But there’s a different aspect to the fusion of art and politics; once again, it can be expressed through invoking Picasso. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein recalls how Picasso and several others were wandering down some Paris boulevard at the start of WWII. She writes, ‘All of a sudden, down the street came some big cannon, the first any of us had seen painted, that is camouflaged … Picasso stopped, spellbound, and said … ‘it is we who have created that’. The link Picasso made between cubist techniques and the tank’s military camouflage suggests the uses to which art may be put may be less than progressive.

In trying to answer the question of how artists might take on a political agenda and not compromise their creativity, one might bear this story in mind. The question itself perhaps implies that creativity is an a priori good, something precious to be sheltered, protected and encouraged as much as possible. But is it this simple? Indeed the ‘social transformations’ referred to by the forum’s question have created a situation where we can no longer merely endorse creativity. Creativity is no longer innocent (if it ever was). It is no longer linked to the autonomy of art, or necessarily an antidote to the vulgarities of capitalism. The world we inhabit, governed by a market economy that has invaded all spheres of life, is at least partially driven by the practices of creativity, of innovation. This isn’t to say that all art is essentially compromised, hostage to the market, co-opted by the imperatives of the new economy and creative capitalism. It is to say that something like creativity needs to be contested, even reclaimed by art―and this is itself a form of politics.

What differences lie between the age of Guernica―of modernism, the golden age of the avant-garde―and today? One difference is that the gap between radical art―with its connection to bohemian or alternative culture―and the wider society has largely collapsed. Much contemporary art can now be regarded as another, albeit successful, commodity. One only need think of the spectacular rise of the ‘mega-exhibition’ and the ‘biennial’, which, according to Julian Stallabrass, function as ‘supermarkets of freely-circulating artworks without historical depth and regional specificity’. He argues that such instances of global contemporary art function as a kind of universal brand that ‘[hollows] … out cultures and replaces history with geographical diversity’. At this level, art as a global commodity celebrates the liberation of the cultural sign (and cultural labour) from its place of origin―leaving the cultural consumer to luxuriate in exoticism, otherness or transgression, or simply the acquisition of more cultural capital.

Moreover, many of the formal techniques of the avant-garde―abstraction, surrealism, cubism, montage and so on―have not led to the creation of new social values, as many artists and philosophers hoped, but have been harnessed for the cultural economy, where ever new combinations of images and stimulated sensibilities are needed to satisfy the modern audience. In the words of one writer, ‘Art now functions as R&D for other parts of the culture industry’.

Cultural production has become a mainstream activity, reflected in both the growth of the art market but also in the increasingly close relationship between art and the state. University courses in the creative arts flourish as universities specialise in more vocationally oriented activities that were once an adjunct to getting a degree―making art, writing, filmmaking and so forth are now courses in their own right―and subsidise the lives of many artists, as students or teachers. The ‘creative industries’ have become a mantra-like phrase: Richard Florida tours the world talking how the ‘creatives’ can lead to urban, communal and economic regeneration. Nowadays politicians enthusiastically talk of the contribution of the arts to the economy. Artistic bohemian culture is drawn into the cultural economy; art and artists are incorporated into the world of tourism, with graffitied laneways or the artists themselves as a must-see for visitors. Just take this typical example from a recent Sydney Morning Herald:

Melbourne’s art scene is a visual hoot, one way or another, with the people-watching almost as entertaining as the canvases. Artists, curators and visitors alike are dressed either beret-to-pointy-shoes in black or are hippies, their kaftans cut from a Ken Done drop-cloth … [It’s so easy to indulge in] Melbourne’s eclectic arts scene. Many galleries are within walking distance … [while] the jewel in Melbourne’s artistic crown is the National Gallery of Victoria in the central business district, a potpourri of grand masters, important Australian works and the downright weird.

So one of the major ‘transformations’ that art needs to deal with is the changing status and function of art―the centrality of the aesthetic and artistic technique to the current economy and the fusion of what were once radical cultures and practices into the mainstream. The question of art and politics cuts both ways: yes, we would like art to be engaged with politics, but let’s not forget what much of art is today, what it enables and legitimises.

Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that the project of successfully merging art and politics faces an all powerful enemy, one able to co-opt creativity, aesthetic dissonance and disruption and leave us with no alternative but to mourn Guernica. The spread of neo-liberalism, cognitive capitalism, Empire―whatever you wish to call the thing that captures and colonises creativity―is vast, but it is also thin and looking increasingly fragile. The cultural economy is predicated upon the need for endless growth, where the way forward can only lie in increased profits and more consumption. The Global Financial Crisis, a looming sense of environmental and social collapse, and the challenge to a universalised model of liberal democracy―as US hegemony―suggest that the cry for alternative ways of living is becoming stronger. That we may well be facing a more radical sense of transformation than anything we have seen for a long time offers a chance for art to engage as the generator of alternative values, as a means to refocus our attention on things and processes that escape or are marginalised by mediated society. Art can be an indicator of different ways to live, producing different sense of time and space, different affective relations, different ways of being-together outside of the spectacle.

Yet it is too much of a burden to place on art to expect that it can sustain a sense of the ‘political’ by itself. Not even Guernica could stop a war. A more productive approach is to see ‘political’ art linked with other forces of opposition―social movements, marginalised peoples, threatened communities―as well as others, engaged thinkers and activists, who can raise oppositional voices and alternative ways of understanding. Political art helps develop and maintain a counter-public sphere, where dominant ideas and assumptions can be challenged.

The social transformations occurring today compel us to examine the use and abuse of art, and particularly the notion of creativity. To interrogate, contest and ultimately reclaim the concept of creativity from the cultural economy, from the creative industries and the like, is itself a political act. Beyond this, the time for proclaiming the end of history, the triumph of the market, and that ‘there is no alternative’ seems at an end. Art has an important role in the generation of alternatives, and in this most general sense can be ‘political’ in widening the range of possible discourses―of ways of seeing, feeling and acting. But for this sense of the political to be more than a fleeting sensation requires the bodily and cognitive insights generated by art to be linked with other sources of oppositional discourse―activists, intellectuals, radical social movements. Art occupies a different realm to these things, but better to have a politics based in mutual reinforcement than division and conquest.

By Simon Cooper

Bio: Simon Cooper is an Arena Publications editor. This is an edited version of a talk presented as part of the Art and Politics Forum at the Arena Project Space, 17 May 2011.

For the present, only a few seriously entertain the second possibility, even though their numbers are steadily increasing. Many more only sense the emergence of a period of farreaching change. While this sense of a future is typically expressed through a wide range of activities within the green range of possibilities, they are frequently given more focus today by the prospect of climate change. For the most part they are framed by the notion of sustainability — the maintenance of basically normal expectations but by different means. Again, there is a small minority who, as they sense the emergence of changes, which could be overwhelming, respond in a geo-political register.

The recent public statement by Malcolm Fraser, Generals Gration and Sanderson, Barry Jones too — figures with different political and professional histories — fall into the latter category. Along with a wider group of prominent Australians, they have responded to the mortal danger of nuclear proliferation. Aware that nuclear weapons have been in the forefront of fundamental changes in relations between nation-states, they recognise that the further proliferation of nuclear weapons now is set within changing circumstances. The conjunction of climate change and the latent conflicts stirred or amplified by extreme economic stress might precipitate scarcely imaginable devastation.

