politics: an interview with w.j.t. mitchell

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Politics: An Interview with W. J. T. MitchellMarquard Smith

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To cite this Article Smith, Marquard(2009) 'Politics: An Interview with W. J. T. Mitchell', Culture, Theory and Critique, 50:2, 321 — 335To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14735780903240380URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14735780903240380

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Culture, Theory & CritiqueISSN 1473-5784 Print/ISSN 1473-5776 online © 2009 Taylor & Francis

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Politics: An Interview withW. J. T. Mitchell

Marquard SmithTaylor and FrancisRCTC_A_424212.sgm10.1080/14735780903240380Culture, Theory & Critique1473-5784 (print)/1473-5776 (online)Original Article2009Taylor & Francis502-3000000July-November [email protected]

Abstract In this wide-ranging interview W. J. T. Mitchell discusses hiscommitment to politics, cultural politics, and the politics of culture. Alwaysengaging, always stimulating, always provocative, he speaks at length aboutBarack Obama, the events of 11 September 2001, Guantanamo Bay, AbuGrhaib, and his time travelling, lecturing, and teaching in some of theworld’s most highly charged territories: Israel, Palestine, Cuba, and China.Forever listening and learning, in this interview Mitchell displays hispassion for and his dedication to intellectual life. Here, as in the rest of hiswork, he provides the best kind of object lesson in how reading, looking,studying, criticising, analysing, and trying to understand all raise the ques-tion, in their own unique ways, of what it means to be political, what itmeans to do politics.

Marquard Smith (MS): It’s 29th June 2008. We’re here to talk about yourpolitical commitment, and your commitment to politics. By the time thisinterview is published we should know the next president of the UnitedStates of America. Today we don’t. When we last talked, you spoke enthusi-astically about Barack Obama, his politics, his philosophy, and his writings. Itstruck me that, stuck as we are between the end of the Democratic primariesand the election proper, it might be interesting to have a conversation aboutwhat I’m going to call your ‘hope for America’s future’. No, let me be a littleless melodramatic: It’d like to hear more about your conviction in BarackObama. It’s an optimistic place to start. I’m sure things will get gloomyquickly enough as we turn to subjects such as the events of 11th September2001, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Israel, Palestine, Cuba, China, and so on… although I’m hoping we can turn things around by the end of ourconversation with a discussion of our renewed hopes for democracy and thecitizen.

Antony Gormley, IMMERSION I, 2008, © the artist.

Downloaded By: [University of Nottingham] At: 13:38 15 June 2011

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W. J. T. Mitchell (WJTM): There are two sides to my conviction aboutObama. One is purely external, looking at him as a phenomenon, as if I werenot an American, just a citizen of the world. And that’s mainly at the level ofthe politics of the image, and the image he projects bodily and epidermally (ifthere’s a word such as that) of this incredible hybrid character with hisbiography extending from Kenya to Indonesia to Hawaii to Chicago, wherehe’s now living.

The other one is much more intimate, tied to the fact that we know himand dined with him and his family, and have had chances to have conversa-tions, which have been illuminating to the extent I realise he really is anAmerican politician. That means you have to restrain any Utopian expecta-tions. And I’ve known this for some time: he is going to disappoint those of uson the left who expect miracles. We’re all prepared for that. But I thinksymbolically, if he’s elected, there will be a massive change in the Americanimage to have him as the President. Partly just because of what he looks likeand who he is, but also his experience and his capacity for understandingwhat people in other countries think and feel.

If you read his autobiography that I’ve just finished, not The Audacity ofHope, which is a political campaign diary, but Dreams From My Father, you seethat this is a guy who has run barefoot with peasant kids in Indonesia; he hasbeen in long-term contact with his extended family in Kenya, which is now ina state of civil war.

Imagine that kind of experience in an American President. We’ve neverhad a President who has the internal resources he does, in terms of his memo-ries, his sense of identity, his relation to the rest of the world. It’s very hard tosay what policies will stem from that, but certainly he has promised to endthe war on Iraq. But on the other hand he’s promised to escalate the war inAfghanistan, and I’m not thrilled about that. Even more disturbing, he contin-ues to accept the dominant metaphor of a ‘Global War on Terror’, which is afantasmatic and incoherent picture of the global situation, and one that hasappalling practical results in the real world. So it’s very complicated, but I dothink it will also be momentous, especially if his national campaign strategyworks and he sweeps a large majority of Congress. Then there’ll be prospectsthat he’ll actually accomplish something – universal healthcare; an effectiveand appropriate foreign policy; a commitment to environmental issues; arespect for the Constitution and the rule of law. Our whole sense of whatAmerican cities are about, not just the African American community but theLatina community, the Asian community, all of that will take on quite adifferent look under his administration.

