Friday 26 April 2013

Autonome in Germany: some 20 excavation pits sunk into the burial mound of Fassbinder’s act of associating the Red Army Faction with Antigone


1.
Envy thou not the oppressor, and choose none of his ways.
Proverbs 3:31

2.
In the future, looking into Fassbinder’s Autumn in Germany will become a yearly observance. Its mess of fragments extracted from later German Romanticism will work like a divinatory tool, withholding an implied wealth of which its revealed moments are but hints and signposts. In particular, just now, it seems to reflect back the pathological traits that are a consequence of Romanticism's preoccupation with the separation from, and its attempted return to, the landscape of Homeland





The autumnal forest crowds forward, as if invading the available space, its expanse impedes Fassbinder’s viewfinder as he searches for the horizon. This is the location where the Romantic must emerge from the undergrowth like a wandering orphan, like the returning outsider. And at the very juncture where the orphan must appear in distracted and melancholic guise (at that juncture which also must recur as the same set of problems in the same false terms), the landscape also returns for him as an exteriorised and unachievable ideal of redemption. 

The four seasons of this orphan’s romanticism are suffused with the Homeland. Brought up by wolves, he is all at once turned against it, excluded from it, nostalgic for it, and returning to it. The Homeland is a transcendent referent, a true North in a wandering existence which begins its self-narration in primal alienation. He must stray from the Germany that appears to him as an ideal place, a place where the orphan intuits he must belong. The imperative of belonging is triggered in this place precisely because it is the place, of all places, which he cannot find. 

The German Space is simultaneously experienced by its orphans as remote and inaccessible. But it is also tantalisingly present. It seems to the orphan as if the home space is seeping through the earth he stands upon, but in an obscure, intangible, almost musical register. Kafka writes, to flee to a conquered country and soon find it insupportable there, for there is nowhere else to run. The orphan must return home but he is already there. And his home is not adequate to his return. 

This  physical location is uninhabitable, unhomely –  if he is to return home then what home means in itself has to be redeemed. The Orphan perceives an objective lack, a violation of his formative relation to place. He intuits but cannot gain access to a criminal wresting or, as in Macbeth, a violent plucking away of himself as infant. The resultant and lifelong wound, he recognises, may only be healed again by tremendous subjective effort. Romanticism, above all, is a pursuit of compensation through subjective exertion that is intended to make up for a shortfall in the world’s presence.  

For its orphans, Germany is the unhomely home – it is self-evidently physically present and yet the sense that this is still not the place remains overwhelming. This formative separation, which is the Homeland’s historical fissuring as experienced by its orphans as who they are, is only to be breached through the rapturous state that the subject demands of itself: running towards nothing/Again and again and again and again.

The orphans register themselves as  absent from their own manifestation in the scene and deduce that it is the condition, the ground, of that appearance which somehow has become damaged. Their sense of not belonging in the relations where they must appear historically, their untimeliness, is theorised as the loss of a transcendental right, a  loss that is consequential to an underlying corruption. There is no beautiful white bird that takes to the wing and leads them along the path they must take. Instead, disinheritance characterises their ontogeny and colours their idea of return – at its most intensely felt, return is conceived only in terms of burial or imprisonment. 


3.
when all those legs and 
arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join 
together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at 
such a place'


4.
Four moments in feuding: i. The structured hostility between names; ii. The  impending pull of this conflict - a conflict in which you have no personal interest and foresee no prospect of a satisfactory outcome; iii. A dependency upon what you oppose; iv. A corrective spiral emerging out of the mutually conditioning fetish for the enemy’s iconography. 
  

5.
Autumn in Germany concludes with the controversy surrounding the burial rights due to Baader, Enslin and Raspe which many in the wider populace disputed at the time but which were eventually performed by latter-day antigones under lowering skies at a cemetery in Stuttgart. The corpses themselves become a sort hybrid of toxic waste and saintly fetish that must be both contained under strict conditions and removed from veneration. 

