SUSAN BUCK-MORSS

1. As soon as Bush threatened to invade Iraq, faculty immediately went into

action as if the 1960s and ’70s were still with us; we were ready on campus to lead
the opposition, but when we looked around, no one was behind us. At Cornell,
most students ignored faculty demonstrations. A handful participated in the
global peace demonstration on February, 15, 2003—itself a highly successful visual
practice of opposition—but they felt isolated and ineffective. Participation in
Internet movements does not compensate for a sense of local insignificance.
Alternatively, local demonstrations in the community of Ithaca, New York, of
which there were many, achieved no national or global visibility.
I was in Washington, D.C., in spring 2003 for a national demonstration, and
the aesthetic dissonance was striking. Young Americans who participated on that
hot spring day wore the barest of body coverings, displaying pierced navels and
ornamental tattoos. They converged with families sponsored by Muslim-American
organizations, who arrived by the busload, sedately dressed, children and old peo-
ple, the women with headscarves, and prayer was observed. This polarized visual
display, all of us shouting support for Palestinians, was difficult to imagine as rep-
resenting a cohesive movement. Without the counterculture of the 1960s, itself
deeply rooted in American folk culture, solidarity among strangers lacked a
shared medium of expression.
Half a decade later, the situation is not very different. There has been little
success in bridging the culture gap in order to produce a popular front against
the government. During the Cold War, there was a porous area of Marxist theoret-
ical debate where both sides overlapped. We lack a common discourse now. We
are missing the brilliant solidarity work done by the civil rights movement and,
later, the feminist movement, both of which were capable of uniting diverse socio-
economic, racial, and cultural groups around a shared political agenda. That may
be a reason the artists have had such a difficult time. There is less of a commonly
articulated cause to express in their work, and art by itself cannot work to create
political solidarity without falling into pedantry.

2. In the 1960s and ’70s, before the globalization of capitalist wealth, average
Americans benefited from U.S. economic hegemony. American students could
renounce materialism and still survive. The nation exported modern necessities
to the world, grew what it ate, produced the clothes that we wore, including the
international style-setter, Levi’s, and workers and capitalists had reason to believe
they were all in the same national-economy boat. A thousand dollars saved in a
summer could buy young people a PanAm ticket around the world with unlimited
stops, allowing months, sometimes years, of travel in countries where the American
dollar was valuable. Travelers got out of the tourist bubble and actually experienced

OCTOBER 123, Winter 2008, pp. 27–30. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
28 OCTOBER

other cultures. Europe on 5 Dollars a Day was a best seller, and car owners shared
their mobile space by regularly picking up hitchhikers.
It’s hard to imagine that now. On the one hand, wealth is spread more
democratically among nations; on the other, within all nations, the gap between
rich and poor has grown astronomically. Facing global competition, young people
lack the luxury of dropping out to travel, or study critically—just as, without the
draft, they lack the necessity of organizing against this barbarous and illegal war
that does not affect them personally.
The absence of the draft is symptomatic of the degree to which this war is
being staged as fantasy for the believing public. Soldiers are exploited as extras in
the scenario written by the neocons and their media-hyped leading man, George
W. Bush. Meanwhile, demonstrators are caged in areas out of view of the main-
stream media, banned from the fantasyland of the war on terror.
A U.S. soldier interviewed for the documentary Occupation Dreamland (2005),
directed by Ian Olds and Garrett Scott, made the simple observation that if a fully-
armed foreign soldier, who did not speak his language, busted into his home and
terrorized his family, he could not see that person as a liberator. That is all you
need to know. But with the smoke-screens of media-delivered politics, no one was
given time or space to pay attention to the truth. “Dreamland” was the name the
soldiers themselves gave to their camp during the Falluja invasion.
Saddam’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, warned on the eve of the invasion that
we were about to see a live performance of the movie Wag the Dog. For its part, Al
Qaeda is obsessed with media spectacle. When political power masterminds global
spectacles like September 11 and “shock and awe,” what chance do art galleries
and agitprop theaters have to compete?

3. “Professionalization” is another word for having to join the commercial sys-

tem to survive. I have met young artists from Mexico, from Serbia, from the
Netherlands in recent years whose original projects (in public space) cost almost
nothing to execute. Then they were discovered—a euphemism for that process of
PR packaging now called “branding,” like cattle. Their work, to be professional,
suddenly had to be expensive—high technology, multimedia laboratory equip-
ment, self-promoting documentation of their projects (which could be made to
appear much more political than the art event itself). They made it into the high-
flying circuits of the art world by producing works that needed art world–type
funding. Once you produce for the art world, there are all kinds of ways, many of
them indirect and apparently innocuous, that the effectiveness of oppositional
work gets compromised. On the other hand, if you stay local, you have a commu-
nity, but lose the possibility to impact a global public sphere.
The most effective forms of cultural production that have managed to com-
municate to a general audience, and are at the same time transgressive, are TV
series like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and South Park. At times, YouTube has
played an important role. There is Amy Goodman’s radio show, Democracy Now,
Questionnaire: Buck-Morss 29

which has been relentless in its serious, oppositional reporting of the news—she
deserves the Nobel Prize. I do not know of any work by artists that has achieved
that kind of public impact. In terms of visual effectiveness, even Sean Penn and
the Dixie Chicks have had more success than the professional artists. The culture
industry (which employs hundreds of creative people behind every star or show)
ends up being more progressive than the supposed alternative of serious art.