That’s a thumbnail answer. We can talk in more detail about it.Obama’s image specifically is not only visual, but it’s also the way he

speaks. Everyone knows he’s a great orator, but beyond that you have to askwhat kind of great orator. The first thing to say is he writes his own speeches.Very unusual. He is actually, I know, quite a good writer. His autobiographyin my view ranks with the writings of Jefferson and Lincoln. This is a realliterary man. He actually reads books [laughs]. He is curious. He’s deeplyreflective. He understands nuance, in contrast to our current President whoonce said ‘I’m being nuanced to death here ….’ because his advisors wouldcome in with complicated assessments of complex problems and he would


An Interview with W. J. T. Mitchell 323

say: ‘give me the bottom line, I’m not interested in those nuances’. Obama is.He’s fascinated by them. He’ll find nuances where his advisors try tosimplify. In that sense, he’s like Clinton.

The other thing about his speaking style is that it’s also hybrid. He’scapable of modulating between the African American preacher, the JesseJackson / Martin-Luther King mode of high oratory, of Biblical reference, the‘shining city on the hill’, the kind of American Zionism of the promised land.This is an observation of a fact. I’m not bamboozled by it. If it was only that,he wouldn’t have a chance because white Americans have shown that theyreally do not take to the African American oratorical style with its sublimerhetoric and invocations of the Bible. The other thing he’s able to do is tomodulate that way down to little tones of rationality, where he says ‘When Italk about change, what do I mean?’ and then he gives you a list of eightthings that he means. Very specific. It isn’t just vague, empty rhetoric, itactually involves decisive policy directions.

There’s that, and then there’s a third level that goes even lower – it’svery quiet – in which he almost whispers. And I’ll give you an example: theMilwaukee ‘Just Words’ speech in February earlier this year. It turns out thata lot of Republicans were crossing over at that time, those that are some-times called the Reagan Democrats, who left the Democratic Party in the1980s and went over to the Republicans, and these people are now calledObamacans. So in Milwaukee before his speech, he was talking to someonewho came up to him and said (whispers) ‘You know, I’m actually a Republi-can.’ And he said ‘Well I’m glad to hear that, but why are we whispering….?’ [laughs]. It got a huge response from the crowd, partly because it wasso down at the threshold of the volume range, and so I think that has a criti-cal role in his rhetorical power and skill, that he has the greatest range ofany orator in my lifetime, even better than Jack Kennedy in that sense. Also,he has a memory which allows him to speak without ever looking at a note,without really looking at a teleprompter. He just goes through it and speakswithout having to check his notes. At the same time, you get the feeling he’sthinking while he’s talking; it’s not just repetition, he hasn’t just memorisedhis speech. Of course the fact is that he has written them – even writtenthem himself, and thought them through. They are deeply considered. Andof course, that oratorical style fits with the hybrid character of the man. Herehe is: African American, community organiser from South Side Chicagowith these experiences outside of the US, and President of the Harvard LawReview, the highest award for the best student in his class at Harvard. He’s abrilliant man.

So you get a range of perceptions about him that I find unprecedented. Ihave a lot of faith in the guy. It doesn’t mean that I follow him everywhere.We’ve already communicated by e-mail, my friends, Janice, and I told himstraight out that it was a horrible vote he made when the US Senate decidedto declare the West Bank and Gaza as terrorist sanctuaries, thereby empower-ing the Israelis to kill any man, woman or child on sight. Of course, if it’s awoman or a child then the immediate excuse is they were clearly being usedas human shields by terrorists! Obama voted for this, and voted for it cyni-cally, as a matter of political necessity. And he’ll do that again – he’s doing itall the time. He understands that no American politician can get anywhere


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without expressing unqualified support for Israel. So I believe in him, but I’mnot idealistic about him.

MS: OK, to the West Bank. I was hoping you’d speak about your time in theMiddle East, in both Israel and Palestine. We were talking about this a fewnights ago, I hadn’t realised you’d been going for quite so long or made suchregular trips …

WJTM: Well, it’s a long story. The first time was in 1970, purely for personalreasons, I went with my wife to Israel to visit our friends and family there. In1970 Israel was quite a different place, in the immediate aftermath of the 1967war.

The first time that it really became a site for me of intellectual work andpolitical reflection was in 1987. I was invited to go to Bar Ilan University togive the keynote address for a conference called ‘Landscape, Artefact, Text’.I’m not sure why they invited me. Bar Ilan is a very conservative, ZionistUniversity in the suburbs of Tel Aviv, and the other keynote speaker wasStephen Greenblatt who was talking about the tradition of Palestine as the‘navel of the world’. I gave a paper which I wrote in New Zealand thatsummer called ‘Imperial Landscape’, which was about these two antipodes,centre and periphery, of the British Empire: the British mandate in Palestine,on the one hand, and the British South Pacific utopia of New Zealand on theother. New Zealand was supposed to be the hub of the British Empire in theSouth Pacific. I’d been teaching landscape theory in painting, gardening,travel, and poetry for some time and it was the first time that it all cametogether for me in relation to this trip. So I wrote a paper entitled ‘ImperialLandscape’ about colonisation, settlement and representations of colonialismthrough a variety of landscape practices.