The German Autumn is thus compared to the story of Antigone at the level of the question of how human values are carried by cultural observances. Dominant culture, as it includes its opposition into the process of reproduction,  is caught between parallel instincts of vengeance and absolvance – if it stands firm, what then? If it accedes, what then? But the question is spurious, the culture has already split and externalised an enemy that belongs to itself, just as the enemy, belonging to it, has reciprocated the externalisation in turn. 

As a fragment of the dominant culture, the discourse of the RAF rapidly and prematurely aged, becoming rigid and inescapable – its neo-pagan adherents and partisans at once so young and yet also appearing to themselves as so near to the end of their time that they had become seasonally ancient, of the old world, the children of the Samhain, because they felt themselves close to death, and therefore without option. Their perception of their moment, their terrain, was that it was dragging them with it as it drained itself into the black forest - the entirety of Germany was inextricably constrained by past crimes. It is impossible to list all the historical permissions that  generated and consistently reinforced the vicious circle of their having no choice but to choose to go underground – to go with history, to accede to the suck of a false and spectacular polarisation. 

The most significant components of the RAF’s history are always going to be those cultural values to which it was implacably antagonistic and yet which it was compelled to reproduce. It is now evident that as a cultural formation thrown by the world into the world, that the RAF was carried along an external trajectory, even as it asserted the ideology of its own autonomy. It is the ambiguity situated in agency, in the question of separation and belonging, and how the ideology of agency and capture functions in the understanding of those involved as the poor orphans of the ‘underground’ that the film Autumn in Germany reflects upon. 

The path of pseudo-agency as that is followed into the forest by ‘the underground’ supposes the subjective crossing of thresholds of escalation which progressively cut off other options until the point where there is, with echoes of Macbeth again, no going back. This has a subjective corollary in a  rapid and sickly maturation (maturation here is understood as the progressive closing of available options). Growing aged very quickly is the defining characteristic of those who participate in the party of war  –  the blank eyes of child soldiers.  However, In another register, freudianism for example, the RAF’s path may also be interpreted as regressive, and the destination of its politics infantile. There is both together  a too-soon growing u, and a capricious, tantrum driven return to the nursery. We can use the fictionalised conceit of  ageing-infantilism, as that might be extracted from the theory of neoteny, as a description for the process undergone phylogenetically in the 3 generations of the RAF, and ontogenetically in those individuals absorbed into it.

The German underground milieu of that period, by a mutation induced by the ‘exceptional’ inheritance of fascism, overcame the coding of its (otherwise to be expected) neoteny, and thereby suspended the moment which ordinarily would have seen it correct and mitigate its various rejections of conditions with a realistic awareness of its own capacities. Instead, by incorporating the mytheme of exceptionality (the inheritance of German fascism and antifascism), the Underground gained its access tothe most atavistic of social-ideological formations. Identifying the mechanism of exceptionality as sufficient legitimation for  its own actions, as if the milieu was being written into its own story, it could not but positively feed back into its own sense of historical mission: how could it not take on the ancient and burdensome obligation of ethical war? 

At that juncture where the coding for engagements with the Other first throws the protagonist into question, a basic ahistorical algorithm for human culture (myth) has already produced an eternal outcome which the milieu must adopt: the relation between belonging and exclusion. The romantics of the underground milieu, as eternal orphans, came to inhabit both poles, ambivalently – victims and avengers who are made to appear at the end of a cycle and thus embody the final confrontation (in this case, as the polarisation on the true inheritance of German culture). The orphans raise their clenched fists at the graveside with the leaves falling around them, the rain is in their faces. And police horsemen gather amongst the trees. 


6.
... the avengers intending your destruction wait for you. The Furies of Hades and the gods, will see you caught up in your own wicked acts. Now listen. Very soon, the men and women of your house will be consumed with anguish. And hatred will stir up the cities to rise against you. All those whose sons who died in war and suffered burial-rites from dogs, wild beasts, or crows will also rise against you...

