It’s the oldest trick in the book. You create the illusion of terror, then

you get credit for stamping it out; you get funds, you get power. And that’s

exactly what’s going on.

Jonathan Franzen, The Twenty-Seventh City

What is it that joins us together? Gifts, obligations. Things like necklaces, like the baubles the Portuguese traded on the Gold Coast for gold, and later, for slaves. Those same gifts they couldn’t understand - why exchange baubles for gold, precious gold, those same gifts that later led them to ask: why risk like and limb for yellow metals, for little yellow baubles?

Gifts always go wrong. They arrive too late, we don’t understand their importance, they are reciprocated in the wrong way: philosophers call it the problem of other minds. This space between gifts is the space where the comic emerges, the comic, and the tragic.

This is the story of one of those spaces.

It starts with being late, and jumping off a mutatu because someone wants to change the meeting place. I was in the centre of town, the long street that led to the Alliance Français extended before me, and I rushed there, ignoring the bustle around me; my mind was anywhere except where I was. Until I get to a throng of people lining the side of the road, centred around a point on the sidewalk that was invisible to me because of the weight of bodies making a small semi-circle against the railings of the private car park. But, as I mentioned, I was oblivious - I pushed through until I found myself in space, wide open empty space in the middle of the crowd.

He was lying on the street, his body stretched out like a line drawing from a crime scene in an American detective series. Surrounded by cartoon quantities of blood, which cascaded down his face, which, in turn, had been distended and changed until, when following the lines of his face, you moved through unexpected contours, and encountered the deep seated unease produced by a face that had a nose that is not where it should be.

My first thought: should I help him? My second, given the huge crowd, I am sure someone is already helping. Car accident, I thought, or maybe a drunkard who fell down. The proximity to the crowd, to all those bodies pushing against me, absolved any responsibility I might have felt: someone must be helping him, from all those people watching, and as a part of the crowd, I am helping him too. What else was the crowd there for, after all, if not to help him?

As I moved on, passing the private car park, I turned, and saw, through the fence, the injured man struggle to get up. My sense of guilt at not stopping was now fully assuaged, he stood up, started moving - he isn’t dead. Then the crowd bayed. A man moved from the centre of the crowd into the empty space, brick in arm, and, from a distance of about 30cm, launched it straight at the man’s face, who promptly fell back onto the ground. The crowd bayed louder, enjoying the discharge, feeling its purpose.

I was stupefied, and everything that should have been obvious came slowly. Anafanya nini? I asked the grinning security guard next to me, what did he do? He is a thief, the guard replied, he was caught trying to steal a wallet from a woman, doesn’t this happen in your country? Inexplicably, I launch into Baccaria; how, here does the punishment fit the crime?

As if punishment has ever had much to do with the crime.

As I wandered around around talking to people, our thief would occasionally get up, to be stoned again. He seemed complicit in the scene - as if to move too much, he would excite the crowd, and the stoning would intensify, but to move too little would invite the crowd’s boredom, and the need to discharge their raison d’être, and possibly his death. Why else would he try to get up? Knowing full well what would happen.

Talking to people, the story they told was not an unexpected one. If they called the police, then he would simply go to the station to be released - unless the robbed woman was rich, the police had no incentive to put people through a massively overworked court and prison system. In any case, he would soon be released - and what type of lesson would that be for other thieves? Here, they say, we are setting them an example. Why don’t they work? Life is hard for us as well, and we continue, we do not steal: they should struggle as we struggle.

My mind was taken back to a conversation that I had with an ascari, a security guard, the night before. I had pointed out the irony of the rich hiring poor people from the slums to work as security guards to protect the rich against, well, poor people from the slums. “Eh, sawa, but thieving is work too.” Only difference, he told me, is that thieves are stupid, they get caught, and that is the only time one calls them a thief. Politicians evidently aren’t - in the run up to the election, the Minister of the Interior has announced a shoot-to-kill policy against criminals.

This policy had resulted in revealing an older connection that we have largely effaced in the west. A couple of months ago, someone evidently had the idea, high up in government, of making an example, setting the public mind at rest. Simon Matheri, a hired gun for other, more well connected politicians thieves, was declared Public Enemy No. 1.

He was a nobody, it was striking that each robbery he was supposed to have been involved in relied on inside connections - to banks, to private houses - that only someone who lived in Karen, the rich gilded enclave, and not Kibera, the largest slum in Africa that is next door, could have.

That, obviously, had little effect on the shambolic PR exercise that followed. Week after week, it was announced Simon Matheri had been shot - only to turn out that the police had in fact shot someone else, who was not Simon Matheri, but only looked like him, and was in fact a security guard, or factory hand, who had been in the wrong place. The effect snowballed - ‘Simon Matheris’ were being lynched all over the place. In the witch-hunts of days gone by, it was the rich who were killed - a commentary on illegitimate power; witches, like the powerful, rely on eating others, extracting their lifeblood. But here was a witch hunt against a man who was poor, by the poor.

The Baiting Crowd, Canetti calls it. The goal is clear, and everyone wants to join in - there is no risk, and every blow, every minor slight accumulated in the day, can be discharged into the hapless victim. “There is, too, another factor which must be remembered. The threat of death hangs over all men and, however disguised it may be, and even if it is sometimes forgotten, it affects them all the time and creates in them a need to deflect death onto others.” Not just death, but poverty, and the ease with which poverty may turn into being a hired gun. In those lynchings, that spread like wildfire around Nairobi, what poverty can make you do was put on a pedestal, and hung up, so that the neck and the poverty became detached from the people. All those frailties and failures we all experience can be pushed onto this one man. Simon Matheri. But he was not enough - there was not enough of this one man to go around. Indeed, he could not be found. So everyone became potential Simon Matheris, and the violence spread: the poor against themselves, in a quest to banish poverty.

One of the interesting things about this is that it involves two crowds. The baiting crowd, and the crowd of the newspaper. People used to travel for hours to see executions - to allow their death to be banished in the death of another, to be equal, for just a moment, with everyone in the crowd, to know that the irreversible law of the state will be carried out. Today, we are disgusted at collective killings - and yet, vicariously, we live them in the safety of our homes, in the newspaper, and now, on television. “One is tempted to say that it is the most despicable and, at the same time, most stable form of a crowd. Since it does not have to assemble, it escapes disintegration; variety is catered for by the daily re-appearance of the newspapers.” These are the newspapers Hegel thought would produce national consciousness - and here in Kenya, we see that close link to the crowd that Canetti talks about. Matheris were being hung everywhere, the obsession of the newspapers turned into the obsession of the crowd, and the more killing there was, the more people drew strength from Simon Matheris, dying for us all over the country.

In the crowd around our thief, they drew strength from each other, from the proximity of the massed bodies; even those who did not throw a stone could feel a part of it, simply by being there.

