Images of War in Contemporary Art: Terror and Conflict in the Mass Media 9781350227330, 9781350227361, 9781350227347

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Images of War in Contemporary Art

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Images of War in Contemporary Art Terror and Conflict in the Mass Media Uroš Čvoro and Kit Messham-Muir

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Uroš Cˇvoro and Kit Messham-Muir, 2021 Uroš Cˇvoro and Kit Messham-Muir have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Toby Way Cover image: The Didactic Wall (detail), 2019 by Mladen Miljanovic © Courtesy by artist 2019. Reproduced with the permission of Mladen Miljanovic. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-2733-0 ePDF: 978-1-3502-2734-7 eBook: 978-1-3502-2735-4 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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To Marijana and Ena, Loretta and Maggie

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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Synopsis

Introduction: Zero Hour, Ground Zero

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1

The Trauma Artist

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Weaponizing Affect

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The Gamification of Terror

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Weaponization of History

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Military Humanism

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Militant Humanism: Repurposing War Infrastructure

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Conclusion: Weaponized Art

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Bibliography Index

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Illustrations 0.1 Smoke billows from the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers after they were struck by commercial airliners in a suspected terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 in New York City. 0.2 8:45, 2001, by Todd Stone. 0.3 Over Oculus Out 3, 2019, by Todd Stone. 0.4 Todd Stone in his studio on the 45th floor of Three World Trade Center, during our studio visit on August 23, 2019. 0.5 One day after the fall of the Berlin Wall (November 10, 1989), a banner reads “For a Berlin without a wall in a Germany without tanks in a Europe without borders.” 0.6 Broadway Boogie-Woogie, 2006, by Nebojša Šerić Shoba. 1.1 Ben Quilty on the cover of The Good Weekend, February 23, 2019. 1.2 Captain S after Afghanistan, 2012, by Ben Quilty. 1.3 Sergeant P, After Afghanistan, 2012, by Ben Quilty. 1.4 Relics of Decay, 2016, by Michael Armstrong. 2.1 All Let Us Rejoice, 2017, by Abdul Abdullah. 2.2 For We Are Young and Free, 2017, by Abdul Abdullah. 2.3 The Saatchi’s Sensation exhibition opened in 1999 at The Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1999. 2.4 Detail from . . . And Counting, 2010, by Wafaa Bilal. 2.5 . . . And Counting, 2010, by Wafaa Bilal. 3.1 Super Speed/El Paso, Texas, 2020, by Teresa Margolles. 3.2 Receipt, 2020, by Teresa Margolles. 3.3 Neo Nazis, Alt-Right, and White Supremacists encircle counterprotestors at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson after marching through the University of Virginia campus with torches in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11, 2017. 3.4 Person X, Christchurch terror attack shooter, makes the “OK/White Power” hand gesture in the dock at Christchurch District Court on March 16, 2019 in Christchurch, New Zealand.

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2 4 6 7

10 17 30 33 52 55 66 67 72 85 86 108 109

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Illustrations

3.5 The alt-right Kekistan flag is flown at an Act for America rally in New York City, attended by members of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, June 10, 2017. 3.6 The ‘Remove Kebab’ meme, originating with the Serbian song, ‘Karadžiću, vodi Srbe svoje’ (‘Karadžić, Lead Your Serbs’), recorded in 1993 during the Bosnian War. 4.1 The Petkovci monument, erected in June 2017 at Petkovci, a village located near the city of Zvornik, Bosnia and Herzegovina. 4.2 The White Album, 2018–2019, by Arthur Jafa. Installation view for the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020), Art Gallery of New South Wales. 4.3 The White Album, 2018, by Arthur Jafa. Still from video. 5.1 Monument to the International Community for the Grateful Citizens of Sarajevo, 2007, by Nebojša Šerić Šoba. 5.2 Sounds of the Homeland, 2018, by Mladen Miljanović. 5.3 Sounds of the Homeland, 2018, by Mladen Miljanović. 5.4 Beace Brocess No. 1, still from video, 2010, by Sharif Waked. 5.5 Beace Brocess No. 5, still from video, 2012, by Sharif Waked. 5.6 how to make a refugee, 1999, by Phil Collins. 5.7 how to make a refugee, 1999, by Phil Collins. 5.8 how to make a refugee, 1999, by Phil Collins. 5.9 The Bell Project, 2007–2015 by Hiwa K. 5.10 The Bell Project, 2007–2015 by Hiwa K. 5.11 View From Above, 2017 by Hiwa K. 6.1 Project Blank Maps: 551.35—Geometry of Time, 2014, by Lana Čmajčanin. 6.2 Project Blank Maps: 551.35—Geometry of Time, 2014, by Lana Čmajčanin. 6.3 Un-war Space, 2019, by Armina Pilav, Ana Dana Beroš, Rafaela Dražić, Miodrag Gladović, Matija Kralj, and Mauro Sirotnjak. 6.4 Un-war Space, 2019, by Armina Pilav, Ana Dana Beroš, Rafaela Dražić, Miodrag Gladović, Matija Kralj, and Mauro Sirotnjak. 6.5 The Didactic Wall, 2019, by Mladen Miljanović. 6.6 The Didactic Wall, 2019, by Mladen Miljanović. Engraved drawings on marble, handbooks, ready made, adhesive letters on wall.

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Acknowledgments This book is part of the Art in Conflict project, led by Professor Kit MesshamMuir (Curtin University), in collaboration with Professor Charles Green (University of Melbourne), Associate Professor Uroš Čvoro (UNSW Sydney), Ryan Johnston (University of Melbourne), and Professor Ana Carden Coyne (University of Manchester), and Partner Investigators Dr Anthea Gunn and Laura Webster (Australian War Memorial). The Australian War Memorial and National Trust (NSW) are Partner Organizations. Art in Conflict is a three-year project funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council. Art in Conflict (LP170100039) receives a Linkage Project grant of A$293,380. War Studies at King’s College London generously supported the Art in Conflict project by hosting the War, Art and Visual Culture: London symposium at the Strand campus on May 31, 2019. We thank Professor Vivienne Jabri and Dr Pablo de Orellana from KCL. The War, Art and Visual Culture: Sydney symposium on February 25, 2019 was supported by project partner National Trust (NSW) and hosted by the SH Ervin Gallery, and we thank Jane Watters, the Gallery’s Director. The War, Art and Visual Culture: Los Angeles symposium was hosted in partnership with Torrance Art Museum, and we give thanks to Director and Curator Max Presneill and Jason Jenn from TAM, as well as co-convenor Dr Sarah Gregg Minslow from CSULA. During research and writing of this book in 2019, Uroš Čvoro was supported by a six-month Special Studies Program (SSP) at UNSW Art & Design and Kit Messham-Muir was supported by a six-month Academic Study Program (ASP) at Curtin University. During that time, Kit Messham-Muir was a Visiting Scholar at War Studies, King’s College London. The appointment was sponsored by KCL’s Professor Jabri, and made possible through Curtin’s ASP and a $2,500 Small Grant from its School of Media, Creative Arts, and Social Inquiry. A $1,500 MCASI Small Grant contributed to War, Art and Visual Culture: Los Angeles. Research is an important core function of Australian universities, and the support of internal funding and sabbatical-type programs such as UNSW’s SSP and Curtin’s ASP are vitally important in making work such as this possible. We would like to thank the artists and academics who we interviewed in the course of the Art in Conflict project and in researching this book. These are xi

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Acknowledgments

Professor Joanna Bourke, Professor Jon Cattapan, Karen Bailey, Baptist Coelho, Dr Laura Brandon, David Cotterrell, Alexandre D. Huy, Derek Eland, Melanie Friend, Stuart Griffiths, Alana Hunt, Sophie Ristelhueber, eX De Medici, Mladen Miljanović, Baden Pailthorpe, Claudia Parducci, Cleon Paterson, Giles Price, Andrew Sneddon, Todd Stone, Kebedech Tekleab, Professor Ian Howard, and Scott Waters. For generously lending their time and granting us image reproduction permissions, we would like to thank artists: Mladen Miljanović, Lana Čmajčanin, Armina Pilav, Nebojša Šerić Šoba, Sharif Waked, Hiwa K, Arthur Jafa, Todd Stone, and Ben Quilty. Research reported in this publication has been conducted in an ethical and responsible manner, under the approved protocols of Curtin University’s Human Research Ethics Committee (HRE20180100) and in accordance with data legislation under the various jurisdictions in which it was conducted. Chapters 1 and 2 of this publication are derived in part from an article published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, published August 5, 2020, © The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, available online at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14434318.2020.1764233 (Kit Messham-Muir and Uroš Čvoro, ‘After Aftershock: The Affect–Trauma Paradigm One Generation After 9/11,’ Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 20, no. 1 (2020): 125–140). Chapter 1 of this publication is also derived in part from an article published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, published August 14, 2018, © The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, available online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2018.1481331 (Kit Messham-Muir, ‘Conflict, Complicity and Ben Quilty’s After Afghanistan Portraits’, vol. 18, no. 1 (2018): 71–89). Under the AAANZ publishing agreement, authors retain the right to expand and adapt published articles. Curators and galleries for valuable conversations, hospitality, and intellectual generosity: Živa Kleindienst and KIBLA at Maribor, Irfan Hošič and REVIZOR at Bihać, Meredith McClean at the Canadian War Museum, John Macfarlane, Directorate History and Heritage, National Defence Headquarters, both in Ottawa, Iris Veysey and Rebecca Newell, Imperial War Museum, London. Thanks to Elena Knox and Rhubarb for copy editing of the manuscript. We give special thanks to Dr Monika Lukowska-Appel for being a fantastic research assistant. We both give the deepest gratitude to Marijana Čvoro, Ena Čvoro, Loretta Tolnai, and Margaret Muir – the funny, intelligent and endlessly supportive women in our lives. Thank you.

Synopsis How do we experience images of war and terror today? The ways we engage with these images are unlike any previous generation. Contemporary art still questions the ethics of war, but in complex and challenging ways that respond to the new field of politics and aesthetics of the recent years, radically different from the traditions of either anti-war protest or glorifying celebration. Images of War in Contemporary Art: Terror and Conflict in the Mass Media overturns dominant understandings of the contemporary art of war and terror by looking at images within the temporal regime of visual culture of war today. For much of the last twenty years, theoretical analyses of war art have been dominated by models of understanding affect and trauma, which developed in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the emotional force of its powerful live images. Now, twenty years after 9/11, trauma has become a popular trope, affect politics is mainstream, and social media has become weaponized with events such as the live-streaming of the 2019 Christchurch terror attack. In response, contemporary art that addresses war and terror has shifted its focus toward how we now experience the time of modern war and terror through images, in mass media and social media. Images of War in Contemporary Art: Terror and Conflict in the Mass Media considers the complex and new ways that contemporary art engages in the politics of war and terror. Through analyses and discussions of contemporary art, this book argues that most effective challenges to the ethics and aesthetics of war and terror today are found in art that disrupts how we understand images of war and terror, making visible, and possible, alternative perceptions of the time of war. We argue that paradigms of affect and trauma, which focus on suffering, empathy, and pity, that have dominated so much theorizing of war art since 9/11, no longer fit the ways in which we experience “war time” now. Images of War in Contemporary Art: Terror and Conflict in the Mass Media breaks with both traditional and current ways of thinking about art’s relationship to war and terror, and offers a radical rethinking of the politics and aesthetics of art today.

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Introduction: Zero Hour, Ground Zero

We’re going to go live right now and show you a picture of the World Trade Center, where I understand . . . do we have it? No, we do not. We have a breaking story though. We’re going to come back with that in just a moment. Matt Lauer, Today, NBC, 8:51:42 a.m., September 11, 2001 With these words, Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today show wraps up an interview with Richard Hack about his book on Howard Hughes and throws to a commercial break. Lauer returns with co-anchor Katie Couric nearly two minutes later with a live image of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, shot from the top of the Rockefeller Center in Midtown, three miles north. The then familiar view of Downtown Manhattan is punctuated by a black smear and a cloudy streak of smoke across the top section of the right-hand tower, billowing from an angled gash across its surface. Lauer and Couric take an on-air phone call from a witness, a former NBC producer who is on her cellphone in Battery Park just south of the scene, and who describes a “big ball of fire.” While the caller speaks with urgency, we hear sirens and the image cuts to a second camera angle, the same scene from a similar distance but perhaps from a helicopter. These two images and the witnesses’ descriptions fill ten minutes before another, clearer, aerial shot enters the cycle. As Couric asks a witness caller a question about human loss, the witness interrupts, “oh my goodness . . . oh, another one just hit!” In that very same moment, Todd Stone stood on the rooftop of 84 Thomas Street, a five-story apartment building in Tribeca six blocks north of the World Trade Center, and caught the second explosion in the viewfinder of his camera. The substation supplying electricity to Tribeca was out, leaving Stone with no power, no television, and no way of getting any information about what was happening. He and his wife had heard the first plane screaming overhead at 8:46 a.m. Stone tells us later, “we hit the ground, we thought it was a guided missile.”1 Within seconds he had taken his camera and begun to shoot images of the 1

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Figure 0.1 Smoke billows from the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers after they were struck by commercial airliners in a suspected terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 in New York City. Photo: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images.

smoke issuing from the side of the tower directly facing him. He ran to the roof of the building and photographed and sketched what he saw, not knowing how it was going to play out. Stone recalls the soundscape in the streets below: “the emergency response, the scream of the ambulances, as all of these people converged on Lower Manhattan.”2 At 9:59 a.m., when the collapse of the South Tower was captured on many of the live TV broadcasts, anchors simply did not comprehend what they were seeing. The commentary on ABC’s live coverage took thirty-five seconds after the collapse of the South Tower to register, with what now seems like surreal calm and understatement, that “it may be that something fell off the building.” NBC took equally long to note, ambiguously, that “something major just

Introduction: Zero Hour, Ground Zero

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happened at that building,” and a further eight minutes to run re-racked video of the collapse a second time and conclude that “when you look at it, the building has collapsed. That tower just came down.” WNBC, who were broadcasting a live interview with two witnesses only two blocks away from the same tower as it fell, took more than ten minutes to comprehend what they had broadcast up close. CNN missed broadcasting the image completely and reported three minutes later that “part of the tower” had collapsed. From his rooftop on Thomas Street, Stone likewise struggled to comprehend what was happening. “My experience was that there was a bomb inside the Towers, which has happened before. My experience was that there were explosions all over Lower Manhattan, that there were bombs everywhere, and I didn’t know where to go. I ran for my life several times that day.”3 When the North Tower, first hit, subsequently collapsed, Stone saw the cascading dust and smoke and immediately thought it was a nuclear bomb exploding, describing seeing a “mushroom cloud” followed by a vast wall of dust rushing up West Broadway, which sent him running for cover. He describes that moment as “horrifying. This thing coming up the street . . . When I was a young man I used to say that I’m not scared of anything. I was terrified that day and, you know, I eventually couldn’t believe my own eyes as to what I was seeing. I was so traumatized.” In that moment, Stone felt like he needed to do something to help, but his wife pleaded with him that, as an artist, his job was to witness it. According to Stone, his first-hand experience of the attack on the World Trade Center transformed both his self and his artistic practice: “the horror of that day gutted me, and I was left with the burden of the memories of what I had seen that day.” His artworks immediately following the event seem to have arisen from raw personal trauma, before the ideas solidified into the now familiar teleological historical narrative of 9/11 and the War on Terror. In the days following September 11, 2001, Stone, once an abstract painter, began work on a series of figurative watercolor paintings of the burning towers. Titled as the time of their occurrences—8:45, 9:03, 10:01—they attempt to arrest and resist the immediacy of the mediated experience. Watercolor, such a delicate, unforgiving, and timeconsuming medium deeply associated with illustrative pictorial landscapes, takes on these cardinal moments of the now-familiar 9/11 narrative—the impact of the first plane, the second plane, the collapse of the South Tower—and attempts to grasp meaning in these moments. They are a deliberative attempt to work through the intractable incomprehensibility of traumatic experience by slowing down its moments, miniaturizing them within a frame and rendering them illustratively.

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Figure 0.2 8:45, 2001, by Todd Stone. © Todd Stone 2001. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

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Much of what Stone has said and written since reflects the 9/11 narratives and tropes that have become ingrained within Western culture, for instance his phrases “the day the world changed”4 and that the World Trade Center site was “the saddest place on Earth.”5 However, a 2011 survey publication of his work titled Witness: Downtown Rising traces his paintings of the Twin Tower site over a decade, from September 10, 2001, through the towers’ destruction and recovery, to the reconstruction of Seven World Trade Center, which was the location of his studio at the time of Witness: Downtown Rising. When we met Stone personally on August 23, 2019, he had moved to a new studio on the 45th floor of the new Three World Trade Center, which was still undergoing its fittingout. In his studio’s panoramic view, the once gaping trapezoid hole in Lower Manhattan has become the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, and the remaining new World Trade Center skyscrapers blend with the Manhattan skyline. Stone still talks of the trauma of that day in 2001, but he also sees an inevitable normalizing of the site which is now the focus of his painting. “Eventually, what is important is what comes out of this,” he says. All of us who witnessed this will fade away. It is going to be the 20-year-olds, the people who weren’t here then, who are going to determine the legacy of what happened here . . . That is the beauty of New York City, that is the beauty of cosmopolitan life, that you are surrounded by people who are not like you, and for an artist that is the charm, that is the impetus, part of the impetus is that you are living in the fulcrum of people coming together that is happening again here, you know. So, I try to tune to that.6

We visited Stone’s Three World Trade Center studio just three weeks before the eighteenth anniversary of 9/11. “Ground Zero” is now another bustling part of New York. Many visit the Memorial and Museum, but many more work in the World Trade Center’s office buildings, shop at The Oculus, or rush through for the PATH train. Tourists with hot dogs and shopping bags seek shade under the trees around the Memorial fountains. It no longer makes so much sense to talk of the site as “ground zero.” For each co-author of this book, 9/11 occurred just as we embarked on our academic careers. Uroš Čvoro was about to begin his doctoral research on the “history wars” surrounding the National Museum of Australia; Kit MesshamMuir had recently gained his doctorate on affect and the 1989 US culture wars. It was immediately apparent that 9/11 would be an undeniably significant, if not defining, event in our own careers as academic researchers in art and visual culture theory.7 We were each already invested in researching the political

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Figure 0.3 Over Oculus Out 3, 2019, by Todd Stone. © Todd Stone 2019. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

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Figure 0.4 Todd Stone in his studio on the 45th floor of Three World Trade Center, during our studio visit on August 23, 2019. Photo: Kit Messham-Muir. © Kit Messham-Muir 2021.

aesthetics of conflict and post-conflict and, like so many other researchers in the humanities and around the world, we felt compelled to respond to this event, to try to understand the images that we had both watched on live television in Australia in the early hours of September 12, 2001, and the years of war and terror that followed. So, when we came to collaborate for the first time on a single work, with the aim of understanding the contemporary art and visual culture surrounding war and terror at the end of the second decade of this century, the terror attack on the United States on the morning of September 11 seemed like the natural historical horizon for this work. However, in the period immediately before our writing of this book, two important realizations became increasingly clear to us. The first realization was that, having dedicated much of the last two decades to thinking about contemporary art and the visual culture of war and terror, the War on Terror had been the irresistible focus—ongoing, present, and urgent—for much of the last twenty years, fixing our historical imaginations to 9/11 as the principal horizon or, in essence, the “zero hour” of the current historical period upon which we would focus. Our second realization stemmed directly from the first. As we worked on the manuscript through 2019 and 2020, having initially focused on

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9/11 it became clear that the character of both terrorism and larger global tensions had mutated radically only in the most recent years, and most notably since around 2016. Moreover, the medialogical, aesthetic, and political conditions that form the current context have seen seismic change in recent years. The relationship of terror to the aesthetic politics of visual culture in the five years previous to this publication would not have been recognizable in almost any sense in 2001. Today, terror is steeped with a visual online counterculture and grounded in toxic identitarian politics and ideas of ethnic cleansing. The current potential for international conflict is fueled by similar identitarian forces, which have manifested in the rapid rise of strongman authoritarian governments in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. These forces are riding a widespread, swelling ethnonationalistic wave, and have been acutely refocused by the global disruption of a pandemic. As the World Trade Center site in downtown Manhattan now blends more seamlessly into the urbanity of Tribeca and Wall Street, rendering redundant the notion of the site as a “ground zero,” September 11, 2001 no longer distinctly represents the zero hour of today’s historical moment. Three weeks after our studio visit to Stone, New York City marked the eighteenth anniversary of 9/11. A whole generation has been born since the tragedy. To that generation, now adult, 9/11 is beyond the threshold of memory. With more recent global political shocks—Trump, Brexit, and COVID-19, amongst others—September 11, 2001 recedes even further in intensity. As collective and personal memories fade, and our current moment is dominated by very different intra- and international tensions, the contemporary art that appears to the authors of this book as most vital right now is that which draws our attention back to the decade before America’s 9/11, to Europe’s “9/11.” This book is an examination of a body of work that helps us to think through changes in how war is apprehended in the present. By “war,” we mean not only the organized and systemic act of physical and symbolic destruction, but also a form of historical experience; which in turn helps frame ways of understanding art and visual culture of the past three decades. We approach this topic in two main ways: by critically engaging with artworks that rethink the parameters of how we understand and represent war, and by evaluating the affect–trauma paradigm as the predominant critical framework by which to explain artistic practice in the last three decades. Our intention is to question why affect theory has become prevalent in explanations of “art about war” to the point of dogmatism, and to articulate the ways in which this shift frames our historical horizon for understanding the present. We argue that there is a strange

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convergence between the hold of affect-based theory on recent scholarship about war in art and what we describe as the “weaponization of affect”: its instrumentalization in toxic and violent identitarian politics, manifested in the Christchurch terrorist attack of 2019. We use our examination of artistic practices that problematize and move beyond notions of affect and empathy as a basis from which to identify the need for new approaches to understanding war. This new understanding rejects 9/11 as the historical “zero hour,” instead highlighting 1989 as the moment in which we saw the historical convergence of several of the key themes we explore here. This includes the appearance of genocide and ethnic cleansing on European soil and the ascendance of the affect–trauma paradigm. Further, it also includes understanding the present as the “negative image” of 1989, in which the promise of 1989’s “end of history” has been debunked, and in which “weaponized affect” has become the critical apparatus through which to understand trauma. This helps us to expand the historical horizon of the present; given that the context in which we are writing is the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is to be expected that we reflect on it. Seen against our discussion of war, there is much that can be characterized about the present extension and intensification of the ongoing militarization of everyday life. In an immediate sense, this is reflected in the routine use of military language to describe the situation of the pandemic; in the way the global body count morbidly takes on overtones of a competitive sport; in the deployment of vaccines to populations; and in the present echoing of post-1989 discussions in Europe over which side had more victims, killed by which totalitarian states. And there is another sense in which the juxtaposition of 1989 and the present speaks to the conditions of war: in the deployed temporal descriptor of the interregnum, the between time. We are constantly reminded about the “return to normal,” about the “recovery,” but there is very little questioning about whether normality was normal to begin with. On the positive side, this current uncertainty demands something of a reboot of the historical framework through which we experience the possibilities of the present.

Europe’s 9/11 Europe’s 9/11, in the European date format, is November 9, 1989, the day that the Berlin Wall fell. While that one event was the culmination of decades of

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inefficiently bureaucratized state communism collapsing under its inability to evolve, and it would take another two years for the Soviet Union to disintegrate, 1989 functions as a metonym for the end of the Cold War and the beginning of what George H.W. Bush would call the New World Order. One of the most influential political analyses to emerge from the immediate post-1989 period was Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man.8 Published in 1992, Fukuyama’s central premise, that 1989 marked the “end of history,” is based on a particular Hegelian notion of history as the progressive movement from tyranny, through rationality, towards liberal self-government. Fukuyama draws heavily on the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “the first historicist philosopher,” as Fukuyama says, who believed that a society’s perceptions of the world are determined by the social and cultural conditions of its time; that ways in which human beings perceive the world change over time; and, importantly, that this historical process would come to its conclusion “with an achievement of free societies in the real world.”9 Karl Marx later borrowed from Hegel in his formulation that history was the story of class struggle but, unlike Hegel, Marx believed that the liberal state would result in the struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, thus continuing the historical processes. “The Marxist end of history would only come with the victory of the true ‘universal class’, the proletariat, and the subsequent achievement of a global communist utopia that would end class struggle once and for all.”10 Fukuyama argues that the monumental failure of state communism in the twentieth century suggests that the Hegelian idea of the end of history was, after all, the more prophetic model

Figure 0.5 One day after the fall of the Berlin Wall (November 10, 1989), a banner reads “For a Berlin without a wall in a Germany without tanks in a Europe without borders.” Photo: Peter Zimmermann / picture alliance via Getty Images.

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(this view was also argued by Alexandre Kojève in the mid-twentieth century). State communism in Eastern Europe and China was, rather than the end of history, merely a regressive episode on the road to the political stability and material abundance that at the time was best represented by Western Europe. Fukuyama points out that the end of history for Kojève was the formation of the European Community.11 The year 1989 was, then, regarded by some as the “end of history” in the sense that the inevitable historical processes towards liberalization playing out in the ideological tensions of the Cold War, between capitalist West versus communist East, were finally resolved. As Fukuyama explained later, “I was simply suggesting that Hegel’s version, where development resulted in a liberal state linked to a market economy, was the more plausible outcome.”12 So, the narrative goes, the great historical conflict was resolved with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, and the end of the Soviet Union. Eastern Europe was not returning to the European fold but returning to its natural state, catching up with the open free market economies of the European Community: as Jürgen Habermas said in 1990, “modernity is extending its borders—the spirit of the West is catching up with the East not simply as a technological civilization, but also as a democratic tradition.”13 The Berlin Wall fell just weeks before the end of the 1980s, the decade when marginalized economic philosophies of the late 1940s became the established social, economic, and military doctrines of Western government, in Thatcherism and Reaganomics. Into the 1990s, Eastern Europe showed promise of hitching a last-minute ride into the European Union on the historical threshold of its founding. Of course, the “natural” posthistoricist state was what we now know as neoliberalism—small, low-taxing, low-spending government; reduced government regulation; society embedded within the market; user pays social services; and globalized systems of production and transnational economies. According to Fukuyama, in this emerging post-Westphalian New World Order, national identity was no longer a threat to security but a quaint old neutered pet: “Modern Europe has been moving rapidly to shed sovereignty and to enjoy national identity in the soft glow of private life.”14 Even in this misty-eyed moment, Fukuyama could not ignore what was happening in “those newly liberated nationalisms in Eastern Europe,” particularly in Yugoslavia, which was in the early stages of a decade of violent ethnonationalist wars, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.15 Fukuyama was convinced at the time that this was just an historical aberration in “the least modernized parts of Europe” and that it would “be counteracted by the pressures of economic integration.”16

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However, three decades later, the forces underlying the violent break-up of Yugoslavia—the emotional and visceral doctrines of blood-and-soil nationalism, based in romanticist ideas of the kinship of an ancient and eternal nation, inevitably threatened by invasion and displacement by outsiders—arguably pose the greatest threats of war, terrorism, and political violence. The second decade of this century has seen the global rise of populist and ethnonationalist strongman leaders, such as Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), Andrzej Duda (Poland), Rodrigo Duterte (Philippines), Viktor Orbán (Hungary), Vladimir Putin (Russia), Donald Trump (United States), and Xi Jinping (China), as well as the rise of far-right nationalist parties across the European Union, such as the AfD (Germany), National Front (France), FPÖ (Austria), UKIP (UK), and Vox (Spain), as well as the 2016 Brexit referendum and the UK’s eventual exit from the EU in 2020. We can add to this wave of ethnonationalism the persecution of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and of Uyghur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang, and other genocidal actions taking place under the cover of ongoing wars in Central Africa, Syria, and South Sudan. At a United Nations Security Council meeting twenty-nine years to the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and days before the centenary of the end of the First World War, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that this rise in nationalism threatens multilateralism and world peace.17 Ethnonationalist terrorism has become a significant threat throughout the Western world.18 Post-1989 ethnonationalism is retroactively transhistorical19—one of its enduring constituent characteristics is a selected and strategic weaponization of history. As we will show in Chapters 3 and 4, the perpetrator of the Christchurch terror attack, who murdered fifty-one people and injured fortynine at two New Zealand mosques, covered the surface of his assault rifles and shotguns with references to battles between Europeans and Muslims over several centuries, and to recent white ethnonationalist attacks.20 He also directly referenced the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, playing the BosnianSerb song “Karadžiću, vodi Srbe svoje” (“Karadžić, Lead Your Serbs”) on his car stereo as he began the Facebook live-stream of his attack.21 The Bosnian War escalated to the point at which the Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, in July 1995, ordered his troops to murder 8,000 Bosniak Muslims in the UN “safe corridor” of Srebrenica. Ethnonationalism is transhistorical in the sense that it conceives of both ethnicity and nation as biologically determined and essentialized, asserting the enduring immutability of the blood and the soil, in the way that Slobodan Milošević in 1989 drew on the mythology of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo to evoke the eternal nation as transcending all historicity. To

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the Christchurch terrorist, his multiple historical references collapse his 2019 murder of Muslims in New Zealand into the same historical moments as attacks on Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995, Macerata in 2018, Montenegro in 1876, and Quebec City in 2017. Moreover, then, the current historical condition appears to be paradoxically posthistoricist, in two senses that complicate and subvert Fukuyama’s understanding of the post-1989 “end of history.” As we have argued elsewhere, the republics of former Yugoslavia are characterized by the twin narratives of neoliberalism and nationalism, often held in irreconcilable tension.22 To a large extent, this condition now appears to have emerged and begun establishing itself more broadly throughout the rest of the world. We might think of posthistoricist post-1989 less as the end of history and more as the beginning of a new unresolved historical process in which tensions are between the ahistorical posthistoricity of triumphantly universalistic neoliberalism and the retroactive transhistorical posthistoricity of embattled tribalistic nationalism. Perhaps the period 1989 to the present can be seen as dominated by the tension between a neoliberalism that is abstracted, technocratic, globalist, and post-ideological, on the one hand, and an identitarianism that is embodied, experientialist, regionalist, biological, and biopolitical, on the other. Expanding from Fukuyama, Walter Benn Michaels argues that a fundamental shift occurred in our concept of political subjectivity after 1989, away from understandings based on ideology and towards understandings that political positionality “can only be a question of what you are.”23 He draws on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s millennial book Empire, and their specific use of the term “biopolitical,” borrowed from Michel Foucault. In short, Foucault argues that ideology develops as an abstraction of the power to exact death on biological life. Sovereigns’ power over life and death of their subjects in rudimentary ancient or feudalist societies was the most basic manifestation of the principle of “bio-power,”24 that “power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the larger scale phenomenon of population.”25 As these structures became more sophisticated, the principle of bio-power became more abstracted, and “methods of power and knowledge assumed responsibility for the life processes and undertook to control and modify them.”26 That is, within increasingly complex societies, the sovereign state’s direct power over the life and death or the biological existence of the subject becomes increasingly abstracted within institutional structures and the knowledge they produce. As Western modernity developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the sovereign state’s abstraction of bio-power became increasingly organized

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and disciplined through political practices within institutions. The modern privatized individual takes form as a political subject, their political subjectivity constituted by their engagement with representational and civic structures; consequently, ideology becomes a doctrine of “the regulated formation of the social body.”27 In early modernity, according to Foucault, institutionalized disciplinary power operates through “bio-politics,” that is, bio-power functioning through the rudimentary abstraction of bodies within systems of organization and classification. Ideology develops with the effect of separating and distancing political subjectivity from biological existence through these higher levels of abstraction. Pre-1989, political subjectivity was seen to lie within ideology— political belief was ideological, abstracted, cognitive, and intentional, transcending the biological. The end of the Cold War brought about the demise of ideological political subjectivity. Hardt and Negri suggest that by the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new political paradigm had emerged that was again more emphatically biopolitical, albeit in very different ways from previous disciplinary selfsurveilling or ideological self-aligning. Hardt and Negri observe, “Foucault’s work allows us to recognize the biopolitical nature of the new paradigm of power.”28 In our current biopolitical paradigm, the political now arises from the embodied, rather than from an abstraction that transcends the body through the ideological. That is, Michaels argues, our political beliefs are no longer off-thepeg ideological adoptions but rather emanate more naturally from our unique experiences. In discussing Michaels, Ruth Leys argues that ideological disagreement is then rigidly universalist, because it assumes we are all essentially the same, just wearing different ideologies; while pluralism involves “differences of personal feeling, identity, or subject position.”29 Put another way, since 1989, belief has become increasingly ontologically embedded within subject position. Fukuyama’s 2018 Identity stands almost a bookend to The End of History and the Last Man, reviewing and revising some aspects of his initial argument. He talks about “the new prominence of lived experience” in the present moment;30 the extent to which identitarianism has become, for the progressive left, substitutive for tackling the larger and more serious problems of socioeconomic inequality;31 and “the rise of a populist right that feels its own identity to be under threat.”32 Identitarianism is not the preserve of the left or the right, but part of the ground on which post-1989 post-ideological politics stands. This is why the historical horizon of our work here stretched from the original milestone of North America’s 9/11 (2001) back to Europe’s 9/11 (1989). Importantly, it is why we focus heavily on the former Yugoslavia, particularly the

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Bosnian War. The first of the Yugoslav Wars broke out in June 1991 with Slovenia’s secession, followed in the same year by war in Croatia (1991–1995). War in Bosnia ensued from 1992 to 1995, and in Kosovo from 1998 to 1999. The Bosnian War was the most complex of the Yugoslav Wars because of the ethnic and religious diversity of the country, in some ways a microcosm of the larger Balkan region. Geographically the center of the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina has three main ethnic groups: the mainly Muslim Bosniaks, the Bosnian Serbs, and the Bosnian Croats. The war ended with the Dayton Peace Agreement in December 1995. The Agreement between Bosnia and Herzogovina, Croatia, and what remained of Yugoslavia established two entities in one country: The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Republika Srpska. This declaration has maintained a tense state of peace—or a “negative peace”—in Bosnia ever since. In the post-ideological context of the post-socialist failed state, the Yugoslav Wars were the epicenter of post-1989 biopolitics. The ethnonationalistic battles of former Yugoslavia were not, as Fukuyama believed in 1992, an anachronistic historical glitch at the edges of the formative European Union. Rather, the Mosques of Banja Luka, the Stari Most Bridge in Mostar, the streets of Sarajevo, and the sports fields of Srebrenica are the “ground zero” of the rising ethnonationalist moment in which we now find ourselves. Post-war Bosnia exists in a tense state of ethnonationalisms, played out in public commemorative culture and amnesia and held in stasis (rather than resolved) by economic necessity. This post-ideological ethnopolitics is, in a very real sense, a model for international populist politics today. Therefore, America’s 9/11 can be seen as less as the zero hour of the global political sphere and more as a shock point at which the pandemic of biopolitical terror reached New York and Washington, DC. In that moment, America caught up with post-1989 Eastern Europe, and so we now stand at the end of the third decade of the current political paradigm.

War Art and War Artists One of the themes of our book is the very understanding of “war art,” a term often used to describe art that in broad terms takes war and its consequences as its subject matter. The term is used to historically frame artistic output during times of conflict. Grace Brockington argues in the final chapter of Joanna Bourke’s recent edited volume War and Art that, “[t]he fact that so much war art is now anti-war testifies to the shift in attitudes to conflict . . . particularly over

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the past 150 years. At the moment, it is difficult, even unhelpful, to differentiate anti-war art from war art per se.”33 While individual studies vary across disciplines (history, art history, visual culture, gender studies), they share some fundamental assumptions. The first is that art takes a critical and humanitarian approach to war: it demonstrates the horrors and consequences of systemic violence and destruction as a kind of warning to future generations. In this instance, art about war takes on an almost monumental quality as an expression of collective outrage against war. The second assumption is that art about war captures the experience of war: that it becomes a form of “feeling for” which provides cathartic release for the audience. We believe that recent decades of scholarship on war art have been largely dominated by the second assumption, evident in the abundance of affect-trauma-centric interpretations. Another key part of grasping what is meant by “war art” is our perception of the role and agency of the artist talking about war. In a number of examples that we discuss in this book, artists have not only experienced conflict first-hand but are also former military personnel. This foregrounds the relationship between “the soldier” and “the artist” in our comprehension of the work. Analysis involves questioning the implicit temporal linearity of the artist-soldier: when does an artist who became a soldier return to being an artist (return to “normality”)? Conversely, it involves questioning our expectation of the work: does it become an experiential “feeling for” on behalf of the audience? With regard to both questions, it is instructive to briefly reflect on the work Broadway Boogie-Woogie (2006) by New York-based Bosnian artist Nebojša Šerić Shoba.34 Šerić describes the work as a scale-model sculpture of trenches on the front line, a reconstruction of his experience of the war. This is a scale model of the trenches I tried to dig during the time when I was drafted into the war in Bosnia. As a soldier, I began to dig the trenches in the shape of Piet Mondrian’s painting Broadway Boogie Woogie. Unfortunately I was immediately arrested by security officers as I was digging these trenches. I did not succeed in explaining to the officers that this act of digging was actually an art project made on the front lines. This project reconstructs my memory of those years, and the actual battlefield where I happened to be – because I couldn’t choose not to be there.35

The work is striking for the way it uses dark humor to upturn our expectations about “war art” and “war artist.” Set as a re-creation of the traumatic experience of the front line, Broadway Boogie-Woogie is also the re-creation of a (failed)

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Figure 0.6 Broadway Boogie-Woogie, 2006, by Nebojša Šerić Shoba. © Nebojša Šerić Šoba 2006. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

attempt to fuse the iconic modernist grid with military combat infrastructure. A soldier digging a trench in the Mondrian grid formation is an irrational act that could be simultaneously interpreted as an effect of PTSD (reaction to the trauma of the battlefield and being forcibly drafted), and subversion through misunderstanding. Subversion here is exerted upon our expectations from the artist in war, and from what the work will say about war. Broadway BoogieWoogie creates a short circuit of identification between “Shoba the artist” doing an art project in the middle of a war, and “Shoba the soldier” over-identifying with his duties as a soldier. Instead of serving opportunities for audiences towards “feeling for,” by performing intense affective states or representations of trauma, Broadway Boogie-Woogie demonstrates the limits of empathy. It recreates the confusion of war, and the seeming irrationality of creating art in this context. What we are supposed to take away from viewing the work is entirely unclear. This ambiguity is highlighted by the fact that Broadway Boogie-Woogie is not overtly critical

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about war; it is simply an activity that says something about war by taking place at the same time and in the same location as a war. Instead of functioning like a humanist condemnation of war, this art is a pseudo-therapeutic exercise for a traumatized soldier with an art education. This intentional upending of expectations about art or the artist “feeling for” on behalf of the audience in the context of war informs our approach to the works discussed in this book. The way in which Broadway Boogie-Woogie connects aesthetics with military infrastructure through intentional misunderstanding underpins a number of our discussions, such as that about Hito Steyerl’s investigation of the connections between prominent galleries and art institutions with funding from weapons manufacturers, and about artworks by Mladen Miljanović, Un-war, and Hiwa K. Most significantly, Broadway Boogie-Woogie rejects empathy as the framework through which to communicate the experience of war, one in which artists and their audiences establish a dynamic in which they think and feel on behalf of the imagined, wounded other. Much contemporary war art becomes trapped in circuits of “vampiristic empathy,” as Fritz Breithaupt terms it: a process of “sharing” another’s experience to the extent of appropriating it, to the detriment of the other’s independent subjective agency. This book’s six chapters are primarily organized into three sections of two chapters each—“The Affect–Trauma Paradigm”; “Gamification and Weaponization”; and “Military vs. Militant.” Each section marks an important shift away from the traditional “war art” that is characterized by monumental and often valorized representations of victims of trauma within an implicitly anti-war ethics, and towards a militant reinvestment in the agency of those subject to war, as active agents rather than as victims. We certainly do not reject the ethical importance of empathy and the role of affect and trauma; however, we aim to loosen the overwhelming dominance of war art that primarily functions through this frame, with the intention of thinking differently about the ways in which contemporary art can engage a range of topics relating to war, terror, and political violence.

The Affect–Trauma Paradigm In Chapters 1 and 2 of this book, we address the rise of what we have called the affect–trauma paradigm,36 which emerged in the mid-1990s and expanded into an extensive field of study during the immediate years following 9/11, to eventually become weaponized in mainstream politics. Following an initial

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moment of shock, 9/11 would quickly and sharply focus theorists of contemporary art, as well as theorists across the broad sweep of the humanities, towards questions around the capacity of images of trauma, violence, terror, and war to generate powerful emotional responses. Ideas around trauma and affect were circulating and evolving in humanities research before 9/11, but that event delivered an unforeseen sense of urgency. According to Patricia Clough, 9/11 was the catalyst for what she would term in 2007 “The Affective Turn,”37 the paradigmatic shift in the humanities towards the embodied, emotional, and experiential. As Richard Grusin suggests, “[t]he affective turn helps explain the embodied individual and collective social and medialogical response to 9/11.”38 In 2009, Hardt and Negri described affect as one of the “powerful new tools in the possession of the multitude.”39 While 9/11 poured so much fuel onto the burgeoning embers of affect and trauma theory in 2001, it is perhaps not coincidental that these theories began to emerge in the early to mid-1990s, at the same time as the Yugoslav Wars and the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, the most murderous manifestation of ethnonationalism since the Second World War. Cathy Caruth’s highly influential 1996 book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History,40 which we discuss in Chapter 1, was influenced by Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman’s work with the creation of an archive of videorecorded testimonies of survivors of the Holocaust.41 In relation to the Bosnian War bringing concentration camps back to Europe, the Holocaust was frequently evoked, including by Auschwitz survivor and Nobel Prize Winner Elie Wiesel, who publicly pleaded with US President Bill Clinton to intervene at the Dedication of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.42 It is also not coincidental that theories around affect emerged during 1990s post-ideology, particularly given the biopolitical underpinnings of affect. As we discuss in Chapter 2, much of humanities affect theory conceives of affect, as Leys says, as “independent of, and in an important sense prior to, ideology— prior to intentions, meanings, reasons, and beliefs.”43 This understanding—that our nonintentional, autonomic, intensive responses ultimately influence our political subjectivity, overriding our intentional thinking and abstracted ideology—posits our responses, alongside our political subjectivity, with the biopolitical; thus, our affective responses are imprinted by body and experience, not emanating from belief and interpretation. Leys argues that the antiintentionalism of dominant ideas of affect in the humanities is central to this biopolitical paradigm. “What is at stake for the theorists whose turn to affect I have been analyzing,” says Leys, “is a ‘logic’ according to which attention to ideology of belief is replaced by a focus on the bodily affects that are understood

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to be the outcome of subliminal, autonomic corporeal processes.”44 The separation of affect and intention thus structurally aligns with a deeper shift across the humanities towards “the valorization of personal experience and feeling over argument and debate.”45 Consequently, affect theory in the humanities tends to be concerned with our aesthetic experience of a thing over its content.46 For example, affect theorist neurohistorians, such as Lynn Hunt and Daniel Lord Smail, believe that meaning in historical texts is found in the unintentional traces in documents, rather than their literal semantic content. These infra-sensible affective traces are seen as more trustworthy records of the past than any record of intended meaning.47 Questions about the meaning of media or art thus are converted into, Leys says, “questions concerning their traumatic-affective influence on the subject.”48 Michaels says, “if political conflict may be imagined as conflict between two competing commitments to what’s right, biopolitical conflict appears as conflict between what is and what isn’t, or (in its more forward looking mode) between what is and what will be.”49 For Michaels, with works of art, “we replace the question of what the work means with the question of how it affects us.”50 How an art work makes us feel is highly individualized and subjective, and cannot be disputed or questioned without questioning the legitimacy of the subject position from which it is felt; that is, “the difference between us is just a difference in our experience, not a difference of opinion.”51 Ultimately, this is determined by the paradigmatic “movement from the universalist logic of conflict as difference of opinion to the posthistoricist logic of conflict as difference in subject-position.”52 Leys explains Michaels’ argument as, in essence, “we cannot disagree about what we feel, we just feel different things.”53 Ultimately, the ontological basis for affect lies at the heart of Leys’s rejection of humanities theories of affect. Leys sums up the biopolitics of affect incisively: “Stressing bodies over ideas, affect over reason, the new affect theorists claim that what is crucial is not your beliefs or intentions but the affective processes that are said to produce them, with the result that political change becomes a matter not of persuading others of the truth of your ideas but of producing new ontologies or ‘becomings’, new bodies, and new lives.”54 Michaels claims that the hyper-individualized “deep pluralism” espoused by affect theorists such as William Connolly denies that beliefs are abstract and thus ideological, but instead embedded in a suite of cultural practices and embodied sensory experiences; as Connolly says, “our beliefs should thus be understood as aspects of our subject positions.”55 This ontological thinking underlying the affect– trauma paradigm reflects the paradigm shift in political subjectivity—from a

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pre-1989 understanding of political subjectivity as primarily cognitive, intentional, and ideology-based, to a post-1989 political subjectivity which is embodied, experiential, and biopolitical. That is, the intentionality of ideology is replaced with “the valorization of identity” based in subject position,56 articulated in the vast gamut of identitarianisms as being as fundamentally different as are white ethnonationalism and LGBTQI+ politics. For many humanities theorists who turned to affect in the last twenty years, affect is now not a simple analytical tool but rather a conceptual strategy with subversive, even insurgent, potential. As Boler and Davis say, “[t]he popular uptake of affect theory tends to celebrate affect’s ‘liberatory’ potential.”57 In the context of its discussions around empathy, trauma, and affect, the first section of our book finds the weaponization of affect to be a complex problem, often based on an invasive and desubjectifying projection of artist and audience into the internal emotional states of others, a colonizing imposition of feeling. In Chapter 2, we consider Rebecca A. Adelman’s recent argument that suggests the affect–trauma paradigm has valorized and promoted a particular approach that is less concerned with knowing the subjective experience of the other and more oriented towards imposing a set of feelings that we cannot know, but can only imagine.58 The works that we discuss in the latter half of this book operate on an altogether different basis and in a very different register, demonstrating the value of thinking beyond the affect– trauma paradigm that has dominated contemporary war art and the way in which it is theorized today.

Gamification and Weaponization Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the aesthetic politics of terrorism in Western culture in recent years. September 11, 2001 was a defining moment that resonates throughout the decades, particularly through Islamist terrorism dominating the Western world’s media attention and political agendas for most of the last two decades. Throughout the first decade following 9/11, our news media brought us images of terror that functioned as auxiliaries of the War on Terror, such as images of attacks in Bali (2002), Madrid (2004), London (2005), and Mumbai (2008), and a spate of low-fi videos of beheadings in the mid-2000s, mostly perpetrated by Iraqi insurgent groups. In the second decade since 9/11, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) rose to prominence in Western media, particularly in 2016 and 2017 with vehicular attacks in Barcelona, Berlin, Nice, Stockholm, and London, the suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in

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Manchester, and two paramilitary style attacks in Paris. In each of these attacks, smartphones ensured that the acts and aftermaths were recorded by bystanders, then instantaneously distributed via social and news media. ISIL also recorded, edited, and distributed on social media ever more sophisticated beheading videos recorded in Syria and other IS-controlled territories. Together, these videos demonstrated that newer technology and social media mean that dissemination of terror no longer needs to rely on news media. Most recently, the Christchurch terror attack on Friday, March 15, 2019 registered another important turn in the visual culture of terrorism. It is no longer necessary to stage horror on a televisual scale, distributed from the metropolitan centers of the media world within infrastructures of broadcast media, when terror can be homespun through a targeted live video stream from a small city in the South Pacific, and distributed within the milieu of social media. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the particular complexities of the aesthetic politics behind the 2019 Christchurch terror attack. As a mediated event, this attack was comparable to 9/11 in its meticulous planning and its intention to create terror designed for a particular medium. Moreover, the Christchurch attack is to the current conditions of the visual culture of war and terror what 9/11 was to the conditions of 2001, not simply in terms of technology and media but in other, deeper ways that are synergetic with our present technological, social, and political landscape. It could not have taken place in 2001—not only because ubiquitous internet and social media did not exist, but because it was very much a product of the conditions of our present moment. The terrorist who, following Jeff Sparrow, we name only as “Person X,”59 is a self-identified fascist who committed genocidal murder after posting a seventy-four-page manifesto online. Importantly, he announced on 8chan’s anonymous /pol/ “politically incorrect” message board that his attack would be live-streamed, which he did via Facebook Live using a head-mounted GoPro camera.60 The result was a seventeen-minute video of Person X taking stock of his weapons, driving to his targets, and shooting his victims from a first-person-shooter video game perspective.61 As he drove from mosque to mosque, his car stereo played an ethnonationalist Serbian song recorded during the Bosnian War; his shotguns and assault rifles carried handwritten texts that referenced the fascist video meme “Remove Kebab,” from which the song originates,62 as well as referencing historical wars between Muslims and Europeans, and other recent terror attacks on Muslims.63 Chapter 3 attempts to understand the complex aesthetic politics of terror today through an analysis of the contexts of the Christchurch attack, including

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the online politics and aesthetics of transgression and the cruel laughter of internet trolls, “whose real intention(s) is/are to cause disruption and/or to trigger or exacerbate conflict for the purposes of their own amusement.”64 We explore how the “lulz” of trolling and “shitposting” aim to burn to the ground any platform for debate, to destroy, to create only a negative emotional response, and to weaponize affect and emotion. Within this context, this chapter considers the intention of Person X’s multiple references to internet meme culture, which arguably aimed to encourage likeminded right-wing extremists to commit similar acts of ethnonationalist terror, to “get training, form alliances, get equipped and then act.”65 Contemporary art struggles often with only limited success to address this new aesthetic politics, which operates in the mostly invisible and arcane subcultures of the internet. Chapter 4 takes up the discussion of the retroactive transhistorical ethnonationalism in Person X’s carefully curated references: his use of the song “Karadžiću, vodi Srbe svoje,” his reference to the “Remove Kebab” meme, historical wars, and recent terror attacks.66 The chapter argues that the retroactive transhistoricism of ethnonationalism functions as a weaponization of history—it is a revision and manipulation of historical experience for the purpose of justifying violence in the present. Hito Steyerl’s performance lecture (and accompanying writing) “Tank on a Pedestal” addresses the weaponization of history in the service of private interests, both in weapons manufacturers using art to whitewash their cultural capital and in militia groups selectively referencing history to weaponize physically and symbolically. Arthur Jafa’s The White Album (2018) articulates the language and acts of violence used to “defend” whiteness as a field of power. In Jafa’s work, whiteness is understood as the invisible field framing our present experience as under attack from various groups. Jafa’s work helps us to grasp how the language of grievance and loss are used to frame whiteness as constantly under attack. Both Steyerl and Jafa draw attention to how historical experience is used as an excuse for violence and to stamp out historical claims: a short circuit towards false equivalence. This chapter also identifies the language of ethnonationalism during the war on the territories of Former Yugoslavia as key to understanding the weaponization of history. The nationalist rhetoric used during this conflict and after the conflict—explicitly referenced by the Christchurch shooter—helps us to come to terms with how history gets weaponized through rhetorical devices such as a “zero hour” of history. Chapter 4 thus provides a bridge to the final part of the book, in which we discuss the work of artists—many of whom are from the Former Yugoslavia—who use temporality to understand the present and open up historical experience to different possibilities.

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Military vs. Militant Taking as its departure point the doctrine of military humanism as justification for military interventions, Chapter 5 examines works from Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Palestine, and Iraq in relation to military humanism at different stages of war. Phil Collins’s how to make a refugee (1999) and Alban Muja’s Family Album (2019) examine the production of the moral order of human rights through images of Kosovar refugees during and after the war; Mladen Miljanović’s Sounds of the Homeland (2018) examines the relation of international intervention and failed post-war state formation in BiH; Sharif Waked’s Beace Brocess (2010) examines the cycle of failed peace negotiations between Palestine and Israel under the patronage of the USA; and Hiwa K’s The Bell Project (2007– 2015) examines the connection between the international arms trade and endless conflict in Iraq. Moving beyond representations of war through images of destruction and loss of human life, these works consider military humanism to be the ideological frame of contemporary wars. By showing military humanism in different stages of conflict, artists capture the way in which discussions and perceptions of war shifted from using destruction to achieve political goals to humanitarian interventions aimed to police criminal perpetrators. The works discussed in Chapter 5 provide a timeline of emerging military interventionism during the decade 1990–2000, and show the prominent position of the Bill Clinton US administration within this shift in global geopolitics. Clinton/Blair military interventionism was directly influenced by Fukuyama’s doctrine of neoconservatism, in which military force is seen as ethically justifiable in order to spread liberal democracy. Really, this was the greatest impact of Fukuyama’s 1992 formulations on the end of history—they did not make a significant contribution to knowledge per se; rather, he “weaponized” Aristotle, Plato, and the existing Enlightenment historicism of Hegel, to argue for the deeply historical fundamentalism of Western politically liberal, economically neoliberal government. The narrative provided by the works we discuss in Chapter 5 illustrate the build-up and intensification of this defining post-1989 political doctrine, which found its apex in the post-9/11 Bush II era’s swing toward a more traditional conservative imperialism in the form of the War on Terror. In this sense, the narrative of this chapter traces the history of US foreign interventionism from the First Gulf War in 1991 (Hiwa K), through its brokerage of Dayton peace accords in 1995 (Miljanović), to its bombing of Serbia in response to Serbia’s aggression against Kosovo in 1999 (Collins and Muja), to its role in Camp David talks between Israel and Palestine in 2000 (Waked). Seen in the context of the

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weaponizing of history in the neoconservative doctrine, this narrative provides a different and much less altruistic perspective on Western peacekeeping troop deployment and humanitarian involvement in conflict. Chapter 6 considers the nexus between militarization of borders and migration. Our departure point is that in the age of “planetary civil war,” mass migration, and forced indefinite detention, borders have become instruments of war: militarized infrastructure used to delay, detain, and control people. In a sense, international politics is returning to a point that can be seen as a poetical counterpoint to November 9, 1989—walls and hard borders are returning to Europe. In this chapter, we articulate the artistic strategy of militant humanism, which captures works that repurpose the militarized infrastructure of global civil war into a survival resource for non-military people such as civilians, refugees, and migrants. This strategy is the reversal of militaristic humanism—considered in Chapter 5— which “humanizes” war and breaching of state sovereignty by framing them as ethical interventions into humanitarian catastrophe on behalf of helpless victims. Militant humanism repurposes military knowledge about space and border control, enabling displaced civilians to breach militarized state sovereignty and circumvent unjust and inhumane migration policies. Discussing works such as Armina Pilav’s project Un-war Space’s archive documenting how to transform spaces of destruction into spaces of survival, Hiwa K’s film articulating how to memorize maps and topography in order to gain asylum in View from Above (2017), and Mladen Miljanović’s production of manuals for migrants seeking entry into the EU in Didactic Wall (2019), we demonstrate how such artistic practices empower civilians through mobility. Militant humanism marks a shift in the “doctrine” of war art from a focus on empathy, affect, and trauma to a focus on active political agency for those subjected to war’s violence, displacement, and loss. We argue that through the strategy of militant humanism, migrants, civilians, and refugees are empowered to circumvent the temporal delay of war, camps, and indefinite detention, and become political activated subjects. This political activation through “militant humanism” shows how artists have responded to the changing temporality of war over the last three decades. Taken collectively, the three works discussed demonstrate a shift in how war is understood—their subjects range through a temporally finite siege in Sarajevo, ongoing military operations and wars in Syria and Afghanistan, and the state of negative peace and permanent crisis in BiH. Their range corresponds to the way in which war has been increasingly spatially decentralized and diffused, moving from a contained area (former Yugoslavia), through an undetermined region (the Middle East), to become a global civil war.

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Notes 1 Todd Stone, interview with Kit Messham-Muir and Uroš Čvoro, recorded on 45th floor, 3 World Trade Center, New York, August 23, 2019; transcribed by Monika Lukowska, October 18, 2019. 2 Stone, interview with Messham-Muir and Čvoro, October 18, 2019. 3 Ibid. 4 Todd Stone, “Preface,” in Witness: Downtown Rising, Paintings by Todd Stone 2001–2011 (New York: Todd Stone, 2011), 11. 5 Stone, interview with Messham-Muir and Čvoro, October 18, 2019. 6 Ibid. 7 Kit Messham-Muir and Uroš Čvoro, “After Aftershock: The Affect–Trauma Paradigm One Generation after 9/11,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art vol. 20, no. 1 (2020): 125–140. 8 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin, 1992). While we are using Fukuyama’s account as a departure point for our argument here, it is important to note that his claim about 1989 as the “end of history” became the theoretical counterpoint for a generation of thinkers about the failed promises of post-socialism. Some of these discussions are covered in Uroš Čvoro, Transitional Aesthetics: Contemporary Art at the Edge of Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 9 Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 64. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 67. 12 Francis Fukuyama, Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition (London: Profile Books, 2018), xii. 13 Jürgen Habermas, “What Does Socialism Mean Today?,” New Left Review no. 1/183 (1990): 8. 14 Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 272. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 United Nations, “Rising Nationalism Threatens Multilateralism’s 70-Year ‘Proven Track Record’ of Saving Lives, Preventing Wars, Secretary-General Tells Security Council,” Security Council 8,395th Meeting, SC/13570, United Nations, November 9, 2018, accessed May 22, 2020, https://www.un.org/press/en/2018/sc13570.doc.htm. 18 Jeff Sparrow, Fascists Among Us: Online Hate and the Christchurch Massacre (Melbourne: Scribe, 2019), 3. 19 For our understanding of “retroactive transhistoricism,” we draw on Slavoj Žižek’s notion of “retroactive archaeology,” whereby a nationalist myth of origin is reinserted into history to justify and legitimize the present. See Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 197.

Introduction: Zero Hour, Ground Zero

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20 Tim Clarke, “Christchurch Mosque Massacre: Brenton Tarrant’s Weapons Armed with Words in Twisted Cause,” The West Australian, March 16, 2019, 2:00 a.m., accessed May 15, 2020, https://thewest.com.au/news/world/christchurch-mosque -massacre-brenton-tarrants-weapons-armed-with-words-in-twisted-cause-ng -b881137038z. 21 “Mosque Shooter Brandished Material Glorifying Serb Nationalism,” Al Jazeera, May 16, 2019, accessed June 19, 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/03/ zealand-mosque-gunman-inspired-serb-nationalism-190315141305756.html. 22 Uroš Čvoro, Transitional Aesthetics: Contemporary Art at the Edge of Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 2. 23 Walter Benn Michaels, “The Shape of the Signifier,” Critical Inquiry vol. 27, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 278. 24 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 140. 25 Ibid., 137. 26 Ibid., 140. 27 Ibid. 28 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 23, emphasis in original text. 29 Ruth Leys, The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 344. 30 Fukuyama, Identity, 110. 31 Ibid., 115. 32 Ibid., 167. 33 Grace Brockington, “Art Against War,” in War and Art, ed. Joanna Bourke (London: Reaktion Books, 2017), 330. 34 We discuss his work Monument to the International Community from the Grateful Citizens of Sarajevo in Chapter 6. 35 Nebojša Šerić Shoba, “Inappropriate Adjustments,” in Evasions of Power: On the Architecture of Adjustment, ed. Katherina Carl, Aaron Levy, and Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss (Philadelphia, PA: Slought Foundation, 2011), 337–350, 338. 36 Messham-Muir and Čvoro, “After Aftershock.” 37 Patricia Ticineto Clough, “Introduction,” The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean Halley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 21. 38 Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 6. 39 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009). 40 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

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41 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992). 42 Bill Clinton, My Life (London: Random House, 2004), 512. 43 Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry vol. 37, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 437. 44 Leys, The Ascent of Affect, 343. 45 Ibid., 344. 46 Ibid., 323. 47 Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” 338–339, 466. 48 Ruth Leys, “Trauma and the Turn to Affect,” Cross/Cultures no. 153 (2012): 14. 49 Walter Benn Michaels, “Empires of the Senseless,” in The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 173. 50 Walter Benn Michaels, “The Beauty of a Social Problem (e.g. Unemployment),” Twentieth Century Literature: Postmodernism 57, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2011): 312; William E. Connolly, Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 311. 51 Michaels, “The Shape of the Signifier,” 274. 52 Ibid., 278. 53 Leys, The Ascent of Affect, 344. 54 Ibid., 342–343. 55 Michaels, “The Beauty of a Social Problem (e.g. Unemployment),” 58. 56 Michaels, “The Shape of the Signifier,” 275. 57 Megan Boler and Elizabeth Davis, “The Affective Politics of the ‘Post-Truth’ Era: Feeling Rules and Networked Subjectivity,” Emotion, Space and Society no. 27 (2018): 80. 58 Rebecca A. Adelman, Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in the Perpetual War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 1. 59 Sparrow, Fascists Among Us, 4–5. 60 “Person X” quoted in Sparrow, Fascists Among Us, 1. 61 “Video Showing Deadly Shooting Near Synagogue on Yom Kippur Was Livestreamed,” CBS/AP, October 9, 2019, 7:51 p.m., accessed October 11, 2019, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/germany-synagogue-shooting-halle-grenadereportedly-thrown-jewish-cemetery-today-2019-10-09/. 62 Ibid. 63 “Mosque Shooter Brandished Material Glorifying Serb Nationalism,” Al Jazeera, May 16, 2019. 64 Claire Hardaker, “Trolling in Asynchronous Computer Mediated Communication: From User Discussions to Academic Definitions,” Journal of Politeness Research vol. 6, no. 2 (2010): 237. 65 “Person X,” The Great Replacement (unpublished document, 2019), 19. 66 “Mosque Shooter Brandished Material Glorifying Serb Nationalism,” Al Jazeera.

