. Written by Drew Lane Utopia 2516 depicts a world without war, hate or greed but also bereft of love, joy and happiness.

“Utopia Place.” A private place for gay and bisexual men to meet in North Geelong, Victoria, Australia. ‘Utopia’ is commonly used to promote homo- and bisexual clubs, facilities and travel resources: the Utopia-Asia.com website, for instance, offers an online community to foster a deeper understanding of gay life in the region and publishes Utopia Guides for homosexual travel in Asia. Founded in 1994 by Singaporean, American and Thai partners, it aims to create ‘positive social alternatives for gays and lesbians in the Asian region.’

“The Fortress of Utopia.” A novel by Jack Williamson, 1939. A U.S. writer, considered by many as the ‘dean of science fiction,’ Williamson was a novelist, short story author and university professor, and influenced Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and Frederick Pohl. By the 1930s, Williamson was an established genre writer and contributed regularly to the pulp magazines, publishing many collaborations with the science fiction author Frederck Pohl. The gritty, realistic tone of his work from the 1930s onward is thought to be influenced by his psychiatric treatment and psychosomatic physical illnesses. Williamson is also famous for coining the word ‘terraforming,’ (literally ‘Earth-shaping’) used as a synonym for planetary engineering.

Hybridising Agency: Humans, Objects, Machines

"This Is What the Future Looks Like" – an illustration of the "Machinic Authority of the vEmpire" by Dragan Kujundzic, University of Florida (BMW ad, on Hotel "Moscow," Moscow, Summer 2003.)

John Urry, Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (2000)

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (2000) and Multitude (2005)

Keywords - globalisation, actor network theory, automobility, bioproperty, cyber-spatial civil society, multitude, Empire, machinic exodus

How does agency encounter the moment of the transnational? Is agency purely human? The problem of locating revolutionary agency within Marxist discourses, to compensate for so-called working-class ‘embourgeoisment’ and the failures of Stalinist bureaucratised communism, has variously looked to humanity as the new arbiter of revolutionary hope. The arguments of John Urry and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri engage in Marxist debates over locating political agency, by combining Marxist theory with post-structuralist and globalisation discourses to reconfigure a project of radical democracy.

John Urry draws on actor-network theory to explore the ‘complex mobile hybrids’ formed through mediations between humans, machines and technologies that reconstitute social relations in an age of extensive corporeal and virtual mobilities. He writes that, ‘People possess few powers which are uniquely human’ (Urry 14), and goes on to invert Marx’s famous dictum, proposing that this is ‘not to suggest that humans do not exert agency. But they only do so in circumstances which are not of their own making’ (Urry 14). Urry has written extensively on automobility, which he identifies as ‘a complex of interlocking machines, social practices and ways of dwelling’ (Urry 190).

As car-drivers, humans become intricately involved with their cars so that they lose subjective autonomy and are reformulated as ‘quasi-objects,’ entering the public sphere in their mobility (Urry 190). Similarly, cybernetic and electronic-based technologies refigure the human body as ‘technosocial,’ symbiotic with machines rather than defined by the boundaries of human skin, creating a powerful but unpredictable agency (Urry 70-1). The boundaries between humans and machines are thus transcended through instantaneous and virtual mobilities allowing a digital convergence of non-proximal local groups in what Urry calls ‘cyber-spatial civil society’ (Urry 74).

The Utopian possibilities of such ‘digital nomadisms’ are, however, underwritten by the ‘electronic fortressing’ of what Urry describes as a ‘new global medieval world’ (Urry 76, 13-14). Analogously, Hardt and Negri outline the privatisation of immaterial forms of property, such as mp3 files or Internet resources, as ‘Baroque’ and ‘neo-feudal’ (Multitude 196). The biopolitical productivity of the multitude, they argue, and its democratic ‘electronic commons,’ are being radically truncated by repressive re-privatisations, culminating in ‘bioproperty,’ or the ownership of life itself in the form of patented genetic codes for plants and animals (Multitude 185).

Empire’s rigid reterritorializations, argue Hardt and Negri, are symptomatic of its machinic authority, in which all movements are fixed within its system and can only exist within hierarchical and exploitative relations (Empire 39, 14). As the living alternative immanent within Empire, the multitude must consequently resist Empire’s rigid boundaries through a ‘machinic exodus’ that hybridises labourers and new productive technologies in ceaseless mobilities. Machinic tools, such as the computer, must therefore become ‘prostheses’ in the creation of ‘new posthuman bodies’ (Empire 215).

Like Urry, Hardt and Negri refer to the ‘new nomad horde’ that threatens Empire with its power to circulate, emigrate and rupture the repressive boundaries of the nation-state (Empire 213, 363). With its mobility and miscegenated hybridity, the multitude poses a radical act of resistance with the powers to actuate an already-extant but virtual global citizenship through irrepressible migrations, both legal and unauthorised. In this way, Urry and Hardt and Negri use the metaphors of the machine and of hybridity to reconfigure radical political agency, identifying Utopian moments within current processes of globalisation.

Visualisations of Utopia (Part One)

I have recently trawled through the web for images of Utopia and discovered a wide and bewildering variety of ways in which Utopia is used for artistic, commercial, religious and political purposes. Below are the first of a series of images that caught my eye, in no particular order. Hope you like them!

Woodcut by Ambrosius Holbein for a 1519 edition of Thomas More’s Utopia. The lower left-hand corner shows the traveller Raphael Hythlodaeus, describing the island. More’s Utopia famously derives from the Greek words for ‘no place’ (outopia) and ‘good place’ (eutopia). Drawing on Erasmus, Plato and Lucian, More describes an island in the New World, linking Raphael’s travels and Amerigo Vespucci’s accounts of discovery in Four Voyages (1507).

"Man From Utopia." Magazine cover, 1972. Underground comic by Rick Griffin, American artist famous for his psychadelic posters in the 1960s. He was involved in the underground comix movement, inspired by the surfing subculture of southern California and psychadelic rock posters of Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelly. Griffin designed concert posters for the Human Be-In and The Charlatans. He was killed in a motorcycling accident in 1991.

A turn-of-the-century postcard of flying machines above a mega-metropolis (Duke University, Special Collections Library). As well as futuristic images that have fascinated artists, flying-machines also have a currency as vehicles of Utopian realisation through production, as exemplified in the Freedom commune, founded in Kansas in 1897. During the early part of the twentieth century, the Utopian colony achieved notoriety not for its Utopian lifestyle but, rather, for its flying factory. The reformer, Carl Browne, had designed the principle of rotary winged wheels to develop a commercial flying machine that would provide employment for Freedom’s denizens and ultimately supersede the bicycle!

(source: H. Roger Grant’s ‘Portrait of a Workers’ Utopia: The labour Exchange and the Freedom Kan., Colony’)

"The only way we'll make things work is if I lie to you and you lie to me." Poster designed by Olafur Eliasson and Israel Rosenfield from the Utopia Station project at the Venice Biennale in 2003. A station in Venice, designed by Tiravanija and Liam Gillick, hosted a series of programmes and performances themed around reimaginings of Utopia. Over 160 artists were commissioned to design posters that were exhibited around the city.

If anyone has any images they would like to blog, or more information on the images used here, please get in touch, we'd love to hear from you.

Ian McEwan's ON CHESIL BEACH

I would like to hear from anyone who has read this novel and enjoyed it because this will help me understand better what pleasures are to be derived from literary mediocrity.