I felt complicit. Where were the police? Finally, a security guard walked up, and then my relief turned to horror as he walked straight up to him the thief, and then onto him, stamping down repeatedly on his neck. As I looked on (vicariously? aghast?), a man started to roll up a rubber tyre up to the thief.

A necklace. Not that it matters, but my body went cold all over.

Freetown, Sierra Leone, 1998. ECOMOG, the Economic Organisation of West African States Monitoring Group (the longer and more official the acronym, the more horrible the crime, is a good general rule - think of the UNHCR) has retaken Freetown from the AFRC junta. ECOMOG is composed of Nigerian soldiers, supporting the Kabbah government, which, in a bizarre turn of events, have allied itself with Mende tribal militias against the national army, the AFRC, who have allied themselves with the rebels.

The Nigerians search the town for anyone who might be a rebel. Like a good detective, guilt was a matter of tracing in the everyday the hand of the sacred. Rough skin on the fingers (rough skin! In a city of refugee farmers) was indisputable evidence that you were a rebel. Everyone I spoke to in Freetown remembers what the EU-funded Monitoring Group did next. A rubber tyre, rather like the one we see rolling towards our thief, was placed around the ‘rebel’s’ neck, petrol was poured onto it, and it was set on fire - A nice bright necklace.

A have a set of recordings of the stories of the Monitoring Group I don’t listen to.

And here we were again, the tyre coming up to our thief. And as it came, this gift for the thief who had disturbed the order of public property, the rightful reciprocity of rich and poor, as it came, the police arrived.

The man I was standing next to fell around laughing. “They have come too early - look at their faces.” And it was true, the police had evidently made a mistake, they looked angry, put out, as if stood up on a prom date. They were out of place. The man next to me explained that the police had been waiting around the corner, and that normally they come after the crowd disperses and they pick up the body for the morgue. But someone had gave them the wrong information, they had come too early, and now they found themselves having to protect the criminal from the crowd.

“It would have been better that he died. Now he will never forget.” What do you mean? You mean he will come looking for revenge when, if, he gets out of hospital. The man’s grasp of human psychology was superior to mine. “No, he cannot even remember the faces of those who beat him. But he will never forget that he was beaten - it will always be lodged him, and he will never stop trying to get it out of him. Better he died.”

The tyre lay in the middle of the road - the man rolling it had run off when the police came, and it looked, banal - eventually a policeman took it out of the road, as if to banish from its memory the idea it might have been used for anything other than a car. Despite occasionally kicking our thief, the police tugged him away from the crowd and guarded him, AK-47’s at the ready (though I am sure they would have rather run than turn them on the crowd), until the ambulance came. Two hours later, when I returned to the scene, he was still there. Perhaps the ambulance was also choosing its time to come, life’s gift, like that of the necklace, always too late, misunderstood,. Comic.

Continuity

Alfred has just woken up. It is perhaps 6am, the rocks broken yesterday for sale on the street lie in a pile at his feet, the small shack from which he sells weed it located just to the left of the picture. He has no customers yet.

(c) Joshua Craze. 2004. Waiting. Freetown, Sierra Leone.

This is an image of war.

We are not used to associating wars with such images: with moments of trade, with faces in the morning.

The civil war in Sierra Leone, in which Alfred was a combatant, is more easily associated with images of astonishing violence.

These images accompany texts that talk of new wars, where once states waged wars, it is claimed, now people do, and these wars cannot be understood on the same terms as wars between states. On the contrary, by considering one of the axioms of Clausewitz’ On War[1], this essay will demonstrate that the uncertain relationship between politics and war we find in Sierra Leone[2], is a relationship already present in the thought of Clausewitz.

Contemporary conflict is not “new” – there are not, despite Mary Kaldor’s[3] insistence, new wars and old wars. Far from being at a disjuncture with wars of state, the logic of war[4] we find in Clausewitz finds its completion in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone is not a “failed state”, nor the civil war a “non-political war”; civil war was the culmination of a political process, as the Sierra Leonean state was the culmination of a process of state formation.

Let us stop holding innocent ideal against distorted realisation.

I. The image of violence.

Violence separates itself out from everyday life – it demands an explanation on its own terms, far away from where we are now. The words that normally pass for an explanation include “barbaric”, and “horrible.” So it is that our war photographers[5] take images of dying troops, maimed victims, cities lit up by tracer fire. In these photographs, the time of war is a time of violence, of frenetic action; it is impossible to think of stillness, of moments of waiting, of moments of everyday life hidden among the explosions.

These images make clear the extent to which 19^th century notions of warfare still grip our imagination: the idea of war as a proper time, fought between two armies, on behalf of two kings, disengaged from the civilian world, finds its 21^st century parallel in these photos of unimaginable violence separated out from the world of waiting to sell weed.

This continuity would be unsurprising if it were not for the fact that the journalism that accompanies these photographs so insistently denies any continuity between contemporary conflict and the wars of the past. Contemporary conflict is indeterminate: at what point, after how many years, do we say that what happens in Somalia is no longer an exceptional war, but the norm? It is based on religion, or tribalism, apparently[6], rather than being aligned with the political wars of the 20^th century. The latter are created by states acting on the basis of rational political goals: today we have irrational civilians, acting erratically, often not at the behest of a state.

The question of continuity is crucial here. The combined effect of such journalism, and such photographs, is to make violence appear as an absolute disjuncture from social life – irrational, barbaric, and, in any event, unthinkable. Yet, at the same time, this discourse makes it continuous with tribal or religious practice: it denies it a status as a war, as politics pursued by other means. This play of disjuncture and continuity ensures a double removal. When we pick up the New York Times or the Guardian, we see violence represented as something irrational – separated out from our lives – and at the same time, continuous with their lives. In any event, it should be clear, it is not our concern.

II. The logic of complementarity

One of the principle reasons that journalists are able to evoke an absolute disjuncture between contemporary conflicts such as Sierra Leone and previous patterns of warfare is the apparent absence of state actors. Sierra Leone saw an indeterminable conflict between proliferating groups of actors that had relationships to, but were not identical with, state actors. It is these state actors that form our understanding of what war is.

In an inheritance from Roman law, throughout the breadth of political theory, from Hobbes to Schmitt, there is still a great emphasis on sovereign states being considered moral persons, and as such, relationships between them should be conducted with comitas (courtesy) and with jus (probity)[7].

On the basis of these relationships of complementarity, a temporality of war is established. Benjamin notes the importance of this relationship in the Critique of Violence:

At the end of the war: the peace ceremony. What has changed through violence (me acquiring your land by force), is now sanctified by a new law. This law makes the foundational violence of the law separate from the legal situation (to take back the land would be illegal), and yet continuity is assured; the grammar of war accomplished, we pass over into the logic of politics.

