Futures and Fictions Read online

  Akomfrah talks of a narcoleptic state, considering the example of Ghana, the disillusioning experiences of the collapse of post-independence politics and the unravelling of Pan-African networks. Re-collecting beginnings also entails recalling a range of unrealised possibilities. The accompanying and opposing archival footage in Transfigured Night revives confident moments of state politics, of Kwame Nkrumah in his newly independent Ghana, followed by a state visit to the United States, moments of handshaking as expression and annunciation of a new era of international collaborations. There is quite a leap of time between these images, of more than fifty years, and a huge fatigue weighs on the present. Hope — to go back to Ernst Bloch —seems absent, invisible in these withdrawn faces and composures. But there is a sense of hope nevertheless, of an activation that only evolves within a period of recovery, a timeout — and in this sense, one might read what looks like stagnation as a state of re-covering. That standing still might be the precursor to moving on, making something new.

  Bloch repeatedly defines the relationship of thinking and the beyond: “Thinking means venturing beyond. But in such a way that what already exists is not kept under or skated over. Not in its deprivation, let alone in moving out of it” (1995: 4). What evolves from this movement of venturing as something new is not imposed, not in front of us, not coming from outside. It comes into existence through a mediated reflection of what is already there, what has happened. Only an understanding of the past can lead to something new, but this needs the process of transition and transformation. Bloch writes against psychoanalytical procedures, against the danger of being caught in what he calls “contemplative knowledge”, as this “knowledge can only refer by definition to What Has Become” (1995: 4). Instead he claims a “knowledge as conscious theory-practice” that “confronts Becoming and what can be decided within it” (1995: 4). The movement of venture seems to describe a double movement, a constant going back and forth between past and future, between recollecting, imagining, projecting. Filmmaking in this sense can be understood as a conscious theory-practice, while the cinematic can offer a space for affective recollection for an audience that allows itself a cinematographic experience, initiating a reflection.

  Over the years, I have worked with a variety of approaches to memory. And with ‘Mnemosyne’, I called on some of these. The first is an idea that you find in many writers and thinkers from James Joyce to Antonio Gramsci to The Communist Manifesto. And this is the idea that moments of crisis, moments of emergency are also at the same conditions under which new things emerge. So memory is a kind of crossroad, a junction, an intersection where the old and the new meet. The second idea is, again, one that you find in a range of writers. But the first indication that I got of it was from Aimé Césaire, one of the founding figures of the Négritude movement. You also see it in the work of Foucault, for example. And this is the notion of memory as counter cartography: memory as a map by which one re-navigates the present (Akomfrah in Scotini and Galasso 2015: 34-35).

  An Unreliable Knowledge of Knowing Only Badly

  Although The Airport eschews archival footage, Akomfrah’s film creates a cinematic space that contains in itself simultaneously the absence and presence of the past. Trusting the surface, the landscape, the ruins to speak for themselves, the film is shot on the terrain of the defunct Ellinikon International Airport in Athens. An astronaut who fell off Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is roaming around, revenants coming from Theo Angelopoulos’ movies crossing his path. The place itself is full of history. Built in 1938, it was originally used mainly by the German Luftwaffe, after the Nazis had invaded Greece; and it became important again towards the end of World War II for the United States Air Force as one of its main bases to fight the fascist forces in the south of Europe. Closed in 2001, the area has since become a shelter for refugees, coming from other elsewheres. All this is information we can look for in other sources, but cannot see on-screen. The visual and acoustic space created resists the domain of information and communication, as well as the imagery of activism. A cinematic practice, not to be misunderstood as withdrawal, that activates a quite fragile, elusive, unreliable but resistant knowledge, close to affection, transmitting a foreshadow, but anything other than facts. The moment one tries to grasp and unfold what it contains exactly, the notion of knowledge has already dissipated and taken new shapes. A knowledge that might give us the sense of knowing only badly, absolutely needed to invent something new.