1

The Trauma Artist

Australian contemporary artist Ben Quilty is not well-known internationally;1 however, in his home country he is an art star, “the darling of the Australian art world,”2 “the closest thing Australia has to a celebrity artist,”3 having won the nation’s most prestigious art prizes (National Self-Portrait Prize 2007; Doug Moran Prize 2009; Archibald Prize 2011). As an “impassioned activist,”4 he has also become the recognizable public face of liberal humanitarianism. Australians who are unlikely to know the name of any other living artist might well have heard of Ben Quilty, similarly to how the wider British public might know of Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin, or the American public might have heard of Jeff Koons. Quilty led an intense public campaign against the execution by Indonesia of his painting protégé and convicted drug smuggler Myuran Sukumaran. He has highlighted the human toll of the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean and South Pacific, as well as confronted contemporary Australia with its shameful and largely ignored history of massacres of the Indigenous population by the colonizing settlers at sites such as Myall Creek in New South Wales. Quilty is a frequent commentator in broadcast media and the subject of a number of documentaries, and Australia’s media, generally speaking, loves him: “mainstream media respond[s] to Quilty with hagiography.”5 In 2019, he featured on the covers of Good Weekend magazine (weekend supplement of The Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s The Age) wearing a crown of barbed wire (“[t]he inference was that Quilty might have a ‘messiah complex’,” says Anna Zagala6). Later in the same year, Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art opened a major midcareer retrospective on Quilty. Its curator, Lisa Slade, commented in the messianic Good Weekend feature that, “[s]o much has happened for him and to him—and to us, as Australians—and he has made so much work about it. The way the arc of Ben’s humanity has developed, through all those experiences, is remarkable. He has become a citizen artist, the witness to our times.”7 Quilty’s first appearance on the cover of Good Weekend was in 2012, for a feature about his then recent appointment as Australia’s Official War Artist. It 29

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Figure 1.1 Ben Quilty on the cover of The Good Weekend, February 23, 2019. Photo: Tim Bauer. © Tim Bauer 2019. Reproduced with the permission of the photographer.

was that role and the work that arose from it—a series of paintings titled After Afghanistan—that first established him as a public figure and humanitarian. The Australian War Memorial’s Official War Artist scheme embedded Quilty with the Australian Defence Force in October 2011. He spent twenty-four days in Afghanistan, mostly at the Coalition base at Tarinkot in Urōzgān Province, taking thousands of photographs, recording video, and creating a portfolio of

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sketches and watercolors, mostly of Australian soldiers, such as Captain Kate Porter, Tarin Kot (2011) and Captain M II, Tarin Kot (2011). He returned to his studio in the countryside south of Sydney not knowing how he could possibly make work about what had been a “surreal” experience.8 When some of the troops he had met also returned to Australia, he asked them to sit for larger-scale painted portraits. It was then he realized that “some of the work has become quite dark because of their experience—it’s a cliché from the Vietnam War—that they then suffer the emotional effects from being exposed to the things that they’re exposed to . . . crashing down to the earth with post-traumatic stress disorder is very crushing and confronting.”9 The trauma of returned soldiers thus became the focus of Quilty’s After Afghanistan series, which toured through Australia from 2014 to 2016. After Afghanistan consists of twenty-two large paintings and sixteen smaller drawings that attempt to convey war trauma. The paintings were all created in Quilty’s studio in the Australian country town of Robinson in 2012, after his return. Some, such as Tarin Kot, Hilux, depict destroyed objects. Others are more abstract and allegorical, such as Kandahar and Tarin Kot, while Air Commander John Oddie, no. 3; Sergeant P. After Afghanistan; and Trooper Daniel Spain are portraits of soldiers in uniform. However, the core of the series, which attracted the greatest amount of critical attention, consists of paintings of the naked and contorted figures of men and one woman—Captain Kate Porter, after Afghanistan; Captain S after Afghanistan; Trooper M, after Afghanistan; Troy Park, after Afghanistan, no. 2; Trooper M, after Afghanistan, no. 2; and Lance Corporal M, after Afghanistan. These paintings in particular are rendered in Quilty’s long-established signature style. Most of Quilty’s paintings are figureground compositions centering on head or full-body portraits or objects such as cars, often floating on an abstracted background. Quilty works speedily and expediently, applying richly pigmented viscous oil paints to large stretched white canvases in thick impasto strokes, most often with a long cake-decorating knife, and occasionally with brushes, fingers, hands. Often, unpainted sections of the white canvas are left to function either as highlights or, as is the case in many of these portraits, the skin of the sitter’s pale body. Documentaries on Quilty often show him working in his studio manipulating his paint and canvases in a particularly dynamic physical way—smearing, wiping, scraping, stepping back and forth to the canvas, turning it upside down. Certainly, the dynamism of his studio technique does translate to the aesthetic of his finished works. And, to some extent, this technique is also part of Quilty’s public image, as “Australia’s artist from central casting”:10 echoes of Hans Namuth’s 1950 film of Jackson

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Pollock working his canvases, with a local pinch of the fast-working television portrait artist Anh Do, or of bush artist Pro Hart in the 1980s Australian Dupont Stainmaster advertisement. Quilty’s own curriculum vitae describes his painting style as “emphatically expressive,”11 which is doubtlessly his thing. Zagala observes that the war artworks “deploy gesture, brushwork and composition to depict the returned soldiers as physically vulnerable and anguished,”12 and certainly in the core After Afghanistan works his technique lives up to the anticipated drama of “Quilty’s expressive compositions,” as Katya Wachtel describes them.13 For example, Captain S after Afghanistan (2012)—a key work in the series, shortlisted for the 2012 Archibald Prize—rendered in fleshy pinks broken up by urgently applied thick bloody reds, hematomatic purples and unpainted canvas, also employs a particularly theatrical composition and pose.14 The form of Captain S’s body is arranged across the nearly-square picture plane, mostly defined by areas of unpainted canvas, with the extremities of his limbs painted in lighter rough strokes of pink and red. Paint is applied mostly to his head and to the negative space surrounding him, in thick strokes of purples and reds, with more minor strokes of complementary colors. The upper edges of the body are indistinct and the left arm is indistinguishable beyond a point near the elbow. The body is posed on its back, tightly contorted into the picture plane in a thick “X” shape, the right arm raised above the head.15 Captain S is a Special Forces soldier, wounded in battle, who spent eighteen hours under fire from the Taliban.16 He says, “[t]he pose actually reflects a circumstance on an operation where I was hiding behind a wall”; he recalls lying face up, agonizingly on top of a large field radio backpack, while attempting to coordinate a medical evacuation of a wounded soldier.17 The dramatically raised right arm draws on a historical “emotive gestural language” of tragedy, which Aby Warburg traces through Albrecht Dürer’s Death of Orpheus (1494), back to ancient Greece.18 Quilty also posed Captain S naked, “showing not only his physical strength but also the frailty of human skin, suggesting the darkness of the emotional weight of the war.”19 This nakedness, and variations on Captain S’s pose, is repeated in similar paintings of Trooper M, Troy Park, and Lance Corporal M. Quilty speaks of wanting to “tear away the uniform and the bravura of masculinity and the threatening nature of their uniform, and see their soul, and see the flesh that’s injured by bullets and shrapnel.”20 We have recently argued that Quilty’s works such as Captain S after Afghanistan take an important step further than simply representing trauma in any straightforwardly iconographic sense. Rather, Quilty’s signature expressivity tends to render the form of soldiers’ bodies in semi-abstraction, often blurring

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Figure 1.2 Captain S after Afghanistan, 2012, by Ben Quilty. © Black Dog Management 2012. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

the distinction between the form of the body and the ground on which it sits. In Captain S after Afghanistan, the left arm of the soldier is indistinguishable beyond the elbow and the upper edge of the torso. Thus, as a figurative painting, Captain S after Afghanistan and many others in this series enact a kind of deft aesthetic failure, where they slip between abstraction and figuration. We argued that, “while the portraits are said to ‘show’ psychological trauma, they actually ‘enact’ trauma through their aesthetic un-portrayals.”21 That is, these paintings enact the fracturing of a picture rather than simply being a picture of a fracture. This disintegration between the figurative and abstract is traumatic in and of itself: “it is not a painting ‘about’ trauma; rather, it enacts a trauma. It is traumatic in its incompleteness, in its incoherence.”22 We will return to this “enacting” approach later in this chapter, in our discussion of “traumatic form.” The national tour of After Afghanistan was accompanied by public program events and intense media attention that emphasized trauma as the core of the series. Since first exhibiting works in the early 2000s, Quilty has explored the darker side of youthful masculinity and its self-destructive rites of passage such

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as heavy drinking and dangerous driving, so the focus on the largely male problems of veteran PTSD, depression, and suicide was a logical progression in his practice. From 2001 to 2017, there were fifty-six deaths on deployment, while of serving soldiers 175 suicided. Further, 198 veterans suicided after being discharged.23 From 2015 to 2017, ex-serving men under thirty years of age were twice as likely to suicide as other Australian men in the same age group.24 During the tour of After Afghanistan, Australia’s national broadcaster, ABC, aired two documentaries on Quilty’s war work. The first, War Paint, was broadcast on September 3, 2012 and touched on the PTSD and depression of returning soldiers. The second, On the Warpath, was broadcast on March 25, 2013, and more emphatically focused on trauma. Introducing On the Warpath, Craig Reucassel said, “six months on, Quilty has gone from official artist to angry advocate. He wants better treatment for Australian soldiers, who he says are still suffering from their time in the war zone.” At a panel discussion hosted by the National Art School Gallery in Sydney a week before the second documentary aired, Quilty criticized the Department of Veterans Affairs for not supporting returned soldiers suffering from PTSD, as well as the Australian Defence Force for attempting to silence the subjects of his portraits who appeared in the documentary. This brought him into direct conflict with elements of the Australian Defence Force, with which he had traveled to Afghanistan as an embedded guest. The national tour of After Afghanistan certainly brought significant media attention to the effects of trauma on returning soldiers. The attention garnered by After Afghanistan was not simply related to the extent to which these paintings might raise public awareness, but also to Quilty’s apparent ability to animate the paintings with an empathy-inducing emotional force, connecting the audience with the trauma of the returned soldiers. Respected critic and art theorist Rex Butler notes, “commentators claim that they offer a real insight into soldiers’ lives, as though through Quilty’s work we might get to know them, their individual lives and struggles.”25 In particular, Quilty’s painterly expressivity is praised for its apparent affective power, its capacity to convey the emotional dimension of his humanitarian subject matter. “What endures in Quilty’s works is the palpable hand of his past emotions,” says Rebecca Freezer. “His characteristic fat swathes of oil paint applied with muscular gestures convey Quilty’s stunning grasp of the expressive potential of this medium.”26 “Quilty’s expressive style suggests an outpouring of passionate emotions,” says Ralph Brody.27 In particular, the After Afghanistan paintings are understood to connect Quilty with the individual psychologically traumatic experiences of his soldier-sitters through the artist’s own astute empathy and, in turn, to convey

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that traumatic experience through their expressivity, gesturality, composition, and aesthetic enactment of trauma. Michael Desmond, former Deputy Director of Australia’s National Portrait Gallery, suggests that in the After Afghanistan series, Quilty’s “visceral technique supports the emotional response of the subjects to their wartime experience and to a sympathetic interpretation of their state of mind by the viewer”;28 and, in turn, connecting us, the audience, to that trauma. We are, so it goes, emotionally moved by the empathic connection to trauma and, the suggestion is, politically activated. In other words, Quilty’s paintings are not simple representations of their sitters or iconographic likenesses that merely signify; rather, through their aesthetic devices, they capture and convey affect. Kathleen Linn talks of “almost sensuous layers of paint [that] reveal the emotional cost of war.”29 The paintings create an empathic bridge from sitter to artist to audience; that is, we feel the trauma through the sheer affective intensity, and come to know something about the trauma they portray. In the midst of its national tour, Butler observed that After Afghanistan had been “highly and virtually unanimously praised” by both the public and the critics. He was sensing a particular lack of criticality in the “group-think” around Quilty’s work amongst Australia’s art critics.30 In a paper from 2017, Butler reiterates, “the responses to the work have been overwhelming and virtually unanimous, with particular attention paid to the portraits of the soldiers naked in extremis stretched out before us. It is these that were almost immediately recognized as offering a new image of war.”31 Francis Russell likewise notes, “Quilty has been almost universally praised as a perfect balancing act.”32 A survey of reviews of After Afghanistan certainly supports these claims. He has been favorably compared to Willem De Kooning, Lucien Freud, and Francis Bacon.33 Linn says, “Quilty’s choice to reveal the emotional toll of war, something that has often been hidden away, raises awareness of the psychological effects and emotional trauma faced by many soldiers returning home from war”;34 Steve Proposch says, “[h]e has given their pain a language”;35 John McDonald, notoriously difficult-to-please critic for The Sydney Morning Herald, says, “[t]here have been many exceptional pictures produced by [Australia’s Official War Artist] program, and every artist says the experience has changed their life, but no one has captured the underlying trauma of active service so vividly.”36 Time and again, Quilty’s After Afghanistan series is lauded by critics for its emotional power,37 its capacity to create an empathic connection to trauma, giving “a first-hand illustration of what the soldiers experienced in Afghanistan.”38 Amongst this overwhelming praise, Butler’s criticism of After Afghanistan is probably the most forceful refutation of Quilty’s war work to date. Butler argues

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that in this portrayal of traumatized subjects, the actual “work” is the public performance of empathy, in the sense that Quilty triggers empathy through his work, but also in the sense that the claim to an affective empathic encounter is reproduced in the public sphere via his appearances in print and TV media and the consensus of his reviews. Rather than the trauma of the soldiers, the artist’s capacity for empathic identification with the traumatized subject is the focus: “what is dramatized, what is the real subject of Quilty’s work,” argues Butler, “is first the painter’s and then the spectator’s ability to enter into an empathetic relationship with these soldiers.”39 This is demonstrated in the 2019 documentary Quilty: Painting the Shadows by Australia’s ABC. Throughout the documentary, Quilty’s approach is heroicized: he is “like the doctor injecting himself to find the cure.”40 In a section about Quilty’s friendship with his protégé Sukumaran, the focus is less on Sukumaran’s death than it is on Quilty’s stress, agony, and survivor guilt following the execution.41 Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung’s commentary in the Sydney-based art blog Running Dog is particularly critical of the Australian media’s focus. “In each story, Sukumaran’s life is diminished as ancillary to Quilty’s feelings.”42 The central narrative thus becomes the artist’s trauma-byassociation. It is this performance of empathy, played out through the intersection of the work and its interpretation in the media, that Butler clearly abhors. “Instead of any empathy with the soldiers we have the signs of empathy (painterly gesturality).”43 Yet, we actually do not get to know anything about the subjectivity of the soldiers—nor, importantly for Butler, do we (the audience) want to know.44 The paintings’ popularity can be attributed to the opportunity they give their audience to engage in a performance of empathy without meaningful commitment and, ultimately, no ethical challenge to Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan or any other expeditionary military deployments. On first read, Butler’s argument may seem a scathing rebuke to Quilty as an artist, and to the Australian media and broader population, who have raised him and his work to a high mantel. However, the true target of Butler’s criticism is the wider contemporary cultural context, circulated and fueled through social media, in which expressivity and emotion override thought and fact, and trauma, along with the public performance of empathy, has a particular social value. Indeed—and this is the profound truth of the work and what it has to tell us about the ideology of our time—what we would say we have in Quilty’s work is that solicitation at a distance or care without responsibility, that “interpassivity” that is to be seen in all contemporary internet campaigns, Facebook signings and twitter trendings in the name of a good cause.45

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“Interpassivity” is a term borrowed from Slavoj Žižek that predates social media, but presages something of its characteristics. It is, Žižek says, “aggressive passivity, the standard ‘interpassive’ mode of our participation in socio-ideological life in which we are active all the time in order to make sure that nothing will happen, that nothing will really change.”46 For Butler, Quilty’s war art works enable this interpassive mode, and the popularity of his work is merely a symptom: “the success of Quilty’s work tells us that it accords, even if in an unacknowledged way, with the wider ideology of our time. With Quilty’s portraits . . . [w]e just abstractly have to feel or sympathise with them, and that is enough.”47 While Butler is scornful of this “wider ideology of our time,” he never quite puts his finger on it. Our exploration in this book of contemporary art that addresses war, terror, and political violence also addresses a “wider ideology of our time.” To properly understand this art today, we must understand the complexities of its context.

War Art/Trauma Art From biennales, art museums, public galleries, project spaces, and the commercial sector, through art magazines, newspapers, online media, academia, and art criticism, much of today’s most critically lauded contemporary art that deals with war, terror, and political violence speaks the language of empathy, affect, emotion, and trauma. When Canadian historian Laura Brandon examines the contemporary art of Gertrude Kearns, or Australian art historian Catherine Speck considers the historical war work of Hilda Rix Nicholas, or British historian Joanna Bourke surveys a century-and-a-half of war and art, it is through the theoretical lenses of trauma, affect, and emotion.48 From the narrowest niches of academic theory in the 1990s, affect and trauma now appear to be the natural theoretical language for addressing war art and visual culture. Anthony McCosker describes this discourse as “waged through a micropolitics operating at the scale of bodies in the flow of affect and sensation awash with peaks of intensity and noticeable disappearances.”49 In recent art history, theory, and curation, we see the rise of theories of affect and trauma in discussions of war art as the culmination of a steady shift, over two centuries, from the romanticized to the traumatic. Bourke’s recent historical anthology War and Art (2017) traces its evolution from the fringes of battlefield art with Francisco Goya’s The Disasters of War, through Roger Fenton’s Crimean War photographs, Paul Nash’s stark modernist trench paintings, and Pablo Picasso’s humanist

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Guernica, to David Cotterrell’s 2009 video installations recorded during medical evacuations of British soldiers in Afghanistan. Bourke begins her “Introduction” with a quotation from Goya: “One cannot look at this . . . This is too much!”50 She adds, “[l]ooking closely at military violence can itself be painful: along with Goya, we may simply exclaim, ‘This is too much!’ ”51 The volume, edited by a world-leading historian of war, frames today’s war art as the end point in a teleological narrative, which runs from the dominance of the fraudulent triumphalist propaganda of celebratory military art toward an art that recognizes the vital importance of understanding affect and emotion. It would seem that increasingly affecting and traumatic depictions of war, and our development of the theoretical tools and language to speak of it, have disabused us of the old myths around the glory of war. The Louvre’s monumental exhibition Disaster of War 1800–2014 in the northern French town of Lens traced a similar history. Choosing a title riffing on Goya’s The Disaster of War series, the Louvre surveyed two centuries of Western war art, proposing that between the Napoleonic Wars and the present art has been instrumental in the growing disenchantment with war. “While scenes of heroic battles had predominated in art, war began to be represented from every angle, including its most atrocious consequences on people, animals, nature, cities, and things.”52 In the twenty years since 9/11—when violent mediated images were thrust to the center of Western visual culture—the most critically praised and seemingly vital and important art concerned with countering the inhumanity of violent conflict is that which seeks to activate affect and trauma as a political strategy against the “seemingly interminable planetary war.”53 How we understand images of war, terror, and political violence today, in this third decade of the twenty-first century, directly shapes how we formulate models to see meaning and how art theory and the humanities intervene within the expanding and evolving fields of affect and trauma. The models through which we understand images are the more abstract part of what Judith Butler calls “the frame” of an image: this is not just the demarcation of a rectangle around an image, but that which permits the legibility of its content, “selectively producing and enforcing what will count as reality,” enabling us to see and comprehend.54 What we conceptualize, and what systems of ideas and terminology we draw upon to describe it, directly impact how we understand art and the world it seeks to engage. Our aim in this book is not merely to critique the present regime of images but, through critical engagement with recent art and visual culture, to examine certain approaches, to question them, and, overall, to transform the ways in which we think about the relationship of art to contemporary conflict. To

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be clear here, the larger purpose is to establish a critical position on the dominant modes of contemporary art that addresses this paradigm. In the twenty years since 9/11, the lens through which we see this art has been overwhelmingly that of trauma, affect, and emotion. In our first two chapters, we want to historicize the set of theoretical formulations that we term the affect–trauma paradigm, which rapidly expanded and developed following and partly resulting from 9/11. In these chapters, we will sketch the trajectory of the affect–trauma paradigm in art theory since the 1990s, because, as we will argue, these tropes have in many respects run their course; moreover, they have become part of the very picture that they were initially drawn upon to understand. Other scholars have provided formidable comprehensive critical genealogies of the converging fields of affect and trauma in the humanities; in particular, we look to Ruth Leys’s The Ascent of Affect.55 We do not intend to repeat or extend Leys’s critique, but rather to highlight the ways in which some of the well-known limitations of the notions of trauma and affect impact on contemporary art and art theory. Within our discipline, the affect–trauma paradigm has long been established as the conceptual water in which we now swim; it is the go-to model for many contemporary artists and theorists seeking to address the visual culture of war, terror, and political violence. Whereas twenty years ago nascent ideas around affect and trauma held potential for understanding a regime of images of conditions that could not be comprehended, they now present an entrenched set of ideas, language, and tropes. And this is exactly what we aim to avoid. We address the dominant affect–trauma paradigm not to review its literature, or to rehearse and re-mount its familiar formulations, but instead to historicize its development, to shift its tense, and to portray some of its key characteristics in ways that denaturalize them. This is essential if we are to open up different ways of thinking about images of war, terror, and conflict in the wider ideology of our time. Across the humanities, while trauma theory and affect theory are two distinct areas of enquiry, their theoretical strands are intertwined, as is their development throughout the post-9/11 period. Put simply, affect was understood to some extent as the extra-cognitive bodily language through which trauma, as well as other emotions, operates. Not all affect relates to trauma; but in this disciplinary area, all trauma tends to be considered to function through affect. And, according to Leys, the development of these two closely related bodies of theory in the humanities after 9/11 led to their eventual convergence around 2011, with the field of affect eventually absorbing trauma studies: “trauma theory has also undergone something of a mutation, by which I mean that it has been revised in

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order to emerge as ‘affect theory’.”56 In Leys’s account, this crossover occurred with Clough’s discussion of the “affective body” as the subject of trauma in The Affective Turn (2007);57 by 2011, affect had become a hot topic in the humanities and social sciences, “and trauma theory has been influenced by this turn of events.”58 The convergence was clearly complete by the time of Meera Atkinson and Michael Richardson’s Traumatic Affect (2013), which collapses the two strands. The events of 9/11 were the catalyst for the intense development of these fields of theory, and by the second decade afterward the vast body of scholarship around affect and trauma had firmly established the affect–trauma paradigm as a broadly interdisciplinary scholarly field throughout the humanities. Once burgeoning strands of speculative and pioneering theory rapidly expanded and settled into an established, overarching paradigm. In the remainder of this first chapter, we mostly address the development of a particular tradition of trauma studies, and we will look more closely at the development of affect theory in the following chapter. However, this is a matter of convenience that belies the extent to which the two strands have tended to heavily influence the same fields across the humanities over the last twenty years.

The Caruthian Tradition in Trauma Studies Humanities theories on affect and trauma first appeared in the 1990s as a particular niche interest amongst a handful of academics addressing the recorded testimonies of survivors of the Holocaust, incontrovertibly one of the most significant traumas in the recorded history of humanity. In the mid-1990s, the recording and preserving of this horrendous genocidal period in living memory took on a whole new degree of relevance: the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995) included ethnic cleansing at moments like the July 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, when Radovan Karadžić ordered Bosnian-Serb troops to attack a UN-declared “safe area,” leading to the slaughter of over 8,000 Muslim Bosniaks. The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s saw the return of concentration camps and genocide to Europe, and the 1994 Rwandan Genocide saw ethnonationalist slaughter in Africa, with mass rape, and up to a million people exterminated in the space of four months. However, it was the live televisual spectacle of 9/11, a terrorist act perpetrated at a major financial and cultural center of the Western world, that precipitated an absolute sense of urgency for humanities theorists to develop better understandings of what many felt to be the intense emotional power of its mediated images. As a direct response to 9/11, theoretical disciplines

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across the humanities experienced nothing short of an eruption, followed by the rapid development of theories of trauma and affect. Particularly important for the humanities, including art theory, was Cathy Caruth’s 1996 monograph Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History,59 which, as Wulf Kansteiner observes, is “a short, elegant book, which has become influential across the humanities.”60 Unclaimed Experience is a readable 112-page monograph that “presents a compact, easily adopted model of cultural trauma.”61 It is a pioneering text in the adoption of psychoanalytical theories of trauma into the context of the humanities in the 1990s pre-9/11, and in its digestibility and highly adaptable generalizations it presented a quick solution to the gaping lacuna in cultural theory for understanding the powerful impact of the media images of 9/11. Unclaimed Experience sought to “speak about and speak through the profound story of traumatic experience” and “explore the complex ways that knowing and not knowing are entangled in the language of trauma and in the stories associated with it.”62 Fulfilling that aim to “speak through” trauma—in which trauma is figured as cultural and aesthetic form—is where Caruth has had the greatest influence. As Luckhurst noted in 2008, Caruth is “one of the central figures who helped foster the boom in cultural trauma theory in the early 1990s.”63 Prior to Unclaimed Experience, in the early 1990s, the psychoanalytical ideas of trauma studies emerged from the overlap of the work of Dori Laub with that of literary theorist Shoshana Felman.64 Laub was a psychoanalyst who, in 1979, began conducting interviews with survivors for the Holocaust Survivors Film Project.65 The collection of video-recorded testimonies was donated to Yale University in 1981, and the Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies has continued to collect interviews.66 E. Ann Kaplan explains, “Felman and Caruth were at Yale where Laub and [Geoffrey] Hartman had begun to interview Holocaust victims in a climate where renewed interest in World War II and its sociopolitical meanings and personal sufferings was on the rise.”67 Kaplan sees this activity as a possible redress to poststructuralism’s loss of material connection. “Addressing the phenomena of trauma must have seemed one way for critics to begin to link high theory with specific material events that were both personal and which implicated history, memory, and culture generally.”68 Influenced by Felman and Laub, Caruth characterizes trauma in a specific way, adopting a dissociative psychoanalytic model. This is the now familiar understanding of trauma: we encounter an initial traumatic event, the “experience that is not fully assimilated as it occurs,”69 and “resists simple comprehension”;70 this initial traumatic experience “returns to haunt the victim . . . [as] not only the

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reality of the violent event but also the reality of the way that its violence has not yet been fully known.”71 It is the incomprehensibility of the initial incident that is traumatizing. “Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature— the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on.”72 Elsewhere, Caruth says: The history that a flashback tells—as psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and neurobiology equally suggest—is, therefore, a history that literally has no place, neither in the past, in which it was not fully experienced, nor in the present, in which its precise images and enactments are not fully understood. In its repeated imposition as both image and amnesia, the trauma thus seems to evoke the difficult truth of a history that is constituted by the very incomprehensibility of its occurrence.73

Indeed, other theorists such as Ernst van Alphen, influenced by Caruth, go as far as to argue that the originary trauma cannot even be experienced, thus is absolutely unknowable.74 This “dissociative” model of trauma comes from a particular reading of Sigmund Freud;75 following a period of latency, the initial unclaimed experience belatedly returns with a symptomatic vengeance that Freud terms Nachträglichkeit,76 literally an “after-shock.”77 Caruth’s use of Freud is loose or, as Kansteiner says, “selective.”78 She cherrypicks those parts of Freud’s diverse body of work that support the dissociative model, and “goes to impressive lengths to find passages in Freud’s large, complex and contradictory oeuvre which confirm her assumptions.”79 For example, Freud fundamentally structures dissociative trauma as “departure and return”; the patriarchal archetype of the murder—and return—of the historical figure Moses is repeated biographically in “Freud’s departure from his father, or his departure from Judaism,”80 which manifested in him psychically as an incomprehensible event and eventual return, leading to a symptomatic “endless inherent necessity of repetition,” returning again and again to the initial trauma.81 In psychoanalysis, individual trauma is understood as a highly subjective internalized process, externalized only as symptoms of parapraxis. Caruth’s formulations, on the other hand, extrapolate from this model to address cultural systems of representation, occurring intersubjectively. “Freud’s central insight, in Moses and Monotheism,” Caruth argues, is “that history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas.”82 While Freudian notions of trauma are psychological, Caruthian notions of trauma find their structures repeated in culture. Griselda Pollock’s exposition of “the Caruthian tradition of trauma studies”83 argues that there is no real distinction between

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individual trauma and trauma at the level of “political terror”;84 instead, an individual trauma and a traumatic historical event become traumatizing because they both inherit the structurally predisposed character of a common ancestor, an archetypal “originary trauma.”85 Caruth understands trauma as the same condition and process regardless of whether it is individual psychological trauma or a collective or cultural trauma, all of which derive their form from a mythical archetype. This makes her idea of trauma adaptable across disciplines; but it also rides roughshod over the differences between psychological, sociological, cultural, and historical layers of experience, as well as different epistemological models. It is a creative and wilful slippage that, confined to the internal logic of Unclaimed Experience, allows Caruth to extend a dissociative psychoanalytic model of trauma into systems of representation in culture. Leys puts it succinctly: “Caruth offers various readings of exemplary works or passages in texts by Freud, Lacan, Kleist, and other writers in which she attempts to show that language is capable of bearing witness only by the ‘failure’ of witnessing or representation.”86 Caruth suggests that the aim of Unclaimed Experience is not to better understand individual trauma in a cultural context, or to understand collective cultural trauma, but to develop a conceptual tool for understanding literature by creatively adapting a tool from psychoanalysis. The broader field of the humanities was more than happy to adopt it and run with it: Caruth is cited and mentioned some 105 times in Springer’s hefty twenty-four-chapter Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture (2016).87 Nevertheless, there have been forceful critiques of this inter-epistemological slippage by Kansteiner, Kaplan, Roger Luckhurst,88 Lucy Bond,89 and, of course, Leys, who has provided a sustained critique and genealogy of trauma and affect studies throughout the development of the two fields over the last twenty years.90 Antonio Traverso and Mick Broderick note that, in media theory, “the methodological distinction between this term’s [trauma’s] original psychological denotation and its analogical use in relation to the socio-cultural realm is often ambiguous if not altogether obscure.”91 During the post-9/11 period, we saw a similar creative yet highly problematic slippage in discussions of “memory”, which overlap with discussions of trauma and affect. Susannah Radstone, in 2005, objected to the tendency in the humanities to stretch our understandings of the personal memories of a single person into the social field of cultural, social, public, and collective “memory.”92 For Kansteiner, the entire field of trauma studies in the humanities is based on a “category mistake” that ignores the incommensurability of “psychotherapeutic theory and practice” versus the “conceptual ambition of speculative philosophy.”93

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The central thesis of Unclaimed Experience is that certain literary texts bear within their formal properties the marks of trauma—that rather than texts about trauma they are traumatic texts in their enactment of certain features of psychological trauma, such as incomprehensibility and repetition. Caruth’s key exemplar, and an example of wilful slippage in her approach, is Freud’s work on trauma, Moses and Monotheism.94 She argues that Freud’s discussion of the historical departure and return of Moses echoes a primal “father” archetype as well as paralleling his relationship with his own father, and that Freud’s processes of writing the dissociative psychological model are in turn layered upon contemporaneous historical traumatic events of two world wars.95 Regarding Moses and Monotheism, she argues that the personal trauma of Freud’s fleeing from Austria for London in 1938 is inscribed within the form of the book itself as a “site of a trauma.”96 The last part of this three-part work was suspended (“repressed”) by the infiltration and invasion of Austria by Nazi Germany, and was not written until Freud fled to London. “The structure and history of the book, in its traumatic form of repression and repetitive reappearance, thus mark it as the very bearer of a historical truth that is itself involved in the political entanglement of Jews and their persecutors.”97 Thus, Moses and Monotheism speaks not of trauma but through trauma, through the affective rupture of the text. Kaplan extends Caruth’s argument, arguing that a trope of repetition in Moses and Monotheism is a traumatic symptom through which the work assumes “more clearly the shape of trauma . . . His mind is able to argue brilliantly and logically in specific places, but the book is like a series of fragments spliced together.”98 The fragmented form of Moses and Monotheism, the breaking-down of the text in its faltering coherence, enacts Freud’s trauma in its form rather than merely representing trauma in its content. This is a similar logic to Julia Kristeva’s earlier notion of transgression in Revolution in Poetic Language.99 Similarly taking from Freud, Kristeva argues that our infant pre-cultural, preOedipal state—the chora—is governed by the unregulated and unacculturated sensory rhythms of our bodies. As we learn symbolic language, these rhythms remain as a kind of unconscious carrier in our written and verbal expressions, always there in the rhythms of our expression. She argues that in moments of instability, such as certain mental illnesses and dreams, these underlying rhythms break through symbolic language. Caruth’s reading of Moses and Monotheism is similar to Kristeva’s reading of the writing of Stéphane Mallarmé. Kristeva sees moments of rupture as avant garde breakthroughs in the text.100 Similarly, for Caruth, the representational function of language breaks down to reveal the trauma in the formal properties of Freud’s work.

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Trauma and Interpersonal Transaction Scholars following Caruth in the first decade post-9/11 such as Pollock and Jill Bennett have written that art and texts “of a certain kind can become a means of staging of encounter rather than the protected turning away from the fearful limit frontier,”101 and that “rather than narrativizing traumatic experience, [they] are seen as bearing an imprint of trauma.”102 Meera Atkinson refers to this “imprint” in a text as “ghostliness.”103 Caruth’s idea of “traumatic form” suggests a kind of affective contagion that jumps the intersubjective gap between author and reader—or artist and viewer, actor and audience, and so forth—transacting something of the individual’s trauma through enacting it within the cultural realms. And that suggestion, while never explained in any practical sense in Unclaimed Experience, is extremely appealing to many scholars in the humanities. Atkinson and Richardson say that Caruth’s adaption of psychoanalytic models of trauma allowed culture, “literature, cinema, art—to be read as structurally and linguistically traumatized, rather than simply describing, directly or thematically, the experience of trauma.”104 In art theory, Bennett’s Empathic Vision (2005) takes on the Caruthian model of trauma,105 and quotes Caruth at length on the “unassimilated nature” of trauma and its “return to haunt the survivor later on.”106 A core task for Bennett was to attempt to understand how the “contagion” of trauma operates intersubjectively,107 attempting to resolve the Caruthian slippage between the psychological and cultural; she aims to address trauma and affect as “a political rather than a subjective phenomenon.”108 In Empathic Vision’s opening pages, Bennett notes that trauma-related art “often touches us, but it does not necessarily communicate the ‘secret’ of personal experience.”109 Her analysis of the intersubjective process focuses on the subjective mechanisms of sense memory and the capacity of images to induce an “unwilled empathy” and how these may translate across a body politic.110 In essence, she attempts to resolve the gap in Caruth’s explanation. In her analysis of Willie Doherty’s The Only Good One Is a Dead One (1993), Bennett evokes an intersubjective “shock of recognition” that can arise from empathic identification,111 then extends this into “the inhabitation of space—of a political place,” which “is seen to give rise to specific psychological effects.”112 In particular, Bennett’s extensive analysis of Doherty’s work attributes its affective charge to its film noir iconography,113 as well as a sense of confinement engendered by its looped time.114 Similarly, in her analysis of the work of Doris Salcedo in the same book, Bennett notes, it “does not, of course, enable us to live out traumatic experience in an extended sense, but it is concerned to actively engender the possibility of an empathic encounter,

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where the graphic trauma image might leave us high and dry.”115 But what is transacted for an audience? It cannot be Salcedo’s specific “experience of traumatic memory and grief.”116 The kernel of Empathic Vision is “the body’s propensity to analogical identification, the identification of a space of the body.”117 A key moment is Bennett’s discussion of the “squirm.” She discusses a condition of her student, Sarah Chesterman, who has no surface skin sensation on ninety per cent of her body. According to Bennett’s account, because Chesterman could not feel her skin, she had to actively visually interpret any contact with it: “You need to feel to see images, she said, and in particular you need to feel to know that what is visibly occurring before you is not actually happening to your body.”118 So, “if she burns her leg,” Bennett explains, “her brain only knows by seeing the skin damage.”119 A surprising effect of this is that she finds it difficult to watch horror movies because she feels what she sees deeply and more invasively. Bennett quotes Chesterman: “When people watch films they squirm. I think that the physical act of squirming is one of feeling one’s own body, it is an act of distancing the sensual experience being depicted—a way of feeling your own body and sending messages to the brain.”120 So, the squirm is a way of feeling our own skin in order to pull back from an uncomfortable over-identification with the image of what is happening to someone else; or, as Bennett puts it, squirming “lets us feel the image, but also maintain a tension between self and image.”121 It is a brilliant formulation that opens up an understanding of the intersection of the sensory body, empathy, and images, but ultimately it cannot resolve Caruth’s conundrum of the transactional gap of individual trauma across subjective boundaries. Following Bennett, art theorist Susan Best has also grappled with Caruth’s paradox of how subjective psychological trauma is transacted intersubjectively, in her analyses of Anne Ferran’s Lost to Worlds, a series of photographic images of former sites of incarceration and forced labor for nineteenth-century Australian convict women. Ferran’s photographs capture mostly the erasure of the site of trauma, so convey within their photographic iconography little more than unreadable traces in seemingly empty physical spaces. Many of the images are looking down onto areas of grass, often with the horizon out of frame. Importantly, they do not picture anything that indicates what is historically significant about the site;122 these sites of trauma are “now reduced to suggestive scars on the landscape: soft indentations, mounds, bare patches and stones.”123 Best’s analysis asks what emotional states or affects can be instilled by these works and, citing their downcast perspective and the ground’s disorienting

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undulations, suggests “mixed emotions perhaps: retreat/shrinking away/shame and advance/resistance to shame/maybe even pride.”124 That is, her analysis considers the gestural grammar behind the downcast and upturned gazes of the photographs, which is assumed to belong to the subjective point-of-view of Ferran. As in our own analysis of Quilty’s “traumatic form,” Best argues for an enactment of trauma through a troubling element of undecidability.125 Best then introduces questions raised by Thierry de Duve who, in an interview with Ferran, said that he reads her images as gesturally enacting Ferran’s own shame. Ferran in response acknowledged that to be the case, but added that this subjectivity is mitigated by her identifying with the victim, not the perpetrator, and imaginatively siding with them; de Duve then points out that, sociologically, Ferran is much more aligned with the perpetrators.126 The exchange with de Duve touches on the irresolvable issue of the transactional gap. Are we, the audience, empathically identifying with Ferran through point-of-view? We have argued elsewhere that point-of-view is no guarantee of identification. With whom does Ferran identify, psychologically/imaginatively, bodily, gesturally, sociologically, politically? Best’s analysis concludes, “[w]e cannot bear witness to this past in the usual sense of finally knowing things that were concealed or comprehending things that no one ever wanted to know about, but on the other hand we are engaged by the quest for that history which must, at least visually, elude us.”127 So, as in Bennett’s analysis of Doris Salcedo’s work, while Ferran’s work has the possibility of actively engendering empathic identification through imagined shared perspectives, it does not enable us to live out any specific interpersonal traumatic experience.128 Similarly, as Butler argues in connection with Quilty’s portraits of soldiers suffering PTSD, “commentators claim that [the paintings] offer a real insight into soldiers’ lives, as though through Quilty’s work we might get to know them, their individual lives and struggles,” but yet Quilty provides only the expressive signs of empathy, and ultimately we know nothing of what the solders went through.129 Neither should we expect to, but the Caruthian conflation of the psychological and the cultural is so infused through our understandings of trauma in cultural expression, that it seems an affective transaction should be possible. Kansteiner argues that the fundamental error in Caruth’s formulation of “traumatic form” is that psychological trauma merely functions metaphorically in cultural expressions of trauma.130 Thus, ruptures and failures in representational systems perform a metaphoric trauma, but are somehow not actually traumatic. So, for example, a blank section or an unintelligible string of text in the passage of a book might be understood in terms of traumatic form as the inability to

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articulate a traumatic event, but its indecipherability is merely a metaphor. This aesthetic enacting of non-representation can be used to profound expressive effect, such as by the eighty-two “blancs,” blank spaces in the text in Elie Wiesel’s Night (1958).131 For Wiesel it performed the “unwritten etiquette”132 that the Holocaust cannot be understood and explained, and, importantly, “the feeling that Auschwitz cannot be fully represented,”133 the paradox he faced as a writer: “how is one to speak of it? How is one not to speak of it?”134 Kansteiner says of the Caruthian formulation, while it is appropriate to insist on a troubling element of undecidability in all processes of communication it is neither necessary nor advisable to express this essential dilemma of representation through the metaphor of trauma. Just because trauma is inevitably a problem of representation in memory and communication does not imply the reverse, i.e. that problems of representation are always partaking in the traumatic.135

While psychological trauma may result in the breakdown of intelligibility, which can be articulated through some form of a textual breakdown of legibility, we should not make the mistake of thinking that a breakdown of legibility is traumatic. Breakdowns in legibility can also be the foundation of absurdist humor, for example. Stemming from our interest in art and visual culture, our brief discussion of humanities-based trauma has been around cultural representation and we have elided an entire subcategory within the social sciences concerned with collective and cultural trauma—not because it is not important to the development of trauma studies in the humanities, but rather because of its peripheral relevance to our central argument and of the necessity of brevity. However, there are some points worth mentioning. The social sciences have seen a boom in trauma theory, but have tended to be less accepting of the Caruthian extension of individual psychology into intersubjective, social, and cultural realms. Reflecting on the development of trauma theory in the immediate post-9/11 years, sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander suggests that the field of trauma studies, as it had developed up to that point in 2004, had been distorted by “common sense” understandings of trauma that emerged in everyday language after 9/11.136 As a consequence, a “lay trauma theory” had emerged, against which Alexander, along with Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Stompka sought to argue in their anthology Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (2004).137 Whereas the more hard-line Kansteiner asserts that cultural trauma is merely a metaphor,138 Alexander characterizes cultural trauma as similar to individual

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trauma in leaving “indelible marks upon [people’s] group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways.”139 However, Alexander explicitly departs from the Caruthian approach, dismissing Unclaimed Experience as “the psychoanalytic version of lay trauma theory.”140 As a sociologist, Alexander does not want to blindly apply the psychoanalytic model to a body politic,141 and points out how the character of cultural trauma diverges from Caruth’s model, drawing instead on the much earlier work of Kai Erikson on collective versus individual trauma and their distinctly different manifestations. (Erikson: “collective trauma works its way slowly and even insidiously into the awareness of those who suffer from it, so it does not have the quality of suddenness normally associated with ‘trauma’.”142) Cultural trauma is produced across the body politic, expressed in the social realm, specifically mediated and “composed of images and narratives.”143 As a process, it is social rather than psychological, and is thus open and contestable political ground. Neil J. Smelser argues that, “[n]o discrete historical event or situation automatically or necessarily qualifies in itself as a cultural trauma.”144 That is to say, whereas according to a dissociative understanding of personal psychological trauma an event that holds significance of which I am not yet aware will leave me ripe for traumatic return later, cultural trauma is a conscious, deliberative, and consensual process. A body politic understood as experiencing cultural trauma might well include individuals suffering from psychological trauma—due to an event such as 9/11, collective cultural trauma and individual psychological trauma might both arise. However, cultural trauma arises from a set of social processes quite distinct from psychological trauma. As Allan Meek says, “cultural trauma implies not that everyone in a society had the same experience but that certain events have been given extraordinary status for a society.”145 Smelser likewise argues that whether an event is a cultural trauma is contingent on the sociocultural context of the event; cultural traumas are “historically made, not born.”146 Consequently, he explains, a cultural trauma differs greatly from a psychological trauma in terms of the mechanisms that establish and sustain it. The mechanisms associated with psychological trauma are the intrapsychic dynamics of defense, adaptation, coping, and working through; the mechanisms at the cultural level are mainly those of social agents and contending groups.147

Importantly, cultural traumas are contested social processes: we can debate whether an event was, indeed, traumatic, and to whom; how it is to be interpreted and ascribed meaning; and what feelings should properly arise from it.148

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Regardless of any personal psychological trauma, cultural trauma involves a symbolic act of naming, designating value to, and narrativizing of that event in the public sphere. And, Smelser argues, the outcomes of cultural trauma are quite different from Freud’s individualized idea of “grief work”; cultural traumas do not resolve in a cure that neutralizes the shock, but rather in “constant, recurrent struggle . . . flarings-up when new constellations of new social forces and agents stir up the troubling memory again.”149 Similarly, Friedländer argues that while individual trauma is characterized by its lack of resolution and eventual fading, collective trauma “is mostly integrated into a wider, coherent narrative and thus transformed from a negative and incomprehensible occurrence into a positive and empowering mandate for the community.”150 By 2011, the field of trauma studies in the humanities had expanded across “a remarkably diverse area of research that extends, in different forms, across a wide number of disciplines (cultural studies, literary studies, psychology, neurobiology, sociology, and media and film studies, to name just a few).”151 Yet the humanities fields of creative culture—art, visual culture, literature, media, film studies, performing arts—were most convincingly and thoroughly seduced by the poetic obscurantism of Caruth’s theory. As Anne Rothe notes, Caruth’s model has “become paradigmatic in trauma studies scholarship.”152 Smelser observes that by 2004—only three years after 9/11, which in the glacial pace of academic research is but the blink of an eye—“the study of trauma is by now an industry and its literature is mountainous,”153 and by 2007, many post-9/11 edited volumes and monographs on affect and trauma, which would become seminal texts in the creative humanities, provide expositions of Caruth’s theory of trauma: examples include Karyn Ball’s Traumatising Theory: The Cultural Politics of Affect in and Beyond Psychoanalysis;154 Judith Greenberg’s Trauma at Home: After 9/11;155 and Ulrich Baer’s Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma.156 Two chapters of Clough’s highly influential The Affective Turn (2007) open with indented quotes from Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience.157 As early as 2004, Kansteiner bemoaned that “the trendy celebrations of trauma” arising from Caruth’s work had become ubiquitous,158 and urged theorists to “differentiate between trauma and the culture of trauma, or, put differently, between trauma and entertainment.”159

Traumatainment In the two decades since 9/11, cultural expressions of trauma have become increasingly popularized, which fuels the broader popularity and appeal of

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Quilty’s After Afghanistan paintings. In our own critical evaluation of those works, we have praised how they “ ‘enact’ trauma through a set of aesthetic unportrayals,”160 and how these works of “traumatic form” are, as a result, the “more successful paintings” while Quilty’s attempts to show trauma in an allegorical register, such as by colors spilling from soldier’s heads, are “less-successful.”161 This is to say, we considered the more adroit and sophisticated expressions of trauma to be those that enact or perform a “failure” of the representational system of the art form itself. It is this dramatization of the representational crisis enacted in aesthetic form, contrasted with the impossibility of transacting anything of the actual individual psychological traumatic experience—our “inability to know”—that Rex Butler argues is the most problematic aspect of After Afghanistan, because it fails to deliver what it promises and yet the work is popularly congratulated for making that promise.162 In the conclusion to his article, Butler refers to the broad popularity of Quilty’s war art works, citing a successful public campaign by the Queensland Art Gallery to acquire Sergeant P, After Afghanistan, 2012. “It, as an emblem of the vague and unspecifiable relationship between us, reassures us that we do not have to do anything about the real Sergeant P, do not actually have to get to know him or do anything for him, as long as we help buy his picture.”163 Making a similar point to Butler about “interpassivity,” art blogger Natalie Thomas says that Quilty “replaces tangible action with affective experience, where collectively doing good is replaced with our addiction to feeling good. Or at least feeling less bad. Quilty’s brand of activism is Activism-Lite. All that’s required from us [is] to listen to and learn from his stories about the unique, selfless life he’s enduring for our benefit.”164 Butler suggests that the much lauded “ability to enter into an empathetic relationship with these soldiers” through these works is, in essence, more about the performance of empathy (“the signs of empathy”)165 than any actual empathic connection to the soldier-sitters or their trauma.166 Butler’s objection is that this masks the more subtle and tacit acceptance of the broader political context that put these soldiers in Afghanistan at all,167 a point that Joanna Bourke makes more generally about current war art from the trauma perspective in her “Introduction” to War and Art: she speaks of “the problem that, too often, audiences of war art are drawn into witnessing the corporeal suffering of victims, stripped of the structural factors that made the violence possible.”168 Thomas points out that the national tour of After Afghanistan is sponsored by defence contractor Thales, and this is feasible because, she suggests, Quilty’s emphasis on individual suffering and mateship diverts attention from more critical political questions.169 It is in a similar vein that Butler argues that After Afghanistan

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Figure 1.3 Sergeant P, After Afghanistan, 2012, by Ben Quilty, in the collection of QAG/GOMA, Brisbane, Queensland. © Black Dog Management 2012. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

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accords with the “wider ideology of our time,” by gesturing toward empathy and the micropolitics of the individual, identity, and trauma, while sidestepping glaring contentious political questions around Australia’s complicity in America’s War on Terror in Afghanistan.170 Netflix’s release of Hannah Gadsby’s live stand-up comedy special Nanette was met with international critical praise on a par with the glowing Australian reception of Quilty’s After Afghanistan. Since the 1990s, Gadsby has gained considerable celebrity in Australia as a stand-up comedian and occasional commentator on art (she has a degree in art history) and she is, incidentally, a friend of Quilty’s. Over the years, Gadsby’s comedy has played off her identity as a lesbian, often relying on self-deprecating humor. However, in Nanette Gadsby attacks the notion of self-deprecating humor as a falsification of the reality of experience. As Gadsby explains during the show, stand-up comedy is based on a two-part formula, a set-up and a punch line, whereas proper stories have three parts, a beginning, middle, and end. When a story is made into a joke it often becomes truncated, with its ending removed. This, says Gadsby, tends to happen at its “trauma point,” the point at which the joke can only be funny if its trauma is repressed. Nanette’s one-hour duration pivots on a rupture that occurs around half-way through, when Gadsby returns to some of her own jokes delivered in the first half of the show, but “starts breaking the rules. She deconstructs the jokes she told in the first half, rendering them unfunny.”171 Gadsby reveals that she felt the need to trim and repress the actual trauma of the experiences that founded the jokes—the traumas of growing up lesbian in conservative Tasmania where homosexuality was illegal until 1997, her residual but enduring sense of self-loathing and shame that prevented her from coming out to her grandmother before she died, and her long-term response to being victim of a violent homophobic assault and rape. In talking about trauma, Gadsby talks through trauma, enacting “traumatic form” in a number of ways. One review of Nanette declares that the “most radical thing Hannah Gadsby does in Nanette is simple: She stops being funny.”172 Gadsby draws on a Brechtian self-referentiality, calling out not only the form that she is breaking, but the way in which she is breaking it. A comedian creates tension, and then releases it with the punchline—a skill she says she is very good at. But near the end, as she reveals the most confronting of violent assaults (“he beat the shit out of me, and nobody stopped him”; “It was two men who raped me when I was barely in my twenties”),173 Gadsby’s voice breaks in anger and the auditorium of the Sydney Opera House falls silent. At that moment, Gadsby refuses to break the tension: “And this tension, it’s yours. I am not helping you anymore. You need to learn what this feels like because

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this . . . this tension is what not-normals carry inside of them all of the time because it is dangerous to be different!” The raw and powerful affect of this moment is what makes it “radical,” “transformative,” and a “game changer.”174 In her final gestural traumatic rupture of her medium, Gadsby announces, “[t]he damage done to me is real and debilitating. I will never flourish. But this is why. . . I must quit comedy.”175 Ultimately, it is Gadsby’s control of the affect of an entire auditorium which many critics have praised.176 Nanette withholds the traditional emotions of comedy—particularly joy and surprise—suspending them with distress, shame, and anger. She says, “this is theatre, fellas. I’ve given you an hour, a taste.”177 As Yasmin Nair says, “Nanette is not a spontaneous event filmed by startled onlookers holding up their phones to record it as it unravelled in public. It is a carefully crafted performance . . . In that sense, it is both a performance of authenticity, and a work of authentic performativity.”178 Arguably, it is in this performance of trauma—trauma as a representational rupture of form in the cultural realm, articulated in the register of affective intensity—that both Nanette and After Afghanistan operate. There are some clear dissimilarities between Quilty’s After Afghanistan and Gadsby’s Nanette, not least that Gadsby focuses on her own trauma, while Quilty stands more as an intermediary for the trauma of others. The lauded artistic value in both is the skilful command of the affective dimension within the confines of the show, the adept performance of trauma as an aesthetic value. However, it remains that we may be affected emotionally by the intensity of the extra-linguistic viscerality of Gadsby’s performance, her tears and breaking voice, but we cannot know Gadsby’s trauma through Nanette, and we cannot know either Quilty’s experience or the trauma of the soldiers returned from Afghanistan. The point here is not that we demand a more and more authentic sense of trauma, more intense emotionality, more affecting performance, that we want a greater empathic connection to more authentically feel the pain. Rather it is that, as a cultural form, trauma will at most only ever convey affect or emotional intensity, never the nature of the trauma itself. Trauma as a creative, artistic, cultural trope has well and truly entered the mainstream, and with it the ante is raised on the affective intensity of its performance. Sasha Grishin, in his review of the 2019 Quilty retrospective, realizes this situation. “The ‘en masse’ emotional pitch of Quilty’s exhibition, after a while, loses its ability to shock . . . the works scream at you from the walls, proclaiming . . . urgency, passion and raw emotion.”179 As we will see at various points during the following chapters, we live in times when being “triggered” to feel trauma, emotion, and affect is the way

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our world does politics; trauma and affect are central to the “ideology of our times.” Politics twenty years after 9/11 is deadlocked in feverish exaltations of trauma and emotion, while Enlightenment values of reason and objectivity wither. Thirty years ago, the most critically-lauded art was that which deployed ironic quotation, to comment on the untethered signifier in the saturated image culture of late twentieth century consumer capitalism. The most praised humor, for example the television show Seinfeld, was that which rendered ironic the meaninglessness of the everyday by monumentalizing the trivial and quotidian. Could it be that trauma is the new ride? In a metaphorical house of horrors, with ruptures and surprises, glimpses of raw horror, the sophisticated dramatization of pain, moving floors that undermine our sure-footedness, maybe we can feel moments of genuine emotion—then step back into the daylight and praise the special effects. In terms of contemporary art that addresses war, terror, and political violence, the war-artist-as-trauma-artist trope tends to direct the frame through which the work of other artists, dealing with the same topic but in different ways, are understood. Michael Armstrong, a contemporary artist who has also been an active soldier in the Australian Army since 1998, serving in Afghanistan, Iraq,

Figure 1.4 Relics of Decay, 2016, by Michael Armstrong. © Michael Armstrong 2016. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

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and Timor Leste, creates works that address the difference and sometimes incommensurability between military and civilian culture. In Relics of Decay (2016), 239 blades of the kind he carried in Afghanistan are suspended in uniform rows from wire lines in formation. “The blade had become a metaphor in my art practice for both soldier and soldiering, a relic of service that in its design struggled to find a useful purpose in a ‘post war’ environment.”180 Armstrong has found that the popularity of Quilty’s work sometimes skews the reading of his own. “This focus on trauma, as is evident in the work produced by Ben Quilty in 2011 under the auspices of the Official War Artist scheme, threatens to dominate the reading of my own works.”181 In addition to their overdetermination, Armstrong sees the trauma-based readings as potentially limiting as war art that is more celebratory and used as a nation-building propaganda tool. His concern is similar to those raised by Butler and Bourke, that responses to his work based in affective responses to trauma may detract from the more structural political context. He says, reiterating Bourke, “[t]hough the construct of the soldier as a survivor of trauma appeals to artists because of its potential to act as ‘the perfect conduit to that past,’ the consumption of war art of this type ‘might simply lead to declarations of horror, rather than any deeper political response’.”182 In the next chapter, we will unpack this idea and consider the affect side of the affect–trauma paradigm, its relation to politics, and its weaponization in today’s contemporary art addressing war.

Notes 1 Except perhaps for winning the 2014 Prudential Eye Award, leading to a solo exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London that same year; see Kit Messham-Muir, “Ben Quilty at the Saatchi Gallery . . . Things Just Got Interesting,” The Conversation, July 9, 2014, 6:16 a.m. AEST, accessed January 23, 2020, https://theconversation.com /ben-quilty-at-the-saatchi-gallery-things-just-got-interesting-28903. 2 Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, “The Canonisation of Quilty,” Running Dog, accessed January 28, 2020, http://rundog.art/the-canonisation-of-quilty/. 3 Rebecca Freezer, “Quilty: Rebecca Freezer, ‘Quilty’,” Artlink (May 16, 2019), accessed June 28, 2019, https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/4755/quilty/. 4 Georgina Safe, “A Ben Quilty Retrospective Opens at the Art Gallery of New South Wales Today,” Broadsheet, November 8, 2019, accessed January 28, 2020, https://www. broadsheet.com.au/sydney/art-and-design/article/ben-quilty-retrospective-opensart-gallery-new-south-wales-today. 5 Freezer, “Quilty.”

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6 Anna Zagala, “What Ben Quilty Offers Us,” Art Monthly Australasia no. 321 (Summer 2019): 64. 7 Lisa Slade, quoted in Brook Turner, “Ben Quilty on the Burden of Being Australia’s Artist from Central Casting,” The Good Weekend, February 23, 2019, 17. 8 Ben Quilty, in Kit Messham-Muir, “Interview with Ben Quilty, Artist, Robertson, Australia, 26 January 2013,” StudioCrasher (February 7, 2013), accessed January 28, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j606Xg1j8zs&t=3238s. 9 Quilty, in Messham-Muir, “Interview with Ben Quilty.” 10 Turner, “Ben Quilty on the Burden of Being Australia’s Artist from Central Casting,” 18. 11 “Quilty—Jan Murphy Gallery,” Jan Murphy Gallery, Fortitude Valley, 2019, accessed January 24, 2020, https://www.janmurphygallery.com.au/artist/ben-quilty/. 12 Zagala, “What Ben Quilty Offers Us,” 64. 13 Katya Wachtel, “The Evolution of Ben Quilty,” Broadsheet, January 29, 2015, accessed January 24, 2020, https://www.broadsheet.com.au/melbourne/art-and-design/article/ evolution-ben-quilty. 14 Art Gallery of New South Wales, “Ben Quilty,” Archibald Prize 2012, accessed May 30, 2017, https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/archibald/2012/29238/. 15 We have described this work elsewhere, in Kit Messham-Muir, “Conflict, Complicity and Ben Quilty’s after Afghanistan Portraits,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art vol. 18, no. 1 (2018): 81. 16 Art Gallery of New South Wales, “Ben Quilty.” 17 Captain S, in ABC TV, “War Paint—Transcript. Program Transcript: Monday, 3 September, 2012,” accessed May 30, 2017, http://www.abc.net.au/austory/ content/2012/s3581736.htm. 18 Aby Warburg, “Durer and Italian Antiquity,” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 553. 19 Art Gallery of New South Wales, “Ben Quilty.” 20 Kathryn Robinson, “Interview with Ben Quilty and Kate Porter: Meet the Press Interviews Australian Artist Ben Quilty and His Subject Australian Army Captain Kate Porter about Their Experiences Working Together,” Meet the Press, February 24 (Melbourne: TEN, 2013), accessed June 15, 2017, http://search.informit.com.au. dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/documentSummary;dn=TEV20130902101;res=TVNEWS. 21 Messham-Muir, “Conflict, Complicity and Ben Quilty’s after Afghanistan Portraits,” 81. 22 Ibid., 84. 23 Annika Blau, “Chart of the Day: The Complex Link between Defence and Suicide,” ABC News, April 24, 2019, 6:04 p.m., accessed February 2, 2020, https://www.abc.net. au/news/2019-04-24/anzac-day-surprising-truth-veteran-suicides-mentalhealth/10772720.

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24 “National Suicide Monitoring of Serving and Ex-serving Australian Defence Force Personnel: 2019,” Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, November 29, 2019, accessed February 2, 2020, https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/veterans/nationalveteran-suicide-monitoring/contents/comparing-suicide-rates-2002-to-2016. 25 Rex Butler, “Ben Quilty: The Fog of War,” Intellectual History Review vol. 27, no. 3 (2017): 442–443. 26 Freezer, “Quilty.” 27 Ralph Brody, “Quilty, Art Gallery of South Australia,” Tulpa Magazine, May 6, 2019, accessed January 24, 2020, https://tulpamagazine.com/2019/05/06/quilty-art-galleryof-south-australia/. 28 Michael Desmond, “Blood and Landscape: Ben Quilty in Afghanistan and at Home,” Broadsheet vol. 43, no. 1 (2014): 36. 29 Kathleen Linn, “Ben Quilty: After Afghanistan,” Visual ArtsHub, Wednesday, March 6, 2013, accessed January 24, 2020, https://visual.artshub.com.au/newsarticle/reviews/visual-arts/kathleen-linn/ben-quilty-after-afghanistan-194488. 30 Rex Butler, “Ben Quilty: The Fog of War,” Finest Art Seminar Series Tonight (FASST), Inaugural Seminar, April 14, 2015, Part II, Panoptic Press (June 24, 2015), accessed May 26, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr3ie4DT1qg. 31 Butler, “Ben Quilty: The Fog of War,” 441–442. 32 Francis Russell, “Quilty at GOMA, 2019,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, Special Issue: War, Art and Visual Culture, vol. 20, no. 1 (2020): 144. 33 Freezer, “Quilty”; Francis Russell, “Quilty at GOMA, 2019,” 144. 34 Linn, “Ben Quilty: After Afghanistan.” 35 Steve Proposch, “Ben Quilty: Spoils of War,” Trouble Magazine, February 2, 2016, accessed January 24, 2020, http://www.troublemag.com/ben-quilty-spoils-of-war/. 36 John McDonald, “Soldiers Laid Bare,” The Sydney Morning Herald, March 9, 2013, 3:00 a.m., accessed January 22, 2020, https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/ art-and-design/soldiers-laid-bare-20130306-2flim.html. 37 McDonald, “Soldiers Laid Bare.” 38 Makani Luske, “A Soldier’s Mirror,” Write About Art no. 5 (2015), accessed June 9, 2017, http://www.eyelinepublishing.com/write-about-art-5/article/soldiers-mirror. 39 Butler, “Ben Quilty: The Fog of War,” 442. Butler’s emphasis. 40 Justin Paton, quoted in “Ben Quilty: Painting the Shadows,” ABC TV, 2019, accessed January 31, 2020, https://iview.abc.net.au/show/quilty-painting-the-shadows/video/ AC1903H001S00. 41 “Ben Quilty: Painting the Shadows,” ABC TV, 2019, accessed January 31, 2020, https://iview.abc.net.au/show/quilty-painting-the-shadows/video/AC1903H001S00. 42 Cheung, “The Canonisation of Quilty.”. 43 Butler, “Ben Quilty,” 449. 44 Ibid., 443.

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Ibid., 449. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 332. Butler, “Ben Quilty: The Fog of War,” 442. Laura Brandon, “Cause and Affect War Art and Emotion,” Canadian Military History vol. 21, no. 1 (2015); Catherine Speck, “Meditations on Loss: Hilda Rix Nicholas’s War,” Artist Profile (March 2015), accessed September 12, 2019, https://www.artlink. com.au/articles/4279/meditations-on-loss-hilda-rix-nicholass-war/; Joanna Bourke, “Introduction,” in War and Art, ed. Joanna Bourke (London: Reaktion Books, 2017), 7–41. Anthony McCosker, Intensive Media: Aversive Affect and Visual Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 26. Bourke, “Introduction,” 7. Ibid. “Exhibition, The Disasters of War 1800–2014 from May 28, 2014 to October 6, 2014,” The Louvre, Paris, 2014, accessed January 23, 2020, https://www.louvre.fr/en/ expositions/disasters-war1800-2014. Ronak K. Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 1. Judith Butler, “Introduction to the Paperback,” in Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2010), xiii. Ruth Leys, The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Ruth Leys, “Trauma and the Turn to Affect,” Cross/Cultures no. 153 (2012): 3. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 3. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Wulf Kansteiner, “Genealogy of a Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor,” Rethinking History vol. 8, no. 2 (2004): 203. Ibid., 203. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4. Roger Luckhurst, “Introduction,” in The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008), 4. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992). Orbis Holding Information, Yale Univeristy, accessed March 20, 2019, https://orbis. library.yale.edu/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=616342. Our Story—Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University. E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 35.

