by the Bureau of Melodramatic Research
March 2012
This text is emotionally part of Bezna#2, but will remain as well outside of its reproductive cycle.
The Reproduction of Darkness
All the way through the protests negative, dark feelings - rage, despair, mania and brutal honesty have been the main accepted, broadcasted and lived emotions. The politics of negativity have been at work and they bound together across class, gender and age different communities, from state functionaries to pensioners, from social activists to unemployed, from workers to students. Fantasies of gallows, mefistos, chopped animals, splatter, decapitations and death were animating every vision of realpolitik. The voodoo effect was re-invested every night, the protesters became the new witches holding magical powers besides the voting power bestowed by a blunt representative democracy. Witches covent versus parliamentary impeachment.
After the violent nights of 14th and 15th of January(1), there was an inverted sense of revolutionary heroism. The heroic image of the able-bodied revolutionary (or the ultra-fit ultra) was replaced by a crazy display, an effective schizo-magical practice of exorcizing the neoliberal demons. There was a Grand Guignol unfolding in the public sphere, a grotesque spectacle with all the props including the SMURD-nurses(2) who were traditionally present on stage to take care of the fainting bourgeoisie. The masochism of freezing in cold winter goes hand in hand with the sadism of the representation. The harsh conditions determine the genre on both the political and the climatic level. There is no hope for warming up (except global warming), one depicts blood while struggling to pump one’s own into the body extremities. Radical meteorology and extreme economical conditions (impoverishment) have produced new affectivities and bleak radicalism.
What is the relation between an aging population and civil disobedience? Can the old become the new ultras in their infinite rage and readiness to surrender their bodies to police violence? What is the dialectics between the “demographic winter” and the revolutionary winter in Bucharest, 2012?
Inhabiting a decrepit body and living a precarious life means becoming violence-proof. The old body is disposable. The subject becomes faint. There is no becoming, there is only fading away. In this precarious bodily state, violence is material, it is the act of staying alive.
In the square precarity becomes a self-assumed methodology. Poor quality images accompany vulnerable bodies, the demonstration placards are handwritten lists of pleas on recycled bottoms of cardboard boxes, black-and-white A4 prints on paper, occasionally covered in plastic sheaths sneaked out of some office desk to the square. A trash culture inhabits the place, the Gothic scenario is staged in the form of a B-movie, low-resolution, on a hand-held camera. According to Hito Steyerl, the poor image is the “lumpen proletariat in the class society of appearances”(3). It is disposable, but also easily reproduced, distributed, replaced. There is no technological pressure anymore, no aesthetic claims and no authorship. The slogans spread, we copy bleakness, we reproduce depression.
In the wake of the anti ACTA protest, Piata Universitatii defies copyright. The reproduction of darkness is free.
We will be all old worms, old hooligans, because there is no offspring, there is no future. Old and New Europe are both old. The fear of aging will not be solved anymore because everything will be wrinkled and all consume will be +70. The gendarms will be old, police will have Alzheimer, the heroes of the revolution will be decrepit. The aging spectacle will be watched over by heart&lung machines.
“I am an old hooligan, but a young worm”
“I am a worm-pensioner”
“The plan of the government: general euthanasia”
“You will pay for the cultural, social and economic genocide”
The Darkness of Reproduction
Birth rates are slowing down, graph curves are bending down. Reproduction means future, the reproductive imperative is part of a narrative of optimism, inherent to the capitalist system. No reproduction conveys no future, but capitalism carries no future as well. Financial futurism cannot sustain actual existence in the long run.
Winter has been traditionally associated with barrenness, with childlessness, it is the time when forces must be saved, it is a time for pure survival. Maybe it isn’t a coincidence that these protests arose in the middle of the cold winter, because there is no more rationale to self-preserve. The economic and material conditions that capitalism reproduces for the 99% can be experienced as an extended and never ending ice age.
In the middle of the cold square, images of abundance are lacking, there is only an abundance of images of poverty. But how is the political power represented, what are the internal relationships between members of the political class? A pink placard was depicting a mother-and-child classic theme, whereby the role of the suckling is taken by President Basescu and the mother is played by Elena Udrea. Too much breastfed, it writes. The man-politician-chief is represented at the breast of the woman-politician-subordinate. What is striking about this representation is that it reveals, as Mariarosa dalla Costa and Selma James put it, the woman “as a safety valve for the social tensions caused by capitalist organization”(4). Actually the woman-politician, Elena Udrea, was in this case representative of all the wives who had to comfort their newly laid off husbands (it is obvious that many of this category were present at the protests). At the same time, this is a proof of the still strong nuclear family doctrine. The image renders transparent what the same author called “the productivity of passivity”, while it probably had the original intention to create a counterpart for the constant infantilization of the (protesting) population and, in turn, to represent the president himself as a dependent, spoiled infant. The biological reproduction has been supplanted by the reproduction of political power, which has to be stopped.
Radical passivity is a non-productive passivity, it is one with the un-mother, with the non-reproduction. The refusal of work(5) must be accompanied by a general strike in the realm of reproduction. The capitalist function of the uterus must fade out.
Will the spring be silent?(6)
As the story tells us, the stork delivers the babies in spring, flying north from the poor south. The rich north is getting warm then and is hoping for high fertility rates. In the wake of the harsher and harsher austerity measures, we will all grow old and invulnerable to the violent protectors of the rich. Progeria and depression, rage and despair and above all a sense of community and social cohesion could stop the next spring to be silenced.
1. In January 2012 the biggest anti-government protests took place in Romania (the widest social unrest after the 1989 Revolution)
2. SMURD= Romanian Mobile Emergency Service for Resuscitation and Extrication
3. Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image, 2009 http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/
4. Mariarosa dalla Costa & Selma James, The Power of the Women and the Subversion of the Community, 1972
5. Franco Bifo Berardi, What is the Meaning of Autonomy Today?, 2003 http://eipcp.net/transversal/1203/bifo/en
6. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962
Bezna on web (you can download here all the issues): http://bezzzna.blogspot.ro/
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