In January 2009, artist and Parsons faculty member Melanie Crean launched The Shape of Change, an ongoing project consisting of two interconnected works that examine the ephemeral nature of change, independence and the formation of identity. The first work tracks change on an international scale on the Web site www.shapeofchange.com, an online archive of American and Iraqi desires for political change. Through the presentation and visualization of  opinions of artists, writers and the general public, this part of The Shape of Change seeks to countermand the empty political brand that the term ‘change’ was reduced to in recent American and Iraqi elections.

The second project looks at change on a personal scale, documenting an infant’s early development as it learns to walk and speak, thus establishing itself as an independent social subject. In this conversation, scholars and practitioners from the fields of art, science and religion discuss how their concepts of change both correspond and differ.

Participants:

AA Bronson is an artist and healer living and working in New York City. In the sixties, he left university with a group of friends to found a free school, a commune, and an underground newspaper. This led him into an adventure with gestalt therapy, radical education, and independent publishing. In 1969 he formed the artists’ group General Idea with Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal; for the next 25 years they lived and worked together to produce the living artwork of their being together, in addition to undertaking over 100 solo exhibitions, and countless temporary public art projects. In 1974 they founded Art Metropole, Toronto, a distribution center and archive for artists’ books, audio, and video. From 1987 through 1994, they focused their work on the subject of AIDS. He is currently the President of Printed Matter, Inc., in New York City, and Artistic Director of the Institute for Art, Religion, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary.

Melanie Crean is Assistant Professor of Media Design at Parsons The New School for Design, teaching classes in experimental time-based work, mobile media and gaming. As the former Director of Production at Eyebeam, she founded a studio that worked with socially based moving image, sound, public art and open source software. She designed special effects at MTV Digital Television Lab and produced documentaries in Nepal, on subjects that include women trafficking and the spread of HIV along trucking routes. Crean has received commissions from Art in General, Bronx Arts Council, Harvestworks, NYFA, NYSCA, Rhizome and Creative Time.

Sensei Jules Shuzen Harris is a Soto priest who has been practicing Buddhism for more than twenty-five years. He holds an Ed.D. with a concentration in applied human development from Teachers College of Columbia University and a MSW from New York University. As a psychotherapist, Shuzen has found creative ways to synthesize Western psychology and Zen to achieve dramatic results with his patients. He also focuses on the relationship between Zen and the martial arts. He is a fourth-degree Dan Black Belt in Iaido (the art of drawing and cutting with a samurai sword) and a Black Belt in Kendo (Japanese fencing). He also founded two schools of Japanese swordsmanship in Albany, NY and Salt Lake City, UT.

Alaa Majeed is a reporter, producer, and translator. She received her BA from Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. Majeed has co-produced segments for Al-Jazeera International and PBS. She has also reported for United Press International, Pacifica Radio, the BBC, National Public Radio, “60 Minutes,”and The Sunday Times (London). Her experience as a translator includes work with news services, conducting/translating classes for Iraqi civil servants, and a position with Nature Iraq, a non-governmental, environmental organization. She is currently also working as a researcher, monitoring news wires, documenting press freedom violations, and conducting investigative interviews with journalists overseas for the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is based in New York. In 2007, she received the International Courage in Journalism award from the International Women’s Media Foundation.

Presented as part of Streaming Culture / Art & Politics, a new interdivisional initiative organized by Victoria Vesna, Visiting Professor, UCLA, and Director of Research, School of Art, Media and Technology, Parsons The New School of Design, in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

If you are not able to join us in person, log on to:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/parsons-the-new-school-for-design

Posted on April 19, 2010

Joshua Simon is a curator and writer based in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. He is the co-editor of Maayan Magazine for Poetry and The New & Bad Art Magazine and editor of Maarvon – New Film Magazine, all based in Tel Aviv. Among his projects in poetry is Red: Poems of the Working Class, an anthology in Hebrew and Arabic he co-edited (May Day, 2007). Recent curatorial projects include Internazionale! (Left Bank, Israeli Communist Party Culture Club, Tel Aviv 2008), Come to Israel, It’s Hot and Wet and We Have The Humus! (Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York Times 2008), The Rear at the First Herzliya Biennial of Contemporary Art (2007), and Sharon (Tel Aviv 2004). The book The Aesthetics of Terror (Charta, 2009) which he edited, is based on a group show on censorship he co-curated in New York City.

