Benjamin Noys

Editorial: History in the graphic novel

It still remains the case that comics are not generally considered to be legitimate objects of cultural analysis. Despite the innovations of cultural studies and the interest of historians in the realms of ‘everyday life’ and ‘popular history’, comics have been confined to the intellectual margins. One reason for their marginal status appears to be the fact that they are hybrid forms which mix text (without being novels) and images (without being films) (Groensteen 2000: 35). Although ‘hybridity’ has been a much discussed concept, especially in relation to ‘postmodernism’ and ‘postcolonialism’, this has not helped to rescue comics from their ‘considerable lack of legitimacy’ (Groensteen 2000: 29). The use of the term ‘graphic novel’ in Britain and the US has, partly, been an attempt to rescue comics from their critical neglect, as well as to recognize the emergence of specifically adult comics and book length works, particularly in the last 20 years. This special issue of Rethinking History is an argument for an engagement with the graphic novel by all those concerned with ‘history writing’ and the analysis of historical representations. Although the graphic novel has largely remained beneath critical attention the form has actually been the site for some sustained and sophisticated engagements with the problems of representing historical events. It was the publication of one work, more than any other, which transformed the status of the graphic novel: Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986, 1991). This representation of the Holocaust, through the memories of Spiegelman’s survivor father, demonstrated the potential of the form. The use of complex and controversial narrative and visual strategies also attracted the critical interest of historians and cultural critics. Hayden White, for example, argued that Maus was a ‘masterpiece of stylization, figuration, and allegorization’ (1992: 41–2) and a ‘critically self-conscious’ (1992: 42) contribution to the debate concerning the limits of representation surrounding the Holocaust. His was only one voice amongst many, and one recent bibliographic survey has shown approximately 100 articles and reviews have so far been published on these two slim volumes. Not only this but Maus also helped transform the language used to describe comics and contributed to the popularity of the term ‘graphic novel’. No longer could works in comic book form simply be dismissed out of hand and the sophistication of these works had to be given recognition. Art Spiegelman himself described what he had written as a ‘co-mix’ rather than just a comic. The slight change of spelling indicated a significant change in direction for the form, as Spiegelman explained: ‘One of the problems is that the word comics itself brings to mind the notion that they have to be funny. [. . .] I prefer the word co-mix, to mix together, because to talk about comics is to talk about mixing together words and pictures that tell a story’ (1998: 174). Now, the very hybridity which had been used to condemn

Into the ‘Jungle’

Hardcore Dance has spent years underground evolving from the still-current stereotype of frenzied thudding bass lines coupled to samples of the tunes of childrens programmes, of a music for E-head ravers whose drug-induced dummy sucking became a potent symbol for a subculture stigmatised as infantile and stupid. That evolution has reached the point of ‘Jungle’, and now Hardcore Dance and Jungle are often used interchangeably as terms of description. It is this musical form which is analysed here as part of the evolution of modern dance music. Too often subcultural study has tended to give the impression that music is one element of a subcultural style and that it is style that drives the subculture. Instead, it is argued that music drives subcultural style, and that the evolution of Hardcore Dance serves as an especially salient example because it is a musical form which persistently resists reduction to typical codes for understanding music, both academic and those in the public sphere.

Shattering the subject: Georges Bataille and the limits of therapy

This article is an analysis of the work of the French intellectual Georges Bataille (1897–1962) and its implications for interrogating the limits of therapy. One of the central concepts of Batailles thought is transgression and the destabilizing effects of transgression on any concept of the limit. I explore this thinking through an analysis of Batailles personal and theoretical relationship to psychoanalysis. Batailles radicalization of psychoanalysis is then pursued through his use of mythic representations of the ‘shattered subject’. These models of the shattered subject offer an interrogation of some of the theoretical and practical limits of therapy, particularly when it is centred on the individual. Drawing on these models it is then argued that Bataille offers a new ethics of abjection, which proposes that we must interrogate the subject in terms of what our culture regards as ‘waste’. Comparison is made between Batailles thought and that of Jacques Lacan, and it is argued that Bataille offers a potential radicalization of Lacans concept of the Real and his ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’. The limits of Batailles own writing are critically interrogated, drawing on the readings of his work by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.