It was an electrifying event in which I became the lightning rod for all thepolitical conflicts in Israel over the settlements, the occupation, and the treat-ment of the Palestinians. I showed, without being fully aware of how provoc-ative they would be, Jean Mohr’s photographs of the architecture of thesettlements, the first, brutalist wave of the 1980s. And I was also deeplyimmersed in Edward Said’s work, particularly his classic book, After the LastSky, which was illustrated by Mohr’s photos. And just to show these photo-graphs and to mention Said, much less to bring up John Barrell’s (1980) thesesabout the ‘dark side’ of the landscape, the presence in the English landscape ofsigns of Enclosure and the dispossession of peasants, which was central to mywhole understanding of what landscape aesthetics was about – all this wasperceived as a provocation. So I was immediately denounced as a Communist,a Marxist thug, etc., but it also had the wonderful effect of making the entireconference respond to me because I was the bad object. My 13-year-old sonsaid to me: ‘Dad, why are they all attacking you?’ [laughs].

So that really launched me into it. ‘Imperial Landscape’ was read prettywidely in Israel and this year, in fact, all my landscape essays are gettingtranslated into Hebrew (Mitchell 2009). They’ve been, I guess, empoweringfor artists and activists in some way. Even though I never posed myself as anexpert, my positioning with respect to this was somewhere between touristand guest worker. Sometimes an outsider can see things and sometimes the



things they see are wrong, mistaken. I’m willing to risk that. The idea ofspeaking your mind on public and private matters is what William Blake’sdefinition of a prophecy is about. If they’re inviting you to speak, then acceptthe invitation and speak.

Then in the 1990s I got an invitation to go again, this time at a landscapeconference at Birzeit University in Palestine. The keynote speakers were Saidand myself, and that was really a peak moment of this whole involvement. Itwas a great conference: five days, with one day off for field trips and excursionsall over the West Bank, and Said and I spent a long time together. We went withthe late Ibrahim abu Lughod, one of the great Palestinian scholars, to hisbirthplace in Jaffa, an ancient city just south of Tel Aviv. It was a complete eye-opener. Another layer of the Palestinian reality was opened up to me. For thekeynote speech I wrote a piece called ‘Holy Landscape’ about the interplaybetween concepts of ‘promised lands’ and sacred missions of conquest andcolonisation in Palestine and the United States. All these were gathered up ina book called Landscape and Power, which had first appeared in 1994, and wasnow re-issued with a new preface. So a second edition of Landscape and Powercame out (2001a). ‘Imperial Landscape’ was the first essay, ‘Holy Landscape’is toward the end, and a lot of the book is of course written by other people likeMichael Taussig, Charles Harrison, and Said. There’s a piece by Joel Snyder onfrontier photography in America, Elizabeth Helsinger on Constable andnational landscapes, and Anne Adams on the Netherlands. The idea was tothink about landscape and power, particularly colonialism, nationalism,imperialism globally and try to co-ordinate this thinking.

So the study of landscape has been a long-term pedagogical, editorial, andscholarly project in which, strangely enough, I’ve never felt expert about anyplace [laughs], any particular place, except one. And that’s only autobiograph-ical: that’s my home place of Nevada and the Sierra Mountains. And that’salways been the kernel of my experience growing up as a child in a frontierlandscape, with Native Americans. Nevada has a kind of cowboy culture.Also, a tourist culture. I can honestly say I know what it feels like to be theobject of the tourist gaze, to be one of the natives that people are looking at.And it’s also just the topography, the feel of the desert. The first time I went toPalestine I had an immediate sense that I’d been there before. Why is this sofamiliar? It was more than just the obvious fact of the desert topography. It wasalso the fact that one of my childhood reading experiences, when I was 12years old, was Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, which he wrote after histime in Carson City, Nevada – my home town – and his visit to Palestine.Twain had perceived the same similitude between the Middle East and theAmerican West, and especially, between the native inhabitants – Palestiniansand Paiute Indians – in the 1860s that I was seeing now in the 1990s and in thetwenty-first century. So that’s what the project has been about. Partly personal,partly scholarly, political, pedagogical.

MS: Definitely political!You may have heard that in 2005 and then again in 2008 the University

and College Union (UCU) in England, the largest trade union and professionalorganisation for academics and lecturers working in the United Kingdom,initiated a debate to consider the prospect of its members severing ties with


326 Marquard Smith

Israeli universities? The motion, short of a boycott, was put forward becauseof ‘the continuation of illegal settlement, killing of civilians and the impossibil-ity of civil life, including education’ as a result of the occupation. Universityand college staff were being asked to ‘consider the moral and politicalimplications [of educational links] with Israeli institutions, and to discuss theoccupation with individuals and institutions concerned’. There are of coursemany academics in the UK that were upset with this, because it runs counterto principles of academic freedom and may even breach the union’s own anti-discrimination policies. And I read that there were a number of US-basedacademics that cancelled plans to visit the UK in protest. Are there similarongoing conversations in the States?

WJTM: I don’t think the boycott has been officially supported by any unionor any other organisation of American faculty or academics or professors.

The equivalent in the US would be the AAUP, American Association ofUniversity Professors, or the MLA (the Modern Language Association). Noneof those organisations have taken up the boycott. Some people have tried topromote it, and the response from the administrators of the Universities likeColumbia, Harvard, Chicago, has been a very firm refusal to go along withany such boycott, appealing to the principle that this is antithetical to thewhole idea of freedom of research, academic circulation of ideas, and so forth.As for myself, I’m against the boycott. I think it’s practically misguided in thatit involves too often putting you in a position of boycotting people who areyour natural allies, since most of the Israeli academics that I know are verysympathetic to the Palestinian cause. I believe in boycotting those who reallyare hurting you, and not your friends.