7.
The dead of the RAF,  the orphans Baader, Enslin and Raspe, appear like Polyneices in the narrative of its sympathisers. And yet, within a slightly different register, the RAF kidnappers of Schleyer now also resemble the unflinching Creon. The equivalent historical roles in enemy military formations simulate each other more than they separate themselves within the register of political difference. 

Creon and Antigone articulate two halves of a single, janus-like figure; each is bound uncomprehendingly to the other by an irresolvable dispute of interpretation of the Law, with neither capable of putting an end to the relation. Both are defined by their unbending reading of an iron law which functions in social consciousness as a means for throwing out multiple and conflicting certainties. Antigone is Creon to the extent that both are products of a single legal code, even as they appear as irrevocably alternative to each other. Their antagonistic readings are generated from a severely restricted palate of historically available character traits, none of which is sufficiently autonomous to develop a perspective that is not bound by law, and thereby capable of releasing the structural feud’s hold upon both of them. 

These fixed traits, as they feed into  hyper-sensitised political identities by which they are validated on one side (and thus condemned by the other) are bent towards an always readied state of perpetual retaliation. 

A feud condemns both parties to fanatically search out what is denounced in the other for the sole reason that this alleged transgression is associated, above all, with the traces of the Other. 



8.
After 43 days we have ended Hanns-Martin Schleyer's pitiful and corrupt existence... His death is meaningless to our pain and our rage... The struggle has only begun. Freedom through armed, anti-imperialist struggle.

RAF statement October 1977


9.
Upon serious injury, this most voracious of scavengers, is plunged into an inescapable descending spiral of responses that is set in motion by two divergent instinctual pathways. The flight response is stimulated by immediate pain and the beast plunges into it, becomes it, and inhabits its injury by withdrawal. But this first  response is soon matched by another, no less instinctual –  upon recognition of its own exposed viscera, the animal is moved, by the visual stimulation of its bite reflex, into an overriding scavenging mode. Thus with two overriding but exclusive instincts running together the animal is split into two simultaneous behaviour patterns. The beast is impelled both to devour the flesh of itself even as it shrinks from its own teeth. 


10.
Fascism is retroactively set in motion by antifascism. Or rather, fascism is the name of the anticipatory reaction (reaction indicating that element of existence not articulated by ‘progressivism’) to those implied tendencies of social democracy which are later realised as antifascism.  Together, fascism and antifascism form a single conflicted figure held by the action of surface tension to a moving ground from which the figure is unable to separate itself.  Fascism is the flight from social democracy. Antifascism is the flight from fascism (which it understands to be an altogether other flight from social democracy). Both flee from the necessity of their engagement with the totalising reproduction of their political expediency. 

From the perspective of any feud-based political fragment, it is necessary, in order to sustain the dyadic figure’s relevance, that  each antagonist performs in the manner expected by the other. More importantly, this expected performance is essential for the continued internal coherence of the opponent.


11.
Autumn in Germany shows the desultory rituals of the underground left at the graveside of three members of the Red Army Fraction, and then its crowds streaming away and soundtracked (as if from a pop concert or football game). Briefly, a minor incident escalates into a skirmish... as the police advance, the crowd takes up the old SA chants, ‘Clear the streets, the SA are marching’ and then ‘Seig Heil, Seig Heil.’ 

This satirical unveiling of the police’s alleged true character involves the expropriation and projection of Nazi-era motifs. It is very clear that those chanting ‘Seig Heil’ are not fascists. At least, this is clear because the film supplies corroborative visual content. But if the screen were blank, if there were no visual information, then these chants would appear indistinguishable from actual fascist chanting. 

It is quite strange then, this instinct manifesting within the antifascist crowd to chant in fascistic phrases, as if the crowd cannot refuse itself the luxury of mouthing such obscenities, and thereby give voice to that which it identifies as its absolute Other. If at the heart of this is an urge, an imp of the perverse, then it demonstrates the convoluted nature of the German orphans. The need to confront fascism, to face it, to test the self against its allure... and thus the faustian necessity of summoning it up, and fixing it in its place, on the other side of the self. The overriding need to know the enemy by introjection and thereby master it, as if it were the self.