The provocations of Alain Badiou

THE FRENCH philosopher Alain Badiou is a deliberately provocative thinker, as these three new translations of his work demonstrate. In each case a cherished element of the current ‘postmodern’ doxa is violently overturned. The Ethics is a scathing attack on contemporary ‘ethical ideology’, whether that is the celebration of human rights or of a respect for the Other. In the Manifesto for Philosophy Badiou indicts all talk of the ‘end of philosophy’ for its arrogant assumption that the task of philosophy is over. Finally, in Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, he overturns the commonly accepted image of Deleuze as an ‘anarcho-desirer’ amongst ‘the bearded militants of 1968, bearing the standard of their gross desire’ (Badiou, 2000: 12) and their heirs amongst Anglo-American Deleuzians. These provocations are not just provocations for the sake of it. Instead Badiou has a more profound project: to rehabilitate ontology, love, a universal emancipatory politics and the subject from their current ignominious status as discredited ‘metaphysical’ concepts.1In doing so Badiou forces us to re-think how we understand our own time and suggests a new

Georges Bataille's base materialism

The French intellectual Georges Bataille (1897–1962) developed base materialism in his work during the late 1920s and early 1930s as an attempt to break with all existing materialism. This essay is an explication of base materialism and its radical implications for contemporary theory. Bataille argues for the concept of an active base matter that disrupts the opposition of high and low and destabilises all foundations. Then he attempts to use this to develop a radical libertarian Marxism, opposed to both Stalinism and fascism. Although it provided a critique of the emphasis in Marxism on production, the active flux of base matter could not be contained in a political discourse. This means that Batailles thought has an impact beyond the political and into the wider domain of theory. One example of this is the influence of base materialism on Derridas deconstruction, and both share the attempt to destabilise philosophical oppositions by means of an unstable ‘third term’. This explains why Batailles materialism does not appear as conventionally materialist, and why it has had little impact within contemporary materialism. Despite attempts to force base materialism into the mold of a new form of materialism it disrupts conventional materialism and the ‘radical’ politics that often goes with it. Bataille destroys the promise of liberated spaces and offers a more radical and disorienting freedom which inscribes instability into all discourses. It is this that defines the importance and necessity of Batailles base materialism today.

‘Monumental Construction’: Badiou and the Politics of Aesthetics

Abstract Alain Badiou offers a thinking of aesthetics geared to the invention of the new, against what he regards as the conformism of contemporary cultural production. His conception of a revived modernism, unafraid of ‘monumental construction’, challenges the modesty of many contemporary conceptions of art. Badiou remains faithful to the ‘modernist moment’, at the same time as arguing the need for a re‐conceptualisation of the modern. This involves a singular historical periodisation and complicated negotiation with the ‘negative’ or ‘destructive’ impulses of modernism, which Badiou claims need to be surpassed by a new ‘subtractive’ orientation. While undeniably bold, such a re‐conceptualisation encounters difficulties in its specification of the new against the background of a capitalism itself dominated by an ideology of production, creation and invention. This difficulty is signalled most prominently by Badiou’s refusal to really identify any contemporary forms that would conform to his call for ‘monumental construction’.

The Discreet Charm of Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour is seemingly unusual amongst French intellectuals in being explicitly anti-Marxist, and his ‘Actor-Network Theory’ is always wielded by him against Marxism. I argue that the anti-Marxism of this ‘anthropologist’ of networks is emblematic of our present moment. Latour’s chiding of Marxism for ‘economic reductionism’ and an inattention to the complexity of the world is the signature gesture of a current moment disenchanted with critique. Analysing Latour’s anti-hierarchical ‘flat ontology’ I suggest that his anti-critical thought mistakes the form of capitalism. De-reifying capitalism into a series of local forms and arrangements occludes the systematic, but non-intentional, ‘structuring’ form of capital as a relation of value. The inflation of ‘agency’, tracked for humans and non-humans, is a result of this occlusion. In Latour’s thought capitalism is presented as incomplete, but the agential forms he offers are deliberately limited and provide only piecemeal opportunities for change: a reticular reformism. It is the displacement of totalisation and reductionism from capitalism to its critics that completes the gesture of anti-critique. In light of the current global financial crisis, which has forced into awareness ‘global capitalism’ as an object and form, I take the opportunity to critique the ‘discreet charm’ of this anti-critical mode of thought, which radiates out beyond Latour. At the time of attempts to re-start capitalism through recourse to further neo-liberal measures this sense of a finite and changeable capitalism, promoted by Latour, gains resonance as an ideological trope. I argue that Latour’s de-reification is, in fact, a re-reification, which cannot grasp the accumulative forms of capital as social relation. The fact that this relation passes through ‘things’, through the form of reification, leads to Latour’s misunderstanding of the ‘agency’ of objects.