1.
Roee Rosen’s insightful “The Law is Laughing: Fragments Following the War in Gaza” traces a variety of pathologies through their symptoms expressed in the Israeli media. The self-explanatory mechanisms of the Israeli media disavow any criminality on their part. The Israeli media presents its case from the standpoint of the victim.
In order to render the logic of the unconscious, Freud cites a joke about the impoverished man who borrows 25 florins from a well-to-do acquaintance, assuring him at some length of his distress. The very same day, his patron comes upon him in a restaurant with a plate of salmon with mayonnaise before him. He reproaches him: “What, you borrow money from me, and then you go and order salmon with mayonnaise. That’s what you used my money for?” “I don’t get it,” answered the accused, “when I’ve got no money I can’t eat salmon with mayonnaise. When I’ve got money, I mustn’t eat salmon with mayonnaise. So tell me, when can I eat salmon with mayonnaise?”

Freud’s delightful reading of this joke puts the impoverished bon vivant’s claim in an existential context: while the benefactor believes the impoverished man should be compelled not to even think of delicacies such as salmon with mayonnaise in his situation, the impoverished man knows that tomorrow he will be in the same situation, therefore he should enjoy today. In many ways, the Israeli self-explanatory mechanisms, both those of the government and those of the media, use the same logic of the accused in this joke, but in a very different way: a series of claims by Dutch, British, Norwegian, and Swedish organizations right after the attack on Gaza were answered with Israeli counteraccusations regarding these countries’ demeanor during the Second World War and during their Colonialist and Imperialist past. Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Avigdor Lieberman’s responds frequently to the accusations by saying something along the lines of: “I don’t get it. Our actions are nothing compared to what you did in the past centuries. Had we have done what we are now doing back then, it would not have even been regarded as crime at all.” In the spirit of the joke, this Israeli mechanism of justification against any criticism of its actions echoes the logic of the impoverished man: “When we didn’t have our own state we couldn’t do it. Now that we do have a state, we mustn’t do it?”

2.
Having the privilege to publish Rosen’s “The Law is Laughing” in Hebrew in Maayan Magazine was a learning experience—the text enabled a reading into the Israeli civil society as constantly oscillating between mobilization as citizenship and citizenship as mobilization. The regime of segregation has taken its toll on the privileged as well as on the oppressed. By making of the Palestinians non-citizens, Israeli civil society condemned itself to have no civilian life. One of the ways this toll manifests itself is a pathology of eccentric normativity: Only in Israel (and maybe North Korea) can one find on the front page of the most popular daily newspaper a rating of high schools based on the number of graduates volunteering to elite army units. Another example for the eccentric normativity of Israeli civil society is the “business as usual” manner with which the Israeli military’s video-on-demand TV channel was received by viewers; during the first days of the attack on Gaza the military spokesman launched a TV channel in which re-runs of aerial documentation of recent shelling on Gaza were shown, together with more “arty” videos with footage of blindfolded detained Palestinians dissolving to landscapes with swarming soldiers and of armored vehicles passing in slow motion. This same eccentric normativity enables the military to occupy a vast area right in the center of Tel Aviv-Jaffa (it owns the most desired real estate lots in the heart of the business district, spread over approximately a hundred acres), and to have its chief command facility hover over the city, making the 1.5 million residents in the surrounding area actual human shields of a military compound.

Contrary to Apartheid, the occupation is a system of denial. As a regime of segregation it differs from Apartheid in that the privileged do not admit its existence. This is a disavowal Apartheid. Eyal Weizman has claimed that today, the concept of the banality of evil, introduced by Hannah Arendt, has been updated to the paradigm of the lesser evil. Today political and ethical debates revolve around a management of evils. This would be one of the ways to explain the Israeli consensus surrounding the attack to which they subjected Gaza.

3.
In the months since the attack on Gaza in December 2008, Israeli media has ignored the city’s existence—there isn’t a word about the hunger and impoverishment of the population. In many ways it is as if the whole Gaza Strip had disappeared. This, while the war has continued by other means: as the military operation, killing approximately 1,400 people, was just phase one of the attack, phase two is the control of the reconstruction of Gaza, or more accurately, the prevention of re-building. Reconstruction is a form of destruction; the aim was to dethrone Hamas through the reconstruction. From the Israeli viewpoint, the battle now is over who will reconstruct Gaza and what elite will be consolidated through the distribution of foreign funds.