It is by no means evident that Fraser and co-authors of the statement see nuclear energy itself as inherently problematical. Even if they were to agree that it is one more example of a profound shift in the way we conduct our interchange with the natural world, it is probable that most of this group would still view it as contributing to economic growth, with the added qualification that it calls for rigorous control.

Nevertheless, this public statement on this particular issue is significant — a small sign of a growing awareness that the scope and reconstititive power of the technosciences now strike at the heart of the prospects of living beings on planet earth.

It is of special interest that this group of prominent Australians was responding to Obama’s turnaround, not only on proliferation but also on the need to eliminate the vast stockpiles of nuclear weaponry. Could it beings then that he is aware, as the end of the short American century approaches, that a global redistribution of levels of consumption is likely to gather pace? Quite apart from climate change and economic crisis, that shift alone is likely to alter the lines of political and cultural division that we have too readily come to take for granted.

When, close in the wake of Prime Minister Rudd’s call for a ban on all nuclear weapons, Obama’s initiative became the context in which Malcolm Fraser and others issued their statement, we can assume that one of their objectives was to emphasise that this issue should be seen as beyond any narrowness of party politics. But that did not ensure that their words gained any lasting public attention. Indeed, as the issue of climate change so clearly illustrates, even when the public is far ahead of government in their willingness to act upon fundamental ethical issues, that by no means guarantees that their voices can prevail in circles of government. Increasingly, our forms of government, our mainstream media as well, stand in the way of effective representation.

Unlike climate change the issue of nuclear proliferation is far from the centre of contemporary public awareness. Forty years ago, when the memory of Hiroshima was still vivid and the confrontation of rival systems raised the prospect of mutually assured destruction, the situation was very different. At that time just one single expression of the new-found engagement of the technosciences with the natural world could raise the spectre of what E. P. Thompson termed ‘exterminism’, the process of the self-destruction of a species.

There is no reason to believe that Fraser and others were raising the more general issue of the technoscientific reconstitution of the world when they spoke out on the particular issue of nuclear proliferation. It is unlikely that more than one or two among their number had given any sustained attention to the obvious reality that a whole series of technosciences now deliver the power to terminate the distinctive form of life of our species.

The basic issue cannot be represented by nuclear weapons alone. It entails technoscientific powers more generally, as they proliferate within political systems, which offer no effective representation of how their significance should be interpreted. If we are to speak of a transition to a different epoch it is this issue — the process of reconstituting our mode of interchange with the natural world — which should be the main focus of attention.

Nuclear technology offers powers of reconstituting the physical world; genetic technology offers the same in relation to living beings; digital technology offers to dissolve knowledge in data or information. All of these powers might well be celebrated if their significance could be more effectively interpreted, but for the present they are instruments. They feed into an orientation towards growth and, with that, contribute to a pervasive myopia: a conviction that assumes that we are still engaged in the conquest of nature and progressively casting aside limitations to our freedom. Is it possible that this is an illusion and that for the present the technosciences facilitate our being overwhelmed by markets which, rather than contributing to these ends, carry us towards the dissolution of life-settings.

Certainly a historical movement is gradually emerging that senses and moves towards a different order of living. But sensing is not comprehending. Nevertheless, for the present and in spite of that limitation, the movements at the grassroots are ahead of any mass public stand by the intellectual and professional groupings.

Half a Step with Kevin Rudd
Perhaps Kevin Rudd was sensing, rather than seriously entertaining, a more far-reaching transformation than even an unprecedented, but ‘merely economic’, crisis could convey when he opened his recent essay in The Monthly in a portentous vein.

From time to time in human history there occur events of truly seismic significance, events that mark a turning point between one epoch and the next, when one orthodoxy is overthrown and another takes its place.

It was as if, in invoking the language of the passage of epochs, Rudd the politician was about to reposition himself as the philosopher statesman and was actually contemplating the prospect of historical transformation. Instead, he came up with a damp squib. An epoch in Rudd’s dictionary is a period of thirty years or so, and in any case it does not relate to comprehensive change but just to a major economic hiccup: one, this time around, building up into a full-bodied neoliberal belch.

Basically Rudd’s answer is more of the same, a return to rapid growth only, under Labor, with more active regulation of the economy. Of course, within the limits of contemporary politics, Kevin Rudd does impress his public as morally serious to an unusual degree, as wishing to be a man of his word. The issue we are raising relates far less to his character than it does to his understanding. And given the pressures and expediencies of political life that includes any honesty of purpose, as at the time of his election, being undermined by the logic of events (one thinks not only of climate change, but also of guarantees apparently given to unions on their right to protect working conditions).

No Way for a Third Way?
In the mainstream media, understanding the meltdown is ceasing to be a contentious issue. Certainly a hard core of resistance is maintained within the Murdoch regime, but otherwise the doctrine of minimal government and ‘let the market rule’ is off the agenda. Social democracy and the ‘third way’ is back, but with a difference. Now the boundaries have closed in. There is no longer a middle way as if between capitalism and socialism, rather only within the terms of two versions of capitalist dominance: between ‘let the market rule’ with minimum regulation and the recognition that regulation is indispensable. Within the mainstream it is clear that the latter has prevailed.

The picture is different among the more searching print periodicals (still mainly based in Victoria), as it is among their online counterparts, with the exception of The Monthly which, even if its editorial inclination included major reservations, has at the time of writing temporally gagged itself by editorial board chairman Robert Manne’s surprisingly supportive endorsement of most of the basic positions of Kevin Rudd’s manifesto. Latterly, it should be added, a series of international figures have commented on the Prime Minister’s article. Without exception they respond within the general frame of economic regulation and recovery.

Otherwise the print periodicals — we have in mind mainly Overland, Dissent and their editors — while actively critical of Rudd’s inertness on basic issues relating to climate change, give few hints that we may be passing into a period of genuinely epochal transformation. While key contributions to these publications are especially critical of the Rudd government’s inertness on climate change, it is as if they lack access to any critical standpoint that might frame a perspective that actually breaks out of the limits of the ‘third way’. Their contributions do not discuss the way the neo-liberal surge of growth was empowered by a radically newfound conjunction: the historically new level of technological capability feeding into the continuing commitment to economic growth. Unlike Malcolm Fraser and co-authors, they do not even tiptoe towards the prospect that unprecedented technological changes may have far more to do with the future of our species than the recent oscillations of the capitalist market.

Hence, while the contributors to these periodicals respond to public dissatisfaction across a whole range of particular issues, they present no effective demand for a basic policy shift. The sense of a future is still shuttered within both old and new ‘third way’ prescriptions. That is, prescriptions that seek to combine a moral concern for the public good — expressed especially in dedication to public control of basic infrastructure — but these same objectives are short-circuited by an inability to confront the privatising impulse of open-ended growth.

