“We have to decipher all the images that surround the country and the city and to understand the real contradictions and connections between them.”

These are the final lines, read by the Welsh Marxist theorist, of Mike Dibb’s excellent 1979 TV collaboration with Raymond Williams, rendering the latter’s book into a compact and poetic essay on the historical entanglement of urbanisation, property and agriculture in British culture and society, as it came to be articulated in verse, prose and painting.

See also his cartographic narrative of slave revolts in Jamaica, and this brief chronological visualisation of the Atlantic slave trade.

[image from Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann, Volatile Smile]

Some years ago, it was common to lament, in critical circles, the taboo on “naming the system”: capital’s unlimited reign was everywhere cloaked in euphemism. While challenges to that reign have been fitful and fragile over the last decade of staggered crisis, the cognitive demand for figures, images, narratives, and allegories of the social totality has been nothing if not insistent.

Across domains, genres, and media—from the economic treatise to the television serial, the novel to the art installation—the same prescription: it cannot represent itself, it must be represented. Underlying it, a common sense: disorientation is the quality of our present; a strategy of emancipation demands a cartography of domination; the collective must be cognitive; knowledge of the levers prepares the power to seize them. And, over and again, the urge to represent is itself the object of dramatization—each fiction a metafiction, every scene tracked by its commentary, all information transmuted into its allegory.

That the representation of capital should so often devolve into a representation of representation is perhaps unsurprising. The demand to visually or narratively identify and encompass a social form, a relation, a totality—a demand often acknowledged to be impossible in the same breath it is proffered—cannot but raise metaphysical conundrums, in all their sordid anxious everydayness. Among them is what we could term the speculative identity of epiphany and opacity.

{…}

The remainder of the essay can be read in the catalogue to the exhibition I stood before the source at the Blackwood Gallery, Toronto, Oct 16-Dec 3, 2016.

For the scourge of the people, the source of the scarcity, is the obstacles placed in the way of circulation, under the pretext of rendering it unlimited. Is public subsistence circulating when greedy speculators are keeping it piled up in their granaries? It is circulating when it is accumulated in the hands of a small number of millionaires who withhold it from the market, to make it more valuable and more scarce; who coldly calculate how many families must starve before they reach a price fixed by their terrible greed? Is it circulating when all it does is cross the regions that produce it, before the very eyes of destitute citizens suffering the tortures of Tantalus, to be swallowed up in the unknown pits of some entrepreneur in public scarcity? Is it circulating when beside the most abundant harvests the needy citizen languishes, unable to give a gold piece or a slip of paper precious enough to purchase a little bit? Circulation is that which puts essential foodstuffs within reach of all men, and carries abundance and life to humble cottages.

(Robespierre, ‘Sur les subsistances’, quoted in the forthcoming book by Geoff Mann, In the Long Run We’re All Dead)

In anticipation of visiting the Wifredo Lam exhibition at the Tate Modern, London, here is  a translation of a short text by Louis Althusser on the Cuban painter, included in vol. 2 of Écrits philosophiques et politiques (Paris: IMEC, 1995). The text in italics is from the volume’s editors.

Lam (1977)

This text, entitled “Lam” by Althusser, was commissioned from him by Wifredo Lam in a letter dated 18 August 1977. It was to feature in the catalogue of a retrospective on Lam’s work at the Nanterre Maison de la Culture in April 1978, which was ultimately cancelled. Going by Lam’s letter, the catalogue was to also include texts by Aimé Césaire, Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier. Althusser sent this text to Wifredo Lam, along with a letter dated 13 October 1977.

            Althusser’s text was finally published shortly after the death of the painter in 1982, in the three catalogues of an exhibition which travelled from the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid (20 October-12 December 1982), then to the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris (23 March-22 May 1983), and lastly to the Ixelles Museum of Bruxelles. The catalogue of the Paris exhibition is entitled Wifredo Lam: 1902-1982.

Lam, I could say: for me it means bodies stretched to their utmost line, lines extended until their final point, angles like stemposts run aground having split the space of their course all the way to their last beach; Lam, I could say: he paints at the limits, just as a few others have thought at the limits.

Yet I prefer to write: these words are those of a man, who, among thousands and thousands of others, one day, encountered Lam in his work.

But need we speak the risky language of the encounter? Better that of the entrance, the most natural possible, into the nearest of spaces and the most familiar of worlds.

Like everyone, I have been struck by some painters, shaken by others, sometimes intrigued and even torn – by some among the greatest. And each time a long labour was needed, in the most muted recesses of the body, to restore the peace of an agreement or to say to suffering: yes.