Beyond that though, I totally understand and sympathise with the Pales-tinian feeling about the boycott, particularly among the Palestinian academicsin the West Bank. And I have raised this question a number of times duringrecent visits to Birzeit University, to try to have discussions with them aboutways to refine and target the boycott more precisely. The loudest voices areall firmly in favour of the boycott. Then, after the discussion is over, peoplequietly come up and say ‘I’m not so enthusiastic about it actually’. They’reintimidated. They are afraid to say so. I think a better strategy would be toseize upon those moments when American or British institutions come out inthe name of high principle and say: ‘we reject the idea of a boycott of Israeliuniversities’. What we should be saying in response to this high-mindednessis: ‘that’s fine, we agree with you. You’re on the right track, but now we wantyou to make a statement calling for a lifting of the de facto boycott onPalestinian universities. Apply your high principles evenly and tell theIsraelis to stop blockading, harassing, and closing institutions of higherlearning in the West Bank. Why don’t you speak out about that with equalfervour?’ I think that’s the thing to call for – a lifting of all boycotts.

MS: Let me turn to your connections with China and Cuba. I know you havespent time in China, going back a couple of decades, and that your recent tripto Cuba was also instructive in many ways. And I really enjoyed reading your‘Havana Diary’ (2008a). I appreciate that China and Cuba are very differentsituations, but I’m interested to hear what you think about how being a



scholar, a public intellectual, how being an activist or an agitator, or a friend,allows for certain kinds of interventions elsewhere. I do like this idea thatyou’re a tourist and a conversationalist at one and the same time …

WJTM: And also a guest worker.Well, they’re very different. China I visited the first time in 1988, the year

before Tiananmen, and I was there as a visiting professor at Beijing ForeignStudies University, teaching a seminar on romantic poetry. And I had not theslightest feeling that I was going there as a political activist to try to make anyintervention. I was just a visiting professor teaching them romantic poetry.And the funniest thing was when I tried to explain that William Wordsworth’spoem ‘Tintern Abbey’ was actually a poem about the enclosure movement andthe disappearance of the peasants from the land, they said: ‘we can get thatkind of stuff here. Could you talk about the form in the poem please?’ [laughs]They did not want to hear my Western Marxist analysis of romantic poetry!They wanted me to talk about beauty and form and meter and so forth.

It was also, remember, the Reagan era and many Chinese loved Reagan.At the same time, I knew that Fred Jameson had made his first visits to Chinain the 1980s and was producing an intellectual revolution at that verymoment. If my assignment was to teach English romantic poetry, what Fredwas doing was teaching Western Marxist poetry of the kind that hepioneered, reformulating all the fundamental categories of Marxist thoughtfor a new generation of post-cultural revolution scholars. So I was aware ofthat, and since I’ve gone back later, you can see that this has now percolatedand matured over a couple of decades in China – partly because of the arrivalof capitalism and the enormous wealth it has brought to some.

I have never felt like I was going to China to intervene politically in anyway. The country is so enormous and complex you feel like every month youspend there, the depths of your ignorance are revealed. All I can say is, Ithink it’s a fabulous, amazing country that produces feelings of exhilarationand horror at the same time. It’s the oldest empire on the planet, if you thinkabout other empires, like this one, the British Empire, or the very short-livedAmerican Empire …

There is one thing we can be grateful to George W. Bush for: he hasbrought the American empire to its knees, laying the groundwork for a simul-taneous military and economic collapse, coupled with damage to its moralauthority internationally. I suspect that the American empire will come to anignominious end just as the Aztec empire did: a military juggernaut thatburned itself out because all of its neighbours finally just said: ‘Fuck you!We’re not co-operating anymore’ [laughs].

So I tend to – strangely enough, and this is not a principled, thought-outposition – I just tend to be pro-Chinese. I think I can understand why Chinahas to have what they call ‘one-party democracy’ [laughs]. So many Chinesescholars, the really smartest ones, understand that the containment of Chinaand the political opposition to the Chinese regime, is so much motivated byAmerican interest. Tibet, for example. Tibet is a cat’s paw in the Chinacontainment policy. I have a lot of sympathy for the Chinese scholars whoargue that the Dalai Lama is a projection of Western Shangri-La fantasies, andthat the Buddhist oligarchy of Tibet is a slave-owning society, with the Dalai


328 Marquard Smith

Lama’s family being the biggest slave-owning family. So there’s plenty ofrepression, and an appalling lack of basic human rights for large masses ofpeople. I hate the censorship. But there’s something about the scale of Chinathat makes a powerful, central, authoritarian government seem almostinevitable. That’s how they’ve survived as a country for all these years.