Kenneth Davidson, as well as being a long-standing senior writer with The Age is also an editor of the quarterly Dissent. As a long-standing Keynesian, Davidson has maintained a critique of the excesses of neo-liberal privatisation for many years. In more recent years, far from simply accepting the social democratic compromises within official Labor, he has maintained an energetic critique. It has focused on Victorian State Government policies, especially on transport and climate change. In the latter context water policy has been a specialty. In creative and well-informed articles he has frequently had the state government ‘on the back foot’. Nevertheless, the general import of his arguments is to make capitalism sustainable. As an independent thinker and activist he is a maverick of the ‘third way’, one who has done much to draw public attention to the prospect that in Victoria ‘third way’ ‘commitment’ to the common good may include the full privatisation of water supplies! As the co-editor of Dissent, Davidson is not one who sees the contemporary meltdown as the harbinger of an historical transformation reaching far beyond the limits of any economic crisis of capitalism. Before that could occur Davidson, like so many others, would need to move beyond the limitations imposed by the philosophical orientations of both classical and neo-classical economics: an undertaking of quite pivotal importance for the politics of an emerging crisis of existence, as distinct from the more limited crises of conventional politics or economics.

Much the same general picture holds for the long-standing quarterly Overland, which, for more than half a century has been a distinctive voice of the independent cultural Left in Australia. The current issue carries two major articles responding to the economic crisis: a lead article by Bob Ellis — a speech writer for Bob Hawke and many others — followed by a more generally framed contribution by Raewyn Connell that moves toward the general observation that in Australia no group or force ‘has worked out how to gain a major purchase in the neo-liberal state or the neo-liberal economy’. Connell goes on to ask how in the unique situation of this particular crisis ‘we can compose a strategy of social change that is workable, can find popular support and that has the prospect of changing institutional structures’. Unfortunately, Connell’s far more searching article is in the shadow of the Bob Ellis piece, which, while vigorously muscular in tone, is decidedly timid in its resort to the ‘third way’ of the 1970s. While Ellis is an engaging writer with an ear remarkably sensitive to public disappointment and able to stir readers again on issues such as the ‘unstoppable anorexia of the universities’, he does not engage with the underlying issues of the present. As is so often the case, he concentrates on critique of neo-liberal policy. Given that straightjacket, welcome and urgent as this critique may be, he fills the gap by vigorously beating the drum on climate change.

Connell is far closer to the underlying preoccupations of this essay when, in concluding remarks, she notes: ‘the crisis behind the crisis, the issues that surround the meltdown, are as dire as those faced by the generation that met depression, fascism and global war’. A totally acceptable general conclusion, but what more, specifically, is that more basic crisis behind the economic meltdown? While seeking a new vision Connell is acutely aware of the difficulties facing that undertaking.

Many readers will recall that in his book Beyond Right and Left another active contributor to ‘third way’ political discussion, David McKnight, seeks to provide just the vision that might respond to such a crisis. Yet far from acknowledging the emergence of an historical transformation, which will break the continuity of the traditions of the capitalist era, McKnight seeks to combine the perspectives grounded in liberalism, socialism and conservatism with the impetus of new social movements. In a broad sense of a ‘third way’ (which distances his standpoint from any glib identification with Blairite policies) McKnight regards the capitalist market as an inescapable attribute of any contemporary economy. Locked into that attitude he too sees climate change as the rallying point around which the new-liberal recommitment to ‘let the market rule’ may be regulated by a state which has moved ‘beyond Right and Left’.

Beyond the Limits of Economic Crisis
McKnight is relatively accommodating to Rudd’s version of the ‘third way’ and that attitude has become more fixed following government responses to the meltdown. His attitude of market inevitability guarantees that his hopes of moving ‘beyond Right and Left’ remain within ‘third way’ perspectives. This pacifying phrase indeed is a distinct misnomer since the capitalist dynamic, which it purports to regulate, is by far the more important influence upon any middle way. Nevertheless our purpose here is not to simply dismiss a regulated capitalism. The key issue is to ask whether the objective of that regulation is to direct the capitalist impulse so that it contributes to the emergence of a different order of social life. It is our belief that any re-direction for regulation so that it contributes to a basic transition is inconceivable unless the framework of discussion and practical effort moves out beyond any exclusive concern with the current economic crisis. It needs to answer questions about how the surge of the last thirty years or so radically accelerated the more modest growth process that prevailed in the decades prior to the leap towards full-blooded globalisation. Complementing that, it needs to ask questions about just how this surge gripped imagination and aspiration. If masses of people willingly locked on to market-imposed shackles, just how did what was taken to be open-ended development become a given fact of social reality that tended to exclude serious consideration of alternatives? In past issues of this magazine we have suggested that answers to questions such as these will not be found by any too narrow a focus on the economy. On the contrary, the key is the historical transformation of our relation to that world so that open-ended growth no longer points towards the end of our species.

Climate change is widely taken to be the general underlying cause of our present dilemmas. It is not. While crucially significant, it is nevertheless one particular consequence of our radically altered mode of interchange with the natural world, and too narrow a focus on it alone can mask the more basic shift in the conditions of our relation to that world.

As a looming consequence of a more general historical transformation, of which both the surge in growth and the widespread neo-liberal delusions integral with it are symptoms, climate change is only the first among a series of crises likely to emerge if we cannot bring ourselves to change our present way of taking hold. Most importantly, just as climate directly impinges on our bodies and our senses, it also directly affects the elementary means of life. Quite inescapably, it stirs recognition of the way the uninhibited growth of the market can reach a point where it ceases to contribute to public well-being. Whatever its status as a consequence of more basic processes, the experience of climate change is the most significant current point of entry to passage beyond the ‘third way’. And clearly the more enquiring branches of the ‘third way’ approaches can bring pressure to bear on governments. They can begin to press them to direct market impulses towards institutional reconstruction.

How then, in the most general terms, should we characterise the shift that, with its radically different possible outcomes, is drawing us into the process of transformation? Beyond that, how in an equally general way might we illustrate it in terms that, once stated, can scarcely be denied? And finally, what might be the broad contours of an approach that begins to chart and to practise the work of transition?

Reconstituting the World?
Half of the evidence of this shift is all about us: the facts. The technological revolution, the knowledge society, the age of information. The other half — their critical interpretation — is nowhere to be seen. It is excluded from mainstream consideration by the momentum of change and the short-term exclusion of alternatives that it promotes. Yet that momentum too relates to another fact: the shifting of the ground upon which all of the just mentioned ‘undeniable facts’ operate.

All of the undeniable facts — and it is important to recognise the comprehensiveness of their claims — operate within a profoundly taken-for-granted relation to the natural world. It is a relation that assumes its utility for us and is often picked up in the catch phrase ‘the conquest of nature’. Utility, use for, conquest: all these terms now demand reassessment.

Prior to a gradual movement to reinterpret our relation to the natural world, which began to take definite shape in the scientific revolution of the 16th century, we dwelt in a given world of Nature, which, in its eternal cycles, sustained our being. The scientific revolution of the 16th century, as it fed into a more general sense of enlightenment, began to change all that. By way of the rational interpretation of what was devoutly seen as the imprint of the Hand of God in nature, Galileo de-centred the earth as the eternal setting of our being. While he gained home imprisonment as his reward, from those who were so secure in their faith that they already knew the truth, Isaac Newton, who explained the given tendency of things to move downwards by the law of gravity, became Master of the Royal Mint.