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78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

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Images of War in Contemporary Art Ibid. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 5. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 4. Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Ernst van Alphen, “Symptons of Discursivity: Experience, Memory, and Trauma,” in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Dartmouth: University Press of New England, 1998), 24–38. Although Kaplan argues that Caruth’s understanding of trauma as essentially disassociative actually derives from the dominant definition of the American Psychiatric Association’s 1994 Diagnostic Manual. Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 34–35. Gregory Bistoen, Stijn Vanheule, and Stef Craps, “Nachträglichkeit: A Freudian Perspective on Delayed Traumatic Reactions,” Theory and Psychology vol. 24, no. 5 (2014): 668. Frank Seeburger, “The Trauma of Philosophy,” in Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture, eds. Yochai Ataria, David Gurevitz, Haviva Pedaya, and Yuval Neria (Cham: Springer, 2016), 168. Kansteiner, “Genealogy of a Category Mistake,” 203. Ibid. Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 16. Ibid., 63. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 24. Griselda Pollock, “Art/Trauma/Representation,” Parallax vol. 15, no. 1 (2009): 44n. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 44. Leys, “Trauma and the Turn to Affect,” 4–5. Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture, eds. Yochai Ataria, David Gurevitz, Haviva Pedaya, and Yuval Neria (Cham: Springer, 2016). Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008), 1–12. Lucy Bond, “Compromised Critique: A Meta-critical Analysis of American Studies after 9/11,” Journal of American Studies vol. 45, no. 4 (2011): 733–756. Leys, The Ascent of Affect; Leys, “Trauma and the Turn to Affect”; Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry vol. 37, no. 3 (Spring 2011). Antonio Traverso and Mick Broderick, “Interrogating Trauma: Towards a Critical Trauma Studies,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies vol. 24, no. 1 (2010): 4. Susannah Radstone, “Reconceiving Binaries: The Limits of Memory,” History Workshop Journal no. 59 (Spring 2005): 137.

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Kansteiner, “Genealogy of a Category Mistake,” 208. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 19–24. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 20. Ibid. Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 45. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Ibid., 16. Pollock, “Art/Trauma/Representation,” 52. Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 23. Meera Atkinson, “Channeling the Specter and Translating Phantoms: Hauntology and the Spooked Text,” in Traumatic Affect, eds. Meera Atkinson and Michael Richardson (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 258. Meera Atkinson and Michael Richardson, “Introduction: At the Nexus,” in Traumatic Affect, eds. Meera Atkinson and Michael Richardson (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 6. Jill Bennett, Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affects and Art after 9/11 (London: IB Tauris, 2012), 23. Bennett, Empathic Vision, 40. Ibid., 6, original emphasis. Ibid. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 82. Ibid. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 65, original emphasis. Ibid. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 42. Ibid. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 42. Susan Best, Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 61. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 61

62 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133

134 135 136

137 138 139 140 141 142 143

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Images of War in Contemporary Art Ibid., 66. Ibid., 66. Ibid., 73. Bennett, Empathic Vision, 65, original emphasis. Butler, “Ben Quilty,” 443. Kansteiner, “Genealogy of a Category Mistake,” 205. Simon P. Sibelman, Silence in the Novels of Elie Wiesel (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995), 33. Edward Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 4. Franz van Peperstratten, “Figure, Law, Silence: ‘Auschwitz’ and the Crisis of Representation,” in Contemporary Portrayals of Auschwitz, eds. Alan Rosenberg, James R. Watson, and Detlef Link (New York: Humanity Books, 2000), 303. Elie Wiesel, Legends of Our Time (New York: Holt, Reinhart, & Winston, 1968), 36. Kansteiner, “Genealogy of a Category Mistake,” 205. Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 2. Ibid. Kansteiner, “Genealogy of a Category Mistake,” 193–221. Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” 1. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 27n. Kai Erikson, quoted in Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” 4. Allan Meek, “Cultural Trauma and the Media,” in Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture, eds. Yochai Ataria, David Gurevitz, Haviva Pedaya, and Yuval Neria (Cham: Springer, 2016), 30. Neil J. Smelser, “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, eds. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 35. Allan Meek, “Cultural Trauma and the Media”, 29. Smelser, “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma,” 37. Ibid., 38–39. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 42. Saul Friedländer, “Some Reflections on Transmitting the Memory of the Holocaust and Its Implications, Particularly in Israel,” in Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture, eds. Yochai Ataria, David Gurevitz, Haviva Pedaya, and Yuval Neria (Cham: Springer, 2016), 318.

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151 Bond, “Compromised Critique: A Meta-critical Analysis of American Studies after 9/11,” 739. 152 Anne Rothe, “Popular Trauma Culture: The Pain of Others between Holocaust Tropes and Kitsch-Sentimental Melodrama,” in Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture. eds. Yochai Ataria, David Gurevitz, Haviva Pedaya, and Yuval Neria (Cham: Springer, 2016), 168n. 153 Smelser, “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma,” 31. 154 Karyn Ball and Angela Facundo, “Introduction,” in Traumatising Theory: The Cultural Politics of Affect in and beyond Psychoanalysis, ed. Karyn Ball (New York: Other Press, 2007), 32–35. 155 Judith Greenberg (ed.), Trauma at Home: After 9/11 (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 148 156 Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 8–9. 157 Hosu Kim, “The Parched Tongue,” in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, eds. Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean Halley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 34; Grace M. Cho, “Voices from the Tuem: Synesthetic Trauma and the Ghosts of the Korean Diaspora,” in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, eds. Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean Halley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 151. 158 Kansteiner, “Genealogy of a Category Mistake,” 208. 159 Ibid., 195. 160 Messham-Muir, “Conflict, Complicity and Ben Quilty’s After Afghanistan Portraits,” 81. 161 Ibid., 83. 162 Rex Butler, “Ben Quilty: The Fog of War,” 449. 163 Ibid. 164 Natalie Thomas, “Quilty: Sit Down Bitch. Be Humble,” Natty Solo, accessed February 16, 2020, https://nattysolo.com/2019/05/11/quilty-sit-down-bitch-behumble/. 165 Butler, “Ben Quilty: The Fog of War,” 449. 166 Ibid., 442. 167 Ibid., 443. 168 Bourke, “Introduction,” 33. 169 Natalie Thomas, “Quilty: Sit Down Bitch. Be Humble.” 170 Butler, “Ben Quilty: The Fog of War,” 442. 171 Chris Rattan, “TV Review: Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette Isn’t Genius—It’s Something Else Entirely: Australian Comedian’s Netflix Special Is a Game Changer,” Toronto Now, June 28, 2018, 3:49 p.m., accessed February 11, 2020, https://nowtoronto.com/ movies/reviews/netflix-hannah-gadsby-nanette/.

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172 Sophie Gilbert, “Nanette Is a Radical, Transformative Work of Comedy,” The Atlantic, June 27, 2018, accessed February 11, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ entertainment/archive/2018/06/nanette-is-a-radical-brilliant-work-ofcomedy/563732/. 173 Hannah Gadsby, quoted in “Hannah Gadsby: Nanette (2018)—Full Transcript,” Scraps from the Loft, July 21, 2018, accessed February 11, 2020, https:// scrapsfromtheloft.com/2018/07/21/hannah-gadsby-nanette-transcript/. 174 Gilbert, “Nanette Is a Radical, Transformative Work of Comedy”; Chris Rattan, “TV Review: Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette Isn’t Genius.” 175 Hannah Gadsby, quoted in “Hannah Gadsby: Nanette (2018)—Full Transcript.” 176 Gilbert, “Nanette Is a Radical, Transformative Work of Comedy”; Andrew Kahn, “Stand-up Tragedy: Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette Shows How Comedy Is Broken, and Leaves Us to Pick up the Pieces,” Slate, July 11, 2018, 10:49 a.m., accessed February 11, 2020, https://slate.com/culture/2018/07/hannah-gadsbys-netflix-specialnanette-is-powerful-anti-comedy.html; Moira Donegan, “The Comedian Forcing Stand-up to Confront the #MeToo Era,” The New Yorker, June 28, 2018, accessed February 11, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/thecomedian-forcing-stand-up-to-confront-the-metoo-era; Chris Rattan, “TV Review: Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette Isn’t Genius”; Annaliese Griffin, “Hannah Gadsby Rewrites the Way We Tell Jokes in ‘Nanette’,” Quartz, June 27, 2018, accessed February 11, 2020, https://quartzy.qz.com/quartzy/1315843/hannah-gadsbysnannette-is-an-incisive-deconstruction-of-comedy/. 177 Hannah Gadsby, quoted in “Hannah Gadsby: Nanette (2018)—Full Transcript.” 178 Yasmin Nair, “Your Trauma Is Your Passport: Hannah Gadsby, Nanette, and Global Citizenship,” Yasmin Nair, November 20, 2018, accessed February 11, 2020, http:// www.yasminnair.net/content/your-trauma-your-passport-hannah-gadsby-nanetteand-global-citizenship. 179 Sasha Grishin, “A Noisy, Passionate Show from an Artist in a Hurry, Quilty Has Just One Emotional Pitch,” The Conversation, March 6, 2019, 6:15 a.m. AEDT, accessed February 11, 2020, https://theconversation. com/a-noisy-passionate-show-from-an-artist-in-a-hurry-quilty-has-just-oneemotional-pitch-112943. 180 Michael Armstrong, “The Soldier as Artist: Memories of War,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Artistic and Cultural Responses to War since 1914: The British Isles, the United States and Australasia, eds. Martin Kerby, Margaret Baguley, and Janet McDonald (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 163–80, 172. 181 Ibid., 164–165. 182 Armstrong, “The Soldier as Artist,” 165; including quotes from Bourke, “Introduction,” 33.

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Weaponizing Affect

In August 2019, six months before a coronavirus pandemic would rapidly evolve the global culture wars in new directions, a much smaller culture battle was breaking out in the contemporary art scene of the tropical north city of Mackay, Queensland, Australia. A group exhibition titled Violent Salt opened in Artspace Mackay and was planned to tour the east coast of Australia until mid-2021. The exhibition, curated by Yhonnie Scarce and Claire Watson, brought together artists from a range of different cultural heritages and, as the curators’ catalog introduction states, reflected “on the experiences of the marginalized, the underrepresented and the silenced,” inviting the artists “to speak the truths about these experiences.”1 The majority of the artists were Indigenous Australians, with the exception of Abdul Abdullah, who included two works in the exhibition.2 These works, both created in 2017, are images embroidered onto black fabric, approximately 126 × 110 millimeters. Each depicts the upper body of a male soldier in contemporary military service uniform, including helmet, radio equipment, and dark glasses. The titles are phrases from Australia’s national anthem, Advance Australia Fair. All Let Us Rejoice is rendered mostly in shades of blue, while For We Are Young and Free is rendered in mauves and pinks.3 In both works, the fairly generic images of soldiers are overlaid with the even more generic iconography of a smiling emoji, large and round, depicted in roughly rendered lines with gradations of red and yellow, respectively. The exhibition’s run was unremarkable, until two months after it opened when it attracted a torrent of outrage from Martin Bella, a sitting member of Mackay’s local council. The councilor posted a photograph of the works and of a section of its didactic panel on his publicly available Facebook page on October 30, 2019. Today I was shocked and disgusted to find that our council contributed to an art exhibition that contained a certain work . . . It is a defaced image of our serving soldiers but it is only when you read the accompanying blurb that you realise just how disrespectful it is . . . If those men and women go overseas on our behalf the least we can do is have their backs.4 65

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Figure 2.1 All Let Us Rejoice, 2017, by Abdul Abdullah. © Abdul Abdullah 2017. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

Bella’s photo of the text panel focused on a section on identity: “The works are not about the specific identity of any one soldier, but about what that soldier represents, and how those collective actions relate to the national identity. What does our liberty mean, when our surrogates are explicitly involved in illiberal, destructive actions in other places?” The stream of comments in response to Bella’s post responded with similar anger and disgust. Some repeated the usual tropes around the works themselves as art and how a child could have done

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Figure 2.2 For We Are Young and Free, 2017, by Abdul Abdullah. © Abdul Abdullah 2017. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

better, but many more expressed outrage at Abdullah’s Muslim background. “Abdul Abdulla, says it all, fucking tosser”;5 “The artist’s name is Abdul Abdullah. Kind of explains everything”;6 “notice the ‘artists’[sic] name? Nuff said . . .”;7 “The name says it all. Disgraceful!”;8 “Look at the ‘artist’s’ name. He clearly supports Islamic fundamentalism since our boys have been the undoing of the Taliban, etc”;9 “If he went back to wherever he is from and did this to one of that countries [sic] own he’d more than likely be beheaded.”10 After two decades of unchecked

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Islamophobia in Australia, it is perhaps unsurprising to read so many comments decrying Abdullah’s name and Muslim heritage. Amongst the reactionary fury was also a more compassionate and empathic concern for the feelings of serving Australian soldiers and veterans, particularly soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Bella wrote in response to a comment, “we have a crisis with serving and ex-serving personnel suiciding. I do not give two damns about bloody art but I care about these men and women. If you cannot see that I pity anyone around you. Your empathy gland is non-functional.”11 Due to Bella’s Facebook post, Abdullah’s work attracted the attention of the Returned and Services League (RSL), a national veterans organization, as well as the Patriots motorcycle group, who met with Mackay’s mayor to lobby to close the exhibition. George Christensen, National Party Member of the federal House of Representatives, also lent his weight to Bella’s argument. Initially, Mayor Greg Williamson defended the artwork according to the principle of free speech, but eventually he decided to have Abdullah’s works removed from the local government funded space, citing “a serious issue with veterans’ health and wellbeing in Australia at the moment.” Similarly, the RSL cited the mental health of local servicemen and women to be at risk owing to Abdullah’s work.12 A closer look at the work, however, reveals very little to suggest that the images relate in any way to PTSD. The images of the soldiers are generic; were it not for the didactic panel, there is otherwise nothing specific to Australian soldiers in the works. Unlike Quilty’s After Afghanistan portraits, these are not identifiable and specific people; their faces and gestures portray no anguish. It seems that their interpretation as specifically traumatized soldiers hinges on the smiling emojis and, in turn, on reading them as ridicule in reference to Abdullah’s subject position as Muslim. The name says it all. Disgraceful! The suggestion is never far from the surface in the comments: Abdullah is a Muslim, and from his natural position outside a narrowly conceived ethnonationalist Australian body politic, he is laughing at “our” traumatized veterans when, of course, “making a joke of Australian soldiers is despicable.”13 Abdullah’s work, read as ridiculing traumatized soldiers, would be nothing short of a callous and unconscionable act of cruelty, a potentially sociopathic infraction akin perhaps to walking into a gallery that was exhibiting Quilty’s After Afghanistan paintings and laughing heartily at the anguished portraits of soldiers. What could it mean for such a thing to happen? Could it be an act of cultural terrorism, using trauma and affect as its weapon? This transgression is, in essence, what Abdullah is imagined to have committed in Mackay in 2019.

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With this chapter we profess an urgency to bracket-off affect theory in contemporary art, to place it in a wider historical context, and to outline the ways in which it has become established in the first two decades of the twentyfirst century as the predominant frame through which we understand and interpret art that addresses war and terror. We begin the chapter with this recent controversy as a counterpoint to Chapter 1, which sketched the historical rise of trauma in humanities and art theory. In this chapter, we address the second strand of the double helix of the affect–trauma paradigm. The point of starting with the Abdullah controversy is not to resolve this one incident; rather, it has two illustrative purposes. Firstly, this incident demonstrates the way in which trauma and affect function as a default frame through which many now view contemporary war art; secondly, it exemplifies the extent to which ideas around trauma and affect have become naturalized beyond contemporary art. Our aim here goes well beyond this storm in an Aussie teacup. Like trauma theory in the humanities, affect theory expanded rapidly as a field of enquiry following 9/11, emerging as an intriguing new way to understand the intensity we feel when we see images like those delivered live on our TV screens that day in 2001. In the twenty years since, affect theory has evolved to be assumed as a powerful political force at the heart of contemporary art and many forms of visual culture. Amongst other uses, it is to be mobilized against the moral and ethical indefensibility of war, terror, and political violence. We live in the age of “affect politics,” when monumental democratic decisions are driven primarily by emotion, and cognitive reason is effectively overruled by feeling and emotion. In their edited volume Affective Societies (2019), Jan Slaby and Christian von Scheve accurately state that affect and emotion “have come to dominate discourse on social and political life at the beginning of the 21st century. In politics, the rise of populism and new styles of political contestation are frequently described with reference to their emotionalizing and affectively polarizing qualities.”14 The first two decades of the twenty-first century have been times of heightened public emotion—horrific images of 9/11 and of gutwrenching torture and terror, dread of a global war, democratic elections based on hate, fear, and confusion, the outcome of the US Presidential election mired in disinformation and unfounded conspiracy theories of rigging and electoral fraud, alarm fueled by a fast-moving global pandemic, panic buying, panic selling, anxiety, grief, hope and relief with the distribution of vaccines. History has always had an emotional dimension, but the great difference is that our present times possess what Slaby and von Scheve describe as “this current ‘emotional reflexivity’—the tendency to understand and portray the social world

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in terms of feelings and emotions.”15 Humanities theories of trauma (see Chapter 1) and theories of affect have played an active and increasingly dominant role during these emotional times. In 2016 and 2017, the Journal of Curatorial Studies published two special issues, “Museums and Affect” and “Affect and Relationality,”16 to which the authors of this book contributed.17 Marking the publication of the second issue, Whitechapel Gallery in London held Affect and Curating: Feeling the Curatorial, which brought together curators, sociologists, and theorists “to consider how museums, galleries, art world events and artworks function as sites for the transmission of affects.”18 The key questions the panel sought to ask were, “What is the feeling of an exhibition?” and “How do curators deploy, stimulate and mobilize emotional states?” In a short article in Frieze, titled “The Trouble with ‘Affect Theory’ in our Age of Outrage” and published just months before the Abdul Abdullah controversy, Susanne von Falkenhausen explicates her response. When I read this [the key questions for the panel], my feeling (or affect) of aggression raises its unreasonable head. I do not want my emotional states deployed, mobilized and stimulated. They are active anyway, just being alive. I do not want them controlled and capitalized—by anybody. Why is it ignored that the mobilization of affect is part and parcel not only of advertisement but of political populism and other forms of taking people for fools? How can affect possibly be thought of as a politically subversive, critical force?19

Contemporary art and art theory have arrived at a point at which affect is understood as so much more than an analytical tool for understanding the emotional dimension of images—also it is understood as a method of artistic aesthetic intervention. This is a shift away from affect as a speculative tool of interpretation and toward affect as a way of doing politics. It is this instrumentalization—or rather, this weaponization of affect—that we authors ultimately question.

Art Theory’s Affective Turn The turn to affect originated as a generational turning-away from the prevailing poststructuralist paradigm that had emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and that, by the 1980s, dominated cultural theory. As a field of inquiry, poststructuralism represents a diverse and highly nuanced set of ideas; but it could be generally characterized as a cross-disciplinary assault on the humanist foundations of

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Enlightenment thinking, on ideas of an autonomous human self that negotiates a world of natural structures and forces. Instead, poststructuralist thinking tends to regard all aspects of human culture as the result of social forces, constructed through discursive means, principally language. In the most over-simplistic terms perhaps, in much poststructuralist thinking, the self and the world it understands are ultimately constructed socially in language. After it emerged as a radical branch of philosophy in post-May 1968 Paris, poststructuralism became enmeshed within the very fabric of the humanities during the 1980s and early 1990s. Because of poststructuralism’s emergence from structural linguistics (C.S. Peirce: “All thought, therefore, must necessarily be in signs”),20 semiotics provided its principal model for thinking about the world and, in turn, conceiving of all mediums of communication as “texts.” Yet, in the political realities of the late 1980s the poststructuralist paradigm no longer seemed fit for purpose. Hal Foster’s Return of the Real (1996) talks about the “dissatisfaction with the textualist [semiotic] model of culture” in the times of the AIDS crisis, disease, death, poverty, and the destruction of the welfare state.21 Within this context, art in America was thrown into the “firestorms over funding and censorship” that came to be known as the Culture Wars of 198922 and were sparked by controversy around Andre Serrano’s Piss Christ, a photographic art work depicting a crucifix immersed in urine.23 This scandal was followed closely by Corcoran Gallery’s cancellation of a major Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective in Washington, DC.24 In the immediate months following the Serrano and Mapplethorpe controversies, art theorists and critics grappled in their conceptual toolboxes for a way to respond, no longer convinced that semiotics was up to the task of revealing anything about the primacy of the embodied and emotional responses to art in the actual world. This led to a brief, fashionable interest in art theory and criticism in Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), with its psychoanalytic pre-subjective twist on “the semiotic.”25 This return to the body in art led to major exhibitions like the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1993 Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art,26 the 1997–1999 Saatchi Sensation exhibition in London, Berlin, and Brooklyn,27 and the 1997 Body exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.28 Foster’s Return of the Real is a clear textualist rebuttal to the “infantilism” of “the abject artist (like Andres Serrano)”;29 but also to the emergence of a tendency across art, theory, and popular culture “to redefine experience, individual and historical, in terms of trauma,” thus guaranteeing an essentialized human subject,30 and, to Foster’s chagrin as we imagine, undoing all the hard work of poststructuralism.

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Figure 2.3 The Saatchi’s Sensation exhibition opened in 1999 at The Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1999. Then-Mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani threatened to stop funding the museum if it continued to display some of the works in the exhibition. Photo: Jonathan Elderfield / Getty Images.

Placed in its historical context, we now see Foster’s Return of the Real caught in the wilderness of a transitional moment between the weakening of the poststructuralist semiotic frame and as-yet-unformulated ideas of affect. Around the same time that Return of the Real appeared, Brian Massumi published his seminal essay, “The Autonomy of Affect.”31 Unlike Foster, Massumi sensed that the political realities of the time demanded something other than either a textual unpacking of meaning or a psychoanalytic theorizing of the extra-linguistic. He spells out the exact nature of the lacuna: “There seems to be a growing feeling within media, literary and art theory that affect is central to an understanding of our information and image based late capitalist culture . . . our condition is characterized by a surfeit of it.”32 In fact, the next passage is worth quoting at length: The problem is that there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect. Our entire vocabulary has derived from theories of signification that are still wedded to structure even across irreconcilable differences (the divorce proceedings of poststructuralism: terminable or interminable?). In the absence

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of an asignifying philosophy of affect, it is all too easy for received psychological categories to slip back in, undoing the deconstructive work that has been effectively carried out by poststructuralism.33

Massumi both foretells the rise of affect theory in the humanities and, as we will see shortly, directly feeds into the new paradigm, greatly influencing its theoretical structures, which endure into the present, twenty-five years later. Richard Grusin says of affect theory that it “provides an alternative model to the human subject and its motivations to the post-structuralist psychoanalytical models favoured by most contemporary cultural and media theorists. Affectivity helps shift the focus from representation to mediation.”34 Theories of affect potentially presented ways of thinking through the disconnection of semiotics from the materiality of the signifier and its limitations in terms of conceptualizing emotion and other non-linguistic phenomena. Jill Bennett’s art theoretical essay for the 1997 Body exhibition proposed that the “violent and the pornographic act upon the sensory body before it has a chance to process information, to ‘read’ the image,” operating as a “language of the body.”35 This “untranslatable idiolect,”36 she argues, is “not so much semiotic,” rather, “the image [is], in a very palpable sense, ‘felt’ rather than merely observed.”37 Like Massumi, Bennett’s route to thinking through this asignifying language in the 1990s was very much influenced by Gilles Deleuze.38 Bennett also drew on Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding of the medieval carnivalesque “grotesque body”39 as a pre-modern, pre-private, intermixed body that “can only be sensed.”40 Four years after Body, the Art Gallery of New South Wales also hosted Conducting Bodies: Affect, Sensation & Memory, a conference that included keynotes by Ernst van Alphen and Geoffrey Batchen, with sessions titled “Theories of Affect,” “Affect and Abstraction,” and “Global Politics and Bodily Memory,” chaired by Body curator Tony Bond and affect theorists Bennett and Susan Best. At that point, theories of affect had become more clearly defined within art theory. The resulting special issue of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, “Affect and Sensation,” included papers by van Alphen, Batchen, Best, and Bennett. In his essay, van Alphen advances the idea of “a new condition of knowledge that enables a production of knowledge that is first of all affective instead of cognitive.”41 Van Alphen’s work on contemporary art addressing the Holocaust is one route through which art theory connected with trauma studies,42 and was taken up quickly by other art theorists.43 Conducting Bodies was held July 20–22, 2001, just seven weeks before September 11.

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Affect Theory in the Humanities Post-9/11 While ideas around affect in art theory and the wider humanities were nascent in the mid-1990s, the events in the United States on the morning of September 11, 2001, which we have come to know as 9/11, delivered an unforeseen validation to many of those ideas and precipitated a strong sense of urgency and timeliness that had been largely absent immediately prior, in existing discussions around memorializing of the Holocaust in the work of van Alphen, for instance. How could the old textualist models of understanding images account for the intense feelings delivered by live television images of passenger jets flown into office buildings, people jumping and falling to their deaths, buildings collapsing into the streets of New York, and the Pentagon in Washington, DC ablaze? Humanities theorists were no longer simply dissatisfied with the semiotic model of culture;44 rather, the times demanded a radical shift in thinking, beyond the worn textualist and psychoanalytical models. Late-1990s embryonic ideas around affect provided the most fertile ground. In 2007, six years after 9/11, Patricia Clough would coin the title The Affective Turn to describe the tsunami of humanities affect theory that followed the infamous terrorist attack.45 As Clough explains, the images from 9/11,46 followed by the Bush administration’s attempts to “smoke ’em out” in Afghanistan and Iraq, sparked an immediate sense of urgency to consider affect in this new context. The War on Terror descended into a decade of what Susie Linfield calls a “diabolical pas de deux of violent images,”47 comprising the “festive cruelty” of photographs from Abu Ghraib prison,48 grainy videos of Iraqi insurgents beheading American contractors, and other images intended to strike the gut: “forms of savagery,” Linfield says, that are “neither mere images nor mere actions, but are designed to be both.”49 “The increasing significance of affect as a focus of analysis across a number of disciplinary and interdisciplinary discourses,” notes Clough in The Affective Turn, “is occurring at a time when critical theory is facing the analytic challenges of ongoing war, trauma, torture, massacre, and counter/terrorism.”50 “The affective turn helps explain the embodied individual and collective social and medialogical response to 9/11,”51 suggests Grusin, and Ruth Leys confirms that many in the humanities and social sciences realized “that the body in its materiality has been neglected.”52 The surfeit of affect spilling from the media images of 9/11 wrought a more forceful rejection of what Norman K. Denzin describes as “using worn-out languages to talk about the states we were in.”53 Looking back from a similar point in time as Clough, Bennett in 2005 would admit to being driven to formulate an art theoretical understanding of affect to resist the pull of the

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theoretical discourse returning to a semiotic approach, represented by Foster’s Return of the Real: “old ‘communicational’ models that rest on the assumption that content is transmitted via text and image began to haunt discussions around imagery relating to war, violence, terror and trauma.”54 Affect theory in the humanities, and trauma studies as we saw in Chapter 1, are certainly not entirely the product of 9/11; however, the explosion of the affect–trauma paradigm is very much a product of post-9/11 theorizing of that key historical event in terms of shock and emotion, which up to that point were still largely unformed theoretical ideas in the humanities, driven by the search for an embodied and material connection to the signifier.55 The affect–trauma paradigm emerged in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and developed and flourished across the humanities in the first decade post-9/11 to eventually dominate the conceptual frames in which theorists of art and visual culture, and many contemporary artists themselves, think about images of war, terror, and political conflict. Over two decades, affect theory in the humanities has overlapped and intermixed with humanities trauma theory, developing into a paradigmatic worldview, expanding and flourishing across disciplines as diverse as history, political theory, human geography, urban and environmental studies, architecture, literary studies, art history and criticism, media theory, and cultural studies,56 as well as more niche humanities such as curatorial studies.57 The field of trauma studies had also emerged from a niche concern in the mid1990s into an expanded and established interdisciplinary field that, by 2010, Antonio Traverso and Mick Broderick described as “an all-inclusive master paradigm, a grand model that would fit and fulfil all cases.”58 Leys sees the increasing expansion of affect theory as a mutation and re-emergence of trauma theory;59 in fact, she stated as early as 2009 that “affect is the new trauma.”60 In truth, affect theory in the humanities emerged in parallel to and in part influenced by trauma theory in the late 1990s, and while the fields differ in some of their key players, canons, ideas, and terminology, significant overlaps have melded them in important ways. To echo Traverso and Broderick’s observation a decade ago, the affect–trauma paradigm is now well established as a nuanced and complexified, cross-referential, factional, and actively evolving body of literature of which we address in this chapter only an iceberg tip, and then only the key moments pertinent to our argument. During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, there have been “two dominant vectors of affect study in the humanities”:61 the Deleuzian and the Tomkinsian. Each school of thought emerged in the humanities from seminal essays published in 1995—Massumi’s “Autonomy of Affect,”62 and Eve Kosofsky

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Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s “Shame and the Cybernetic Fold.”63 Both essays were responding to the mid-1990s Zeitgeist of The Return of the Real and the need to understand the emotional life of images, and both looked across disciplinary lines to psychology for solutions to plunder and adapt. The Deleuzian strand, as the name suggests, derives from the philosophical lineage of Deleuze, particularly through Massumi’s Deleuzian interpretation of psychology experiments.64 The Tomkinsian strand is derived from work on affect and emotion by American psychologist Silvan Tomkins,65 which initially bled into the humanities through the work of Donald Nathanson,66 a professor of psychiatry and human behavior and founding Executive Director of the Silvan S. Tomkins Institute and emotions psychologist Paul Ekman. It fully crossed epistemological lines in the work of Kosofsky Sedgwick, a gender and queer studies theorist. The two vectors or strands differ significantly to the extent that humanities theories employing ideas around affect are often easily identifiable as belonging to one or the other; yet, they are similar in important ways, which we will discuss shortly. Similarly to our previous chapter (on trauma theory), our purpose here is not to provide a comprehensive account, but to historicize the rise of the affect–trauma paradigm in theories of art and visual culture over the last twenty years, and to show that this larger conceptual frame now forms part of the wider ideology of our time. So, we will provide a brief sketch, then address our main concerns. Influencing the Deleuzian strand of affect theory, Massumi sees affect as an autonomic embodied/psychological system in which we feel in varying degrees of intensity, our response to that intensity being almost like a reflex. Affect is not the same as emotion, but it can be a trigger of emotion: “affect is intensity,” he says, while “emotion is qualified intensity . . . it is intensity owned and recognised.”67 Massumi creatively interprets (he “wilfully or otherwise misreads,” Leys says)68 actual psychology experiments to suggest a distinction between meaningful cognitive content and felt intensity.69 Affect is “prepersonal,”70 in that our affective responses to the world do not involve our cognitive thoughts or beliefs, and are thus pre-cognitive, pre-linguistic, and pre-subjective. Like emotion, affect has varying degrees of intensity;71 it is not yet emotion but may lead to emotion. Massumi’s conception of affect, then, is concerned with the process of transmitting intensity intersubjectively rather than as affect-emotion. The Massumi approach has been extremely influential on the art theory and visual culture theory of the likes of Bennett, van Alphen, Anthony McCosker,72 Stef Craps,73 Karyn Ball,74 and Griselda Pollock. The Tomkinsian strand derives more directly from a specific field of psychology, particularly the work of Silvan Tomkins. Unlike Massumi, Tomkins

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conceives of affect as directly related to emotion, yet still separate.75 That is, we might intuit that emotion has an object—I am angry at you; that is, my anger is meaningfully motivated by you—however, the Tomkinsian understanding is that “when the proper conditions are met, the affect is triggered.”76 We have a limited set of “affect programs” which vary in intensity, such as enjoyment-joy, fear-terror, anger-rage, and shame-humiliation. Our experience of emotion is actually the experience of the triggering of these affects hard-wired into our very being as humans.77 This is the “Basic Emotions paradigm.”78 “Affect programs” are genetically hard-wired in the lower-brain “reptilian” functions of the amygdala and, once triggered, cause us to experience emotions and manifest them in characteristic facial expressions.79 The Tomkinsian approach sees affect as operating separately to higher-brain cognitive functions; in fact, once triggered, it has little to do with its cause.80 This Tomkinsian school of thought informs the thinking of art and cultural theorists such as Best, Anna Gibbs, Jonathan Flatley,81 and Elsbeth Probyn.82 In 2016, Best concedes that the Deleuzian approach now dominates;83 however, across the entire field of the humanities, the reality is far messier than that. In the first decade after 9/11, theoretical models intersected, collided, and converged in publications like Melissa Gregg and Greg Seigworth’s influential The Affect Theory Reader (2010), which alongside Clough’s The Affective Turn signaled the consolidation of the paradigm while recognizing the diversity (or, we could say less generously, the inconsistency) of foundational positions. However, while affect theory has developed into a prevailing paradigm across the humanities, it has evolved into a vastly diverse and often contradictory field, with no consensus on the meaning of “affect” itself.84 Ronak K. Kapadia’s art theoretical monograph Insurgent Aesthetics (2019) dedicates a footnote that fills two entire pages to the “terminological slippage” between “[f]eeling, emotion, affect, and perception.”85 Without dedicating several chapters to cataloguing the manifold, nuanced hybridities and offshoots that have been cultivated within disparate disciplines and epistemological contexts drawing on different models, it is accurate to say that affect theory in the humanities has developed as its own field of study. What is generally common amongst hybridized DeleuzianTomkinsian formulations of affect is the understanding that affect is linked to, but distinct from, emotion. Similarly to how humanities trauma studies inherits Cathy Caruth’s conflation of personal psychology and the interpersonal, humanities affect theory inherits (from both Tomkins and Deleuze) the idea of affect as pre-personal intensity, quite separate from emotion and feeling, and subsequently it privileges affect over emotion.

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Furthermore, the affect theory that has flourished in the post-9/11 landscape tends to separate itself intellectually from the existing field of emotion studies in the humanities that includes work by Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, and feminist critiques by Marilyn Frye,86 Sue Campbell,87 and Alison M. Jagger.88 Some more recent important work includes Sara Ahmed’s influential The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004),89 and Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers In Their Own Land (2016), which analyzes the place of “feeling” (rather than affect and/ or emotion) in the rise of Tea Party conservatism that foreshadowed the election of Donald Trump.90 Megan Boler and Elizabeth Davis argue that the “autonomic” idea of affect ignores an entire field of inquiry that includes Hochschild and Ahmed, effectively consigning “emotion to the dustbin of theory.”91 Ahmed’s 2004 edition of The Cultural Politics of Emotion largely bypasses the contemporaneous field of affect theory and makes only a cursory reference to the work of Silvan Tomkins. However, her 2014 revised edition, re-published well after affect theory had established its dominance in the humanities, raises specific objections to the approaches of the two dominant “affective turn” schools of thought, particularly relating to the way in which they sharply define affect and emotion against each other.92 The concern for many theorists of emotion is that affect is seen as an inherently radical force, not bogged down in the twee sentimentality of the emotions, which Massumi sees as being domesticated by being brought from the pre-cultural into the domain of the semantic and semiotic. Importantly, this splitting of affect from emotion is not simply a matter of different disciplinary traditions or tastes. Both the Deleuzian and Tomkinsian strands of affect theory conceive of affect as related-to yet separate-from or priorto emotion for a very specific reason. Despite their different epistemological origins and inherent factionalism, the Deleuzian and Tomkinsian approaches are both anti-intentionalist—that is, they see affect as an autonomic response that precedes any subjective intention on behalf of the person affected. As Eric Shouse says: “Feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal.”93 So, to maintain a separation of affect from emotion, intention, thought, and belief is to conceive of affect in a way that imbues it with a particular power. As Leys argues, to conceive of affect as a precognitive, pre-subjective system that precedes emotion and cognition, “independent of, and in an important sense prior to, ideology—that is, seeing affect prior to intentions, meanings, reasons, and beliefs,”94 opens up the possibility “for progressive social transformation.”95 If cognition arrives too late for the intentions of our political beliefs to play any role in our response, if we regard affect as independent of and prior to ideology,96 our

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political agency is at the mercy of the affective message.97 In other words, I might intellectually disagree with what you say, but nonetheless I am powerfully influenced by how you say it, despite myself. For Leys, this is the central purpose of the turn to affect—to shift attention away from representation as the sole carrier of meaning and towards our “subpersonal material-affective responses, where, it is claimed, political and other influences do their real work.”98 The immediate and unthinking affective response serves as a motivator for ideological thought that follows.99 Consequently, affect theory in the humanities tends to be concerned with our aesthetic experience over its content;100 the affective dimension overwhelms the representation, effectively rendering signification irrelevant.101 Questions about the meaning of media or art thus are converted into “questions concerning their traumatic-affective influence on the subject,” according to Leys.102

The Fungibility of Affect Politics In the final chapter of her forceful critique of affect, The Ascent of Affect (2017), Leys asks, “[w]hy are so many scholars today in the humanities and social sciences fascinated by the idea of affect?”103 Referring to Massumi, Shouse, and Nigel Thrift,104 she says: The claim is that we human beings are corporeal creatures imbued with subliminal affective intensities and resonances that so decisively influence or condition our political and other beliefs that we ignore those affective intensities and resonances at our peril—not only because doing so leads us to underestimate the political harm that the deliberate manipulation of our affective lives can do but also because we will otherwise miss the potential for ethical creativity and transformation that ‘technologies of the self ’ designed to work on our embodied being can help bring about.105

In other words, for humanities theorists with a tendency toward social justice and progressive politics, ideas around affect did not simply present new ways of understanding culture amidst the disenchantment with textualist semiotic models; indeed, the possibility of political agency was at stake. In the initial post9/11 period (2001–2007), affect theory held the potential to better explain the seemingly hypnotic force of feeling through which we can be emotionally manipulated, influencing our cognitive political beliefs against our own best interests. However, following the affective turn (2008 onwards), affect theory evolved from an analytical tool into an instrument for potential action, a creative

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political weapon of influence. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri called it, it is one of the “powerful new tools in the possession of the multitude.”106 Also around 2009, Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt argue there is an underlying assumption in much affect theory of the inherently transformative and transgressive nature of affect.107 Boler and Davis point out that the “popular uptake of affect theory tends to celebrate affect’s ‘liberatory’ potential.”108 As an analytical tool, the affect approach offers some fascinating insights; however, as a transformative political mechanism, its schema, which gives very little attention to cognitive critical thinking beyond the emotionally driven, must surely be somewhat alarming to any humanities scholar hoping to enlist it as an instrument to further social justice. Take cultural theorist Anna Gibbs’s analysis of the rise and popularity of Pauline Hanson, Leader of Australia’s far-right-wing One Nation Party.109 Hanson first came to prominence following her maiden speech to the Australian Parliament in 1996, in which she attacked Australia’s official policies of multiculturalism and welfare support for Indigenous peoples. As she spoke the words, “I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians,” and “I am fed up to the back teeth with the inequalities that are being promoted by the government and paid for by the taxpayer under the assumption that Aboriginals are the most disadvantaged people in Australia,” her voice nervously broke. She tremored through accusations concerning “political correctness,” “multiculturalists and a host of other minority groups,” “fat cats, bureaucrats and the do-gooders.”110 The speech ignited intense media interest in Hanson and more opportunities for her to inarticulately convey her particular reactionary politics. Nevertheless, Gibbs notes, “the distress in Pauline Hanson’s voice also affected people who don’t fit the usual profile of a One Nation Voter—people who belonged to the educated (in some cases, highly educated) metropolitan middle classes.”111 Gibbs says, anecdotally, that this affect translated into votes for One Nation amongst certain people in her circle, “not in spite of, but, arguably, because of her inarticulacy.”112 Hanson’s inarticulacy, her lack of polish as a professional politician (even now, as she sits in the Australian Senate twenty-five years later), seems to lie at the core of her political force. Gibbs argues that Hanson’s trembling voice, and her manner seeming on the verge of tears, echoed and amplified the distress and disenchantment politically disengaged voters felt about the parliamentary political system. “In the context of affect contagion,” says Gibbs, “Hanson’s very inarticulacy was efficacious.”113 Gibbs’s suggestion is that Hanson’s trembling voice worked on an affective register to effectively influence potential voters in ways that the cognitive expression of her ideological message otherwise would not have done.

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William E. Connolly suggests that policy discourse alone is not sufficient to sustain politics, that politics operates through the infrasensible register and, moreover, the radical right is more effective at the micropolitics of affect than the democratic left: “right-wing news, think tanks, and electoral campaigns play relentlessly upon [affect],” while the democratic left assumes that politics is largely a matter of presenting reasoned discourse around policy.114 Affect politics began to appear in mainstream American politics with the“branded politainment” of Sarah Palin, Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s running mate in 2008, which in many respects presaged Donald Trump’s presidency.115 “Politainment” has also long been the stock-in-trade of the conservative Murdoch owned Fox News network. Always conceived as a conservative cable news outlet, Fox took its own affective turn in 2009 with the addition of Glenn Beck to its programming (he went on to found The Blaze TV in 2011). In Olivier Jutel’s words, “Beck’s shtick was the befuddled everyman who, reacting to a crisisstricken America, is emotionally wracked by the burden of being the messenger of this reality.”116 Beck’s right-wing politics was characteristically articulated on Fox through affective means, with tearful and fearful exhortations to his audience: evocations of their folksy common sense versus a fetishized liberal enemy who takes apparent joy in the destruction of the community and shared identity of the American people. “They imagine the omnipotent enemy as an existential threat,” says Jutel, “and the shared experience of this perceived vulnerability functions as proof positive that the people have access to a critical ‘truth’ and represent the universal will of history.”117 Connolly, in 2011, comments that “it seems unwise to ignore the infrasensible dimension of politics in an era of twenty-four hour news, an American regime increasingly resentful about its place in the world, and large sections of the population primed to respond aggressively to any scandal invented by bloggers and Fox News.”118 Ten years later, Beck’s performative affective approach feeds into today’s formula of Fox News presenters such as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, who regularly present opinion pieces about the “political correctness” of the left suppressing basic freedoms of speech for the sake of virtue signaling and playing identity politics. The message to white middle America is similar to that of Hanson to white middle Australia in the 1990s—it is a message of fear, threat, resentment, and anger, that their country is being taken away by evil and irrational forces from without and within. Affective politics, then, provides the emotive fuel of Brexit/Trump era post-truth, in which how one feels the world to be takes precedence over any purportedly objective reality. “Post-truth” became the Oxford Dictionary’s

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Word of the Year 2016, the year of the election of President Trump and the Brexit referendum. Its definition is: “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”119 In Lee McIntyre’s 2018 book on the topic, he describes post-truth using the following scenario: “when a person’s beliefs are threatened by an ‘inconvenient fact’, sometimes it is preferable to challenge the fact.”120 As an example, he quotes a 2016 exchange between CNN reporter Alisyn Camerota and conservative Newt Gingrich, in which the reporter quotes FBI statistics that violent crime has lessened throughout the United States, statistics that disagree with Gingrich’s narratives about how Americans feel. He responds that the “average American” does not feel crime is down, and that the statistics are merely her “view.” He says, “liberals have a whole set of statistics which theoretically may be right, but it’s not where human beings are. People are frightened. People feel that their government has abandoned them.” She responds, “they feel it, yes, but the facts don’t support it,” to which Gingrich answers, “as a political candidate, I’ll go with how people feel and I’ll let you go with the theoreticians.”121 McIntyre argues that, as also suggested by Bruno Latour, the heart of post-truth is the politics of climate change denial.122 William Davies sees the rise of affect politics on a much longer and larger paradigmatic scale, as part of the decline in popular faith in the basic systems of Western representative democracy. That is, we are witnessing the dismantling of the Hobbesian Enlightenment system of abstracting physical violence into the coercive power of the state, which saw the development of systems of abstraction and institutions of objective expertise.123 Affective politics favors how we feel and what we believe to be true above any expert consensus of objective fact.124 Suspicion of representative democracy and the authority of experts was central to the 2016 Brexit campaign: pro-Leave campaigner Michael Gove declared that “people in this country have had enough of experts”; Gisela Stuart said, “[t]here is only one expert that matters, and that’s you, the voter”;125 and “Phyllis from Sheffield” called in to a national BBC radio show and complained that “experts built the Titanic.” The host of that show noted, “a lot of what happens now is driven by emotion, by instinct and by experience—not by expertise.”126 Expertise, according to John Clarke and Janet Newman’s analysis of Brexit, “symbolized ‘elsewhere’; international institutions, EU bureaucrats and those seeking to protect global free trade.”127 The same affective politics resonated throughout Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, in his frequent condemnation of “the elites,”128 and in his appeal to big-picture emotional messages with little basis in

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fact or method, to emotion over reason and instinct over expertise, his “Trumping of politics” with affect.129 Despite the speculative optimism of art theorists, the actual politics of our time has played out far less positively. By the time of Massumi’s 2015 Politics of Affect, the capacity of affect for mass manipulation was becoming apparent, and he refers to “the mistrust of affect.”130 In a transcription of a conversation, Joel McKim and Massumi consider the “criticism that’s been widely held in critical theory that affective politics is inherently fascistic.”131 Massumi agrees that the potential is there, but disagrees that there is anything inherently fascistic about affective politics.132 “There is also a sense in the critiques of affective politics as fascist that nonconscious process is an absence of thought. I follow Deleuze and Guattari in saying that nonconscious process is the birth of thought.”133 In this way, according to Massumi, affect is a potentiality that is founded on the promise of intensity. “It is neutral as well in relation to political criteria of judgement. Affect can be fascistic or progressive; reactionary or revolutionary.”134 Massumi is perhaps over-optimistic about the ideological neutrality of affect, when the ways in which it has played out in actuality for two decades have demonstrably favored the fascistic and reactionary. In a different but related context, Angela Nagle uses the term “politically fungible” to describe the ideologically flexible, morally neutral aesthetics of transgression, which we address in the next chapter.135 Affect is similarly “politically fungible”—its neutrality makes for a vacuum, a vessel waiting to be filled by political intentionality.

The Ontology of Affect Despite its proven instrumentalization by reactionary politics, left-leaning progressive humanities in the last few years have been optimistic enough to regard affect as capable of being weaponized, not in the more general sense of the mainstreaming of affect politics, but as a conceptual strategy with subversive, even insurgent, potential. Ronak K. Kapadia’s Insurgent Aesthetics provides an interesting proposition for the weaponization of affect for a particular anti-war progressive politics that draws heavily on humanities affect theory. Insurgent Aesthetics demonstrates something of the biopolitical underpinnings of affect theory, which lie at the core of Leys’s ultimate rejection of affect theory in the humanities in her The Ascent of Affect (2017). Kapadia’s Insurgent Aesthetics provides analyses of a number of works by Wafaa Bilal, a diasporic Iraqi American performance artist and writer living and

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working in the US since the 1990s.136 For Kapadia, Bilal’s work provides a clear example of the term “insurgent aesthetics,” meaning that “we can analyze gendered-racialized embodiment of the artist’s manipulation of the senses to account for and allegorize the subjective experiences and lived vulnerabilities of populations that are both produced and obscured by US neoliberal racial regimes of security.”137 In Kapadia’s wordily poetic analyses, he recounts Bilal’s durational performance of . . .And Counting (2010), a twenty-four-hour live event in New York in which a borderless map of Iraq was tattooed onto Bilal’s back in different inks. Iraqi cities were tattooed in Arabic in blue, then five thousand red dots marked the deaths of American soldiers killed since the invasion in 2003, and finally a further hundred thousand dots, marking only the “official” Iraqi death toll, were added to the map in ink that is usually invisible yet becomes luminous under ultraviolet light. The invisibility of the Iraqi dots acts as a straightforward metaphor, but what appeals to Kapadia is the sensorial and affective dimension of the performance, which confronts the audience with the relentless pricking of Bilal’s bleeding skin over the duration of one day, compressing both the space and time of a hundred and five thousand violent deaths in Iraq over seven years. Kapadia argues that visuality is privileged in the hyper-rationalized military regimes of state, demonstrated by the disembodied yet surveilling view of military drone technology: the eye becoming equated with the power to visualize and dominate.138 On the other hand, works such as . . .And Counting, which combines the painful penetration of the skin with the mechanical buzz of the tattooist’s needle, de-emphasizes visuality by focusing on the broader spectrum of senses to include touch and sound.139 For Kapadia, . . .And Counting performs what literary theorist Jonathan Flatley calls “affective mapping,” a process of “mapping out one’s affective life” and thus revealing a political problem, such as racism, “that may have been previously invisible, opaque, difficult, abstract, and above all depressing, [yet] may be transformed into one that is interesting, that solicits and rewards one’s attention.”140 Certainly, Bilal’s performance enacts Flatley’s idea of an affective map as being “a carefully prepared aesthetic experience, an experience that is narrated—and connected up to collective, historical processes and events—even as it is produced.”141 It provides a “shudder,” an aesthetic estrangement that is a defamiliarization of one’s own emotional life and makes it “appear weird.”142 Kapadia goes on to contend that Bilal deploys what he refers to throughout Insurgent Aesthetics as a “queer calculus”: in the case of . . .And Counting, a “queer calculus of pain.”143 In his “Introduction,” Kapadia explains how his notion of “queer calculus” is in essence an artistic aesthetic strategy for subverting the

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Figure 2.4 Detail from . . .And Counting, 2010, by Wafaa Bilal. Photo: Brad Farwell. © Wafaa Bilal 2010. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

unfeeling bureaucratized and militarized reactionary politics that has rendered death and suffering as statistical calculations, erasing the racial and gendered identities of those it kills, while those identities are themselves its targets. Kapadia’s argument is that by emphasizing the affective dimension, and drawing upon embodied experiences of trauma, contemporary art can subvert the technocratic unfeeling apparatus of the state, that it “makes sensuous what has been ghosted by US technologies of abstraction,” and “makes intimate what is rendered distant, renders tactile what is made invisible.”144 Drawing on the field of queer studies and affect theory, “queer calculus is a critical hermeneutic strategy through which racialized and dispossessed peoples . . . have created alternative world-making knowledge projects to render visible or sensuous all that has been abstracted from the forever war.”145 A queer calculus, argues Kapadia, “underscores the role of affects, sensations, and embodiment.”146 Bilal’s . . .And Counting renders visibly and invisibly on the skin the sensorial and social interface of intersubjective exchange. Kapadia’s notion of a queer calculus is not merely intended as an analytical tool for understanding art and visual culture; it is principally concerned with strategically deploying affect, sensation, emotion, and feeling as a way of doing politics in contemporary art.

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Figure 2.5 . . . And Counting, 2010, by Wafaa Bilal. Photo: Brad Farwell. © Wafaa Bilal 2010. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

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Kapadia’s Insurgent Aesthetics seems to be the exact type of ontological thinking that von Falkenhausen objects to in her article in Frieze. She says, “affect gets its subversive promise from the proclaimed uncontrollability of its movements,” and that the application of affect theory in contemporary art suffers from a “carefully constructed blind spot . . . It conceals its own ideological qualities—and this, again, is a marker for all ontologies.”147 The concealed ideology within the now dominant theorizing and instrumentalizing of affect is the very point to which Leys arrives at the end of her last chapter of The Ascent of Affect. At the end of her critique of affect theory in the humanities, Leys identifies affect theory— characterized as autonomic, separating pre-personal affect from ideology—as aligning with what she sees as a troubling deeper historical underlying shift, “a relative indifference to the role of ideas and beliefs in politics, culture, and art in favor of an ‘ontological’ concern with different people’s corporeal-affective reactions.”148 That is, Leys argues that affect structurally aligns with a particular ontological understanding of political subjectivity that has arisen over the last thirty years, which she registers in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, particularly their Empire (2000) and Commonwealth (2009). Walter Benn Michaels’s critiques of Hardt and Negri argue that political subjectivity was once considered to lie in ideology (intentional, formulated, cognitive, reasoned), while into the twenty-first century political subjectivity has become based in a particular kind of biopolitics (embodied experience, subject position, ontological identity). According to Michaels, this current biopolitical paradigm replaces the intentionalism of ideology—political belief that is ideological and abstracted— with “the valorization of identity,”149 what Leys calls the “valorization of personal experience and feeling over argument and debate.”150 In other words, Michaels argues understandings of the basis of political subjectivity have shifted in the last thirty years from being cognitive, abstract, and ideology-based toward being affective, embodied, and experiential. Political subjectivity “can only be a question of what you are.”151 Difference and experience are central to political subjectivity within this current paradigm, and so, “conflict has nothing to do with ideology; it is nothing but a conflict of subject-positions.”152 This is, for Michaels, the heart of the “movement from the universalist logic of conflict as difference of opinion to the posthistoricist logic of conflict as difference in subject-position.”153 Extending this logic, he says, “people who believe differently are treated as people who are different.”154 Leys interprets Michaels’s argument in relation to affect theory to mean that “we cannot disagree about what we feel, we just feel different things.”155 Leys argues that this is why affect theorists in the humanities maintain their core anti-intentionalist position.

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“What is at stake,” she says, “is a ‘logic’ according to which attention to ideology of belief is replaced by a focus on the bodily affects that are understood to be the outcome of subliminal, autonomic corporeal processes.”156 The overall price for clinging to anti-intentionalism “is to imply such a radical separation between affect and reason as to make disagreement about meaning, or ideological dispute, irrelevant to cultural analysis.”157 Your affective response to something is not wrong; it belongs to you, it is legitimized by you, by your ontological political subjectivity. For Michaels, this is an ironic effect of the relativism and pluralism of poststructuralism, which, while philosophically aiming to de-essentialize meaning and subjectivity, ultimately leads to a reinvestment of these within the biopolitical realm. Michaels finds that the hyper-individualized “deep pluralism” of affect theorists such as Connolly denies that beliefs are abstract and thus ideological, but are rather “embedded” in a suite of ontological and nonideological cultural practices and embodied sensory experiences; as Connolly says, “our beliefs should thus be understood as aspects of our subject positions.”158 Our beliefs are not off-the-peg ideological adoptions but emanate naturally from our unique experiences. Thus, Leys argues, ideological disagreement is rigidly universalist, because it assumes we are all essentially the same, just wearing different ideologies; while pluralism is capable of “involving differences of personal feeling, identity, or subject position.”159 For Michaels, with works of art, “we replace the question of what the work means with the question of how it affects us.”160 How an artwork makes us feel is highly individualized, subjective, and personal, and cannot be disputed or questioned without questioning the legitimacy of the subject position from which its effects are felt. If political positionality is understood to arise from subject position and experience, and if affect is non-intentional, perhaps the logical trajectory is toward a public political discourse in which the authenticity of a declared and intentional political position might be doubted as merely ideological—and, in a biopolitical paradigm, implicitly inauthentic—and can potentially be betrayed at an affective level. William Davies, whose Nervous States (2018) provides a deep historical narrative of this paradigm shift, has said more recently, [t]oday, minor gestures that would usually have passed without comment only a decade ago become pored over in search of their hidden message. What did Emily Maitlis mean when she rolled her eyes at Barry Gardiner on Newsnight? What was Jeremy Corbyn mouthing during Prime Minister’s Questions?161

To Maitlis’s Brexit eye roll and Corbyn’s muttering we could add innumerable examples from recent times: Donald Trump pushing past Duško Marković,

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Prime Minister of Montenegro at a 2017 NATO summit; Boris Johnson’s regular theatrical gesticulations; Justin Trudeau’s contemptuous glance at Trump’s offer of a handshake in 2017; Prince Andrew’s incongruous head-shaking in his notorious 2019 “Epstein” interview with Maitlis;162 Dr Anthony Fauci’s “facepalm” during Trump’s mention of the “deep state” at a White House COVID-19 press briefing in March 2020.163 These flubs, gesticulations, and awkward moments are routinely understood as unintentional parapraxes that betray the façade of ideological positionality. Alternatively, in much affect theory, ideology is understood as the cognition that comes after the affective encounter; as Leys suggests, the purpose of the turn to affect by many humanities theorists was to shift attention away from cognition as the sole carrier of meaning or “ideology,” and instead to conceive of the immediate and unthinking affective response as serving as motivator for the ideological thought that follows.164

Figuring The notion of affect as non-intentional, thus not emanating from ideology and interpretation but rather imprinted by the body and experience, underwrites the logic of the weaponization of affect, such as we see in Kapadia’s Insurgent Aesthetics. Kapadia’s “queer calculus” enacts a strategic activation of individualized affective experience that reveals and subverts the technocratic universalism of the militarized state.165 Kapadia’s formulations play out the very scenario that Leys warns against: “Stressing bodies over ideas, affect over reason . . . what is crucial is not your beliefs or intentions but the affective processes that are said to produce them, with the result that political change becomes a matter not of persuading others of the truth of your ideas but of producing new ontologies or ‘becomings’, new bodies, and new lives.”166 For Kapadia, affect theory provides the theoretical weaponry needed to subvert the affectless imperialized militarism of American authoritarianism through strategies of “affective intervention,”167 to generate “an entirely new mode of inhabiting and feeling the world.”168 We see a very different understanding of affect and militarism in Rebecca A. Adelman’s Figuring Violence. Rather than seeing affect as a potential instrument of progressive and liberatory political action, Adelman argues that it is our capacity for affect, imagination, and empathy that ultimately enables the military state’s violent and de-subjectivizing subjugation of citizenry. Published in 2019, the same year as Kapadia’s Insurgent Aesthetics, Adelman’s Figuring Violence considers the military apparatus of the US state in relation to the those that it

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subjugates and de-subjectifies through invisibility and isolation, such as detainees in Guantanamo Bay.169 Rather than the militarized authoritarian state being an unfeeling quantifying machine, Adelman believes affect is central to how it operates. The state “figures”—in the sense of imagining and calculating—the extent of the suffering of those it de-subjectifies, “not only speaking, but feeling on behalf of its subjects.”170 She says, “affectively, these figures anchor contemporary American militarism, which I define as the complex of feelings, beliefs, and perceptions that make war in general—and our current war in particular—seem necessary, if not inevitable, and ultimately beneficial.”171 Kapadia’s take on the power of the militarism of the state differs entirely from Adelman’s. He views it through a Foucauldian “juridico-discursive” model of power,172 operating amongst other ways in a negative relation in which “power can do nothing but say no.”173 It is a binary system of permitted/forbidden, an interior/exterior understanding of power.174 Thus, Kapadia argues, the US seeks to isolate and confine the enemy “other” through criminal and immigration laws: “the war on terror relies on constructing a visible external ‘Muslim’ enemy by conflating transnational differences of region, nationality, ethnicity, class, gender and religious affiliation.”175 The “sensorial regimes” of affect, sensations, and embodiment176 become artistic and aesthetic weapons against “authority’s clenched fist.”177 Affect’s pre-cognitivity means it is always operating beyond the cognitively structured, legalistically conceptualized military state. Affect is untethered from ideology—for Kapadia, it is transgressively outside of power. The coercive judicial reach of the state, at its extremes in the war on crime, war on drugs, and in extension the war on terror, works to place “white cisgender heterosexual male citizen-subjects above gendered racialized Others.”178 But this is why, through the sensory and the affective and, moreover, the expression of otherness in art, the affectless, abstract calculus of the state can be confronted and potentially subverted. “Insurgent Aesthetics reveals how diasporic art and expressive culture can make available new ways of knowing, sensing, and feeling.”179 While Kapadia sees the US global security state as rendering impossible the affective glue of social relations “through its violences, abstractions and restrictions on the movement of gendered racialized bodies,”180 Adelman sees its power as productive in a Foucauldian sense—importantly, productive of affect. In considering detainees at Guantanamo Bay detention camp, which she visited in 2012, Adelman argues that our attempts to empathize actually abstract their subjectivities into “figures who appear not as political subjects, but as receptacles for affective investment,” which in turn “promotes the development of a shallow

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ethics in response to their suffering, the erasure of political subjectivities.”181 Indeed, Adelman argues that the military state actually denies personhood under emphatically affective and imaginative practices. Contrarily to Kapadia’s position, Adelman considers all feeling, even that we consider to be virtuous, as always “operating in tandem with ideological formations.”182 Here, her notion of “figuring” is important. Figuring occurs when we imaginatively project into the internal emotional states of another, and it can be an invasive and de-subjectifying form of empathy, a colonizing imposition of feeling. The act of figuring is oriented less toward knowing the subjective experience of the other (which we cannot know but can only imagine), and more toward assuming or imposing upon them a set of feelings that we have imagined ourselves. Figuring is a “dark side of empathy” in which asymmetrical power relations are played out. It is the kind of “vampiristic empathy,” as Fritz Breithaupt puts it, that we see with “helicopter parents” and stage parents. An extreme form of emotional identification, vampiristic empathy is the process of sharing another’s experience to the extent that the observer appropriates it over time, while neglecting the other’s independent well-being. Put more precisely, vampiristic empathy is the process of coexperiencing another’s situation while supplanting their objectivities, goals or desires with one’s own.183

Adelman’s notion of figuring is effectively a form of vampiristic empathy. While it is well-intentioned, and can even be motivated by love and care, it is fundamentally de-humanizing. Adelman says, “the affective investment of figuring is a presumption to know how the figure in question thinks or feels; the dividend is the sense of sharing in that feeling and responding appropriately to it.”184 Adelman’s argument is similar to more familiar arguments around the problematic ethics of “speaking for” someone else: she states that “feeling for” is a form of de-subjectification.185 We imagine and sentimentalize, requiring only a plausible vision of those we feel for without any actual connection.“Identification, or at least the feeling of identifying with someone else, can be satisfying whether it is accurate or not. Yet most theorizations of affect accept those feelings of connection and interactivity on their own terms.”186 Adelman’s contention is that representations of suffering do not transmit feelings of suffering, but are anchored to popular imaginings of how those whose suffering we see ought to be feeling, and that “imagination rather than actual connection . . . sustains these circuits of feeling.”187 More specifically, Adelman’s thesis is that the instrumentalization of affect is deeply engrained within American militarism.