Cuba on the other hand …

MS: Is not so big…

WJTM: Is not so big, but thinks of itself as big and is thought of as big by theUnited States. Curiously enough. Cuba and the United States have this mirrorrelationship. Cuba regards itself as the centre of the world – it has a foreignpolicy worthy of a great power. You know, does anyone care about Jamaica’sforeign policy? [laughs] Barbados’ foreign policy? It’s the tiniest ego-maniacalnation in the world, and that’s largely due to Fidel Castro. But not only him,also to José Martí, to the whole Cuban revolution going back into the 1890s,when they said ‘Fuck the Spaniards, screw the Yankee imperialists, CubaLibre! We are Cubans’. They have this great traditional literature, music, art.It’s a real place, tiny but incredibly feisty – so I fell in love with it. Also in OldHavana it has this amazing museum of seventeenth, eighteenth and nine-teenth century colonial architecture. Suddenly you’re just projected back intime. Cuba was the hub of the Spanish Empire in the New World, so it’s anamazing place to sink into, historically. As for the contemporary politicalmovement, you’ve read about it in my ‘Havana Diary’. I’m always a naïvetourist, but I was really, really naïve this time! [laughs] I’m afraid I wrote the‘Havana Diary’ in a post-visit euphoria, when you’re just completely envel-oped in the magic of a new experience and enjoying walking into the barwhere Ernest Hemingway drank, having a Mojito, smoking a cigarette, andjust hearing echoes of the revolution.

The part that makes me a little embarrassed about this is, of course, thestudents I was teaching – I had been invited to give a series of lectures on art,activism, and dissent, organised by Tania Bruguera, a Cuban artist friend andcolleague at University of Chicago – and the lectures were obviously aboutdissent in America against the American government, so they were connectedto Cuba in the sense that I was looking at Edward Said and his Orientalism(1978), and its relation to Roberto Fernández Retamar’s great essay ‘Caliban:Notes Towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America’ (1989).1 (‘Caliban’ isactually one of the principal inspirations for Orientalism).

Retamar is probably the leading literary scholar in Cuba in the revolu-tionary era, and is still alive. We had lunch with him. He’s this incrediblyimpressive individual who’s at the same time utterly compromised by hisbureaucratic position as an apparatchik in the Castro regime. And we metother people like that. We met probably the most powerful man in the Cubangovernment, Ricardo Alarcón, the President of the National Assembly. This

1 The essay was originally published in 1971.



was arranged by my colleagues and next-door neighbours who were travel-ling with us, Bill Ayers2 and Bernardine Dohrn. (Bernardine went to Cuba forthe first time in 1969 with a contingent of the Students for a DemocraticSociety. They cut cane and met with the North Vietnamese delegation there.So Bernardine has this ancient connection with Alarcón, who was a youngrevolutionary at the time.) We spent a lot of time in Alarcón’s presence; heinvited us to his office for a long meeting; he attended one of my lectures, andwe subsequently went to dinner with him. He was the Cuban Ambassador tothe United Nations, so he’s lived in New York, is very urbane, very fluent inEnglish. (In fact, all the Cuban intellectuals are fluent in English.) So I waspretty dazzled by all of this. There’s no doubt it’s a very oppressive regime.They restrict access to the Internet, and there are all kinds of humiliatingrestrictions, e.g. Cubans cannot go into the tourist hotels. They’re still second-class citizens; they have a double economy; a double currency; terrible publictransportation; services are breaking down. Then, of course, the greatest giftFidel has politically is the US, as the great Yankee oppressor who becomes thealibi for every shortcoming the Cuban people endure.

I think Obama’s election will defuse a lot of this. Obama’s alreadyspoken to the Cuban Americans in Miami and I think he has persuaded manyof them that it’s time to change course. Fidel is not long for the world. He’salready stepped down. His brother is taking power and his brother does nothave the same kind of charisma or, I think, intransigence about the purity ofthe revolution.

So what I predicted in the ‘Havana Diaries’, and I think was incrediblynaive [laughs], was that the problem for the Cubans was how to make thistransition without basically becoming a US client state, an economic colony. Ihad the confidence that no matter how much the ordinary Cubans may resenttheir own government, they resent the Yankees even more and they will hangon to their independence in every way they can. The question is, will they hangon to their revolution? What will happen to that? It just so happened thatMichael Moore’s film Sicko (2007), his exposé of the American health careindustry, had recently been released, and so every person we met wanted tohave conversations about Sicko and its representation of the Cuban healthsystem. Everybody just said: ‘You naive Americans. You think we have it greathere, don’t you?’ ‘No, no, we don’t really think that’, we replied. [laughs] ‘Yesyou do think that! We know what you think’, they said. Especially for ’68erslike Bill and Bernardine and Janice and me. They immediately recognise whowe are, that we are romantics about Cuba.

MS: It’s OK, my father and his generation of communists in the 1930s and1940s were romantics about Stalin! [laughs]. Until they found out about thepurges. It always takes a while for the truth to filter through.

2 Yes, this is the very same ‘William Ayers’ who became a central issue in the 2008Presidential campaign. Obama’s friendship with Ayers was characterised by theRepublican attack machine as ‘palling around with terrorists’, even though Ayers’activities in the Weather Underground occurred when Obama was 8 years old, andAyers was never convicted of anything. Ayers is now a highly respected professor ofeducation at University of Illinois, Chicago, and a dear friend and neighbor.