A prophetic appointment, one might say, as the rational power to know the world differently joined with the practical movement to relate to it differently. Interpretive rationality, mainly in the form of a religious expression of the impulse to place humankind in an intelligible reality, was crossing over; rationality, which had once fired the questionings of Galileo and Newton, was crossing over to constitute the fixed end of human activity. It was no longer enough to acknowledge the bounties and perils of the natural world as the frame of our being. The point now was to acknowledge a different truth: to exploit and conquer the earth as a resource. A different truth: the object now for instrumental rationality was expressed by trade, by mercantile activity, by enclosures in the name of profit and productivity, by colonisation.

But does this series include globalisation as well, is there an ambiguity emerging so that the answer is both yes and no?

Whatever the answer to that final question, we may readily assert that in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, emergent capitalism took hold of our changing relations to the natural world. Rational reconstruction of the division of labour and tools of labour fed into the encompassing expectation of a progress being integrally associated with growth. Up until now.

Trajectories of Transformation
In all the foregoing we have sought to lead up to the gradual disclosure, within the flux of contemporary reality, of a fundamental issue. The financial meltdown is an actuality, so too is the more basic process of economic crisis, yet both of them are symptomatic.

They are consequences, from the standpoint of this statement, of an ongoing transformation wherein the primacy of direct labour (including its mechanised modes) in our interchange with the natural world is being superseded by the primacy of technoscientifically mediated processes. Just because this is an epochal transformation it is not readily comprehended by governments. Indeed, its initial effect is radically to supercharge the conquest of the natural world. From that there follows on consumerist euphoria wherein conquest can appear as open ended and the pursuit of individual interest the consummation of freedom.

That is, until this overall process encounters a natural limit, as well as a limit of our species type — a biosocial limit. Gradually then a contradiction emerges, not between Right and Left, but even as that distinction changes, across a more fundamental division between those who are hell-bent to maintain the trajectory of the conquest of nature and those who recognise that via a whole series of potential crises that trajectory, unless it is radically qualified, points toward the end of human being.

A contradiction of this scope reaches into the roots of our culture. It is not a class contradiction, although it is integrally related to class interests: it is better described as a cultural contradiction or, for those who prefer a different terminology, as an ontological contradiction. It is not one that calls for a revolution but rather for a revolutionary transformation conducted across a protracted period by way of a transitional practice. That is a practice of deeds, complemented by an ethic of the common good, rather than by the fixations of growth. It is a practice, inseparable from an ethic, which now, within the contradictory social framework emerging from modernity, is increasingly aware of its multiple roots in the social forms of successive modes of engagement with the natural world. To implement and to state that emergent ethic now entails a bridging between two modes of practical life in their constitutive engagement with the natural world. To forge a unity between the quasi-spontaneous response of a whole spectrum of green movements with a more abstracted intellectual culture cannot be other than a difficult and protracted process. Especially among the intellectually related groupings, it calls for a reorientation. That is, a reversal that restores the priority of interpretation: a break out from its present subjection within the takenfor- granted perspectives directing the technosciences.

Conclusion
Deeds, practices, commitment to the common good. This conjunction, pursued with the unswerving certainty of those who know the truth, led directly to the moral ignominy of ‘actually existing socialism’. Ideals grounded within the limitations of existing theories of life and society were not enough. Now, certainty lives on but within a different order of deeds as the institutional order of the market sustains the certitudes of growth and consumption. The forgoing pages, couched as they are in general terms, are both a statement of future policy and a resolution. They seek to spell out some of the parameters within which, in future publications the editors hope to explore and contribute to the emergence of a transitional practice. That is, a practice of social life which, moving beyond the fetishes of growth and consumption, seeks to build an institutional frame work that sustains human life within an ethic of equality and the common good.

arena publications editors Geoff Sharp, Nonie Sharp, John Hinkson, Paul James, Alison Caddick, Simon Cooper

Murdoch’s lectures were fairly unremarkable. He outlined his vision for what he calls ‘the golden age of opportunity’. He focused on a number of areas that for him represent the rapidly changing world we now inhabit, including newspapers, education, technology and the rise of a global middle class. The challenge for Australia is to embrace change and ‘not rest on our past achievements’. Complacency is the enemy — we must according to Murdoch ‘avoid institutional idleness … the bludger should not be our national icon’. By contrast, Murdoch invokes a mythologised past — the stoicism and reserve of the pioneers and the laconic heroism of Australian soldiers. These values need to be reinvoked if Australia is to reap the benefits of the future.

The dichotomy between bludgers and heroes has become standard tabloid fodder, yet Murdoch never seemed to get much further. He name-checked a few obvious social changes (growing middle class, rise of Asia) and listed a few concerns (technology, declining education) but he didn’t really develop any of these areas. He merely advocated the market as a solution, as opposed to government interference and regulation. Hence, schools would do better with corporate sponsorship because ‘[c]orporate leaders know the skills that people need to get ahead’. A similar instrumentalism pervaded his discussion of newspapers and technology. The lectures fell short of the kind of reflective depth shown by previous Boyer lecturers — on both sides of the political divide.

It’s hard to share Murdoch’s enthusiasm for a ‘golden’ future, given the ruthlessness that accompanies his vision. Often his lectures sounded like a mildly elevated version of the speech a new CEO gives to employees shortly before dishing out redundancies: ‘embrace change — or else’. While accepting that not everything will be rosy, Murdoch glossed over the difficulties. In the style familiar to readers of The Australian or the Herald Sun, Murdoch dismisses contrary viewpoints by diminishing those who hold them. Thus, those worried about the future of newspapers are soaking in ‘self-pity’ which is ‘never pretty’. Anyone concerned about technology is a ‘whinger’. Thanks to global markets we are getting richer. The only ones who don’t like it are the ‘elites’, the trademark term used by News Ltd writers for anyone who disagrees with them.

No wonder Murdoch privileges the pioneer and the soldier — they don’t say much. For all the talk of freedom and diversity in the Boyer Lectures, Murdoch’s record on this score is shaky. Many would argue that Murdoch has waged a war on the public sphere. Rather than foster debate, the Murdoch media evinces a pathological dislike of discussion. Witness the shouting down of political opponents on Fox, or the raft of copponents on Fox, or the raft of conservative columnists in The Australian who vilify rather than debate those who do think differently. It’s hard to take Murdoch seriously on freedom when we remember how all 247 of his newspapers ‘independently’ supported the Iraq invasion, how Murdoch intervened to pull Chris Patten’s book on Hong Kong so as to please his Chinese clients, or how Murdoch dropped the BBC from Chinese satellite coverage and instead carried the Chinese government channel. No wonder, when discussing the golden future, Murdoch relied on the ‘Asian tigers’ whose authoritarian capitalism functions without any ‘elites’ getting in the way.

Behind all this lies the sheer vacuity of Murdoch’s conception of the media. Despite the discussion of newspapers, new media and technology, Murdoch revealed no understanding of the cultural and social role of the media. It’s simply another commodity; the future simply a market waiting to be harnessed. The idea that media might shape our sense of who we are, and continues to mould our sense of national identity, is missing from Murdoch’s vision — as is any reflection on the public sphere. There is no space to ask what the effects on our society are when we alter our relation to the media, or whether commercial media is qualitatively different from other kinds of media. Such questions of course underpin the arguments for public and independent media. No wonder they were missing from Murdoch’s vision of providers and consumers.