It is from out of the background to such confrontations, the fascistic character traits of antifascism, that the Anti-German critique first emerged under a cloak of self-contradiction. In the ten minute documentary footage under discussion, with its ‘Here’s to you Niccola and Bart...’ soundtrack, we are set the problem of the fascistic characteristics inherent to all militantism: the unaccountable organisations; their atavistic representation of will and fate; the mythologisation of irresolvable conflicts; the violent kidnappings and murders; the criminalisation of the enemy; the rationalisation of crimes; the fetish of weaponry; the sentimentalisation of our struggle; the militarisation of the ‘committed’ existence; the flags; the salutes; faces masked; the black uniforms; the graves; the dead heroes; the poetry;  the soldierly ideal; Romance. Above all, Romance.



13.
The bleak, yet fertile, yet indifferent, yet forgiving land where the murdered, the murderers, the hunger strikers, the kidnapped, the kidnappers, the chanters, the police are all returned ... the deep land, this backdrop, a stage hemmed in, first by autumnal and then by frosted forest; a habitat that is adequate to the actualisations of historical struggle – a battlefield crying out for heroes. Leaves fall on the land and cover it at the end of the cycle. 

Here is Polyneices, the dead hero who has been denied his return to this land, this earth from which he was first raised up and now must return. And beneath it all the maddening fore-knowledge of death, and the rank absurdity of existence lived in relation to death. Here, this pole of this feud, revivified from out of the deepest grave as yet another instance of the exceptional cause, and within the discourse of which are encompassed the land and suffering, historical law and chthonic rights, first as a constellation of terms made significant by military struggle, and then as a dream of victory at last dreamt  precisely in the terms of a final separation from the other and its cause, its claim on the land, suffering, historical law and chthonic rights. The return is always imagined in terms of an irrevocable separation. 



14.
But if this communist milieu had not adopted the militarist path, which slogans other than ‘Clear the streets, the SA are marching’ might it have adopted? What are the chants that might have released the crowd from its Germanic inheritance of loss and separation? What would have articulated more truthfully its properly mediated situation in the world? Wouldn’t truthful slogans of weakness function more militantly in this context than the chants of a spurious military potency? 

The slogans they did not shout:  ‘Our involvement constitutes the content of our desire to escape from it;’  ‘As proletarians we were separated from this land, we now may never return to it;’  ‘The capacity of the productive relation exceeds all capacities to resist it;’ ‘We are powerless to transform the circumstances that have produced us;’ ‘We are also our own police;’ ‘‘Our politics are merely the incorrect formulation of the problem of our existence;’ ‘Our autonomous actions rehearse the limit of our historical determination;’ ‘If we are to chant, then we must chant against ourselves.’


15.
The pro-revolutionary milieu awards to itself not only the right to undertake a critique of its conditions but also the right to possess the future form of human society.  The milieu habitually fails to recognise that it is in fact a product of the conditions it revolts against. It forgets that its solutions are as much constrained by the parameters of the existing social relationship as any other political ideology. The milieu imagines that the ideas it gives form to belong to a future eternity or at least the future, and it does not consider how tainted these ideas are by what has gone before. ‘For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain : he heapeth up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them.’ 

The milieu seeks for itself a transcendent role and yet it becomes embroiled in endless duels with both rivals and outright enemies. Such duels drag it back into mere politics, a situation where it most conforms to the conventions of its time. It finds itself ordered rather than ordering, bound up in conditions where it is programmed to give form to the full range of possible alienated comportments of the present within its own activity – a range of afflictions that, without the milieu’s interventions, would not have found form at all. It is through its commitment to duelling that the milieu is employed to realise the social relation’s most dominant values even through the revolt against those values.