Almost ten months after the attack, the first report on the situation of the population in Gaza in Israeli media was a story about the Gaza zoo; after the zebras in the zoo were killed during the Israeli attack, the manager invited an artist to paint stripes on a number of donkeys. This sad story of deprivation and creativity was regarded as a funny anecdote by Israeli commentators, and experts on animal rights were rushed to the studios to explain how inhuman the Gaza zoo staff was.

During this whole period of silence since the attack, the front pages of Israeli papers were bleeding with headlines to stories of random violence: an ultra-orthodox pregnant woman arrested for starving her toddler son, later diagnosed in her psychiatric evaluation as suffering from Münchausen syndrome by proxy; a hate crime, directed against a gay youth center in the center of Tel Aviv, that killed two teenagers; a group of drunk teenagers beating to death a man on the beach in front of his wife and daughter; a TV celebrity, Dudu Topaz, going on a revenge spree, ordering attacks on TV executives after his show was taken off the air and rival channels rejected him—waiting for his trial in a detention facility, Topaz hanged himself in the shower using the cord of an electric kettle; a young divorcé drowning his daughter in the bathtub and cutting his wrists—while waiting for his trial he jumped to his death in the detention facility’s courtyard from a ten-foot-high wall, cracking his skull and breaking his neck.

At the same time Israeli media highlighted these gruesome stories, they were silent on the conditions in devastated Gaza. Since January 2009, after the Israeli military resumed its invasion, Gaza has continued to be enclosed from all sides and under a strict embargo of rations and quotas of food, clothes, medication, and building materials. In the face of the media’s inability to acknowledge their responsibility and unwillingness to report this collective abuse of a population of more than 1.5 million people, one cannot but define their hysteria over this series of random stories of violence in the past months as a symptom of repression and projection. These headlines are a confession: we are the starving mother, we are the drowning father, we are the ones committing hate crimes, we are the ones who are killing the innocent, we are going on a revenge spree.

4.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt suggested the Dreyfus affair to be a “foregleam” of the twentieth century, a grand rehearsal of the rivaling ideological powers of twentieth century Europe. With the help of Karl Marx’s analysis of the fall of the Second French Republic and the raise of Napoleon III in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (which was first published in the U.S. in the spring of 1852, one hundred years before Arendt’s book), one can borrow this “grand rehearsal” idea and apply the grave mishaps of the Second French Republic to twentieth- and twenty-first-century parliamentary regimes, or better, “dictatorships of the bourgeoisie.” Marx is giving an insightful report on the recent history of his time, describing how the logic of lesser evil and (almost) free general elections results in proto-Fascism. In his text, Marx shows how the Revolution, calling for universal manhood suffrage, resulted in just a few months in the election of a “grotesque mediocrity” of a president (on December 10 that same year). Louis Bonaparte was elected President of the Republic with almost 5.5 million votes—75% of the total). He would later on eliminate the Second Republic and restore a Second Empire on December 2, 1852 (What Marx refers to as his Eighteenth Brumaire). Marx would have probably agreed with Deleuze and Guattari when they say: “No, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted Fascism.”

5.
Nowadays in parliamentary regimes governance is often synonymous with corruption, and Israeli politics is no exception. Under parliamentary regimes of the past decades we have been subjected to the rule of capital’s technocratic Fascism—a bureaucratic elite of economists and political practitioners. Yet, in Israel one notices how the traditional “junta” of military elite (Yitzhak Rabin, Commander in Chief turned Prime Minister; Ezer Weizman, Air Force Commander turned President; Ariel Sharon, Head of Southern Command turned Prime Minister; Ehud Barak, Commander in Chief turned Prime Minister; Shaul Mofaz, Commander in Chief turned Cabinet Minister and candidate for Prime Minister in the primary elections of Kadima Party—this genealogy of militarism in government established its dominance with the Israeli military victory of 1967) joined forces with the technocratic Fascists (Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni—and prominent Israeli politicians who are linked to the genealogy of neo-liberalism that swept the country since 1991, all with strong ties to key business figures who benefitted immensely from the ongoing wave of privatizations they have been implementing in the last two decades) to construct together a corporatist Fascism.

