Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader

Edited by Chris Kraus and Sylvère Lotringer

MIT Press, 2001

Marcus Boon

I was a teenage Semiotext(e) reader.  When I first arrived in New York in 1982 aged 18, the newly published “Polysexuality” issue of the journal, with its bulbous leatherman on a motorbike on the cover and its “sadistic” blurred interior typeface, embodied a vision of art and knowledge that promised to open up secret worlds hidden in the gloom of Reagan’s America and Thatcher’s UK.  Semiotext(e) was started in 1974 by Sylvère Lotringer, a professor of French at Columbia University. Early issues, with titles such as “Alternatives in Semiotics” and “Saussure’s Anagrams” had a strong linguistic focus, but by 1975 the magazine had focused on French post-structuralist post-1968 theory, devoting issues to Georges Bataille and Friedrich Nietzsche, two issues to “Schizo-Culture” and so on.  In 1983, Lotringer started the Foreign Agents series of cheap, stylish, minimalist paperbacks with a collection of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's work, On the Line, Jean Baudrillard's Simulations, which became one of the seminal texts for the 1980s art world and Lotringer’s dialogue with Paul Virilio, Pure War, which, among other things, was a powerful influence on American cyberpunk.  In 1990 New Zealand-born film maker Chris Kraus (who is married to Lotringer) began editing the Native Agents series, devoted to first person American fiction/nonfiction mainly by women, including Eileen Myles, Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller and Kraus herself. 

Last year, Semiotext(e) ended its association with co-editor and manager Jim Fleming and Autonomedia, the Brooklyn based alternative publishing collective, for a new distribution deal with MIT Press.  One of the first fruits of this new association is Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader, edited by Kraus and Lotringer, offering a selection of greatest hits from the last 25 years of the journal and the book imprint, including selections from Acker, William Burroughs, Hélene Cixous. Michel Foucault, Marker, Kate Millet, David Wojnarowicz, Louis Wolfson and many others.  Even if you do not care in the least about French theory or post “I” fiction, the garish, eyecatching title lettering on the spine will elicit all kinds of interesting conversations on the subway or with immigration officers in airports.  If you find yourself being questioned at JFK, and the first amendment working any more, try telling your questioners that, as Lotringer and Kraus say, the title is a kind of joke.

The book consists of a series of sections with titles like “Terror”, “Pure War” , “Ecstasy” and “Life in these United States” that bring together the theoretical interventions of the mostly French male academic writers and the mostly male New York downtown 1970s writers who Lotringer edited, with the first person texts written by the mostly American female writers that Kraus worked with.  It is very hard to articulate exactly how the European theorists, 1970s New York avant garde and the first person narrative writers of the 90s fit together.  Apparently, even back in the day, it was a volatile mix.  Lotringer recalls a conference he organized in 1975 at Columbia University at which Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard, none of whom were known in the US at the time, attended along with New York avant garde figures such as William Burroughs, John Cage and Richard Foreman and various political, counter-cultural figures of the time.  According to Lotringer there were clashes and disputes between the various parties present, Foucault eventually allying himself with a group including radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing, mental patient advocate Howie Harp, and Judy Clark, who gave a paper on behavior modification in the prison system (and was later arrested and imprisoned as a result of her involvement with the Black Liberation Army and the Brink’s hold-up in New Jersey). 

Michelle Tea, author of one of the Native Agents books, says in her review of the Reader that the French theory is illustrated by the American first person narratives, but the relationship between the two is much more enigmatic (and is complicated by the presence of the earlier NY avant garde who were neither theorists nor post “I” women writers).  At the very beginning of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari speak of the rhizomatic association of a wasp and an orchid, two unassociated things brought together temporarily for a particular reason, without their ever becoming fused into a single transcendental unit: Deleuze’s collaborations with Guattari are a fine example of this, as is Semiotext(e).  Resistance to the full flowering of the rhizomatic association has been very strong though.  Although in one of Kathy Acker’s texts, Lotringer is excited that he has made terrorism fashionable in New York, the Italian autonomists and German radical groups around Baader Meinhof that Lotringer documented so well remain unknown to most Americans – who continue to prefer homegrown extremism, whether of the Weatherman or Charlie Manson variety.  As for theory (I realize that it is absurd to use this word to describe such a complicated ecology of intellectual, political and aesthetic practices and practitioners, but I will do so for the sake of convention), Lotringer’s interviews with New York avant garde figures such as film maker Jack Smith, or painter David Wojnarowicz, reprise a series of fascinating, highly intelligent rebuffs to the Europeans, whether projected as some kind of alien Other or accurately understood.  One of the most fascinating encounters documented in the Reader is between a theoretically oriented interviewer and New York composer John Cage.  The interviewer repeatedly attempts to assimilate Cage’s aesthetic of improvisation and spontaneity into a philosophical system (as Stockhausen and Boulez tried as well), while Cage carefully steps outside of the oppositions that are offered to him.  Cage, like film-maker Jack Smith or for that matter Burroughs, recognized the ghost of European intellectual hegemony when he saw it, and was not about to genuflect to it. 

