Spectacle and terror

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 37, 2006, Pages 87-106

  Stallabrass, Julian ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33644554522     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (62)

1. Retort (Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, Michael Watts), Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, London 2005, p. 102 (henceforth AP).
2. AP, p. 107.
3. 'States of War', NLR 36, November-December 2005. Setting this assessment of the US state in its wider geopolitical field, and likening the gamble of the Iraq war to high-risk business techniques, Balakrishnan argues that Retort's conceptions of primitive accumulation and spectacle are, ultimately, 'juxtaposed rather than integrated'. He also sounds a note of scepticism that 'Seattle, Genoa, Chiapas' can rise to the challenge of the current political conjuncture.
4. 'On Afflicted Powers', October 115 (Winter 2006).
5. AP, p. 102.
6. AP, p. 79.
7. AP, p. 94.
8. Arundhati Roy, 'The Algebra of Infinite Justice', Guardian, 29 September 2001.
9. AP, p. 97.
10. Rosa Luxemburg, 'The Junius Pamplet: The Crisis in German Social Democracy' (1916), in
11. Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, ed. Mary-Alice Waters, New York 1970, p. 262.
12. A second expanded edition was published by Penguin: Raymond Williams, ed., May Day Manifesto 1968, Harmondsworth 1968.
13. AP, p. 9.
14. Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power, Edinburgh 2005.
15. AP, pp. 25, 34.
16. AP, pp. 26-7, 29.
17. AP, p. 5.
18. AP, p. 28.
19. For a survey, see Chris Dahlen, 'The Pop Culture of 9-11', 28 March 2005, available at www.pitchforkmedia.com.
20. Among the works often alluded to here are Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and Graves's Goodbye to All That, both 1929, and Dix's great cycle of war prints of 1924. The point can be overplayed: to take just one example, Henri Barbusse's Under Fire, published in 1916, was a highly successful account of the novelty of the war.
21. New York Police Department, Above Hallowed Ground: A Photographic Record of September 11, 2001, New York 2002.
22. AP, p. 19.
23. AP, pp. 20, 181-2.
24. AP, p. 180.
25. AP, p. 21.
26. W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, London 2003, p. 77.
27. AP, p. II.
28. David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford 2005.
29. This is one of the points examined by Gopal Balakrishnan. He argues that war between states, and colonial occupation, have been less common features of the post-1945 era, but also that what has largely replaced them - an 'asymmetric, discriminatory framework of legal disputes', including sanctions, supervision of weapons programmes and regime change - blurs the distinction between peace and war. 'States of War', p. 28.
30. AP, p. 15.
31. See Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, Cambridge 1984. Hal Foster asked Retort about the novelty of atavism and modernity, yielding the reply that while it is an old configuration, in the new situation the opposition is of an unprecedented starkness: 'On Afflicted Powers'.
32. AP, p. 37.
33. AP, pp. 80, 42.
34. AP, p. 63.
35. AP, p. 67.
36. See the letter from Matt Pires in London Review of Books, 23 June 2005.
37. AP, pp. 67, 72-4, 80-1.
38. AP, p. 93. Some of these tensions are readily acknowledged in the October interview: '"Blood for Oil?" is in high tension with "Permanent War", and meant to be. The chapters rehearse two logics of imperialism, and do not claim to be able to map the one onto the other at all precisely'. Balakrishnan charges Retort with uncertainty here, oscillating between war as breaking down barriers to neoliberalism, and as 'a product of ideological fixations and delusions peculiar to an impasse of neoliberalism': 'States of War', p. 9; although, as I shall discuss, perhaps both could be true.
39. AP, pp. 22, 2311.
40. AP, p. 175;
41. Giovanni Arrighi, 'Hegemony Unravelling', parts 1 and 11, NLR 32, March-April 2005 and NLR 33, May-June 2005;
42. Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire, London 2003;
43. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Decline of American Power: The US in a Chaotic World, New York 2003.
44. José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, Manchester 1986, pp. 245-6.
45. AP, pp. 90-1.
46. AP, pp. 135-6.
47. AP, p. 150.
48. AP, p. 172.
49. AP, p. 185.
50. V. I. Lenin, What is to be Done? [1902], Moscow 1947, pp. 74-7.
51. AP, pp. 188-9.
52. See David Baran and Mathieu Guidère, 'Decoding the Iraqi Resistance Propaganda', Le Monde diplomatique, 11 May 2005.
53. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, New York 1994, p. 19.
54. Baran and Guidère, 'Decoding the Iraqi Resistance Propaganda'.
55. Patrick Cockburn, 'The Abyss in Iraq', NLR 36, p. 47.
56. Tim Page, Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side, Washington, DC 2002, p. 46.
57. See Page, Another Vietnam.
58. AP, pp. 177, 192.
59. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA 2000, p. 396; and
60. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York 2004, p. 66.
61. AP, p. 4n.
62. AP, p. 188.