In 2006 Roee Rosen created the illustrated figure of Shit Boy and the drawing Shit Boy Showers (Suicide). In this touching and hilarious drawing, Shit Boy is showering in his own pee, and by doing so bringing about his own demise. Rosen’s Shit Boy is our Angelus Novus—it calls for an allegorical reading of the age of “Anal Capitalism” (as Kaja Silverman coined it) and is a poignant image for our political horizon. Walter Benjamin saw Paul Klee’s 1920 watercolor Angelus Novus as depicting “the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” Rosen’s Shit Boy presents a perpetual circulation of destruction and reconstruction. This is an animation of an ungrateful privilege—being captive of yourself, being hostage of a logic of which you yourself are the cause. The “shit boy showers pathology” is self-inflicting. Jewish Israelis are held hostage by their own logic. They are trapped by their privileges.

6.
In his fragments, Rosen refers to war crime as a political qualification and to criminality as a sought-after characteristic of the Israeli leadership. It seems even more so today with the Israeli response to the investigation of international human rights and humanitarian law violations related to the attack on Gaza, which was assigned by the United Nations Human Rights Council and headed by Richard Goldstone. After the Goldstone report, Israeli Welfare Minister Isaac (Buzi) Herzog of the Labor Party suggested constructing a special internal bureau to deal with allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity by high-ranking Israeli officers and politicians. Herzog was quoted saying: “Israel is going through a harsh judicial campaign that undermines its sheer existence, and therefore it has to recruit the best jurist minds to support it in its battle.” In a bitter irony, the Welfare Minister turns the state that was supposed to protect the victims of crimes against humanity into a state that protects war criminals. By suggesting the construction of this bureau, the minister has proven that Israeli leadership forms its constituency through incrimination. We are all accomplices. Harboring war criminals, Israel has turned to be a very bad Holocaust joke.

Posted on December 2, 2009

Inspired by the 2005-06 cycle of public programs, Considering Forgiveness is the first in a series of forthcoming books that examine pressing issues of social, cultural and political relevance from a multitude of perspectives. The Considering Forgiveness volume is edited by Aleksandra Wagner with Carin Kuoni, with curatorial advice by Matthew Buckingham. It features textual and visual contributions commissioned from scholars, activists and artists, including Anne Aghion, Ayreen Anastas, Gregg Bordowitz, Omer Fast, Rene Gabri, Andrea Geyer, Mark Godfrey, Sharon Hayes, Susan Hiller, Julia Kristeva, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Lin + Lam, Jeffrey Olick, Brian Price, Jane Taylor, Eyal Weizman and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl.

Table of contents and introductions (PDF)

Pbk, 6.5 x 10.5 in. / 268 pgs / 90 color
ISBN: 978-0-9821745-0-0
Price: $24.00

Review in Modern Painters magazine, June 2009

Available in bookstores, at online retailers, and directly through D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers.

Posted on September 20, 2009

Where does conflict come from? The answer to this question is becoming ever more elusive, even in cases where we appear to know the answers, the protagonists and the situations well enough. Roee Rosen’s text, “The Law is Laughing: Fragments Following the War in Gaza,” asks what role the law occupies in a protracted conflict. The question itself is structured around the over-determination of protagonism and on an understanding of conflict that revolves around a narcissistic and negative doubling of the protagonist. Rosen’s mode of interpretation is itself both comedic and comic, banking on the startle response of the reader, familiar with and worn-out by terms of the situation to which he refers.

In his essay “Laughter” (1900), Henri Bergson proposes, broadly, that a situation that is comic is structured around the coexistence of contradiction within a singular situation without one element of the combination ever overwhelming the other, except in a punctuated manner.¹ These punctuations are revelatory moments that elicit release in the form of laughter. For Bergson, the reigning contradiction is a mechanistic arrangement that gives off the illusion of life. If the procedural matrix of the law is a form of such mechanistic arrangement, then we might read Rosen’s fragments as identifying those moments in which the law seems, perversely, to come to life as though through the periodic and repeated lifting of a veil.