  Towards the end of his lecture, Akomfrah speaks about Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), a major work on recollection, which he says he revisits every year. Lanzmann as a reference has become nearly as uncommon and unpopular as Bloch, although for quite different reasons. His categorical rejection of archival footage, banning the image for its incapacity to illustrate the logic of fascism and the experience of the Holocaust, compels survivors to speak, to re-collect their memory, while the camera obsessively pans over places of extermination, creating an imagination between the resistance of nature and its strong presence and an activation of the past’s traumatic ghosts.

  Akomfrah, again, describes the moment at the beginning of an encounter, any encounter, when the interviewee starts searching for an answer, he or she is always turning the head away from the camera, and his or her eyes turn towards an elsewhere searching for an answer. “It is always like this”, he says. Watching people recollecting. We are left with a space of recollection, of sound and image looping through the organ amorous of repetition. “Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold”, whispers a voice in The Nine Muses, quoting Zelda Fitzgerald. The future has already begun by making an image.

  1. Fred Moten introduced the double feature of The Nine Muses and Archie Shepp in Algiers, in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin on 4 October, 2013 during the conference After Year Zero – Geographies of Collaboration.

  Works Cited

  Akomfrah, John (2016), In the Shadows of the Real, lecture given at Trondheim Academy of Fine Arts (KIT), 16 March.

  Black Audio Film Collective (1986), Handsworth Songs, DVD, SD Digital file by LUX, artists’ moving image. Bloch, Ernst (1995), The Principle of Hope Volume 1. Cambridge/London: The MIT Press.

  Deleuze, Gilles (1994), Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press. Debuysere, Stoffel (2015), “Signs of Struggle, Songs of Sorrow”, in Black Camera, 6.2, Bloomington, 61-78. Donnellan, Philip (1964), The Colony, on: From Visions of Change Vol 1, DVD by the BBC.

  Gilroy, Paul and Jim Pines (1988), “Handsworth Songs: Audiences/Aesthetics/Independence – Interview with the Black Audio Collective”, in Framework 35, ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, London: Sankofa Film and Video, 9-17.

  Rushdie, Salman (1987), “Songs doesn’t know the score”, in The Guardian, 12 January, available online: http://www.diagonalthoughts.com/?p=1343; accessed 28 October, 2016.

  Scotini, Marco and Elisabetta Galasso (eds.) (2015), Politics of Memory – Documentary and Archive. Berlin/ London: Archive Books.

  Zudeick, Peter (1985), Der Hintern des Teufels – Ernst Bloch – Leben und Werk. Bühl-Moos: Elster Verlag.

  LUXURY COMMUNISM

  A Conversation between Mark Fisher and Judy Thorne

  Judy Thorne: Luxury communism1 clashes together two concepts which change when they are juxtaposed. There are a set of meanings and associations with “luxury” and with “communism”. Communism, what is communism about? It is about everyone dressed in overalls, working in factories, inefficiently producing machine parts and living in prefabricated concrete towers. It is possible, even common, to simultaneously believe that it would be better to dispossess the rich and organise production collectively, and to believe that such a system would involve reconciling yourself to a kind of grey penury and renouncing many of the pleasures of the present. A nice idea, maybe, that everyone could be equal. But look what happened in the end: the Soviet Union fell because people were envious of Western consumer goods, they stormed the Berl
in Wall because the lure of Levi Jeans just became too much to bear. In the DDR Museum in Berlin, there is actually a pair of Levi Jeans hung up for you to fondle, to feel how soft and well-constructed they are, so you can understand how the people living under communism must have suffered, and how inevitable it was for it to all collapse in the end. So that’s communism.

  What about luxury? When you are living in luxury, you have achieved the good life within capitalism. You have got a yacht with a helipad, an infinity-edge swimming pool, five large and glossy horses, and a watch so flash that people can see how important you are from across a business-class airport lounge. Luxury goods are luxurious precisely because they are exclusive; “exclusive” is basically a synonym of luxury.