Violence, and its state representative, war, have always had this law-making power. What makes war between states as moral people different is that the rhythm of the war has been assured from the start. As much as the end of the war is followed by the peace ceremony, the beginning of war, for the modern state, is preceded by the declaration of war. As Schmitt details in The Nomos of the Earth[9], it is remarkable how utterly condemned the surprise attack is in the 19^th century. As much as war has a law making power then, this power is constrained in the theory of the state by a set of pre-established laws that seek to legally limit the way in which war is carried out.

Following the end of the Second World War, however, the European powers were forced to engage in a seemingly very different type of conflict.

Here.

(c) Robert Capa. Near Namdinh.May 12, 1954.

It is 1954. We are in Indochina. In the background, a French military convoy in the background roars through to Doia Tan. It certainly has a sense of time: places to get to, missions to be accomplished. In the foreground, a man ploughs a field. He also has a sense of time: the time the rice should be planted, fertilised[10]. These two senses of time are absolutely incommensurable[11]: there is no logic of complementarity here. And with it, no clearly defined start nor finish to the war.

The time between the declaration and the peace ceremony is the time of war. For Clausewitz, the time of war is decided by politics, and ended by politics.

The war in Sierra Leone began in silence. There was no declaration before the collection of Burkinabe, Liberian and Sierra Leonean men crossed the Liberian border into Kailhoun province. There was no peace ceremony at the end.

In On War, Clausewitz tries desperately to keep politics separate from war – to make sure that the grammar of war (its demands, its structural necessities) did not overwhelm the logic of politics, and result in an absolute war which ended in complete destruction. The time of war announced by peace treaties and declarations is one way of assuring its divide from the rest of life. But if there are no treaties? And if the treaties, even in Clausewitz, were not effective?

We see precisely this absence of a specific temporality to war in Sierra Leone. Alfred, whose story began this essay, fought during the war, changed sides with abandon, gave up, became a drug dealer, a diamond miner, went back to war, and gave up again: the structures of the war were not separated out from everyday life, they were entrenched within it. There was no time of proper engagement, of two armies agreeing to do battle away from civilians, and thus, in the depiction of the international media, correspondingly no politics.

What this essay will now suggest, however, is that this not simply a question of contemporary conflict - the indetermination which makes separating war from life impossible is not a result of globalisation, or the rise of non-state actors. It is prefigured in the theory of the state of the 19^th century.

III. The indetermination of a relation

War is a question of continuity. But a continuity of what, precisely? The term finds itself firmly established in Clausewitz’s most famous proposition in On War[12]: “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” This proposition actually occurs twice in On War, and in each case it refers to a different object. We must here not forget that On War is an unfinished text, that Clausewitz wanted to rewrite the book according to something that occurred to him only half way through, that throughout the text there is evidence of a constant battle between war and politics, but a battle which shifts its contours, and by the end has come to assume a completely different meaning, and that, finally, and most importantly, this proposition is merely one of what Balibar[13] calls the four axiomatics of the text, and that, for reasons of space, by taking only these one axioms, I am today being unjust to Clausewitz.

In book I, we find the proposition that war is a way to continue politics with other means. The assumption here is that politics is normally carried out by non-violent means[14], and that it is the right of the state to pursue politics through violent means when these normal means are insufficient. It is important to note, for Clausewitz, it is the state that is allowed to act, and the state is a unity between people, nation and army. These means can then be codified in proper relations.

Yet right away, Clausewitz acknowledges, the means of war – violence – and, crucially, the means of these means (patriotism, the institution of the military) change politics; what is initially set out to be a means employed by politics, becomes something which turns back on politics, makes demands of it, effects it in manifold ways. So while initially we have the formulation that the time of war is but a particular time of politics (a time of politics carried out in a particular way), already in book I, Clausewitz finds time doubling back on itself; the time of politics becoming, already, the time of war. For instance, to give a modern example of the time of politics that Clausewitz would not have been comfortable with, in an election, we already find the time of war prefigured in the need to instil a certain sense of patriotism, in the need to plan to give sufficient funds to the military.

Ultimately, the law-making power of violence (the ability to give violence a continuity that retroactively modifies the conditions of its own founding) can be seen in the constant threat that the military can take over; that the time of politics simply becomes an extension of war. History is littered with examples, but in case we think that this is so far from our situation today, the example[15] of Turkey, a modern European nation where the military has launched four coup d’états since 1960[16], should suffice. The very possibility of war, the necessity of preparing for war, reveals here the violent basis of state power, and the way in which what is initially a means to be employed by the state ends up modifying the logic of politics itself, whereby politics becomes the preparation for war.

By the end of On War, the unease about the relationship of war to politics has expressed itself in a more striking formulation of the proposition. In book VIII, the emphasis is placed on the idea that war is “nothing else but the continuation of politics by other means”. Here, war is no longer an option pursued by political actors when non-violent political means are no longer sufficient[17], instead, it is one among many options. This does not resolve the tension outlined for Clausewitz’ first formulation, but merely displaces it.

First of all, it is entirely ambiguous whether this is descriptive or a prescriptive: is the grammar of war merely the continuation of a political logic (always and in all cases), or, is it the case that it functions as a warning: the violent means of war are only legitimate insofar as they follow a political logic, and do not subvert the logic of the political. To place these doubts back inside our argument: it is not resolved whether the time of war is pursued according to the time of politics (when things should be done, in proper time, according to politics) or whether the time of war is always separate from the time of politics (if the decisions of battle never run according to the priorities of politicians) but necessarily be subordinate to it in order to be legitimate – to be accorded legitimacy afterwards, or retroactively.

IV. The time of peace is the time of war

What Clausewitz feared most was what he called absolute war – where the grammar of war triumphed over political concerns and both sides ended up destroying themselves. What he didn’t anticipate, but what his entire work seems a preparatory warning against, was total war. Instead of war continuing on its own path, and overcoming politics in the proper time of war (that initially declared by politics), what we saw during the 20^th century was war becoming the total commitment of politics: war ceased to be the commitment of states when non-violent means no longer worked, it became a commitment of all people, not simply states or armies. The Schmitt who wrote State, Movement, People[18], reverses Clausewitz, and claims politics should be placed in the cause of war. However, he does so only to the extent that war emerges as a possibility to return to an autonomous political sphere.

In several respects, contemporary conflict is structurally similar to the theory of total war: it involves every element of society, the relationship between politics and war is reversed. What is missing is the state, precisely. Yet, if we were to look closely at the war in Sierra Leone, we would find it is the legacy of a particular history of state formation: Chabal and Daloz[19], in particular, have extensively documented the extent to which seemingly failed states are actually the result of conscious choices by elites to put resources into informal networks rather than Weberian bureaucratic structures, largely as a result of the states insertion into an inter-national environment in a marginal position.