The first instance of this unveiling is in the parsing of the names of various military operations whose cheerful meanings carefully and meaningfully veil the horror of the operations themselves. These names do not conceal any hoped-for outcomes, but in fact provide semiotic cover for enacting certain forms of destruction. The reading of those names through the veil of that semiotic cover is a process rich with revelation, especially insofar as it points to the contradiction between meaning and action, between nominal and verbal forms. As Bergson puts it, in comedy, one is faced with “manner seeking to outdo the matter, the letter aiming at ousting the spirit.”

The fragment itself bears testimony to the punctuated temporality of a protracted civil war that in turn bears the enormous weight of a fundamental contradiction, that between ethical and unethical forms of militancy. The law imagines itself to be on the side of sovereignty and professional soldering and against terror and un-civility, yet the lines between the ethical and unethical are continuously blurring within the spaces of conflict.

Each episode, each action, in this protracted conflict is marked by the law’s negation of itself, that is to say, its violation of norms upheld as sovereign, by sovereign authority. This self-transgression that turns the lawgiver, the state, into a criminal, results in confounding the boundaries of sovereignty. When the state itself thus negates the concept of the law, what is happening may be read as a simultaneous and, of course, contradictory expansion and contraction of the scope of the law and sovereignty under the guise of a singular set of procedures. “An effect, which grows by arithmetical progression, so that the cause, insignificant at the outset, culminates by a necessary evolution in a result as important as it is unexpected.” (Bergson, 113) Rosen suggests that events progress in a punctuated fashion and their effects are ejected values. If the comedic effect lies in maintaining an illusion of life in relation to a mechanistic arrangement, then the zombie is the perfect choice of metaphor—neither fully living nor fully dead, the zombie periodically returns to haunt the scene of the crime, thus revealing the law’s transgressions.

Through each fragment, each punctuation, we can discern the increasing urgency of understanding the comedic structure of sovereign law, the chief protagonist in this protracted civil war. Rosen writes: “When the law is constituted on its own negation, its comic mode is not set against the law (as Deleuze understands humor and irony). This comic mode is not driven by a discontent with what is (for instance, as a defiance against wrongdoing or a reaction to fear or horror), but is rather prompted by a paradoxical attempt to stabilize and preserve the law in its condition of self-negation. (…) The comic resonance is thus the result of a condition by which the state itself negates the concept of the law.”

This self-negation takes myriad forms: the benign and even cheerful naming of events; the multiplication of forms of illegality that might be legal and legalities that might in fact be illegal; the negation of the border and the disavowal of sovereignty as a means of maintaining an occupation; the consequent confusion of who belongs as a citizen; and, finally, the refusal even to simulate ideals of justice and good-will as required by the norms of nationalism.

How then does the law maintain itself as law? Rosen’s fragments suggest that the comedic mode is critical to sovereign self-maintenance. In this mode, life itself is negated while its illusion is maintained through the perpetuation of mechanistic arrangements. In this mode, the law imposes its sovereignty while provoking suspicion about its own seriousness. But its effects are realized primarily in its performative dimension. Linguistic anthropologists and poststructuralist critics suggest that performative acts are a special genre of speech or other behavior that are constitutive of meaning in and of themselves. While the law presupposes the citizenry as its interpretive community, its constant violations of its own normative limits open a space of uncertainty about this community. The law’s performative violations of its own limits speculatively seek out an alternative community, constituted by and therefore accepting of its violations.

What is inherently comedic about this mode of operation is its episodic but profound engagement with normative limits, at once presupposing and constituting those limits. The law is not humorous but comedic, laughter is not just a release but constitutive of the citizen. The sovereign laughs at and laughs with the citizen thus negating the oppositional dimension of laughter instead, bringing to the fore its focus on contradiction, the mixing of mechanistic form with the episodic illusion of life.

The particular contradictions that are brought together in the operations of the law prompt reversals of commonsense understandings—as when the assertion of good citizenship becomes an act of mutiny against a law-negating state rather than an act of conformity. Each episode begins to be measured in terms of possible reversals. Rosen’s fragments might be read similarly, mimicking the sovereign’s comic mode, they work as critique precisely because their seriousness is articulated in a veiled language—not of death and destruction alone, but of how the illusion of life is ostensibly maintained.