  Putting the concepts of “luxury” and “communism” together does not make much sense, and it is from this lack of sense that a new idea emerges. By clashing the concept of communism together with the concept of luxury, you create a kind of libidinal energy. Luxury communism provokes you to imagine what would be possible in a world where we held all wealth in common and applied it to advancing the joy of humanity as a whole; where everything was for everyone. “Luxury” and “communism” together point towards a system of value other than that of the commodity. Communist luxury is not going to be exclusive, decadent wastefulness. It is not about signifying high — that is, higher than you — status. Our luxury is not the pleasure of possessing exclusive goods, but rather the pleasure of luxuriating: the sensual joy of having to do less work, time to be unproductive, and the possibilities for more intense sociality, eroticism and adventure this opens up. I love the picture for “what we will” on the eight-hour-day movement image; as if we had time and energy after work to go boating together. After a three-hour day maybe, or as part of a two-day work week.

  Labour Slogan Poster, 1908

  As a way of imagining what public luxury would look like, I always start thinking of cities. A city which is truly beautiful, full of theatres, forest gardens, waterways, cafés, gorgeous buildings, curving arcades, life, art, is for me the clearest way to imagine communal luxury. As Kirsten Ross has described movingly in her discussion of communal luxury in the Paris Commune, communist luxury is art and beauty plundered from private salons, fully integrated into the public sphere, and elaborated and refined by this process. Luxurious public housing. There are some actually-existing places which feel prefigurative in this regard. In Berlin there are modernist housing estates built in the 1920s which reduced me to tears when I visited them, because they were simple, artful and beautiful, and built obviously with the idea of being the ordinary way housing would be built in the new century. When you are looking for an affordable flat in this country, it is rammed home to you how completely exceptional humane building is in Britain. Areas like the Barbican offer glimpses; the actually-existing Barbican is rendered almost irrelevant by its gross exclusivity, but imagine a whole city built like the Barbican, with its rhythmic concrete splendour, water gardens and tiled plazas, as well as a fully integrated free public transport system.

  The Barbican, London (c) Judy Thorne

  Park Hill in Sheffield is another place you can go and walk around and imagine what it would be like if cities were built for the pleasure of their inhabitants — much more modest, and obviously run into the ground by neglect, and now pretty much entirely depopulated and being turned into exclusive, private and unaffordable flats by Urban Splash.

  Mark Fisher: The housing estates in Berlin, Park Hill, the Barbican — these belong to a popular modernist moment whose ambition it is now difficult to imagine. The installation of capitalist realism depended on making this popular modernist architecture and the vision that underpinned it seem retrospectively impossible. Partly, this is, as you hint towards, a question of libido — the strange, science-fictional beauty of these housing projects belies the idea that left-wing initiatives are inherently dreary. These examples make a powerful case for the idea that beauty and pleasure are enhanced by being shared. This brings out a further important point, inherent in the idea of luxury communism: a rehabilitation of the concept of the public. In neoliberal propaganda, the public has been equated with a dreary statism — which is one reason I think it is an urgent task to distinguish between the public and the state.

  Dieter Urbach image collage Large Hill House, based on a design by Josef Kaiser, reproduced with permission from Berlinische Galerie

  The triumph of capitalist realism — the idea that there is no alternative to capitalism — has depended on not only a denigration of the public, but ultimately on a denial that anything like the public really exists. This was the intuition behind Thatcher’s claim that there is no such thing as society: the idea that “society” is just some fiction that has no substantive existence. But the public — and the related idea of the public good — can both be fictional (in the sense that they are virtual, they do not have empirical existence) and real (once they are posited, they influence action and production in all kinds of ways). Park Hill, the Barbican, those housing estates in Berlin — they are all examples of the ways in which the concept of the public could inspire very tangible productions. These luxury communist spaces show how the positive fiction of the public can help to produce a future that contemporary capitalism is incapable of generating.