The endless war we seemingly see in Africa, and that is not without parallel in the war on terror (like the war in Sierra Leone, this is a war without a proper sense of time, and, correlatively, it is a war without proper subjects), is prefigured by the inability to distinguish between war and politics in Clausewitz’ text.

What is left ambiguous in Clausewitz, is what precisely war is. It is, one notes, primarily defined negatively – as not being political (and correlatively non-violent). Yet given, as Benjamin has shown, the violent character of politics, and of the laws on which it is founded, we cannot be happy with such a definition of war (as the absence of politics, or of violent means employed by politics).

In wars between states, legal theorists tell us, we have different, contradictory conditions. “The possibility of military law rests on exactly the same objective contradiction in the legal situation as does that of strike law – namely, on the fact that legal subjects sanction violence whose ends remain for the sanctioners natural ends, and can therefore come into conflict with their own legal or natural ends.[20]”

It is precisely in this contradiction that war as a time emerges. What happens in war? Troops move from place to place, they receive instructions – what is efficient and rational for them, given the circumstances, may not be efficient or rational for political actors worried about public relations back home. This is one time of war. It is, one should already note: a time already played at, already present, in peacetime: in practices and drills, in the ritualised launching of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan. Peace here becomes the playing out of the forces that sustain it.

Even in these exercises, other senses of time emerge: the time of waiting, the traders who make their money: in World War Two it was selling cigarettes, in the Green Zone of Baghdad today, it is KFC franchises, for Alfred, in the story that began this essay, it is selling weed.

There is the boredom of the troops; the hours spent waiting in strange places – trenches in a bygone era, today; shells of mosques. War cannot be the elimination of these senses of time: they are always present – it is indeed a framing of them, occurring in an ambiguously legal space which relies on two key elements: first, a beginning and a possible ending – a condition that we have seen does not pertain to Sierra Leone, but equally, cannot be ensured by Clausewitz, for it is a condition that relies on the separation of politics from war, whereas we are here concerned with elucidating war as a zone as such, and not in relation to politics. Second, it relies on a logic of complementarity: two armies fighting each other. It does not matter if there are more than two sides, as long as the logic continues; national armies, in a legally pre-defined space, fighting a war.

We have seen this space collapses in Clausewitz, we have seen this space collapse in Sierra Leone. What is left is not simply war, but the absence of a political sphere outside of private interests. War becomes merely a framing device to justify the suspension of a legal space founded on elements which do not pertain to the contemporary situation.

Bibliography

Balibar, Etienne. On Clausewitz. Public Lecture. Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities, Northwestern University, Evanston, May 8, 2006.

Benjamin, Walter. 1921. Critique of Violence. In Benjamin, Walter. 1996: Selected Writings. Volume One: 1913-1926. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Von Clausewitz, Carl. 1873 [1832]. On War. N Trübner: London.

Chabal, Patrick & Daloz, Jean-Pascal. 1999: Africa works: disorder as a political instrument. Indiana: Indiana University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. 1988. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Continuum Press.

Fanon, Frantz. 2001. The Wreteched of the Earth. Penguin: London.

Kaldor, Mary. 1999. New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity

Kaplan, Robert. 1994. The Coming Anarchy. The Atlantic Monthly. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/foreign/anarchy.htm. Accessed 6/2/2004.

Manela, Erez. 2008.The Wilsonian Moment: Self-determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Salt, Justin. 1999: Turkey’s military ‘democracy’. Current History. Vol. 98, pp.72-78

Schmitt, Carl. 2003 [1974]. The Nomos of the Earth: in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. London: Telos Pres

Schmitt, Carl. 2001 [1933]. State, Movement, People. Washington: Plutarch Press.

A review of Archive Fever – Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art – International Center of Photography, New York. January 18- May 4 2008.

A few months ago messages went around the internet, saying things like “The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae.”

In comparison to the way we scan web pages or typed print, reading handwritten pages in an archive is a curiously intimate experience. It is not just that often, such as in the colonial records from Mathari mental hospital shown in the photograph below, the English used is archaic, it is also that reading handwriting far removed from you in space and time proves oddly difficult. In the records I was looking at, the scrawled pen of the doctors on the reports of Mau-Mau insurgents became oddly personal. I grew to recognise the way certain f’s curled, began searching for deviations in handwriting, in the sense of the records. It was as if I was reading for the first time, recognising that actually, none of the words made sense, and the struggle for comprehension – of a different time, of a different person – had to begin anew.

The difficulty in understanding the handwriting of a colonial doctor fifty years points to a difficulty with the archive that does not lessen if the archive in question is composed of images, videos, or the printed word. In each case, there is a handwriting; a subjectivity in the archive that cannot be understood simply in terms of the formal rules in which the archive is embedded.

The archive’s resistance to itself is one of the principle focuses of Okwui Enwezor’s latest exhibition. As you descend into the mazy warren of rooms beneath the International Center for Photography, one is immediately confronted by Christian Boltanski’s Lessons of Darkness: Archives: Detective. A series of boxes, each with a picture on the front: the context of the images suggests that these are the mug-shots of criminals – the left over case files of a tired policeman. In fact, we have no way of knowing if these images are fictional: those of the victim of a crime, those of the criminal, or just snapshots of random people, arranged in such a way as to depict them as criminals.

Let us try a brief thought experiment. I construct a fictional person: find a possible name, make sure he or she has a believable history of social services payments, insert a record of these payments into the relevant government records, and ensure our fictional character worked for a conveniently defunct organisation with few other employees. It is perfectly possible to create a ‘real’ archival person in such a fashion: because we construct our character in terms of the rules of the archive, he is not disprovable within the domain of the archive itself. These rules include both the formal rules, such as where a signature should be placed on a document, but equally the informal forms of life present in the archive: we should ensure that our fictional character has a nice median income as taken as an average of the archive, so as not to arouse suspicion.

Now imagine an archive where every single character is fictional.

This is actually the case of every archive. For in our entirely fictional archive, all we could ever do – without correlation from outside the archive – is prove that each record was faulty, contained contradictions to other records, without ever proving the fiction of the entire archive.

Many of the exhibits in Archive Fever play with these notions, exploring the sense in which the archive is a fiction of its own – in a more academic language, that recalls the Foucault of The Order of Things, we would say that the archive is the systematisation of its own enunciability.

The artist here, at least intuitively, works in a similar manner to the historian. As Carlo Ginzburg sets out in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, the historian searches the archive, not for confirmation of what is already known, but for clues; glimpses of the past that rupture our expected sense of history. Such is the case with Andy Warhol’s Race Riot (c.a.1963), a series of silkscreen paintings made from Charles Moore’s photographic essays for Life magazine of the riots in Alabama.