Posted on September 20, 2009

1. The Comic Mode of the Occupation
The name of Israel’s recent war in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, was taken from a Hanukkah nursery song that Israeli children know by heart. It was penned decades ago by Chaim Nahman Bialik who in Israel is known as the national poet (the complete line reads, “My uncle bought me a dreidel made of cast lead”). When a mass killing in which hundreds of Palestinian children are slaughtered in about three weeks has a name conjuring innocent childishness, we are faced with a vile joke. The comic bent of the occupation army and of Israeli law is persistent and has its own distinct literary style. Its poetics can be recognized in a long sequence of names offering a variety of reversals—a war being called “peace” in Operation Peace of the Galilee (the first Lebanon war, 1982); a destructive offensive rendered in terms of constructive defense in Operation Defensive Shield (2002); and the horror of assault on the city of Rafah in Southern Gaza cloaked under a name of faux pastoral lyricism in Operation Rainbow in a Cloud (2004).

To set into relief the uniqueness of this comical lyricism, one need only mention the American offensive Operation Desert Storm, an infantile, repulsive name inspired by war movies, but undoubtedly a name without concealed smiles. In Israel, these reversals of meaning are ubiquitous and go beyond the naming of wars, so much so that they are routine presuppositions of daily life. In 2003, for example, I wrote about how a news story was seen as “positive” because it reported on the reduction in the jail-time sentencing for what are called “administrative detainees,” prisoners who are never put on trial, and hence for whom a legal sentence actually doesn’t exist. This amounts to a legal action that contradicts its own premise – or a joke by which the law negates itself.

2. The Comic Mode and the Law as the Criminal
A philosophical insight to which I frequently return is Gilles Deleuze’s claim that the comic mode is the only way to destabilize the law. A law such as “thou shalt not kill” is premised on the possible action of the killing. Thus, on the structural level, crime affirms, justifies, and solidifies the mechanism of the law. The comic response to the law (for instance, the masochist’s eagerness to be punished regardless of his innocence or guilt) may confound, confuse, and undo the structure and the meaning of the law. How then can one reconcile the comic mode of Israeli law with the transgression of law that the comic mode is supposed to entail?

The answer lies in the fact that, with the advent of the occupation, Israel became a state whose law is based on its own negation. The occupation refutes the notion of the border as the basis of national sovereignty. Once the concept of the border has been negated, the state itself must diligently and persistently act to obfuscate its borders and disavow its sovereignty, from which follows the negation of the presupposition that the state’s inhabitants are its citizens, and thus the very concept of citizenship is negated as well. (It should be noted that, in Hebrew, the word “ezrakh” is used both for “citizen” and “civilian,” a subtle conversion that makes citizens into mere civilians distinct from military personnel.) The comic resonance is thus the result of a condition by which the state itself negates the concept of the law. The lawmaker—the state—is the criminal.

3. Without the Facade of a Law
National law, of course, is never innocent, but its rules and operations are premised on a simulation, appearance, and facade (of good will, justice, ideals, and values) that cannot be maintained once the negation of the foundation of the national law (the border) becomes the explicit appearance and the constitutive structure, that is, once certain crimes explicitly appear as law.

In this sense, I do not wish to claim that Israel’s crimes are worse than those of other nation-states (for example, the United States’ crimes in Iraq), but rather to understand the special pathologies stemming from this disintegration of the relation between appearance and action, law and crime, transgression and comicality. Thus, for example, one can imagine an American citizen who actually believed George W. Bush’s axis-of-evil rhetoric, but it is impossible to imagine an Israeli citizen who would be deluded enough to think that the Israeli government would like to turn the Palestinians of the occupied territories into Israeli citizens. This is why the murderer is unabashed when joking: there is no facade to keep.

4. The Unique Comicality of Criminal Law: A Nameless Comicality
When the law is constituted on its own negation, its comic mode is not set against the law (as Deleuze understands humor and irony). This comic mode is not driven by a discontent with what is (for instance, as a defiance against wrongdoing or a reaction to fear or horror), but is rather prompted by a paradoxical attempt to stabilize and preserve the law in its condition of self-negation. Such comicality, of a criminal sovereign, is akin to cynicism, but does not fully correspond to it. We are dealing with a nameless comic mode.