The violence of representation and the representation of violence

We could summarise the approach of theory to the problem of violence as the movement through a chiasmus: from ‘the representation of violence to the violence of representation’. The interventions of theory suggest that instead of remaining at the level of the representation of violence, we have to consider that a form of violence is intrinsic to the very act of representation itself. Theory, which refers to those positions that were inspired by paying attention to the sign and the signifier, directs its attention to this ‘primary’ violence at work in the sign. In this way it undermines, or deconstructs, the usual distinction made between violence and representation, which places violence as exterior to, or beyond, representation. Hannah Arendt ascribes such a view to Greek thought when she remarks: ‘Only sheer violence is mute’.1 In contrast, theoretical analysis suggests that, in fact, violence is essential to representation, to language, and to the image. It is ‘empirical’ violence, or representations thereof, that is derivative and secondary, or serves to conceal or distract from this ‘fundamental’ violence. The result is that violence isn’t simply at the limits of representation, but rather it is an internal divide within representation.

Destroy Cinema!/Destroy Capital!: Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle (1973)

A preview for Guy Debord’s film The Society of the Spectacle (1973) at the Studio Gı̂tle-coeur announced it with the following text that appeared on a black screen: “When the idea occurred to me to create the world, I foresaw that there one day, someone would make a film as revolting as The Society of the Spectacle. Therefore, I thought it better not to create the world. (signed): God” (Levin 397). Debord was the founding member, and leading theorist, of the heterodox French Marxist group the Situationist International. In 1967, he had published his book The Society of the Spectacle and in 1973, he released the film version under the same name. Eisenstein had failed in his ambition to film Capital; although the situationists were of the opinion that, even if it had been made, “considering his formal conceptions and political submissiveness, it can be doubted if his film would have been faithful to Marx’s text” (Cinematic 220). In contrast Debord had succeeded, in his own opinion, in using film as a medium for presenting revolutionary theory. This was due, in part, to the events of May 68, in which Debord and the situationists had been actively involved. It was this revolutionary rupture that made possible the bringing to the screen of such a work, and which this work also celebrated. As the events had broken with the “old world” so the film aimed at the “unmaking” of the existing world. One of the situationists favorite quotations was from Marcel Carné’s film Les Enfants du Paradis (1943–5): the character Lacenaire says “It takes all kinds to make a world—or to unmake it” (Cinematic Works 157). What Debord aimed to do was to put the “unmaking” of cinema in the cause of the “unmaking” of capitalism, and so to unmake the world. These two tasks had to be carried out simultaneously, as the history of cinema cannot be distinguished from the history of modern capitalist society. The first thesis of The Society of the Spectacle, which is also the first thesis spoken on the film’s soundtrack, begins: “In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented an immense accumulation of spectacles” (Cinematic 43). That is, capital takes the form of the society of the spectacle. It does not exist in one particular image but instead reigns as a regime “in which everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation” (Cinematic 43). What is required in this situation is not “a few partial political critiques, but a total critique of the existing world” (Cinematic 221). Why then choose cinema as the site in which to conduct this critique? Doesn’t Debord fall, immediately, into a “performative contradiction”: denouncing the society of the spectacle in its most spectacular medium? This is entirely inadequate as a criticism. Debord recognizes that cinema is an integral part

Fascinating (British) Fascism: David Britton’s Lord Horror

Although we are familiar with films and novels as sites of ‘fascinating fascism’ (Sontag) there has been comparatively little attention paid to comics or the graphic novel. David Britton’s Lord Horror forces us to confront this absence. These graphic novels offer an historical fantasy based on the life of the pre-war fascist and wartime traitor William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw Haw. This disturbing representation of fascism is an explicit challenge to the anti-fascist consensus in post-war British culture. Lord Horror operates as an act of ‘counter-memory’ in recovering a repressed British fascism. It also represents fascism as a carnivalesque transgression. In doing so it uses the hybrid form of the comic book (that mixes text and images) to explore the penetration of fascism into both high and low culture. This representation inverts our sense of fascism as a limited historical phenomenon and also raises questions concerning the politics of history itself. Through an engagement with the work of Walter Benjamin these highly unusual graphic novels scramble the codes on which historical representation rests. This scrambling raises the question of ‘fascinating fascism’ with an extreme urgency and, at the same time, suggests that it cannot be resolved.