In the original image, the violence is arresting: the intensity of the image focuses on the dog, the bite: the moment of contact. In the silkscreen version, the distinctions leak away; the dog is as white as the background, the immediate violence recedes into an abstract geometry of white and black. Despite himself, Warhol produces an exemplary Marxist artwork, where the moment of violence is reworked in terms of its structural conditions. The violence of the police dog biting the protestor is unsettling, Race Riot suggests, not because of the immediate violence suggested by the archival image, but because this violence is normal, part of a broader political economy of structural and racial violence that endures long after the wound of the bite has faded. The canvas here is absolutely incommensurable with its background

(the photograph, the context in Alabama) – it opens up a space between the photograph and its archival meaning that allows us to look at our history again in a new light.

Race Riot is perhaps the purest example of this sort of artistic practice in Archive Fever, but other artworks function in an analogous fashion, Glenn Ligon’s reworking of Mapplethorpe’s images of black men in the The Black Book opening up a space where we can destabilise the underlying eroticism of the images. Constantly, the artworks test the rules of the archive, opening up new meanings, destabilising others, creating fictions that function as truths: both within the system of the archive, and in those wonderful moments, such as in Race Riot, where they break through the truth of the archive to reveal the structural inequality revealed behind the rules of the archive, that in this case present a moment of violence as singular, rather than embedded within a broader system of racial discrimination.

Individual works are successful in doing this, but as a whole, the exhibition functions as a collection of parts. Too many works, such as Hans-Peter Feldmann’s collection of front pages from around the world on 9/12/2001, are merely surface reflections of the phenomenon they mean to explore. In Feldmann’s case, the collection demonstrates a powerful proof that history has become merely the manifestation of its own spectacle, but allows us no way to puncture this, to move through this in the powerful way Race Riot allows for the events of Alabama.

More important than the failure of individual works however, is that the exhibition offers no serious self-criticism. It is astonishing that an exhibition that deals with the archive – with the arranging and ordering of material – offers no thought on how the art world arranges its own materials. Such a reflection should include on how such work came to be given a (fictional) coherency in the exhibit, how, for instance, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ piece has now moved through three exhibitions (at least) to inhabit the space at the International Center for Photography. On the sign at the beginning of the exhibition, Enwezor claims to be constructing a meta-commentary on the archive. To do so properly would have meant analysing the process of archive construct in the exhibit itself; this would have allowed the works to live together, rather than seeming to be a collection of parts.

Mal d’archive

Thankfully, the archive offers a model for understanding more than simply the rules of its own creation. That is does so is suggested by the title, Archive Fever, a silent homage to Derrida’s book Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (the book is mentioned nowhere in the exhibit, though if you look hard on the website, you can find one mention of Derrida’s name).

While I would not want to criticise Eric Prenowitz valiant translation, the original French title, Mal d’archive, is much more suggestive that the phrase Archive Fever would allow. The mal of the title suggests not simply fever, but illness, and also, something malicious: tu me fais mal. There are at least three mal’s suggested by Derrida’s title.

There is the feeling of finding something unpleasant in the archive – the discovery, for instance, of someone’s hidden Nazi past, or of a letter your lover wrote to his mistress. Mal d’archive - something that burns us if we read it. Exemplary of this sense of the archive is Anri Sala’s video work Intervista (1998). A detective story of Communist Albania, it charts Anri Sala as he struggles to decode a lost video of his mother at a Communist party meeting, the lip reader he employs at the end to give life to her words is the paradigmatic example of the archive’s burning power.

Why do we look, if this is what we will find? The incessant compulsion we have to look through our own records, to desperately search for something that we know will cause us pain, is one if fevers of the archive to which Derrida’s title alludes. It is perhaps closest to Derrida’s own understanding of the archive as not the construction of a system, but its disjuncture with itself; the archive occurring at the breakdown of memory, when we realise the archive for what it is, a fiction constructed according to rules of which we are only dimly aware.

Aware, however, we are, and this dissatisfaction with our own memories conditions our search for their disruption. Ilán Lieberman’s uses of the archive in his work Niño Perdido (Lost Child, 2006–7) is a poignant reflection on this search. His pain-staking drawings of photographs of missing children function as pre-obituaries. Whereas the archival photographs of the children function to present an absence, and in so doing makes this absence only more apparent (the double death of the photograph), his drawings mark a dissatisfaction with the archive, a search for life in those photographs that mark an endless mourning for what is absent. In so doing, they also work as a commentary on the nature of the photograph itself. The photographic moment, as commentators from Barthes to Sontag have remarked, is always dead, lost, and what we have, when we hold the photograph in our hands, is a small testament to this death. By redrawing the photographs of missing children, Lieberman adds a density to the images that denies the finitude of the moment, which asserts, against the mute equivalence of the archive, the hope of redemption.

Looking at his photographs reminded me of Afghan miniatures from the Timurid dynasty in Herat.

Each miniature was supposed to be an exact copy of those that had gone before it; the labour involved was painstaking and exact. So exact, that many miniaturists went blind, and it was only then, when they were thought to be apart from the temptations of innovation and the tricks of vision, that they could paint pure replicas and embody the essential truth of the work. Such refusal of the evident truth of the archive, and insistence on the work of time present in the artwork, is embodied in the quiet determination of Lieberman’s images.

The actual images from Afghanistan in the exhibition are perhaps the worst work on display. Fazal Sheikh’s photographs of Afghan refugees holding small portraits of young men are gestural images that left this reviewer with just one burning question: what strange obsession leads us to collect these images, to parade these private archives in public (at Sheikh has also done with images from Kenya, Somalia, Brazil, Sudan…the list is endless)

This is perhaps the most pressing sense of mal d’archive – not the pain the archive inflicts on us, nor the unsettling search for the disruption of the archive within itself, but the feverish making of the archive. What compels us to keep accumulating images and documents, images of images, documents about documents – to keep arranging and sorting the fragments of our memory?

The work of art distorts – it transforms materials that we think we know, that we classify and understand, and transports them to a singular place. The effacement of aura we see in the photograph does nothing to reduce this fundamental magic. The photograph opens up new horizons on what is shown on its surface just as the painting does for the material forms from which it is constructed. Given this rupturing effect of the artwork, one would expect an exhibition on the archive to attend to the question of our fanatical compulsion to store documents and images, arranging them in patterns: our search to give order to existence.

That the exhibition does not offer us a meditation on this is perhaps not surprising when we remember that it offers no commentary on its own archive – its practice of taking disparate materials and transforming them into yet another Enwezor exhibition. As a counterpoint to our story, I can offer only an image, and the brief poignant story that lies below it. In this story, the compulsive need of the Guatemalan police to preserve the documents that incriminate them stands in testament to the importance of questioning our compulsion to archive, and attests to the opportunity that Archive Fever missed. Mal d’archive, indeed.