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The examples she explores in Figuring Violence, such as the cultural impulse to protect American school children from images of 9/11 or Abu Ghraib, demonstrate long histories of affective investment that have evolved into increasingly sophisticated political imagination and mediation. Adelman’s is a very different conception of affect as a way of doing politics from Kapadia’s optimistic queer calculus “that unsettles normative analyses of the forever war and outlines blueprints for utopian future imaginings amid limitless violence”;188 for Adelman, affective imaginings are richly intertwined with de-subjectification, coercion, and violence. Returning to the Abdullah controversy, Abdullah’s images of generic soldiers were figured as Australian soldiers, of course, because of the artist’s statement; their blank and arguably affectless faces were further figured as conveying posttraumatic stress disorder, which in turn was figured as the result of active service—yet, the iconography of the works is actually heuristically wide open. We may well ask: in what ways do we understand Abdullah’s images of soldiers as necessarily traumatized? In these interpretations, much is assumed on behalf of the imagined subjectivities depicted in generic portraits. Abdullah’s superimposition of a smiling emoji was imagined to be a mocking laugh at the imagined trauma of imagined soldiers. Commenters on Bella’s post said, “I have a daughter serving in Afghanistan at present. She would be horrified at this ‘art work’s [sic]. Shame on you”;189 “bloody disgusting boycott artspace feel sorry for the diggers portrayed.”190 These are, at a third remove, imagined responses of actual servicemen, servicewomen, and veterans, upon whom homogeneity as a group is also imaginatively projected. Interestingly, one commenter said, “[j]ust checked with my dad, a veteran himself, and he doesn’t find it offensive. He said he’s offended by people not thinking for themselves, and being told by others how to think.”191 Despite the arguments by conservative politicians and Facebook commenters that weighed into the Abdullah controversy, we have found no reported or documented objections or complaints from actual serving or veteran military personnel on their own behalf. They may well exist, but while the protection of veterans’ health and wellbeing is doubtless important, the absence of any specificity in this case creates a gap in the argument that can only be filled imaginatively. We mentioned at the end of Chapter 1 some responses to Quilty’s After Afghanistan by Michael Armstrong, the contemporary artist who has also been an active soldier in the Australian Army since 1998 and served in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Timor Leste. Armstrong “was appalled at how [his] colleagues had been characterised as victims of trauma.”192 To him, Quilty’s portrayal of war

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predominantly as “horror” was, “at its core, untruthful,” and Armstrong worries that Quilty’s focus on trauma threatens to dominate readings of Armstrong’s own works.193 Interestingly, Armstrong notes that the trope of the traumatized soldier has become central to today’s nation-building mythologizing.194 Christina Twomey similarly registers the tendency, noting a shift in the public memorializing of Australia’s involvement in past wars from narratives of heroism and valor to those of victimhood and trauma.195 Twomey argues that this shift began after the 1980s.196 She argues that “emotion and affect, through the medium of the individual story” have been central to the transformation of Australia’s national mythologies around its military and their participation in international conflicts.197 In another context, mythologizing of the veteran as traumatized is played out spectacularly in President George W. Bush’s Portraits of Courage, which toured North America from 2018 to 2020. Abdullah argues that the reading of mockery in his works by those who opposed them is not the intended meaning of the work. He has long used the smiling emoji in a number of different works that are not about soldiers, he says, “where I’ve talked about the difference between a person’s lived experience and the perception of them and what they project—the difference between how we feel and how we seem.”198 We cast no doubt on the authenticity of the interpretations and feelings of those who were offended; rather, we see within much of the displays of genuine disgust and declarations of empathy a great deal of figuring. If we do read Abdullah’s work as laughing at Australian veterans suffering from PTSD, we will have to disbelieve all of the artist’s public statements that refute this reading as inauthentic. Abdullah says,“I wonder if I had a different name or a different religion whether this would have been news at all.”199 Indeed, despite Abdullah’s publicly stated and repeated intentions, many of the objections to the works read them as a type of biopolitical parapraxis betraying his political subjectivity at an affective level. In Breithaupt’s The Dark Sides of Empathy, he considers empathically imagining the psychological states of another in gestures of “empathic sadism” or “empathic cruelty” not to be warped, but to be “within the spectrum of normal empathy.”200 It is interesting that the example Breithaupt explores is an anonymous post from December, 2015 on an online Reddit forum dedicated to discussing and heroicizing serial killers. In the post, “Just_that_random_guy” responds to the topic “Do Sexual Sadistic Serial Killers Really Lack Empathy” by saying, “I am able to understand and feel what the person would go through and the kind of pain and fear the person would experience and that’s what actually turns me on.”201 The gratification received by committing an act of cruelty, argues

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Breithaupt, is thus enabled by Just_that_random_guy’s capacity for empathy. Similarly, in Against Empathy, Paul Bloom argues that “ability to accurately read the desires and emotions of others is the hallmark of the successful psychopath and can be used for cruelty and exploitation.”202 Our empathy does not give us access to knowledge of the trauma of one of Quilty’s soldier-sitters; we can only imagine it. In the imagination of that experience in cultural form, our empathic projection of what we assume is performed in the public sphere of the gallery. Importantly, engaging in art at exhibitions is a social act, a public performance, and it too comes with “feeling rules,” behavior socially permissible within that space. Perhaps it is difficult to even imagine another visitor laughing at one of Quilty’s soldier portraits. Perhaps it is too unsettling. However, it is not inconceivable to imagine festive cruelty in an online context, particularly on a site such as Reddit, where users such as Just_that_random_guy are absolutely anonymous. We will return to this context in the next chapter, where we consider the culture of 4chan and 8chan and the cruel transgressive humor of the “lulz” in relation to recent images of acts of terror.

Conclusion In these first two chapters we have placed the development of theories of trauma and affect in the humanities into their intellectual historical contexts, from their emergence in the 1990s, through their surging development in the decade immediately following 9/11, to their establishment as a complex, multifaceted, and dominant paradigm in the second decade since 9/11. Paul Stenner says that the “affective turn is not a singular movement, but the rejection of the textual turn in the name of affect is announced loud and clear in each of its distinct strands.”203 Indeed, as we have argued, the development of affect theory in the humanities was partly motivated by a push away from the predicates of the preceding textual turn. Despite the problems and limitations of affect theory that we have mentioned here, it certainly succeeded in preventing the wider humanities from gravitating back toward a semiotic poststructuralist approach. Massumi’s 1995 clarion call for a “cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect” and “an asignifying philosophy of affect”204 was answered, loudly and diversely, across the breadth of humanities disciplines, including, not insignificantly, art theory. Embryonic theories of affect in the humanities promised to expand our conceptual frames for describing, understanding, and modeling new ways of thinking about affect, emotion, feeling, empathy, and sensation. However, twenty-five years after

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Massumi’s call, and twenty years after 9/11, we are now straightjacketed by preponderant and dominating theories that seem very different from the speculative and creative solutions of two decades ago. Affect theory is no longer simply a way of understanding the intensity of feeling in our visual world; it has become weaponized across the political spectrum. In actuality, affect is politically fugitive and fungible, open to be mobilized and deployed with radical or reactionary intentions. It is central to the politics of the post-truth era, deployed by conservatives and right-wing elements in recent years with the Trump and Brexit votes, suggesting that affect and emotion have been most powerfully and successfully mobilized to libertarian rather than liberatory ends. The effects are not merely a threat to liberal democracy: Bryan Walsh wrote in Time in 2017, “Trump’s habit of making wild claims on Twitter could be especially dangerous in the event of a pandemic, when public confidence in government is critical to public safety.” Walsh quoted Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University to the effect that the “emerging climate of fake news and alternative facts leaves us worse off than ever before,” professing worry “because I’m certain that we will get an outbreak.”205 Moreover, affect theory deployed by leftist progressive politics, such as in Kapadia’s Insurgent Aesthetics, tends to fall in line with a larger paradigmatic rise in individualized biopolitics, in which the political sphere is conceived less as the public contestation of ideologies and more as embedded within the experience and embodied affective capacities of subject position. Affect is now embroiled within the identitarianism of our age, underwriting the resurgence of fascist ethnonationalism across the world as well as the individualism of progressivism, which we touch upon during the course of our following chapters. We are drawing a clear line under the dominance of affect and trauma in our study of the contemporary art and visual culture of war and terror. We do not refute the importance of affect and trauma theory in humanities and art theory studies around images of war; we acknowledge the importance of this theoretical work, and its continued use as one of a number of analytical tools. However, in the chapters that follow we will not privilege its approach when looking at contemporary art, and neither will we favor creative works that clearly operate or are easily interpreted within its structures. Thirty years ago, we needed to invent ways of thinking and a language to help us to consider visual phenomena for which semiotics could no longer provide adequate or effective formulations. Art theory possessed no new and adequate theoretical models or vocabulary that allowed us to speak productively about the affective and emotional intensities of the images that we see of war, terror, conflict, and political violence. And now we

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have that. September 11 was a key moment in catalyzing ideas that were circulating in the 1990s, and across a broad range of humanities disciplines, the post-9/11 period—roughly 2001 to 2008—was characterized by an eruption of literature in the closely related and overlapping fields of affect theory and trauma studies. However, in the last ten years, the affect–trauma paradigm has tended to homogenize art theory discourse into consistent analyses with fewer surprises. We are in danger of seeing everything through the filter of affect and trauma. As Leys says, “cultural theorists who have turned to affect are interested only in the effects that media and other representations have on the viewer, thereby converting questions about the meaning of artistic works into questions concerning their traumatic-affective influence on the subject.”206 In a recent interview specifically around issues of affect, war, and art, Joanna Bourke suggests historicizing “the trauma paradigm” that, as a set of theoretical tools for conceptualizing the world, has become entrenched and perhaps even a spent force in our ways of thinking about war. “[W]hen we see ‘trauma’ in the title of the book we actually know what the argument is going to be now. I think that we have reached the end of that particular way of understanding our world.”207 We want to resist the tendency toward seeing art that addresses war, terror, and violence through this paradigm. We are intent on thinking through images in a different way. We want to think about the notion of the mediated event, averse or otherwise, in ways that untether it from the affect–trauma paradigm, which over-determines the ways in which we understand contemporary images of war, terror, and conflict.

Notes 1 Yhonnie Scarce and Claire Watson, “VIOLENT SALT,” Violent Salt (Mackay: Artspace Mackay, 2019), 9. 2 Violent Salt artists were Abdul Abdullah (NSW), Vernon Ah Kee (QLD), Richard Bell (QLD), Daniel Boyd (NSW), Megan Cope (QLD), Karla Dickens (NSW), S.J. Norman (VIC), Yhonnie Scarce (VIC/SA), and Jemima Wyman (QLD). “VIOLENT SALT ARTSPACE MACKAY TOURING EXHIBITION,” Artspace Mackay, 2019, accessed March 12, 2020, https://www.artspacemackay.com.au/whats_on/ homepage_news_items/demo_news_items/exhibition_openope3. 3 The lyrics of Advance Australia Fair changed in 2021, and this line is now “for we are one and free.” 4 Martin Bella, “Martin Bella,” Facebook, October 31, 2019, accessed April 7, 2020, https://www.facebook.com/martin.bella.560.

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5 “Martin Bella,” Facebook, October 31, 2019, accessed April 7, 2020, https://www. facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1004662799876114&set=pcb.1004652246543836& type=3&theater. 6 “Martin Bella,” Facebook, October 31, 2019, accessed April 7, 2020, https://www. facebook.com/martin.bella.560. 7 “Martin Bella,” Facebook, October 30, 2019, accessed April 7, 2020, https:// www.facebook.com/martin.bella.560. 8 “Martin Bella,” Facebook, October 30, 2019, accessed April 7, 2020, https:// www.facebook.com/martin.bella.560. 9 “Martin Bella,” Facebook, October 30, 2019, accessed April 7, 2020, https://www. facebook.com/martin.bella.560. 10 “Martin Bella,” Facebook, October 31, 2019, accessed April 7, 2020, https://www. facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1004662853209442&set=pcb.1004652246543836& type=3&theater. 11 Bella, “Martin Bella,” Facebook, October 31, 2019. 12 Linda Morris, “Anti-war Artworks Removed in Censorship Row,” The Sydney Morning Herald, December 9, 2019, 12:00 a.m., accessed March 12, 2020, https:// www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/anti-war-artworks-removed-incensorship-row-20191204-p53gzk.html. 13 “Martin Bella,” Facebook, October 31, 2019, accessed April 7, 2020, https://www. facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1004662799876114&set=pcb.1004652246543836& type=3&theater. 14 Jan Slaby and Christian von Scheve, “Introduction: Affective Societies—Key Concepts,” in Affective Societies, eds. Jan Slaby and Christian von Scheve (New York: Routledge, 2019), 1. 15 Ibid., 1. 16 Journal of Curatorial Studies 4, no. 3, Museums and Affect (2015); Journal of Curatorial Studies 5, no. 1, Affect and Relationality (2016). 17 Kit Messham-Muir, “Dark Visitations: The Possibilities and Problems of Experience and Memory in Holocaust Museums,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art vol. 5, no. 1 (2004): 97–111. 18 “Affect and Curating: Feeling the Curatorial,” Whitechapel Gallery, 2017, accessed April 7, 2020, https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/events/affect-curating-feelingcuratorial/. 19 Susanne von Falkenhausen, “The Trouble with ‘Affect Theory’ in Our Age of Outrage,” Frieze 204, June 6, 2019, accessed February 26, 2020, https://frieze.com/ article/trouble-affect-theory-our-age-outrage. 20 Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1931), vol. V, para 251.

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21 Hal Foster, Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 166. 22 William Messer, “Update,” New Art Examiner (November 1994): 52. 23 US Senator Alphonse D’Amato, quoted in Carole S. Vance, “Issues and Commentary: The War on Culture,” Art in America 77 (September 1989): 39. 24 Nichols Fox, “Helms Ups the Ante,” New Art Examiner (October 1989): 23. 25 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 26 “Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art,” Whitney Museum of American Art, June 23 to August 29, 1993. 27 Carol Vogel, “Australian Museum Cancels Controversial Art Show,” The New York Times, December 1, 1999, accessed September 21, 2018, https://www.nytimes. com/1999/12/01/nyregion/australian-museum-cancels-controversial-art-show.html. 28 Body: Exhibition, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, September 12 to November 16, 1997 (Melbourne: Bookman Schwartz, 1997), 132. 29 Foster, Return of the Real. 30 Ibid., 168. 31 Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique no. 31 (Fall 1995): 83–109. Version quoted here from Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 217–239. 32 Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” 221. 33 Ibid. 34 Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 7. 35 Jill Bennett, “Kama and Eroticism: The Five Senses in the Work of Francesco Clemente and Pierre Klossowski,” in Body, ed. Anthony Bond (Melbourne: Bookman Schwartz, 1997), 132. 36 Ibid., 132. 37 Ibid., 131. 38 Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 7. 39 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1968). 40 Bennett, “Kama and Eroticism,” 132. 41 Ernst van Alphen, “Toys and Affect: Identifying with the Perpetrator in Contemporary Holocaust Art,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art vol. 3, no. 1, Affect and Sensation (2002): 178. Note: Although this special issue of ANZJA was published in 2002, the issue had been bedded down too soon for any mention of 9/11 in its Editorial.

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42 van Alphen, “Toys and Affect,” 158–190; Ernst van Alphen, “Caught by Images: On the Role of Visual Imprints in Holocaust Testimonies,” Journal of Visual Culture vol. 1, no. 2 (2002): 205–221; Ernst van Alphen, “Playing the Holocaust,” in Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art, ed. Norman L. Kleeblatt (New York/New Brunswick: The Jewish Museum New York/Rutgers University Press, 2002), 65–84. 43 Natasha Goldman, “Israeli Holocaust Memorial Strategies at Yad Vashem: From Silence to Recognition,” Art Journal vol. 65, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 102–122; Kit Messham-Muir, “Dark Visitations: The Possibilities and Problems of Experience and Memory in Holocaust Museums,” 97–111. 44 Foster, Return of the Real, 166. 45 The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean Halley (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 46 Patricia Ticineto Clough, “Introduction,” in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean Halley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 21. 47 Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 152. 48 Judith Butler, “Introduction to the Paperback,” in Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2010), 83. 49 Linfield, The Cruel Radiance, 152. 50 Clough, “Introduction,” 1. 51 Grusin, Premediation, 6. 52 Ruth Leys, “Trauma and the Turn to Affect,” Cross/Cultures no. 153 (2012): 5. 53 Norman K. Denzin, “Reviewed Work(s): The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social by Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley,” Contemporary Sociology vol. 37, no. 6 (2008): 604. 54 Bennett, Empathic Vision, 152. 55 Leys, “Trauma and the Turn to Affect,” 6. 56 Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry vol. 37, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 434. 57 For example, the “Museums and Affect” special issue of the Journal of Curatorial Studies vol. 4, no. 3, October 1, 2015. 58 Antonio Traverso and Mick Broderick, “Interrogating Trauma: Towards a Critical Trauma Studies,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies vol. 24, no. 1 (2010): 7. 59 Ruth Leys, The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Leys, “Trauma and the Turn to Affect,” 3. 60 Lauren Berlant, “Affect Is the New Trauma,” The Minnesota Review no. 71/72 (2009): 131.

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61 Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 5. 62 Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique no. 31 (Fall 1995): 83–109. 63 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, “Shame and the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins,” in Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, eds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 1–28. 64 For example, Massumi’s particular reading of “The Snowman Experiment” is an interpretation of experimental work detailed in Hertha Sturm and Marianne Grewe-Partsch, “Television—The Emotional Medium: Results from Three Studies,” in Emotional Effects of Media: The Work of Hertha Sturm, ed. Gertrude Joch Robinson (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1987), 25–44. 65 Silvan Tomkins, “What Are Affects?,” in Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, eds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 33–73. 66 Donald L. Nathanson, Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 66. 67 Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” 221. 68 Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” 467. 69 Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (Oxford: Blackwell Publications, 1996), 218. 70 Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,” M/C Journal vol. 8, no. 6 (2005): 1–5. 71 Ibid., 1–5. 72 Anthony McCosker, Intensive Media: Aversive Affect and Visual Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 73 Stef Craps, “Wor(L)ds of Grief: Traumatic Memory and Literary Witnessing in Cross-cultural Perspective,” Textual Practice vol. 24, no. 1 (2010): 51–68. 74 Karyn Ball, “Introduction,” in Traumatising Theory: The Cultural Politics of Affect in and beyond Psychoanalysis (New York: Other Press, 2007), xxxii–xxxv. 75 Nathanson, Shame and Pride, 73. 76 Ibid., 73–74. 77 Ibid., 73. 78 Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” 439. 79 Ibid., 438. 80 Ibid., 438. 81 Jonathan Flatley, “Glossary,” in Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 12. 82 Elsbeth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005).

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83 Susan Best, Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 19. 84 As far back as 2004, Sarah Ahmed acknowledges “each of these crucial terms— sensation, emotion, affect, cognition and perception—is disputed between disciplines and within disciplines.” Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, second ed. (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2014). In 2008, Jonathan Flatley said, “The vocabulary of affect can be confusing, in part because there are many terms—affect, emotion, feeling, passion, mood—and a long history of debate not only about which terms are the right ones and how to distinguish between them, but about what they mean in the first place”—Flatley, “Glossary,” 11–17. In 2014, Elspeth Brown and Thy Phu also agreed that “[t]here is no scholarly consensus concerning the meaning of affect and emotion”—Elspeth Brown and Thy Phu, “Introduction,” in Feeling Photography, ed. Elspeth Brown and Thy Phu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 6. “The affective turn is a hybrid affair,” said Paul Stenner, “influenced by a range of different traditions, each operating with a rather different account of ‘affect’ ”—Paul Stenner, Liminality and Experience: A Transdisciplinary Approach to the Psychosocial (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 198. 85 Ronak K. Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 214. 86 Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1983). 87 Sue Campbell, “Being Dismissed: The Politics of Emotional Expression,” Hypatia vol. 9, no. 3 (1994): 46–65. 88 Alison M. Jaggar, “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology,” Inquiry vol. 32, no. 2 (1989): 151–176. 89 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 207. 90 Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016), 22–23. 91 Megan Boler and Elizabeth Davis, “The Affective Politics of the ‘Post-Truth’ Era: Feeling Rules and Networked Subjectivity,” Emotion, Space and Society 27 (2018): 81. 92 Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 207. 93 Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,” 1–5. 94 Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” 437. 95 Ibid., 436. This is, argues Leys, despite increasing recent scientific evidence that this is simply not correct: Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” 439–440. 96 Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” 437. 97 Ibid., 443. 98 Ibid., 450–451. 99 Ibid., 472.

102 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108

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111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124

Images of War in Contemporary Art Leys, The Ascent of Affect, 323. Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” 450. Leys, “Trauma and the Turn to Affect,” 14. Leys, The Ascent of Affect, 308. Nigel Thrift, “Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect,” Geografiska Annaler vol. 86, no. 1 (2004): 58. Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” 436. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009). Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt, “In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work,” Theory, Culture and Society vol. 25, no. 7/8 (2008): 15, 16. Megan Boler and Elizabeth Davis, “The Affective Politics of the ‘Post-Truth’ Era: Feeling Rules and Networked Subjectivity,” Emotion, Space and Society no. 27 (2018): 80. Anna Gibbs, “Contagious Feelings: Pauline Hanson and the Epidemiology of Affect,” Australian Humanities Review no. 24 (December 2001). “Revisit Pauline Hanson’s Infamous Maiden Speech,” SBS, July 19, 2016, 12:53 p.m. (updated August 1, 2016, 9:55 a.m.), accessed April 12, 2019, https://www.sbs.com. au/guide/article/2016/07/19/revisit-pauline-hansons-infamous-maiden-speech. Gibbs, “Contagious Feelings.” Ibid. Ibid. William E. Connolly, “The Complexity of Intention,” Critical Inquiry vol. 37, no. 4 (Summer 2011): 796. Laurie Ouellette, “Branding the Right: The Affective Economy of Sarah Palin,” Cinema Journal vol. 51, no. 4 (Summer 2012): 190. Olivier Jutel, “American Populism, Glenn Beck and Affective Media Production,” International Journal of Cultural Studies vol. 21, no. 4 (January 2017): 376. Jutel, “American Populism,” 390. Connolly, “The Complexity of Intention,” 796. “Word of the Year 2016,” Oxford Languages, 2016, accessed February 18, 2020, https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2016/. Lee McIntrye, Post-Truth (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2018), 13. “Transcripts,” CNN, Aired July 22, 2016, 08:30 ET, accessed February 18, 2020, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1607/22/nday.06.html. McIntrye, Post-Truth, 10–11; Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Newark, NJ: Polity Press, 2018). William Davies, Nervous States: How Feeling Took over the World (London: Jonathan Cape, 2018), 40–48. Ibid., 40–48.

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125 Michael Deacon, “Michael Gove’s Guide to Britain’s Greatest Enemy . . . the Experts,” The Telegraph, June 10, 2016, accessed April 18, 2019, https://www. telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/10/michael-goves-guide-to-britains-greatestenemy-the-experts/. 126 Finlay Grieg, “Jeremy Vine: Brexit Was No Surprise to Radio 2 Listeners,” iNews, Tuesday October 3, 2017, accessed April 18, 2019, https://inews.co.uk/culture/ radio/jeremy-vine-brexit-radio-2-listeners/. 127 John Clarke and Janet Newman, “ ‘People in this Country Have Had Enough of Experts’: Brexit and the Paradoxes of Populism,” Critical Policy Studies vol. 11, no. 1 (2017): 100. 128 Donald J. Trump, “Let Me Ask America a Question,” Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2016, 7:18 p.m. ET, accessed April 18, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/let-meask-america-a-question-1460675882. 129 Hua Hsu, “Affect Theory and the New Age of Anxiety: How Lauren Berlant’s Cultural Criticism Predicted the Trumping of Politics,” The New Yorker, March 18, 2019, accessed April 12, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/25/ affect-theory-and-the-new-age-of-anxiety. 130 Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 66. 131 Ibid., 65. 132 Ibid., 66. 133 Ibid., 66. 134 Ibid., 209. 135 Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-right (Alresford: John Hunt Publishing, 2017), 36. 136 Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics, 76–102. 137 Ibid., 78. 138 Ibid., 69. 139 Ibid., 22. 140 Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 4. 141 Ibid., 83–84. 142 Ibid., 80. 143 Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics, 93. 144 Ibid., 10. 145 Ibid., 21. 146 Ibid., 26. 147 Falkenhausen, “The Trouble with ‘Affect Theory’ in Our Age of Outrage.” 148 Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” 451. 149 Walter Benn Michaels, “The Shape of the Signifier,” Critical Inquiry vol. 27, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 275.

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164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177

Images of War in Contemporary Art Leys, The Ascent of Affect, 344. Michaels, “The Shape of the Signifier,” 278. Ibid., 280. Ibid., 278. Walter Benn Michaels, “Empires of the Senseless,” in The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 170. Leys, The Ascent of Affect, 344. Ibid., 343. Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” 472. Walter Benn Michaels, “The Beauty of a Social Problem (e.g. Unemployment),” Twentieth Century Literature: Postmodernism vol. 57, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2011): 312; William E. Connolly, Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 58. Leys, The Ascent of Affect, 344. Michaels, “The Beauty of a Social Problem (e.g. Unemployment),” 311. William Davies, “Why Can’t We Agree on What’s True Any More?,” The Guardian, September 19, 2019, 15.00 AEST, accessed February 20, 2020, https://www. theguardian.com/media/2019/sep/19/why-cant-we-agree-on-whats-true-anymore. “Prince Andrew & Epstein Interview Body Language Analyzed (2020),” The Behavior Panel, YouTube, May 27, 2020, accessed August 4, 2020, https://youtu.be/ HC40bgA2wKA. David Choi, “Lozenge Was Stuck in His Throat,” Business Insider, March 24, 2020, 2:43 p.m., accessed April 8, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com.au/dr-faucifacepalm-covered-his-face-after-stuck-lozenge-2020-3?r=US&IR=T. Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” 472. Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics, 93. Leys, The Ascent of Affect, 342–343. Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics, 21. Ibid., 22. Rebecca A. Adelman, Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in the Perpetual War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 1. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 5. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 82. Ibid., 83. Ibid. Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics, 55. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 97.

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Ibid., 55. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 29. Adelman, Figuring Violence, 3. Ibid., 5–6. Fritz Breithaupt, The Dark Sides of Empathy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 205. Adelman, Figuring Violence, 7. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 10. Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics, 21. “Martin Bella,” Facebook, October 31, 2019, accessed April 7, 2020, https://www. facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1003965356612525&set=pcb.1003965376612523& type=3&theater. “Martin Bella,” Facebook, October 31, 2019, accessed April 7, 2020, https://www. facebook.com/martin.bella.560. “Martin Bella,” Facebook, October 31, 2019, accessed April 7, 2020, https://www. facebook.com/martin.bella.560. Michael Armstrong, “The Soldier as Artist: Memories of War,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Artistic and Cultural Responses to War since 1914: The British Isles, the United States and Australasia, ed. Martin Kerby, Margaret Baguley, and Janet McDonald (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 163–180, 166; including quotes from Laura Webster, “Ben Quilty: After Afghanistan,” Art Monthly Australia 258 (2013): 15; and Geoff Dyer, The Missing of the Somme (London: Penguin, 1994), 27. Armstrong, “The Soldier as Artist,” 164–165. Ibid., 165. Christina Twomey, “Trauma and the Reinvigoration of Anzac: An Argument,” History Australia vol. 10, no. 3 (2013): 88. Twomey, “Trauma and the Reinvigoration of Anzac,” 88. Ibid., 88. Morris, “Anti-war Artworks Removed in Censorship Row.” Ibid. Breithaupt, The Dark Sides of Empathy, 171. Ibid., 161. Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (New York: Ecco, 2016), 3. Stenner, Liminality and Experience, 208. Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” 221.

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205 Bryan Walsh, “The World Is Not Ready for the Next Pandemic,” Time, May 4, 2017, accessed April 24, 2020, https://time.com/magazine/us/4766607/may-15th-2017vol-189-no-18-u-s/. 206 Leys, “Trauma and the Turn to Affect,” 14. 207 Joanna Bourke, interview with Kit Messham-Muir, Sydney, February 27, 2019, transcribed by Monika Lukowska-Appel.

3

The Gamification of Terror

At the James Cohen Gallery in Tribeca during January and February 2020, fourteen blocks north of the World Trade Center Memorial and nearly two decades since the events of September 11, 2001, Teresa Margolles’s solo exhibition displayed a set of seemingly minimalist objects: a rectangular grid of 2,300 black burnished tiles along the length of one wall, three minimal black and gold garments on stands, two simple concrete benches, and a framed photograph of a pile of red shotgun cartridges on a black background mounted next to a small paper receipt for the purchase of the same ammunition. Multiples of the same receipt, reproduced on poster-sized paper (36 × 24 inches), were stacked neatly on a white plinth near the gallery entrance. The minimalist aesthetic in Margolles’s practice is often infused with the residual matter of violence. At the 2009 Venice Biennale, Margolles hung a flag outside the Mexican pavilion that was darkly stained with blood collected from execution sites in Juárez, the Mexican border twin to El Paso. Inside the pavilion she displayed jewelry made from shards of windshield glass and the performance Limpieza, in which families of victims of the drug wars mop the pavilion floor with diluted blood from assassination crime scenes.1 The works in her 2020 Tribeca exhibition, which was titled El asesinato cambia el mundo/Assassination changes the world, similarly conceal horrific violence beneath the surface coolness of minimalism. The gallery’s descriptions of the work note that the two concrete benches, titled Dos bancos, are “made from a mixture of cement and material sourced from the ground where the body fell of a person shot dead at the northern Mexican border.”2 The garments, titled El Brillo: One assassination shapes the world (Un asesinato forma el mundo), are “hand-embroidered in goldwork bullion style with glass shards from a site where violent acts occurred in Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico, 2019.”3 The shotgun cartridges (Super Speed/El Paso, Texas (2020)) and Receipt (2020) are from an ammunition purchase from the Walmart store on Gateway Boulevard in El Paso, Texas, where on August 3, 2019, a twenty-one-year-old terrorist murdered twenty-three people using a semi-automatic assault rifle.4 Departing 107

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Figure 3.1 Super Speed/El Paso, Texas, 2020, by Teresa Margolles, pigmented inkjet print, box of 24 cartridges purchased from Walmart, Gateway Blvd, El Paso, TX, unframed: 26 × 35 3/8 inches (66 × 90 cm), framed: 26 3/4 × 36 1/4 × 1 3/8 inches (67.9 × 92.1 × 3.5 cm). Photo: Phoebe d’Heurle. © Teresa Margolles. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York.

visitors to Margolles’s Tribeca exhibition could take a copy of the enlarged receipt from its position near the gallery door. Colby Chamberlain notes in Artforum that this act was “an obvious homage to one of the artists most associated with elegiac Minimalism, Felix Gonzalez-Torres.”5 Margolles’s elegiac minimalism elegantly articulates the well-established aesthetic tropes of contemporary public memorials to victims of mass murder, which have dominated during the last forty years. Chamberlain’s Artforum review historically aligns the advent of this elegiac minimalism with the 1982 dedication of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, representing a shift from “the era of testimony” following World War II to the emerging “era of forensics” in the 1980s.6 This correlates with the shift from the figurative representation of many previous memorials to the emergence of a minimalist “traumatic form,” which (re)enacts psychological trauma in the breakdown of intelligibility, articulated through some form of a textual breakdown of legibility (see Chapter 1). It is the aesthetic of the fractured Star of David of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin (1999), Rachel Whiteread’s Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna (2000), Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in

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Figure 3.2 Receipt, 2020, by Teresa Margolles, stacked facsimiles of receipt from purchase from Walmart, Gateway Blvd, El Paso, TX, each: 36 × 24 inches, edition of 3 plus 1 artist’s proof (JCG11285). Photo: Phoebe d’Heurle. © Teresa Margolles. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York.

Berlin (2005), and Michael Arad’s World Trade Center Memorial (2011). The New York Times noted of the latter memorial’s selection process, “[n]o one was surprised, given the ages of the finalists, that minimalism was the universal vocabulary of the submissions.”7 In their material and aesthetic disavowal of figuration, these abstract minimalist memorials can be seen as attempting to perform and enact trauma through staging an experiential breakdown of representation. Whereas abstract minimalism is now the established visual language of trauma in memorials, more figurative representations seem woefully kitsch and iconographically over-determined in their ease of reading. Accordingly, Margolles’s Super Speed/El Paso, Texas and Receipt present the same tropes of elegant minimalist rupture as do Arad’s World Trade Center Memorial. The terror perpetrator in El Paso was a far-right extremist, as has been the case with the majority of terror attacks in the United States since 9/11.8 The El Paso attack is part of a profoundly significant shift in terrorism, not just in the United States, but internationally. This shift has a very particular aesthetic dimension, which is of central interest here. The aesthetics of terror today has evolved in the underbelly of the internet, on anonymous online message boards invisible to mainstream visual culture and, until recently, to the mainstream

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political arena. The El Paso terrorist acted alone, and posted a manifesto titled The Inconvenient Truth on the anonymous 8chan online message board, which begins: “In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto. This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”9 Thirteen hours after the El Paso terror attack, and in direct response, a male shooter in Dayton, Ohio, killed ten and injured twentyseven.10 A week later on August 10, 2019, a twenty-one-year-old man in Norway attacked a mosque in Bærum with two shotguns and a handgun, killing one person.11 On October 9, 2019, in Halle, Germany, a male shooter attempted unsuccessfully to attack a synagogue on Yom Kippur, before which he killed two people at a kebab shop, live-streaming the attack on Twitch. As The New York Times notes, “[t]he methodology of the assailant bore a striking resemblance to the rampage by a far-right extremist against two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.”12 In the terror attack in Christchurch on March 15, 2019, a twentyeight-year-old male self-identified fascist and white supremacist—who we name in this book “Person X”13—used two shotguns, two semi-automatic assault rifles, and a lever-action rifle to murder fifty-one people and injure forty-nine at two mosques. The previous day, he had posted on the 8chan /pol/ “politically incorrect” message board: “Well lads, it’s time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort post. I will carry out and [sic] attack against the invaders, and will even live stream the attack to Facebook.” Person X urged other anonymous posters, “please do your part by spreading my message, making memes and shitposting as you usually do.”14 He included a link to Facebook and a seventy-four-page manifesto. Through the link, a live video of the attack was streamed via Facebook Live from a GoPro camera mounted on the shooter.15 The Halle shooter’s thirty-five-minute live-streamed video showed similar scenes to those of the Christchurch terror attack: the shooter taking stock of his weapons and shooting his victims from a first-person-shooter “video game” perspective.16 The Christchurch attack also influenced the Norway attack, with the gunman posting online: “Well cobbers it’s my time, I was elected by Saint [Person X] after all, We can’t let this go on,” referring to the Australian terrorist responsible for the Christchurch attack.17 Before the El Paso attack, on April 27, 2019, a nineteen-year-old man in Poway, California attacked a synagogue killing one and injuring three, after also posting a manifesto on 8chan’s “/pol”“politically incorrect” board citing the “sacrifice” by Person X a month earlier.18 Other “lone wolf ” politically motivated hate attacks similar to these had occurred leading up to the Christchurch terror attack, such as one by a Pittsburgh man who on

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October 27, 2018 posted on Gab, “HIAS [Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society] likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics. I’m going in,” before murdering eleven people at a synagogue.19 Far-right politically motivated mass shootings first emerged as a significant phenomenon with the 2011 Norway attacks—“22 Juli” or “22/7” as the attacks are known in that country—when a single heavily armed terrorist attacked government and civilian targets, including a left-wing youth camp, killing 77 people. However, the Christchurch terror attack is now the focal point of so many far-right terror attacks that have followed—and will follow—because it marks the rise of a gradual and silent weaponization of social media; it stands as a watershed moment in what has been described as the “gamification of terror.”20 The Christchurch attack lies at the nexus of a complex and synergetic confluence of factors that lie largely outside of the political and aesthetic imagination of contemporary art discourse, including that which addresses war and terror. Indeed, the significance for visual culture of the Christchurch attack goes well beyond the technological evolution of live-streaming, into an aesthetic politics that is wildly and complexly polysemic, layered, fugitive, and fungible. The visual culture of terror today is a kind of grotesque kitsch, an aesthetic of low-grade appropriation. It is the visual culture of carnivalesque montage, founded in a culture of laughing at pathos and a cruel festive triggering of affect and emotion. Its aesthetic is the antithesis of the tradition of elegiac minimalism Margolles evokes in her work on the El Paso attack. While Margolles’s minimalism aligns with a particular dominant contemporary art aesthetic—cool and contemplative with a gritty twist, not to mention made for the white cube interiors of collectors and museums—the aesthetics of terror today are in large part invisible to the world of contemporary art, which still tends to dismiss the online digital visual world as inconsequential. Our intention in this chapter is to turn attention to this seemingly arcane but insidiously powerful political aesthetic realm, which is vitally important to understanding the aesthetics of terror that relate to the politics and aesthetics of transgression, festive cruelty, and the carnivalesque. It is self-evident that the principal purpose of terrorism is not the disruptive or murderous acts of terror themselves, but the broader and ongoing effects triggered through their mediation and distribution. The terror act is the lightning crack, and the media that distributes it resonates it in a thunderous boom. In modern acts of terror, there is no louder boom than 9/11, which has resonated across two decades, through two major wars, the rise and fall of ISIL, the refugee crisis, rising populist nationalism, and a global geopolitical landscape that would

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have been unrecognizable in 2001. As a mediated event, the 2019 Christchurch terror attack was comparable to 9/11 in its meticulous planning and its intention to create terror designed for a particular medium. For much of the last twenty years, Islamist terrorism has dominated media attention and the political agendas of the Western world. Of course, 9/11 is the defining moment that resonates throughout the decades—a spectacularly horrific attack staged in New York, the city that for many functions as a metonym of America’s social, cultural, and economic character, carefully coordinated to attract the absolute maximum live news media attention, watched live throughout the entire world. Jacques Derrida, who watched events unfold on CNN from a hotel in Shanghai, asks rhetorically, “[w]hat would ‘September 11’ have been without television?”21 For a decade, Western news media and visual culture was infused by images of the aftermath of attacks, such as those in Bali (2002), Madrid (2004), London (2005), and Mumbai (2008). The American-led war in Iraq led to a new phenomenon of beheading videos, which included a 2004 spate of low-fi videos of the beheadings of Nick Berg, Kenneth Bigley, Jack Hensley, Kim Sun-il, Georgi Lazov, and others, perpetrated, recorded, and distributed on the internet by Iraqi jihadist groups. Ten years later with the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in the power vacuum of northern Iraq and eastern Syria, another spate of terror attacks, some paramilitary but many also involving vehicles, were perpetrated in Paris (2015, twice), Nice (2016), Berlin (2016), Barcelona (2017), London (2017), Stockholm (2017), and Manchester (2017). Now, smartphone videos ensured that these attacks and their immediate aftermaths were recorded in one form or another, and quickly distributed via social media as well as traditional news media. ISIL also created beheading videos for distribution via social media, now with more sophisticated recording and editing, including videos of James Foley, Steven Sotloff, David Cawthorne Haines, Peter Kassig; eighteen Syrian soldiers of the Syrian Arab Army (in 2014); and twenty-eight Ethiopian Christians, four Kurdish Peshmerga members, twenty-one Egyptian Coptic Christians, and the Japanese citizens Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto (in 2015). Together, these videos demonstrate that with newer technology and social media it is no longer necessary to stage horror on a televisual scale at the metropolitan centers of the media world, or to distribute it within the infrastructures and social milieu of broadcast media. With the capacity of ISIL significantly diminished since 2016 and the rise of white ethnonationalist terror in recent years, the visual culture of terrorism takes a very different turn. The 2019 Christchurch terror attack heralded a shift that goes much deeper than its use of mobile technology and capacity for distribution

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on social media and the internet. Much has been written about ISIL’s use of technology and social media (see, for example, Violent Extremism Online: New Perspectives on Terrorism and the Internet (2016),22 and it is not our purpose here to review those analyses. Rather, we are interested in the very different character of more recent violent extremism online. Looking back on Violent Extremism Online from only five years on, the change is striking. At a complex level and in a qualified way, the Christchurch terror attack is to the current conditions of the visual culture of war and terror what 9/11 was to the conditions of 2001; indeed, also what the Iraqi insurgency videos were to 2004 and ISIL videos were to 2015. An examination of the Christchurch terror attack tells us much about the synergistic relationship of our present technological, social, and political landscape and the aesthetic politics of terror today. The Christchurch terror attack could not have taken place in 2001 in any way approximating the way in which it did in 2019—not simply because social media and ubiquitous connectivity did not exist in 2001, but because of seismic social and political shifts over the last five years, the implications of which we are only recently beginning to understand. However far-reaching its effects, we need to understand that the intended audience for the Christchurch attack was a very small group of like-minded and politically aligned would-be attackers. The Christchurch terrorist did not need an audience of millions to spread fear throughout the world. Instead, the target audience of the Christchurch attack was the handful of potential copycat attackers, those 200 viewers who were following the shooter and watched the seventeen-minute video streaming live from his GoPro. Some of those 200 people then shared it within their own echo chambers by feeding the recording back into 8chan’s /pol/ board and Facebook: 4,000 times before Facebook took action, removed the existing uploads, and prevented another 1.2 million uploads.23 The stated intention of Person X’s terrorist act was to encourage likeminded right-wing extremists to plan similar acts of terror, to “get training, form alliances, get equipped and then act.”24

Christchurch, New Zealand, 1:40 p.m. (NZDT) March 15, 2019 A Facebook Live video begins streaming. We can see three firearms on the passenger seat of a car, and after some short fumbling with the camera, the car begins to move. We cannot see Person X, but the first thing we hear him say is, “remember lads, subscribe to PewDiePie,” referring to a viral meme publicity

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stunt to increase subscription to YouTuber and online gamer PewDiePie’s channel, open to the public to perform increasingly attention-grabbing acts to publicize the phrase “subscribe to PewDiePie.” Accordion folk music begins to play on the car stereo. The choice of music is carefully curated, as are so many aspects of this video, to resonate with a particular audience, distributed across the world but connected via the internet. It is a Serbian song, “Karadžiću, vodi Srbe svoje” (“Karadžić, Lead Your Serbs”), recorded in 1993 during the wars in the Balkans following the break-up of Yugoslavia. On the seat to Person X’s left, the black surfaces of shotguns and semi-automatic assault rifles are handscrawled with white text making coded references to historical wars between Muslims and Europeans, Serbian nationalism, and fascist internet memes.25 “Remove Kebab” is amongst the texts on one of the rifles.26 Within a few seemingly mundane minutes, the driver arrives at his destination, takes the firearms in hand and begins his mission to violently murder as many Muslim worshippers as possible at the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre. The images and sound, captured and streamed by a GoPro camera mounted on the shooter, combine to create point-of-view footage that replicates the perspective and aesthetic of a video game. A few minutes before the Facebook Live video stream began, Person X emailed a seventy-four-page manifesto titled The Great Replacement to the New Zealand Prime Minister’s office and number of media outlets. His manifesto is peppered with references to white supremacist atrocities of recent years (2011 Norway shooter, 2015 Charleston shooter) and encoded with right-wing internet memes of the kind that circulate anonymously amongst neofascist threads on message boards such as 4chan and 8chan. As Kevin Roose points out, his references were “thick with irony and meta-text and very easy to misinterpret if you’re not steeped in this stuff all the time (and even if you are).”27 One such reference is to Candace Owens, a conservative American with a prominent YouTube presence: “Every time she spoke I was stunned by her insights and her own views helped push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness. Though I will have to disavow some of her beliefs, the actions she calls for are too much, even for my tastes.”28 Written by someone intent on genocidal murder, the irony underlying his sarcasm would only resonate with anyone familiar with Owens and who understands the far-right disdain for her more palatable “cuckservative” form of politics. An article published by Robert Evans on Bellingcat, an investigative journalism website, shortly after the attacks suggests that the manifesto is a mixture of the shooter’s genuine beliefs and traps laid for journalists, buried beneath “shitposting,” which is “the act of throwing out huge amounts of content,

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most of it ironic, low-quality trolling, for the purpose of provoking an emotional reaction in less internet-savvy viewers.”29 Essentially, shitposting is an extreme form of trolling, a strategy of shutting down online discussion by flooding an internet forum to the degree that it is no longer functional, aiming to frustrate and infuriate genuine participants, “triggering” them to respond in anger, with the ultimate objective—and this is central—of laughing at their emotional response. Evans says the manifesto is “a clear and brutally obvious example of this technique.”30 And the live-streamed seventeen-minute Facebook video of murder and maiming is another part of that shitposting. This is far from what Heather Brooke had in mind only eight years earlier, when she wrote in her book The Revolution Will Be Digitised (2011) that “a new Information Enlightenment is dawning where knowledge flows freely, beyond national boundaries of status, class, power, wealth and geography, replacing them with an ethos of collaboration and transparency.”31 Brooke characterizes the potential for social media, still emerging at that time, with misty-eyed optimism, seeing in it the potential to overturn engrained social and economic inequalities at a global level. The Revolution Will Be Digitised now reads as a snapshot of a brief and glorious moment in the evolution of social media. The newfound capacity for users to communicate through peer-to-peer connections was met with widespread positivity around the possibilities that could arise from this new democratic media. Also in 2011, Brian Loader and Dan Mercea spoke of social media’s “virtual public sphere,” suggesting that Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter had brought about a new age in participatory politics,32 social media having the potential to fulfil the Habermasian ideal of a properly democratic and participatory public sphere, hitherto diminished in modernity by the imperatives of corporate interests.33 A true public sphere, as Lisa Kruse, Dawn Norris, and Jonathan Flinchum summarize it, “requires unlimited access to information, equal and protected participation, and the absence of institutional influence, particularly regarding the economy.”34 In 2011, social media was ticking all these boxes, with its “focus upon the role of the citizen-user as the driver of democratic innovation through the self-actualized networking of citizens engaged in lifestyle and identity politics,” according to Loader and Mercea.35 Social media, these theorists predicted, meant that publics would no longer be passive consumers of mass media, government propaganda, and corporate spin, but be “instead actually enabled to challenge discources [sic], share alternative perspectives and publish their own opinions.”36 For Brooke, this “New Enlightenment” was driven by the goal of “discovering truths about the way we live, about politics and power.”37 This effusive optimism was fueled by the role of social media in the Arab Spring of 2011, comprising

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popular uprisings in Arab nations including Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen. Later that year, the global Occupy movement began from the anticapitalist movement Occupy Wall Street, “remarkable for the prominent role social media, and in particular Twitter, played in facilitating communication among its participants.”38 In Angela Nagle’s excellent, nuanced account of the online rise of the alt-right and meme culture, Kill All Normies (2017), she describes that moment as “the leaderless digital counter-revolution,” which also importantly included Wikileaks and the Anonymous movement.39 These uprisings and protests seemed fundamentally leftist in their politics, driven to reject undemocratic, strongman authoritarian governments and rapacious and unbridled corporate neoliberalism. The Guy Fawkes mask, appropriated from the 1980s V for Vendetta comic books and the 2005 movie of the same name, literally became the face of Occupy protestors and of Anonymous. For Nagle, the Guy Fawkes mask characterizes much of the aesthetic politics of this last decade—politically fungible, anonymous, and all that arises from the Pandora’s box of the uninhibited, unregulated, unmoderated, libidinal world of possibility. The “chan” message boards began with 2chan, set up in 2001 for exchanging anime images and followed by 4chan in 2003. By 2011, 4chan had 750 million page views per month. “This culture of anonymity,” observes Nagle, “fostered an environment where the users went to air their darkest thoughts. Weird pornography, in-jokes, nerdish argot, gory images, suicidal, murderous and incestuous thoughts, racism and misogyny were characteristic of the environment created by this strange virtual experiment, but it was mostly funny memes.”40 As with 8chan that followed, anyone with access to the website could post without registering, which would automatically generate the username Anonymous. Never really a coherent group, Anonymous became identified as a real-world entity when it claimed responsibility for incidents such as Project Chanology, a coordinated, targeted attack against the Church of Scientology. Anonymous launched distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks crashing the Scientology website, flooded the church’s helpline with prank calls, and protested in Guy Fawkes masks outside Scientology churches. The Economist saw the attacks as “fair game” in a David and Goliath style battle, saying the group’s “best weapon may be ridicule.”41 A closely associated group, LulzSec, launched successful cyberattacks on large corporations including Fox, Sony, and Nintendo, and government departments including the CIA.42 Following their early attack on Fox, and a campaign to free Chelsea Manning, LulzSec were wrongly understood as being politically leftist,43 whereas their 2011 manifesto states: “This is the Internet, where we screw each

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other over for a jolt of satisfaction.”44 As Nate Anderson said at the time, “they’re in it for the lulz.”45 The “lulz” he means is different from the mainstream social media LOL (Laugh Out Loud)—the lulz is mocking laughter targeted at earnestness and, particularly in the last ten years, the “moral self-flattery of what felt like a tired liberal intellectual conformity running right through from establishment liberal politics to the more militant enforcers of new sensitivities from the wackiest corners of Tumblr to campus politics.”46 The lulz is a cruel mocking laughter that has been suppressed by the contemporary mores of social acceptability in real life, and so finds fertile ground in the anonymity of the “chan” boards.

The Lulz Hence, the source of what seemed to be a digital insurgency was also the source of some merciless cruelty, such as the case of “Jessi Slaughter,” an eleven-year-old girl who, in 2010, became the target of mass harassment.47 Like most tales of internet bullying, the narrative is messy, and it is far outside of the reach of this chapter. In short, Jessi posted a video that was shared on 4chan’s /b/ “random” board, which led to users identifying her real name and “doxxing” her. Doxxing is when attackers identify a victim’s personal details, such as their home address and telephone numbers, then expose them publicly or within a message board or Internet Relay Chat to other potential attackers with the intention of generating mass harassment.48 Jessi’s doxxing was followed by a flood of pizza deliveries and prank phone calls to her home, to which she responded in another distraught video, adding further fuel to the harassment. Her live video response was interrupted by an angry tirade by her father, but this only led to further merciless lampooning of both daughter and father, including online repetition of his phrases “you done goofed,” “consequences will never be the same,” and a threat to call the “cyberpolice.”49 “In their emotionally underdeveloped way,” notes Nagle, “lack of Internet-culture knowledge is always license on 4chan for any level of cruelty.”50 In internet trolling, the aim is to trigger the most intense emotional response possible from the (often random) victim, and the ultimate objective is the satisfaction of laughing in cruel mockery at their visible aggravation. The crueler the trolling, the more tragic the victim, and the more visible their distress, result in all the more satisfying lulz. Trolling culture is a “dark side of empathy.” The satisfaction of the lulz is invested in the depth of the emotional response and the

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extent of the psychological and emotional damage. Anonymous perpetrators, often self-declared social misfits, most likely know the depths of pain and perhaps even identify with it, being quietly thankful that they are not themselves on the receiving end of the cruelty. Undoubtedly the apex (or nadir, depending on one’s perspective) of this phenomenon in the last ten years has been a series of incidents that began in late 2014 and can be collected under the rubric of “Gamergate.” Gamergate was a conflict between a small number of female game developers, feminist game critics, and computer game journalists, versus a mostly anonymous mass of libertarian gamers. The former declared the digital gaming industry to be fundamentally white and masculinist and in need of reform for greater inclusivity; libertarian “Gamergaters” interpreted these criticisms of the gaming communities as attacking and undermining the autonomy of their hitherto unregulated digital space with “social justice extremism.”51 We will not disappear down the rabbit hole of recounting this highly inflammatory narrative. Much has already been written about Gamergate.52 It was a battle waged almost entirely outside of the gaze of the mainstream media and has only retrospectively risen to any level of broader interest by virtue of its importance to the culture war between leftist progressives and right-wing libertarians that spilled into the public arena of American politics during the 2016 presidential election. What is important to this book is that Gamergate brought to prominence one of the key figures of the alt-right, Milo Yiannopoulos. Yiannopoulos wrote articles defending Gamergaters against what he deemed the unwelcome incursion of left-wing and feminist political correctness, or PC, and his defenses were published in the alt-right online periodical Breitbart. Not insignificantly, the executive chair of Breitbart, Steve Bannon, was also chair of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and Vice President of Cambridge Analytica, the disgraced election psyops company that stole millions of Facebook users’ personal data and then used them to microtarget misinformation to persuadable voters in the 2016 election.53 Bannon went on to become White House Chief Strategist for the first seven months of Trump’s administration.

The New Authoritarianism In the years between Gamergate and the early days of the Trump presidency, Yiannopoulos rapidly emerged from the political shadows into the mainstream of American politics, becoming the darling of an online right wing. A young,

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charismatic, flamboyantly gay man, Yiannopoulos’s right-wing opinions were framed as the work of a “provocateur,” the self-proclaimed “most fabulous supervillain on the internet” and “loveable rogue.”54 His attack on actor Leslie Jones after her appearance in the all-female principal cast of the 2016 Ghostbusters remake (which was itself seen as an incursion into geeky fandom by feminism and political correctness), led to mass trolling of Jones and the permanent ban of Yiannopoulos from Twitter.55 Twitter users called Jones an ape and sent her pornographic images (“even got a pic with semen on my face”), eventually forcing her off the platform.56 Framing himself as a champion of free speech in opposition to the PC values of the left, and even to centrist liberal mainstream politics, Yiannopoulos took his Dangerous Faggot tour across America’s college campuses in 2016 and 2017. Most notably, on February 1, 2017, about a thousand leftist protestors picketed Yiannopoulos’s talk at the University of California, Berkeley, which descended into a riot: a police generator was overturned and set on fire, windows were smashed, fireworks were thrown at police, and the event was aborted. While some other recent right-wing protests had also turned violent—six months earlier the fascist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville,

Figure 3.3 Neo Nazis, Alt-Right, and White Supremacists encircle counter-protestors at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson after marching through the University of Virginia campus with torches in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11, 2017. Photo: Shay Horse / NurPhoto via Getty Images.

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Virginia led to the beating of an African American man by six protesters and a fatal vehicular attack on a crowd by a neo-Nazi—the Berkeley riot allowed Yiannopoulos to reiterate a now familiar culture war refrain, that the left are against free speech while the right are its natural guardians. He responded with a video on Facebook in which he said, “they’re so threatened by the idea that a conservative speaker might be persuasive and interesting and funny, and might persuade, you know, might take some people with him, they just have to shut it down at all costs.”57 Conservatives commonly figure themselves in these culture war battles as honest, everyday folk, and characterize progressives as humorless authoritarians, with their “no-platforming,” “cancel culture,” campus safe spaces, trigger warnings, and self-chosen gender pronouns. Jeff Sparrow astutely traces the lineage of these deeply engrained tropes. He details the emergence of leftist progressive politics in the 1960s as transgressive counter-culture and their establishment as top-down “delegated politics,” by the 1990s, by which time radical social justice ideas were legitimized and institutionalized as policy.58 Sparrow argues that during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, conservatives reacted by positioning themselves not as opponents of racial or gender equality, but as advocates of equality. By opposing PC, they weren’t being sexist or racist; on the contrary, they were battling a new, authoritarian doctrine espoused by (in Bush’s words) the “political extremists roam[ing] the land, abusing the privilege of free speech, setting citizens against one another on the basis of their class or race”.59

The progressive left is refigured in the present political landscape as repressive. “The new authoritarianism of the twenty-first century has nothing to do with the Presidency of Donald J. Trump,” says Salvatore Babones in his 2018 polemic: “The new authoritarianism of the twenty-first century is, paradoxically, a liberal authoritarianism. It is a tyranny of experts.”60 That is, authoritarian resides not in the strongman populism of leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, but in liberalism, “the world’s dominant political philosophy,”61 represented by the “liberal elite” within Hollywood, universities, and some media. Against this backdrop, it might be argued that Yiannopoulos’s popularity was partly due to the fact that his aesthetic was counter-intuitive, as a “fabulous” gay man among conservatives. He epitomized much of the attitude of the far-right, which has become more ingrained in the last five years: young, transgressive, “telling it like it is,” and “triggering the libs” with a tinge of festive cruelty. Yiannopoulos’s Breitbart articles argue that, for instance, “fat-shaming

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works . . . we shame fat people for a reason. It’s not just cruelty; it’s for their benefit.” Blaming all the usual alt-right nemeses: feminists, lefties, and academics,62 Yiannopoulos personifies the lulz of internet culture. His is a meanspirited and deliberately anti-empathic humor, with an overarching sense of you-can’t-say-that transgressiveness that appeals to those people who feel that their “right” to say whatever they want has been eroded by the new authoritarians. In March 2016, as Trump gained momentum in the Republican primaries, Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari wrote a guide to the alt-right for Breitbart, downplaying the seriousness of its racism and connection to neo-Nazis and emphasizing its sardonic humor and use of edgy memes.63 According to Nagle, the main driver of the rise of the alt-right was the appeal of rejecting the dour humorlessness of the progressive left, of political correctness, and of “call-out culture.” An online backlash of irreverent mockery attracted many followers, yet Nagle warns that “those who made the right attractive will have to take responsibility for having played their role.”64 Nagle’s blaming of the left for creating a breeding ground for the backlash, leading to the rise of the alt-right, is a stretch, as though internet users enter an open market of ideas ready and willing to buy exclusively into one ideology or another. We are not certain that there is such a level of commitment to ideology in online culture. However, we certainly agree that the right’s lulz, irreverent mockery, and ironic transgression of the earnestness of social justice acted as a Trojan horse for the openly white ethnonationalistic alt-right to hide among “an online army of ironic in-jokey trolls.”65 For Yiannopoulos and Bokhari, trolling is nothing more than a night of naughty fun. “From digging up the most embarrassing parts of his family’s internet history to ordering unwanted pizzas to his house and bombarding his feed with anime and Nazi propaganda, the alt-right’s meme team, in typically juvenile but undeniably hysterical fashion, revealed their true motivations: not racism, the restoration of monarchy or traditional gender roles, but lulz.”66 In a political sense, as Nagle says, “meme-making trolls whose dark humour and love of transgression for its own sake made it hard to know what political views were genuinely held and what were merely, as they used to say, for the lulz.”67 Whenever there is pressure to self-censor, argue Yiannopoulos and Bokhari, “there will always be a young, rebellious contingent who feel a mischievous urge to blaspheme, break all the rules, and say the unsayable. Why? Because it’s funny!”68 They go on, “it’s just fun to watch the mayhem and outrage that erupts when those secular shibboleths are openly mocked. These younger mischief-makers instinctively understand who the authoritarians are and why and how to poke fun at them.”69

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The Fungibility of Transgression Nagle likens the lulz of trolling and meme culture to the way in which carnival laughter is characterized in Mikhail Bakhtin’s 1965 book on the aesthetics of transgression, Rabelais and His World.70 This is an important point that is worth exploring a little further. Bakhtin’s influential work concerns European medieval carnivalesque culture as it is captured in the five-volume sixteenth-century novel Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais (c. 1490–1553).71 For Bakhtin, the carnivalesque was the culture of the folk, and sought to subvert the overriding authority of the church through a range of everyday practices such as swearing, parody, irony, farce, and festive laughter. The important feature of festive or carnival laughter is that it is “ambivalent” in a sense that also encompasses ambiguity; it can be understood in more than one way at the same time, for instance as mocking and light-hearted, and/or as deriding and self-deprecating.72 So, one could be at once ironic yet literal, serious yet playful. The comparison that Nagle draws can be applied across a number of aspects of trolling and shitposting lulz. In an online written world in which text is the principal carrier of meaning, devoid of all intonation and non-verbal cues, ambiguity is inevitable. This internet phenomenon is sometimes referred to as Poe’s Law, the name of which arose from an online Christian forum in 2005: “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is uttrerly [sic] impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article.”73 As Emma Grey Ellis says, it is impossible to tell who is joking online, contributing to a situation in which “if nobody knows what anyone means, then every denial is plausible.”74 Ambiguity and plausible deniability lie at the core of trolling culture. Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis say in their 2017 Data and Science Research Institute report Manipulation and Disinformation Online that ambiguity “is a key feature of many subcultural spaces, where racist speech and content is bandied around in such a way that it can be read either as the trolling of political correctness or as genuine racism. Determining intent is often impossible, especially given that participants are most often anonymous.”75 Or, as Nagle puts it, “what came to complicate the detached humor is that, as in so many other similar cases, it also allowed cover for genuinely sinister things to hide amid the maze of irony.”76 Nagle argues that a mistake that academic analyses continue to make is to assume that “the aesthetics of counterculture, transgression and non-conformity” are somehow inherently liberalizing forces, as they were during the 1960s and at other points in history. In describing the online alt-right as being like punk, as dangerous, subversive, and transgressive, Yiannopoulos aligns it with the

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transgressive impulses of the work of the Marquis de Sade and Surrealism. In this way, we could see the online alt-right as the next chapter in Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, his “serpentine” history of transgressive aesthetics, that snakes from the Dutch heretic, John of Leyden in 1534, through Dada, Situationism, and 1976 London punk.77 “The ease with which this broader alt-right and altlight milieu can use transgressive styles today”, argues Nagle, “shows how superficial and historically accidental it was that it ended up being in any way associated with the socialist left.”78 Against the backdrop of a seemingly humorless and authoritarian left, the ambiguity of irony, along with transgression, acts as a lightning rod for the transgressively inclined, in a similar way that the Sex Pistols’ use of the Swastika was more a taboo-transgressing act of irreverent rejection of the veteran generation than a genuine alignment with Nazism.79 Yiannopoulos and Allum say, “Young people perhaps aren’t primarily attracted to the alt-right because they’re instinctively drawn to its ideology: they’re drawn to it because it seems fresh, daring and funny, while the doctrines of their parents and grandparents seem unexciting, overly-controlling and overly-serious”,80 and “These young rebels” are “drawn to the alt-right for the same reason that young Baby Boomers were drawn to the New Left in the 1960s: because it promises fun, transgression, and a challenge to social norms they just don’t understand.”81 And therein lies the double-edge of transgressive ambiguity: more soberingly, Marwick and Lewis’s report says, “The anti-Semitic blog The Daily Stormer pioneered a number of the alt-right’s aesthetic elements, many of which cribbed directly from chan culture: memes, 80s sci-fi, Italo-disco/synthpop music, and, as founder Andrew Anglin puts it, ‘Non-ironic Nazism masquerading as ironic Nazism.’ Thus, white nationalism was re-engineered to appeal to millennials.”82 Indeed, the actual style guide for the Nazi site The Daily Stormer, leaked to the Huffington Post, says, “The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we’re joking . . . I am a racist making fun of stereotype [sic] of racists, because I don’t take myself super-seriously.”83

Memetic Warfare Historically, the aesthetic of transgression throughout Dada, Situationism, and punk has often drawn upon the visual devices of montage and collage. They are methods of physically cutting or ripping printed images or words, then rearranging and reassembling them in ways that can radically mimic, subvert, and parody the meaning of the original source material. Montaging imagery maintains a residual

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meaning from its original components and the new meaning of its juxtapositions, often disrupting but not destroying the meaning of the originals so that they exist in a mimetic zombie state, appropriated and enslaved by their reconfiguration. An important element of that aesthetic rupture is low-fidelity reproduction and the rough facture of the removal of the image from its original context. We see this aesthetic of rupture and discontinuity applied with transgressive intent in Guy Debord’s The Naked City (1957). His part-collage image redeploys fragments cut from a city map and pasted in ways that visually rearticulate and subvert urban psychogeography, thus aesthetically conveying Debord’s concept of the dérive, the transgressive strategy of wandering through the city streets unguided by the urban architecture in a way that defies the restrictive tendency of the city to socially organize. As Marcus argues, this aesthetic is found on the album cover of the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks. The aesthetic is “grotesque” in the particular sense of the word used by Bakhtin: the fragments do not intuitively belong together, yet their “interplay reveal[s] an extreme lightness and freedom of artistic fantasy, as gay, almost laughing libertinage.”84 Bakhtin is talking about a grotesque aesthetic that arose in the late Roman Empire and resurfaced in the medieval folk culture of the carnivalesque. Internet memes enact a similar disruptive grotesque aesthetic of montaging imagery, albeit digitally executed, with similarly light-yet-serious intentions. Memes appropriate recognizable and usually culturally loaded imagery, pasting them into a different context from the original. Frequently, and in their most recognizable form, memes overlay appropriated images with bold white sans serif text. Usually a few words are set as a feed line at the top of the image, and a punch line is set at the bottom. This same aesthetic has been repeated throughout a multitude of combinations of memes over the last decade. From Sean Bean as Boromir saying “one does not simply . . .,” to “cash me ousside,” to “woman yelling at cat,” memes are well established as the principal visual language of social media. They began in channer culture around 2011; Nagle documents that “it was the image- and humor-based culture of the irreverent meme factory of 4chan and later 8chan that gave the alt-right its youthful energy.”85 In internet culture, memes re-articulate the montage aesthetic which imbues them with the slippery politics of irony and transgression. Memes are both highly complex and absolutely simple. In many respects, they defy everything that is represented by reasoned and rational discourse. While reasoned discourse may need thousands of words, careful use of terms, and the construction of structured argumentation, a meme uses one or two short sentences or even fragments. Yet, arguably, memes are complex and nuanced. They are intended to

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be easily read by their target audience, yet their meanings are heavily layered and intertextual, drawing on mainstream pop culture as well as more arcane in-joke sources. And perhaps in-jokes are part of the appeal, around which a kinship culture forms, separating itself from mainstream culture and “normies.” Sparrow provides a deep and nuanced analysis of the Christchurch terrorist’s manifesto in Fascists Among Us: Online Hate and the Christchurch Massacre. “Trolling had always involved transgression,” he says, “with anons [anonymous chan board posters] priding themselves on their indifference to the sentiments of normies.”86 A case in point is alt-right figure Carl Benjamin, who goes by the pseudonym Sargon of Akkad, when he says, “these uptight fucking try-hards will never understand that . . . sometimes things are just humorous and the more they react in such a disgusting normie manner the funnier it will get.”87 To those who belong to this in-crowd of outcasts, normies are excluded by apparently missing the nuanced ambiguities of memes and their droll knowingness. Memes can at once valorize and victimize, mock-valorize and mock-victimize. They are democratizing insofar as anyone with access to meme generator sites (such as imgflip.com/memetemplates) can create the stock-standard meme in seconds, yet they only have a life on social media if they resonate and go viral. “Cash me ousside” is as good an example as any. Thirteen-year-old Danielle Bregoli and her mother were guests on Dr Phil in 2016, invited to discuss the daughter’s unruly behavior with the celebrity TV psychologist. Talking about stealing cars, Bregoli was mostly incomprehensible to Dr Phil and the studio audience, who began laughing at her, to which she responded in ghetto vernacular, “catch me outside, how ’bout that?” or, as immortalized in the meme, “cash me ousside/how bow dah”—the text, in the familiar sans serif bold font, is split between the top and bottom of the image frame.88 The meme was generated on October 2, 2016, and spread quickly as posters on social media and message boards used it as an ironic overreaction to another’s post or comment. A thirteen-year-old white girl threatening violence in faux ghetto-speak, yet doing so almost convincingly, struck the right balance of ambiguity to be re-read in multiple ways.