330 Marquard Smith

I was hoping we’d have a chance to speak about 1968, and the persistenceof that generation’s commitment to a certain kind of political engagement andidealism?

This year, we’ve been inundated with TV and radio broadcasts, withconferences and exhibitions and so on, celebrating the 40th anniversary of1968. The more the year has gone on, the more I’ve been thinking about myown generation’s 1968: 1989. At University of Westminster we’re planning toorganise a conference on the topic, and our working title is: ‘Fuck ’68: 1989and its Legacies’ [laughs].

1989 was the year of anti-communist revolutions across Central and East-ern Europe, the Tiananmen Square massacre, the bicentennial of the FrenchRevolution, the end of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, therelease of Soul II Soul’s Club Classics Vol. 1, the introduction of the Poll Tax, therelease of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, the Velvet Revolution inCzechoslovakia, the Romanian Revolution, the execution of Nicolae and ElenaCeausescu, acid house, the Manchester scene, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and somuch more. A seismic year – historically, politically, culturally. One incite-ment after another. The connections between 1968 and 1989 are fascinating forany number of reasons, and one of the things that really does interest me is themusic-drugs-sex convergence. If everyone in ’68 was politically engaged,dropping out, loving, listening to rock/psychedelia, and thinking utopianthoughts, how did those kinds of things play out in ’89? (The pervasiveness ofhugging, for a start, tells me that there was a whole different economy of phys-ical contact going on. The distinct lack of political rhetoric, especially on themusic scene, of words at all in fact, is for me an intriguingly apoliticalpoliticisation of cultural practices.) But I digress. Tell me about your ’68 …

WJTM: That’s a shrewd observation, and it’s somehow right.I spent the summer of ’68 in London. We went to the Bath music festival,

dropped acid, slid down muddy hills covered with urine and faeces, androlled ourselves up in a sheet of plastic to keep off the elements. We listenedto Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Winter, The Jefferson Airplane – just ecstatic with thewhole idea that the world was on the verge of revolution. I mean, I reallybelieved it at that moment. I went to my first academic job at Ohio StateUniversity that year, convinced that we were going to begin a revolution rightthere on the streets of Columbus, and that the University was going to be onan entirely new footing. Democracy was going to break out everywhere:equality, liberty, fraternity.

It was really a glorious moment and it just gradually faded into the ’70s,getting narrower and narrower. I remember the key moment was ’73, whensuddenly the drug of choice changed from LSD to what were called Sopers ordowners, which basically just tranquillised an entire generation. There wererumours at Ohio State that a truckload of these drugs had been driven in bythe FBI to pacify the students. Then the Vietnam War, and its end. The end ofthe Nixon era. In the end it seemed like the only thing left to do was to histor-icise it! To try not to forget it. To hang on to what was true about it, to critiquewhat was false, and move on. Leftist scholars like Martha Vicinus were sayingin the early ’70s, ‘the left will rise again, and when it does I want to be thesmartest old lady in it!’ [laughs].



So when ’89 came, and back to your comments about the resonance of ’89and ’68, I think a lot of us felt that the wheel was turning, coming roundagain, with the idea of the peace dividend, and the end of the Cold War. Ithink it produced a decade of an economic bubble and a bubble of politicalhope: the Clinton era. The US did pretty well under Bill Clinton. There was amoment when I thought the American people had finally grown up andmatured, when, despite every effort to impeach Clinton over MonicaLewinsky, the more the media and Republican Party tried to destroy him, thehigher his rankings got with the US electorate. I remember at the time think-ing: finally, we’ve become a mature country! We’re becoming like the French,who really don’t give a damn about the sexual activities of their politicians.The question is, is he a good President? And he was pretty good, though farfrom perfect.

MS: How wrong you were, in terms of your sense of the maturity of theAmerican electorate! [laughs].

WJTM: Oh boy, yeah! [laughs] But if these things do go in 20- year cycles,then we are clearly due for something …

2008 stands on the verge of another big change after a nightmarish eightyears under George W. Bush. It really has felt like a nightmare from which alot of people are trying to awake. I remember vividly during the Clinton erafeeling that things were pretty good! There was a lot of new wealth. Therewas a euphoria around the dot.com bubble, and a lot of young zillionaires inSilicon Valley. I got invited to conferences where I would come in and give atalk about dinosaurs or bio-cybernetics in the midst of these young entrepre-neurs from Silicon Valley who were flying in on their private planes. A verystrange, unreal moment. But then the stolen election of 2000, and thenSeptember 11th, really just exploded all that, so that you got a dose of awfulreality.

MS: I’m glad you brought up the events of and around September 11th, 2001.I’d like for us to speak a little about this, as well as to hear your thoughts onAbu Ghraib, to say nothing of Guantanamo, rendition flights, and so on.Perhaps then we can go on to conclude by discussing questions of democracyand the citizen, what it means to be a citizen, a political subject, in this time ofours.