Now, with the first canvas by Lam I saw, it was as if I’d known it forever. Unbeknownst, it was already part of me. And each time I advanced into his work, by sections and chances – the teeth of life – toward the beginnings of bodies naked and mute like faces, or elsewhere, and later, each time he had always preceded me.

I really believe this is his miracle: this man, who comes to us from the end of the world, the other one, from the edge of an endless ocean, this painter who traces in such long or dense lines birds beasts flowers creepers jungles and humans never before seen, this foreign man who speaks in silence our unknown language, and we hear him.

The reason for this miracle? Without a doubt it is Lam’s humility, and his goodness: accepting to be what he is, of his land and his sky, and to gaze at its plants, animals and men, loving them simply. It is also that he paints at the limits: not so much of beings and their forms, but of the mute cry of a people crushed by centuries of history. In humility such a refusal of humiliation, in peace the tension of such a violence. That is why Lam’s world is at once our own: because he lays it bare.

Freud spoke of a strange familiarity, of the uncanny. Lam’s great birds, made of sun and night and more than birds, are strange perhaps, just as those enigmatic beings stretched in the infinity of an air too rarefied not to be the void. What is strange is that they are not strange to us, but familiar. A familiar strangeness. When we enter into their world, a silent being has already, long before us, said yes to them: our body and its torn memory of suffering and peace.

I discover him: I have known Lam forever. He was born before us, the oldest painter in the world: the youngest.

This translation is the manuscript version of an article that has been accepted for publication in the June 2017 issue of ARTMargins (http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/artm). For copyright information or permission to reprint, please contact journals-rights@mit.edu. 

Multiplication of traces through the modem administrative apparatus. Balzac draws attention to this: “Do your utmost, hapless Frenchwomen, to remain unknown, to weave the very least little romance in the midst of a civilization which takes note, on public squares, of the hour when every hackney cab comes and goes; which counts every letter and stamps them twice, at the exact time they are posted and at the time they are delivered; which numbers the houses . . . ; which ere long will have every acre of land, down to the smallest holdings . . . , laid down on the broad sheets of a survey – a giant’s task, by command of a giant.” Balzac, Modeste Mignon, cited in Regis Messac, Le “Detective Novel” et l’influence de la pensee scientifique (Paris, 1929), p. 461.

– Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (p. 221)

“The cinematic deceit transmuted liberation into vengeance, the pursuit of a social justice which embraced race, class, and gender into Black racism, and the politics of armed struggle into systematic assassination. The screen impostors occupied a manichaean world in which whites were evil, corrupt and decadent; where Black accomplices to white venality were tainted with a similarly debased nature; and the central Black protagonists were preoccupied with vigilantism. Capitalism, signified at most by skyscraper exteriors, almost entirely disappeared, constituting a normalising space whose interstices lent marginal terrain for the practices of the drug trade and prostitution. The real world of the market, unseen and unremarked upon, hovered above the ghetto streets, the police station, the strip club and the dealer’s locales (storefront, suburban home, high rise apartment, etc.). The world in front of the camera was some sort of twisted, perverted mirror of the normal, the reasoned, the ordered, the safe and unremarkable American landscape. The denizens dwelling in the nether world were as different from real America as gargoyles are from pigeons. The object was to exhibit these bizarre and semi-mythic life-forms while assuring the screen audience that they inhabited a space some safe distance away.”

“At the time of Blaxploitation films, it was a commonplace that actual Black urban  communities in all parts of the country were heavily patrolled and policed by agents deployed by federal, state, county, local, and private institutions. The external imposition of order was manifested through electronic surveillance, informants, undercover operatives, special police intelligence units, interventions of mailed correspondence, photo surveillance, foot- and automobile-patrols, frequently centralised by inter-agency cooperation. From within the community, moral and civil order were maintained by church networks and the routines of daily labour, community associations, mainstream and radical political organisations, neighbourhood watch groups and a canopy of adult and youth activities. Why then would Hollywood and independent film makers construct this densely jungled urban landscape inhabited principally by predators? How might the manufacturers of such a fantastically unrealistic portrayal expect that their creation would achieve the ring of authenticity?

In the Bad Black Woman genre, the body of the Black female anoints this unreality as authentic. On the one hand, the undeniably erotic objectivity of the Black female body inscribes the mark of truth onto the social fantasy. And the narrative, filled with competing claimants for that body – lovers, rapists, and the merely obsessed (in Foxy, the judge is characterised by his taste for ’your kind’) – transports the credibility of their desires into an authentication of the world in which these denizens are imagined to exist. Unlike her white female counter-part of the jungle and plantation films, it is not the Black female who is an ambiguous figure negotiating the chasm between the white and the Black worlds. It is the chasm which is ambiguous: male desire and the resulting calumny of male domination erases the distinctions between white society and Black society. In the total absence in the genre of any allusion to actual international capitalism, a predatory fratriarchy displaces modes of production as the source of evil. Material greed, political tyranny and the domination by capital of labour are merely vacuous surrogates for male desire. … The false, Hobbesian depiction of the Black community, the procrustean social consciousness of its protagonists, the bluntly pathogenic and unrelievedly pure malevolence of its villains, the outrages perpetrated on the flesh of friend and foe alike, are all spun into credible artifices by the single truth of the Black woman’s body.“

– Cedric J. Robinson, ‘Blaxploitation and the misrepresentation of liberation’, Race & Class 40 (1) (1998).