Gamification of Hate The meme most central to the alt-right’s memetic warfare is Pepe the Frog. Pepe began as a character created by Matt Furie in the comic book Boy’s Club. Pepe was ripe for a trolling meme—a bright green cartoon frog with large bulbous glistening

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eyes and oversized mouth, his face reeking pathos. Images of wide-eyed, smiling Pepe are accompanied with a speech bubble reading “feels good man,” while Pepe looking downcast with a downturned mouth is accompanied by “feels bad man.” For a period of time early in the 2010s, Pepe was a largely innocuous meme used to convey polarized emotional responses on social media. For example, in 2014 pop star Katie Perry tweeted “Australian jet lag got me like” with a close-cropped, teary-eyed Pepe.89 One response to her tweet betrays something of the chan culture undertones of Pepe at the time, intimating that Perry’s tweet was proof Pepe had become a dead “dank” meme: “this image used to be used to express the existential crises of losers/now its [sic] for jet lag for pop stars.”90 However, in the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election, the Pepe meme mutated into an ironically “dank” meme, becoming reinvested with ambiguous troll droll knowingness. In mid-2015, a comic-style image posted on 4chan’s /pol/ board depicted Smug Pepe with signature Donald Trump hair, holding a Trump election badge, in front of a US border fence holding back Mexicans drawn as “Wojak” or “The Feels Guy” (another pathos meme that mocks others’ sadness and regret). Then, as a nineteen-year-old white nationalist told Oliva Nuzzi in 2016, a 4chan campaign attempted “to reclaim Pepe from normies.”91 By alt-right posters and white supremacists, Pepe’s “feels good man” was turned into “kill Jews man.”92 Other mutations were Pepe with a Hitler moustache holding a copy of Mein Kampf, Pepe in a white KKK hood, and Pepe in SS uniform in front of the gates of Auschwitz. And while the revival of Pepe from dank meme into pseudo-ironic fascist icon had been coordinated on the arcane threads of 4chan, the images were effectively laundered through r/The_Donald subreddit on Reddit and then into Twitter and Facebook. Trump himself embraced the Pepe meme when he retweeted an image of himself as Pepe on October 13, 2015, including a link to a YouTube video called “You Can’t Stump the Trump” (volume 4), which is peppered with alt-right memes.93 French ultranationalist Marine Le Pen was also made into Pepe, with the same border fence cartoon but depicting Algerians behind the fence.94 In the 2016 US election, memes were effectively market tested by small groups on 4chan and 8chan, and then on Reddit, before being transmitted to where they could go viral on social media or possibly be reposted in microtargeted sponsored posts by digital campaigns. After Pepe’s appropriation by the alt-right, an attempt was made by anonymous posters on 4chan in February 2017, to problematize the “OK” hand sign in what they called “Operation O-KKK.” The initial poster’s intention was not to make a white supremacist symbol as such, but to generate a false outrage by potentially “triggered” online liberals. “We must flood twitter and other social media

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websites with spam, claiming that the OK hand sign is a symbol of white supremacy. Make fake accounts with basic white girl names and type shit like: OMG that’s so truuuuu. Use as many emojis as you please.” The post suggested using an image of Mel Gibson making the OK sign as proof of its valence, and the hashtag #PowerHandPrivilege. The post also said, “[b]onus points if your profile pic is something related to supporting feminism. Leftists have dug so deep down into their lunacy. We must force to dig more, until the rest of society ain’t going anywhere near that shit.”95 In other words, the intention was to fire a shot against the left in the online culture wars by making leftists appear emotionally oversensitive to the point of irrationality—that is, the intention was to troll the left, to trigger an embarrassing rejection of the OK symbol that would prompt a mainstream emotional rejection of the left. Yet, as with much rightwing irony, the OK symbol was then reappropriated in a now familiar ironicbut-not-ironic way by alt-rightists such as Yiannopoulos and the neo-fascist Proud Boys. A year after the Operation O-KKK post on 4chan, the Southern Poverty Law Centre questioned whether the OK sign was really now a white power symbol. David Neiwart says, “[t]he smirk that almost inevitably accompanies the ‘OK’ sign, that simplest of hand signals, is the dead giveaway in the shroud of internet-age befuddlement,” concluding that the smirk “gives away

Figure 3.4 Person X, Christchurch terror attack shooter, makes the “OK/White Power” hand gesture in the dock at Christchurch District Court on March 16, 2019 in Christchurch, New Zealand. Photo: Mark Mitchell-Pool/Getty Images.

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the proper answer: You’re being trolled.”96 When Person X was brought before a New Zealand court with his hands cuffed in front of him, he held his right hand in the OK sign, jokingly not-joking, ironically non-ironic, perhaps for the lulz. Pepe the Frog became evermore labyrinthine, ironic, and in-joking with the expanded intertextuality of “Kek” and the “Kekistani Movement.” The word “Kek” first appeared on the multiplayer videogame World of Warcraft, which translated a player’s text message “LOL” into “KEK.”97 “Kek is also an ancient Egyptian deity represented as a frog-headed man,” Nagle explains.98 Thus, within channer culture arose the ironic pseudo-religion of “the Church of Kek.” In January 2017, possibly not uncoincidentally around the time of Trump’s inauguration, the idea emerged on Twitter of the Republic of Kekistan, “a country created by users on 4chan’s / pol/ board as the tongue-in-cheek ethnic origin of ‘shitposters’ known as ‘Kekistanis’ who worship the ancient Egyptian diety [sic] Kek.”99 A Kekistani national flag then emerged from 4chan. As Neiwart explains, its “design, in fact, perfectly mimics a German Nazi war flag, with the Kek logo replacing the swastika and the green replacing the infamous German red.”100 The design also replaces the iron cross on the original Nazi Kreigsmarine flag with the 4chan logo. Swiftly the flag was adopted by the alt-right and became widely available on online stores and on eBay. The flag is often seen in right-wing protests and rallies, such as those in a Southern Poverty Law Center video, in which a protester declares “the Kekistani people are here, they stand with the banner . . . of the oppressed minorities, the oppressed people of Kekistan. They will be heard. They will be set free. Reparations for Kekistan, now!”101 Kekistan ironized the plight of Syrian refugees when the refugee crisis was in full force, with millions fleeing civil war in Syria and ISIL. The suggestion is that white loss of privilege due to perceived ethnic dominance is comparable with loss of an ethnic and national homeland. It is, of course, a joking-but-not-joking trolling of the left, or of those who the alt-right call “social justice warriors,” or SJWs. And, of course, as Neiwart points out, “alt-righters are particularly fond of the way the banner trolls liberals who recognize its origins.”102 The Kekistani national flag possesses a (barely) plausible deniability, while scoring points in the alt-right’s pursuit of lulz by “triggering” liberals. There are quite literally thousands of hours of video on YouTube that put greater layers of complexity and intertextuality on “Kek.” One example is the hundreds of videos posted by “Big Man Tyrone,” who is cast as the President of the Republic of Kekistan. Big Man Tyrone’s demeanor echoes African despots such as Robert Mugabe or Idi Amin: dressed in a Pepe-green military uniform and green beret, sat behind a desk against a background of Kekistani flags. With a heavy accent he addresses his “fellow ethnic Kekistanis” as “battle-ready meme

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Figure 3.5 The alt-right Kekistan flag is flown at an Act for America rally in New York City, attended by members of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, June 10, 2017. Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis via Getty Images.

warriors,” with reference to “the God Emperor Donald Trump.” He exhorts the “brave sons of Pepe” to free the Kekistani homeland from “normie oppression” by triggering SJWs at the Boston Common Rally for the Republic on November 18, 2017, organized by the right-wing groups Resist Marxism and Boston Free Speech (which would in turn be protested by leftist groups): “I challenge you all to unleash your maximum creative energy for the success of this mission. Our bidding must be subtle, precise and deployed smartly to maximize our power levels. Have your cameras ready for there will be extra Tendies to the one who gets the best video of triggered lefty cucks.”103 He speaks in the argot of Kek (“power levels” from video games, “Tendies” for bonus points, “cucks” for cuckolds), mixed with a parody of rousing, warlike, religious, and totalitarian rhetoric. Events like Unite the Right, and Rally for the Republic, saw the online gamification of white supremacism spill from 4chan, Reddit, and Twitter into the real world. In the Data and Society Research Institute report from the same year as those rallies, one reads that “online harassment, like trolling, becomes informally gamified.”104 Rally for the Republic and other rallies like it provided opportunities to trigger lefties in real life. Memetic warfare is one big, semiserious game, the goal of which is to trigger the most intense affective response.

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Nothing is clear or stable here. And that is exactly the point. Genocidal ethnonationalist biopolitics is hidden in plain sight amongst a juvenile culture of ever-shifting subterfuge. It is jokingly not-joking, ironically non-ironic. Ideas and their symbols that for seventy years were clearly and consistently fixed to humanity’s most horrific episode of cruelty and mass murder are effectively flattened into grist for the mill of this endless point-scoring gamification, in which ideology can be as shallow as a team color (this week I’m on the red team) or worthy of real, violent, mass murder with an automatic assault rifle. It is a vast and quickly morphing online ecosystem in which edgy and transgressive qualities are conflated with genocide. If you take the inherent race hate seriously, then you are a normie and the joke is on you. Take the example of vlogger Lauren Chen, whose video “The Internet for Dummies: Pepe, Kekistan & Normies” patiently elucidates for normies that this is all just one big intergenerational misunderstanding: “more and more we’re seeing that people who aren’t familiar with these communities, especially the traditional media, are misunderstanding what is being said so egregiously that we who favour online discourse might as well be speaking a different language than them.” Chen explains that all the references to Hitler are, of course, just jokes: “Why? . . . because if you’re upset by this the answer is to get a reaction from people like you.” So, the fascism behind Pepe and Kekistan is just a joke that normies are not “in on,” and if you think, “internet jokes can inspire actual racism and violence, chances are you’re a normie and you probably shouldn’t be writing about this.”105 Before Person X murdered the worshippers at the Christchurch mosques, he wrote in his manifesto, “[w]hilst we may use edgy humour and memes in the vanguard stage, and to attract a young audience, eventually we will need to show the reality of our thoughts and our more serious intents and wishes for the future.”106 As his Facebook Live video began to stream, Person X played what might seem like innocuous accordion folk music on his car stereo. The song,“Karadžiću, vodi Srbe svoje” (“Karadžić, Lead Your Serbs”), is from a well-known internet meme, commonly known as “Remove Kebab,” “Serbia Strong,” or “God is a Serb.” The video that features in this meme exhibits the many artefacts of a heavily copied, degraded 1990s VHS magnetic tape. Much of it depicts Serbian troops, tanks, and news images composited with the face of now convicted war criminal Radovan Karadžić.107 Central to the “Remove Kebab” meme, however, is an image from after the first verse, showing two men in Serbian military uniforms in what is likely the Bosnian countryside. On the right is a stony and thin-faced accordion player, further back and to the left is a trumpeter. This particular image from the video has evolved as a meme over the last fifteen years, remade,

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Figure 3.6 The ‘Remove Kebab’ meme, originating with the Serbian song, ‘Karadžiću, vodi Srbe svoje’ (‘Karadžić, Lead Your Serbs’), recorded in 1993 during the Bosnian War.

quoted, parodied, and mimicked many times, for example in 8-bit and pixelated versions that imitate 1980s video games.108 The video was performed and recorded in 1993, in the context of the war in Bosnia following the break-up of Yugoslavia. One of the worst atrocities of the Bosnian War was the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, when Karadžić ordered Bosnian-Serb troops to attack a UN-declared “safe area” leading to the genocide of 8,000 Bosniaks, mostly Muslim men and boys. The lyrics of the song warn Muslims that “the wolves are coming.”109 Without knowing its lyrics and the context of its origins, the video might be read as a quirky and slightly surreal folk song sung by two sinisterlooking soldiers; however, to ethnonationalists it is an anthem. It is impossible to know to what extent those who have shared this meme have understood its original meaning or context, and if they much cared beyond the lulz. However, in Person X’s manifesto, he answers the self-posed question, “[w]ho are you?” with “recently I have been working part time as a kebab removalist.”110 He says the intention of his attack is “removing the invaders” and “removing Islamic occupiers.”111 The target audience of the Christchurch terror attack would likely have understood the coded call to action amongst the meme references. The

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surfaces of his weapons and other gear, written over in white, he photographed and distributed on the internet. In addition to the words “kebab removed,” the texts reference numerous historical battles: “Vienna 1683” evoked the Siege of Vienna by the Turks; “Tours 732” evoked the Battle of Tours at which Charles Martel defeated an army of Spanish Moors; “John Hunyadi” was a Hungarian who led battles against the Muslim Ottomans in the fifteenth-century military; “Sebastiano Venier” was a sixteenth-century Venetian at the Battle of Lepanto at which the Ottoman fleet was defeated; “Novak Vujosevic” killed twenty-eight Ottomans at the Battle of Fundina in Montenegro in 1876; “Serban Cantacuzino” was a seventeenth-century Romanian who defeated the Ottomans at the Battle for Vienna; and there were many more deep historical references such as these. The texts also name the Canadian terrorist who killed six people and injured nineteen people at a mosque in Quebec City in 2017; the Italian terrorist who wounded six African migrants in Macerata in 2018; and the Spanish man who publicly stabbed to death anti-fascist protestor Carlos Muñoz in 2007.112 The audience of likeminded trolls and shitposters may also have understood the connection between all these words and the accordion music playing on Person X’s car stereo. They likely would have understood the attack as high-stakes trolling, murderous shitposting, peppered with memetic intertextuality and ironic in-jokes. “Create memes, post memes, and spread memes,” Person X wrote in his manifesto.“Memes have done more for the ethnonationalist movement than any manifesto.”113

Conclusion In late 2019, a small video game production house with the ideologically suggestive name 2Genderz Productions released a first-person-shooter video game called The Shitposter. The website plays off the identity of Person X, closely mimicking his name and describing the character as “a well known and respected online live-stream video prankster renowned in the gamer community, [who] lived a simple life of shitposting online and talking online with frens [sic].” The game’s design is simply an unopposed killing spree: “With no opposition in his way, [the shooter] picks up his livestreaming gear for one final time, ready to unleash the ultimate practical joke upon Clowntown. JooTube [sic] may remove his videos, but they cannot stop this hilarious practical joke from going viral. Become the epic gamer you were always destined to be and join [the shooter] for the final livestream.”114 Unsurprisingly, the New Zealand government’s Classification Office banned the game almost immediately, citing, apart from the

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obvious reasons, its “limited playability and crude rendering,” but noting, however, that it could be valuable for researchers examining alt-right propaganda.115 And it certainly is. The poor quality of the gameplay strongly suggests that The Shitposter was created less to be played and more to be banned. One article on gamer website Rock, Paper, Shotgun recounts that 2Genderz had produced similar games and made several previous attempts at publicity, from claiming to produce parody and actually oppose neo-Nazis, to posing as a “concerned citizen” writing about a scandalous video game. The article concludes that, “[w]hether the developers think it’s all just an edgy joke or not doesn’t much matter when it’s satisfying a culture which has sheltered, nourished, and celebrated racists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and mass murderers.”116 In the months following the Christchurch attack, discussions on 8chan mentioned the high body count of Person X’s attack, with some contributors expressing a desire to “beat his high score.”117 The effect is that of stochastic terrorism; that is, as Juliette Kayyem (former assistant secretary at the US Department of Homeland Security) says of the El Paso shooting, “[t]here are no lone wolves.”118 Rather, each attacker belongs to one or more geographically distributed yet ideologically aligned online communities. Sparrow says, “the massacre at the Christchurch mosques was an act of terror, consciously designed, in many ways commentators haven’t understood, to inspire further acts of terror,” and that it is a strategic decision by fascists not to organize publicly or at any institutional level, but to encourage violent terror acts by individuals acting ostensibly in isolation.119 There is no clear link between an instigator and a perpetrator; rather, a kinship culture forms around a set of ideas that are considered extreme within the mainstream. Online culture-war politics are central to the culture and aesthetics of stochastic right-wing terror, yet its fugitive and fungible aesthetics of transgression ensure that it is particularly difficult to analyze or to address in contemporary art. For example, Pepe the Frog, once an icon of white supremacy, has more recently been adopted as a mascot of the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. From The New York Times: “It has nothing to do with the far-right ideology in the state,” one person wrote on LIHKG, an anonymous forum that has been the center of discussion for protesters. “It just looks funny and captures the hearts of so many youngsters. It is a symbol of youth participation in this movement.”120 As Nagle notes, “the ideologically flexible, politically fungible, morally neutral nature of transgression” presents deep philosophical problems to anyone espousing radicality, regardless of their political alignments.121 This further complicates the already complex ambiguity and serves to muddy

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meaning in ways that favor the deployment of memes as a fascist mask. We began by suggesting that contemporary art struggles to address the aesthetics of terror today, except through the tradition of elegiac minimalism that we see, for instance, in Margolles’s work about the El Paso attack. So much of the aesthetic we discuss is effectively invisible to mainstream visual culture, even though it is mostly openly available and widely known to much of the global population. There have been few notable attempts to address this aesthetic politics in a fine art context, such as LD50 Gallery’s highly contentious exhibition 71822666 in London, about which Frieze reflected, “in a world increasingly riven by stark political and social polarization, we are witnessing a confusing cross-pollination between digital and non-digital contexts. These days, even a meme can provoke a riot.” 71822666 brought to the streets online culture-war politics, by replicating the same political and aesthetic tropes that confound most people unfamiliar with this baffling carnivalesque underworld.122 Yet researching both the intentions and aesthetics of online culture-war politics may be key to better understanding why certain political “surprises” occur, such as the election of Donald Trump or the British vote to leave the European Union. Person X’s target audience understood what aspects of his video and manifesto were shitposting for the benefit of the press, the majority of whom have probably never visited an 8chan discussion board or followed a right-wing Twitter feed or Facebook page. For the rest of us, the core of the mediated event was invisible. We did not watch the live feed. Instead, all we hear are mainstream media echoes, fragments of the manifesto, moments of blurred and edited video, and the outpouring of grief from New Zealand and its Prime Minister; media coverage of the event itself, particularly the video and the manifesto, is mostly conspicuous by its absence and inaccessibility. The Christchurch terror attack successfully communicated its purpose to its own audience—the proof of which is in its stochastic copycats—while shutting down to the rest. Sparrow believes that this was the aim of Person X: “Despite his rhetoric about the masses, Person X did not intend his manifesto for the public. He deliberately sought to baffle ‘normies’ via his shitposting, with the document studded with 8chan humour.”123 Shutting down the video and manifesto, removing them from the mainstream web and social media never prevented them from reaching their audience. And accessing and owning a copy of the video or manifesto then becomes a further transgressive act, defying the liberal “new authoritarians” represented by Jacinda Arden’s leftist New Zealand government. Seeing, owning, and distributing the video and manifesto—and now, The Shitposter video game—transgressively legitimizes the in-group’s sense of separatism from the normies.

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In 2001, the 9/11 attackers weaponized America’s civil aviation and media, using both to create an event of mass violence and then relying on the dominant news media to immediately replicate and widely distribute its imagery to generate terror. In 2019, Person X weaponized not only social media and the internet, but its culture of trolling, whose modus operandum is destroying and shutting-down. In the age of trolling, Person X’s audience was intentionally limited to the small group that would catch the irony, unpick the arcane references, and delight at its “Easter eggs,” and cheer on live-streamed murder. The joke is on the rest of us. Fifty-one people were violently murdered, and we are left to search for meaning in fragments that we were never intended to understand. To pay any attention to this act, such as writing a chapter in an academic book that in part addresses it, or even blocking access to the manifesto or video, only adds to the effects of the “shitposting,” and serves to feed the trolls. There is no way to win; and that is the point. While the perpetrators of 9/11 aimed at unleashing an immediate surfeit of terrifying images, the method of Person X, the El Paso terrorist, and the others that follow, is the gamification of terror. Their terrorist acts are embedded in a richly knowing and heavily encoded intertextuality composed of inconsistent irony and ambiguity, a blend of levity and mass murder, and the drollness of the lulz. Central to this gamification of terror is the weaponizing of emotion. The lulz extracts joy for the perpetrator from the festive cruelty of triggering negative emotion in the victim. It seems that this culture of cruelty is paradoxically highly empathic, albeit reaching into the dark side of empathy. Nagle makes an interesting argument that any trolls know what hits the deepest because they themselves know the pain of social isolation: “The pain of relentless rejection has festered in these forums and allowed them to be the masters of the cruel natural hierarchies that bring them so much humiliation.”124 One of the most disturbing aspects of Person X’s manifesto is that he clearly understood the power of emotion: “humans are emotional, they are driven by emotions, guided by emotions and seek emotion [sic] expressions and experiences . . . [b]e creative, be expressive, be emotional and above all be passionate.”125 In this light, his actions appear all the more sickening. Echoing the post-truth rejection of facts in favor of feelings, he proclaimed: “Emotions rule over facts. Stop trying to persuade the general population with statistics, charts, tablets and figures.”126 It is a reminder of the extent to which emotion and affect have themselves become weaponized in this world. Since the Christchurch attack, this toxic right-wing online culture has evolved in ways few could have predicted. Most notably, we have seen the rise of QAnon from the same furtive and fertile anonymous spaces of the internet, to emerge as

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a force in the political mainstream during the 2020 US presidential election, and fueled in part by conspiracy thinking surrounding COVID-19 and the global “plandemic.” Followers of QAnon are convinced that the world is being run by a satanic cabal of pedophile celebrities and Democrat politicians who are trafficking and consuming children, while brazenly peppering popular culture with encrypted clues. With QAnon, online right-wing memetic warfare takes on a cultish dimension, combining gamification and post-truth Trumpist politics. Followers attempt to decode message “drops” left by the anonymous “Q” on 8chan and 8kun, many of which are prophesies that consistently never eventuate, and promises of “The Storm” and “The Great Awakening,” in which President Trump will declare martial law, arrest the cabal, and save the imagined children. Reed Berkowitz sees it as the “gamification of propaganda”: “QAnon uses the oldest trope of all mystery fiction. A mysterious stranger shows up and drops a strange clue leading to long-hidden secrets which his clues, and your detecting power, can reveal.”127 When Trump loyalists stormed the US Capitol building in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021, the mob was led by QAnons, Proud Boys saluting with the “OK” sign, and protestors with MAGA hats waving Trump 2020 banners and the Kekistani flag. Since election night, Trump had pushed post-truth narratives, without any foundation in fact, that the 2020 US Presidential election had been fraudulently won by Democrat Joe Biden. The “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, DC on that January day was the outgoing President’s last-ditch attempt to overthrow the democratic processes by preventing the Congressional certification of then President-Elect Biden. The attempted insurrection at the Capitol was a carnivalesque scene of alt-right symbolism and in-jokes, tear gas and broken glass, makeshift gallows and violence. Rampaging through the halls of the Capitol, many wearing paramilitary gear, some carrying plastic “flex cuffs” and high-voltage cattle prods, the mob called for the hanging of the Vice President.128 Five people died during the violence;129 the longer-term damage to liberal democracy remains to be fully realized.

Notes 1 Raul Martinez, “What Else Could We Speak about Teresa Margolles at the Mexican Pavillion,” Art in America, June 9, 2009, 5:56 p.m., accessed May 4, 2020, https://www .artnews.com/art-in-america/features/what-else-could-we-speak-about-teresamargolles-at-the-mexican-pavilion-57746/.

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2 “Teresa Margolles: El asesinato cambia el mundo/Assassination Changes the World,” James Cohen Gallery, New York, 2020, accessed May 4, 2020, https://www .jamescohan.com/exhibitions/teresa-margolles?view=slider#18. 3 “Teresa Margolles: El asesinato cambia el mundo/Assassination Changes the World.” 4 The Associated Press, “El Paso Walmart Shooting Victim Dies, Death Toll Now 23,” The New York Times, April 26, 2020, accessed May 4, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/ aponline/2020/04/26/business/ap-mass-shooting-texas.html. 5 Colby Chamberlain, “Teresa Margolles, James Cohen, Tribeca,” Artforum International vol. 58, no. 8 (April 2020), accessed May 1, 2020, https://www.artforum. com/print/reviews/202004/teresa-margolles-82492. 6 Chamberlain, “Teresa Margolles.” 7 Julie Iovine, “Are Memorial Designs Too Complex to Last?,” The New York Times, November 22, 2003, accessed April 22, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/22/ arts/are-memorial-designs-too-complex-to-last.html 8 A 2017 US government report found that after 9/11, “far right wing violent extremist groups were responsible for 62 (73 percent) while radical Islamist violent extremists were responsible for 23 (27 percent).” Countering Violent Extremism: Actions Needed to Define Strategy and Assess Progress of Federal Efforts (Washington, DC: US Government Accountability Office, 2017), 4. 9 El Paso shooter, quoted in Simon Harris, “The Inconvenient Truth: The Manifesto of El Paso Walmart Shooter Patrick Crusius,” European Freedom, August 4, 2019, accessed May 5, 2020, https://www.europeanfreedom.com/2019/08/04/theinconvenient-truth-the-manifesto-of-el-paso-walmart-shooter-patrick-crusius/. 10 This was seemingly a reprisal attack by a shooter describing himself as a “leftist” on his Twitter profile. Paul P. Murphy, Konstantin Toropin, Drew Griffin, Scott Bronstein, and Eric Levenson, “Dayton Shooter Had an Obsession with Violence and Mass Shootings, Police Say,” CNN , August 7, 2019, 21:27 GMT, accessed October 9, 2019, https:// edition.cnn.com/2019/08/05/us/connor-betts-dayton-shooting-profile/index.html. 11 “Norway Mosque Shooting: Man Opens Fire on Al-Noor Islamic Centre,” BBC News, August 10, 2019, accessed October 11, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/ world-europe-49308016. 12 Melissa Eddy, Rick Gladstone, and Tiffany Hsu, “Assailant Live-streamed Attempted Attack on German Synagogue,” The New York Times, October 9, 2019 (updated February 21, 2020), accessed May 4, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/09/ world/europe/germany-shooting-halle-synagogue.html. 13 We follow Jeff Sparrow’s decision to refer to the terrorist as “Person X.” Sparrow explains that it is not simply that New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern pledged never to utter his name, but also that “Person X” represents a broader phenomenon of anonymous ideologically driven hate crimes. Jeff Sparrow, Fascists among Us: Online Hate and the Christchurch Massacre (Melbourne: Scribe, 2019), 4–5. 14 “Person X,” quoted in Jeff Sparrow, Fascists among Us, 1.

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15 Fergus Hunter, “The Internet: Optimised for Hate, Terror and Chaos,” The Sydney Morning Herald, March 16, 2020, accessed May 13, 2020, https://www.smh.com.au /politics/federal/the-internet-optimised-for-hate-terror-and-chaos-20190316 -p514sr.html. 16 “Video Showing Deadly Shooting Near Synagogue on Yom Kippur Was Livestreamed,” CBS/AP , October 9, 2019, 7:51 p.m., accessed October 11, 2019, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/germany-synagogue-shooting-halle-grenadereportedly-thrown-jewish-cemetery-today-2019-10-09/. 17 Lizzie Dearden, “Revered as a Saint by Online Extremists: How Christchurch Shooter Inspired Copycat Terrorists around the World,” The Independent, August 24, 2019, 22:22, accessed May 4, 2020, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/ australasia/brenton-tarrant-christchurch-shooter-attack-el-paso-norwaypoway-a9076926.html. 18 John Gage, “California Police Investigate Hate-filled 8chan Manifesto that Could Link Synagogue Shooting to Mosque Attack,” The Washington Examiner, April 28, 2019, 12:33 a.m., accessed October 9, 2019, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/ news/california-police-investigate-hate-filled-8chan-manifesto-that-could-linksynagogue-shooting-to-mosque-attack. 19 Kevin Roose, “On Gab, an Extremist-friendly Site, Pittsburgh Shooting Suspect Aired His Hatred in Full,” The New York Times, October 8, 2018, accessed May 5, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/28/us/gab-robert-bowers-pittsburgh-synagogueshootings.html. 20 Robert Evans, “The El Paso Shooting and the Gamification of Terror,” Bellingcat, August 4, 2019, accessed October 9, 2019, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/ americas/2019/08/04/the-el-paso-shooting-and-the-gamification-of-terror/. 21 Jacques Derrida, “Interview with Giovanni Borradori,” in Philosophy in a Time of Terror (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 108. 22 Violent Extremism Online: New Perspectives on Terrorism and the Internet, eds. Anne Aly, Stuart Macdonald, Lee Jarvis, and Thomas Chen (London: Routledge, 2016). 23 “Facebook: New Zealand Attack Video Viewed 4,000 Times,” BBC News, March 19, 2019, accessed June 19, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47620519. 24 “Person X,” The Great Replacement (unpublished document, 2019), 19. 25 “Mosque Shooter Brandished Material Glorifying Serb Nationalism,” Al Jazeera, May 16, 2019, accessed June 19, 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/03/zealandmosque-gunman-inspired-serb-nationalism-190315141305756.html. 26 “Mosque Shooter Brandished Material Glorifying Serb Nationalism,” Al Jazeera. 27 Kevin Roose, quoted in Pritha Paul, “Candace Owens Laughs Off New Zealand Mosque Shooter Manifesto Reference,” International Business Times, March 15, 2019, 5:28 a.m., accessed June 19, 2019, https://www.ibtimes.com/candace-owens-laughsnew-zealand-mosque-shooter-manisfesto-reference-2775758. 28 “Person X,” The Great Replacement (unpublished document, 2019), 17.

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29 Robert Evans, “Shitposting, Inspirational Terrorism, and the Christchurch Mosque Massacre,” Bellingcat, March 15, 2019, accessed June 19, 2019, https://www.bellingcat. com/news/rest-of-world/2019/03/15/shitposting-inspirational-terrorism-and-thechristchurch-mosque-massacre/. 30 Evans, “Shitposting, Inspirational Terrorism, and the Christchurch Mosque Massacre.” 31 Heather Brooke, The Revolution Will Be Digitised (London: William Heinemann, 2011), ix 32 Brian D. Loader and Dan Mercea, “Networking Democracy?,” Information, Communication and Society vol. 14, no. 6 (2011): 758. 33 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 34 Lisa M. Kruse, Dawn R. Norris, and Jonathan R. Flinchum, “Social Media as a Public Sphere? Politics on Social Media,” The Sociological Quarterly vol. 59, no. 1 (2018): 69. 35 Loader and Mercea, “Networking Democracy?,” 758. 36 Ibid., 759. 37 Brooke, The Revolution Will Be Digitised, ix. 38 Michael Conover, Emilio Ferrara, Filippo Menczer, and Alessandro Flammini, “The Digital Evolution of Occupy Wall Street,” PLoS ONE vol. 8, no. 5 (2013): 1, https:// doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0064679. 39 Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-right (Alresford: John Hunt Publishing, 2017), 14. 40 Ibid., 17. 41 “Fair Game; Scientology: An online onslaught against Scientology,” The Economist vol. 386, no. 8565 (January 31, 2008): 66. 42 “LulzSec Hackers Claim CIA Website Shutdown,” BBC News, June 16, 2011, accessed May 5, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-13787229. 43 David Murphy, “Three Reasons to Fear LulzSec: Sites, Skills, and Slant,” PC Mag, June 19, 2011, 12:46 a.m. EST, accessed May 5, 2020, https://web.archive.org/ web/20111215213511/http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2387219,00.asp. 44 Noreen Malone, “This Is the Internet, Where We Screw Each Other Over for a Jolt of Satisfaction,” The New Yorker, June 23 2011, accessed 12 October 2020, https:// nymag.com/intelligencer/2011/06/this_is_the_internet_where_we.html 45 Nate Anderson, “LulzSec Manifesto: ‘We Screw Each Other Over for a Jolt of Satisfaction’,” arstechnica.com, June 18, 2011, accessed May 5, 2020, https:// arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/06/lulzsec-heres-why-we-hack-you-bitches/. 46 Nagle, Kill All Normies, 7. 47 Maya Oppenheim, “Jessi Slaughter on Becoming a Meme and Falling Victim to Trolls after Infamous YouTube Video,” The Independent, March 30, 2016, accessed May 5, 2020, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/jessi-slaughter-youtubevideo-viral-troll-damien-leonhardt-2010-myspace-a6959436.html.

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48 Nagle, Kill All Normies, 22. 49 “Jessi Slaughter,” Know Your Meme, 2012, accessed May 5, 2020, https:// knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/jessi-slaughter. 50 Nagle, Kill All Normies, 18. 51 Kevin McDonald, Gamergate: First Battle of the Culture War (United States: Independently published, 2019), 8. 52 For two differing perspectives, see McDonald, Gamergate, and Zoë Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate (New York: Public Affairs Books, 2017). 53 Cecilia Kang and Sheera Frenkel, “Facebook Says Cambridge Analytica Harvested Data of up to 87 Million Users,” The New York Times, April 4, 2018, accessed October 6, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/mark-zuckerberg-testifycongress.html; Christopher Wylie, quoted in “ ‘Cambridge Analytica Planted Fake News’—BBC News,” BBC News, YouTube, March 20, 2018, accessed October 7, 2019, https://youtu.be/mjtR3W3eAFU: “We got approached by a professor from Cambridge University, Alex Kogan, and he presented a solution to us which was an application that he had on Facebook that got special permission to collect data not just of the users—if you joined the app, it didn’t just collect your Facebook data, but it went and crawled through all of your friends’ data and pulled all of that data also whenever you joined the app. So, that meant that if we got one person to join the app, we got around, you know, 150–200 friends’ profiles with that. And so if you imagine you get one, two, three, that all adds up really quickly and scaled really fast. And so what we did is we then took that data and related it to survey responses that the app users had also filled out to look at the relationship between how you answer on a psychological survey and what your Facebook profile says, and then that allowed us to then go through the rest of the friends’ data and make inferences about the psychological profile of each person in their friend networks based on their likes.” 54 John Carucci, “Milo Yiannopoulos on Trump, Ariana Grande, and Russia,” Seattle Times, July 21, 2017, accessed May 5, 2020, https://www.seattletimes.com/nationworld/milo-yiannopoulos-on-trump-ariana-grande-and-russia/. 55 “Abuse of Ghostbusters’ Leslie Jones Leads to Twitter Ban for Milo Yiannopoulos,” ABC News, July 20, 2016, accessed May 5, 2020, https://www.abc.net.au/news/201607-20/twitter-bans-milo-yiannopoulos/7644668. 56 Jamie Altman, “The Whole Leslie Jones Twitter Feud, Explained,” USA Today, July 25, 2016, accessed May 5, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/college/2016/07/25/ the-whole-leslie-jones-twitter-feud-explained/37420235/. 57 “Milo Yiannopoulos Speech Protest Turns Violent at UC Berkeley,” ABC News, February 2, 2018, accessed May 7, 2020, https://youtu.be/-PSYPrE5LrQ. 58 Jeff Sparrow, Trigger Warnings: Political Correctness and the Rise of the Right (Melbourne: Scribe, 2018), 24–40.

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59 Sparrow, Trigger Warnings, 22. 60 Salvatore Babones, The New Authoritarianism: Trump, Populism, and the Tyranny of Experts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 10–11. 61 Babones, The New Authoritarianism, 1. 62 Milo Yiannopoulos, “Science Proves It: Fat-shaming Works,” Breitbart, July 5, 2016, accessed May 5, 2020, https://www.breitbart.com/social-justice/2016/07/05/ fat-shaming-is-good-science/. 63 Milo Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-right,” Breitbart, March 29, 2016, accessed October 31, 2019, https://www. breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-altright/. Note: Bokhari is said to have ghostwritten Yiannopoulos’s book Dangerous, according to Joseph Bernstein, “Here’s How Breitbart and Milo Smuggled White Nationalism Into the Mainstream,” BuzzFeed, October 5, 2017, 4:28 p.m., accessed May 7, 2020, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/heres-howbreitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism. 64 Nagle, Kill All Normies, 11. 65 Ibid. 66 Yiannopoulos and Bokhari, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-right.” Emphasis in original text. 67 Nagle, Kill All Normies, 6. 68 Yiannopoulos and Bokhari, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-right.” 69 Ibid. 70 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968). 71 François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J.M. Cohen (London: Penguin Books, 1955). 72 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 11. 73 Nathan Poe, “Big Contradictions in the Evolution Theory: Discussion in ‘Creation & Evolution’ Started by Carico, Aug 10, 2005,” Christianforums.com, August 10, 2005, accessed May 8, 2020, https://www.christianforums.com/threads/big-contradictionsin-the-evolution-theory.1962980/page-3#post-17606580. 74 Emma Grey Ellis, “Can’t Take a Joke? That’s Just Poe’s Law, 2017’s Most Important Internet Phenomenon,” Wired, June 5, 2017, accessed May 8, 2020, https://www. wired.com/2017/06/poes-law-troll-cultures-central-rule/. 75 Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, Manipulation and Disinformation Online (New York: Data and Society Research Institute, 2017), 7. 76 Nagle, Kill All Normies, 9. 77 Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 90–93. 78 Nagle, Kill All Normies, 24.

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79 Ibid., 24–25. 80 Yiannopoulos and Bokhari, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right.” 81 Ibid. 82 Marwick and Lewis, Manipulation and Disinformation Online, 11. 83 Sparrow, Fascists Among Us, 53. 84 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 32. 85 Nagle, Kill All Normies, 16. 86 Sparrow, Fascists Among Us, 52. 87 Carl Benjamin, “The BBC Discover the Great Meme War,” YouTube, April 8, 2017, accessed November 1, 2019, https://youtu.be/ohxDM9eGu6Q. 88 “Cash Me Ousside / Howbow Dah,” Know Your Meme, 2017, accessed May 10, 2020, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cash-me-ousside-howbow-dah. 89 Katy Perry, Twitter, November 8, 2014, accessed May 12, 2020, https://twitter.com/ katyperry/status/531011411720151041?lang=en. 90 @NPuntIntendedSP, Twitter, November 8, 2014, accessed May 12, 2020, https:// twitter.com/NPuntIntendedSP/status/531101268408668162. 91 Olivia Nuzzi, “How Pepe the Frog Became a Nazi Trump Supporter and Alt-right Symbol,” The Daily Beast, May 26, 2016 (updated April 13, 2017), accessed May 12, 2020, https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-pepe-the-frog-became-a-nazi-trumpsupporter-and-alt-right-symbol. 92 An Xiao Mina, Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2019), 101. 93 Donald J. Trump, Twitter, October 13, 2015, accessed May 14, 2020, https://twitter. com/realdonaldtrump/status/653856168402681856?lang=en. 94 Amar Toor, “France’s Alt-right Has Turned Pepe the Frog into Pepe Le Pen,” The Verge, February 6, 2017, accessed May 12, 2020, https://www.theverge. com/2017/2/6/14522542/pepe-the-frog-france-le-pen-meme. 95 Anonymous (ID:GqQuAU8x), “INTRODUCING: OPERATION O-KKK,” / pol/4chan, February 27, 2017, accessed May 12, 2020, https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/ thread/114482325/. 96 David Neiwert, “Is That an OK sign? A White Power Symbol? Or Just a Right-wing troll?,” Southern Poverty Law Centre, September 19, 2018, accessed May 12, 2020, https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/09/18/ok-sign-white-power-symbol-orjust-right-wing-troll?fbclid=IwAR3s9UK-CdLa3QJ-WeiLc8DQT_ DBhKUyWhgurrZJmwC4zKRtMP-Y07pcfw0#.Xbl1naXNwbk.facebook. 97 Katie Notopoulos and Ryan Broderick say, “Kek. A replacement for ‘LOL.’ If you’re an Alliance player in the online multiplayer game World of Warcraft and you type ‘LOL’ to a member of the Horde faction, it’ll be read as ‘kek’.” Katie Notopoulos and Ryan Broderick, “The Far Right’s Most Common Memes Explained for Normal People,”

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Buzzfeed, March 3, 2017, accessed October 31, 2019, https://www.buzzfeednews. com/article/ katienotopoulos/a-normal-persons-guide-to-how-far-right-trolls-talk-to-each. 98 Nagle, Kill All Normies, 18. 99 “Republic of Kekistan,” MicroWiki, the Micronational Encyclopedia, last edited January 18, 2020, accessed May 13, 2020, https://micronations.wiki/wiki/Republic_ of_Kekistan. 100 David Neiwert, “What the Kek: Explaining the Alt-right ‘Deity’ behind their ‘Meme Magic’,” accessed May 13, 2020, https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/05/08/ what-kek-explaining-alt-right-deity-behind-their-meme-magic. 101 “The Alt-Right’s Satirical ‘Deity’ Kek Spreads Its Memes”, Hatewatch, YouTube, May 7, 2017, accessed May 13, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1 9&v=KNlPCKyItLM&feature=emb_title. 102 Neiwert, “What the Kek.” 103 “Boston Meme War Declared,” Big Man Tyrone, YouTube, October 7, 2017, accessed May 13, 2020, https://youtu.be/ef4dzL_2YbA. 104 Marwick and Lewis, Manipulation and Disinformation Online, 9. 105 “The Internet for Dummies | Pepe, Kekistan & Normies,” Lauren Chen, YouTube, July 12, 2017, accessed May 14, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=w1XPcSOh4ao. 106 “Person X,” The Great Replacement, 45. 107 The video also has a digital distortion in the middle where an email address has been removed; see version at “Serbia Strong Orginal Bay Radovan Karadzic,” ARHIVIST, YouTube, August 3, 2008, accessed May 14, 2020, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=uSCJxxI83v4. 108 “REMOVE 8-BIT,” dashipls, YouTube, August 11, 2012, accessed May 14, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9HzqxwKfiM; “Remove Kebab (Pixel Version) + 8-bit Song,” Triangle chan, YouTube, February 26, 2017, accessed May 14, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuKTIco9meA. 109 Robert Colson, “Christchurch Attacks: Suspect Took Inspiration from Former Yugoslavia’s Ethnically Fueled War,” Radio Free Europe, March 15, 2019, 15:19 GMT, accessed June 19, 2019, https://www.rferl.org/a/christchurch-attacks-yugoslaviatarrant-inspiration-suspect-new-zealand/29823655.html. 110 “Person X,” The Great Replacement, 5. 111 Ibid., 5, 7. 112 Tim Clarke, “Christchurch Mosque Massacre: Brenton Tarrant’s Weapons Armed with Words in Twisted Cause,” The West Australian, March 16, 2019, 2:00 a.m., accessed May 15, 2020, https://thewest.com.au/news/world/christchurch-mosquemassacre-brenton-tarrants-weapons-armed-with-words-in-twisted-cause-ngb881137038z.

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113 “Person X,” The Great Replacement, 47. 114 “The Shitposter,” 2Genderz Productions, 2019, accessed May 14, 2020, https:// www.2gen.pro/the-shitposter/. 115 “s38(1) Notice of Decision OFLCRef: 1900543.000,” available at “Two Terrorist Publications Banned,” Classification Office, New Zealand Government, October 31, 2019, accessed May 14, 2020, https://www.classificationoffice.govt.nz/news/ latest-news/two-terrorist-publications-banned/. 116 Alice O’Connor, “New Zealand Banned a Mass Shooting Game as a ‘Terrorist Publication’,” Rock, Paper, Shotgun, November 1, 2019, accessed May 14, 2020, https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/11/01/new-zealand-banned-a-massshooting-game-as-a-terrorist-publication/. 117 Evans, “The El Paso Shooting and the Gamification of Terror.” 118 Juliette Kayyem, “There Are No Lone Wolves,” The Washington Post, August 5, 2019, 1:48 a.m. GMT+8, accessed May 5, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ opinions/2019/08/04/there-are-no-lone-wolves/. 119 Sparrow, Fascists Among Us, 4–5. 120 Daniel Victor, “Hong Kong Protesters Love Pepe the Frog. No, They’re Not Alt-right,” The New York Times, August 19, 2019, accessed May 11, 2020, https:// www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/world/asia/hong-kong-protest-pepe-frog.html. 121 Nagle, Kill All Normies, 36. 122 Pablo Larios, Ben Eastham, Daniel Keller, and Jörg Scheller, “Survey: Culture Wars,” Frieze, March 16, 2020, accessed May 15, 2020, https://frieze.com/article/surveyculture-wars. 123 Sparrow, Fascists Among Us, 64. 124 Nagle, Kill All Normies, 84. 125 “Person X,” The Great Replacement, 47. 126 Ibid. 127 Reed Berkowitz, “A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon”, Medium, October 1, 2020, accessed February 16, 2021 https://medium.com/ curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon-580972548be5. 128 Associated Press, “WATCH: Video shows Capitol ‘mob calling for the death of the vice president,’ Plaskett says,” PBS News Hour, February 10, 2021, accessed February 16, 2021, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-video-shows-capitol-mobcalling-for-the-death-of-the-vice-president-plaskett-says. 129 Kenya Evelyn, “Capitol attack: the five people who died”, The Guardian, January 9, 2021, accessed February 16, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/ jan/08/capitol-attack-police-officer-five-deaths.

4

Weaponization of History

Whilst the terrorist attack in Christchurch revealed the ongoing gamification of terror, we argue that it also demonstrated another key aspect of the present milieu: what we describe as the weaponization of history. The Christchurch terrorist turned history into a weapon, into a reason and excuse for committing mass murder. In this respect, we argue that Person X’s use of the song “Karadžiću, vodi Srbe svoje” (“Karadžić, Lead Your Serbs”) from the 1990s, which features in the well-known internet meme “Remove Kebab,” is significant for the temporal formation it establishes while connecting the ethnonationalist violence of the present with events from recent history. As the writing on the surfaces of Person X’s weapons clearly showed, the Christchurch attack was “inspired” by historical figures and events marking conflicts between Europe and the nearby Islamic world, such as John Hunyadi, a Hungarian who led battles against the Muslim Ottomans in the fifteenth century; Novak Vujosevic, who killed twenty-eight Ottomans at the Battle of Fundina in Montenegro in 1876; and Serban Cantacuzino, a seventeenth-century Romanian who defeated the Ottomans at the Battle for Vienna.1 The sound of “Karadžiću, vodi Srbe svoje” also reinforces Serbian nationalism, particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as the focal point for Person X. He had taken a bus trip through Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina on December 28–30, 2016.2 Something as historically specific and geographically situated as a Serbian nationalist song recorded in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993 serves a right-wing internet meme because it symbolizes the apparently transhistorical struggle of white Europeans against the seemingly inevitable encroachment on European soil of Muslims from the “Near East.” Importantly, leading into this chapter, the song also represents the weaponization of the historical montage that characterized the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, and has continued in its memorialization since, in attempts to justify ethnic cleansing and genocide. As we showed in the previous chapter, the Christchurch terror attack drew on an aesthetic of transgressive montage and collage that has become weaponized 145

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in the “memetic war” from which this particular act emerged. We explored the ways in which the aesthetic politics of online fascism grew from a seemingly arcane but ultimately insidiously powerful aesthetic lineage, a low-grade appropriation aesthetic and a subculture of carnivalesque montage founded in a practice of laughing at trauma for the cruel festive triggering of affect and emotion. The events in Christchurch showed how carnivalesque transgression is no longer the provenance of the left, and in this chapter we take that tragic transgression as the point of departure for considering ways in which recent contemporary art and visual culture have sought to address something that is profoundly characteristic of war and terror in our age. The Christchurch terror attack is a condition of its time insofar as it emerges from the festering underbelly of the internet culture wars, but it is marked by the perverse temporality of the weaponization of history. The terrorist’s referencing of Serb nationalists reveals a deeper connection behind the murderous historical logic, albeit logic steeped in self-ironizing online trolling culture. On his firearms, Person X created a montage of twentieth-century images and symbols, all of which may not seem to amount to a coherent message. However, this chapter assumes that Person X’s perverse temporal logic is intentional, and takes that intentionality seriously by following the historical logic working behind it. Through a broad use of historical symbolism, Person X’s claims to the transhistorical reveal the realworld conditions that enabled his murderous act. The proclaimed motivation for the attack was Person X’s grievance over “white genocide,” and for the sake of analysis we will here take the claim of “white genocide” seriously. In this respect, we are following the approach of A. Dirk Moses. Given the proliferation of “white genocide” fantasies and the seeming readiness of adherents to take its premises seriously and—for at least one of them—to match paranoid words with murderous deeds, it is important to briefly explore . . . this rhetoric, in particular its currency today, and its attraction for many people . . . Where ideas have such an effect in the world, we are bound to take them seriously.3

To take Person X seriously, is to strip back the slippery layers of irony and fungibility that proliferate in the subculture from which he emerged, and examine a far more urgent notion that has gained a troubling degree of purchase in recent years, which is that a montaged historical reality has become deeply normative. In this new political reality of fragmentation, everything is relativized and up for grabs, which means that ironic Fascism can be an acceptable political alternative. White nationalism can be seen as the inevitable outcome of a

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twentieth century in which ethnonationalism was thought to have been resoundingly defeated but re-emerged in the final decade as the Yugoslav Wars. Ironic fascism views multicultural politics as a totalitarian prison that must end in bloodshed, and the history of the world as a centuries-old struggle for nationalist independence. Moreover, the extreme relativization of twenty-firstcentury ethnonationalism requires that personal temporality is fragmented and individualized, yet our ethnic and national experiences are seen as ontologically given and fixed, stripping us of both collectivity and generalizable humanity. This is the broader context of the montages of images and symbols of the online far right, and of the self-ironic violence adopted by the Christchurch terrorist. The ideology behind the Christchurch attack resonates with the present ideology around the 1990s war in the Balkans, where history has been relativized into “interpretations” that normalize Fascism, and a mixture of cynical manipulation and relativization has pervaded the social, political, and cultural discourse about the past in the last three decades. On the one hand, the discourse transforms the past into a point of difference (“our past but not our past”). On the other hand, the discourse produces what Boris Buden calls a “postcommunist subject” characterized by “free will,” who has broken free from the chains of totalitarianism in favor of neoliberal democracy, and is using violence to change its past.4 The logic of Person X, and of the entire “white genocide” fantasy, as Moses calls it, follows an intention to shut down future possibilities by violently reinforcing historical inevitability. What is the weaponization of history? In addition to the physical act of murder, the Christchurch terror act has been interpreted as weaponizing language5 and affect.6 Here we want to add a third layer. Weaponized history is a systematic manipulation of history to amplify resentments and deepen social divisions. It transforms history into a weapon through brutal simplification of historical record into singular “facts,” to enable collective grievance. Weaponizing history entails two concurrent processes: using history as justification to engage in rhetoric and acts of violence, and criticizing the rhetoric that contributes to the state of play in the present. While the first process has been the much-publicized staple of nationalist violence for decades (as we have suggested), the second has only begun to emerge in recent incidents. This second aspect is crucial because it goes beyond simply skewing historical facts (dates, battles, victories, defeats), long a tactic of nationalists, to mimic progressive (left) critiques in order to create false equivalence between historical victims of violence (marginalized groups) and those inflicting violence in the present. This duality is at the core of claims about “white genocide,” along a gamut from Person X’s manifesto to speeches by US

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President Donald Trump. This duality of grievance is also what makes it possible to relativize historical experience and articulate the present as inevitability. This chapter will unpack key aspects of weaponized history in relation to the broader discourse of “weaponization” and misuse of history. It will do so by discussing two recent contemporary art works that deal with manipulation of historical experience for the purposes of inciting violence in the present. The first work is Hito Steyerl’s performance lecture (and accompanying writing) “Tank on a Pedestal.” This work addresses the weaponization of history in the service of private interests, foregrounding weapons manufacturers using art to whitewash their cultural capital, and militia groups tapping into history to both physically and symbolically weaponize. We argue that Steyerl’s critical engagement with history enables us to think about the weaponization of loss as crucial to understanding weaponized history. The second work, Arthur Jafa’s The White Album (2018), articulates the language and acts of violence used to “defend” whiteness as a field of power. In Jafa’s work, whiteness is critically reframed in ways that make visible that often invisible power. He shows how deliberate framing constructs the present historical experience of white people as suffering oppression by various groups. The language of grievance and loss is used to frame whiteness as constantly under attack. Jafa’s work helps us to grasp the temporality of whiteness in the present through this narrative of loss and experience of “unknown knowns.” Narratively, history is weaponized by white supremacists using tactics that mimic progressive identitarian politics in attempts to lay claim to trauma, to claim a position of white victimhood. All this takes place at the register of affect politics. Unlike contemporary art works that deal with war and terror under the rubric of the affect–trauma paradigm, which effectively buys into the weaponization of affect and trauma, Steyerl and Jafa engage the right’s weaponization of history head-on, calling out the absurdity of its temporal logic, or rather of its illogical flattened transhistorical temporality. The two works discussed enable us to take a critical perspective towards the weaponization of history by drawing attention to the way in which it frames the present as society in decline. Historical experience is used as an excuse for violence and also to stamp out differing historical claims: a short-circuit toward false equivalence. The discussion will foreground the language of ethnonationalism during the war on the territories of the Former Yugoslavia as key to understanding the weaponization of history. The nationalist rhetoric used during this conflict and after the conflict—explicitly referenced by the Christchurch shooter—helps us to see how history gets weaponized through rhetorical devices, such as a “zero hour” of history. It helps

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us to come to terms with the significance of politically charged temporal formations, such as loss, for our understandings of war in the present. This discussion will also provide a bridge to the second half of the book, in which we discuss the work of artists, many of whom are from the Former Yugoslavia, who take temporality as key to understanding the present and opening up our historical experience to different possibilities.

Weaponization of Life and Language It is important to clarify the broader context for our use of the term weaponized history. It in part references the term “history wars,” which describes some 1990s public debates in Australia, the UK, and the US.7 In these debates, the conservative position was that the discipline and practice of history was under attack from theorists who asserted that there was not one version of the past that was an objectively knowable fact. Interestingly, almost three decades later we find a reversal in which the conservative alt-right questions “truths”—an example of the second function of weaponizing history detailed above, the mimicry of progressive, poststructuralist questioning of the truths of master narratives. (Progressive historians have also been wont to claim the “death” of professions and disciplines.) As with assumptions that the aesthetic of transgression is inherently progressive (Chapter 3), or that affect is inherently liberatory (Chapter 2), the present weaponization of history casts doubt on the assumption that challenging established narratives is inherently progressive. The weaponization of history takes form in radically challenging master narratives of truth while maintaining conservative ideology. William Davies observes that “the notion of ‘weaponising’ everyday tools has become a familiar part of the political lexicon.”8 Whereas we once spoke of weaponization of pathogens, such as the refining of anthrax, or US President Ronald Reagan’s weaponization of space, we now have Trump “weaponizing the world economy”9 while China is “weaponising its currency in an escalation of its trade war with the US”;10 the US Director of the Defense Security Service warns about the “weaponisation of business” itself, where international partners steal ideas,11 and James Bridle says that tech giants such as Amazon and Uber “wield technological obscurity as a weapon”;12 in the Syrian Civil War, there has been a “weaponisation of health care—a strategy of using people’s need for health care as a weapon against them by violently depriving them of it.”13 “Weaponisation of everyday things,” Davies says, “weakens the distinction between war and peace.”14

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The notion of deploying a “weapons grade communications tactic” within the everyday, peacetime civic realm—as was the case in Cambridge Analytica’s deployment of big data based, microtargeted voter suppression through social media15—is perhaps as symptomatic of war today as it is illustrative of contemporary media strategies. The idea of weaponization has some corollaries. Firstly, the clear line between how we define infrastructures of “war” and “peace” is fundamentally affected. The notion that in Western culture civic infrastructures are necessarily imbricated with military structures was perhaps first observed in relation to Napoleon Bonaparte’s First Empire France. Paul Virilio observes that this confluence of the military and the civilian became entrenched in World War I, with the invention of the modern “wartime economy” that was necessary for total war.16 By the conclusion of World War II, the confluence of civic and military infrastructures of state was such that President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned about the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the “military-industrial complex.” There followed the “television war” of Vietnam and the live 24-hour media cycle of CNN’s reporting of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Expansion of the “military-industrial-media-entertainment network” was well underway by 2001, when James Der Derian’s Virtuous War pointed out the merging of “the production, representation and execution of war.”17 Indeed, as far back as the 1980s, Atari had worked with the US Army on upgrading its arcade game Battlezone for training purposes, effectively weaponizing the home gaming console.18 Today, drone viewfinders and consoles are modeled on the Sony PlayStation and the Microsoft Xbox.19 The September 11 attack saw the weaponization of civil aviation infrastructure redeployed as missiles to attack civilian subjects and architecture, as well as the military infrastructure of the Pentagon. The widespread current use of the term “weaponization” to describe a diverse array of technologies, civic institutions, and social-media advertising suggests that the extent to which the infrastructures of peace can be instrumentalized as weapons is limited only by the military and paramilitary imagination. Secondly, the present notion of weaponization fundamentally alters how we delineate the physical spaces of war and of peace. Drone technology has meant that all spaces, including civic spaces, are available to aerial attack by drone strike. The civic space of targets is militarized, as are the places from which the missions are remotely controlled. Drone operators can fly sorties that obliterate human lives half-way across the planet, then at the ends of their shifts drive home to their families in the suburbs of Las Vegas. The potential that peaceful civic spaces of any kind can, through acts of terror, become war zones at any

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moment, such as mosques in New Zealand, markets in London, or concerts in Manchester, destabilizes our understanding of the absoluteness of any space of peace. That is arguably the main purpose of terrorism. Any civic space has the potential to become a war zone without warning, so the front line of war is no longer a delineated space across territory but, in essence, a “pop-up” scene of violence. We have seen the aftermath on the streets of Paris, London, and Berlin dissolve as those spaces are returned to their civic function. Once all civic spaces are seen as weaponizable, the notion of the rightful places of war and of peace becomes unstable and interchangeable. A 2017 article in The Guardian declared “weaponize” to be the political buzzword of the year. It is increasingly used in political and business language to describe turning something into a weapon, and in public debates concerning everything from social media and memes, to Brexit and Donald Trump’s antiimmigration rhetoric.20 Steven Poole argues that the effects of perceiving everything as a potential weapon in an eternal low-burn intensity war include: the normalization of the rhetoric of war that leads to a growing acceptance of actual wars and prolonged authoritarian states of exception curtailing freedoms; and increased cynicism and disbelief toward sources of knowledge and information, leading to the proliferation of misinformation and conspiracy theories. In this second respect, Poole notes the emergence of claims from US national security press about the Russian use of “weaponized narratives,” which have contributed to the rise in post-factualism: “weaponised narrative seeks to undermine an opponent’s civilization, identity and will by generating complexity, confusion and political and social schisms.”21 Emerging in the wake of revelations about the interference of Russia into US presidential elections through an online disinformation campaign, and compounded by fears about technology eroding privacy, the notion that information is weaponized has gained currency. It is interesting in our context to note that discussions of “weaponized narratives” identify a global rise in blood-and-soil nationalism as a result of “attacks” on identities that bind us together. Both weaponized history and weaponized narrative are forms of grievance against violence and calls for violence.

Tank on a Pedestal and Hand Emerging Out of the Ground Hito Steyerl’s discussion of a tank on a pedestal articulates weaponized history. In her book Duty Free Art (2017), Steyerl discusses coming across online footage of a display tank being repurposed for battle.