And what does one make of the inclusion of German “terrorist” Ulrike Meinhof’s “Armed Anti-Imperialist Struggle” or former Black Liberation Army leader Assata Shakur’s “Prisoner in the United States”?  Originally Meinhof’s piece was part of the remarkable volume devoted to Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, in which a vast collection of interviews and texts opened up buzz words like “Baader Meinhof” into multiplicities in which strategies of resistance and becoming fragmented off in many directions, allowing one to perceive the complexity of events.  As an isolated piece, Meinhof’s text ends up looking like very late radical chic, served up for whatever sensationalist or kitsch value remains in it.  Of course, Meinhof’s text can stand on it’s own, or could resonate with the other texts around it, but I don’t think it does.

I miss the density of perspectives gathered around a particular event that characterized the journal in it’s heyday.  The book went to press before September 11, and inevitably, given that terrorism is one of the books foci, one reads the Reader in the light of that date.  Baudrillard’s piece on Mogadishu remains brilliant, the various Deleuze and Guattari associated pieces are still thrilling, but most of the pieces seem historically of their time.  What remains is Lotringer’s exquisite taste in both European and American thinkers, and the real role he has played in introducing theory to America, insofar as that has actually happened (Lotringer’s version of theory bypassed psychoanalysis and Derridean concerns with textuality for the French Nietzscheans, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze). 

The title of the Reader embodies many of the contradictions within.  “Hatred of Capitalism” was New York film-maker Jack Smith’s suggestion for an alternative title for the inescapably academic “Semiotext(e)”.  Lotringer is dismissive of academic faddishness.  When I went to graduate school in the early 1990s in New York, it was partly out of a desire to read more of the stuff that Semiotext(e) had turned me on to (this was the time that French theory was becoming fashionable in academia according to Lotringer).  My interest in Semiotext(e) began to wain around the time that French theory started to become unfashionable in the mid 1990s, and my own interests tended in the direction of the kind of first person narratives which the Native Agents series published (which were then also becoming fashionable).  It’s hard not to see the evolution of the Native Agent series, under Kraus’s editorial control, as in itself a part of a broader response to “theory” in the 1990s and a growing lack of patience, both in the US, but also in France with the jargon ridden parodies and pastiches of certain original thinkers, which resulted in the growth of cultural studies and reflexivity as intellectual tropes in the 1990s.  Both Kraus and Lotringer note that they wanted to get away from the overwhelmingly male culture of theory.  But why use the American women writers (and the name of Semiotext(e)) to do so?  Maybe Semiotext(e) would have been better off remaining a forum for overeducated, arty, white male crankiness, such as it is.  Isn’t this what Jack Smith meant when he proposed his alternate title?

More problematic in the Reader is the absence of any material associated with Jim Fleming and Autonomedia.  Semiotext(e) was originally published by Lotringer, out of Columbia University.  Jim Fleming became the manager of Semiotext(e) in the early 1980s, and took responsibility for the business end of the journal and imprint.  He is also listed as co-editor of the Foreign Agent series in Virilio’s Pure War (1983).  According to Lotringer, a loose agreement was made with Fleming that allowed him to use any money made from Semiotext(e) to build up the collectively run Autonomedia.  Important issues of Semiotext(e) such as the SF, USA, Architecture and Radio numbers were published jointly, according to the credits pages, and the two presses catalogs overlapped both in terms of the authors they published and the book formats.  Last year, Semiotext(e) ended its association with Autonomedia, with the back catalog being split according to who was most involved editorially, with Kraus and Lotringer retaining the name.  Thus the Reader contains none of the work associated with Fleming or Autonomedia.  This is unfortunate because if there is a mutant offspring of the downtown New York scene and French theory, it is embodied in Autonomedia’s ethos, and the post-punk, anarchist, spiritualized, radical ecology oriented American writers who it publishes.  Semiotext(e) USA, edited by Fleming and fellow Autonomedia editor Peter Lamborn Wilson, charted the rise of this movement, while Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zone was one of its bibles in the 1990s, to the point where Bey himself withdrew from his celebration of temporary moments of autonomy such as those celebrated by participants in the Burning Man ceremony in Nevada, into a more rigorously DeBordian critique of the spectacle, which was capable of appropriating both the TAZ and the multiplicities and radical neo-subjectivities which Semiotext(e) celebrated.  In one sense, the TAZ’s success, along with Semiotext(e)’s estrangement from Autonomedia suggests one of the problems with rhizomatic multiplicities – the difficulty in controlling the directions in which they proliferate, the constant risk of autonomy being reabsorbed into transcendental units under whatever name. 

Hatred of Capitalism, with its lack of biographical information, it’s ad hoc organization and programmatically spontaneous introduction has a painstakingly unfinished quality, as though it is desperately trying to avoid becoming history, trying to remain open, multiplicit, which is another way of saying alive.  The anxiety is palpable – and in itself the strongest sign of life.  It reminds me of the anxiety I’ve always felt reading Semiotext(e) – the almost unbearable sense of what the world we live in today is like, how painful it really is to think about the situation we find ourselves in.  No easy solutions, no withdrawal from the world, no attempt to convert our suffering into masochistic pleasure (well, maybe once or twice).  What then?  Hatred of Capitalism – a joke?  What do we know about jokes?  The theorist would have much to say on this point, but the post-I writer just laughs.

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