In this ‘golden age’ we will inhabit a cultural economy that contains no culture, a democracy that contains no discussion. Murdoch’s Boyer Lectures celebrate a world of ceaseless connection but it’s hard to get excited about his examples — the stock trader with access to real-time prices around the world (a spectacular, if largely unacknowledged, piece of bad timing), the Korean teenager on his MySpace page downloading music, the Australian expat checking on the footy score. Is this the best that Murdoch can do — something that sounds like a Microsoft ad from a decade ago? Anyone wishing to confirm the banality of culture in the techno-marketplace need go no further than cataloguing Murdoch’s moments of enthusiasm expressed in the 2008 Boyers.

So what inspired the ABC to choose Murdoch? He’s a canny businessman but no great thinker. What he does think we already know merely through exposure to the large quantity of the media he controls. Moreover his entire worldview is opposed to the principles that underpin the ABC. Or used to. The ABC has begun to adopt practices not a million miles away from those of Murdoch. For instance, multiple delivery platforms but reduced content; added commercial value to content though the sale of books, magazines and DVD’s; constant repetition and recycling of content; and the creation of media celebrities associated with the broadcaster. The significance of such commercialising activities would be a fit subject for exploration on RN’s Media Report. But that’s been axed along with a number of other programs, as June Factor pointed out in Arena Magazine no. 98.

These shifts in the ABC have helped obscure its role as public broadcaster with a mission that diverges from commercial media. So perhaps it ought not to be a shock that Murdoch was chosen for the Boyers. And now that Murdoch’s company is in partnership with ABC books he can publish and profit from his own lectures. That’s just the beginning. No doubt we will see the ABC carry ads for Murdoch’s publishing house in the near future. In the meantime we look forward to the ABC carrying on with its fierce spirit of independence, and speculate on whether it’s more likely that the ABC will carry any substantial critique of Murdoch in the future, or that Janet Albrechsten and Andrew Bolt will be chosen to deliver future Boyer Lectures.

Simon Cooper is an Arena Publications Editor.

The massive support for Bush has generally been understood as having a historical precedent in the sense that ‘US citizens always unite in times of war’. Putting aside debates about what kind of war this really is, it is important to recognise the potential dangers that lie behind this apparent unity. To state it bluntly, the principle of democracy said to be under siege from terrorism is itself rapidly being undermined in the United States. Since the attacks the already narrow space in US politics for liberal or dissenting thought has been further reduced through various devices. Firstly, through the lack of critical scrutiny by the mainstream media of the actions and statements of the US government. Secondly, in the work of conservative thinkers who have used the tragedy to attack both Left traditions in the United States and contemporary anti-globalisation forces. Thirdly, the attempt to counter terrorism by strengthening governmental surveillance and arrest powers to unthinkable levels. Importantly, the way the United States as a state is seeking legitimation through the notion of ‘security’ also works to enact a depoliticisation of the state itself.

John Leonard was largely accurate when he described the shortcomings of the US media’s representation of the war on terrorism as the ‘lack of any meaningful dissent from the tom-toms’. Certainly, there has been no shortage of gung-ho advocates for Bush’s war. On the Fox news channel Bill O’Reilly pleaded for the US government to ‘bomb the Afghan infrastructure back to rubble’, and also called for Iraq and Libya to be bombed for good measure. But more depressing than such aggressive posturing is the almost complete lack of critical distance shown by the mainstream US media. On the David Letterman Show, legendary CBS news anchorman Dan Rather said of Bush: ‘[He’s] the president, he makes the decisions … wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where. And he’ll make the call’. With sentiments like this, and Dan Rather is merely representative, there is no need for the government to impose the kind of media restrictions used in the Gulf War.

This lack of space for dissent makes it easy for the political Right to attack those who have dared to question US policy. Under the conditions established by the almost uniform media coverage of the terrorist attacks and their aftermath, even the mildest call for debate can be pilloried as ‘anti-American’. For instance, David Horowitz in ‘Bin Laden’s American Blood Brothers’ (salon.com) denounces the entire critical left tradition as simply a ‘privileged radical’s view of America — their facile defamation of our country’s power and wealth, their ready appeasement of our mortal enemies …’ He goes on to blame the Left for enabling the recent terrorism to manifest itself. Hence it was ‘liberal self-hatred masquerading as a concern for human rights [which] was the primary reason why it was so easy for a complicated and lethal attack to be planned and carried out without coming to the attention of American intelligence agencies’.

Similarly, a wide-ranging piece in the New Republic by Peter Beinhart manages to indict everyone — from French farmer and activist Jose Bove, to Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s new book Empire — for creating the conditions which led to terrorism. Beinhart calls for a halt to planned anti-globalisation demonstrations in Washington, and argues the time has come for the anti-globalisation movement to choose sides. ‘[D]omestic political dissent is [now] immoral without a prior statement of national solidarity.’

Such statements echo Bush’s ‘with us or against us’ speech. They effectively close the democratic practices they purport to protect. Even mild questions, such as concerns about repeating the mistakes of the past — as when Dick Cheney suggests putting on the payroll ‘the dark side’ of humanity in order to fight terrorism — are ruled out within a discourse that subsumes all criticism under a call for national unity.

The lack of critical dissent within the mainstream media has also helped create the ground for a different kind of assault on democracy, the creation of laws which grant enormous surveillance and arrest powers to law enforcement agencies. The Combatting of Terrorism Act currently being fast-tracked through both houses of government gives the executive branch the power to engage in warfare without the need to obtain congressional approval, which as Joel Skoussen argues, creates powers ‘which the founders of this nation would have vigorously rejected’. Compare the entire year it took to pass Clinton’s anti-terrorism bill after the 1988 bombing of US embassies in East Africa to the present legislation, which may be passed within a few weeks of the attack on the WTC. Other aspects of this legislation relax the restrictions on obtaining access to private e-mail and internet use, and expand the conditions where wiretapping is legally acceptable. In addition, non-US citizens suspected of involvement with terrorist activities will be able to be detained without a court order.

It is unlikely that any of the new laws being proposed would have prevented the acts of 11 September. Certainly, if passed they will restrict the civil liberties of those residing in the United States. But there is another potential consequence: in expanding legal/governmental power to new levels, the government may well provoke the activity of terrorist groups within the United States. The militia and anti-government groups that rose to such prominence in the 1990s may gain increased membership as the things they oppose — big government and the loss of civil liberties — are strengthened in an attempt to prevent foreign terrorism.

The Bush administration’s pledge to ensure the nation’s security has larger implications for state democracy beyond these specific instances. Extending the logic of the ‘war on terrorism’ and considering the support from other Western nations, we arrive at a situation where security becomes the basic principle of state activity and the primary criterion of political legitimation. This has the potential to create an endless cycle where security and terrorism form a symbiotic relationship, each legitimising the other (‘infinite justice’). Furthermore, as Giorgio Agamben has noted, and as we have already seen, the notion of security is predicated on a state of exception — that of the state which must be secured. Constituting this exception enacts the depoliticisation of society, and is anathema to democracy, rather than consistent with it.

Simon Cooper is an Arena Publications editor.

