LEFT CURVE No. 35 EDITORIAL

When this issue went to press in early March 2011, it’s was too early to say what the lasting outcome of the unfolding Arab uprisings will be. But it’s not hard to sense that we are witnessing a major historical turning point—a tear, breach in the fabric of the global status quo that came out of nowhere, unexpectedly, spontaneously, from the margins, by the actions of ordinary people—and not through the usual maneuverings of established groups or political parties—giving rise to an autonomous communal will, a mysterious force that has universal validity as an expression of the yearning for dignity, respect, justice and communality within a self-creating open space. At the very least, it’s a reaffirmation that people can become active agents of their destiny, adding to an age-old legacy (always present, but usually hibernating, buried in subterranean alcoves of the human soul) that there is another way to live than the given system of domination. I’d add desire for “freedom” to the previous sentence but for the fact that the word has been completely corrupted and emptied of meaning during the history of modernity (everybody is for “freedom”, regardless of ideology). Anyway, as the old saying goes “only time will tell”. Nevertheless, no matter how the Arab uprisings of 2011 might be co-opted (and all the powers that be are feverously working to do just that), they do signal an awakening that cannot but reverberate throughout the world and become a crucial element in the unfolding resistance to the hegemonic, neo-liberal world system. Noteworthy is the fact that these revolts espouse universal values and not narrow nationalist, ethnic or religious exclusivity—dealing a well deserved body blow to the Islamophobic hysteria whipped up in the U.S. and Europe since 9/11. It is also important to register that this upheaval is occurring in the midst of a global crises of apocalyptic foreboding and impending catastrophe: accelerating environmental degradation, the continuing global economic crises, the alarming expansion of the surveillance state and the unending wars waged by the U.S. and its NATO satraps—within the context of the global jostling underway in the face of declining U.S. power.

The contents of this issue had already been in place by the time the Arab revolts began to unfold so, other than Jack Hirschman’s poem, “The Book of the Face Arcane”, we don’t have work here that deals this momentous development. But what these uprisings bring to the fore—the potential development of a “counter-power” that can challenge the reigning neo-liberal, techno-capitalist order; and its mind-numbing, zombie- sclerotic commodity-spectacle—has always been an underlying position of this journal, and continues to be so in this issue. The opening article by P. J. Laska, “Nightfall for AWOL: The Dimming of the Dream and the Search for an Alternative”, analyzes the current global economic crisis—by examining the contradictory historical roots of capitalism and its ideology, with its repeated cycles of economic crises, wars, corruption anddesecration of internal and external nature—concluding that, “…the whole interlocking economic… enterprise stands like a cracked colossus blocking the path to a sustainable future for the world’s population while it tries to figure out how it can repair itself. Without collective resistance, it will march under its banner of ‘PROGRESS’ down the backward path toward more aggressive and senseless exploitation of labor, more looting of the natural world, more enhancement of surveillance and more regimen under the cover of ‘security’. What sane alternative is there but to assist in its interment and in the preparation of an historical marker for its grave.”

A theme that runs through several articles here (“The Political Animal: Species-Being and Bare Life”, “Animals and Monsters”, “Bandit”, “Let the Saint Automatons Work”) is that of the historical evolution of humanity’s relation to animals, or by extension to earth-bound nature as a whole. The Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben has referred to this process as the movement of the “Anthropological Machine” (The Open: Man and Animal, Stanford, 2004); which, in defining “human” as what is “not animal” has been a motor of Western culture for over two millennia. With the complete colonization/commodification of the external/ internal world by capitalist modernization, the machine’s trajectory is now, according to Agamben, “idling”. He sees this “hiatus” as a zone of “a-knowledge” in which the old dualities (darkness and light, matter and spirit, animal life and logos [distinguishing characteristic of the “human”]) have become “inoperative”, “beyond being and nothing” within which something unnamable, unconstrained by the logos, may emerge. But perhaps it might be useful to add that what is needed now is the “dismantling of the ‘Anthropo-centric Machine.’” In any case, modernity’s drive to control and dominate nature has skidded up to the edge of a crumbling precipitous. In lieu of radically different paths emerging, catastrophic free-fall and disintegration into the gaping abyss below looms. Such issues are explored by Laura Hudson’s “The Political Animal: Species-Being and Bare Life”. The article insightfully weaves through conflicting themes espoused by liberal democracy, the environmental movement, animal rights, deep ecology, fascism, the critical theory of Adorno and the writings of the early Marx—all in relation to Agamben’s concept of “bare life” with the aim of developing “resistance to a capitalist order that denies us our ability to be what we have never yet been: human”. From a different angle, similar issues are dealt with by Ted Dace’s witty, sardonic, tragic-comic romp through human presumptuousness over the ages, in his article, “Monsters and Animals”. Clare Brandabur’s, “The Year Without a Summer: Climate Change Past and Future”, succinctly describes what is at stake and ventures to point to some hope within the depressing ecocide that so far is proceeding full steam.