The future never arrives

On gesture in the world[1]

Time has been annihilated. As early as 1848, and the onset of the telegraph, came the claim that from now on, duration and distance will no longer exist. We could tell a history of modernism that charted the course of the world from this moment as one of greater and greater abstraction, as “all that is solid melts into air” (Marx:2002:4 [3]. Such a history would have globalisation as a further intensification of the process of modernism: rather than places, we have equivalences – as capitalism renders cultures exchangeable, different only within a prefigured system of value. Rather than the body and particular expressions, we have capital, circulating freely through fibre-optic cables.

Given this movement towards greater abstraction, Fig. I, a snapshot from a film made just over a hundred years after a telegram is sent announcing the annihilation of time, poses a quandary.

Antonioni’s depiction of modern alienation, L’Eclisse[4], centres on the bustle of the stock market in Rome. Here, at the centre of the capitalist universe, in the place, or the non-place, we expect to find the abstraction of money in its purest form; we find, instead, the gesture. Not simply the body at the heart of capitalism[5]: a particular gesture, singular to a place and a local economy of signification at odds with capital’s abstractive power.

In her ethnography of the stock markets in Chicago and London, Zaloom (2006:51-72) explains the gestural language of the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT). The hand is turned inwards to show a desire to buy, outwards, to sell. One to five is signalled as one might expect, 6-9 by turning the hand sideways. Zero is a closed fist. The figure of the man on the stock market (and it is almost always a man): he is not the globe, nor yet is he globalisation: he is in a world, a particular one, which denotes customs and conventions that have no simple relationship to capitalism – the conventions, for instance, of gestural communication, the customs of Italian, and indeed Roman, personal relations. Furthermore, all these customs and conventions should not be seen as being contrary to capitalism; rather, they emerge through it: only through the market: the gestures, only through state capitalism: the personal relations.

At the centre of capitalism, there is a flurry of arms. How we understand these gestures is the central problematic of this essay.

Figure I: Still from Antonioni, Michaelangelo. L’Eclisse (1962).

I. the world has disappeared

In hypermodernity, Augé claims (1995:75-116), people increasingly come to know the world through signs of things, rather than through things in themselves; through a small town and its signs for shops and tourist attractions, glimpsed from a motorway, rather than through the town itself. The world’s financial markets offer superficial confirmation of such a claim. In March 2004, for instance, out of the 51 million contracts sold at the CBOT, only 3% ended up in the delivery of a material good (Zaloom:97); in such a market signs – in this case, money – have an (almost)[6] entirely autonomous existence from the material goods to which they supposedly refer.

A narrative that sees the increasing prevalence of signs over what might once have been called use-value is common to many accounts of globalisation, Augé included. However, what is frequently occluded is the degree to which these narratives are continuous with what commentators like Georg Simmel believed was happening in modernity. In his celebrated essay, The Metropolis and Mental Life, Simmel (1971[1903]:324-339) sets out the distinction between village life, with its relationships based on emotion, and the rational life of the city:

All emotional relationships between persons rest on their individuality, whereas intellectual relationships deal with persons as with numbers, that is – as with elements which, in themselves, are indifferent, but which are of interest only insofar as they offer something objectively perceivable (ibid:326).

For Simmel, the intensification of stimulus in the city, combined with the presence of strangers, means people increasingly dealt with each other as abstract and equivalent categories.

In Simmel, money provides the means by which people are abstracted from themselves. In Augé, money is replaced by the notion of sign, but the process remains identical. For instance, in supermodernity, Augé (1995:103) holds that individuals can only enter contractual relationships – precisely, relationships determined by numbers. In a discussion of Marx’s analysis of M-C-M (the way in which money is freed of its productive constraints to become capital, and then re-produces itself as itself – rather than as a commodity, for instance – before being reinserted as money), Jameson (1997:251) produces a similar analysis, claiming: “capital itself becomes freefloating. It separates itself from the concrete context of its productive geography.” Financial markets, for Jameson, create a disembodied spectre of value without mooring in a mode of production. This is structurally equivalent to Augé’s analysis: in one, relations based on place are replaced by contracts; in Jameson, capital also separates itself out from geography and becomes a sovereign domain of equivalence.

To put this process in the context of the figure of the gesture of the stock market trader: this gesture is an aberration because it supposes precisely the type of bodily, cultural relation that should have been effaced, or at least circumscribed, by the process of modernity/globalisation, which should not allow for local clusters of meaning to exist at the heart of the deterritorialising machine. In this sense, the gesture of the trader seems like a figure of incomplete modernity; soon the computer and the internet will efface this moment of bodily habitus at the centre of capitalism. Such an argument would parallel that of Jameson (1992) in Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism[7], where he argues that far from constituting a break with modernism, the fragmentary indeterminacy of postmodernism is part of an incomplete modernity.

The disappearance of this remnant seemed at hand in 2005, when the New York Stock Exchange announced a merger with Archipelago, an electronic exchange, and 200 years of pit trading seemed at an end. Ultimately, this final closure seemed to support Jameson’s theory that “globalization is rather a kind of cyberspace in which money-capital has reached its ultimate dematerialisation” (1997:260).

II. The gesture reappears

The claims that a new more rational age is on the horizon, without the restrictions of the social, have of course been made before, just as the claim that the world is now dematerialised echoes the modernist concerns of Georg Simmel. It is instructive in this regard to look at the development of an almost caricatural Foucauldian institution: the CBOT. The building constructed by the CBOT on LaSalle Street in 1930 seems to be inspired by Bentham. In response to growing commerce and Chicago’s position as the capital of America’s, if not the world’s, derivative markets, the CBOT designed a building in which everyone was designed to see everyone else – perfect vision enabling perfect information. Such a structure was intended to prevent personal and social relations forming where certain groups where favoured due to their position in the room (Zaloom:2006:42). When the traders entered the new building, however, there were immediately complaints: they couldn’t hear anything, it was said; noise could not be distinguished from information. Immediately, the traders started to form social groups within this non-social space.

The architects of electronic systems of trading also claimed that it will be faster, more efficient, and more equal – one of the most forceful arguments against pit trading in Chicago (which fundamentally ended in 1998, though sporadic trading continues to this day) was that it allowed for personal networks, which were thought to impede the liquidity of capital. As Chicago moved to an electronic system, the various firms of stock brokers used extensive training to prepare their workers for the change. Here, we must follow Weber (2003), in making a link between ethical and economic orders. One must note: it requires socialisation to require depersonalisation. As Simmel argues prophetically (it is 1903) “what appears here as dissociation is in reality only one of the elementary forms of socialisation” (1971:329).