WJTM: Let’s start with 9/11. Almost from the instant it happened – ithappened when I was making my first sustained foray into media theory – Iwas teaching a media course at Colorado College, and we were scheduled toread Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media on 9/11. We watched televi-sion a lot that day, and we talked about the events in McLuhan’s terms. So itwas certainly a ‘visual culture event’. I wrote a piece entitled ‘The War ofImages’ that was published in the alumni magazine at University of Chicago(2001b), on the destruction of the World Trade Centre as the production of animage, a dramatic spectacle, and its relation to iconoclasm. It was immedi-ately attacked by all sorts of people, who said: ‘How dare you talk about thisas an image. Don’t you understand real human beings were killed?’ And of


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course I did understand that, but I felt it was important to point out thatimages are also real things in the world. These people were killed becausethey happened to have the bad luck to be in an iconic building. And I dared tosay that this was true for the people in the Pentagon as well. Buildings aresymbolic and the destruction of symbols is an essential part of war. It isn’t justabout killing people. So a lot of my thinking about 9/11 has been in terms ofthe politics of the image and, of course, war as politics by other means. Thereis a whole range of tactical and strategic possibilities implicit in the relation ofwar and images, from trying to produce images that signify victory, to turn-ing points, memorials, monuments, and trophies, to subhuman caricatures ofthe Evil Enemy. And then there is also the appearance of unplanned,unpredictable images that signify defeat. They produce what they signify bydemoralisation, a sense of despair, hopelessness, and a loss of moralauthority.

The key thing about the Abu Ghraib photographs is that they mark themoral end of both the war in Iraq and the War on Terror. The torture victimsof Abu Ghraib prison, the de jure terrorists, are supposed to be the enemy,but of course most of them were innocent people caught up in randomsweeps of Sunni neighborhoods. Innocence is too strong a category. Theywere ‘not involved in terrorist activities’, they just happened to be in thewrong place in the wrong time. The curious thing is that the central iconicphotograph of Abu Ghraib, the hooded man, is almost accidental – if ithadn’t been taken at exactly that angle, that frontal angle, if it had beentaken from any other angle, and indeed it was taken from several otherangles, none of which produced an iconic image. So this was just contin-gency, a matter of luck. And it ushered in the moral end to the war in thesense that everyone knew all of the causes of the war, like the weapons ofmass destruction, the connections to 9/11 and Al Qaeda had all been shownto be fabrications of the Bush White House. So at the time when the AbuGhraib photograph appeared, I’d already been working on the images of thewar in Iraq, 9/11, and the War on Terror. With the Abu Ghraib photographsI was able to say: ‘this really marks something quite profound that we don’tsee the shape of yet’. So I wrote to all my Art History friends, my iconologi-cal colleagues, and said: ‘let’s archive, document, track down mutations ofthis figure, to begin to make sense of how the Abu Ghraib archive is consti-tuted, can be understood, and analysed. Within a month the image of theAbu Ghraib man disappeared. The media didn’t want to see it anymore,didn’t want to hear about it. There was also a paradoxical, contrary move-ment: the fetishisation of the photographs in order to confine the damage tothose American soldiers who appear in the photographs – the ‘nine badapples’ – to make them anomalous, exceptional.

But these images were just the tip of the iceberg! As Errol Morris hasshown in his film, Standard Operating Procedure (see my article in Harper’smagazine (2008b)), the Abu Ghraib photos revealed something deeplysystematic about American interrogation practices, and indeed somethingrather larger about a certain American mindset in relation to the War onTerror. This is a syndrome I like to illustrate with Hans Haacke’s amazingphotograph, ‘Star Gazing’ (Figure 1), which shows a man in an orange jumpsuit wearing a hood made out of the starry field of an American flag.



Haacke shows the way in which the War on Terror has the effect of ‘self-hoodwinking’ the American electorate (he produced the image just before thedisastrous 2004 election). It also echoes the basic tactic of hooding and stresspositions as forms of self-torture which turn the body and the imaginationagainst itself. Rory Kennedy’s film, The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (2007), makes thepoint that a simple technique like forcing someone to stand on a spot motion-less for a few hours can have the effect of making them psychotic. Psycholog-ical torture of this sort has much more long-lasting effects thanstraightforward physical torture such as beating.

MS: So, after the last eight years, under these conditions, after everything we’veseen and heard and read, what happens to the idea of political consciousness?What happens to the idea of being actively political as an academic, as anintellectual? How do we conceive of our role and responsibilities as politicalcitizens? I think that is my question.

I look around me, I see the consolidation, and an intensification of interestin recent (post-Marxist) political philosophy – in the writings of people likeMichael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Nancy Fraser, Alan Badiou, GiorgioAgamben, Jacques Rancière, and Ernesto Laclau and Chantelle Mouffe. (I’msure it’s unforgivable to throw the names of these very different thinkersaround so irresponsibly, but so be it!) I wonder how, in a state of exception, onecan think differently, how one does think differently, about one’s ability to be

Figure 1. Hans Haacke, ‘Star Gazing’, 2004. The editors thank the Design and Artists Copyright Society for permission to reproduce this image.