The genre of reality TV has itself undergone a marked change in recent years. While any relation to reality was always tenuous, the original reality programs like Cops and LAPD at least made a pretence of showing the ‘reality’ of urban life. The new breed of shows are based as far away from the normal settings of life as possible. If Cops edited out, or simply failed to show the social context for human behaviour, Survivor dispenses with this social context completely — the existential setting of the outback, or an island effectively removes the social as well.

There are other changes too. Cops contained a circular narrative revealing a relentless cycle — the chase and capture of the poor and ethnic minorities. Survivor proceeds by a linear narrative towards a goal of last man/woman standing. Cops involved a highly intrusive voyeurism where we watched individuals with little control over their lives being captured at what was probably their lowest point. The contestants in Survivor are free to reinvent themselves as if they were in an internet chat-room. They also differ in that they are middle-class, telegenic, healthy, and completely confident (especially in the new series) about their construction of themselves as media spectacle. Survival in this context tends to be read positively — a diet of bush tucker leads to a set of washboard abs and new ‘knowledge’ about oneself. Thus Survivor connects with the type of thinking embodied in new-age men’s movements, weekend corporate retreats and the popularity of Tom Hanks in Castaway — that you can transcend your material and social baggage and reinvent yourself within a new context.

Was it only three years ago that critics were lauding the Truman Show and its ‘message’ about the dilemmas of living in a media-saturated society shaped by pervasive forms of surveillance and spectacle? Whatever kind of cautionary tale we might have drawn from that film now seems irrelevant. It is as if at the end of that film Truman simply walked back into his old role — after renegotiating his contract for higher pay. The idea of ‘innocence’, the driving force behind the drama in the Truman Show, has now lost all currency. Surely nobody believes the ‘ordinary people’ tag — the Survivor contestants come across as a bunch of aspiring actors — too media savvy, too knowing for us to think otherwise. The fact that Richard Hatch, the winner of the first Survivor, can so easily make guest appearances as himself on TV shows such as Becker, reveals this lack of distance between the ordinary and the ‘acted’. Nobody seems to mind either that the producers of Survivor exhibit total control over their participants — and even manage to govern criticism of their own product. If the rumour that ‘critical websites’ such as Survivorsucks.com are actually managed by the producers of the show are to be believed, then the misgivings in Truman about the dangers of a totally administered spectacle now seem rather pointless — cast off like some pop version of the Frankfurt school.

The insertion of game-show-like narratives, combined with the exotic locations, are what probably accounts for the success of the Survivor-type shows. While more ‘pure’ forms of voyeurism — web-cams and the like — might hold our attention for a while, in the end they are about as interesting as an old Andy Warhol film. Significantly, the game-show narrative differs from older games in that traditional skill, knowledge or physical prowess is not necessarily rewarded. Game-show nasties, as they have been dubbed, work by encouraging forms of deceit and treachery. The best competitors are often excluded by the others who are threatened by their skill. The scenarios are constructed so as to encourage conflict. Shows such as Survivor and (perhaps the nadir of the genre) Temptation Island work more as manufactured morality tales — at what point will you betray your allies, your spouse or girlfriend/boyfriend in order to win? While a week was spent mourning the passing of Don Bradman and the values he ‘stood’ for, the reality is that we now prefer to watch individuals ‘win’ by the most devious and unsporting ways possible.

Another reason for the popularity of the new breed of reality-based shows lies in the fact that at some level their ‘nastiness’ resonates with the working lives of so many people. It’s no surprise that the winner of the first Survivor was a management consultant — these shows reflect nothing if not a contemporary management ethos. For anyone working in an institution — such as a university, a bank, a government department or the ABC — watching Survivor, or even The Weakest Link, feels like a grim parody of their working lives. Employees know the atmosphere governed by extremely tacit networked alliances, of perpetual cutbacks — there are always too many employees — where staff are continually forced to reinvent themselves in order to ‘survive’. As in the game-show nasties, even to do one’s job well hardly guarantees success in an environment where someone always has to be retrenched.

If the content of shows such as Survivor end up advocating a logic entirely suited to the more aggressive forms of entrepreneurial capitalism, the techniques of the show work to repackage ‘reality’ as a dramatic spectacle. Game shows and soap operas, the twin genres that define Survivor, have always done this. It is worth considering how the editing of ‘reality’ in such programs — the compression of time into a series of incidents — parallels the way in which our lives are increasingly managed as a set of discreet and intense set of experiences (think of tourism, mass entertainment spectacles, intense but rapidly redundant forms of work such as consulting or IT). The rapid sense of boredom generated by reality TV begs the question of the extent to which we ought to allow our own reality to be re-edited as a commodified spectacle at the expense of other ways of being.

Watching Survivor, I couldn’t help thinking about how media technologies can themselves be used in ways that allow us to reflect more critically upon the voyeuristic processes enabled through mass media. One example is the installation piece HMP Pentonville by UK artist Darren Almond, where a camera films an empty prison cell and where the only form of activity is a clock ticking. We watch the cell — there is no spectacle, no edited highlights — only the sense of time passing. The piece engages with voyeurism, and the prospect of ‘doing time’ in a very different manner to that of Survivor. The thought of that prison cell reminds me of those illegal immigrants who started off this piece, and how a detention centre in Woomera reveals the reality of a much less attractive form of confinement in the Australian outback. That instance of ‘total administration’, of image and movement, is the other side of the apparent freedom to remake oneself.

This should give us pause. However those who too easily predict a coming collapse of capitalism leave themselves vulnerable to its seemingly eternal delay into a series of chronic crises and renewals. As Boris Frankel points out in his essay in this issue of Arena Magazine, left intellectuals who insist that capitalism’s collapse is around the corner debilitate themselves. This kind of apocalyptic hope cannot deal with the shape-shifting capabilities of this form of life. The market may have a terrible precariousness, but at the same time it is being constantly readjusted and reproduced.

To respond adequately we need to understand these processes. Its periodic convulsions are constantly smoothed over through new expressions of legitimation, and as these expressions wear thin, the ensuing crises have to be locally contained and smoothed over. In Australia we have seen the electoral consequences of re-using an exhausted language to reassure voters. John Hinkson argues here that the technological extension of the market into people’s lives pushes to the margins all those who are less than techno-savvy. A significant section of the public is now, in turn, rejecting the current expressions of a world from which they have been progressively excluded.

In response, other forms of control are called upon to give the sense that the nation is more than an administrative node for trade’s global flow. This control is exerted on the bodies of those who make the mistake of thinking that the ideal of security and mobility applies equally to all — for example, the figure of the refugee. For the moment, treating refugees as ‘illegal’ queue-jumpers works well to re-legitimise the idea of stable control. It is a strategy that for a time will have popular appeal, and it is a strategy that gets strange support from a new genre of television. The state in the role of vigilant regulator of the country’s borders has its popular-culture parallel in the taste for surveillance, administration and discipline in ‘reality TV’. As Simon Cooper asks — who stays on the island?

Just as the categories of ‘economy’, ‘nation-state’ and ‘society’ are presented through images under reconstruction, the sense of the ‘self’ is also being de-stabilised. Like the Japanese watcher at the window, there is now occasion to confront a less than solid vision of the self. As the market becomes an increasingly shifting glass of refracted images the consequences for us are devastating. The depression epidemic, argues Guy Rundle, is a manifestation of this kind of deep-felt ‘framelessness’. Individuals are left to re-construct themselves from a fragmentary psychological model or through the binding properties of drugs.