  JT: The public as a space for vaunting ambition is certainly something that has faded since the end of the Cold War and the triumph of the private in every sphere, from the level of social atomisation to the agents of service delivery. There was a curious way in which the public was weaponised during the Cold War, not as soldiers but as more or less successful consumers of the material provision of their respective blocs. There was an exhibition in the summer of 2015 in Berlin about urban planning in the 1960s, showing how the East and West halves of the city competed with each other to demonstrate the superiority of their economic models, with the destroyed and partitioned city as their canvas. This led to extraordinarily science-fictional plans. One idea, to provide everyone in a growing population with fabulous living spaces, was for vast housing mountains with sloping sides, arranged amongst water gardens. The mountains would be oriented in such a way as to ensure every apartment was bathed in sunlight, with the core of the giant structure occupied by some acoustically sealedoff automated industry. Josef Kaiser, the architect of this vision, described the megastructure as “a friendly hill with hanging gardens, open and accentuated by a scattering of communal facilities such as gymnastic rooms, play areas or a snack bar, each on the various floors, easily reached via lift” (quoted in Köhler & Buttlar, 2015). Now it is not at war, capitalism’s belief in, let alone ambition for, the public sphere has evaporated completely.

  Part of reclaiming — or reinventing — the public also involves politicising the interiors of all these flats, and the work and social relations that take place in them. Luxuriant domestic space would also need to be deprivatised, so no one has to eat, spend an evening or raise children alone if they don’t want to. Domestic work, as with industrial work, could be automated as far as is desirable, with vacuum cleaners which just get on with it by themselves and automated laundry systems, leaving us more time for care.

  A word on automation: often luxury communism is paired with the demand for “full automation”. Of course, we must automate all the work we have to do at the moment that is a drag, and which would still be a drag even if it was not alienated. The abolition of work and the reduction of labour time towards zero have been demands of social movements across the history of capitalism. In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, workers’ revolts in Italy, militant unionism and rave culture all took direct action to minimise the time actually spent at work. But even if work was entirely unalienated, and people did have genuine collective ownership and democratic control of the products of their labour, there would still be a lot of jobs that people did not want to do, that were boring, unpleasant or dangerous. These should be automated as far as possible, to free up as much of human time as possi
ble for activity which is satisfying, delightful and sublime. But it is important to be clear that automation by itself never liberates, and can on the contrary lead to deeper oppression. The Job Centre excels at making time not spent in work even harder, more degrading and miserable than the worst job; and is, of course, preferable to starvation, the other alternative to employment in capitalism. The automation of laundry and chopping vegetables does not free women. What frees up human time is the construction of a society based on freedom, equality and mutual aid; and this is true under whatever mode of technology a society possesses, from Bronze Age to space opera. The abolition of gender requires a queer feminist revolution. But the collectivisation of domestic labour is part of the abolition of gender, and doing that labour, whether collectively or not, will be made easier and more pleasant by automating the boring bits.

  One very early attempt to manifest the collectivisation of domestic labour architecturally was the Narkomfin building in Moscow. The building was completed in 1932, by which time the explosion of the radical imagination that happened after the 1917 Revolution had been largely quelled by Stalinism, so Narkomfin was obsolete even before it was finished. But it was a wonderful architectural expression of early Soviet feminism, which in the 1920s was far in advance of any subsequent period. Narkomfin had communal kitchens, dining rooms, and laundry, a crèche, a gymnasium and a library. Its tall windows overlooked a park and flooded the rooms with light. Private space was visually and physically diffused out into the communal spaces of the building and the gardens beyond. The building was reserved for elite Ministry of Finance workers, and then for other specific categories of worker as the fashions changed and the building became less prestigious. But it still stands in Moscow, and the idea still serves as a jumping-off point to imagine feminist and luxury communist living spaces.