'Afflicted Powers' by the RETORT collective of Berkeley, California, asks whether Guy Debord's thesis - expounded in 'The Society of the Spectacle' in 1967 - is still capable of explaining our present situation, post-9/11 and post-Iraq. Brutally condensed this thesis was that capitalism and Soviet communism were converging toward a single system in which advertising and propaganda colonized the very human imagination, to produce a historyless world in which appearance dominates reality. We the inhabitants become spectators onto our own lives, we define ourselves by the brandnames we consume and live vicariously through our love/hate worship of celebrity. Debord's Situationist International had its brief moment of glory during the Paris events of 1968, but he dissolved it in 1972 on the grounds that it had itself become part of the spectacle, and killed himself in 1994.

RETORT concludes that with some modifications the thesis still holds, and these authors are well qualified to answer, at least one of them having known the Situationists first hand. Despite overly modest disclaimers to the contrary they capture at least some of Debord's caustic and pithy tone which makes a refreshing change from the post-post-structuralist treacle of so much modern social commentary. They describe our present state as being governed by 'the contradictions of military neo-liberalism under conditions of spectacle', and pose the central questions: to what extent did '9/11' usher in a new era?; are US actions since 9/11 simply a historical regression to naked force?; and does the concept 'society of the spectacle' still have any explanatory value or are we now facing a cruder, older kind of statecraft?

The book doesn't claim to answer these completely, but merely to open them up for further debate as a precondition for rebuilding any sort of coherent leftwing opposition (the title 'Afflicted Powers' is from Milton's Paradise Lost, uttered by Satan when recounting his failed rebellion).

The book takes off from two striking (ie. spectacular) images of al-Qaida's devastating attack on the Twin Towers and the grotesquely hooded Iraqi prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison. RETORT contends that al-Qaida fully understands that US military power is now based as much in spectacle as material firepower, so it committed an outrage that while itself confined within the spectacle (that is, which could achieve no conceivable political goal), still inflicted great damage on the spectacle of US power.

RETORT does not in any way defend al-Qaida, but on the contrary explains lucidly how Revolutionary Islam used a toxic combination of the worst of Leninist/Guevarist vanguardism and anti-modern religious fundamentalism to defeat all its secular progressive rivals. In an excellent chapter they also untangle the circulation of oil, construction services and arms sales between the US and the Middle East, which is far, far more complex than any crude leftist claims that Iraq was invaded only to grab the oil fields.

This book is in a different league from most of the anti-war books published since the Iraq invasion, and really should be required reading even for those who will not agree with its analysis. ( )

Village Voice
Top Shelf 2005
Our 25 favorite books of the year�from teen sex diseases and Aztec slaughterhouses to Kiss riffs and juvenile tambourinists
December 13th, 2005 3:37 PM


Vik Muniz�s Double Mona Lisa (Peanut Butter + Jelly), from Reflex
photo: Courtesy Vik Muniz/Aperture Foundation
Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction
By Sue Townsend
Soho, 327 pp., $24

Townsend uses the weight of her 23-year-old literary project to create an expert entertainment that's also a cogent, furious foreign-policy critique. Hypnotized by credit card offers, thirtysomething Adrian sinks hundreds of thousands of pounds into debt; the final calculation is both absurd and chilling, a potent metaphor for the cost of the war effort. His support for Tony Blair crumbles as it becomes clear that his infantryman son faces real danger. "Happy people don't keep a diary," Adrian concludes. Can greedy readers be forgiven for wishing him just a little more misfortune?

Afflicted Powers
By Retort
Verso, 211 pp., $16

It starts with a rebarbative proposition. The events of September 11, 2001, were indeed attacks in a terrain once thought unassailable: the arena of domination known (and misknown) as "the spectacle." "The state's reply to them," the first chapter notes unflinchingly, "has exceeded in its crassness and futility the martyr-pilots' wildest dreams." Elaborating global and local conflicts within a web of strong, weak, and failed states, the book pursues much of what's hauntingly unsatisfying about most "explanations" of recent history. It's similarly enlightening on the troubling development of "Revolutionary Islam," and global oil economics�situating these things, without justification or excuse, within the failed narrative of modernity. Unorthodox, historically informed, and fearless, this volume is desperately necessary for thinking, circa now, about common life without commonplaces.