16.
“There is between us an intimate connection of a nature which makes it a point of honour with me to try..."

The productive manifold of society generates feud-like conflicts, or duels, between competing forces which do not individually, or even collectively, begin to negate the contradictions that have  brought them into being, and of which they are mere suggestions. Neither fascism nor antifascism, nor the two together, articulate the real nature of the capitalist relation. All that the struggle against fascism, as it is described in Autumn in Germany, or even the ‘real’ political struggle against capitalism, preserves of the violent, primal separation of man from himself as he is caught up in the reproductive apparatus is violence as a constant. All that any particular conflict articulates of its underlying determinants is the prevailing conditions for violence. There is violence appearing at the surface where there is violence obscured beneath. The opportunity for the transcendence of such conditions does not lie in the agency of the combatants.


17.
In more recent history, the Anti-German tendency has emerged within the German homeland from the same ideological template as earlier versions of anti-imperialism but  sharply deviating or merely inverting the conclusions of 'ant-americanism' and 'Anti-Zionism'. Just as the Red Army Fraction chose its acronym with provocative care so the Anti-Germans, in response to renewed German nationalism, staged gratuitous counterintuitive demonstrations in favour of the allied destruction of 'Germany' during the 2nd World War. 

Beneath all variants of homeland anti-imperialism lies a primal psychological identification with an already established national enemy as if it were a representation of the self outside the nation’s borders. The Palestinians c’est moi. Corresponding to this identification with 'the other side' is activated a primal repudiation of the interpellated patterns of patriotism that are institutionalised by social reproduction. This 'counter-identification' most commonly proceeds very logically from the formulation 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' but the twist in Anti-Germanism is that the given, constituted national 'enemy' is impishly promoted to the status of 'friend'. A simple case of inversion of given terms from which a logical procedure of inference then proceeds. Anti-Germanism, as with so much burning-the-flag anti-imperialism, turned patriotism upside down... and yet remained trapped within the categories of patriotism and nationhood, without ever reducing them to an economic  analysis. 

The hyper-sensitised microcosm of Anti-Germanism was unable to release itself from its fascination with the historical centrality of Germany, precisely because its categories were constructed to endlessly encounter the objects of this fascination, albeit in inverted form. By definition, its repudiation of 'Germany' supposed the presence of an autonomous and archetypal character within nation states which remains impervious to all critique, and is thus, essentially, inexplicable. 

There remained in the Anti-German analysis, an active reproduction of the constraints of German ideology, which would always cause it to conclude that it was not Anti-German enough, a conclusion which sent it into a vicious circle. It is this disinhibited extension of logic, a rapid bolting or going to seed, from such severely constrained theoretical grounds that is most damaginly prevalent within the categories of the various critiques of domination – the categories of pro-revolutionary thought are projected and applied in all directions, except to the role of those categories in reproducing the fixed apparency of opposition. 

At the point where critique ought to end by documenting its own limitations and failure of perspective, the pro-revolutionary milieu in general continues to extrapolate and project frenziedly as a means to compensate or transcend that failure. At its every point of appearance, the opposition to capital also always functions affirmatively by realising objects as a damaged progeny which otherwise would have remained unknown, and thus unrecuperable. 

The doubled character of oppositionism, which must always also affirm the entirety of its object array, induces a perpetual retreat from once potently resistant forms. No sooner is a position established than it must be abandoned under pressure of its non-sustainability. Every formation must split. The  tendency to schism in political positions binds them to this rule of oscillating departure and return to principles: internal pressures cause fissures and separations along deep structural faultlines that are buried far beneath the formation’s capacity to engage them. Vertiginously, damn’d spots of complicity are first discovered on the body and then hysterically externalised. 