4. The global public sphere—not as it now exists, but as it has the potential of
becoming—should be the focus of all oppositional work now, whether by artists,
writers, or activists. Realization of that potential depends on undoing the cultural,
religious, and national borders exploited by politicians. Historical work by acade-
mics is vital. It needs to go on at the boundaries of so-called civilizations. There
are multiple strategies for achieving this, but it has to be careful work, tearing
down brick by brick the limits to historical imagination. No limit is more in need
of dismantling than the wall of silence and misrepresentation that insulates fifteen
centuries of Muslim history from the West’s account of its own past. The whole
conception of separate civilizations is a terrible distortion of the past, whereby his-
tory is evoked to prove the uniqueness and specialness of particular human
groups. Theorists have tried to compensate by ideas of “multiversality” or “hybrid-
ity,” but that moves in the wrong direction. Rather than imagining multiple
separate cultures, all of which should have an equal voice, we need to resurrect the
idea of humanity (as experienced by the U.S. soldier in Falluja) without, in the
same breath, claiming that we own that term, and those who don’t agree with us
are inhuman—hence deserving of any inhumanity perpetrated against them. The
Left has been just as guilty of this construction of an enemy Other as, say, the
Christian Right.
I get impatient when Western theorists believe their own unchanged con-
ceptual frames are adequate to analyze the present. Globalization for them means
simply that Foucault, or Derrida, or Benjamin now exist in Chinese translation.
They seldom ask, what Chinese theorists should we be reading? We continue to
assume that the most advanced thinkers and artists are living in Paris, or London,
or New York (although we allow them now to have exotic last names). We are as
confined within the globally extended theory-world as artists are within the glob-
ally incorporated art world.

5. Precisely what political means, and consequently what depolitization would

entail, is up for discussion. The old national politics is insufficient for protest
today. In 1968, one could view images of mass demonstrations throughout the
world—Tokyo, Athens, Mexico City, Berlin, as well as Berkeley and Paris. That
spontaneous utopian moment of global solidarity is still a puzzle to me. What did
it mean? How might that spirit be continued? Or does it happen now in localities
out of bounds of U.S. media coverage, and we aren’t joining? Surely, there are pri-
vately communicated webs of protest and solidarity that spread as e-mail lists, and
30 OCTOBER

blogs that provide open, oppositional discussions, as well as electronically created,

global counter-cultures. The new technologies are the answer, not the problem;
but we are in a contradictory stage of their development. On the one hand, the
Internet, satellite TV, podcasting, etc., have multiplied the sources of information
beyond the capacity of anyone to receive; on the other, the concentration of
power in the hands of a few media enterprises monopolizes the terms of deploy-
ment of media- access, content, and operational control.

6. When it comes to the Middle East crisis, the strongest work has been by
artists who know personally the areas affected. I am thinking, for example, of the
video work of Emily Jacir that juxtaposes the landscapes of Texas and Palestine;
photographic manipulation in the work of Khalil Joreige and Joanna Hadjithomas
that reconstructs the experience of urban aerial bombing in Beirut; the installa-
tion by Elias Khoury and Rabih Mroué, Three Posters, that takes on the issue of the
suicide bomber; Walid Raad and the Atlas Group, who make connections visible
that have nothing to do with cultural boundaries. For just plain beauty that tran-
scends cultural differences, I’d pick Shirin Neshat’s video Passage (2001).
There are many examples. One would not have expected that the first
decade of the Iranian Revolution would witness a renaissance of cinema, which
took place despite the Muslim revolutionary government’s censorship. While all of
these artists, once discovered, risk the problems of professionalization already
mentioned, they began as locally grounded practitioners who, because they came
from the so-called periphery, had to be aware of global realities at the same time
that they responded to the historical events of their own lived experience. In con-
trast, the greater the power a nation wields in the world, the less capable its
thinkers and artists may be to recognize the provincial naivité of their own beliefs.
Cultural creativity is not something that can be instrumentally orchestrated. So,
instead of the question, What is to be done?, one might want to ask, What is being
done, in places, by people, in media, that we are not yet well positioned to see?
Lastly, effective opposition is hindered by the bogus logic of intellectual
property as the basis of free expression for which academics and artists have been
used as poster children. Maneuvering in the virtual space of spectacle-politics
demands new strategies, new alliances, new financing. Artists and academics are
not alone in trying to figure these out. Oppositional political parties are just as
stymied. Wherever breakthroughs happen, we need to learn from them.

SUSAN BUCK-MORSS is Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory in the Department of
Government at Cornell University, and a member of the graduate fields of German Studies and History
of Art.