Alternatives to this atomised condition require seeing politics as a sustained project across every aspect of life, but possibilities could also emerge in areas that do not offer a typically political program of resistance. Despite the ubiquity of dislocation, the communicative aspect of art as a point of potentially shared meaning is one small area in which to reclaim some stability. Here we might glimpse a beginning of more thorough social change beyond art. The works of Colin McCahon and Rosalie Gascoigne (featured on the front and back covers respectively) display the way a formal cohesion can be gleaned from otherwise disparate social particles. In McCahon’s work we see older, religious frameworks restructured for newer problems of place and self. Gascoigne’s work manages to inject newly framed possibilities into life’s ephemera and detritus. It is not spiritual retrieval that is the key here, but rather the process of collecting what is left behind, the process of capturing meaning in the context of a shared and co-operative sense of the future. It is a process that might benefit the Japanese office-sitter — and the rest of us too — that is, if we can bear to drag our gaze away from the false security of the corporate window.

Matthew Ryan

So why now? Far from being an unrepresentable event, the Holocaust has become ubiquitous in Western culture, especially in the United States. Some examples: remaining survivors tell their stories on the Jerry Springer show; the pre-war photos of Anne Frank appear in a new Microsoft advertisement; and her story is dramatised in an upcoming Spielberg film. Meanwhile, Hadassah Lieberman, wife of the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, never loses the chance to gain currency by introducing herself to voters as ‘a child of Holocaust survivors’. Some examples are more exploitative than others, but they all work to normalise if not commercialise the Holocaust. In her recent book Remembering to Forget, Barbie Zelizer remarks on the iconic status of certain Holocaust photos, how the same photos are repeatedly circulated and reproduced, thus flattening historical detail and inviting tragic (if fleeting) emotions, but not understanding.

In one sense the Holocaust comedy is a welcome antidote to what can be described as the Schindler’s List phenomenon — the short-term catharsis revealed through the vicarious experience of horror and brutality, without context or understanding. The Holocaust simply polarises into a struggle between absolute evil and its hapless victims. The depoliticisation of the Holocaust does not begin and end with Spielberg however. A recent wave of criticism at the ‘Holocaust Industry’ — not only the exploitation of the Holocaust in certain quarters but also the elevation of the Holocaust to mythical heights — reveals what is problematic in such a move. Some Jewish critics have pointed out how the entire history of a people has been reduced to a decade-long tragedy. Others, such as Norman Finkelstein, have revealed how the ‘sublime’ nature of the Holocaust is used to deflect criticism of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians. The circulation and repetition of Holocaust imagery means that it now appears everywhere, understood paradoxically as a unique event of pure inhuman evil. Other forms of genocide aided and abetted by Western states — Rwanda, Timor — pale by comparison, and are largely unrepresented (as opposed to unrepresentable).

Enter the latest Holocaust comedy, Train of Life. The humour of the film relies on the absurdity of its plot and the madcap nature of the village’s inhabitants. Hearing that the Nazis are coming, the villagers decide — via a plot hatched by the village idiot — to fake their own deportation. They somehow get a train; some of the villagers are trained to speak German and German uniforms are made; while others pose as communists and the rest pose as victims. No sooner do they escape their village than some of the role players come to believe in their roles — the communists rebel, the ‘Nazis’ become more authoritarian, and so on. In the midst of this are the humourous struggles — of a religious, sexual and social kind — that occupy everyday ‘Jewish’ life.

As in Life is Beautiful, the film relies on a massive deception in order to ensure the survival of its characters — faking the Holocaust. The charge of Holocaust trivilisation is countered through arguing that the triumph of the human spirit is revealed in the face of hopeless odds. Of course there are records of the type of gallows humour used in the camps, most notably by Stephen Lipman in his study Laughter in Hell. Part of the marketing package that goes with Train of Life is a special section on the specific nature of Jewish humour — pointing out how humour was, for Holocaust sufferers, a ‘defiant cry for life’.

Yet there is an important difference between modes of experience here — between those who experienced the camps, and those who experience its mediated representations. One of the problems with Life is Beautiful is that the comedy works to shield us from the reality of the Holocaust in the same way that Guido, the hero of that film, shields his son from the true nature of the horror. Train of Life attempts to avoid this problem via its conclusion. The whimsical, caper-like comedy is undercut by the final scene which reveals the ‘reality’ — the village idiot framed in a single shot inside a death camp — and we realise that he has fantasised the whole story — that he will not ‘survive’.

It is a powerful twist, yet ultimately it is asked to do too much. The final image, the tragi-comic face of the main character framed by barbed wire, proves to be too existential — a condemned man dreaming his escape — and lapses into the kind of iconic status linked by Zelizer to the act of forgetting. The edginess and potential radicality of a Holocaust comedy is all too quickly drawn back into our received patterns of reception. Witness the response to the film at the Venice Film Festival — a ten-minute ovation, and a demand that the film be considered for competition. Is this ready-made success in fact indicative of its status as affirmative culture — that we are ready for comedies about the Holocaust precisely because the free-floating nature of contemporary emotional life allows us to experience moments of humour and tragedy while the events which produce them are decontextualised — simply part of the universal flow of images?

If the Holocaust comedy can be regarded as the most recent ‘popular’ attempt to represent the Holocaust, the exhibitions and presence for the Melbourne International Festival of Daniel Libeskind — the designer of the Jewish Museum in Berlin amongst other things — represents one example of how the ‘Holocaust’ circulates within the sphere of high art. Libeskind’s architecture is visually stunning — full of exposed structures, fissures and partial forms. Informed by poststructuralist ethics, it creates an architecture of fragments. For instance, the Jewish museum in Berlin has no ‘entrance’ — one must pass through the older Berlin museum to gain access. Inside are dead ends, places which suggest exile, others which link to the older museum — emphasising links and discontinuities between the past and present, between Gentile and Jewish culture.

Such a building is highly effective in Berlin for obvious reasons. But what are we to make of Libeskind’s work outside of its ‘place’ — as a mobile work of art? Libeskind now designs buildings in the United Kingdom and the United States as well as Europe. The success of Libeskind’s style, in an era of endless arts festivals, faces the danger of transcending its connection to the historical events it attempts to invoke. If this is the case, then Libeskind’s radical architectural form simply becomes a high-art version of the same detached sublimity experienced in more popular modes such as film. In other words the ethics of avoiding co-opting the Holocaust into a singular, commodifiable narrative can all too easily be conflated into an uncritical celebration of discontinuity, which avoids the Holocaust’s historical context. The obvious influence of Libeskind’s work on the shard(s) of Federation Square (which lack any historical context) reveals the way in which aesthetic forms can be easily detached from their historical connections, emptying out the grounds from which architectural form, or even the radical possibilities of Holocaust comedy, might open the space for remembering as a political act.

Like a funhouse mirror, the brutal mass-bombing and shelling of Chechnya by Russian forces resembles a distorted version of NATO’s bombing of Serbian forces in Kosovo. And while there are differences, as Clinton and Blair are keen to point out, the complicity of the West in the Chechnya situation is both real and multilevelled. Firstly, Russia has taken a leaf out of NATO’s manual on how to wage contemporary warfare. Secondly, the United States has long been a supporter of Russian attempts to dominate Chechnya. Finally, the muted response by the West to such overt barbarism has as much to do with investments in the global economy, natural resources, and ideological attempts to restrain perceived growth of fundamentalist Islam as it has to do with the issues of opposing a powerful and nuclear-capable nation.