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A tank on a pedestal. Fumes are rising from the engine. A Soviet battle tank— called IS3 for Iosip Stalin—is being repurposed by a group of pro-Russian separatists in Konstantinovka, Eastern Ukraine. It is driven off a World War II memorial pedestal and promptly goes to war. According to a local militia, it “attacked a checkpoint in Ulyanovka, Krasnoarmeysk district, resulting in three dead and three wounded on the Ukranian side, and no losses on our side.”22

Steyerl continues: In the example of the kidnapped tank, history invades the hypercontemporary. It is not an account of events post factum. It acts, it feigns, it keeps on changing. History is a shape-shifting player, if not an irregular combatant. It keeps attacking from behind. It blocks off any future. Frankly, this kind of history sucks. This history is not a noble endeavour, something to be studied in the name of humankind so as to avoid being repeated. On the contrary, this kind of history is partial, partisan, and privatised, a self-interested enterprise, a means to feel entitled, and objective obstacle to coexistence, and a temporal fog detaining people in the stranglehold of imaginary origins. The tradition of the oppressed turns into a phalanx of oppressive traditions.23

Steyerl here encapsulates an attempt to preserve peace by remembering violence becoming raw material for the recommencement of war. Steyerl outlines the key properties of weaponized history: privatization and weaponized loss. What is striking about the tank footage—and Steyerl’s use of it—is the complete absence of historicization. In the immediacy of watching it, it is impossible to discern when the event happened.24 While we can try to deduce the moment in which it is happening from the clothing, or from our familiarity with the recent history of Russia–Ukraine conflict, there is an undeniable feeling that this could have happened at any point between World War II and the time of Steyerl’s lecture. In other words, the presence of the tank becomes an indication that history is being used and manipulated in the present. Other than the claim of the tank being repurposed and sent back into battle, we are left with no sense of whether this could in fact be part of re-enactment or vandalism. However, one thing that is certain is the vigilantism: that people in the video are acting in their own private interests. One of Steyerl’s broader themes is how art can be mobilized in the interests of weapons manufacturers.25 In terms of weaponized history, her critique is of the complicity of art and its institutions with the military-industrial complex. The essay “Tank on a Pedestal” was first published in online journal e-flux in 2016, and deals with questions that were already present in her works Abstract (2012) and Is the Museum a Battlefield? (2013), the latter of which is a video recording of

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a lecture commissioned for and presented at the 2013 Istanbul Biennale. In Abstract, Steyerl draws on the grammatical equivalence between cinematic and military terminology. She also explores this line of thinking in Is the Museum a Battlefield?, considering how many art museums and biennales are sponsored by weapons manufacturers. Steyerl thus articulates cultural institutions as storage spaces in which history is deposited, only to be brought back and weaponized when it becomes useful. But what exactly is being privatized in the tank video? It represents not just any history, but the history of anti-fascist World War II struggle being repurposed into a nationalist cause.26 If the people reviving the tank were bringing history back to life in order to kill, Steyerl’s example finds resonance in the Balkans’ prevailing narrative of a return of a historical force which will correct grievances in the present. Writing over a decade ago about post-socialist visual culture, Boris Groys suggested that its relation to the past can be described as privatization.27 According to Groys, artists and cultural producers working in the context of post-socialism are able to tap into a large reservoir of symbols and images left over from communist times in order to bring complex and unfinished historical ideas and processes into the public conversation. And they are able to do so with relatively little effort because these symbols are still so meaningful to so many people. In identifying this process as privatization, Groys drew a parallel between the still-present traces of socialist heritage, changes in conception of collective identity, and the economic privatization that has been taking place in postsocialist societies. Steyerl’s discussion of the tank on a pedestal provides a vivid illustration of war objects and artefacts being stored in cultural institutions and awakened when they become useful. The museum, tasked with preserving history, becomes a passive storage, watching until history performs its loop, and returning the historical artefacts as weaponry. This sense of history returning is also evident in the complex and politically charged relationship between monuments and the culture of remembrance in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). But there is another aspect of weaponized history in these monuments that is significant: weaponized mourning through the narrative of loss. The temporal narrative of loss is based on self-victimization in relation to perceived historical struggles against injustice.28 Monuments that articulate a sense of loss highlight external threats to the national group. The threats structure and give meaning to the group: if there is no threat, there is no group.29 In June 2017, BiH media reported that a monument dedicated to the fallen local soldiers was erected in Petkovci, a village near the city of Zvornik, in the shape of the Serb nationalist three-finger salute (a hand with the thumb, index,

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Figure 4.1 The Petkovci monument, erected in June 2017 at Petkovci, a village located near the city of Zvornik, Bosnia and Herzegovina. With its three-finger hand gesture, a Serb nationalist salute, the monument appears to be intended to troll the nearby site of the mass executions of Muslim Bosniaks during the Bosnian War. Photo: Uroš Čvoro. © Uroš Čvoro 2021.

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and middle finger extended).30 It aimed to establish an ethnically homogeneous and militaristic narrative of sacrifice for the greater good of the nation against an unnamed yet clearly identifiable enemy. In the Petkovci monument, the nationalist hand gesture and the proximity of the monument to a site of the mass execution of Bosniaks were a provocation to all non-Serbs. The approach of the monument to representing “the other side” was dictated by the ethnic majority population in the local area, and by interest groups connected to the nationalist political elites, which control and approve the construction of monuments.31 The Petkovci monument encapsulates the throes of monumental obsession and history wars in which BiH appears to have been locked for over two decades. Since the end of the 1992–1995 war, more than 2,100 monuments have been built.32 Nonetheless, BiH remains one of the most divided post-conflict societies in the present era, with ethnic division enshrined into its constitution. Its contemporary social and aesthetic complexities around monuments—the high number built, the entrenched nationalism, the systemic denial of genocide, and revision of history—exemplify the difficult political situation in the country. Since the Dayton Agreement in 1995 that marked the end of war, the country remains mired in the ethnonational identitarianism of its two main constituent entities, the Bosniak-Croat Federation and the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska, and displays a failed trajectory from violence to reconciliation. This postconflict trajectory has been hampered by dispossession of social wealth and infrastructure, a labyrinthine system of government, and routine sequestering of political debate into nationalist rhetoric by the dominant parties. Consequently, BiH is confronted with the co-existence of three mutually exclusive “official” narratives that dominate its culture of remembrance, whilst simultaneously disputing each other’s claim of ownership over the space and time of the country. In this context, the Pektovci monument is a materialization of the dominant, aggressively nationalist rhetoric. The monument in Petkovci is the archetypical “inat” monument, presenting an aggressive instrumentalization of death unconstrained by sensitivity to suffering or to historical accuracy. Located beside the main village road, the monument takes the form of a black granite hand giving the three-finger Serb nationalist salute. The names, birth and death dates, and photographs of dead soldiers are distributed across the fingers, and the base of the hand bears the inscription, “People who forget the past have no right to a brighter future.” The carnivalesque cruelty of the Petkovci monument is a highly visible nationalist provocation in a village populated by Serbs and Bosniaks. While the monument is ostensibly about commemorating local soldiers, the nationalist salute, in line of sight from

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the local mosque, and its proximity to sites of the mass execution of Bosniaks in the surrounding area, deploy it as a nationalist instrumentalization of dead bodies. The affect of the monument’s intentional defiance of social acceptability echoes the cruel mocking laughter of the Christchurch “lulz” (Chapter 3). It is intended to provoke an emotional response, to “trigger” the Bosniaks, to laugh at their loss, and in doing so symbolically harvest it as the Serb nationalists’ gain. Along with other BiH monuments, it reflects a trend in weaponization of history by commemoration intended to troll, insult, and reproduce violence. During our visit to the site in September 2019, several passers-by gestured back at the monument in solidarity with the same three-finger salute. This reciprocal gesture symbolically reanimates the hand and the struggle for a “brighter future” it represents. Yet, participatory reanimation of a hand emerging out of the ground also recalled for us the horror film trope of a hand shooting out of the grave. In saluting the dead hand, the locals were perhaps engaging in what can be described as zombie nationalism. Like the online alt-right’s plundering appropriation of the Nazi Kreigsmarine flag into the Kekistan flag (Chapter 3), the carnivalesque cruelty of the Pektovci monument operates through a montage of historical revisionism. The hand is located next to a 1964 monument commemorating the fallen Partisan fighters from World War II who fought to defeat mid-century fascist ethnonationalism, and bears a dedication to all who gave their lives for “freedom and brotherhood and unity of our people.” The hand manipulates that anti-fascist struggle into a Serb struggle for independence through a striking cognitive leap: the inscription also instructs its “people” (the Serbs) never to forget history—except when it does not fit the nationalist narrative, such as the history of trans-national solidarity commemorated by the Partisan monument located beside it. In this intersection of zombie nationalism and revisionism, we can observe history being weaponized. Both the Petkovci monument and the tank presented by Steyerl draw on the “return of the living dead” as a core fantasy in weaponized history: the fantasy of a person who does not want to stay dead but returns as a “collector of unpaid symbolic debt.”33 The tank is an inanimate large green object, but the YouTube footage shows the process of re-starting the engine, much like Frankenstein’s monster being reanimated to go on a murderous rampage, and not unlike that other green monster, Pepe the Frog, being reanimated from a “dank” meme in 2016. Similarly, the Christchurch terrorist reanimated the dead by writing their names on firearms used to carry out murders in the present, as direct revenge for those battles from centuries ago. Symbolic reanimation becomes a technique of

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ritualistic vengeance, used to collect the unforgiven debt to white history. The white dead cannot find their proper place in the text of a history that has been “eroded,” and return to avenge and correct the wrongs from the past.

Temporality of Weaponized History Serb nationalists of the 1990s were not the first to use propaganda to justify nationalism and violence, nor were they the first to manipulate history in order to justify murder. But there is an argument to be made that the historical context for the rise of Serb nationalism—in particular, the Fukuyaman “end of history” argument—in many ways provides the prelude for the present. Perhaps the key here is to understand the rise of nationalism as a shock absorber against the disorienting realities of globalization and the collapse of universal narratives. While thirty years after 1989 we find ourselves in a political and global economic system in which the nation-state is no longer central, this does not mean it is irrelevant at a social level; in fact, there has been a global resurgence of nationalism coupled with racist, xenophobic, and patriarchal movements. It is a well-worn trope that historical time in former Yugoslavia is politically charged.34 This interest in the politics of temporality was awakened by the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, fueled by the manipulation of history in nationalist rhetoric, and taken up in ill-informed and sensationalist journalism.35 Despite our suspicion toward the wholesale way in which historical time and temporality in the region have been nominally tied to the nationalist cause and defined in opposition to progressive politics, it is impossible not to observe the ease with which historical time travel occurs in the Balkans. When speaking to people with lived memories of World War II in the Balkans, the conversation will often recall history by jumping between events that are decades if not centuries apart. Conversational historical montage, wherein lines between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and between the Gestapo and NATO, become blurred, can be explained in generational terms not unique to any region: after all, current Balkan generations can have witnessed multiple conflicts and belonged to at least three states in one lifetime, often without ever having left their place of birth. Their narratives will also, of course, depend heavily on the national framework (and political orientation) of the storyteller. Yet, there is something striking about popular understandings of conflict and history in the Balkans involving a non-linear conception of historical time.36

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One of the most powerful narrative devices of historical clash is the “zero hour of history.” The most well-known construction of a zero hour in the region of Former Yugoslavia was the production of the mythology of Kosovo by Serb nationalists at the six-hundredth anniversary of the Kosovo battle, held on June 28, 1989 at Gazimestan near Pristina in Kosovo. In our Introduction, we noted the way in which 1989 has become Europe’s “9/11” in terms of its vertical division of history into periods before and after the fall of state socialism and, at a paradigmatic level, in terms of the shift from an ideological basis of political subjectivity to current ontological and experiential understandings. The rise of nationalism during the breakdown of Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s can be seen as the direct manifestation of the shift in political subjectivity. As the largest political event in Serbia’s history, the gathering at Gazimestan featured the highest-level political functionaries from all Yugoslav republics, and was attended by over a million people and broadcast on all state television channels. The event was framed as a celebration of an important anniversary, yet it was a politically motivated spectacle responding to unrest that had been growing in Kosovo since the early 1980s, due to demands for increased autonomy by the Kosovar Albanian population from Serb domination. It marked the rise of Slobodan Milošević from a mid-level party apparatchik to a powerful demagogue who spoke about “national awakening” and “national pride.” Milošević conflated Serb martyr mythology of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, nationalist anxieties from 1989, and the future destiny of the so-called “heavenly nation.” He connected the two “zero hours” of history (1389 and 1989) in order to mask the historical condition of 1989 (Yugoslav debt crisis, global recession, crumbling of state-socialism, intensification of globalization) and to articulate the present as a historical-existential imperative of preserving the future of national identity in opposition to “others” (Kosovars, Bosniaks, Croats). There are a few factors that are crucial to the myth of the national zero hour. One is its connection to the idea of reclaiming something that was lost (national pride, tradition). Here the temporality of zero hour connects to longer historical myths and justifies the present. Another key factor is the notion of beginning anew. In this sense, zero hour represents a break with the past, or rather a break with aspects of the past that are not useful. In Kosovo this was the break with the Yugoslav past. If we apply this framework to the present, the zero hour becomes a useful device for nationalist and racist claims of grievance. Arthur Jafa’s The White Album is a powerful illustration of how post-2016 claims of white grievance (such as those manifested violently in Person X’s claims of white genocide to justify his terrorism in Christchurch) combine connectedness to a

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historical sense of white privilege (understanding national space as the space of white power) with disconnection from the historical conditions that made the privilege possible (systemic racism and disadvantage). Jafa’s work illustrates the complex and perverse temporality of white entitlement and white grievance. It cuts across questions of white victimhood and claims to loss and trauma by laying right-wing affect politics bare, taking them seriously on their own terms, and doing so in a way that draws on and re-reappropriates the montage aesthetic that has been so heavily appropriated by the online alt-right.

The White National Space and the Unknown Knowns: The White Album The White Album (2018) is Arthur Jafa’s celebrated follow-up to Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016). Commissioned by and premiered at the University of California’s Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, the work got full international exposure at the 2019 Venice Biennale, where it won the Golden Lion award for best work. Titled as a reference to the Beatles’ self-titled album and Joan Didion’s collection of essays by the same name, The White Album combines a pair of musical tracks with a series of video segments that tackle issues around representation of race and violence. In the forty-minute video, Jafa serves as a DJ to create a sequence of videos and sounds featuring an extensive list of more-or-less familiar public figures and viral video celebrities: the white supremacist who in 2015 murdered nine people at a Bible study at a church in Charleston, South Carolina; Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange (1971); Honey Boo Boo; Val Kilmer in the music video for Oneohtrix Point Never’s Animals (2016); Erykah Badu; Iggy Pop; O.J. Simpson; US military personnel; gun enthusiasts; dancing German cybergoths; a Celtics fan in an ecstatic Bon Jovi lip-synch. These figures are interspersed with close-up portraits of people from Jafa’s private life and collaborators from his gallery. The White Album is an expansive and multi-layered work that resists fixed meaning. Jafa has pointed out in interviews that he intends to add more footage and keep changing the work, suggesting an understanding of images close to the constantly updated content on online platforms. The White Album is informed by methodologies from Jafa’s earlier engagement with streams of images in Love Is the Message. Love Is the Message is the clearest articulation of Jafa’s aesthetics principles and methodologies (and certainly the most well-known in his long career), and it operates as a companion piece to

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The White Album. According to Jafa, The White Album partly came out of the discomfort that he felt with some of the reception of Love Is the Message: namely, the seven-minute absolution felt by white audiences when faced with images of black bodies in various stages of distress and humiliation.37 So, if The White Album draws on the methodologies of Love Is the Message, what are they? The existing literature identifies two key methods used by Jafa to achieve his goals: affective proximity and temporal displacement.38 The former refers to his technique of montage, which juxtaposes images registering vastly different and often opposing affects. Images of violence are quickly followed by humorous images. The method of creating a flow of images akin to a DJ set was acknowledged by Jafa as intending to move his audience out of their comfort zone. Affective proximity relates to his second method of temporal displacement. Using “worrying the note” as the musical basis for staying out of the entrenched temporal register of continuity, in Love Is the Message Jafa attempts to create the feeling of being in a state of emergency, which he correlates with the state of blackness.39 The fast-paced edits, the rapid-fire succession of images is intended to induce this state of emergency. In addition to its basis in the live DJ experience, Jafa’s work also engages with the history of cinema to develop what he calls “black cinema.”40 This art historical method has a wide array of exponents including Aby Warburg in an atlas tracing lines of visual continuity in images spanning centuries, or Benjamin in montaging disparate elements to create dialectical images. Jafa’s method similarly aims to jolt the audience out of a passive state into a moment of “shock” or realization: one related to the experience of blackness. He means to identify the present as temporally thick with long histories of injustice and exploitation. He creates a “black visuality,” as he describes it, a point of identification with the ideal black subject. This is perhaps the origin of his discomfort with the reception of Love Is the Message. While the seven-minute cathartic excursion into the black experience mimicked the consumption of offensive and insensitive images online, it allowed the white audience to enter them absolved of guilt. The White Album upturns the performed empathy in responses to Love Is the Message, showing that weaponized affect can also lead to “ahistorical” acts of violence such as mass murder in Charlestown. So, these methodologies are used in The White Album: what does that mean for its representation of whiteness, which is its declared aim?41 We argue that Jafa makes whiteness visible as a field of power. By reflecting on the temporality of whiteness as a field of power and the ways in which history is used as a weapon, The White Album exposes the estrangement of whiteness, of grasping and

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Figure 4.2 The White Album, 2018–2019, by Arthur Jafa. Installation view for the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020), Art Gallery of New South Wales. Originally commissioned by the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/ PFA). Presented at the 22nd Biennale of Sydney with assistance from the United States Government. Photo: Zan Wimberley. © Arthur Jafa 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

capturing it an invisible structural condition.42 We can see this in the way in which most of the speaking subjects in the work define whiteness through “negation,” explaining only what it is not. Jafa says that an intention in the work was to try to navigate the difference between white people he knows and loves, and whiteness as a more general condition.43 Perhaps another way to articulate this is to note the split in the perception of whiteness between people who would identify as white and people who would not identify as white. Whiteness operates as a structural condition of privilege. We can see this in the footage of the two “central” on-camera confessions featured in The White Album: one from a white teenage girl issuing a diatribe about double standards applied to white people; the other from a heavy-set self-described “redneck” and reformed racist Dixon D. White. The girl talks about how she is not racist. She uses the standard negation of racism in the phrase “I am not racist, but . . .” Following this qualification, she unsurprisingly arrives at an even worse position of cognitive dissonance: being racist through the negation of racism, through an estrangement of her own prejudice against blackness. As she stumbles from one over-used, faux-empathic

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cliché to another, she starts to shift the responsibility for racism to people of color. Jafa then cuts to a close-up of actor Val Kilmer from the video for the electronic musician Oneohtrix Point Never’s Animals. Wearing a red Nike track suit and sitting on the edge of a bed, Kilmer’s image as used by Jafa humorously evokes sheer exhaustion with the young woman’s musings. Jafa then cuts to a video of the rapper Plies, known for his hilarious Instagram rants filmed sitting in his car, wearing a snapback and gold grills. He also is talking directly to the camera, and the sequencing makes it appear as if he’s in conversation with the young woman. “You wanna argue,” he says. “I can’t argue with you. Nooooo. Look at you. You mad, you big mad.” By making this monologue one of the central parts of The White Album, Jafa defines whiteness as what Australian anthropologist Ghassan Hage describes as a “field of power,” in which the young woman represents white nationalists who feel empowered to have managerial capacity over the national space.44 She is someone with clear ideas about what is undesirable, and possesses the white cultural capital to empower her to make such judgments. Whiteness is not only a condition of privilege, but the structural condition that determines the implicit (and explicit) racial hierarchy which can be described as “degrees of whiteness.” The more signifiers one has of white cultural capital—such as the way one speaks, looks, and dresses—the more empowered one feels. Crucially, this sense of entitlement over managing (“worrying about”) the national space is also driven by a sense of threat from non-whites. If the young woman’s race-relations-managing monologue articulates whiteness as a structural condition of privilege, Dixon D. White’s monologue from the position of a reformed racist is a rejection of whiteness as structural privilege which has shaped the history of the US. Dixon’s video denouncing his racist past and the systemic racism in America became an online sensation.45 This video was followed by others in which he talked about racial politics in the US. However, his critical position toward whiteness was revealed to be a performance when it was publicized that his real identity was Jorge Moran, a half-Cuban director and actor, and he was attacked because he lacked “white capital.” Suddenly, his heavy southern American accent lacked authenticity, and his performance of whiteness became offensive to audiences who identify as white.46 We interpret Jafa’s placing of two confessionals in proximity to each other as a way to capture the feeling of knowing whiteness. Rather than something that can be clearly identified, it becomes an “unknown known.” Jafa says: “For me, the question is: What is one to make of that which one cannot not know and that which one must, ultimately, unknow?”47 He talks about trying to unknow whiteness as something that we cannot not know. As Slavoj Žižek suggests, such are the silent

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Figure 4.3 The White Album, 2018, by Arthur Jafa. Still from video. © Arthur Jafa 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

presuppositions of which we are unaware, but which determine our acts. Žižek’s idea stems from his discussion of US State Secretary (during the George W. Bush administration) Donald Rumsfeld’s description of what was known and what was unknown. In March 2003, Rumsfeld was attempting to provide a justification for the US-led invasion of Iraq by suggesting that there is a difference between what we know (“known knowns”), what we know we don’t know (“known unknowns”), and what we don’t know we don’t know (“unknown unknowns”). Rumsfeld used the last category as an example of threats posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime that Americans were not even aware of, which is why they must strike pre-emptively. To this list, Žižek added a fourth category, “unknown knowns,” to describe “the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.”48 In this category he includes hazing rituals in the US military, exemplified by the leaked torture photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. The White Album features the disingenuous “unknown known” of whiteness through two moments in which violence is strongly suggested, but not shown. In video of the white supremacist 2015 Charleston massacre, we see black-andwhite surveillance footage of a car pulling into a parking lot. The male driver calmly walks through the unlocked door of a building. Jafa forces us to sit with the horror conjured from this memory as he cuts away to another video. Minutes later, he brings viewers back to the surveillance video. The man calmly exits the building, gets into his car, and drives away. Another moment of merely suggested

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violence is footage of a bearded man pulling an assortment of weapons out of his ill-fitting jeans. The comical aspect of the cartoon-like appearance of large weapons from unexpected places is amplified by the juxtaposition of a meme of a person being thrown by a horse. But this proximity also creates the “lulz” effect of casual festive cruelty. Seen in the context of the other footage suggesting mass murder, we anticipate what the man in the bad jeans is preparing for. In both instances, the stream of images in the work is punctured by violence as the supplement to public discourse around race. Weaponization of history here functions through lone shooters taking up arms to defend what they see as loss of white position (privilege) in the world, and through bemoaning the loss of white innocence (deniability) over such explosions of violence.

Conclusion White nationalism in Jafa’s The White Album is articulated through the sense of entitlement coupled with a feeling of loss. As Hage explained in the wake of the Christchurch attack, white nationalism is a combination of a sense of decline, a sense of being besieged, and a sense of privilege that has long been in the making . . . It entitles certain white people to unreasonably depict non-whites as illegitimate and to consider them responsible for white people’s problems. It legitimises the feelings of hatred and the harbouring of violent fantasies of extermination towards them. All packaged with a veneer of self-pity and self-righteousness.49

Hage argues that there is an increasingly available literature portraying people of white European origins as being in a state of decline. In this portrayal, white people are about to suffer a reversal of circumstances and become dominated by people who have long themselves been dominated by Europe. Hage explains that the fear of being besieged by the people one is colonizing is not a new phenomenon, but has been present throughout European colonialism. This sense of historical injustice felt by those who oppress is intrinsic to whiteness as a field of power in Hage’s account and in Jafa’s work. We see instances of white violence erupting (as a pathology) but in large part it remains invisible, though its power is understood and felt. Whiteness actually structures the whole field as conceptual and historical infrastructure: as a way of looking, as a way of telling history, and as a way of experiencing time.

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Jafa’s The White Album makes visible this invisibility of whiteness. It joins other artists’ work created in recent years, which taken collectively makes increasingly visible a plethora of invisible positions of privilege. Jafa’s work captures the experience of whiteness from the perspective of people who identify as white in response to the making visible of whiteness. This experience is one of loss and lament. Partly, what has been lost is the privilege of invisibility, of being able to manage the national field of power and to assess and evaluate the difference of others without having to account for one’s own position. The White Album provides three main versions of that loss: the indignation of the blonde woman, the performed good intentions of Dixon (he is really performing them), and the violent lashing out. This chapter has extended our argument about turning away from affectcentric interpretive frameworks by showing how the Christchurch attack was not just a carnival of violence and murder, but an example of the deliberate weaponization of history. The justification for murder was underpinned by an historical montage that connected disparate and seemingly disconnected events. It simultaneously constructed the present as a “zero hour” (a new beginning that reclaims the present for whites) removed from the histories of violence that made the attack possible. Weaponized history positions white nationalism as the inevitable outcome of both the multicultural history of the world as a centuriesold struggle for national independence, and the specific events of the twentieth century. It views progressive left politics as a totalitarian prison that must end in bloodshed; it views white violence and terrorism as material and symbolic reflections of this historical determinism. When history is weaponized, it frames the present as a zone of relativization, greenlighting fascism as one acceptable response. This understanding of history also means that our very sense of temporality is relativized, stripping us of collectivity. The mixture of cynical manipulation and relativization is symptomatic of the broader social, political, and cultural discourse about the past in the last three decades. If the events at Christchurch have somehow shut down our historical horizon by violently reinforcing an historical inevitability, the works discussed in this chapter, of Jafa and Steyerl, step in the direction of opening history to new possibilities and different imaginations. Their works present powerful critiques of the historical normativity underpinning how we experience violence in the present. Following this line of critique, the next two chapters will investigate the temporal dimensions of the present through discourses of militaristic humanitarianism (Chapter 5) and militant humanism (Chapter 6).

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Notes 1 Tim Clarke, “Christchurch Mosque Massacre: Brenton Tarrant’s Weapons Armed with Words in Twisted Cause,” The West Australian, March 16, 2019, 2:00 a.m., accessed May 15, 2020, https://thewest.com.au/news/world/christchurch-mosquemassacre-brenton-tarrants-weapons-armed-with-words-in-twisted-cause-ngb881137038z. 2 Michael McCowan, “Christchurch Suspect: Europe Investigates Possible Far-right Links,” The Guardian, March 18, 2019, accessed May 18, 2020, https://www. theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/18/christchurch-suspect-europe-investigatespossible-far-right-links. 3 A. Dirk Moses, “ ‘White Genocide’ and the Ethics of Public Analysis,” Journal of Genocide Research vol. 21, no. 2 (2019): 202. 4 Boris Buden, Zona Prelaska: O Kraju Postkomunizma (Beograd: Fabrika Knjiga, 2012). 5 Celine-Marie Pascale, “The Weaponization of Language: Discourses of Rising Right-wing Authoritarianism,” Current Sociology Review vol. 67, no. 6 (2019): 898–917. 6 Bharath Ganesh, “Weaponizing White Thymos: Flows of Rage in the Online Audiences of the Alt-right,” Cultural Studies vol. 34, no. 6 (2020): 892–924. 7 Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004). 8 William Davies, Nervous States: How Feeling Took over the World (London: Jonathan Cape, 2018), 18. 9 Tim Harford, “How the US is Weaponising the World Economy,” Financial Times, June 14, 2019, accessed October 2, 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/62e050ac-8dbf11e9-a1c1-51bf8f989972. 10 David Scutt, “Fears China is Weaponising Currency as Yuan Falls through ‘Line in the Sand’,” The Sydney Morning Herald, August 5, 2019, 5:11 p.m., accessed October 2, 2019, https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/fears-china-is-weaponisingcurrency-as-yuan-falls-through-line-in-the-sand-20190805-p52dyf.html. 11 Daniel E. Payne, quoted in Lowmania, “Inside DOD’s Changing Approach to Industrial Security,” Law360 (June 20, 2017), accessed October 2, 2019, https://www. law360.com/articles/935090/inside-dod-s-changing-approach-to-industrial-security. 12 James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (London: Verso, 2018), 118. 13 Fouad M. Fouad, Annie Sparrow, Ahmad Tarakji, Mohamad Alameddine, Fadi El-Jardali, Adam P. Coutts et al., “Health Workers and the Weaponisation of Health Care in Syria: A Preliminary Inquiry for The Lancet–American University of Beirut Commission on Syria,” The Lancet vol. 390, no. 10111 (2017): 2516–2526. 14 Davies, Nervous States, 19.

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15 Brittany Kaiser, “Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, Oral Evidence: Fake News, HC 363,” House of Commons, Tuesday April 17, 2018, accessed October 5, 2019, http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/ evidencedocument/digital-culture-media-and-sport-committee/disinformationand-fake-news/oral/81592.html. 16 Paul Virilio and Silvere Lotringer, Pure War (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 9. 17 James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-MediaEntertainment Network (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001), xx. 18 Marcus Power, “Digitized Virtuosity: Video War Games and Post-9/11 Cyberdeterrence,” Security Dialogue vol. 38, no. 2 (2007): 281. 19 Roger Stahl, Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2010), 91. 20 Steven Poole, “Weaponise! The Meaning of 2017’s Political Buzzword,” The Guardian, March 28, 2017, accessed May 7, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/ mar/27/weaponise-the-meaning-of-2017s-political-buzzword. The article was based on a similar New York Times article published earlier that year. See https://www. nytimes.com/2017/03/14/magazine/if-everything-can-be-weaponized-what-shouldwe-fear.html. 21 Poole, “Weaponise!” 22 Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (London: Verso, 2017), 1. Even though the footage of the tank being started up by the local militia is available online, Steyerl notes that it is impossible to verify whether the tank did in fact drive off the pedestal. The footage of the tank being started up, and Steyerl’s discussion are part of her performative lecture “Is the Museum a Battlefield,” available at https://vimeo.com/76011774. This lecture served as the basis for Chapter 1 in Duty Free Art, where this quote comes from. 23 Steyerl, Duty Free Art, 2. 24 For a news report about the actual event which took place in 2014, see https://www. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2657083/If-good-Red-Army-Viral-video-WWII-tankstarted-inspires-pro-Russian-rebels-raid-MUSEUMS-Ukraine.html, accessed May 1, 2020. 25 It is interesting to note that the tour of Ben Quilty’s After Afghanistan exhibition, discussed in Chapter 2, was sponsored by the weapons manufacturer, Thales. 26 This is a counterpoint to Hiwa K’s work, discussed in Chapter 5, which features weapons being melted into a bell. Hiwa K seeks to reverse the standard process of melting bells to make weapons. Steyerl shows the contemporary version of bells being melted—a museum display being brought back into battle. This also connects to the idea of how civilian infrastructure gets militarized. In Steyerl’s case, the civilian infrastructure is not really civilian anyway, but historical objects of militarism. 27 Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 168.

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28 Here we are relying on Žižek’s account of nationalism in the former Yugoslavia. Žižek uses Jacques Lacan to argue that nationalism is centered around the imagined theft of enjoyment that was never possessed in the first place. See Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 203. 29 We discussed the relationship between perceived historical trauma and its representation in Chapter 1. 30 “Zvornik: Spomenik s tri prsta kod mjesta masovnih egzekucija,” Al Jazeera, June 9, 2017, accessed April 9, 2018, http://balkans.aljazeera.net/vijesti/zvornik-spomenik-stri-prsta-kod-mjesta-masovnih-egzekucija. 31 The following discussion of the Petkovci monument draws on the arguments in Chapter 3 of Uroš Čvoro, Post-Conflict Monuments in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Unfinished Histories (London and New York: Routledge, 2020). 32 Centre for Nonviolent Action, War of Memories: Places of Suffering and Remembrance of War in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Sarajevo-Belgrade: Centre for Nonviolent Action, 2016). 33 Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 16. 34 For a discussion of nationalist zero hour of history, see chapter 1 in Uroš Čvoro, Transitional Aesthetics: Contemporary Art at the Edge of Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 35 For an overview of media sensationalism in reporting on the Yugoslav conflicts, see Enika Abazi and Albert Doja, “The Past in the Present: Time and Narrative of Balkan Wars in Media Industry and International Politics,” Third World Quarterly vol. 38, no. 4 (2017): 1012–1042. 36 Ilana Bet-El, “Unimagined Communities: The Power of Memory and the Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia,” in Memory and Power in Post-war Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past, ed. J. Müller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 210. 37 Reflecting on the reception of Love Is The Message, Jafa remarks: “I started to feel like I was giving people this sort of microwave epiphany about blackness and I started [feeling] very suspect about it. After so many ‘I cried. I crieds,’ well, is that the measure of having processed it in a constructive way? I’m not sure it is.” See Ruth Gebreyesus, “Why the Film-maker behind Love Is The Message is Turning His Lens to Whiteness,” The Guardian, December 12, 2018, accessed April 29, 2020, https:// www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/dec/11/arthur-jafa-video-artist-love-isthe-message. 38 Christina Knight, “Feeling and Falling in Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, the Message is Death,” The Black Scholar vol. 49, no. 3 (2019): 36–47. 39 Jafa describes his process as “the use of irregular, nontempered (nonmetronomic) camera rates and frame replication to prompt filmic movement to function in a

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manner that approximates Black vocal intonation.” In the same way that jazz musicians “worry the note,” playing around the beat and outside of the diatonic scale, Jafa experiments with editing practices (rapid fire pacing, affective proximity) that disrupt the viewer’s experience of time. This means going against editing practices that smooth over differences captured on camera and produce a sense of continuity—not only procuring a false sense of continuity, but also a subject which is assumed to be continuous (and white). Jafa’s strategy could be said to reflect the nonlinear relationship that contemporary Black people have to time: Jafa says that Black people live at the tempo of emergency. In this sense, Black people are the ideal subjects to whom the film is addressed. Jafa talks about The White Album as a DJ set, and in the context of black cinema, of taking black aesthetics and applying them to whiteness. See conversation between the artist and curators Apsara Diquinzio and Kate Mackay, BAM/PFA, 2018, accessed April 29, 2020, https://bamlive.s3.amazonaws.com/The%20exhibition%20 brochure%20%28PDF%29%20for%20the%20program/MATRIX_Jafabrochure_201912.pdf. Also see Aria Dean, “Film: Worry the Image,” Art in America, May 26, 2017, accessed April 29, 2020, https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/ features/worry-the-image-63266/. Jafa suggests that The White Album is an attempt to work within the “ideas of black aesthetics . . . but don’t necessarily take the black figure as the subject.” See Fanny Singer, “Arthur Jafa’s ‘The White Album’,” Art Agenda Reviews, March 20, 2019, accessed April 29, 2020, https://www.art-agenda.com/features/259117/arthur-jafa-sthe-white-album. A key part of this is the invisibility of whiteness. In relation to whiteness, Jafa uses the analogy of ancient Greco-Roman sculptures that are commonly scrubbed clean of any color and blanched in the name of purity before being displayed in museums: “It’s so bound up with the fragility of whiteness as a self-conception. Not as a conception anybody else imposed on it—because it’s a conception that exists not as a definition of what it is but as a definition of what it isn’t.” See Ruth Gebreyesus, “Why the Film-maker behind Love Is The Message is Turning His Lens to Whiteness.” Jafa says: “For me, it is about the tension (or gap) between, on one hand, what Cornel West has termed, ‘What one cannot not know as a black person in America’ (which basically could be named ‘whiteness’) and on the other hand, my deep affection, adoration, and love for people in my life who would be termed ‘white.’ How can you reconcile these two facts? One could say it’s about the difference or distinction between ‘whiteness’ and ‘white people.’ Or perhaps, more bluntly, the difference between bad ‘whiteness’ and good ‘whiteness.’ ” “Arthur Jafa,” Biennale of Sydney, accessed April 20, 2020, https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/artists/arthur-jafa/. For our articulation of whiteness as a field of power, we draw on Australian anthropologist Ghassan Hage’s critique of Australian multiculturalism as framed by

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whiteness as a field of power. See Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Sydney: Pluto Books, 1998), 53–59. Hage argues that within the context of how Australian multiculturalism is experienced at an everyday level, there exists a hierarchy of power based on the accumulated cultural capital of Australian identity. This cultural capital is defined through performed signifiers of Australian national identity, such as speech and customs. Race (or skin color) plays an important part of this: the closer one is to the perceived “Anglo” or “European” look, the more cultural capital one has. His YouTube profile is available at https://www.youtube.com/channel/ UCxrwoWJ8cYyW9U8Fik7yATw, accessed March 31, 2020. For details on the “controversy,” see “The Strange YouTube Controversy of ‘Ex-racist’ Dixon White and His ‘Racial Healing Challenge’,” accessed March 31, 2020, https://newmediarockstars.com/2015/06/reverse-rachel-dolezal-the-racial-healingchallenge-and-the-strange-youtube-controversy-of-ex-racist-dixon-white/. “Arthur Jafa,” Biennale of Sydney. Slavoj Žižek, “What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know that He Knows about Abu Ghraib,” In These Times, May 21, 2004, accessed April 20, 2020, https://www.lacan.com/ zizekrumsfeld.htm. Ghassan Hage, “White Entitlement Is Part of the Very Structure of Australian Society,” The Guardian, March 18, 2019, accessed April 20, 2020, https://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/18/white-entitlement-is-part-of-thevery-structure-of-australian-society.

5

Military Humanism

In 2007, on the fifteenth anniversary of the commencement of war, a public sculpture was unveiled in central Sarajevo, located near the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Nebojša Šerić Šoba’s Monument to the International Community (2007) features a giant can of spam on a pedestal with the inscription, “Monument to the International Community: From the Grateful Citizens of Sarajevo.” Winner of a public competition—as part of the project De/ construction of Monument (2004–2007), which included a series of seminars, exhibitions, and interventions in public spaces—the work approaches post-war commemoration in an unexpected way. Using the familiar scale, placement, and aesthetic of post-war monuments, Monument to the International Community departs from the traditional representational frame of war commemoration, in order to focus on the role of the international humanitarian response to the war in BiH. The Warhol-inspired can of “Icarus” spam is a reminder of the inedible food aid (often past its expiry date) sent to the starving population of Sarajevo during the siege (1992–1996). The dedication to the international community is a cynical one, thanking the UN humanitarian mission for their belated and inadequate response to atrocities in BiH, which contributed to the disaster.1 As a powerful indictment of the failed international humanitarian mission in BiH, Monument to the International Community approaches post-war commemoration through the frame of international humanitarian intervention. The work draws attention to the war in BiH as a historical event that not only shocked the world with atrocities unseen on European soil since World War II, but also—central to the discussion in this chapter—marked a watershed in military doctrine, from Cold War containment to what Noam Chomsky, in his 1999 book The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo, called “military humanism”; to quote US President Bill Clinton’s address to the American nation on March 24, 1999, after the launching of aerial bombing on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia—then just Serbia and Montenegro—“we are upholding our values, protecting our interests, and advancing the cause of peace.”2 As Costas Douzinas 171

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Figure 5.1 Monument to the International Community for the Grateful Citizens of Sarajevo, 2007, by Nebojša Šerić Šoba. Photo: Uroš Čvoro. © Uroš Čvoro 2021.

argues, NATO’s professed moral use of military force in the service of human rights marked a new turn in the perception of military intervention in the new millennium.3 While the passivity of the international community during the early 1990s in the face of atrocities in BiH in many ways enabled events that led to genocide,4 the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia represented a military

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intervention no longer based on equivalent relations between nation-states. While there were undeniable atrocities committed by the Serb army and police in Kosovo—and they represented the continuation of Serb genocide against Bosniaks in BiH—the response by NATO represented an over-correction in defiance of international sovereignty, with significant and ongoing consequences for war in the twenty-first century. The 1999 NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was the first military campaign in history publicly declared as being conducted in the name of human rights, but the willingness of Western powers to override nation-state territorial sovereignty and international treaties for ostensibly moral purposes has since become one of the central justifications for war.5 However, this new, emphatically post-Westphalian internationalism seems to be have been more heavily applied in Yugoslavia, Helle Malmvig argues, than in the African nation of Algeria, which was experiencing similar human rights violations to those in Kosovo, yet whose sovereignty was deemed to be sacrosanct.6 Seen in this context, the decade of war in the former Yugoslavia gradually established the parameters for the selectively applied doctrine of “military humanism” as one of the central characteristics of post-1989 war, through to the post-9/11 War on Terror, and in the more recent interventions in Syria. The intellectual source of the 1990s doctrine of military humanism is to be found in Francis Fukuyama’s notion of “the end of history,”7 which we discussed in our introduction. Fukuyama’s idea, that the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the natural progression from tyranny to free market economics and liberal democracy, became instrumentalized in the adoption of expeditionary military neoconservatism, most notably by supposedly “liberal”/“left” governments, such as those of the Democrat Clinton and the UK Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair. Writing at the time of the NATO bombing of Kosovo, Paul Virilio writes: When you claim to prosecute a war in the name of human rights—a humanitarian war—you deprive yourself of the possibility of negotiating a cessation of hostilities with your enemy. If the enemy is a torturer, the enemy of the human race, there is no alternative but the extremes of total war and unconditional surrender.8

Military humanism, rife with Orwellian ethical paradoxes, legitimized the deployment of military force for the purposes of furthering liberal democracy and “keeping the peace.” Its absurdity is captured in artist Gertrude Kearn’s painted portrait of the Canadian General Lewis MacKenzie, chief of staff of the

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UN peacekeeping force during the Bosnian War. The painting bears the words, in bold military text, “KEEP THE PEACE OR I’LL KILL YOU.” In the 1990s, international peacekeeping efforts were problematic, to say the least: putting international troops in Rwanda much too late to prevent genocide, lacking the powers to prevent later atrocities such as the 1995 Kibeho massacre, and putting Canadian troops in Somalia from 1992 to 1993, which resulted in the “Somalia affair,” in which Canadian troops captured a local teenager who had been looting their supplies and tortured and killed him, taking photos of their crimes. And, of course, international peacekeeping placed Dutch, French, and British UN troops in BiH, creating an undefendable safe corridor in Srebrenica, failing to demilitarize the area, and setting up the conditions for the 1995 massacre. These problematic 1990s interventions of military humanism, spreading freedom by force, presaged the pre-emptive “Bush Doctrine” and the naked US-led neocolonialist adventurism which followed the 9/11 attacks behind the flimsy façade of the War on Terror. Such use of overwhelming military force to uphold a quasi-moral international order was the driving ethical imperative for the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the ongoing US drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan.9 Despite any of its genuine good intentions—Clinton stated in his autobiography, “I was determined not to allow Kosovo to become another Bosnia”10—military humanism enacts an extreme and toxic form of empathy, what Fritz Breithaupt terms “vampiristic empathy,” “the process of coexperiencing another’s situation while supplanting their objectivities, goals or desires with one’s own . . . neglecting the other’s independent well-being.”11 Indeed, as the comparison between Kosovo and Algeria suggests, this empathy is a means to an end, much more about the agenda of and benefits to the empath. No doubt Clinton did not want to be remembered as the president who stood by and let another Bosnia or Rwanda happen on his watch. Taking the doctrine of military humanism as justification for military interventions as its point of departure, this chapter examines a range of contemporary art works from the post-conflict states of Kosovo, BiH, Palestine, and Iraq in relation to military humanism at different stages of war: Phil Collins’s how to make a refugee (1999) and Alban Muja’s Family Album (2019) examine the production of the moral order of human rights through images of Kosovar refugees during and after the war; Mladen Miljanović’s Sounds of the Homeland (2018) examines the relationship between international intervention and failed post-war state formation in BiH; Sharif Waked’s Beace Brocess (2010) examines the cycle of failed peace negotiations between Palestine and Israel under the patronage of the US; and Hiwa K’s The Bell Project (2007–2015) examines the

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connection between the international arms trade and endless conflict in Iraq. Moving beyond representations of war through images of trauma—affective provocations wrought from the destruction and the loss of human life—these works consider military humanism as the ideological frame of contemporary wars from 1989 onwards. In particular, in many of these works, opposition to war is articulated through depicting various forms of temporal loops, in which the inevitability of war in the age of military humanism is laid bare in the predictability of the different stages of conflict. So that, for example, “aftermath” is conceived less as a post-traumatic moment of searing shock, and more as an expected moment of pause before the inevitable resumption of violence, in one form or another. By showing military humanism in different stages of conflict, the artists we discuss in this chapter capture the way in which discussions and perceptions of war shifted from the use of destruction to achieve political goals to humanitarian interventions aimed at policing criminal perpetrators. Again, it is temporality—not the affect–trauma paradigm, not empathy and the provocation of emotional response—that is the key to understanding the way in which these artists approach the military humanism of contemporary warfare. In an immediate sense, these works stage the history of military humanism, and the way in which, since 1989, it has become established as the doctrine of the current world order. They do this by tracing the emergence of the US as the “benevolent empire.”12 The works considered here provide a timeline of emerging military interventionism during the first post-1989 decade (1990– 2000), and the prominent position of the Bill Clinton US administration within this shift in global geopolitics. The narratives provided by the works illustrate the building up and intensification of political doctrines that reached their apex in the post-9/11 War on Terror. In this sense, the trajectory of this chapter traces the history of US foreign policy interventionism throughout this post-1989/pre9/11 period, in which the aggressive and expeditionary doctrine of military humanism developed: from the first Gulf War in 1991 (Hiwa K), through its brokerage of the Dayton Peace Accord in 1996 (Miljanović), the bombing of Serbia in response to its aggression against Kosovo in 1999 (Collins and Muja), to the role of the US in the Camp David talks between Israel and Palestine in 2000 (Waked). This narrative provides a very different perspective on peacekeeping troop deployment from that of the herocizing of UN peacekeepers in works such as George Gittoes’ Portrait of Jonathan Church (2017), painted from a photograph the artist took on April 22, 1995, in the aftermath of the Kibeho massacre in Rwanda. Furthermore, in pushing back the historical horizon of the present geopolitical paradigm from America’s 9/11 to Europe’s

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9/11—November 9, 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, which set up the conditions for the conflicts of the 1990s—this narrative also reframes the history of the last three decades in relation to growing Islamophobia, shifting the West’s perception of Muslim people from being victims to being perpetrators of violence. This shift ultimately escalated to the present surge of ethnonationalism and white supremacism, leading to the 2019 Christchurch terror attack and the stochastic terror it inspires. Lack of action to stop the conflict in BiH led to genocide and ethnic cleansing, and to the positioning of BiH Muslims as the “Palestinians of the Balkans.” The war in Kosovo only solidified this perception, prompting international intervention and the NATO bombing of Serbia, and paving the way for the Bush doctrine and the manipulation of the UN leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In addition to staging the history of the development of military humanism, these works outline the way in which this paradoxical doctrine manifests itself during and after war through different actors: in Miljanović’s work, war’s veterans amidst failed state formation and reconciliation; political leaders and the predictable cycle of the failed peace process in Waked’s work; victimized refugees and moralizing in the work of Muja and Collins; and entrepreneurs and the arms trade in Hiwa K’s work. These works show the way in which human experience negotiates (failed) institutional processes of post-conflict reconstruction and disavow the linear temporal logic inherent in post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation. Veterans, politicians, refugees, and entrepreneurs oscillate between open and closed spaces and temporalities, between accomplished pasts and pre-determined futures, to eschew teleological accounts about what is meant to happen after a conflict ends. Many of these works highlight a shared commonality within the conflicts they address—held in a perpetual loop, a kind of Nietzschean eternal return, in which peace is never achieved but rather held in stasis in a permanent state of exception. They suggest, in various ways, that the external forces perpetuating each of these conflicts create closed temporal vortices that, thirty years since “the end of history,” still resist the realization that the end of history has long since ended. In different ways, the works we address in this chapter make these perpetual loops visible, and then attempt to subvert them by intersecting them with different temporalities, in particular, deeper historical frames that make strange their ongoing stasis, revealing the absurdity of the definitions of war/peace. These works attempt to break the loop, and in this sense, we can approach them as attempts to reclaim the time of post-conflict, by politically locating their subjects in a multitude of histories.13

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Approaching military humanism through the experience of different actors with differing degrees of political agency and visibility is significant because all the regions considered in this chapter experienced wars characterized by an imbalance of power. Subjected to military campaigns waged by technologically and materially superior forces, these regions—and the actors represented in the works—were perceived not as an external enemy, but as criminalized objects of policing and suppression. As Douzinas argues, from the perspective of the intervention driven by military humanism, “moral ends justify the overwhelming means and overwhelming force generates morality.”14 The policing aspect of military humanism is also crucial for considering the externally imposed, and eternally failing, peace process in these regions. The works addressed in this chapter all problematize the notion of post-conflict as the completion of war followed by reconciliation and rebuilding. The locations represented by the artworks—BiH, Kosovo, Palestine, Iraq—have all been subject to prolonged periods of instability, crisis, and the cycle of major international military and peacebuilding intervention. This means that conflicts in these locations have been expressive of the larger global geopolitical interests of major international players. By extension, following the externally mandated cessation of the conflicts, the peacebuilding efforts in each region have also been subject to external influence, inferring to some extent that those major geopolitical players have a stake in perpetuating the loop. In the regions under consideration, conflict is more often than not continued “by other means” (cultural, political, economic) and the lived reality often resembles what can be described as “negative peace”: a situation that resembles war in all respects except for armed combat. Importantly, these works refuse the temporal binary of war/peace, and instead position conflict in a broader context, drawing attention to global geopolitics that not only played a large part in causing war, but continue to influence the lack of resolution. In what follows, we consider the works grouped under three key characteristics of military humanism. The first section discusses war as a policing operation and its connection to failed state formation and the peace process as presented in Miljanović and Waked’s practice. The second section discusses the production of war as a moral order as justification for military intervention, addressed in Collins and Muja’s practice. The third part considers the connection, in Hiwa K’s work, between military interventions and the amassing of military and technological force through the arms trade. We then draw conclusions about how this argument provides the next step in moving away from affect-centric understandings of war and 9/11 as the “zero hour” of recent scholarship on representations of war.

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Post-war Reconciliation: Mladen Miljanović’s Sounds of the Homeland (2018) and Sharif Waked’s Beace Brocess (2010) Sounds of the Homeland (2018) Mladen Miljanović’s Sounds of the Homeland (2018) combines popular music, delegated performance, and temporal displacement to create a powerful critique of present-day BiH as a failed state caught in post-war meantime. Producing and performing a “found song” with demobilized Serb, Croat, and Bosniak veterans from the 1992–1995 war, Miljanović creates a narrative that ostensibly examines perceptions of contemporary BiH from three nationalist perspectives. At the start of the video, we see six men standing on top of a hill, against a background of scattered houses. Two men are holding a shargia (a traditional single stringed instrument), one is holding a violin, and three are waiting. We hear the audio track of an upbeat folk melody and the men start playing the instruments and singing in Bosniak-Serbo-Croat. The video shows the men lip-synching to the call-and-response melody, with the man on the left (Miljanović) enunciating a line which is then repeated by the group: America made Bosnia a state The state so lovely that makes every Croat go mad The state split in two between Orthodox and Federation The state in which neither Bosnia nor Posavina is left for Croats Far be it from me to see the Turks prevail or Islamic regime rise Or to see my Angie, as beautiful as she is, walking covered and veiled What are you doing America? What are you doing Kraut? Nobody calls me daddy But they call me “babo”

The first verse establishes the song as a critique of post-Dayton Peace Agreement (1995) BiH from the perspective of a Croat nationalist bemoaning the marginalized position of Croats. The lyrics are centered around the loss and absence of national sovereignty of Croats in a country divided by constitution between the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska and the Bosniak-dominated Federation. The narrative expresses fear of the Islamization of BiH and the subjugation of Croat women to the religious and political influence of the

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Bosniaks. Its patriarchal and traditionalist perspective ascribes the blame for the present predicament of Croats in BiH to the role of the international community and key geopolitical players, Germany and the US. In the second verse, the lyrics express the same frustration from the perspective of a Bosniak nationalist fearing the influence of Russia-supported Serbs leading to “immorality.” The third verse is from the perspective of a Serb nationalist bemoaning the loss of Serb territories in BiH. The song thus presents a fusion of the three nationalist perspectives on contemporary BiH. Each verse articulates the loss—or “theft of enjoyment” as Slavoj Žižek would put it15—of some essential aspect of national identity in the context of post-war BiH. Fusing the exoticism and idiosyncrasy of Balkan folk music with documentary aesthetics, Miljanović’s Sounds of the Homeland articulates BiH as a failed state locked in status-quo, in which each of its three main ethnic groups finds it impossible to fulfil its aspirations of national sovereignty. Crucially, the critique is directed at the role of powerful international players—Germany and the US—in creating the political deadlock of the state. In this sense, Miljanović’s use of the song repurposes a nationalist grievance into a form of transnational populist critique of global geopolitics. This is also reflected in the formal arrangement of Sounds of the Homeland. While the work has the appearance of a straightforward video clip for a music number shot on location, there are several key details that make it a powerful

Figure 5.2 Sounds of the Homeland, 2018, by Mladen Miljanović (duration 5:13, filmed with Greg Blakey). Photo: Nemanja Mićević and Greg Blakey. © Mladen Miljanović 2018. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

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Figure 5.3 Sounds of the Homeland, 2018, by Mladen Miljanović (duration 5:13, filmed with Greg Blakey). Photo: Nemanja Mićević and Greg Blakey. © Mladen Miljanović 2018. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

exploration of temporal geopolitics of post-war BiH: the participation of veterans, the use of found music, and the use of footage to create a non-linear temporal register.

Delegated Veterans in the Failed State Sounds of the Homeland was produced and performed with the participation of “war veterans,” which is announced in the end credits. This positions the work within the sphere of artistic practice that Claire Bishop describes as “delegated performance”: hiring non-professionals to perform their own socioeconomic category and bring “authenticity” into the work.16 In Miljanović’s case, this includes working with demobilized Serb, Croat, and Bosniak veterans, most of whom also work as musicians and performers. Their participation frames the labor involved in creating the work around questions of warfare as labor, which is continued post-conflict “by other means” (transformed into an entertainment/performing industry). We will explore this below. But here we can also ask, what is the authenticity that is being brought into the work? On one level, the veterans operate as “authentic” reminders of the war: examples of

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militarized masculinity that contributed in the struggle for homogeneous national identities. In the context of post-conflict BiH, their allegiance to the national cause is unquestioned because of their sacrifice and participation in the formation of ethnically homogeneous groups. This is the kind of rhetoric that is frequently espoused by nationalist politicians, who instrumentalize narratives of nationalism to avoid dealing with difficult questions of corruption and bureaucratic dysfunction. But on another level, the veterans also function as living ideological reminders of the war, which is placing a burden on the annual budget. Their authenticity exists in the point of tension between an ideal (the fallen fighter) and the lived reality (people who have been used and neglected by the corrupt state). The veterans’ participation in the transnational ensemble thus operates as a double “betrayal” of the nationalist cause their authenticity recalls. First, because their class solidarity transcends the nationalist rhetoric about three irreconcilable sides that fought on opposing sides in the war. And second, because performing in a transnational folk ensemble recalls the rich history of similar performances in Yugoslavia. Understanding the role of popular music is essential to the way Sounds of the Homeland problematizes the relationship of music with national representation.

Popular Music as Shared History The “found sound” of the song “America Made Bosnia into a State” featured in Miljanović’s Sounds of the Homeland was originally recorded by Ante Bubalo, an amateur BiH folk music performer whose discography goes back to the mid1970s. Bubalo’s career trajectory in many ways parallels the developments in recent history of folk music in the former Yugoslavia, from epic storytelling songs that deal with the effects of modernization on everyday life in Yugoslavia, through the nationalist-patriotic war and post-war periods.17 Miljanović’s inclusion of this song references the position of folk music as the cultural memory of Yugoslavia and highlights post-socialism in former Yugoslavia as a repetition of nationalist discourses that are now seen as a way to brand one’s identity. Sounds of the Homeland becomes an attempt to deal with the legacies of recent nationalist-driven wars in which popular music played an intrinsic role in fueling ethnic passions. Popular music played an instrumental role in exYugoslavia by shaping perceptions of cultural and national identity. Originating in the unique ideological position of Yugoslavia—between East and West and between socialism and capitalism—popular music became a powerful symbolic

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mobilizer. Music became the stage on which collective identity was forged after World War II and the premise on which national differences were constructed during the wars in the nineties. Paradoxically, it remains the only shared culture in the region. The cultural space of Yugoslavia represents a failed attempt to forge a shared culture, and music played a crucial role in this attempt. Following the dissolution of the Yugoslav state, the institutional framework for transnational collaboration vanished and was replaced by popular and often nationalist music. Music thus provides an ideologically charged context for narratives of cultural remembering, belonging, and difference, articulated through music. The song taps into the perception of popular music as “the epic of the everyday,” while questioning the changing nature of populism implicit in the music and popular culture in general. Sounds of the Homeland brings this complex history into the present, questioning the relation between shared heritage and nationalist instrumentalization of popular culture. On the global level, this includes the increasing interconnectedness of the far-right and Balkan nationalist mythologies, which we have discussed in the previous two chapters as acting as an important symbolic rallying point for “Person X” in his live-streamed terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. As we discussed in those chapters, the shooter’s weapons bore the names of figures from Balkan history, all of whom had fought against the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, the folk song that was heard playing on the live-streamed video as Person X drove to commit the murders glorified Radovan Karadžić—who, in that same week, was sentenced to life in prison for his role in genocide against Bosniaks. The Christchurch terror attack weaponized history and brought Serb nationalism back into the global spotlight twenty-five years after the Bosnian War. Importantly, it demonstrated the almost mythical status of the Balkans in the collective imagination of today’s far-right—as a place where white Christians have fought against Muslims for centuries. This blatant manipulation of history, where genocide of the 1990s was framed within the “clash of civilizations” narrative in 2019, used the cynical appropriation of nationalism to justify violent xenophobia. In contrast, the historico-temporal dimension of the song being performed in Sounds of the Homeland is used to critically embrace the temporal register of meantime. But this temporal register of meantime is also evident in the relationship between the crisp digital aesthetic of Sounds of the Homeland and the “Remove Kebab” video meme, referenced by the Christchurch shooter and from which the folk music in his car was taken. As we discussed in Chapter 3, the meme was

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based on a VHS video performed and recorded in 1993 during the Bosnian War. It carried the aesthetic of a heavily copied degraded 1990s VHS magnetic tape, with much of it depicting Serbian troops, tanks, and news images composited with the face of now convicted war criminal Radovan Karadžić. Central to the “Remove Kebab” meme, however, is an image after the first verse showing two men in Serbian military uniforms in the Bosnian countryside. As we argued, without knowing the lyrics and context of its origins, the video might be read as a quirky folk song performed by two sinister looking soldiers; however, to white ethnonationalists in 2019, it is an anthem that warns Muslim populations around the world that “the wolves are coming.” Miljanović’s Sounds of the Homeland not only dismantles the militaristic nationalism of the 1993 song and video, but also poses the question of the historical horizon of the grainy 1990s VHS aesthetic, so closely aligned with reports and footage of violence and genocide. It poses the question about the proximity of this aesthetic to the notion of meantime: of Bosnia as a perpetual ready-made site of conflict and ethnonationalist violence. In the next chapter, we will examine works such as Un-war Space that critically engage with our apprehension of this aesthetic in relation to the Bosnian War.

In the Post-War Meantime During the second verse of “America Made Bosnia into a State,” the camera slowly pans away from the performers, revealing that they are standing on top of a heavily ruined building. The site is an old stone quarry and the building was part of the processing facilities, which have been abandoned and neglected since the nineties. Once the camera pans back, it gives the appearance of a postapocalyptic landscape with the six figures on the hill.18 The mood shifts from a quirky folk song to a melancholy dirge, with the figures singing to an empty landscape. The image of the figures standing isolated on the building against the immensity of the landscape recalls ideas of isolation and spatio-temporal displacement: they are singing to desolation and apocalypse, and their song is seemingly falling on deaf ears. The work articulates the loss of historical experience. The war in BiH has, in addition to the physical devastation of life and property, been interpreted as a rupture in the experience of time, between prewar “normality,” “lost time” in war, “dead time”,19 or stuck in “Dayton meantime.”20 A number of sociologists have noted the way in which people in BiH have experienced their daily reality as being frozen in time for over two decades. In Sounds of the Homeland, members of the three ethnic groups are literally stuck

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on a crumbling building singing about the political impasse of post-Dayton BiH. The fact that all three groups are represented is intended to reflect all of BiH, but it also necessarily references the history of Yugoslavia and interethnic coexistence. Thus, they are stuck between a known—albeit “failed”—shared history and an unknown future mandated by larger historical forces. Sounds is thus approaching BiH through temporal structures suspended between a known—and often idealized—past of Yugoslavia and a normative, yet unattainable, future of the EU. This gesture highlights the extent to which temporal immobility has become important to the lived experience of BiH. It makes visible, and in turn absurd, the post-Dayton stasis. Given that the work takes the synthesis of “three national narratives” as its point of departure, and given that it shows us the monadic freezing of the clash of these three narratives in the present, what is the “utopia” that it hopes to generate (as the artist claims)? Or, put another way, what alternative future does Miljanovič hope to achieve by revealing the absurdity of BiH’s tired temporal loop? Perhaps, this utopia is to be achieved in finding a shared space of solidarity outside of the Western humanitarian discourse of reconciliation.21 It is instructive to view Sounds of the Homeland in relation to Sarajevo-based photographer Ziyah Gafić’s film Rope (2018), in which he documents the mountain climb of two climbing partners who find themselves on opposite sides in the war. The familiar trope of friends-becoming-foes through historical circumstance is offset by the visual dialectic in the work: a twentieth-century problem is being mediated through twenty-first-century technology in the form of the drone being used to shoot the film—an asynchronous relationship between the “complex” Balkan history of war and its lack of resolution, and the cutting-edge technology used for fighting and visualizing war in the present. Thus in both Rope and Sounds we see generational memory being played out and mediated through the present: the lost children of socialism who got caught up in nationalism, and are utterly lost in the post-conflict meantime. The approach of embracing non-linear temporal registers as a way to capture and problematize post-war experience is also evident in Sharif Waked’s work Beace Brocess.

Beace Brocess (2010) Waked’s Beace Brocess No. 1 (2010) is a two minutes and forty-seven seconds video loop that investigates the public spectacle of repeated peace negotiations with no substance or results. The work uses archival footage from the Middle

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East Peace Summit held at Camp David from July 11 to July 25, 2000 mediated by US President Bill Clinton, between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. The work is a direct reference to the failure of the talks—with each side blaming the other—as well as the protracted history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.22 Beace Brocess references well-known news footage of Arafat and Barak engaging in a display of hospitality that involved rotating in a circle, playfully fighting over who should enter the negotiating chamber first during the 2000 Camp David talks. As Chrysi Lionis suggests in her analysis of the work, what at first appears as an extreme display of hospitality quickly becomes a contest of wills between the two leaders, revealing the deadlock of politeness as the civilized version of the ongoing violence.23 As has often been mentioned, Waked astutely uses dark humor and absurdity to reveal the falsehood and superficiality behind symbols of statehood, international peacekeeping, and political dialogue. Beace Brocess is presented in

Figure 5.4 Beace Brocess No. 1, still from video, 2010, by Sharif Waked. © Sharif Waked Studio 2010. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

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the style of silent black-and-white cinema and is set to an upbeat carnivalesque soundtrack, seemingly at odds with the gravity and significance of the Camp David talks as a historical event. But it is precisely Waked’s use of humor in the temporal loop that gives Beace Brocess its critical edge in relation to peace talks, by using laughter as a framing device for the temporal loop of Beace Brocess, and by using “funny” mistranslations and misunderstandings to endlessly serialize the event.