The realization of a tear, breach and self-creating open space, referred to above, has also been an underlying motivational force of the modern artistic process in general, and of the avant-garde in particular. The exhaustion of the avant-garde trajectory, coupled with the dissolution of traditional, organic culture can also be tied to the “idling of the Anthropological Machine,” brought about by the complete commodifiation of life by techno-scientific neo-liberal capitalism. So the historical task, not just politically, but artistically as well, is for creative energy to be harnessed to help break out of the current, dualistic aporia.

The interview with the Hungarian “non-art-artist” Tamás St.Auby, “Let the Saint Automatons Work”, brings up many salient questions worth pondering, such as: insights into the dissident movements prior to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc; questions about the “creative process” not bound by individualistic, commodified, “object art”; relevance of “myth” in the world today; the self-unfolding of the Zeitgeist; the relation of “human” and “animal”; authoritarian and egalitarian personality types; elimination of meaningless “work” through automation and a guarenteed basic income; the icon/ iconoclastic conflict; problems of “representation”, in art as well as politics. Our selections from Dmytri Kleiner’s “The Telekommunist Manifesto”, which strictly speaking is a political tract, can also be taken as genre of “Tactical Media” which, historically, is an outgrowth of trends within Conceptual/Process Art of the late 60’s-early 70’s—particularly in the way Kleiner reworks sections of Marx’s Communist Manifesto and can be read as a form “beyond art”. The work of Theodore A. Harris, which we first published in Left Curve no.24 (2000), has developed in quality and sophistication over the years, as shown by the exhibit he organized, “Surface Politics: Looking Beyond Aesthetics and Formalism” and his “Collage and Conflict: A Triptych Manifesto” (pp.58-61). In so doing, Harris well demonstrates the wide range that African-American art encompasses, not confined to delimiting “ethnic”, “protest” or “agit-prop” work. Gene Ray’s, “Adorno, Brecht and Debord: Three Models of Resisting the Capitalist Art System”, analyzes three modes of critical artistic engagement that the 20th century produced: Adorno’s “dissonant modernism”, Brecht’s “functional transformation” and Debord’s “Situationist détournement of art, aiming to rupture and decolonize naturalized everyday life”. In a welcomed move beyond the artistic sectarianism of the recent past, in which radical cultural critique would favor one or the other of these positions, Ray argues that all three are valid forms of radical culture, the essential point being the importance of confronting rather then accommodating one’s work to the the dominant capitalist art system.

Worthy of mention also is Richard Gilman-Opalsky’s “Upheaval as Philosophy: Eleven Thesis on Guy Debord”, written on the model of Marx’s “Thesis on Feuerbach.” E. San Juan Jr.’s article, “Leading Filipino Writers in the U.S.: Fin-de-Siecle Notes on Carlos Bulosan, Jose Garcia Villa, Jessica Hagedorn, and Bienvenido Santos” is a sustained, principled critique of neo-liberal hegemony in general and of its colonization/ commodification of Asian-American literature in particular, which “rejects dialectics and the historical unity of opposites for a world made uniform and thus exchangeable by the logic of formal democracy where abstract, statistically equal individuals operate as buyers and sellers of commodities.” Noteworthy also is Steve Redhead’s, “Archaeology of the Post-Future”, which focuses on the writings of Paul Virilio that describes, among other things, our world as an instant “now” (catastrophic and claustropolitan) devoid of “solids”, the continuation of which “…will render the Earth uninhabitable by its acceleration”.

I also encourage the reader to take a look at Shosana Madmoni-Gerber’s article, “Whitewashing History: Israeli Media & the Yemenite Babies Affair” as it reveals another disturbing aspect of Israeli history that has not received any attention to date. I’d also like to draw attention to the excellent poetry in our selections from the Revolutionary Poets Brigade Anthology. Though lacking in a critical edge that would have been welcomed, the review of Jack Hirschman’s 983 page tome The Arcanes, by Dottie Payne, an impassioned celebration of Hirschman’s five decades long poetic-politico output and verbal mastery and verisimilitude, exemplifies the kind of admiration his work has evoked. Also, do check out David Brian Howard’s “Pelodo”, an experimental, idiosyncratic (in the good sense) piece which is part of a larger work, Gnawing on Skulls that aims to “reframe the central debates in recent contemporary Western Culture, utilizing contemporary critical theory, philosophy, and criticism, interwoven with excerpts from historical and contemporary novelists, poets, visual artists and even nursery stories.” An important means by which capitalist ideology has been buttressed in the recent past has been through the enlistment of academia to serve it’s agenda, as the article in tribute to Howard Zinn, “Social Movements and the Academy” by Delia Aguilar”, demonstrates. The complicity of academia in the corporatization of higher education is also addressed by Harvey Whitney’s article, “Postmodernism, Corporatism and the Myth of Critical Thinking in the Human Disciplines”. Ali Shehzad Zaidi in “Rediscovering Thomas Paine and the Sacred Text of Nature”, while drawing on a wide range of ancient and contemporary sources—western and non-western—demonstrates the enduring legacy of one of the most visionary figures of the American revolution, whose vision still awaits fulfillment.

As usual, there is much more in this issue than space allows for comment, so I have to leave it to the reader to make his/her own discoveries. As always, we very much welcome your comments. Finally, this journal can continue only with your help, please order copies
or subscribe. Thanks!—the editor