5. The Legal-Illegal and the Illegal-Illegal
In my novel Ziona™ (2006), there is a minor character, Ma’adan (formerly Gordon) Dukas, who settles in a caravan on hill number 547, which he calls Tel Or (Hebrew for Mount Light): “a one-man settlement of the illegal-legal-legitimate kind (to be distinguished from the illegal-illegal-legitimate kind, and from the illegal-illegal-quasi-legitimate kind).” When the law negates itself, it perpetuates a dynamic, ever-expanding system of legal activity aiming to establish comic distinctions between legally approved crimes (the crime that is not a crime), and between those crimes that are still defined as crimes. This legal bustle is characterized by dizzying hyperactivity, and even though, by its very nature, it aspires to remain discrete, its signs cannot help but pop up in the media. Thus one can read about the versatile actions of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), specifically the department of international law and its attorney’s office, whose prime goal is to render kosher those illegal military actions such as the killing of civilians (Haaretz magazine, January 23, 2009).

Then there is the plan to “incriminate,” after the fact, every house bombarded during Operation Cast Lead—the creation of a dossier for each target that documents its hostile use—a plan whose natural offshoot ought to be the incrimination of every murdered child. There is also the exposure in the media of a governmental database, deemed secret by the defense ministry, that documents the fact that the vast majority of the settlements in the occupied territories—“The Legal Illegal”—are unlawfully expanding, building with no authorization on a massive scale, often on private Palestinian lots (Haaretz magazine, January 30, 2009). This database reveals that which is still “Illegal-Illegal” aspiring to become a “Legal-Illegal” as well, an activity in which practically all Israeli governments have engaged since the occupation, with varying degrees of concealment.

6. Values as Phlegm; Values as Zombies
When the law is its own negation, its comicality is like spasmodic coughing. The phlegm(s) secreted during such coughing fits are cherished values that are converted into refuse. In Operation Peace of the Galilee, the value that became refuse is the longing for peace. And in Operation Cast Lead, in its extraction of its name from a nursery song, the value/waste is the sensitivity to the lives of children. Values are the living dead—matter ejected that ever returns from within: an uncanny zombie. This explains why someone who holds the value as if it were fully alive (an Israeli mourning the murder of Palestinian children) might be intimidating and threatening, to the point of being called a criminal (a traitor). As zombie values resurge as the Unheimliche, there is a correlation between the Israeli psychological reactions used to cope with, for instance, the murder of children, and the major comic mechanisms described by Deleuze: disavowal as the mode of the masochist (e.g., we murder despite the terrible pain we feel; we murder because there is no choice; we kill as few as we can; our suffering and our attempt to save those we did not have to kill attest to our humanity; we, in fact, do our best to save lives by killing) and negation as the mode of the sadist (Hamas is responsible; it is the Palestinians who put the children in harm’s way; they murder themselves through the mediation of our weapons, hence, we do not murder).

Comic coinage in this situation is the zombie residue of values the law is supposed to affirm, that is, when it could still be “seriously” grasped as a law—the era when it could still be said without a bitter smile that Israel aspires to be a democracy, sovereign within its established borders. Think, for example, of a relatively bland product of the law, meant to signify humanism, abidance by international law, and the fear of hurting civilians: a procedure the IDF calls “knock on the roof,” that is, shooting “mild” ammunition at the roofs of people’s houses in Gaza before deploying heavy ammunition that will eradicate the house and kill those who stay inside it. The name “knock on the roof” cannot but be associated in the Israeli memory with the infamous “neighbor procedure” (the army’s use of Palestinian fighters’ family members and friends as human shields in the attempt to lure them out of houses during the second Intifada). These names remain as verbal comic loci of zombie values.

7. Measured Crime
The comic phlegm, as well as the crimes themselves, has a dimension of proportionality. Thus, for instance, exceedingly cruel and prohibited cluster bombs were used against the civilians of Gaza and phosphorous weaponry was used against Lebanon, however the criminal measures that will be taken against the demonstrators in Bil’in, Palestine, who protest weekly against Israel’s separation wall, will be more moderate (as many of the demonstrators are Jewish Israeli citizens)—with an occasional comic resonance. Among the diversity of such measures, the Israeli police recently introduced The Skunk, an armed vehicle splattering demonstrators with jets of noxious fluid. Thus, for humanitarian activists, the law reserves the more gentle reversal—that of treating protestors like criminals. This proportionality, however, is fluid, ever seeking opportunities to redraw its lines. War is such an opportune time. While the headlines were busy with Operation Cast Lead, tiny news items informed the Israelis that the Bil’in demonstrators were now being shot with 22 millimeter bullets, long declared illegal after their deadly potential was recognized.

