boredom is always counter-revolutionary

In a political system that insists on binaries – you must always be either for us or against us – it is difficult to articulate a position that is the rejection of both sides. It seems naive, quixotic maybe, in the clamour and shellshock of military politics to try to make audible a voice that is neither of the armed sides. This is how many observers have experienced the recent massacre in Gaza, as an abhorrence at Israel’s actions, yet also an unease with automatically siding with Hamas. However, what must be recognised is that to temporarily take a side, within the gestural and binary politics of the Spectacle, can be as much a statement of rejection, of disidentification, as of identification with a set of standards that are not truly your own.

So, when I see people in demonstrations on the streets of London declaring that ‘We are all Hamas now’, I do not assume that these people advocate the same extremist positions that are so easily dug up by Israel’s apologists to justify the massive ‘collateral’ damage accumulated in the supposedly justified killing of Hamas members. Identifying with an otherwise repellent political body may be a suspension of beliefs enacted for reasons practical (they are the only people actually fighting back against the Israeli aggressor), juridicial (however questionable, Hamas is democratically elected) or humanitarian  (whilst they seem more devoted to military victory than preserving the lives of the Palestinian people, supporting Hamas seems the closest one can get to supporting the Palestinian people who are bearing the brunt of this conflict).

This scenario is certainly not new or specific to military conflict, having at its core the the basic choice in taking an oppositional position between taking a side and keeping a voice, even if it is someone else’s, or stepping into political obscurity with intact but unacknowledged principles (we can exist in isolation but it means the deepest loneliness). For example – and I hope you will forgive what may seem a trivial issue compared to recent events in Gaza – the French Surrealists for many years held onto a fraught association with the Third International and the French Communist Party in an effort to demonstrate that their aesthetic concerns had political agency and could operate in the service of a wider cause. However, as socialist realism became official doctrine, with its obvious implications on an anti-doctrinal movement of individual liberation like Surrealism, the Surrealists were forced to break with the Party in 1935 and – save for a few years’ association with Trotsky – never really regained any political weight.

Jacques Ranciere offers one way of understanding how ‘We are all Hamas’ comes about, explaining that identifying politically with the Other is often done not so much pro-them, as anti-us. The cause of the other is taken up to register dissatisfaction with the aggressor, rather than everlasting support for the opponent (maintaining, in this case, that it is Hamas as distinct from the Palestinian people who is the opponent; and the us would be the West). The following passage is from an article by Ranciere called ‘The Cause of the Other’ (Parallax 1998, Vol 4 No 2, pp25-33). This passage is also used by Kristin Ross to explain how the May ‘68 chant of ‘We are all German Jews’ was more than just solidarity with Daniel Cohn-Bendit, but part of the process of ‘political “subjectifiction”, as he calls it – the manifestation of political subjectivity – first and foremost in an experience of disidentification or declassification, and not in an experience of shared community’ (May ‘68 and Its Afterlives 2004, p57). Ranciere says,

Politics is not something that is declared in the face of a war that is seen as the emergence into truth of something truly historical. Politics is something declared in the face of policing, defined as the law that prescribes what emerges and what is heard, what can be counted and what cannot be counted.

[...]

Insofar as it is a political figure, the primary meaning of the cause of the other is a refusal to identify with a certain self. It is the production of a people different from the people seen, named and counted by the State, of a people defined by the wrong done to the constitution of of a commonality that was constructing an other communcal space. A political subjectivation always implies a “discourse of the other” in three senses. It is, firstly, a rejection of an identity established by an other, a degrading of that identity, and therefore a break with a certain self. Secondly, it is a demonstration addressed to an other that constitutes a community defined  by a certain wrong. Thirdly, it always contains an impossible identification, an identification with an other with whom one cannot in normal circumstances identify…

[...]

It is the rediscovery of what a political subject (proletarian or otherwise) is: the manifestation of a wrong, a counting of the uncounted, a form of visibility conferred upon something that is supposedly non-visible or that has been removed from visibility (pp. 29-30).