If we go back to the origins of tires, we will discover which part of its cost must be attributed to energy expenditure. These require a flux of a given climate’s solar energy, physical work in rubber plantations, coal for the railways and ships which transport the raw material from the tropics, as well as for the factories which transform it into tires. The railways and ships, in turn, and all the buildings and implements necessary for their manufacture, as well as the materials used – the iron and the metals, and the coal that must be extracted – are the result of the spending of physical energy.

– Frederick Soddy, Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt (1926), quoted in Luis Fernández-Galiano, Fire and Memory: On Architecture and Energy (p. 198).

From a 1973 talk by Michel Foucault on the history of madness and anti-psychiatry, partly reproduced in Artières and Bert’s stimulating dossier on Histoire de la folie:

[There is] an entire geography, an entire differentiated chronology of truth, in other words truth was not always conceived as the very element of the universal, but in our culture there is – running through the centuries and no doubt yet to be extinguished – this idea that truth is an event that produces itself in certain places and certain moments; one could perhaps say, and indeed I do, in brackets and by way of hypothesis, that the moment in which this idea that truth is an event that is simply produced in certain places, in certain moments, in which this idea started to be seriously shaken up, my impression is that it was with the great techniques of navigation, that is to say when one was compelled to invent instruments such that one could register, discover, define, formulate truth in any place whatever and any moment whatever. The ship, that placeless place, lost in infinite space, which at each instant must take stock of its situation; it is, if you will, the very image, the very problem that is at the heart of our society: how, everywhere and no matter from what point of view, to grasp truth, and, here and there, the great problem of navigation was the great moment of rupture [coupure], I don’t mean in scientific consciousness, but in what I would call the technology of truth. 

An acute observation on the articulation between capital’s representability and the technical composition of labour post-73, from his remarkable 1980 essay ‘The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse’ (worth revisiting in these Anthropocene-mongering times):

The very image of the worker seems to disintegrate before this recomposition of capital. The burly, “blue collared” line worker seems to blur in the oil crisis, diffracted into the female service worker and the abstracted computer programmer. The large concentrations of factory workers that proved so explosive are dispersed, the specific gravity of the worker’s presence is dramatically reduced. And it all feels so different! Your wages go up but they evaporate before you spend them, you confront your boss but he cries that “he has bills to pay,” and even more deeply, you don’t see your exploitation any more. On the line, you literally could observe the crystallization of your labor power into the commodity, you could see your life vanishing down the line, you could feel the materialization of your alienation. But in the service industries, your surplus labor seems to be non-existent, even “non-productive,” just” a paid form of “housework,” cleaning bedpans, massaging jogger’s muscles, scrambling eggs. While in the “energy/information” sector you seem to be engulfed by the immense fixed capital surrounding you, it feels as if you were not exploited at all, but a servant of the machine, even “privileged” to be part of the “brains of the system.” These feelings disorient struggles. As the vast spatial migrations “to look for a job” disaggregate militant circles, the old bastions are isolated and appear archaic, almost comic.

[…]

The divergence of prices and values is nothing new. On the contrary, it has always been an essential aspect of capitalist rule. Values (worktime) must be transformed into prices and this transformation is never one-to-one. The essence of the transformation of values into prices is that though capital extracts surplus value locally, it does not let those who do the extracting command and expend this surplus value. The hand of capital is different from its mouth and its asshole. This transformation is real, but it causes illusions in the brains of both capitalists and workers (including you and me!). It all revolves around mineness, the deepest pettiness in the Maya of the system. For capital appears as little machines, packets of materials, little incidents of work, all connected with little agents of complaint, excuse and hassle. Each individual capitalist complains about “my” money, each individual worker cries about “my” job, each union official complains about “my” industry; tears flow everywhere, apparently about different things, so that capitalism’s house is an eternal soap opera. But mineness is an essential illusion, though illusion all the same. Capital is social, as is work, and pitiless as Shiva to the complainers, but needs their blindness to feed itself. It no more rewards capitalists to the extent that they exploit than it rewards workers to the extent that they are exploited. There is no justice for anyone but itself.