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political? During the last few years, it strikes me that there’s a new attentionbeing paid to the idea of the citizen. I’m not saying it’s a direct consequence ofthe last eight years of the Bush administration …

As I said a few weeks ago, following your presentation at the event toinaugurate the Centre for Visual Fields at University of Sussex, we live ininteresting times, and it is a strange time for democracy and for the citizen. Asquestions of civil liberties and human rights become ever more complex – tosay nothing of those more minor, but intimately connected, freedoms toresearch, to study, to access knowledge, and to make new knowledge even –we are not (as George W. Bush may well have put it) so much in a state ofemergency as in an extended (that’s to say global and globalised) iteration(following Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt) of Giorgio Agamben’s ‘state ofexception’, a moment in which the government claims that it needs tosuspend the laws in order the preserve the rule of law. This ‘state of excep-tion’ isn’t an aestheticisation of politics, to quote the famous phrase of WalterBenjamin but rather, as Nick Mirzoeff has put it, a state that ‘cast[s] a pall ofinvisibility over that which is done in the name of the state of exception’(2008: 23).

I’m interested to know how are we meant to come to grips with this stateof exception, what Jacques Rancière, somewhat differently, has called ‘the“perplexities” of the Rights of Man on the “humanitarian” stage’? ForRancière (2004) the answer to how we’re meant to come to grips with it issimple enough: dissensus. This is, for him, the possibility of a difference ofopinion, a dissenting opinion, in which the very possibility of the politicalsubject demonstrates they are deprived of the rights they had (as well as therights that they did not have) and that this very demonstration demonstrates,through public action, that they also ‘had the rights that the constitutiondenied to them, that they could enact those rights’ (304).

Perhaps the efforts of Obama’s campaign to initiate a culture of grass-roots funding, with its massive community of small donors, is a hugelysuccessful instance of affirmative opinion exercising …3

WJTM: Well, this is not going to be a very direct answer. But I think I can saya few things about the question of what it means to be political, or to do poli-tics, in relation to what we do. Which is reading, studying, criticising, analys-ing, trying to understand. I’ve always felt that what Heidegger called ‘actualthinking’ is an inherently political act. It may not be political in the usualsense of action and direct involvement, but it constitutes the foundation ofany authentic politics in my view. We have had eight years of thoughtlesspolitical action, driven by ideological fantasies, deep ignorance of the realitiesof the Arab world, and an even deeper lack of curiosity. We have beengoverned by a militant anti-intellectualism that regards ‘gut feelings’ andfervent religious convictions as an adequate basis for political action – a ‘faith-based’ foreign policy coupled with a faith-based science policy that inhibitsscientific research, denies the reality of global warming, and rewards incom-petence at every level. And unfortunately we have been in a situation where

3 So, perhaps, is the historic voter turnout at the 2008 US election.



the traumatic images of 9/11 have seemed to validate moralistic ‘instincts’,blind Manichean reactions, and institutionalised stupidity. 9/11 had thetragic effect of combining a know-nothing, self-hoodwinking politicalprogram with an enormous popular panic that supported claims of absolutepower (the state of exception) and absolute certainty (the definition of friendsand enemies as Good and Evil). Carl Schmitt must be smiling in whatevercircle of hell he occupies today.

So it is tremendously encouraging to me that Barack Obama – who, as Iedit the final draft of this interview in mid-November 2008, is now the Presi-dent-Elect of the United States – is a very smart, exceptionally learned, curious,and judicious man. He is capable of self-criticism and self-consciousness, capa-ble of admitting a mistake and learning from it. I foresee a period of ‘actualthinking’ in the White House that I hope will radiate outwards to the Americanpeople and the world.

In the meantime, I think it is our responsibility as intellectuals to resistcynicism and fatalism, and to connect our work to the world – a connectionthat Edward Said called ‘secular criticism’, a worldly sense that ideas domatter, even the most esoteric and recondite. And even more important thanideas is thinking, which I hope we have been doing here this lovely afternoonin an English garden …

References

Barrell, J. 1980. The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting1730–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mirzoeff, N. 2008. ‘Visual Culture, Everyday Life, Difference and Visual Literacy’.Visual Culture Studies: Interviews with Key Thinkers. Edited by Marquard Smith.London: Sage Publications.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (ed). 2001a. Landscape and Power. Second edition. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press.

Mitchell, W. J. T. 2001b. ‘The War of Images’. University of Chicago Magazine December:21–23.

Mitchell, W. J. T. 2008a. ‘Havana Diary: Cuba’s Blue Period’. Critical Inquiry 34:3, 601–11.Mitchell, W. J. T. 2008b. ‘Questions for Errol Morris’. Harper’s Magazine, 24 April.Mitchell, W. J. T. 2009. Holy Landscape. Edited by Larry Abramson, translated by Rona

Cohen. Shenkar/Resling Studies in Visual Culture. Tel Aviv: Resling Publishing.Obama, B. 2007a. The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.

Edinburgh: Canongate Books.Obama, B. 2007b. Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Edinburgh:

Canongate Books.Rancière, J. 2004. ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’. South Atlantic Quarterly

103:2/3, 297–310.Retamar, R. F. 1989. Caliban and Other Essays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press.Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Said, E. 1998. After the Last Sky. New York: Columbia University Press.


politics: an interview with w.j.t. mitchell

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