Clinton as the Absent Center of Temporality In an immediate sense, Beace Brocess is funny because we are watching two elderly political leaders caught in an endless dance. The depiction of a cyclical, unending, and ultimately futile dance is a powerful indictment of the Camp David talks as a historical event responsible for the ongoing state of limbo. But here we want to argue that the ideological framing of Beace Brocess is also signaled by what is not included in the work, that is, that the work does not include the footage of US President Bill Clinton as the third participant in the dance. This becomes apparent if we observe the news footage that captured the dancing standoff between Arafat and Barak. It features the three leaders walking through the Camp David gardens toward the building. They briefly stop and pose for the press corps. Both Arafat and Barak remain silent, while Clinton exchanges a few jokes with the journalists about not giving any comments about the process, and at one point laughs loudly. While all three leaders are smiling, there is a palpable sense of discomfort in their body language. Clinton then politely ushers Arafat and Barak toward the door, where the dance begins. In the moments preceding the footage included in Beace Brocess, we see that Clinton is initially part of the shuffle about who gets to walk in first, and that both Arafat and Barak gently push him through the doorway. What then ensues is their polite standoff. Waked’s exclusion of Clinton in the Beace Brocess dance is primarily intended as a way to focus the issue on the relationship between Palestine and Israel, embodied through its leaders. But this exclusion also provides the ideological framework. In a literal sense, Arafat and Barak are stuck in the doorway dancing with each other, while Clinton can be heard laughing in the background. Read in this key, Beace Brocess becomes a temporal loop structured by the “offstage” laughter of the peace-broker Bill Clinton. The never-ending contest between Arafat and Barak captured in the work is what occurs between Clinton’s laughing in front of the press and Clinton’s being heard laughing inside the negotiating chamber. Beace Process is locked into an endless

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temporal loop bookended by Clinton’s laughter. This reading of Beace Brocess brings us to metaphors that have been used to talk about peace negotiations and post-conflict societies. The work captures the metaphor of “journey”: the two leaders draft a “roadmap to peace,” to lead their respective peoples on the “road to democracy” to join the “global family of nations.” In this instance, their inability simply to walk through the door is due to their stubbornness— whether it is through a misplaced over-performance of politeness and hospitality in front of the media, or whether it is due to their insistence on traditional notions of hospitality that are passive-aggressively blocking the process, holding it in a perpetual loop of “no, you first.” But in the broader historical picture, the key aspect of the question is that their destination, symbolized by the grinning and laughing Clinton, is the post-1989 world in which America behaves as a global policeman, the broker and enforcer of peace: “keep the peace, or I’ll kill you.” In this world, Arafat and Barak operate as symbols of historical problems that refuse easy solutions after the “end of history.” Their awkward body language embodies their societies, as being stuck in history, unwilling to move forward. This subject of political leaders embodying the temporal delay of their respective societies is a powerful media trope that has often been replayed in reports on conflict. There are numerous examples of the way in which the Balkan or Middle Eastern leaders have been portrayed to suggest they are stuck in a traditionalist mindset. In this way, their societies, and the conflicts that plague them, become expressive of “ancient hatreds” rather than of current complex geopolitical questions and interests. Albanian artist Adrian Paci’s work Interregnum (2017) uses footage from official broadcasts of mass displays of mourning from different communist societies. Showing footage of long processions of people waiting or weeping, the work connects staged displays of mourning for unidentified “leaders,” raising questions about waiting and being stuck in history. Interregnum and Beace Brocess thus present two sides of the same situation: the waiting people, and the dancing leaders stuck in the doorway to the end of history. In both cases, what is not shown in the work is much more powerful than what is seen, because it sets the temporal geopolitics of waiting and delay.24

Serialization of the Image into Geometric Shapes The second key aspect of the humor in Beace Brocess is its use of misunderstanding and mistranslation. As Lionis suggests, the title of the work

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makes a mockery out of the Declaration of Principles negotiations common title of “peace process” by playing with the fact that native Arabic speakers are frequently unable to pronounce the letter “p.” This might be said to allude to the Palestinian criticism of Arafat, who participated in the peace process, signing Accords that resulted in the devastation of his people.25

Waked has developed Beace Brocess into a series of studies, numbered 1 to 5. The series develops the embrace of the two leaders captured in the first video, freezing it into panels of abstract patterns: outlines of the figures with a bright yellow color field changing and undulating between panels (No. 2) (2011); white cutout shapes of the figures with a red color field undulating and shifting between panels (No. 3) (2011); black soft silhouettes (No. 4) (2011); and an animation of the geometric evolution and shifting of the shapes (No. 5) (2012). The translation of the footage takes the color scheme of the footage in No. 1 (black and violet), developing it into a serialized experimentation with color and font that evokes an array of art-historical associations from Russian constructivist experiments with abstraction to Agnes Martin’s and Piet Mondrian’s study of grids. Waked elaborates the footage to trace the lines and shapes of movement between the embracing men. In doing so, he amplifies the points of contact between them while abstracting them, creating a bodily unity. Each series of images includes a panel that fuses the two bodies into one. Beace Brocess thus achieves a reversal of cognitive mapping of the event: instead of providing us with contextual information designed to broaden our understanding of the situation, it obfuscates the key elements. Time is locked into an endless loop with no palpable outcomes or resolutions, and the leaders are abstracted into geometric shapes that resemble strategic maps. The association with maps is particularly powerful in the context of the meeting, as the evolving color shapes across the panels recall visualizations of conflict zone maps where the loss and gain of territories over time is measured and translated into abstract shapes. Waked’s choice of bright and attentiongrabbing color is seemingly intended to signal the translation of complex realities into easily digestible visual bites. The Western fundamental lack of understanding of the complexities of the Israel–Palestine conflict is translated onto the bodies of the two leaders, which are, in turn, abstracted into shifting geometric shapes. The use of clear outlines and bright colors also evokes the aesthetic of cartoons and comic strips, highlighting the comical aspect of the event. Beace Brocess No. 1 is in many ways a meme—before internet memes were a cultural phenomenon— and the works that follow it are the unpacking of the micro-gestures within the

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Figure 5.5 Beace Brocess No. 5, still from video, 2012, by Sharif Waked. © Sharif Waked Studio 2012. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

meme. The work anticipates the popularity and ubiquity of memes and GIFs, which have become digestible soundbites of information used to share complex events on social media. The serialization of the Barak and Arafat cameo anticipates the endless circulation of countless videos transformed into sixsecond loops. Importantly, we don’t learn much from the fragmentation of the video: there is no additional information that sheds light on the personalities of the two leaders or the events of that day that may have contributed to this exchange. Instead, Beace Brocess is about the moment at the threshold of the negotiating chamber, frozen in time and broken down into its minute components. Geometry and color introduced as a frame for reading the encounter do not provide the key to its understanding, but only its further obfuscation. The leaders themselves are only making the situation worse: their dance at the threshold of the negotiating room is a refusal to enter it, which only prolongs the conflict. Waked responds by turning their bodies into changing maps. Beace Brocess captures the ideological framework of the Camp David talks

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between a moment of resolution and failed negotiations under the patronage of a pseudo-moral superpower. In this sense, Waked reminds us of the way in which peace talks, as humanitarian gestures of global powers, have significant consequences for our understanding of collective agency and historical responsibility.26 In particular, they indicate the way in which the ability to dominate a peace process obscures the neocolonial aspirations hidden behind humanitarian declarations. This relationship between a moralizing discourse and humanitarian intervention is also central to Phil Collins’s work how to make a refugee (1999).

War as a Moral Order: Phil Collins’s how to make a refugee (2000) and Alban Muja’s Family Album (2019) British artist Phil Collins’s work, how to make a refugee (1999), examines the media construction and representation of refugees. Shot during the Kosovo War (1998–1999), while Collins was part of a crew of journalists visiting the region with a humanitarian mission, it addresses the depiction of war victims and refugees by journalists. Collins captures the moments before, during, and after a photo shoot organized by a team of journalists working in an unnamed refugee camp in Macedonia. Their subject is a family of Kosovan-Albanian refugees. Over the course of the video, the artist grants very little insight into the family and the events that brought them to Macedonia, instead focusing on the way in which such photo shoots are orchestrated to elicit an affective and emotional response from the audience. The work initially shows a young boy being photographed and interviewed by an off-camera photographer and a journalist, both British. We also hear the voice of the Albanian translator giving instructions to the boy about showing his injuries to the camera. The scene shows the journalists examining the wound on the boy’s stomach, requesting that he remove his shirt and put his blue baseball cap back on. The boy is clearly troubled by the process and keeps hiding his injured leg from the cameras behind a vase of artificial flowers. The boy is instructed to put his shirt back on, the artificial flowers on the table are removed, and other family members are ushered into the frame and instructed where to sit. Their faces reflect anxiety and eagerness to comply with the journalists’ requests. The work is difficult and uncomfortable to watch because it intentionally reproduces the troubling power dynamic between the journalists’ objectifying gaze and the boy and his family being subjected to that gaze. Collins’s how to

Figure 5.6 how to make a refugee, 1999, by Phil Collins. Single-channel color video projection with sound, 12 minutes. © Phil Collins 1999. Courtesy Shady Lane Productions, Berlin and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles.

Figure 5.7 how to make a refugee, 1999, by Phil Collins. Single-channel color video projection with sound, 12 minutes. © Phil Collins 1999. Courtesy Shady Lane Productions, Berlin and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles.

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Figure 5.8 how to make a refugee, 1999, by Phil Collins. Single-channel color video projection with sound, 12 minutes. © Phil Collins 1999. Courtesy Shady Lane Productions, Berlin and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles.

make a refugee is overtly about the “making” of refugees into figures of lack: homeless, helpless outsiders reduced to an abject media spectacle. The cold focus on the injuries on the boy’s body, the treatment of the family as objects to be arranged in a scene, are stark reminders of the trope of the refugee as “bare life” without agency.27 We are watching people being reduced to objects of humanitarian pity, seemingly unaware of the larger geopolitical forces shaping their lives.28 These politics of humanitarian pity is what gives Collins’s work a critical purchase on the broader context of the Kosovo War. Collins’s how to make a refugee captures the journalistic processes through which the members of this family, and particularly the injured child, become grist to the mill of commercial media processes. They are no longer so much people, with complex lives and relationships, as they are refugees—constructed as “objects-of-pity.” They have become emotive cogs in the affective corporate machines of the news media, receptacles for affect, empathy, and political imagination in a way that, according to Rebecca A. Adelman, are ultimately de-subjectivizing. As we discussed in Chapter 2, Adelman argues that these kinds of attempts to generate empathy

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have the effect of abstracting the subjectivities of their targets into “figures who appear not as political subjects, but as receptacles for affective investment,” promoting “the development of a shallow ethics in response to their suffering, the erasure of political subjectivities.”29 This emphatically affective and imaginative practice can be an invasive and de-subjectifying form of empathy, a one-way imposition of feeling. This “figuring,” as she calls it, can create the conditions in which “feeling for” is de-subjectifying in a way similar to “speaking for” someone else.30 Those feelings may be well-intentioned, yet, Adelman argues, they are never neutral, but, rather, are always “operating in tandem with ideological formations.”31 In other words, the act of figuring portrayed in how to make a refugee denies complete personhood to the members of this family, despite possibly the very best intentions of the journalists. Pity can be a colonizing type of empathy: we imaginatively project into the internal emotional states of another and, in that sense, figuring can be an invasive form of empathy, a colonizing imposition of feeling. The act of figuring is oriented less toward knowing the subjective experience of the other and more toward assumptions, or imposing upon them a set of feelings that we can only imagine, in which asymmetrical power relations are played out. Collins’s how to make a refugee shows the process of creating the media’s representation of colonizing empathy for a refugee: capturing beautiful, heartbreaking, meaningful images through camera angles, and revealing the contextual information that gives the story emotional content. Collins literally shows us the behind-the-scenes process of the ideological formations of this mise-en-scène. Seen in the context of the Kosovo War, this is significant because of the role that images played in turning public opinion, which led to military intervention. Widespread images of human suffering in Kosovo shocked the Western world from 1998 to 1999. The story presented in the media at the time was one with a seemingly straightforward plot. An ultranationalist government in Belgrade, led by Slobodan Milošević, was fighting against the rebel group, Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which sought the separation of Kosovo from the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In the ensuing conflict, 90 per cent of Kosovar Albanians (around 848,000–863,000 people) were displaced. Some believed Serbian forces used brutal force to suppress the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo, a perspective supported by the emergence of images of massacres, displayed on television screens and printed in newspapers throughout the West. Prior to the widespread release of images portraying the Kosovo War, the West had been openly referring to the KLA as a terrorist organization. But in a surprising turn of events, by the spring of 1999, NATO had initiated an air campaign against

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Yugoslavia over the Kosovo conflict, in tacit alliance with the KLA. The emergence of the emotive images framing the Kosovar Albanians as victims of a terrible war now made the West’s official policy appear misguided, exposing differences between the media’s representation and policy claims. In the Introduction, we discussed how as the 1990s unfolded, the West’s vision for the post-communist world was heavily influenced by Fukuyama’s notion of “the end of history,” in which, in his words, “development resulted in a liberal state linked to a market economy” and “the more plausible outcome” of the resolution of the Cold War.32 Arguably, military humanism developed as the core doctrine of the New World Order, both in parallel with and in response to the wars in the former Yugoslavia. While the calamitous mishandling of UN peacekeeping in Bosnia created the conditions for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, by 1999, the more emphatically partisan multilateralism of NATO responded to the war in Kosovo much more decisively and aggressively. Slavoj Žižek provides an excellent contemporaneous analysis of the ideological parameters of the NATO intervention into Kosovo and the specific role played by images of suffering refugees.33 Žižek argues that the situation in Kosovo presented a form of double blackmail, in which both sides of the argument were equally wrong. On the one hand, it was easy to celebrate and praise the NATO bombing of thenrump-Yugoslavia as the first case of global intervention into a country violating the human rights of an ethnic group. However, on the other hand, Žižek argues that it is also equally easy to be critical of NATO’s violation of Yugoslavia’s state sovereignty under the pretext of enforcing human rights, as well as of the role of the Western media in selectively elevating figures such as Milošević and Saddam Hussein into universal embodiments of evil. Žižek concludes that the situation presented a false choice: However, what if this very opposition between enlightened international intervention against ethnic fundamentalists, and the heroic last pockets of resistance against the New World Order, is a false one? What if phenomena like the Milosevic regime are not the opposite to the New World Order, but rather the place at which the hidden TRUTH of the New World Order emerges? When the West fights Milosevic, it is NOT fighting its enemy, one of the last points of resistance against the liberal-democratic New World Order; it is rather fighting its own creature, a monster that grew as the result of the inconsistencies of the Western politics itself.34

Žižek’s identification of the paradox at the core of the Kosovo War—and the public debates that surrounded it—is significant because it pinpoints the emergence of a new era of warfare, which he calls “militaristic humanism” in a

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paraphrase of the term “military humanism.” This era, forged in the 1990s and truly maturing with Kosovo in 1999, continues to this day, marked by an emphatically post-Westphalian change in global geopolitics, where military interventions routinely breach state sovereignty and the principles of noninterference in internal affairs. Militaristic humanism “humanizes” war by framing it as an ethical and moral intervention into humanitarian catastrophe. The Kosovo war was the first depoliticized war in which NATO acted as an agent of human rights. Collins’s how to make a refugee demonstrates the media construction of the ideal subject-victim on whose behalf NATO engages in militaristic humanism: “not a political subject with a clear agenda, but a subject of helpless suffering, caught in the madness of a local clash that can only be pacified by the intervention of a benevolent foreign power.”35 how to make a refugee shows the emergence of a new era of warfare supported by the ideology of victimization, which paved the way for the US invasions after 9/11.36 But if Collins captures the process of “making a refugee” in the service of militaristic humanism in 1999, two decades later we are faced with the question: “when does one stop being a refugee?” This is a question of the temporality of the refugee, one that is deemed an anomaly in a world organized around notions of citizenship and nation-states, yet one that is increasingly becoming the permanent experience for millions of people in the twenty-first century.37 The answer to the question, “When do Kosovo refugees stop being refugees?” was provided by Alban Muja’s entry for the Kosovo pavilion in the 2019 Venice Biennale, titled Whatever Happens, We Will Be Prepared. The year 2019 marked the twentieth anniversary of the war in Kosovo and Muja’s Kosovo pavilion entry for the Venice Biennale addressed the legacy of the bloody conflict, studying how this war was analyzed through the media, in Kosovo and around the globe. The work consisted of portraits of refugee children and other images taken from the world’s newspapers and media. The Kosovo War saw 90 per cent of the population of Kosovo displaced during the fighting, creating a nation of refugees. The starting point of Muja’s project was a selection of photographs of child refugees, taken during the war. These images were published in newspapers and on news sites around the world and became synonymous with the war, emblematic of the chaos, trauma, and pain communicated to the public by the global media. Twenty years on, Muja tracked down the individuals, now adults, captured in these frames to delve into both the way in which the images acted as carriers of personal memory and how they helped craft a wider political and media story, beyond the control of the subjects represented.

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While Collins’s work is about the symbolic construction of the interpretative frame through which we experienced and consumed images of refugees in 1999, Muja’s is about the temporality of that frame. In revisiting the subjects of media images and asking them to speak about their memories of events (most were children or infants when the images were taken), he addresses the mediation of these images: how has time changed the subjects’ perception, and inflected their memories? Were any memories transferred though the media or through listening to their parents? But he also addresses the question of when these subjects stop being refugees. The temporal reading of the two works is facilitated by their historical relation to militaristic humanism in Kosovo: Collins’s work was created at the time of the birth of the doctrine, and Muja’s work is the revisiting of the ongoing impact of this now well-established doctrine, twenty years later. In many ways, what happened around Kosovo twenty years ago set the tone for the last two decades of understandings of war and refugees. It is telling that the first work was made by a “Westerner” (albeit with the best intentions), and the second by an artist who was one of the subjects of those images in the work (and of the victimhood ideology). There is a postcolonial mimicry logic at play in the relationship between the two works. Collins made his work because he was exposed to the suffering of Kosovo refugees and to the way in which the media was reporting; Muja made his work because he was one of those refugees, but he only returned to the subject twenty years later, after (he admits) dealing with more “universal” subjects.38 This sense of the history of conflict returning in cycles is also central to the figure of the entrepreneur in Hiwa K’s The Bell Project.

War and Amassing of Material Resources: Hiwa K’s The Bell Project (2007–2015) The Bell Project (2007–2015) was Hiwa K’s contribution to “All the World’s Futures” at the fifty-sixth Venice Biennale (curated by the late Okwui Enwezor). The Bell Project consists of a two-channel HD video installation, Nazhad and the Bell Making (2007–15), a cast bronze bell secured in a wooden frame, and a research project conducted with local students in Italy. The work was the result of a longer project, which was realized in Venice. Hiwa K had been following the film’s protagonist, a Kurdish entrepreneur called Nazhad, for seven years before the Biennale presented the opportunity to explore the different facets of the work: the location in the Venice Arsenale shipyard (and its association with war), and the existence of a bell foundry near Crema in Lombardy (and its connection

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to the practice in pre-industrial Europe of melting down church bells to make cannons). The eponymous bell of the project was produced in Italy using the material collected by Nazhad, and its surface was adorned with a bas-relief depicting Mesopotamian artefacts that had been destroyed by Daesh in Iraq. In the video Nazhad and the Bell Making, we see how Nazhad capitalized on smelting mines that were set by Iranian and Iraqi forces during the 1980–1988 war, and, as his business grew, how he turned his skills to deactivating armaments and recycling other residue from two successive Gulf Wars (1991 and 2003) and from the contemporaneous conflict with ISIL. The detritus resulting from other civil conflicts in Iraq, including mines, bombs, bullets, and parts of military planes and tanks, provided raw materials for Nazhad’s production of metal bricks, which are sold globally for further processing. At several points in the video, Nazhad displays his encyclopedic knowledge of the armaments in his scrapyard. Nazhad, himself, also carries traces of conflict, evidenced in his pronounced limp, caused by a landmine during the Iran–Iraq war. On the second screen, we see footage of the creation of the bell in Italy. The juxtaposition of the two stories creates a montage of destruction and production in the aftermath of war across two different contexts. Nazhad and the Bell Making is ostensibly about war in a form of history-telling. History is narrated in the work through Nazhad’s personal experience and memory of war, and through materials used in war. Weapons articulate a narrative of war which is translated through melting them into the different material form of the bell. In this respect, Hiwa K’s work employs a strategy similar to that used in Goncalo Mabunda’s The Knowledge Throne (2014), which examines the collective memory of war in Mozambique by recycling weapons (AK-47s, pistols, knives) into thrones and masks. Mabunda’s act of material transformation, much like Hiwa K’s, draws attention to weapons as a form of narration at the intersection of neocolonial exploitation and the arms trade in Africa. On the level of personal experience, Hiwa K’s work contrasts the understanding of war as an omnipresent, yet invisible, low hum in the West to war as a ubiquitous framework for understanding Iraq. Although the traces of war are visible in almost every frame of the video, war itself is demythologized through a narrative about a man who makes a living out of it. This is evident both in Nazhad’s story and in those of his Italian collaborators. In the video, we hear from a friend of the artisan at the bell manufacturing studio in Italy, that his ancestor was involved in producing cannons in wartime, suggestive of a deeper cyclical structure of narratives related to weapons, bells, and metal, which goes beyond the post-1989 temporal loop of war/peace. On the level of materiality of the object, recycling

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Figure 5.9 The Bell Project, 2007–2015 by Hiwa K. Two-channel color video with sound, 35 minutes (Italy), 26 minutes (Iraq). Video still. © 2015 Hiwa K. Reproduced with the permission of the artist and Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani, Milan-Lucca.

Figure 5.10 The Bell Project, 2007–2015 by Hiwa K. Two-channel color video with sound, 35 minutes (Italy), 26 minutes (Iraq). Video still. © 2015 Hiwa K. Reproduced with the permission of the artist and Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani, Milan-Lucca.

the residue in the aftermath of warfare in Iraq into an object is central to the project.39 The realization that bells were melted during wars to create cannons prompted Hiwa K to reverse this process: “The West was busy at the time of wars melting bells into cannons . . . I just reversed it.”40 In the work, the reversal of

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Figure 5.11 View From Above, 2017 by Hiwa K. Single-channel color video with sound, 12 minutes. Documenta 14. Stadtmuseum Kassel, Kassel. Video still. © 2017 Hiwa K. Reproduced with the permission of the artist and Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani, Milan-Lucca.

destruction was highlighted by events that occurred during the process of making the bell. An ISIL video released on February 26, 2015, documenting attacks on artefacts in the Mosul Museum, included footage of men with sledgehammers smashing a statue of a lamassu, an ancient Assyrian protective deity taking the form of a human-headed and winged ox or lion.41 In the final stage of the bell’s creation, we see an image of a lamassu reappearing on the bell in a symbolic gesture of reversing the destruction. But significantly, the church bell produced will never be functional, which gives the work a sense of futility.

Archiving War and Entrepreneurialism of War Hiwa K describes this process of gathering and developing material as reverse archaeology: digging upwards rather than looking downwards from a dominant (Western) perspective.42 Hiwa K uses the language of the archive to intervene in dominant cultural narratives and to propose alternative figurations of the subject (the entrepreneur) and history (as recycling). This methodology of invoking the archive as a corrective to established truths about Iraq is a continuation of the artistic and cultural practices that emerged in the 1980s43 and more recent tendencies in art to connect personal, historical, and political archives in new ways.44 But Hiwa K’s practice is perhaps more closely aligned with critical

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archival works that use “archives of crisis” to question the historiography that disenfranchised the many “others” of the Western world.45 This questioning pivots around the figure of Nazhad, whom Hiwa K describes as “an entrepreneur who makes all his money out of these munitions, but he is also an archive of sorts.”46 This duality, where a man who has profited from war also operates as its main critic, is at the core of the work. Nazhad’s scrapyard is both the source of his livelihood (and his wealth) and the archive of global geopolitics and the arms trade in Iraq.47 Nazhad’s work, recycling the material of weapons and selling it, is just as much a continuation of profiting from war as it is a reversal of the destruction in war, transforming melted weapons into a bell. The exhibition of the work in Venice is, equally, the continuation of the nexus of the weapons trade and artefacts looting, and its repurposing. Regarding the connection of the work to the global arms trade and looting, Hiwa K suggested, “I was thinking about the whole market of metal and weapons and how ISIL are included in that trade, especially in the looting and trade of artefacts.”48 In effect, Nazhad is the entrepreneur of war whose sources lie in the past two hundred years of colonial expansion. The involvement of different nation-states in the arms trade in the region is repeatedly illustrated through Nazhad’s encyclopedic knowledge of the origin of different weapons. Yet this conception of war is steeped in a particular historical understanding, based on nation-state geopolitics. Underneath it is another narrative about a war which is fueled by neoliberal privatization and deregulation, and which has benefited the global weapons manufacturing companies. Nazhad is caught is this tension: while he is able to give us the nation-state that sold the weapons he finds, it is less likely that he (or anyone, for that matter) can distinguish between the weapons of Halliburton, Blackwater, or ISIL. As privately owned and highly profitable businesses, all three operate according to rules that go beyond the domain of twentieth-century nation-states. In this sense, Nazhad is the entrepreneur of the aftermath of a war that is now self perpetuating, and his scrapyard is the archive of the business of violence, which is now one of the key branches of the global necro-economy.49 If the point of departure for The Bell Project is that war operates in a neverending cycle of production and destruction, Hiwa K’s intervention is not just about reversing the cycle but about creating a short circuit. Iraq, like so many parts of the world, has functioned as a sort of readymade conflict, accompanied by images of death, destruction, and the displacement of people. The gesture of creating a bell out of the wreckage transforms war commodities into a cultural commodity, and one that is deeply connected to the historical complicity of the

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West. This gesture seemingly reinforces the message that European wars of yesterday are today being fought in Iraq. However, through the figure of Nazhad, Hiwa K also draws a connection between war and private business. Thus, he suggests that war is not only a business, but that it is largely a privately owned one, and that we need to rethink how we approach culpability and responsibility. Furthermore, we need to rethink the relation between cycles of capital and war without end. At a time when the EU seems to be under threat of imploding from rising racism and chauvinism (calling for new wars), Hiwa K’s bell might be the (silent) reminder that Iraq’s present is Europe’s future.

Conclusion The works discussed in this chapter stage the history of the emergence of military humanism as a turning point in the international geopolitics of war. The moment identified by the works is the origin of the increasing weaponization of everyday life and the increased use of military language, here expressed through the use of war and violence to uphold a pseudo-moral global order. Our earlier chapters have outlined the different ways in which everyday life has been weaponized. The works discussed in this chapter can be understood as a response to this weaponization, problematizing our perception of war as a form of military humanism through images of veterans and failed state formation (Miljanović), images of refugees as helpless, depoliticized victims (Collins and Muja), images of war entrepreneurs (Hiwa K), and helpless political leaders (Waked). The works in this chapter also provide the next step in our shift away from the affect–trauma paradigm reading of war. In different ways, the works discussed here all reject “colonizing empathy” as a framework through which to talk about the experience of war. In other words, these works are not about claiming to feel for a particular group or claiming to provide an entry experience of war. As we discussed in Chapter 2, representations of suffering that claim to “feel for” do not transmit feelings of suffering, but, rather, are anchored to a popular imagining of how those whose suffering we see ought to be feeling. More broadly, they connect to the instrumentalization of affect deeply engrained within American militarism, and closely intertwined with de-subjectification, coercion, and violence. The works by Miljanović, Hiwa K, and Waked reject this notion of “feeling for”: their works are emphatically not about empathy. Rather, they are about establishing the historical horizon as the framework for experience. They are about exploring

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the possibility of what can be imagined within a historical moment, and about the experience of history that informs that experience. And this historical moment is the post-1989, post-historical relativization and closing down of our ability to think differently from the normative present, and the reduction of our experience into ahistorical affect. Their approach expands our historical frame of understanding of how war is represented. It moves beyond 9/11 as the “zero hour” for contemporary war and places it within a larger narrative. The next chapter will continue this line of argument in showing how artists are using the move away from empathy to repurpose military technology. Put differently, these artists are not claiming to feel for their subjects but are drawing on their own experiences to creatively invent methods and infrastructures that repurpose the militarized present.

Notes 1 A similar position is taken by Šejla Kamerić’s work Bosnian Girl (2002), featuring a photograph of Kamerić overlaid with the wartime graffiti of a Dutch United Nations soldier serving in Srebrenica: “No Teeth . . .? A Moustache . . .? Smel Like Shit . . .? [sic] Bosnian Girl!” The striking contrast between the image of a woman and the crude sexist contempt of an anonymous soldier is a powerful condemnation of Western complicity in the Srebrenica genocide, wherein UN Dutch soldiers stood by while Bosnian Serb forces murdered 8,000 Bosnian men and boys. For a discussion of this work, see Uroš Čvoro, Transitional Aesthetics: Contemporary Art at the Edge of Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 2 Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 3. 3 Costas Douzinas, “Humanity, Military Humanism and the New Moral Order,” Economy and Society vol. 32, no. 2 (2003): 161. 4 Samantha Power documents the passivity of the international community—and the United States in particular—in the face of genocide in BiH. See Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 5 The United States went ahead with the bombing of Serbia in 1999 without the authorization of the Security Council of the United Nations. The Security Council of the UN is the only international body with authority to order military action in defense of international peace and security. 6 Helle Malmvig, State Sovereignty and Intervention: A Discourse Analysis of Interventionary and Non-interventionary Practices in Kosovo and Algeria (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 26.

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7 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin, 1992). 8 Paul Virilio, Strategy of Deception, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2000), 8–9. 9 Hugh Gusterson, “Drone Warfare in Waziristan and the New Military Humanism,” Current Anthropology vol. 60, supplement 19 (February 2019): S77–S86. 10 Bill Clinton, My Life (London: Random House, 2004), 849. 11 Fritz Breithaupt, The Dark Sides of Empathy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 205. 12 As Edward Said points out, “the rhetoric of power all too easily produces an illusion of benevolence when deployed in an imperial setting.” See Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993), 8. Contemporary perceptions of the global geopolitical and military role of the United States often reflect this sense of benevolence (rather than coercion): it has been described as a “benevolent empire,” a “new liberal empire,” or “a cooperative empire” because its foreign policies and military engagements are framed as a “better international arrangement than all realistic alternatives.” See Ann Laura Stoler, “On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty,” Public Culture vol. 18, no. 1 (2006): 125–145, 129. 13 Kodwo Eshun from The Otolith Group describes the acts of reclaiming time as acts of “chronopolitics.” Although Eshun applies the term “chronopolitical” to the work of contemporary African artists, it is applicable to examples considered here, as they critically engage with the impact of neocolonial historical narratives on particular subjects. See Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” CR: The New Centennial Review vol. 3, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 292. 14 Douzinas, “Humanity, Military Humanism and the New Moral Order,” 174. 15 Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 204. 16 Claire Bishop, “Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity,” October vol. 140 (2012): 91. 17 For a detailed discussion of this history, see Uroš Čvoro, Turbo-folk Music and Cultural Representations of National Identity in Former Yugoslavia (London: Ashgate, 2014). 18 In many ways, the scene recalls the symbolism of the final scene in Emir Kusturica’s film Underground (1995), where a wedding party dancing to upbeat music stands on land which separates itself from the river bank and slowly floats away. 19 Larisa Kurtović, “Politics of Impasse: Specters of Socialism and the Struggles for the Future in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina,” PhD thesis (Berkeley, CA: University of California Berkeley, 2012). 20 Stef Jansen, Yearnings in the Meantime: “Normal Lives” and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex (New York: Berghahn, 2015). 21 In this respect, it is interesting to note how in the “making of” feature that accompanies the Sounds we see the artist and the veterans learning the song, practicing the lyrics, and recording the song. They sit around drinking coffee and rakija and joke about

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“forgetting Cyrillic.” Rather than this resembling any process of “healing” or “reconciliation,” they find a common language and solidarity through humor. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict has persisted for over half a century, with very little progress toward a resolution, despite repeated efforts by the international community to pressure the government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) toward a peace process. Camp David peace talks were part of this process. See Sami Adwan, Dan Bar-On, and Eyal Naveh, Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel/Palestine (New York: New Press, 2012). Chrysi Lionis, Laughter in Occupied Palestine: Comedy and Identity in Art and Film (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 130. Here we can also include Chantal Ackermann’s work From the East (1993), featuring large groups of people waiting. Lionis, Laughter in Occupied Palestine, 131. It is interesting to observe Beace Brocess in relation to Taryn Simon’s work Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015), which displays dried flowers taken from decorative arrangements used in significant political meetings and events. The two works provide different approaches to the framing of historical events. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). For an insightful critique of the politics of humanitarian pity in representations and discussions of refugees, see Vinh Nguyen, “Refugeetude: When Does a Refugee Stop Being a Refugee?,” Social Text vol. 37, no. 2 (June 2019): 109–131. Rebecca A. Adelman, Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in the Perpetual War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 3. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 5–6. Francis Fukuyama, Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition (London: Profile Books, 2018), xii. Slavoj Žižek, “Against the Double Blackmail,” New Left Review 1, no. 234 (March/ April 1999), https://newleftreview.org/issues/I234/articles/slavoj-zizek-against-thedouble-blackmail. Žižek has been criticized for publishing different versions of this essay, which reflect different and often contradictory positions on whether Serbia should or should not have been bombed by NATO. See Rex Butler, “On the ‘Subject’ of Žižek,” International Journal of Žižek Studies vol. 10, no. 3 (2016): 1–14. Despite Žižek’s admittedly slippery refusal to take up a firm position (which has often been the case with his commentary on current events), his criticism of the ideological double bind in Kosovo is insightful. Ibid. Ibid. One of the justifications for the invasion of Iraq was the liberation of women.

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37 Vinh Nguyen, “Refugeetude: When Does a Refugee Stop Being a Refugee?,” 112–113. 38 See https://www.sleek-mag.com/article/kosovar-artist/. 39 Anthony Downey, “Unbearable States: Hiwa K and the Performance of Everyday Life,” in Don’t Shrink Me to the Size of a Bullet: The Works of Hiwa K, ed. Anthony Downey (Cologne: Walther König Verlag, 2017), 33. 40 Aliya Say, “Hiwa K: For Whom the Bell Tolls,” The Art Newspaper, September 1, 2015, accessed March 24, 2016, http://theartnewspaper.com/features/hiwa-k-for-whomthe-bell-tolls/. 41 Kareem Shaheen, “Isis Fighters Destroy Ancient Artefacts at Mosul Museum,” The Guardian, February 27, 2015, 08:26 AEDT, accessed April 22, 2020, http://www. theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/26/isis-fighters-destroy-ancient-artefacts-mosulmuseum-iraq 42 Ben Ferguson, “Digging Upwards,” Frieze, April 22, 2017, accessed October 1, 2019, https://frieze.com/article/digging-upwards. 43 See Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), and Susannah Radstone, The Sexual Politics of Time: Confession, Nostalgia, Memory (London: Routledge, 2007) for two discussions of the growth of memory culture. 44 In 2004, Hal Foster identified an “archival impulse” in artistic practices. See Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October vol. 110 (Autumn 2004): 21. For a more recent account and update of Foster’s articulation, see Mathias Danbolt and Sven Spieker (eds.), “Roundtable on the Critical Archive,” Art Margins vol. 3, no. 3 (2014). 45 Elpida Karaba coins the term “archives of crisis” in “Tactics of Resistance: The Archive of Crisis and the ‘Capacity to Do What One Cannot’,” Third Text vol. 27, no. 5 (2013): 685. 46 Anthony Downey and Amal Khalaf, “Performative Resonances; Hiwa K in Conversation with Anthony Downey and Amal Khalaf,” Ibraaz, http://www.ibraaz. org/interviews/171. 47 Downey, “Unbearable States,” 29–40, 33. 48 Downey and Khalaf, “Performative Resonances.” 49 Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “The Coming Global Civil War: Is There Any Way Out?,” e-flux no. 69 (January 2016), accessed October 1, 2019, https://www.e-flux.com/ journal/69/60582/the-coming-global-civil-war-is-there-any-way-out/.

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Militant Humanism: Repurposing War Infrastructure In Danis Tanović’s Oscar winning film No Man’s Land (2001), there is a scene set in 1994 in the middle of the Bosnian War, featuring two Bosnian soldiers in a trench outpost. Stuck on the frontline, in close proximity to Bosnian-Serb forces, the two soldiers are quietly passing the time, one keeping a lookout through binoculars, and the other reading a newspaper. Deeply immersed in an article, the soldier reading the paper suddenly exasperatedly exclaims: “Oh dear, oh dear,” to which the other replies, “What is it?” Not lifting his head from the paper, the first soldier says, “You should see the shit that is going down in Rwanda!” Annoyed, the other replies, “You really are insane!” Laced with characteristic Bosnian dark humor, the scene captures one of many ethical and moral paradoxes of the war: the capacity to empathize with the suffering and trauma of others while dealing with your own. The soldier’s sincere concern for Rwandans caught up in a genocidal war in 1994 is paradoxical because he is reacting in apparently complete disconnect with his own circumstances of (literally) living on the frontline of a genocidal war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). This scene resonated with events of October 2019, as the Vučjak migrant camp near Bihać once again came into the BiH media spotlight. Operating under appalling conditions, with no heating, toilets, or running water, and under threat of receiving no more supplies, the camp was reaching maximum capacity, with tens of thousands more migrants being brought in daily. This camp and its surrounding region (Unsko-Sanski Canton) was the ground zero for BiH’s version of the “migrant crisis” that has beset Europe in recent years. Even though it is not an EU state, BiH is one of the transit countries for people en route to the EU, and it is the last country before Croatia, the EU outpost charged with policing the borders. Bihać was the location closest to the Croatian border and became the convergence point for people trying to get into the EU. BiH thus once again found itself at the center of a humanitarian crisis, only this time not as a country being subjected to a genocidal war, but as one unable to accommodate 207

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the large numbers of migrants from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan moving across its borders en route to the EU. BiH’s inability to adequately accommodate these migrants was largely due to its still economically stumbling and dysfunctional economy, struggling with its own nationalist status quo perpetuated by the political elites since the end of war and the Dayton Peace Accord in 1995. This inadequacy mirrored its inability to deal with even larger numbers of its citizens leaving the country to look for employment and stability in the EU. But images of detention camps, accounts of the use of violence by the Croatian border police, and forced displacement of people from one location to another also raised the ugly specter of the war from two-and-a-half decades earlier. Not only were the people of BiH once again challenged to empathize with the plight of others while dealing with their own dire circumstances, they were also subjected to war-like language and conditions. This time, however, it was not a war for ethnically cleansing territories, but war for maintaining the increasingly militarized borders of a Europe descending into far-right extremism. Taking BiH’s version of the so-called “migrant crisis” as its broader context, this chapter considers the nexus between the militarization of borders and migration.1 Our point of departure is that in the age of “planetary civil war,”2 mass migration, and forced indefinite detention, borders have become instruments of war: militarized infrastructure used to delay, detain, and control people. In Chapter 4, our point of departure was Hito Steyerl’s use of the term “planetary civil war”—which draws on Giorgio Agamben’s work3—to discuss the weaponization of history as a broader framework for understanding how war is represented. In this chapter, we articulate the artistic strategy of militant humanism, which captures works that repurpose the militarized infrastructure of global civil war into a survival resource for non-military people, such as civilians, refugees, and migrants. Militant humanism—a purposeful subversion of the term “military humanism” that we discussed in Chapter 5—repurposes military knowledge about space (geography, topography) and border control, enabling displaced civilians to breach militarized state sovereignty and circumvent unjust and inhumane migration policies.4 In discussing three works—Armina Pilav’s project Un-war Space archive documenting how to transform spaces of destruction into spaces for survival, Hiwa K’s film View from Above (2017) articulating how to memorize maps and topography in order to gain asylum, and Mladen Miljanović’s production of manuals for migrants seeking entry into the EU in Didactic Wall (2019)—we demonstrate how such artistic practices empower civilians through mobility. We argue that through the strategy of militant humanism, migrants, civilians, and refugees become

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empowered to circumvent the temporal delay of war, camp, and indefinite detention, and become politically activated subjects. This political activation through “militant humanism” reflects how artists have responded to the changing temporality of war over the last three decades. Taken collectively, the three works demonstrate the shift in how war is understood, from the temporally finite siege of Sarajevo, through ongoing military operations and wars in Syria and Afghanistan, to the state of negative peace and permanent crisis in BiH. This corresponds to the way in which war has increasingly been spatially decentralized and diffused from a contained area (former Yugoslavia), through an undetermined region (the Middle East), to a global civil war. But there is also a sense of a closed loop, where BiH becomes a war zone again, albeit for different reasons. The way in which these works show how yesterday’s refugees are teaching survival strategies to today’s migrants also shows how new forms of detention are increasingly racialized. Expanding border police powers correspond to increased criminalization of displaced people, and increased duration of detention. Militant humanism thus marks an intervention into the militarized border by creating a short circuit in the infrastructures designed to control lives. It does this by creating a resource based on lived experience and designed to protect and preserve life against military destruction. Militant humanism marks a response to the growing militarization of everyday life by drawing attention to the way in which civilian infrastructure is increasingly being used for military purposes, and to the way in which our very understanding of the notion of “civilian” is changing. Recent decades have been marked by the pervasive use of military technology and ideology to control and manage movement across borders. This includes a shift in public discourse which criminalizes refugees and migrants—forcing distinctions between “legal” and “illegal”—under the pretext of threats to state security. The more or less overt racism underpinning these distinctions is hidden behind the ideology of micro-policing; our collective need to “be aware” and “learn” about possible threats. Militant humanism intervenes in this politically and emotionally charged nexus by turning the ideology of gradually learned militarization on its head. Rather than slowly acclimatizing to the militarization of borders (learning from the military) to aid, or at least enable, the control of movement, it repurposes military structure to enable movement: the collateral damage of destroyed urban infrastructure and architecture becomes the means to enable survival of civilians caught in war (Pilav); intelligence about maps and topography becomes the means to secure asylum (Hiwa K); military manuals become the means to safely cross borders and avoid detection (Miljanović). In this process, militant

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humanism not only intentionally ignores ideological distinctions between civilians, migrants, and refugees, it also disrupts the hierarchy of learning. While all the artists discussed here create learning tools, archives, or manuals for their audience, this process is not based on the artist as a “subject supposed to know,” educating the audience from a position of authority. Empathy, as discussed in our earlier chapters, acts as a counterpoint for these works: they are emphatically not about performing empathy, an approach that culminates in Miljanović’s Didactic Wall. Rather than performing empathy, these works are based on the lived experience of artists or experience learned from strategies used by people in similar circumstances. Furthermore, the didacticism of these works is constantly undermined through performance, where the artists are intentionally misunderstanding what they are supposed to share. In addition to the conceptual and political drivers of militant humanism, there is another aspect that is worth highlighting here. In creating sources of information for displaced peoples, these artists are effectively creating informal educational infrastructure. This is significant because recent years have witnessed a two-fold process: the simultaneous militarization and strengthening of certain state-based infrastructure (such as security), and the systemic weakening of other state-based infrastructure (including education, community services, and cultural institutions).5 In this context, artistic projects have been generating infrastructure typically established and funded by the state: art schools, museums, and community centers. This shift, to the role of the artist as a social practitioner capable of generating vital infrastructure, is evident in the works considered here. Militant humanism in the works of Pilav, Miljanović, and Hiwa K illustrates the ways in which artists working in zones of prolonged instability and crisis use their art to generate infrastructure in the absence of state support. The resources created—whether they are archives, manuals, or poetic reflections—show art’s capacity to generate infrastructure and cultural forms that are resilient to precarity. The methodology of militant humanism thus pivots around two key issues: militarized border infrastructure, and the process of learning. In particular, we are interested in the deeper temporal loops created by the way these artists approach learning about the militarized border: remembering their own experience, while forgetting (or misinterpreting) the ideological command connected to that experience. The border becomes a space entangled between militarization and non-military intervention, and reimagination. While the border is defined by increasing control and violence, it is redefined through the repurposing of the knowledge used for control. By analyzing the various modes

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of militant humanism, we want to draw attention to the modes of rethinking or relearning the militarized border through improvised or temporary uses. But equally, we want to draw attention to the way in which militant humanism prompts us to rethink our understanding of the people forced to cross them. As yesterday’s migrants and refugees perform the role of the teacher-artist, helping us learn how to redefine borders, we simultaneously unlearn our perception of how we categorize the labels “migrant” and “refugee.” Before discussing how the works by Pilav, Hiwa K, and Miljanović address these questions, we need to unpack our approach to militarized border and learning.

The Militarized Border In the simplest terms, militarization of borders refers to the transformation of borders from sites of law enforcement and policing activities, designed to intercept people who violate immigration laws, to sites for militarized security activities, focused on preventing violent threats from entering the state’s territory.6 This includes the deployment of military troops (rather than civilian border patrols) along borders, utilization of military ideology and terminology in management, and protection of border sovereignty. It also includes the increased use of military technology in policing the border, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, surveillance systems, and military hardware. Borders thus become key parts of the militarization of infrastructure and the transformation of people’s lives into a perpetual conflict. As discussed in the previous chapter, in relation to the work of Steyerl, one of the key differences between 9/11 and the present is the shift from the monolithic and highly visible War on Terror to diffused and dispersed drone warfare, and the weaponization of everyday life and the spheres of civilian infrastructure. We register this change as a shift from the battlefield or “area of engagement” to invisible infrastructures of war that exist all around us. This includes infrastructural zones which behave like software in moving beyond state jurisdictions,7 and occupation infrastructures which exist alongside border architecture and technologies.8 Borders become not only the means to control and divide, but also the spatio-temporal framework for our comprehension of the present. The work 551.35—Geometry of Time (2014) by Lana Čmajčanin engages with the temporality of the border.9 The work is a large-scale lightbox featuring thirtyfive maps which defined the borders of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as a part of different state formations, during the last 551 years: since the incorporation of

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Figure 6.1 Project Blank Maps: 551.35—Geometry of Time, 2014, by Lana Čmajčanin. Installation view: Pera Museum, Istanbul. © Pera Museum 2014.

the Kingdom of Bosnia into the Ottoman Empire (1463), through its annexation to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the incorporation of its territory into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, to its final deconstruction as a result of the Dayton Agreement (1996). Overlapping these thirty-five historical maps results in information noise, too much stratified data, the epicenter of which can be found in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Instead of showing distinct and clear borders, these maps evidence strategic shifts in space organization, revealing patterns of violence and instability caused by colonial, imperial, conquering, migrational, martial, and “peacekeeping” redesigns. Čmajčanin creates a portrait of BiH as a state-in-time: the visualization of the changing contours of BiH over a period of \time. Ironically, the end result registers the absence of state. Within the changing space of BiH, the state itself becomes subject to larger external forces. In this sense, the work becomes a case study of the withering away of state in the twentieth century, due to conflict but also due to the emergence of global neoliberalism. Čmajčanin approaches war as the infrastructure for understanding and narrating the historical experience of BiH. This is a reference to the fact that for over two decades, BiH has been seen as a readymade post-conflict society plagued by rampant nationalism, political nepotism and corruption, social decay, and mass migration out of the country.

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Figure 6.2 Project Blank Maps: 551.35—Geometry of Time, 2014, by Lana Čmajčanin. Installation view: Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow. © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art 2014.

But it also refers to the way in which this infrastructure is reproduced through educational structures: how maps are used as means of learning and instruction. This brings us to learning as the second key aspect of militant humanism.

Learning through Art The works we describe as militant humanism all operate through what has been described in contemporary practice as an educative form.10 Here art becomes a form of teaching of practical skills needed for protection or survival, whether this involves producing a manual for movement through unfamiliar terrain (Miljanović), creating an archive that is a resource for survival (Pilav), or learning about memory techniques that will help one to navigate immigration protocols (Hiwa K). Learning and education operate in these works through a performance that dislocates the authoritative position of the artist (as the educator) from the knowledge that is being transferred. While the former operates through a

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performance of didacticism, the latter operates through over-identification with the ideology of militarization. Teaching, in its traditional model, follows a temporal trajectory where the teacher is “ahead” of the student. The teacher is part of history and works for its progress, while the student remains excluded from that temporality or perpetually delayed in relation to it. As Sven Spieker argues, this model mirrors the colonial and authoritarian mindset, where the student remains in the position of the colonized receiving the knowledge.11 This is especially relevant in the context of works that deal with migration from the Middle East into Europe: for instance, Miljanović states that he was provoked into making the work by seeing exploitative neocolonial art in Europe that was “about” refugees; and Hiwa K is responding to decades of asylum-seeking migrants from Iraq. The motivation of the artists relates to Rebecca A. Adelman’s notion of “figuring,” which we discussed in Chapter 2, which is oriented less toward knowing the subjective experience of the other and more toward assuming or imposing on the other a set of imagined feelings.12 In this sense, while the empathy that drives “figuring” can be well intentioned, fundamentally it is premised on, and enabled by, asymmetrical power relations. We argue that even though these works result from an intention to share useful information with the audience, the artists refuse to identify with the position of an empathic teacher, “choosing to perform such a position instead, and thereby stripping it of the aura of authority.”13 Pilav, Hiwa K, and Miljanović are transparent about their personal connection to the knowledge being shared, and they use this connection as part of the material condition of the work. These works exist because the artists learned from the experience of people before them and they pass this knowledge on to the next generation. Through this openness and self-critical relation to the process of teaching through art, the didactic premise of the works is transformed into an external object for the audience, enabling the critical dialogue about the relationship between art and knowledge production. Knowledge production in these works also relates to the origin and temporality of the knowledge. In all cases, the artists are learning from lived experience, whether their own or that of those close to them, and this experience relates to changing conceptions of migration, and knowledge about how best to respond to them. Put differently: while Bosnian refugees are not the same as Syrian refugees (because of the institutional racialization of migrants), they exist within the continuum of people displaced due to the global geopolitics of the last few decades. Sharing knowledge among them (about how to survive in war situations, about how to navigate militarized borders and irrational bureaucracies)

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constitutes an act of activating political agency; they stop being helpless victims and become political subjects. Another important factor in understanding the didacticism of these works is the motivation behind them. Hiwa K and Miljanović are clear in declaring their works as forms of opposition to the militarization of life. But the method of this opposition is the strategy of over-identification: the catalysts for Hiwa K’s and Miljanović’s works are acts of subversive misunderstanding of the administrative procedure and military ideology.14 Hiwa K’s main protagonist in View from Above learns the requirements of the immigration test all too well, and Miljanović creates The Didactic Wall by taking literally the dedication in a book gifted to him by his superior officer at the completion of his military service. In overidentifying with the established regime of the militarized border, the artists cause a short circuit in the functioning of that system, creating a space for resistance. And through this short circuit, they collapse the premise of the debate on migration by simultaneously occupying both sides of the debate. On the one hand, they harness the conservative right-wing paranoia which sees migrants as manipulative foreigners thwarting the system in order to get social and material benefits (“our jobs”), while on the other hand, they play out the well-intentioned but often patronizing critique of that paranoia which claims migrants “just want to have the freedoms that we take for granted,” risking their lives “because they are so desperate, they are willing to do anything.”

Un-war In October 2019, The New York Times reported that a new US Army Reserve unit was being established to “protect antiquities and important cultural sites in war zones.”15 Comprising artists, curators, and other art professionals, this unit will be responsible for providing expert advice about the “most prized antiquities and cultural treasures” to American soldiers “enmeshed in conflict for nearly two decades.”16 The report is striking for the way in which it connects expertise about art, the role of the US (and UK) military in the preservation of cultural treasures on foreign soil, and changing conceptions of war. The report repeatedly establishes a historical link between the current endeavor and the “Monuments Men” team, who recovered millions of cultural treasures looted by Nazis around Europe during World War II. As “the last good war,” the distinct opposition in World War II between the evil of Nazi Germany and the moral high ground of the Allied troops has been repeatedly invoked as justification for US-led military

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interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The tracking down of looted cultural artefacts by the “Monuments Men” has been plainly established as a part of this effort, and The New York Times report goes to great lengths to place the current efforts on the same historical level. Yet even if we take into account the mythologization of the moral high ground of the Allies, what emerges in The New York Times report is a clear distinction between the conduct of World War II and the war in Iraq, and the attitude toward the destruction of cultural spaces. The report acknowledges the urgency of protecting the remnants of Mesopotamian, Sumerian, Persian, Assyrian, and Babylonian cultures in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen, and acknowledges the complicity of US troops in their destruction. However, it also points out that American troops cannot be expected to defend cultural treasures, and that the protection of these artefacts is intended, equally, as a public relations exercise (winning local hearts and minds) and as a means to gaining strategic advice on where to position US troops (that is, advice as to whether certain areas should be used to position troops or whether they should be bombed). Thus, The New York Times report illustrates the perfect example of the application of the doctrine of “military humanism” to the sphere of cultural and heritage studies. Almost two decades after the commencement of the ongoing US-led invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan—which breached numerous international conventions, resulted in countless deaths and destruction, and ushered in the age of planetary civil war—the US military initiated a humanitarian mission to save and protect cultural treasures. The historical revisionism here operates on two levels: connecting the present to a historical moment when the US military held the moral high ground, and using the protection of cultural artefacts to justify and whitewash military destruction. It also provides the perfect counterpoint for approaching Un-war Space, a work which documents wartime destruction by demilitarizing it: archiving how civilians caught in the Sarajevo siege by Bosnian-Serb forces (1992–1996) repurposed spaces of military destruction into spaces of survival and protection.17 Un-war Space is a collaborative work created by a collective of architects and researchers: Arminal Pilav, Ana Dana Beroš, Rafaela Dražić, Miodrag Gladović, Matija Kralj, and Mauro Sirotnjak. The work consists of two mobile archives (presented as two purpose-built multimedia exhibition devices in protective cases), an open source online archive, and performative “encounters” with local spaces and environments, which occur each time the work is exhibited.18 The mobile archive features video recordings of daily life under siege, interviews, recordings of radio broadcasts and interviews, and architectural plans showing how spaces were transformed. It also includes a document titled “Un-war

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Lexicon,” which presents a theoretical reflection on the project in the form of an exposition of key terminology. The overall project is conceived as an incomplete and open-ended archive; the intention is that it should expand through new materials being constantly added. Using footage, documents, testimonies, and sketches, Un-war documents processes that use the material destruction of buildings as a resource for interventions reversing the destruction. This includes processes in public spaces such as: cleaning building basements and arranging them as safe spaces for sleeping, cooking, playing, and reading; using destroyed cars and shipping containers to create barriers and obstructions around pedestrian paths to ensure safe movement; creating small urban gardens for food production in secluded park areas; creating impromptu cemeteries in parks; creating innovative objects for cooking, heating, and lighting; developing new forms of communication, such as sending messages via VHS tapes between safe and unsafe areas. While these processes often occurred in public areas, most of daily life in a war zone is confined to the home or shelter, therefore Un-war’s strategies also include interventions in and reimaginings of the interior domestic space: rearranging

Figure 6.3 Un-war Space, 2019, by Armina Pilav, Ana Dana Beroš, Rafaela Dražić, Miodrag Gladović, Matija Kralj, and Mauro Sirotnjak. Installation view: Tense Present, group exhibition, 2019, KIBLA Portal. Photo: Janez Klenovsek / ACE KIBLA archive © 2019.

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Figure 6.4 Un-war Space, 2019, by Armina Pilav, Ana Dana Beroš, Rafaela Dražić, Miodrag Gladović, Matija Kralj, and Mauro Sirotnjak. Installation view: Tense Present, group exhibition, 2019, KIBLA Portal. Photo: Damjan Svare / ACE KIBLA archive © 2019.

rooms in a flat to take into account the direction of sniper fire; controlling lighting to reduce visibility from outside; creating communal spaces to protect people against the cold; rearranging domestic spaces to include new storage areas for food and water; using balconies to create sandbag barriers; creating makeshift heating stoves and, because many buildings do not have chimneys, poking their smoke outlets through holes punched in walls or windows. In fact, during the war in Sarajevo, flats were transformed from spaces that were accessible only to the occupying family members to spaces that could offer communal shelter during an emergency. As Pilav explains, Un-war “is a didactic tool for anti-militarist urbanism.”19 Taken collectively, the strategies cataloged and documented in the work transformed Sarajevo from a ruined and non-functioning city into a collaborative

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city repurposed for survival and protection. As Pilav argues, in this process civilians transformed from passive, collateral, subjects of war into participants that are actively reimagining and reversing military destruction. Materials, objects, and spaces that had been destroyed became functional again, often in unexpected and humorous ways. Thus, the didacticism of Un-war operates through the strategy of the repurposing and defamiliarization of war and destruction. We argue that this strategy operates on three key levels: by turning military knowledge into a civilian resource; by repurposing the media through which the war is documented; and by defamiliarizing our conception of life in a war situation. Un-war is concerned with the availability, to civilians, of information about war, about transforming military knowledge into a civilian resource. The work documents the way in which civilians learned to distinguish the sounds of different weapons and respond appropriately—for instance, the “screaming” of a fired grenade meant that it was not coming in your direction. For their protection, they acquired a heightened spatial awareness, learning, for example, how to behave near windows when there was sniper fire. Un-war thus marks the transfer of knowledge from military personnel to the civilian population, and its use as communal survival information. Pilav and the research team are not so much “teachers” as ethnographic archivists, collecting people’s strategies. Furthermore, Un-war operates through a series of encounters with exhibition sites; the archive device is a “thinking-in-progress machine”: an unfinished and open project that keeps expanding, changing, and adapting in light of new information. Through the physical engagement of visitors (pressing with a finger, turning a handle), the device transforms into a performative archive, enabling interaction with the material and an amplified level of experience. This experience is especially significant in attuning the audience to the way in which the contemporary context of the weaponization and militarization of borders excludes civilians through control of information classified under the term “security.” In addressing the rethinking of the media representation and discourse of the war, Un-war intentionally uses analog media as its source, and has an appearance at odds with cutting-edge hi-tech aesthetics. The portable protective cases in which the work is exhibited were specifically designed for durability and mobility (essential in times of war), but also for their sense of belonging to an earlier time. Un-war’s “retro” appearance should be understood in relation to its subject matter and the way it has been remembered: the media representation and aesthetics associated with the siege of Sarajevo. Everything that happened in Sarajevo was documented using old analog media formats: texts, fax-machines,

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photographs, drawings, diaries, and video. Every media report from that era has a particular grainy low-resolution VHS footage aesthetic that is easily distinguishable from more recent war reporting that uses tools such as webmapping, 3D models, interactive websites, smart phones, and social networks and blogs. This gives Un-war an intentionally anachronistic appearance, not only documenting one of the last wars before the ubiquitous social media phenomenon, but also taking on the aesthetic of that era. The work thus also connects to the appropriation of the grainy 1990s VHS aesthetic in the “Remove Kebab” meme, used as an anthem of contemporary ethnonationalism in the Christchurch terror attack. Un-war archive’s use of old media formats and aesthetics invites the question of how much more informed we are about war today. As Pilav suggests, while new technologies have enabled instant transfer of information and wider access to it, this does not necessarily contribute to a greater understanding of how citizens adapt to wartime conditions. Access to the internet is still far from universal, some estimates suggesting that over half of the world’s population has never used it; and, as discussed in relation to the work of James Bridle, the weaponization of communication infrastructure has led to even greater restriction of access to information. Un-war defamiliarizes our conception of life under war. It is about the limited mobility of civilians enduring war, and the reduction of the civilian population to a state of permanent uncertainty and fear. It shows Sarajevo through the changed physical experience of space: running, not walking; ducking for cover or crawling on the ground instead of standing upright. But Un-war documents strategies that resist this immobility through the reuse and reappropriation of the infrastructure intended to limit movement. Un-war Space thus demilitarizes the memory of the longest siege in recent European history by documenting everyday strategies through which civilians undid the war. In this way, it draws attention to the experience of war that is outside the traditional military or journalistic frame: introducing ephemeral and fleeting moments, but also including emotional responses to the built space. Un-war demonstrates how people become more attentive to the space around them during war. While in most cases this refers to assessing possible threats and dangers, this strategy also allows for the possibility of remembering war differently. While the work makes use of the experience of Sarajevo, the artists refuse to focus on the singularity of the BiH experience of war. In capturing the destruction and the repurposing of that destruction during the war in Sarajevo, Un-war captures the redistribution and management of destroyed space (during and

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after the war) that can be applied anywhere. The post-Yugoslav wars of the 1990s can be understood as the first (most primitive and aggressive) form of resource accumulation through land grab. This is followed by the stripping of social assets through privatization, de-industrialization, and the demolition of social safety supports. This process of fast and aggressive post-conflict privatization through awarding private reconstruction contracts and restricting access to local resources has been described by Naomi Klein as “shock doctrine” capitalism.20 As Sarajevo continues the process of (slow) reconstruction and (failed) reconciliation more than two decades after the war, the framing of war through the notion of the shock doctrine draws attention to the connection between urbicidal violence, destruction as a form of capital accumulation, and militarized neocolonial exploitation. The work highlights the different economies as temporal cycles bearing on the urban space of Sarajevo. Un-war operates as a montage of human destruction and reconstruction as temporal orders of disintegration and growth. This is the cycle of destruction and reversal of destruction, centered on communal survival and resilience. Resourcefulness and resilience in the face of irrational migration and asylum laws that force migrants into a permanent state of suspension are the basis for Hiwa K’s work View from Above (2017).