Despite some coverage, the media response, in proportion to the amount of killing and terror that is evident in Chechnya, has been restrained. While Russia over the past six weeks has relentlessly bombed cities and villages, resulting in indiscriminate destruction, causing over two hundred thousand people to flee to neighbouring Ingushetia, there has been precious little coverage in the media of a crisis that equals, if not surpasses, the one in Kosovo. Whereas dozens of television cameras were able to convey the multifaceted scenes of terror in Kosovo, we are yet to see anything comparable in Chechnya. One can speculate on the reasons for this. One is that Russia has ensured that media contact is minimal – it is fighting its own version of an ‘information war’. Few reporters are willing to go to an area made so obviously dangerous by random bombing, combined with threats of kidnapping. Russian shelling has destroyed local media structures, along with everything else. The lack of television coverage means that Russia can deny much of what it is doing, the attack on Elistanzhi and the bombing of five Red Cross vehicles (killing two staff and twenty-five civilians) being two notorious early examples.

Another reason may be the effects of the new post-1989 division between so-called Central Europe and what remains of the East, a kind of replication of Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘new poor’ at a national/regional level. In other words, if it is not in ‘Europe’ then it does not get priority – at some level it does not even exist. Perhaps it is all too much to cope with so soon after Kosovo. Here we have another example of forced movement, bombing from above, except that the same side is doing both the bombing and the forced emigration. Yet if Kosovo remains in limbo, with little in the way of positive results, if the ‘humanitarian’ values espoused as the reason for the high-altitude bombing in the Balkans have withered with time, is it not possible to find a degree of convergence between NATO-style abstract destruction in the name of humanitarianism, and the more obviously odious form destruction takes in Chechnya?

Since the breakup of the USSR, the republic of Chechnya has been a source of consternation for Russia. Claiming an independent heritage and a different ethnic composition (largely Muslim), Chechnya also contains much of the rich oil and gas deposits of the Caucasus. In 1994 Russia attempted to submit Chechnya to its will, first through what is known as the Russian ‘Bay of Pigs’ disaster, when Russian soldiers disguised as Chechens attempted to infiltrate the region, and were comprehensively routed. Six months later this was followed by open invasion. In the end Russia withdrew, having sustained large casualties in fighting a vicious ground war. There have been subsequent incidents of Chechen terrorism, including several bomb attacks in Moscow in ‘retaliation’.

This time, it is different. Russia has followed the model of the United States in Iraq and NATO in Kosovo and has conducted war at a distance. When the weather is clear Russian airplanes have made over 150 sorties a day. On 3 November the Russian airforce commander complained that his pilots had dropped so many precision-guided bombs that they were running short. At the time of writing the bombing has increased. Not that precision seems to have been of much importance. The city of Grozny is decimated, its central marketplace and hospital destroyed. It may even be that the airforce and army do not even know what they are hitting, with many Russian pilots having received minimal training. Patrick Cockburn of the Independent reports that the most common sound in Chechnya is that of the notoriously inaccurate Grad missile launcher.

There is no doubt that in the short term many in Russia are reaping the benefits of this new style of mediated destruction. The approval ratings of Prime Minister Putin have soared as he vows to teach a lesson to the ‘bandits, terrorists and gangsters’ in Chechnya. That this can be done without apparent risk of the humiliation and defeat of Russian soldiers, as in the first war, means that Putin’s military posturing has made him currently the most popular Russian politician. By conducting this ‘safer’ NATO-style war, Russia gains a double revenge – against Chechnya after the humiliations of the 1994-6 war, and against the West – as Russia reasserts itself after being largely left out of the negotiations in Kosovo. The assertion of national power also provides a useful deflection away from the recent money-laundering scandal that rocked Moscow.

There is also a more material gain. It seems that Russia is determined not only to liquidate Islamic rebels (an attempt which has largely failed), but also to regain control of the Caucasus via first gaining control of Chechnya – the gateway to the rich energy resources of the Caspian and Central Asia. Notably, Russia’s ‘recovery’ has been led by profits generated from oil and gas. Indeed Russia’s current account surplus may top 20 billion US dollars, thanks to oil and gas revenue, something that was no doubt made clear to the IMF on a recent visit.

The West has been slow to criticise Russia for conducting the form of abstract terrorism it is now engaged in. Reasons are easy enough to find. Firstly, the Clinton administration has been a long-time supporter of Russia’s attempt to dominate Chechnya. Indeed in the first campaign of 1994-6 President Clinton was highly vocal in his support for Russia, comparing Russia’s ‘struggle’ with Chechnya to America’s civil war, even going so far as to call Boris Yeltsin a Russian Abraham Lincoln. The fact that Chechnya is largely Muslim, and the fact that bombs had been planted in Moscow by Chechens has allowed the rhetoric of the ‘war on terrorism’ to flow freely. In December last year the New York Times declared that ‘Mr. Yeltsin is justified in using military force to suppress the [Chechnya] rebellion’. Only very recently, Madeline Allbright expressed US support for Russia against fundamentalist terrorism. Al Gore has said that he will be even tougher than Clinton on Muslim fundamentalist campaigns of violence. This general tenor has created a paradoxical effect upon the world stage. At the same time as President Clinton was ordering Indonesia to get out of East Timor (albeit without real commitment), his administration was supporting a savage invasion of Chechnya, in the name of a war on terrorism. While support has recently waned in the light of Russia’s open and ‘disproportionate’ campaign of terror, this complicity explains the West’s muted criticism, and both the United States’ and Britain’s affirmation at this point that they will not attempt to impose sanctions.

The relation between Russia and the global economy points toward a further level of complicity. Some commentators have called for the United States to stop financial assistance to Russia, as this is clearly, at some significant level, underwriting the war on Chechnya. Yet, while this may happen, the United State is reluctant because of the effect this might have on the global economy. As Rupert Cornwall writes, ‘Economic sanctions could backfire by triggering loan defaults or a repeat of Russia’s 1998 financial crisis that might destabilise international markets’ (Independent, 6 November 1999). For a number of reasons then, it would seem that the hands of the United States are tied. If Prime Minister Putin thumbs his nose at the West, gaining in popularity as he does so, it is perhaps this knowledge that the West simply cannot afford to risk another financial collapse that underscores his immunity to criticism.

After the disaster in Kosovo, and after the destruction of the Chechen republic, it is increasingly clear that the only solution to such racial and territorial aggression is a strengthened United Nations able to intervene on the ground and outside of regional or national interest. While this is a tall order, it is the only realistic possibility. In the last six months we have seen that neither the United States nor NATO is able to act as the world’s policeman. The style of intervention – abstract killing at a distance, the generation of genuine, if often fleeting, upwelling of humanitarian support via media concentration – has proven highly selective, as well as ultimately ineffective. Now Russia has used the methods of the West in a brutal parody of Kosovo-style intervention. The West is unwilling to act due to varying degrees of complicity, its media almost turning a blind eye to the problem.

Note: For the full version of this article, see issue 44 of Arena Magazine.