It is striking the extent to which this scheme seems to follows Foucault’s account (1979) of the development of the prison. We have the development of a discursive formulation that posits the eradication of the personalised social relation and the institution of, precisely, institutional relationships (of the one-counts-for-all type). Then, just as in Foucault’s prison, the implementation of these schemes produces practices which, while emerging out of an abstracting discourse, nevertheless constitute its negation. For instance, in the Chicago pit, traders were of two types: brokers – who mediated between the pit and a bank or investment company – and locals, who played the market on their own account. Each was parasitic on the other. Zaloom (2006:100) shows how in this system a series of relationships developed that were far removed from the logic of profit. Locals would “take a loss to the benefit of the broker and his client, and in doing so, they would strengthen their relationship through reciprocity with the broker.” Furthermore, systems of status would develop that had little to do with capital and everything to do with a complex play of masks and status more reminiscent of medieval theatre: to ascend in the ranks of traders, one must constantly attempt to – physically – move up a series of steps. The first few times a neophyte dealer did this, he would be pushed off and mocked. Only after demonstrating sufficient bravery (and not necessarily profit), and enduring the requisite humiliation could the trader ascend to a higher level.

Which is to say, what the traders were doing was not simply making money. As Apparadurai sets out in The Social Life of Things (1986:3-64), money does not simply abstract, it also re-enters into local worlds of meaning and significance. To see this movement means looking beyond Jameson’s horizon when he claims that specific particularities (e.g. a culture) become capital: “commodity production is now a cultural phenomenon, in which you buy the product fully as much for its image as for its immediate use” (2000:53). While this is undeniable, what is equally true is that capital becomes cultural: becomes appropriated by local worlds. It is important to give this point its proper accent however: it is not simply that the abstract becomes concrete, but that it becomes concrete as an abstraction: capital becomes cultural only as capital; only as a non-place becomes a place even as it negates the idea of place.

III. Numbers of gesture

So far, we have only considered the physical place of the pit itself. What is important to emphasise is that this is not simply the sign of an incomplete modernisation: the phenomenology of the market is equally present in computer trading (Fig. II). This is not because computer trading is as real and situated as pit trading (though it is), but because pit trading (and indeed, social life in general) is as virtual as computer trading: the same play of potential and possibility, sculpted by habit and phenomenological placing, it at play in pit as it is on the computer screen.

Fig II. Image of the OmniTrader computer system.

So it is not just a case of noticing the presence of the physical in interaction with the computer, as Zaloom does (2006:86)[8], it is also the case of noticing that people do not simply buy derivatives in blocks of 10,000: as Mackenzie (2007) notes: “In some supposedly anonymous electronic markets, participants sometimes signal their identities by offering to buy not 10,000,000 shares, but 10,000,467, or bidding at $92,700,059: the ‘467’ or ‘59’ is like a codename.” The personal gestures of the pit are here re-expressed in an electrical market place, as particular configurations of number comes to stand in for individuals, and the sense of a place existing in a non-place is again re-established. Zaloom (2006:173) argues that the computer trader, like the unusual strategies of the pit trader, in “separating off his market self from his social self… refashions himself as a machine for trading.”

However, such an argument would simply leave us with a notion of differential modernities: the same capitalist system absorbed and changed in differing physical localities[9]: gestures would be variations on a theme.

IV. Numbers gesture

Osborne (2001:18 argues that “all non-places are places qua non-places” because even the negation of place is determinate: it is still in what was locale (what could be anywhere) that meaning is construed. This we see borne out by the traders’ behaviour: their division of work and life, the masks people wear, that Zaloom extensively documents, to hide their alienation. What this points to however, is that the distinctions of globalisation are not clear-cut, not place and non-place, or abstraction and emotion, to remember equally Simmel’s modernism. Instead, they are distinctions of structure.

Electronic trading systems, no less than the pit trading, are systems to structure perception and possibility. In the two systems just mentioned, as we have established, personal relations are intended to be abolished, and yet they reappear – in the figure of the gesture in the pit, and in the figure of the numeric gesture in the electronic trading system. But so far, these figures seem contingent: temporary moments of resistance against the narrative set up by the promise of the opening telegraph: time has been annihilated, and the future has arrived.

There is a third image to consider (Fig III.) – that of the figure of the movement of capital itself. As Herz (1998:20) argues, what needs to be put in question is just how the economy took on a life of its own in modern Western society, for a detailed consideration of Gursky’s Chicago Board of Trade II would lead us to the opposite conclusion.

Fig. III: Andreas Gursky. Chicago Board of Trade II.

The normal confusion of the stock market – a flurry of arms and tongues opaque to the outsider – is heightened by Gursky’s use of time: the image spills out waves of movement as time embeds itself into the image. Here computer banks and information screens are as uncertain and overwhelming as the gestures that surround them. Gesture is not apart from the virtual, and nor the virtual from the real[10]: given this continuity, we should not expect the possible to be effaced by capitalism[11] anymore than the possible is effaced by the actual.

That Jameson and Augé have such a strong link to Simmel in this regard is indicative of another, quieter, genealogy: that which links the conception of the individual in Simmel (a pre-given, atemporal entity) to the idea of the subject in Jameson and Augé. I want to suggest instead, in closing, a figure that shows the way a subject – indeed, a subject with particular practices and particular ideas – can emerge within capital itself.

After the move to fully electronic trading on the London International Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE)[12], a strange figure started to be seen. In many electronic displays on derivatives market, one does not see particular offers, but merely aggregate bid/ask levels for the derivative in question (it is thought this absence of information makes it easier for traders to concentrate on the numbers). Sometimes, there is a spike in the bid/ask levels without an appreciable change in the price. This is normally thought to be someone called a “spoofer”: someone who wants to use a large quantity of bids to create the illusion that there is more demand to buy or sell than there actually is: great cache is associated to “taking him out” and returning the market to its “proper level.” However, though Zaloom (2006:226) doesn’t appreciate this, there is no logic necessity that this figure is a single person at all: it may simply be a series of bids that appear together for contingent reasons. Yet this figure is attributed subjectivity and intentionality, and the market acts as if this figure exists. It is within capital itself – as a structuring of flows of perception and memory – that one can find subjectivity, and it is this subjectivity that undermines any oppositions between abstraction and the particular, because it emphasises that movement is prior to any stoppage: any process of subjectivity.

To return to Jameson (1997:265) then, from a different path: “precisely what finance capital brings into being: a play of monetary entities that need neither production (as capital does) nor consumption (as money does), which supremely, like cyberspace, can live on their own internal metabolism, and circulate without reference to an older type of content.” This internal metabolism is correctly observed – but it is that which emerges through capital, only to negate its premises, if not its functioning.

The future never arrives: but the hands function, nonetheless; within times own annihilation, we find duration.

V. Bibliography

Antonioni, Michelangelo. 2004 [1962]. L’Eclisse. Criterion Collection: London.