8. Haaretz: The Criminal’s Expression
It is difficult to add much to Noam Chomsky’s exhaustive analysis of the way consent is manufactured by the media. Consent necessitates gaining the favor of those who perceive themselves to be critical and enlightened through a newspaper that has the appearance of integrity, criticality, and autonomy in relation to the law: in the United States, the New York Times (for example), rather than the tabloids, and in Israel, Haaretz.

During the war, the structures described by Chomsky were clearly reflected in the headlines of Haaretz. The daily number of Palestinians killed appeared customarily at the end of the bylines (if at all), and details of the killings were usually scarce and marginalized and accompanied by no images. The general composition of the daily, with the reports of Amira Hess (the only journalist who delivered substantial information from Gaza) relegated to page 8 or 9, reduced Hess’s contribution to almost that of an Op-Ed.

But what went beyond Chomsky’s reflections were instances in which Haaretz portrayed the imagined nation as a singular, unified entity with its own collective psychology—that of the criminal. This is how, for example, Haaretz framed the United Nations’ call for a cease-fire in a big headline on page 2: “Israel’s Friends Sarkozy and Bush Disappoint in the UN” (January 11, 2009). The “disappointment” over the fact that the “friends” do not approve of the crime and decline to oppose the UN’s resolution is not given in quotes. The disappointment doesn’t even reside in dismay over the position of a right-wing leader. The disappointment” is not a response to the news either (against which other reactions can be fathomed, such as relief and strengthened hope for a cease-fire). Rather, the disappointment itself is the news reported: “I” am disappointed¬—“I,” that is to say “we,” are disappointed, and we will to continue “our” war in Gaza by the criminal power that is the law.

9. Solemnity
From within the comicality of the law can be understood the radical dimension of the call of a thinker such as Ariella Azoulay who argues for a serious, willful return to the notion of citizenship, and for the active assertion of a civil domain. In relation to the law as such, the coinage “a good citizen” might indicate conformism, obedience, and a normative stance, but in a law-negating state, good citizenship might be seen as a mutiny.

10. War Crime as a Political Qualification; The Timing of War
If the state is criminal, it stands to reason that part of its leader’s job qualifications would include an ability to be a criminal, and since the problems at hand are no less than existential, white-collar crimes would not suffice: the leader should be a war criminal.

This is why Ariel Sharon epitomizes the “leader” in the national imaginary. Sharon is the leader who was found unfit by a federal committee to serve as a defense minister following the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon (1982), and became a highly popular prime minister, not in spite of his crimes, but because of his proven ability to negate the law. This sheds some light on the timing of massive killings right before or after national elections: the second Lebanon war left about 1,000 Lebanese dead two months after an election and Operation Cast Lead left at least 1,300 Palestinians dead (of whom at least 410 were children according to Be’Tselem data of January 28, 2009) two months before an election. During election time the burden of murderous proof lies with the prospective leader, especially if the suspicion can be raised that his or her heart is not cold enough.

Posted on September 20, 2009

Prompted by Israel’s invasion of Gaza in January 2009, the following text by artist Roee Rosen and the response by anthropologist Vyjayanthi Rao examine the public articulation of conflict, specifically the military acts in the current Israeli Palestinian conflict. Rosen posits that the comedic mode, which has yielded innocuous names for aggressive military actions, is a core trait of Israeli law in that it reaffirms itself by negating the premise on which it is built. Vyjayanthi Rao develops a narrative of the law as protagonist in a temporary situation. Both Rosen and Rao have participated in various VLC programs; the subjects of sovereignity, electoral processes and performativity were also alluded to in the exhibition OURS: Democracy in the Age of Branding.

Roee Rosen is an Israeli-American artist and writer, living and working in Israel.

Vyjayanthi Rao is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The New School.

Rosen’s text was written in late January 2009 before Benjamin Netanyahu’s election as prime minister in spring 2009.

Posted on September 20, 2009