Internal splits develop around flaws and  inconsistencies. Unexpected weaknesses of the self are projected onto, and identified with, perceived heresies of dissident factions becoming the pretext for further expulsions and schisms. Anti-germans separated themselves from generic antifascism along the faultline of anti-imperialism. Where the left followed a conventional path of support for national liberation projects (implying the underlying analysis of proletarian states), anti-germans identified with what it took to be the beleaguered cause, and the progressive role, of the ‘highest’ phase of ‘civilisation’. 

At some point, which may be described in seasonal terms, their German Autumn, all fragmented objects/affects belonging to revolt must be reduced to fetishes in the enactment of base political feuds (Anti-Germans versus anti-imperialists) and thus become separated from a more immediate repudiation of general conditions which these feuds only serve to unconsciously realise. Where it is drawn into feuding, the pro-revolutionary milieu transforms its vulnerable and ambivalent objects into mere affirmational weapons as each faction attempts to reproduce itself as a formidable opponent within the existing social relation. 

Curiously, and this cannot be overstated, it is at the point of realising a stage of realpolitik, or a pragmatics, or a militarisation, or a formalisation of structure, or a separation of itself as a distinct entity, and undertaken in the context of opposition to feuding competitors as an act of maturation, that is to say, it is at that point where this faction proposes its undertakings as something real in the world, that its critical potential falls back into affirming the single description of existing power relations. At the moment of its highest seriousness, emerging from its competition with rivals, the form of pro-revolutionary politics always lapses into tragedy.


18.
In order to head off the milieu’s ever-present tendency to pass into a mature phase where it considers it is capable of realising itself as a revolutionary subject, self aware  social critics must step in and foreclose on the formation of any concrete politics. The anticipated moment of critical maturation is never here. The pro-revolutionary figure, its perceptions, its critiques, its proposed goals, its targets, its relations are fruit grown at the wrong latitude  and which will not ripen... any attempt to subjectively realise revolutionary relations must end in complete and ruinous capture and thus in the reproduction of capitalist relations as a discourse of revolution. 

The real strength of pro-revolutionary critique is located in the part-formed, neotenous and ambivalent character of the objects which it identifies as significant and at the point it abandons them. 

The milieu is capable of registering negation, and it is also able to read the game that it is playing a few moves ahead, perceiving the necessity for a negation of the negation. However, its groupscules rarely intuit that the milieu will never achieve the position to realise what it perceives as necessary

It is a defining characteristic of the milieu that it is not in position. It does not have, and cannot have, enough resources, enough time, enough information at its disposal – it is only ever a solidification of consciousness, brief and sporadic episodes of wakefulness, taking the form of lapsing objects, that appear at the edge of the crisis in social relations. The milieu is not the mechanism that transforms society; it is merely a fragment of society which recognises the need for humanity to activate that mechanism.


19.
According to Bolk, ‘man in his bodily development is a primate foetus that has become sexually mature’, and consequently can reproduce. His theory proposes that a genetic code can stop one kind of growth and encourage another. Man is a neonate ape to whom this happened. Unfinished, he is able to learn more.
Ape Theatre John Berger 1990


20.
Awareness is an autumnal state, and seeks for itself threshold sites, portals to the next. It stands somewhere between the conditions of historically given neoteny and atavistic maturity. Autumnal consciousness identifies, even incarnates, the paths along which the bound energies of the dominant relation are dissipated. It is a conduit. A middle term between the abstract relation and the suffering masses, giving expression to the limits of each as they wither and die. It seeks the release of given relations from their tight, Summer circuits;  wishing that they would relax, let go of themselves, it seeks for the world a state of deciduous dormancy. 

For-human consciousness is a low sun, a cooling breeze, a southerly migration. It is an antechamber to Winter. Its transitional and structured appearance in the world ought to ensure that the ambition of a constituted conscious opposition to capital never exceeds this role of disaffection by which it understands that it records, gives form to, even embodies, the crisis of present relations, but without in anyway articulating the form, in its own formations and practices, of a concrete transcendence. Autumn's child never pursues a positive politics but engages in deliberate and systematic refusal of every political formation, and thereby opens cleared spaces for those who will appear in other and earlier times.