Apparadurai , Arjun. 1986. Introduction: commodities and the politics of value. In, Arjun Apparadurai (ed). The Social Life of Things: commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. pp.3-64.

Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. Verso: London.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. Bergsonism. Zone Books: New York.

Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish. Vintage: London

Hertz, Ellen. 1998. The Trading Crowd: An Ethnography of the Shanghai Stock Market. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Jameson, Fredric. 2003. The End of Temporality. Critical Inquiry. Vol. 29. Summer. pp.695-718.

Jameson, Fredric. 2000. Globalization and Political Strategy. New Left Review. Vol. 4. July/August. pp. 49-68.

Jameson, Fredric. 1997. Culture and Financial Capital. Critical Inquiry. Vol. 24. No.1. pp.246-265.

Jameson, F. 1992. Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso: London.

Janszen, Eric. 2008. The next bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow’s big crash. Harpers. February 2008. pp.39-45.

MacKenzie, Donald. 2007. Zero is a Clenched Fist. Review of Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London by Caitlin Zaloom. London Review of Books. 1 November 2007. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n21/mack01_.html. Accessed 2/2/2008 (subscription required).

Marx, Karl. 2002. The Communist Manifesto. Penguin: London.

Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press: Durham & London.

Osborne, Peter. 2001. Non-places and the spaces of art. The Journal of Architecture. Vol.6. Summer. pp.183-194.

Simmel, Georg. 1971 [1903]. The Metropolis and Mental Life. In: Simmel, Georg. 1971. On Individuality and Social Forms. ed. Donald N. Levine. University of Chicago Press: Chicago. pp. 324-339.

Weber, Max 2003. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Dover Publications: London.

Zaloom, Caitlin. 2006. Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. University of Chicago Press: Chicago & London.

Subject without object: the party in the thought of Alain Badiou

The party is the active purification of politics.

Alain Badiou. April 1975.[1]

We know today that all emancipatory politics must put an end to the model of the party.

Alain Badiou. February 2002.[2]

In the silence you don’t know, you must go on severing, I can’t go on, I’ll go on severing.

Beckett, Unnameable.[3]

If “the 19^th century’s Hegelian idea was to rely on the movement of history ‘to surrender to the life of the object’, the 20^th century’s idea is to confront history, to master it politically.”[4] Such is one of the central theses of Badiou’s summation of the last hundred years, The Century. He sketches out a whole series of methods by which such mastery was attempted; the party constituted the principle means by which an emancipatory politics could bring a political subjectivity into alignment with objective historical processes. The party, in the Marxist tradition of the 20^th century, was the mediating force between an objective situation (capitalism), and the creation of a political subjectivity. In order for such a subjectivity to exist, it needed to purify itself of every reference to the objective historical stratum[5]; in the language of the later Badiou, to subtract itself from the presentation of the situation.

In 1975, at the end of the Cultural Revolution in China, such a movement was still thinkable in terms of the party. By 2002, Badiou is actively involved in Organisation Politique, a political project that explicitly refuses the party model, and the space of the political project that runs along the axis revolution/state is firmly closed.

In the text from which the first quote is taken, the party is the engine of the political. In the second, the party has vanished from the proper horizon of politics. It is no accident that we should use the word “vanished.”

In Théorie du Sujet[6], the clinamen, what Badiou also calls the “vanishing term”, and which is a precursor to the notion of the event in Being and Event[7], takes place only to immediately vanish. While the clinamen can never be encountered in thought as such, through an adherence to the traces of the vanishing term, the clinamen can be the basis for a subject. One can find precisely such a tracing of the vanished party in the political thought of Badiou’s later works.

For instance, for the Badiou of Being and Event there is no Two that exists prior to the taking of a political position[8]: it is through the particular statement that division emerges, and this division is not between two antagonistic enemies, as Schmitt[9] might understand politics. Rather, it is between the adherents to the statement and the situation as such. Unlike classic Marxist discourse, where the subject adheres to a pre-existent objective stratum (e.g. the way the proletariat are attached to the working class), the subject here “is not a substance.”[10] From out of the situation, a two is created, the political subject and the situation that resists, and through this procedure, there is a one, a singular political subjectivity. This is to say, there is not an antagonism between two equal parties but between a subject which is adhering to an event that has no relation to the situation, and the situation itself.

In a structurally similar fashion, in Maoism we can witness a process of thought which allows for the emergence of the bourgeoisie within the dictatorship of the proletariat itself[11]. That is to say, if Lenin[12] finds in the basis opposition between proletariat and bourgeoisie the fundamental motor of history, in Maoist thought, class conflict is not totally determined by pre-existing objective relations (i.e. the economic interests of the working class and the bourgeoisie) but can emerge as a two in any given situation. In the Maoist conception of the party, one can find a trace of what is to emerge in Badiou’s later work.

In the first quote from Badiou, the party is the mode of politics, in the second, the party has vanished.

Here, the question is not one of affirming, in Badiou’s later thought, a simple continuity with his Maoist period, as Bruno Bosteels seems tempted to do[13]. However, nor is it the case that one can unproblematically assert a complete break between Badiou’s latest work and his Maoist period, as is Hallward’s tendency[14]. Instead, it is question of understanding the specific lines of continuity between the two positions, and equally, the disjunctures between them. Ultimately, the challenge must be to think these disjunctures, not from outside the situation of Badiou’s thought, not, for instance, from the position of an inevitable development following the collapse of the USSR, but from within the thought of the party in the philosophy of Alain Badiou itself.

This essay will trace the notion of the party itself, as it is presented in the work of Alain Badiou. Due note will be taken, when possible, of the differences between the approach of De l’idéologie[15] and Théorie de la contradiction[16], two early texts by Badiou, and his later work. However, the emphasis will be on tracing the development of the notion of the party during the 20^th century, as it is presented by Badiou, and on accounting for the continuity between the problematic posed by the party and the political thought Badiou presents in his later work, principally The Century, Abrégé de Métapolitique[17], and Being and Event.

The thesis advanced is as follows. Communism, in all its various forms, poses the party as a solution to two problems: that of duration - which is to say, how does one keep people together - and that of mediating objective situations and political subjectivity. In the course of the 20^th century, the failure of the party to achieve generic Communism is largely to be understood in terms of its insistent attempt to relate politically subjectivity to the existing situation. This insistence on relation leads, as we shall show, to an unending destructive movement that is unable to secure the movement from the state to communism. It is precisely this relation that Badiou’s political thought attempts to undo, and in so doing, suggests a way that one can achieve a generic communism from within an existing situation. It is not a question then, of marking out the thought of Badiou from the thought of the party, but understanding how Badiou’s thought emerges from the disjunctures present in the party. In Beckett’s words: “In the silence you don’t know, you must go on severing, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”; from the ruin of the party, in the space of what Badiou calls the second restoration