View from Above Hiwa K’s View from Above (2017) is a twelve-minute video work commissioned for Documenta 14 (curated by Adam Szymczyk) and shown in Stadtmuseum Kassel. It is narrated by the artist and features footage of an unnamed model of a destroyed city. The narration is partially based on Hiwa K’s personal experience as a refugee during his five-month journey from Kurdistan to Germany in the early 1990s, and the video shows close-up and tracking shots of the model of Kassel’s destruction by Allied bombing during World War II. For the Documenta exhibition, the model featured in the video was displayed in a nearby room in the museum. In the voiceover, Hiwa K recounts how refugees from Iraq seeking asylum in the EU had to prove, in an interview, that they were coming from an “unsafe zone,” by recalling the topographic details of a particular environment.21 Hiwa K narrates how a deserter from the Iraqi army, who had applied to a Schengen country for asylum, had had his application denied after five years of waiting and faced the threat of deportation to Iraq, and possible execution. “M” fled to another Schengen country and learned about “unsafe zones” from maps

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hand-drawn by people from those zones. Using the maps to learn about these environments from an aerial perspective enabled M to convince authorities that he came from an unsafe zone and so pass the test for asylum. The basis for View from Above is the relationship between memory and the fictions that constitute and determine our identity. While Pilav and Miljanović use documentary materials (photographs, textbooks, illustrations) as the basis for their work, Hiwa K employs a highly poetic language that constantly shifts between fact and fiction, between physical locations and the unconscious experience of them, and between the narrator and the protagonist of the work. In this sense, the work highlights our inability to distinguish between sites of destruction, or between war and its representation, and juxtaposes this inability with the seeming “clarity” of immigration bureaucracy’s ability to distinguish between safe and unsafe. The only verifiable “fact” mentioned in the work is the 1991 Kurdish revolution, and the flight of people from Iraq to Europe that has lasted for decades. Anchored in this historical moment, the narrative of the work jumps between the past and the present, between unnamed locations and people, between different temporalities of people stuck in detention. The effect created is a powerful montage of temporal displacement. This sense of displacement includes the position of the narrator—even though the voice is Hiwa K’s, it is left unclear whether he is speaking as the storyteller, the protagonist, or as part of the internal monologue of the second protagonist. His own memory of what transpired constantly changes, as is evident in several points of the voiceover: “he forgot his story because he did not need it anymore”; “M is unlearning his own memory in order to learn from the map”; “I helped him to invent a new fiction.” The verifiable “constant” in the work is the administrative hurdle of the interview for asylum-seekers. Yet the interview is framed as a bureaucratic fiction, which, although both corruptible and indeterminate, has the institutional power to control lives. Included in this fiction is the “unsafe zone,” which, according to the narrator, “only exists in the minds of bureaucrats,” and also the aerial view of the environment, with the associated belief that people should perform according to a set of rules and expectations. This is where the didacticism of View from Above comes into play. Hiwa K’s use of fiction highlights the unreliability of memory and uses this unreliability to undermine the interview process, the truth claims on which the interview process is based, and the authority of the teacher. View from Above is about the burden of proof imposed on refugees, where in order to be granted asylum they must prove their knowledge of certain cities to bureaucrats who don’t know anything about these cities other that what they

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have learned from maps. The destiny of refugees is thus based not on actual lived knowledge, but on the type of questions they are asked. Citizenship and asylum tests, such as the one mentioned in the work, are examples of cultural translation from the perspective of the translator.22 In these tests, the subject is expected to learn and assimilate specific codes and symbols that construct a notion of an identity: a sense of seeing and understanding a territory, based on a particular viewpoint. In View from Above, the test demonstrates the way in which our political reality is framed by aerial perspective (of the map), and the way in which this perspective defines inclusion or exclusion of the individual. But, as Hiwa K illustrates, even as it attempts to shape a political community, this test also provides space for disruption and evasion. This takes the form of learning the language of the map and the language of the interview, and performing them to the officer: replicating the field of view of the officer (the abstract, universal perspective of the law). This form of learning is designed for disruption. It is about learning the perspective of the state in order to circumvent unjust and cruel asylum laws: inventing stories to comply with unreasonable and illogical bureaucratic demands placed on refugees by EU asylum laws. The irony of the work is that an honest application is repeatedly rejected, while the invented story is speedily accepted and M is congratulated on its accuracy. Learning as disruption also operates in the dynamic between M as the pupil and Hiwa K as the “teacher” who taught M how to reproduce the “view from above.” In several instances, we hear about the teacher’s pride in how well the pupil has learned the details about the unsafe zone city. But we also hear how the teacher becomes perplexed when the pupil has assimilated the new details so well that he has forgotten his own personal history. The pupil has reinvented himself to comply with the demands of the state to such an extent that his own identity has been erased. As Hiwa K puts it in the narration, “he replaced one fiction with another.” But the narrator is not the authoritative source of knowledge. The strategy of learning how to navigate the interview has already been used by generations of people in order to secure asylum. In this sense, the work connects to the lived experiences of migrants as discussed by Miljanović in his work Strike (2017), which features a military map, with strategies, devised by people from a small Bosnian village, for crossing borders and obtaining work permits in the economic centers of Europe.23 Both works intentionally play off fears of the perceived “invasion” of Europe by migrants against the lived experience of those migrants seeking a better life and safety. Hiwa K’s work can thus be aligned with what Peter Osborne describes in contemporary practice as “speculative collectivities”:

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non-national or “parastate” collective formations based in radical respatialization of social relations.24 In View from Above, respatialization includes the spatiotemporal reordering of the border. The reordering of the border relates to the links between the hierarchical viewpoint and the potentially fatal politics of exclusion. The vertical and the horizontal act as vectors as they divide the reality of a given space or place in time. Iraqis who fled from “unsafe areas” were unable to sound convincing when explaining about their homes because their answers were based in the horizontal perspective. Learning “the view from above” entails their learning about the remaking of the world through security policies, violence, and war—a world of horizons bound together through “vertical geopolitics.”25 The view from above has traditionally been associated with empowerment: seeing like a state, whether militarily, cartographically, or administratively. The view from above is connected to forms of legibility through domination and superiority, in and through which peoples can be dislocated from their everyday complexities and seen (and governed) in the abstract. From map-making to aerial surveys, the view from the air is complicit in producing, sustaining, and eroding territorial sovereignty on the ground. Hiwa K’s work reflects the encounter between the migratory experience of space and the state, but it is also about the confrontation of migratory temporal experience with the temporality of the state. Sandro Mezzadra’s and Brett Neilson’s analysis of contemporary border regimes introduces the term “temporal border” to highlight the deployment of administrative delay, filtering, and detention as technologies that produce temporalities of waiting, holding, and withdrawal as migrant subjects negotiate their way through the rules.26 For Mezzadra and Neilson, the tensions between these temporalities are played out across the many borders that cross their [prospective migrants’] biographies, often in ways that question the easy chronology of future and past. Echoes of the past and uncertainty about the future invade a present in which experiences of life and techniques of measure at once overlap and clash.27

This description resonates with Hiwa K’s work, which is about bureaucratic delay as a means of control, about keeping people in limbo for years by not processing their claims. In this work, we hear that M was kept in asylum limbo for five years. Hiwa K blurs the distinction between historical condition and personal narrative, generating an uneasy non-chronology that necessitates a conscious transformation of subjective position within the work. He starts with a pragmatic, though dangerous, solution to geographic and cultural immobility: crossing the border

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illegally. The work then talks about participation in an exercise of following protocol. This is intended to show the cynicism and failure of the bureaucratic process: the impossibility of gaining access without having the requisite knowledge of geopolitical organization (and destruction) of space over time. The issue of having access to the strategic information required in order to enable border mobility is also central to Mladen Miljanović’s work The Didactic Wall.

The Didactic Wall Miljanović’s exhibition The Didactic Wall opened on July 15, 2019 in the Bihać City Gallery in the north-western BiH city of Bihać. Curated by Bihać-based Irfan Hošić, the exhibited body of work consisted of large marble panels with engravings, stacks of manuals, wall text, and cabinets displaying textbooks on military tactics.28 The opening of the exhibition also included a performance by Miljanović, doing an army crawl around the gallery. The opening of the exhibition in Bihać at the height of BiH’s “migrant crisis” was a potentially volatile event. Since the start of the “refugee crisis” in Europe, BiH has been one of the key transit zones for people from Syria and Pakistan en route to the EU. As of 2019, thousands of people are housed in makeshift centers in the area surrounding

Figure 6.5 The Didactic Wall, 2019, by Mladen Miljanović. © Mladen Miljanović 2019. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

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Figure 6.6 The Didactic Wall, 2019, by Mladen Miljanović. Engraved drawings on marble, handbooks, readymade, adhesive letters on wall. Installation view: Tense Present, group exhibition, 2019, KIBLA Portal. © Mladen Miljanović 2019. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

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Bihać. Prevented by the Croatian border police from crossing into EU territory— there are numerous reports of violence and intimidation inflicted by the Croatian forces during forced deportations back into BiH—thousands of people are stuck in detention with limited food and water and poor sanitation. Given that the work shown at the publicly funded gallery was directly contravening the “protection” of borders between BiH and Croatia—by producing manuals about how to survive and avoid detection while crossing the nearby Croatian border— there was a sense of apprehension about how the authorities might react. Miljanović’s approach was to subvert militaristic knowledge by repurposing it. Drawing on his own military service training and using illustrations and symbols found in army strategy manuals from the Yugoslav Military (JNA), Miljanović created pocket manuals for refugees with instructions on how to cross into the EU. This gesture could have been seen not only as a direct subversion of the militarized border regime, but as a provocative historical montage of the similarities between the “totalitarian” Yugoslav militarism and the present, presumably post-totalitarian, states in the region. The opening was attended by the local audience, as well as a number of migrants residing in the Vučjak camp near Bihać. The atmosphere was jovial (with migrant children laughing and mimicking Miljanović’s performance at the opening). There was no police intervention, despite one of the produced manuals being set on fire by some of the children outside of the gallery in the city center.29 This was not an act of vandalism but participation in the intended use of the manual: Miljanović created an edition of the booklets with flammable colored powder, which, if set on fire, could be used to signal for help. However, he had envisioned that this would happen in the countryside, rather than outside a gallery in the middle of the Bihać promenade and historical center. Effectively, the ignition of the smoke signal became a plea by migrants for visibility in the face of their increasingly forced detention in the Vučjak camp. Following the opening, The Didactic Wall gained global visibility, with articles and reviews appearing in several languages and a significant presence on social media.30 In an interesting parallel, the discussion of the work, which featured texts in Arabic, English, Spanish, and Urdu, largely continued in English, once again confirming the dominance of English as the lingua franca of contemporary art. The work touched a raw nerve in contemporary art by tapping into what is a challenge for contemporary practitioners: what can artists do in the face of such an overwhelming global humanitarian crisis.31 This question was, in fact, asked of Miljanović at the public discussion that took place the day after the opening.32 His answer was quite revealing of the methodology central to his practice, and

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The Didactic Wall. Miljanović said that art can make a difference by intervening within the institutional space of art production, within the infrastructures that frame (and limit) the social engagement of art. It is precisely within this intervention that we can articulate the way in which The Didactic Wall addresses the militarization of the contemporary border. The act of creating manuals by appropriating and repurposing military knowledge reflects Miljanović’s long-term interest in manipulating and subverting existing structures of power and knowledge. The Didactic Wall is in many ways the culmination of a series of works that fused monumentality and militarism into powerful critiques of BiH’s present predicament.33 The work also follows the approach to war art that is emphatically not about producing empathy. In The Didactic Wall, Miljanović places himself within existing power structures and manipulates the institutional, political, and armed force that is supported by an international network for gathering and managing information. Irfan Hošić argues that The Didactic Wall is a “subversive educational installation.”34 In one sense, the work is concerned with subverting the draconian EU migration laws and forced detention by helping displaced people to navigate obstacles and difficulties in order to reach their desired destination. Producing a manual with information on how to orient oneself while moving through difficult terrain, how to avoid detection, and how to seek shelter and survive contravenes the mandate of Croatia as the outpost of EU border protection and management. It also intervenes into a space of increasingly violent strategies used by the Croatian border police, which raise the specter of the 1990s Yugoslav War and the politics of ethnic cleansing. But the subversion of The Didactic Wall also operates on a deeper level, prompting us to rethink the very framework of the artist “teaching” the audience. The subversion of the educational aspect of The Didactic Wall refers to our perception of the artist as the authoritative source of information for the work. The instruction manual produced by Miljanović is based on his “misunderstanding” of his own military instruction. The point of departure for the work is Miljanović’s acting in line with the dedication he received at the completion of his military service. Reproduced in the exhibition as wall text, the dedication was included in a book gifted to Miljanović by his commanding officer, instructing him to “successfully apply” his military knowledge in peace and in “eventual war.” Rather than treating the dedication as an empty ceremonial gesture that accompanies institutional rites of passage—such as graduation or completion of military service—Miljanović takes the command seriously and follows it through to its conclusion. This is an act of over-identification, where

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the official language is taken more seriously than it takes itself, causing a short circuit in the ideological apparatus. In following the command too closely and using military language and iconography (from the former Yugoslav People’s Army) to create instructions for migrants, Miljanović undermines the security standards of the state. Rethinking the security standards of the state includes rethinking the very notion of illegality that is frequently invoked in discussions about migrants. In blurring the distinction between military and civilian knowledge in his work, Miljanović is also intentionally blurring distinctions between “ordinary” civilians, refugees, and “illegal” migrants. But in approaching migration outside of the militarized and criminalized framework of the current political conversation, Miljanović is, in fact, approaching migrants in the spirit of the UN convention relating to the status of displaced peoples.35 Miljanović’s strategy of educative subversion is also apparent in his approach to the materiality of the work. The largest and visually most dominant component of The Didactic Wall is the marble panels, which literally form a wall. This creates a powerful material reminder of the global resurgence of walls on borders. However, the monumental permanence of the panels in The Didactic Wall is undermined by Miljanović’s insistence that they are secondary and exist only to document the manuals. Yet the manuals are disposable to the degree that they can be burned in case of an emergency. Thus, the materiality of the work is unstable, which in turn destabilizes the temporal framework of The Didactic Wall. In other words, if the work is a manual for how to cross terrain, does the work “stop” when the destination is reached, or when the manual is burned in the process of reaching that destination? This sense of temporal dislocation and subversion of border policing was continued in the process of transporting The Didactic Wall across borders, following the Bihać exhibition. The itinerary for the next two exhibitions of the work (Podgorica in Montenegro, Maribor in Slovenia) was intended by Miljanović to follow the route taken by migrants across the region. In moving across borders, the work was performing the movement of people, and at the same time demonstrating that art operates as a form of cultural passport that is not available to migrants.36 Yet in symbolically and physically performing this very paradox, the work subverts the administrative infrastructure used to control movement across borders. While moving through Croatia en route from Podgorica to Maribor, The Didactic Wall became the first monument from Republika Srpska to be recognized by the Croatian border authorities. In October 2019, while the work was being transported to an exhibition in Maribor,

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Slovenia, Croatian customs stopped it at the border and executed the delay method colloquially known as YAMOP, or “you are missing one paper.” This is one of the standard administrative procedures used by border police to delay or hold people or goods crossing the border: demanding a previously unheard of document. In this instance, the Croatian customs officer demanded that the courier produce an official confirmation from the Republika Srpska Ministry of Culture that the work was not an “object of cultural significance.” This ridiculous request (made completely redundant by the courier’s possession of valid papers) meant that in the eyes of the Croatian customs officials, Republika Srpska is a recognized legal entity. This was an unprecedented act of cultural diplomacy, taking place on the same border at which violence was routinely used to push migrants back, and was performed by an unwitting official of the Croatian government, which is opposed to Republika Srpska pretensions to independence from BiH and unification with Serbia. Subversion of militarized borders is very likely to occur each time the work crosses a border, or travels to a different country on the migrant route,37 both through the work’s engaging with the administrative procedures, and through the simple fact that art about migrants is crossing borders that migrants themselves are unable to cross.

Conclusion Militant humanism is the practice of politically activating displaced groups within established regimes of power and representation. Pilav, Hiwa K, and Miljanović repurpose the militarized infrastructure of global civil war into a survival resource for non-military people (civilians, refugees, migrants). They appropriate militarized knowledge about space (geography, topography) and procedures of border control, enabling displaced people to breach militarized state sovereignty and circumvent unjust and inhumane migration policies. They produce educational infrastructure that empowers civilians and enables mobility in the face of the increased restrictions being imposed on their daily lives. Empowerment of civilians is achieved by collapsing the distinction between “true” and “false” migrants, refugees, and civilians: all are subjects of the militarized gaze. But this process is also achieved by rethinking the position, and the political activation of the artist: through addressing military iconography (Miljanović), urbicide and architectural destruction (Pilav), or immigration and asylum procedures (Hiwa K).

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In this chapter, we have argued that the practice of militant humanism, politically activating displaced civilians, pivots around two key issues: border as militarized infrastructure, and didacticism (the educational aspect of the works discussed). In relation to the border as militarized infrastructure, militant humanism functions as an intentional materialization of the populist fantasies of illegal migrants invading Europe and stealing jobs or presenting security risks. These three works capture the geopolitical paradoxes of the present by overlaying the spatial limits of Europe according to the different national and international bodies that define it: the nation-states, the Council of Europe, NATO, the Schengen Zone, the transportation corridors and hubs, all of which have different versions of limits and exclusions. Here, militant humanism intentionally echoes the militaristic language that permeates so much of the public discourse on cross-border exchanges, as much as it references the clash between the different geopolitical organizations and regimes of that space. The form of the military language and knowledge is crucial, in that it recalls both the conquest and control of the nation-state territory, and points toward the production of knowledge about space as a way of controlling and regulating movement. But in equal measure, militant humanism ethnographically documents strategies that migrants have used in order to circumvent restrictive migration laws, thus connecting to the didactic impulse in the works by Pilav, Hiwa K, and Miljanović. Yet didacticism here operates in a non-hierarchical and temporally non-linear way. Information is learned from historical repetition of experience and is collectively shared. The gesture of sharing stands in opposition to the increased restriction and therefore reduction of availability of information, especially to vulnerable and displaced peoples. Rather than approaching migrants as passive and helpless subjects, militant humanism empowers them by drawing on their own experience and amplifying it. This emphasis on lived experience juxtaposes locality with globalized, strategic, militarized knowledge about domination of that same territory. In an age of data mining and microsurveillance, there is a sense in which these three works hark back to “archaic” forms of knowledge: outside of digital tracking and satellite surveillance. Here we return to the question of people gaining access to knowledge (via the internet) at the cost of new forms of domination and control. Despite claims that we live in an increasingly connected world, where people are able to access all forms of information, some estimates indicate that more than half the world’s population (especially in the poorest countries) does not have access to the internet.38 In this context, reproducing archaic forms of knowledge can only be interpreted as an intentional gesture.

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The artists discussed in this chapter produce artwork that pits lived experience against invisible structures, such as the hierarchies that police access to the EU. In the works presented, the opposition between stasis and movement is shown to be a historical and geopolitical construct, yet one whose direction and rhythms of movement have very real consequences in people’s lives. Despite being subject to forces often beyond their control, in recouping agency through militant humanism people are using those forces to inform their experiential times and spaces and propel them in unexpected directions.

Notes 1 Writing from the perspective of 2021, this point also invites reflection on the relation of lockdowns, militarization of life, and border restrictions during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the specifics of the pandemic lockdown exceed the parameters of this book, we argue that the language of “health” has in many way supplemented the language of “security” to enable increasing impingement on privacy and civil rights. 2 Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (London: Verso, 2017). 3 Giorgio Agamben, Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). 4 This strategy is the reversal of militaristic humanism, which “humanizes” war and the breaching of state sovereignty by framing them as ethical interventions into humanitarian catastrophe on behalf of helpless victims. Militaristic humanism, which emerged as a justification for NATO bombing of Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo War, is significant not only as an ideology of justifying war, but also of how refugees were framed as idealized victims. We discuss this in more detail in relation to the work of Phil Collins and Alban Muja in Chapter 5. 5 Here we approach infrastructure not only in terms of logistical systems and structures but as visible and invisible processes which manage the flow of global production (and destruction) and condition our everyday reality. See Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007). 6 Reece Jones and Corey Johnson, “Border Militarisation and the Re-articulation of Sovereignty,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 41, no. 2 (2016): 187–200. 7 Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft (London: Verso, 2014), 58–59. 8 Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007); Easterling, Extrastatecraft, 14.

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9 551.35—Geometry of Time is part of her larger project titled Blank Maps (2016– 2018), which Includes seven bodies of work shown in various iterations. For an overview of her practice, see Cmajcanin’s website: http://www.lanacmajcanin.com. 10 Sven Spieker, “Unoriginal Pedagogies: ‘Didactic’ Art as Edification (Robert Morris, Walter Benjamin, Ilya Kabakov),” in Ethos und Pathos. Mediale Wirkungsästhetik im 20. Jahrhundert in Ost und West, eds. R. Niccolosi and T. Zimmermann (Munich: Böhlau Verlag, 2017), 413–23. 11 Ibid., 414. 12 Rebecca A. Adelman, Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in the Perpetual War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 3. 13 Ibid. 14 Slavoj Žižek originally deploys the term “overidentification” to describe the political provocations of Slovenian industrial band Laibach (affiliated with NSK), which adopted the stylistic and aesthetic expression of fascism within Yugoslav socialism. See Slavoj Žižek, “Why are Laibach and NSK not Fascists?,” reproduced in Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, ed. Laura Hoptman and Tomas Pospiszyl (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 285–8, 287. 15 Ralph Blumental and Tom Mashberg, “The Army Is Looking for a Few Good Art Experts,” The New York Times, October 21, 2019, accessed October 22, 2019, https:// www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/arts/design/new-monuments-men. html?smid=nytcore-ios-share. 16 Ibid. 17 Armina Pilav, Un-war Lexicon (Zagreb, 2018). 18 Un-war Space online archive is available at http://unwarspace.bk.tudelft.nl/, accessed October 22, 2019. 19 Sonja Leboš, “Un-learn, De-grow, Un-war: Armina Pilav: Un-war Space, Greta Gallery, Zagreb,” Život Umjetnosti 104 (2019): 182–90, 189. 20 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (London: Random House, 2007). 21 Referring to an earlier time, Hiwa K suggests that in 1991, a division was created between northern Iraq (Kurdistan) and the rest of Iraq, and that the UN considered Kurdistan a safe zone. The work and a slightly different version of the voiceover narrative told by the voiceover in A View from Above are available at https:// kow-berlin.com/artists/hiwa-k/view-from-above-2017, accessed October 30, 2019. 22 Boris Buden, Stefan Nowotny, Sherry Simon, Ashok Bery, and Michael Cronin, “Cultural Translation: An Introduction to the Problem, and Responses,” Translation Studies vol. 2, no. 2 (2009): 196–219. 23 For a detailed discussion of this work, see Uroš Čvoro and Chrisoula Lionis, “When the Periphery Laughs: Humor and Locality in Contemporary Art from Greece and Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Cultural Politics vol. 15, no. 2 (2019): 223–243.

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24 Osborne uses The Atlas Group as his primary example of art practice in this regard. See Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013), 195. 25 On the notion of vertical geopolitics, see Stephen Graham, “Vertical Geopolitics: Baghdad and After,” Antipode vol. 36, no. 1 (January 2004): 12–23; on “views from above,” see Caren Kaplan, Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 26 Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labour (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 132. 27 Ibid., 134. 28 The manual is also available as a free pdf online via the Bihać Gallery website: http:// www.fondacijarevizor.org/files/media/pdf/5d543b930978e7.08710029_Mladen%20 Miljanovic_Didactic%20Wall_Handbook.pdf (accessed October 28, 2019). 29 The smoke signal ignition at the opening did not attract the attention of the local authorities. The lack of intervention by the local police, while commendable, perhaps reflected that BiH is indeed transitioning into a neoliberal democracy: one where art is permitted to protest unjust policies while they continue unabated. This is the “Bush doctrine,” popularized by George W. Bush’s well-known response to mass protests in London against the US-led invasion of Iraq: when asked what he thought about the protests, Bush replied that this is the cornerstone of Western democracy, and that the Iraq War was being waged to preserve these kinds of freedoms. In other words, Bush understood that the public protesting was permissible precisely because it had no bearing on the decisions being made behind closed doors. This understanding of art is in stark contrast to “totalitarian” Yugoslav socialism, which took art seriously and routinely arrested dissident artists (a situation which is reoccurring in China). 30 The work was also featured in Croatian media, as evidence of suspicious material found in the possession of migrants at the camp. See the report by Croatian TV network RTL Direkt from October 24, 2019, https://www.facebook.com/ watch/?v=1093784437458668 (accessed October 28, 2019). 31 In this sense, Miljanović’s work continues earlier attempts by artists to create guides enabling border mobility, such as Heath Bunting’s BorderXing Guide (2001). 32 For a short report on the opening and the public panel, see the website of Revizor Foundation, which organized and hosted the event: http://fondacijarevizor.org/ novost/didakticki-zid/11 (accessed October 28, 2019). 33 These works include his Strike series and works about BiH monuments featured in the Aperta Fenestra exhibition held in Banja Luka in September 2019. For a detailed discussion of Strike, see Čvoro and Lionis, “When the Periphery Laughs: Humor and Locality in Contemporary Art from Greece and Bosnia and Herzegovina.” 34 Irfan Hošić, “The Didactic Wall,” The Didactic Wall / Didaktički zid, Gradska Galerija, Bihać, 2019.

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35 Ibid. 36 For a discussion of migration and art as passport in relation to the work of Tanja Ostojic, see Čvoro, Transitional Aesthetics: Contemporary Art at the Edge of Europe (London: Bloomsbury, (2018). 37 While I was accompanying Miljanović on his way from Banja Luka (BiH) to Maribor (Slovenia) for a group exhibition that featured The Didactic Wall, we crossed the Croatian border with a car boot full of printed manuals. We did not report the manuals to the border police, which was not illegal because it was not commercial material, and its value did not exceed the allowed amount. However, we were potentially facing the prospect of the border police discovering the manuals and our having to explain ourselves to them. 38 On imperialism aspirations of global tech companies in the poorer “global south,” see Michael Kwet, “Digital Colonialism Is Threatening the Global South,” Al Jazeera, March 1, 2019, accessed November 4, 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/ opinion/digital-colonialism-threatening-global-south-190129140828809.html.

Conclusion: Weaponized Art

Susan Sontag begins her very last book, published the same year as the Americanled invasion of Iraq as part of the War on Terror, with a contemplation on Virginia Woolf ’s statement in Three Guineas, published the year before the eruption of World War II, that images of war are a powerful argument against the horrors of war. Exploring Woolf ’s statement, Sontag says: Look, the photographs say, this is what it’s like. This is what war does. And that, this is what it does, too. War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins. Not to be pained by these pictures, not to recoil from them, not to strive to abolish what causes this carnage—these, for Woolf, would be the reactions of a moral monster. And, she is saying, we are not monsters, we are members of the educated class. Our failure is one of imagination, of empathy: we have failed to hold this reality in mind.1

The overall conclusion of Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) argues that any and all impacts of images of war are ideologically determined rather than universal, that “no ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.”2 Judith Butler says of Sontag’s argument, “in her view, the image can only affect us, not provide us with an understanding of what we see.”3 In other words, images of war can function as affective conduits, yet their psycho-emotional force does not make them any less ideologically framed. Sontag’s deliberative response to 9/11 echoes what she wrote in The New Yorker only days after 9/11: “Politics, the politics of a democracy—which entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been replaced by psychotherapy.”4 These words, written on September 17, 2001, intuit the politics of the two decades to follow, which have formed the paradigm that we address in the first third of this book. The trajectory of our argument began at that point because much of the contemporary art that has dominated discussions of war art for decades seems to suggest the same thing that Woolf suggested in 1938—war happens when our 237

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imagination and empathy fail. In our discussions, we have avoided the distraction of directly discussing empathy, rather assuming it under our discussions of trauma and affect; however, it is worth bringing empathy briefly to the fore here, in our conclusion. In 2016, after a solid decade of the dominance of affect theory, Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy sought to redress a tendency he saw in contemporary academic and pop psychology to overstate the extent to which our behavior is informed by irrational biases—by the affective and emotional.5 Bloom sought to steer compassion back to rationality: “It is easy to see why so many people view empathy as a powerful force for goodness and moral change. It is easy to see why so many believe that the only problem with empathy is that too often we don’t have enough of it.”6 Yet, Bloom argues, empathy is “a poor moral guide . . . It grounds foolish judgments and often motivates indifference and cruelty.”7 Emotional empathy is something quite different from compassion, he argues, defining empathy as “the act of feeling what you think others are feeling—whatever one chooses to call this—[which] is different from being compassionate, from being kind, and most of all, from being good.”8 Bloom’s Against Empathy resists the overwhelmingly positive groupthink that has dominated academic and popular thinking around empathy, instead making a case for “conscious, deliberate reasoning in everyday life.”9 Empathy is deeply enmeshed with identity and ontology, potentially forging its bonds through the otherwise weak ties of shared nationality, ethnicity, language, and culture. “Empathy is biased,” says Bloom, pushing us in the direction of parochialism and racism. It is short sighted, motivating actions that might make things better in the short term but lead to tragic results in the future. It is innumerate, favoring one over the many. It can spark violence; our empathy for those close to us is a powerful force for war and atrocity towards others.10

Here we might think of Milošević’s Kosovo speech in 1987, which established him as a defender of the Serbs. At a time when Serbs in Kosovo were claiming oppression by the ethnic Albanian majority of that Yugoslav republic, Milošević asserted: “No one has the right to beat you. No one will ever beat you again.” It was a powerful moment of kinship, which also presaged the genocidal ethnonationalism of the 1990s Yugoslav Wars. Fritz Breithaupt argues that, “[s]ometimes we commit atrocities not out of failure of empathy but rather as a direct consequence of successful, even overly successful, empathy . . . in many cases, empathy not only fails to stop negative acts but in fact motivates them and promotes them.”11 It might be difficult for people in the West to admit they felt

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much greater empathy for the 2,977 victims of 9/11 than for the million who died in Iraq following the US invasion in 2003, but the sustained focus of the West’s media clearly demonstrated that to be the case. As Butler argued during the height of the War on Terror, some lives fit our culture’s frames, while others simply do not; that is, only some lives are determined as grievable. “Ungrievable lives are those that cannot be lost, and cannot be destroyed, because they already inhabit a lost and destroyed zone . . . When they are destroyed in war, nothing is destroyed.”12 “Empathy reflects our biases,” says Bloom, comparing empathy to a spotlight that includes some and excludes others: “empathy distorts our moral judgments in pretty much the same was as prejudice does.”13 When Martin Bella, a sitting member of the local council of Mackay, expressed his outrage at Abdul Abdullah’s depiction of Australian soldiers in the 2019 exhibition Violent Salt (see Chapter 2), he implored that if anyone is not able to understand the depth of the crisis of Australian veterans suffering PTSD, “your empathy gland is nonfunctional.”14 As one would absolutely expect, Bella’s empathy is oriented toward the Australian soldiers he knows personally and not the statistical civilian deaths in an alien culture across the globe. As we saw in Chapter 3’s discussion on the gamification of terror, empathy itself can be weaponized. As Breithaupt says, our capacity for empathy empowers and enables us to commit acts of intense cruelty “within the spectrum of normal empathy.”15 That is, empathy is—to repeat a term we have tapped into throughout this book—fungible.16 Like affect, emotion, and the aesthetics of transgression, empathy’s effects and uses are not fixed: empathy is not inherently and necessarily ethical, moral, or just. In Chapter 2 we drew on Rebecca A. Adelman’s incisive analysis of the instrumentalization of affect and empathy within American militarism. Adelman argues that even when it is well-intentioned, and motivated by compassion, empathically “figuring” can be fundamentally de-humanizing: “the affective investment of figuring is a presumption to know how the figure in question thinks or feels; the dividend is the sense of sharing in that feeling and responding appropriately to it.”17 In her conclusion, Adelman points out that those often considered to be the target or receptacles of empathy, emotion, and pity are not allowed to be angry, since anger asserts political agency and disrupts the flow of empathy: “An angry injured veteran reveals the inadequacy, or even absurdity, of most civilian displays of gratitude and impugns the state for its miserly protections.”18 She says that anger “is a way of recognising the suffering of others without making any kind of epistemological or affective claim on it.”19 Certainly Adelman’s appeal to anger is interesting and disruptive to the discursive canonizing of empathy and affect. However, as we concluded in

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Chapter 1, what we need is not more authentic and intense emotionality, more affecting performances of trauma, greater empathic connection, or more anger. Emotional intensity, to paraphrase Butler, cannot provide us with a better understanding of the actual thing that affects us.20 A scream, no matter how authentic or intense, contains no knowledge beyond itself. Rather, emotional intensity locks us into a perpetually suspended moment. As we argued in Chapter 2, we now live in a particular ontological paradigm of political subjectivity in which, according to Walter Benn Michaels, understandings of the basis of political subjectivity have shifted from cognitive, abstract, and ideology-based toward affective, embodied, and experiential. And thus, our predominant understanding of political subjectivity is that it “can only be a question of what you are.”21 Our experiences, the differences in our being, are seen as central to our political subjectivity and so, as Michaels characterizes this posthistoricist logic, “conflict has nothing to do with ideology; it is nothing but a conflict of subject-positions.”22 Ruth Leys says, extending this logic, “we cannot disagree about what we feel, we just feel different things.”23 What is at stake, Leys argues, is that the “ideology of belief is replaced by a focus on the bodily affects;”24 that is, in the valorization of empathy, action motivated by deliberative compassion is seen as ideological, even contrived, while emotional empathy is understood as deeply authentic, a subjective attribute, part of who you are. However, in practice, the best we can hope for empathy, affect, and emotion is that they may, at the very outside chance, provoke some kind of action; yet, as Rex Butler argues concerning Ben Quilty’s After Afghanistan portraits of soldiers suffering the effects of PTSD, this empathic “feeling for” is usually enough for audiences. Those audiences engage in what Slavoj Žižek calls the “interpassive,” a form of “aggressive passivity” in which we are actively participating in political life as a social activity, “all the time in order to make sure that nothing will happen, that nothing will really change.”25 The public performance of empathy in the social sphere is the end, rather than a means to anything beyond. We have felt for; we have done our part. Alternatively, the type of militant humanism demonstrated in Mladen Miljanovič’s Didactic Wall begins with the intent of action. It is compassionate ideology made active—driven by intention, grounded in ethical reasoning, and tactically deployed. It is not a form of empathic figuring in the sense conceived in Adelman’s notion of figuring.26 Miljanovič’s Didactic Wall does demonstrate a particular “cognitive empathy” that recognizes the injustice of refugees displaced as a consequence of actions by the West, who are then excluded from the West, but the artwork’s slabs of granite and stack of manuals have little to do with

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emotional empathy, affective contagion, or “feeling for.” Instead, they tell real displaced people seeking asylum how to cross razor wire, evade drone detection, and discern direction without a compass. Miljanovič points out that the granite slabs are secondary, a by-product, of the actual work, which is the handbook distributed to migrants. The handbook is utilitarian and dispensable, to be used and discarded or burned to signal for help if necessary. It is a methodology. Militant humanism in works such as Didactic Wall is a tactical methodology rather than an ideology as such. It exploits the increasing militarization and weaponization of everyday life. It is weaponized art—art that utilizes military knowledge for humanitarian purposes. Paul Virilio says, “here are three phases of military knowledge. The tactical phase is the first, since it goes back to hunting societies. Tactics is the art of the hunt.”27 Then, in Virilio’s schema, the second phase is strategy or politics, and the third is logistics.28 For Virilio, tactics is an “art,” similar to Michel Foucault’s ars:29 expedient, with no prescribed plan, deploying creativity. The famous military theorist Carl von Clausewitz argued that tactics is a form of what we might call today “just-in-time’ ” knowledge as opposed to “just-in-case” knowledge: “combat is composed of more or less large numbers of single acts, each complete in itself, which we call engagements and which form new units. From this two activities spring: individually arranging and conducting these single engagements and combining them with one another to attain the object of war. The former is called tactics, the latter, strategy.”30 For Clausewitz, according to Scott Sigmund Gartner, “strategy links military actions to political objectives.”31 Michel de Certeau’s now classic The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) picks up on these definitions in relation to social critique, arguing that the “strategic model” is geared toward “generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, ‘clientéles,’ ‘targets,’ or ‘objects’ of research).”32 Tactics, on the other hand, for de Certeau is “a calculus which cannot count on a ‘proper’ (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality.” That is, he argues, “[t]he place of a tactic belongs to the other. A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance.”33 The tactical methodology of militant humanism does not aim to think or feel on behalf of someone else, but rather takes up position alongside the other. In this tactical methodology, both the artist and the subject of their work are wholly within the same systems in which they operate. To be clear here, our argument in this book is not that contemporary art addressing war, terror, and political violence through the registers of affect,

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emotion, and empathy is actually cynical; or that ideas that have evolved with the affect–trauma paradigm of the last twenty years are not effective theoretical tools; or that emotion and empathy are fundamentally bad. Rather, our argument is that these approaches have not adequately accounted for, and can no longer effectively address, the very particular ways in which politics of culture, war, and images interrelate today. The performance of trauma has become mass entertainment, ethnonationalist authoritarian strongmen are elected by force of affect politics, and mass murder is committed for the targeted and empathic cruelty of “the lulz.” Over the last twenty or so years, once niche ideas around emotion and empathy have ossified into the concepts through which we engage in everyday political practices and conceive of ourselves and our political agency. As critical theorists of culture, we need to understand this; as political actors, we need to find other ways of thinking about this world. In the later chapters in this book, we have begun to consider recent contemporary art that has explored ways out of this stultifying conceptual impasse. In different ways, those works have considered ways of breaking the temporal loops that dominate, breaking through a presentism that has persisted unchallenged as a fixation of the temporal suspension of affect and the repetition of trauma. Many of these artists redeploy deeper historical knowledge and military knowledge, while wilfully misinterpreting the ideological basis of that knowledge. This kind of militant humanism politically activates vital actors, such as displaced people within established regimes of power and representation. The art appropriates militarized knowledge about space (geography, topography) and procedures of border control, enabling displaced people to breach militarized state sovereignty and circumvent unjust and inhumane migration policies. In doing so, it reframes politically and economically dispossessed people as political subjects, not helpless victims or receptacles for affective investment and mirrors for our own displays of empathy. These works produce educational infrastructure that empowers civilians and enables mobility in the face of the increased limits being imposed on daily life. Sharing knowledge—about how to survive in war situations, about how to navigate militarized borders and negotiate irrational bureaucracies—constitutes an activation of political agency. Doubtlessly, these are not the only ways out of the affect–trauma impasse, and we will continue to explore contemporary art that seeks to think differently about war, terror, and political violence. Finally, we acknowledge here that, quite separately from the ambitious intentions of this book to engage a shift in art and visual culture theory, a deep and broad transition has been underway during its writing. When we wrote our

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Introduction, the world was unaware that a coronavirus pandemic would spread rapidly across the globe during 2020, eventually taking millions of lives. The COVID-19 death toll in New York City alone has massively exceeded that of 9/11. The culture war that we touch on in Chapter 3 evolved with COVID-19 in ways that this book did not have the scope or space to address, such as the rise of coronavirus denialists and libertarian anti-maskers who believe its all a hoax, while others believe it is a plandemic and burn down 5G mobile data towers. State ethnonationalism continues to play out in Vladimir Putin’s announcement of the untested Sputnik V vaccine and Sino-American saber-rattling around the “China Virus”.34 When US President Donald Trump contracted COVID-19 and recovered with experimental therapies not widely available, he told the world “don’t let it control your life,” as though the million dead (to that point) had merely made poor individual choices. And while 4,000 Americans died of COVID-19 every day, QAnon—the increasingly mainstream online right-wing cult, fixated on conspiratorial fantasies of satanic child sex rings purportedly run by Democrats and Hollywood—cast Trump as America’s savior. This book emerged in this moment of profound and rapid transition. In a world about to change on a scale possibly greater than it did after 9/11, we need new ideas.

Notes 1 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2003), 6. Emphasis in original text. 2 Ibid., 6. 3 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable (London: Verso, 2009), 66. 4 Susan Sontag, “The Talk of the Town: Tuesday, and After: New Yorker Writers respond to 9/11,” The New Yorker, September 17, 2001, accessed August 13, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/09/24/tuesday-and-after-talk-of-thetown. 5 Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (New York: Ecco, 2016). 6 Ibid., 2. 7 Ibid., 2. 8 Ibid., 4. 9 Ibid., 5. 10 Ibid., 9. 11 Fritz Breithaupt, The Dark Sides of Empathy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 1.

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12 Butler, Frames of War, xix. 13 Bloom, Against Empathy, 31. 14 Martin Bella, “Martin Bella,” Facebook, October 31, 2019, accessed April 7, 2020, https://www.facebook.com/martin.bella.560. 15 Breithaupt, The Dark Sides of Empathy, 171. 16 Ibid., 6. 17 Rebecca A. Adelman, Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in the Perpetual War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 7. 18 Ibid., 245. 19 Ibid., 248. 20 Butler, Frames of War, 66. 21 Walter Benn Michaels, “The Shape of the Signifier,” Critical Inquiry vol. 27, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 278. 22 Ibid., 280. 23 Ruth Leys, The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 344. 24 Ibid., 343. 25 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 332. 26 Adelman, Figuring Violence, 1, 4. 27 Paul Virilio and Silvere Lotringer, Pure War, trans. Mark Polizotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 14–15. 28 Virilio and Lotringer, Pure War, 14–15. 29 See Foucault’s notion of ars erotica in Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 70. 30 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. O.J. Matthijs Jolles (New York: Random House, 1943), 62. 31 Scott Sigmund Gartner, Strategic Assessment in War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 20. 32 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), xix. 33 Ibid. 34 Donald Trump, quoted in Morgan Chalfant, “Trump cites Barron Trump’s coronavirus case in arguing for schools to reopen”, The Hill, October 14 2020, accessed October 20 2020, https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/521122trump-cites-barron-trumps-coronavirus-case-in-arguing-for-schools-to

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Index 11th September 2001 see 9/11 1989, post-1989 5, 9–15, 21, 24, 25, 26n, 71, 157, 158, 173, 175, 176, 187, 197, 202 2chan 116 4chan 94, 114, 116, 117, 124, 126–129 8chan 22, 94, 110, 113, 114, 116, 124, 126, 133, 134, 136 9/11 xiii, 3, 5, 7–9, 14, 15, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 38–41, 43, 45, 48–50, 55, 69, 74, 75, 77–79, 92, 94–96, 98n, 111–113, 135, 137n, 158, 173–177, 195, 202, 211, 237, 239, 243 Abdullah, Abdul 65, 67, 70, 239 All Let Us Rejoice 65, 66 For We Are Young And Free 65, 67 Violent Salt exhibition 65, 96n, 239 abject art 71 affect xiii, 5, 8, 9, 18, 19–21, 23, 25, 35, 37–41, 43, 45, 50, 54, 55, 56, 65, 68–83, 85, 87–96, 101n, 111, 135, 146–149, 156, 159, 160, 177, 192, 201, 202, 238–242 Affective Turn, The 19, 40, 50, 74, 77 Deleuzian affect theory 73, 75–77 intentionalism 87 politics xiii, 69, 79, 81–83, 148, 159, 242 theory in the humanities 20, 73–75, 77, 79, 83, 87, 94 -trauma paradigm 8, 9, 18, 20, 21, 39, 40, 56, 69, 75, 76, 96, 148, 175, 201, 242 Tomkinsian affect theory 75–77 Adelman, Rebecca A. 89, 192, 214 figuring 89, 91–93, 193, 214, 239, 240 Figuring Violence 89, 92 Afghanistan 25, 30, 31, 35, 36, 38, 51, 53–56, 74, 92, 174, 208, 209, 216 Agamben, Giorgio 208 Age, The 29 Algeria 173, 174

alt-right 116, 118, 119, 121–129, 133, 136, 149, 156, 159 Andrew, Prince 89 Anonymous 116, 118 Guy Fawkes masks 116 Project Chanology 116 Arad, Michael, World Trade Centre Memorial 109 Archibald Prize 29, 32 Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney) 71, 73, 161 Australian Army 55, 92 Australian War Memorial (AWM) 30 authoritarianism on the left 118–120 on the right 8, 89-90, 116, 120, 151, 214, 242 Bacon, Francis 35 Bakhtin, Mikhail 73, 122 Bannon, Steve 118 Batchen, Geoffrey 73 Beck, Glenn 81 Bella, Martin 65, 239 Benjamin, Walter 160 Bennett, Jill, Empathic Vision 45–47 Berg, Nick 112 Berlin Wall 9–12, 173, 176 Best, Susan, Reparative Aesthetics 46, 47 Biden, Joe 136 Bihać, Vučjak migrant camp 207 Bilal, Wafaa 83, 85, 86 biopolitics 15, 20, 87, 95, 130 biopolitical 13–15, 19–21, 83, 88, 93 Blair, Tony 173 Blaze TV 81 Bloom, Paul, Against Empathy 94, 238 Boo Boo, Honey 159 Bond, Lucy 43 border 11, 25, 107, 126, 207–212, 214, 215, 219, 223–225, 228, 229, 230–233, 235n, 236n, 242

269

270

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Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) 12, 15, 24, 40, 145, 153–156, 171–174, 176–181, 183, 184, 202n, 207–209, 211, 212, 220, 225, 228, 231, 235n Brechtian self-referentiality 53 Breitbart 118, 120, 121 Breithaupt, Fritz, The Dark Sides of Empathy 18, 91, 93, 174, 238 Brexit 8, 12, 81, 82, 88, 95, 151 Brody, Ralph 34 Brooke, Heather 115 Bosnian War 12, 15, 19, 22, 131, 154, 174, 182, 183, 207 Bush, George H.W. 10, 120 Bush, George W. 93, 163, 235n Butler, Judith 38, 237 frame 38 Frames of War 237 Butler, Rex 34, 51, 240 Capitol Hill Riot (January 6, 2021) 136 Caruth, Cathy 19, 41, 77 Caruthian formulation 40–49 trauma studies 39, 40–43, 48, 50, 73, 75, 77, 96 Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History 19, 41 Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Everyday Life 241 Cheung, Eugene Yiu Nam 36 Christchurch xiii, 9, 12, 13, 22, 23, 110–113, 125, 127, 130–135, 145–148, 156, 158, 164, 165, 176, 182, 220 Person X 22, 23, 110, 113, 114, 127, 130–135, 137n, 182 terror attack xiii, 12, 22, 110–112, 127, 131, 134, 145, 146, 178, 182, 220 CIA 116 Clinton, Bill 19, 24, 171, 175, 185, 186, 187 Clough, Patricia Ticineto, The Affective Turn, 19, 40, 50, 74, 77 Čmajčanin, Lana xii, 211, 212, 213 CNN 3, 82, 112, 150 Cold War 10, 11, 14, 171, 194 Collins, Phil, how to make a refugee 24, 174, 190–195 communism 10, 11 Connolly, William E. 81

Cotterrell, David xii, 38 COVID-19 8, 9, 89, 136, 233n, 243 Croatia 15, 145, 207, 208, 228–230 Couric, Katie 1 Daily Stormer, The 123 Davies, William 82, 88, 149 Dayton Agreement in 1995 24, 155 de Duve, Theirry 47 De Kooning, Willem 35 Debord, Guy 124 dérive 124 Deleuze, Gilles 73, 77 Der Derian, James 150 Derrida, Jacques 112 Desmond, Michael 35 desubjectifying 21 Doherty, Willie, The Only Good One is a Dead One 45 Doug Moran Prize 29 Douzinas, Costas 171 doxxing 117 Dürer, Albrecht 32 Duterte, Rodrigo 12 Eastern Bloc 11 Eisenman, Peter, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Berlin) 108 Ekman, Paul 76 Emin, Tracey 29 emotion 23, 36–39, 54, 55, 69, 73, 75–78, 82, 83, 85, 93–95, 101n, 111, 135, 146, 239, 240, 242 and affect 54, 93 and politics 78–79 empathy xiii, 9, 17, 18, 21, 25, 34, 36, 37, 45, 46, 47, 51, 53, 68, 89, 91, 93, 94, 117, 135, 160, 174, 175, 192, 193, 201, 202, 210, 214, 229, 237, 238–242 empathetic relationship 36, 51 empathic identification 36, 45, 47 signs of empathy 36, 47, 51 vampiristic empathy 91, 174 Enwezor, Okwui 196 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 120 ethnic cleansing 8, 9, 11, 40, 145, 176, 229 ethnonationalism 12, 15, 19, 21, 23, 95, 147, 148, 156, 176, 220, 238, 243

Index terrorism 8, 12, 176, 220 strongman authoritarians 8, 12, 116, 120 Yugoslavia 11–15, 23, 25, 114, 131, 148, 149, 157, 158, 171, 173, 181, 182, 184, 193, 194, 209, 212 European Union (EU) 11, 12, 15, 25, 82, 134, 184, 201, 207, 208, 221, 223, 225, 228, 229, 233 expertise 82, 83, 215 Facebook 12, 22, 36, 65, 68, 92, 110, 113–115, 118, 120, 126, 130, 134, 140 Falkenhausen, Susanne von 70, 87 fascism 130, 146, 147, 165, 234 feeling 14, 16–18, 20, 21, 36, 46, 48, 49, 51, 68–70, 72, 74, 77–79, 85, 87–91, 93–95, 101n, 135, 152, 160, 162, 164, 193, 201, 214, 238–241 rules 94 Fenton, Roger 37 Ferren, Anne, Lost to Worlds 46 First World War 12 Foster, Hal 71, 205n Foucault, Michel 13 Fox News 81 Glenn Beck 81 Sean Hannity 81 Tucker Carlson 81 Freud, Lucien 35 Freud, Sigmund 42–44, 50 Moses and Monotheism 42, 44 Nachträglichkeit 42 trauma theory 19, 39–41, 48, 49, 69, 75, 76, 95 Frieze magazine 70, 87, 134 Fukuyama Francis 10, 13, 26n, 173 End of History and The Last Man, The 10, 14, 26n Identity 14 fungibility 79, 83, 95, 111, 116, 133, 122, 146, 239 Gadsby, Hannah 53, 54 Gamergate 118 Gamification 18, 21, 107, 111, 125, 129, 130, 135, 136, 145, 239 genocide 9, 11, 19, 40, 130, 131, 145–147, 155, 158, 172, 174, 176, 182, 183, 202

271

Gibbs, Anna 77 Gittoes, George 175 Gonzalez-Torres Felix 108 Good Weekend 29, 30 Goya, Francisco, Disasters of War series 37 Gregg, Melissa 77 ground zero 1, 5, 8, 15, 207 Groys, Boris 153 Grusin, Richard 19, 73, 74 Guantánamo Bay 90 Guardian, The 151 Gulf War 1991 24, 175 Gulf War 2003 175 Habermas, Jürgen 11 Hage, Ghassan 162, 164, 169n Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri 13, 14, 19, 80, 87 “biopolitical” 13–15, 19, 20, 21, 83, 87, 88, 93 Commonwealth 87 Empire 13, 87 Hart, Pro 32 Hirst, Damien 29 Hitler, Adolf 126, 130 Mein Kampf 126 Hiwa K xii, 18, 24, 25, 167n, 174–177, 196–201, 208–211, 213–215, 221–224, 231–232, 234n The Bell Project  24, 174, 196–198, 200 Hollywood 120, 243 identitarian politics 8, 9, 81, 115, 148 identitarianism 13, 14, 21, 95, 155 identity 11, 14, 21, 49, 53, 56, 81, 87, 88, 115, 132, 151, 153, 158, 162, 170n, 179, 181, 182, 222, 223, 228 ideology 13, 14, 19, 21, 36, 37, 39, 53, 55, 76, 78, 87–90, 121, 123, 130, 133, 147, 149, 195, 196, 209, 211, 214, 215, 233n, 240, 241 Internet 22–23, 36, 109, 112–117, 119–130, 132, 135, 145, 146, 188, 220, 233 Iraq 21, 24, 55, 74, 83, 84, 92, 112, 113, 162, 174–177, 197–201, 204n, 208, 214, 216, 221, 222, 224, 234, 235, 237, 239 ISIL 21, 22, 111–113, 128, 197, 199, 200

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Jafa, Arthur xii, 23, 148, 158–165, 168n, 169n Love Is The Message, And The Message Is Death 159, 160, 168n, 169n White Album, The 23, 148, 158–165, 169n Kansteiner, Wulf 41–43, 47, 48, 50 Kapadia, Ronak K. 77, 83–85, 87, 89–92, 95 Insurgent Aesthetics 77, 83, 84, 87, 89, 90, 95 queer calculus 84, 85, 89, 92 Karadžić, Radovan 12, 40, 130, 131, 182, 183 Kearns, Gertrude 37 Kekistan 128–130, 136, 156 Big Tyrone 128 Kekistani flag 128, 129, 156 Kekistani Movement 128 Kibeho Massacre 174, 175 Kojève, Alexandre 11 Koons, Jeff 29 Kosovo 12, 15, 24, 158, 173–177, 190, 192–196, 204n, 238 Liberation Army 193 speech 1987 238 Kristeva, Julia 44, 71 Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection 71 Revolution in Poetic Language 44 Lauer, Matt 1 Le Pen, Marine 126 Leys, Ruth 14, 19, 20, 39, 40, 43, 74–76, 78, 79, 83, 87–89, 96, 101n, 240 Ascent of Affect, The 39, 79, 83, 87 critique of affect theory in the humanities 87 Libeskind, Daniel, Jewish Museum Berlin 108 Linfield, Susie 74 Linn, Kathleen 35 LOL 117, 128 Louvre, the, Disaster of War 1800–2014 38 lulz 23, 94, 117, 121, 122, 128, 131, 135, 156, 164, 242 LulzSec 116 McCain, John 81 McCosker, Anthony 37, 76 McDonald, John 35

McDowell, Malcolm 159 Mallarmé, Stéphane 44 maps 25, 188, 189, 208, 209, 211–213, 221, 223 Mapplethorpe, Robert 71 Marcus, Greil, Lipstick Traces 123, 124 Margolles, Teresa 107–109, 111, 134 El asesinato cambia el mundo/ Assassination 107 Super Speed/El Paso, Texas 107–109 Massumi, Brian 72, 73, 75, 76, 78, 79, 83, 94, 95, 100n ‘Autonomy of Affect’ 72, 75 Politics of Affect 83 Medici, eX de xii memes 110, 114, 116, 121, 123–126, 130, 132, 134, 151, 188, 189 cash me ousside 124, 125 dank 126, 156 Pepe the Frog 125, 128, 133, 156 One Does Not Simply . . . 124 Remove Kebab 22, 23, 114, 130, 131, 145, 182, 183, 220 Woman Yelling at Cat 124 Michaels, Walter Benn 13, 14, 20, 87, 88, 240 Middle East 25, 209, 214 Militant humanism 25, 165, 207–211, 213, 231–233, 240–242 Military humanism 24, 171, 173–177, 179, 194, 195, 201, 208, 216 Miljanović, Mladen 18, 24, 25, 174–181, 183, 184, 201, 208, 209, 210, 211, 213–215, 222, 223, 225, 226, 228–232, 235n, 236n, 240, 241 Didactic Wall, The 215, 225, 226, 228–230, 236n Sounds of the Homeland 24, 174, 178–184 Strike 223, 235n Milošević, Slobodan 12, 158, 153, 194, 238 Moses, A. Dirk 146, 147 Mostar 15 Muja, Alban, Family Album 24, 174–177, 190, 195, 196, 201, 233n Muslims 12, 13, 22, 114, 131, 145, 176, 182 Mosques 12, 15, 110, 130, 133, 151, 182 Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar 12 Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang 12 Myall Creek (massacre site) 29

Index Nagle, Angela 83, 116, 117, 121–124, 128, 133, 135 Namuth, Hans 31 National Museum of Australia 5 National Portrait Gallery (Australia) 35 National Self-Portrait Prize 29 nationalism 11–13, 15, 111, 114, 123, 145–148, 151, 155–158, 164, 165, 158n, 181–184, 212 transhistorical 12, 13, 23, 145, 146, 148 NATO 83, 157, 172, 173, 176, 193, 194, 195, 204n, 232, 233n Nazis 215, (Neo-Nazi) 119, 121, 128, 133, 156 Kreigsmarine flag 128, 156 Nazism 123 NBC 1, 2 neoliberalism 11, 13, 116, 212 Netflix 53 New York Times, The 109, 110, 133, 215, 216 New Yorker, The 237 Nicholas, Hilda Rix 37 Occupy Movement 116 Official War Artist On The Warpath (ABC TV Australia) 34 Oneohtrix Point Never 159, 162 ontology 83, 238 Operation O-KKK 126, 127 Palin, Sarah 81 Peirce, Charles S. 71 Petkovci monument 154–156, 168 PewDiePie 113, 114 Photography 30, 37, 46, 65, 66, 74, 107, 132, 155, 163, 175, 190, 195, 202, 220, 222, 237 memorial 108 point-of-view 47, 114 soldiers 155 Picasso, Pablo 37 Guernica 38 Pilav, Armina 25, 208–211, 213, 214, 216–220, 222, 231, 232 pluralism 14, 20, 88

273

political correctness 80, 81, 118, 119, 121, 122 PC 118–120 /pol/ 22, 110, 113, 126, 128 politically incorrect 22, 110 Pollock, Griselda 42, 45, 76 Pollock, Jackson 32 post-ideological 13–15 posthistoricity 13 poststructuralism 41, 70–73, 88 Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) 17, 31, 34, 47, 68, 93, 239, 240 post-truth 81, 82, 95, 135, 136 Proposch, Steve 35 psychoanalysis 42, 43 psychological operations (PsyOps) 118 Putin, Vladimir 12, 120, 243 QAnon 135, 136, 243 Queensland, Australia 29, 51, 65 Quilty, Ben 29–37, 47, 51–56, 68, 92–94, 167 n, 240 After Afghanistan 30–35, 51, 53, 54, 68, 92, 167 n, 240 Captain S after Afghanistan 31–33 Sergeant P. After Afghanistan 31, 51, 52 Rabelais, François 122 Reagan, Ronald 149 Reaganomics 11 refugees 24, 25, 128, 174, 176, 190, 192, 194–196, 201, 204n, 208–210, 211, 214, 221–223, 228, 230, 231, 233, 240 camp 190 crisis 29, 111, 128, 225 Syrian 128, 214 Reucassel, Craig 34 Rumsfeld, Donald 163 Running Dog 36 Russell, Francis 35 Russia 12, 151, 152, 179 Second World War 19 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 76 Seigworth, Greg 77 Seinfeld 55 Serbia 24, 130, 145, 158, 171, 172, 175, 176, 202n, 204n, 231, 233n

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Serrano, Andres 71 Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks 124 Slade, Lisa 29 Somalia Affair 174 Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others 237 shitposting 23, 110, 114, 115, 122, 132, 134, 135 Šoba, Nebojša Šerić 17, 171, 172 Sparrow, Jeff 22, 120, 125, 133, 134, 137n Fascists Among Us 125 use of the name Person X 22, 134, 137n Speck, Catherine 37 Srebrenica 12, 13, 15, 40, 131, 174, 194, 202n Steyerl, Hito, Is the Museum a Battlefield? 152, 153, 167n Stone, Todd 1–6, 8 Witness: Downtown Rising 5 Strategy 21, 25, 28, 83–85, 115, 124, 149, 169n, 197, 208, 215, 219, 220, 223, 228, 230, 233n, 241 Sukumaran, Myuran 29, 36 Sydney Morning Herald, The 29, 35 tactics 148, 225, 241 Taliban 32, 67 Tanović, Danis, No Man’s Land 207 Tarin Kowt (Tarinkot, Tarin Kot) 30 Thatcherism 11 Thrift, Nigel 79 terrorism 8, 12, 21, 22, 68, 74, 109, 111, 112, 133, 151, 158, 165 Islamist terrorism 21, 112 left wing terrorism 110 right wing terrorism (terror) 107–136 stochastic terrorism 133 terrorist attacks xiii, 2, 9, 74, 111, 145, 182, 220 Bærum, Norway 110 Bali (2002); Madrid (2004); London (2005, 2017); Mumbai (2008) 21, 112 Christchurch, New Zealand xiii, 9, 12, 13, 22, 23, 110–113, 125, 127, 130, 131, 133–135, 145–148, 156, 158, 164, 165, 176, 182, 220 El Paso, Texas 107, 109–111, 133–135

Halle, Germany; Poway, California; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 110 Barcelona (2017); Berlin (2016); Paris (2015); Manchester (2017); Nice (2016); Stockholm (2017) 112 time xiii, 3, 5, 7, 9–11, 15, 16, 18, 19, 24, 35–37, 39, 40, 43, 45, 53, 54, 72, 74, 76, 83, 84, 91, 176, 183, 188, 189, 193, 196, 198, 201, 203n, 207, 208, 212, 216, 219, 224, 225, 230, 231, 233, 234n, 238, 240, 241 historical horizon 7–9, 14, 165, 175, 183, 201 Nietzschean eternal return 176 stasis 15, 176, 184, 233 temporal loops 175, 210, 242 temporality 23, 25, 146–148, 149, 157–159, 160, 165, 175, 186, 195, 196, 209, 211, 214, 224 Times, The 110 Tomkins, Silvan 76–78 totalitarianism 147 transgression 23, 44, 68, 83, 111, 121–125, 133, 146, 149, 239 transgressive aesthetics 123 trauma xiii, 3, 5, 8, 9, 16–18, 20, 21, 25, 29, 31, 32–51, 53–56, 60n, 68–71, 73–76, 85, 92–96, 109, 148, 159, 168n, 175, 195, 201, 207, 238, 240, 242 cultural trauma 41, 43, 48–50 dissociative model 41–44 post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 17, 31, 34, 47, 68, 93, 239, 240 studies 39, 40–43, 48, 50, 73, 75, 77, 96 traumatainment 50–55 Triggering 77, 111, 115, 120, 128, 129, 135, 146 trolling 23, 115, 117, 119, 121, 122, 125, 128, 129, 132, 135, 146 Trump, Donald J. 8, 12, 78, 81, 82, 88, 89, 95, 118, 120, 121, 126, 128, 129, 134, 136, 148, 149, 151, 243, 244n 2016 election 118 2020 election 136 Trumpism 120, 126–129, 136 Twitter 36, 95, 115, 116, 119, 126, 128, 129, 124, 137n

Index Unite the Right (Charlottesville VA) 119, 129 United Kingdom 12, 149, 173, 215 United Nations 12, 202n peacekeeping 25, 174, 175, 185, 194, 212 United States 7, 12, 74, 82, 109, 161, 202n, 203n army 150, 215 University of California Berkeley 119 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) 211 UN-WAR 18, 25, 183, 208, 215, 216–221 Urōzgān (province) 30 US Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington DC) 19

275

White House 89, 118 white supremacism 129, 176 Whitechapel Gallery, Affect and Curating: Feeling the Curatorial 70 Whiteread, Rachel, Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial (Vienna) 108 Whitney Museum of American Art, Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art 71 Wiesel, Elie 19, 48 WikiLeaks 116 Woolf, Virginia, Three Guineas 237 World Trade Center 1–3, 5, 7, 8, 107, 109

V for Vendetta 116 Van Alphen, Ernst 42, 73, 74, 76 Venice Biennale 107, 159, 195, 196 video games 129, 110, 131 first-person shooter 22, 110, 132 Shitposter, The 132–133 Vietnam 31, 108, 150 Virilio, Paul 150, 173, 241

Yiannopoulos, Milo 118–121, 123, 127, 141n YouTube 114, 115, 126, 128, 156 Yugoslavia (former) 11–15, 23, 25, 114, 131, 148, 149, 157, 158, 168n, 171, 173, 181, 182, 184, 193, 194, 209, 212 Yugoslav Wars 15, 19, 40, 145, 147, 221, 238

Wachtel, Katya 32 Waked, Sharif, Beace Brocess 24, 174, 178, 184–189, 204n War on Terror 3, 7, 21, 24, 53, 74, 90, 173–175, 211, 237, 239 Warburg, Aby 32, 160 weaponisation 149

Zagala, Anna 29, 32 zero hour 1, 7, 8, 9, 15, 23, 148, 158, 165, 168n, 177, 202 Žižek, Slavoj 26n, 37, 162, 163, 168n, 179, 194, 204n, 234n, 240 interpassive 37, 240 retroactive nationalism 194

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