Oslo shooter, Dark Matter, ressentiment

Below is an excerpt from the last section of Chapter 4 of Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture. Though it was written several years ago I think it might have some relevance to debates surrounding recent tragic events in Norway:

Acid green and grainy, the four-minute streamed snuff video Homeland Security Part 2 is framed in a dark, circular vignette. Allegedly shot through the lens of a night-vision riflescope we see a distant rock outcropping that appears as if underwater. Then a male voice, in English. ‘He’s low crawling…Guy with a backpack. I bet ya it’s probably full of dope’, Breaking from the rocky ridge is a shadowy figure moving tentatively across the desert ridge in the dark. ‘You know what?’ a second male voice responds, ‘I’m going to take a fuckin’ shot.’ A cracking sound, and a bit more conversation: ‘Get the shovels, get some lime… and hey, grab me a 12 pack, too.’ ‘Roger that. We fuckin’ nailed him, dude!’

Purportedly the video shows the murder of an unarmed, illegal immigrant somewhere in the desert border between Southern California and Mexico. The snuff movie was made by members of the Mountain Minutemen, one of over a hundred informally organized vigilante groups that emerged after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. This particular video appeared briefly on YouTube in August 2007, was removed from the Internet after thousands had seen it and commented on it, many with a grisly appreciation. After an investigation by the local sheriff the video’s authors insisted it was staged, no one had been killed. Although some members of the broader Minuteman Project publicly denounced the alleged farce, describing its makers as ‘renegades’, the farce has since taken on a mythic status amongst anti-immigrant extremists and white supremacists. [1]

Minuteman Project co-founder Jim Gilchrist graphically depicts himself superimposed over the United States Constitution on his own website. He sports an arsenal of compact surveillance equipment: a short wave radio, cell phone, and small video camera that he clutches in his hand much like a handgun, finger crooked as if ready on the trigger. [2] Another website for the Campo Minutemen shows an image of a man speaking into a walkie-talkie with a rifle slung over his back. He is silhouetted against a spare desert landscape at sunset. The website banner reads: ‘Doing For Our Country What Our Government Won’t.’ [3] This slogan, much like Gilchrist’s montage, or the nocturnal snuff film’s ironic reference to homeland security, simultaneously invokes ‘the law’, only to insist that it is either fraudulent or too abstract and therefore insufficient. No written statute it seems can protect the homeland, only flesh and blood guardians who grasp its deepest, most basic truth: vigilance and sacrifice. ‘At some point’, reads one anti-immigrant manifesto, ‘we must stop this interminable flood of humanity or suffer our demise by its sheer numbers as they impact every aspect of our teetering society.’ [4] A sense of visceral, existential panic comes across in this nearly Biblical representation of pending disaster. Nevertheless, the representational violence and racism only hinted at on the websites of informal border patrols is granted full expression elsewhere. A visit to the webpages of the far-Right Militia Movements, or the openly fascist Stormfront Media Portal articulates what the Minutemen dare not say: the rising flood on the nation’s borders is not just a tide of unwanted surplus, it also not white surplus. [5] Sartre might have described this thinking as Bad Faith: a kind of self-deception in which an alleged external threat ­–in this case the rising tide of dark human surplus– is in fact a response to the wounded fantasy of those whose sense of national integrity and personal identity has been forever ruined by an era of de-territorialized global capitalism. [6] Still, no less than De Certeau’s ‘everyman’, this grotesquely retrograde resistance appears inseparably woven into the networks of neoliberal enterprise culture, and the darkest of its ‘dark matter’ reinforces what Eve Sedgwick Kosofsky described as ignorance effects that are capable of being ‘harnessed, licensed, and regulated on a mass scale for striking enforcements.’ [7] Proponents of the new, networked economy insist that digital technology is fundamentally changing for the better how individuals ‘interact with their democracy and experience their role as citizens…and their relationship to the public sphere.’ [8] The notion of networked ressentiment does not seem to have crossed their minds.

Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals pivots on a dialectical flash, an instant when the blocked desires of the subservient class first gain knowledge of their collective advantage over their masters. It is first and foremost an opposition to a world that exists outside the self, new form of negative creativity the philosopher calls ressentiment. The word conjures not only resentfulness, but also active repetition and the folding back upon oneself. Out of the repeated experience of humiliating submission the meek give birth to intelligence and self-knowledge. Ressentiment is a reactive project of survival, and with it emerges a previously unrecognized repertoire of skills: the ability to counterfeit and conceal oneself, to be patient in getting what one desires. Against this furtive artistry Nietzsche opposes the fierce appetites of the master class who have no need for self-consciousness or places of hiding. Although Nietzsche is openly contemptuous of this new servile morality, he also acknowledges that, ‘a race of such men of resentment will necessarily end up cleverer than any noble race.’ One thing is clear, whether merely bitter or revolutionary, undeveloped or reactive, this survival project inevitably makes use of whatever resources it finds at hand, including the misappropriation of the ‘master’s’ own voice, the principal means of expressing political will today The non-market dark matter that Benkler refers to is shot through with just such stealthy, frequently ambiguous expressions of resentment and rebellion. It is replete with acts of theft, rich with double entendre and knowing acts of indirection. Scott describes these ‘weapons of the weak’, and,African American scholar Cornel West lectures that as ‘Nietzsche noted (with different aims in mind), subversive memory and other-regarding morality are the principal weapons for the wretched of the earth and those who fight to enhance their plight’. [9] However, this insubordinate dark matter can just as easily take the form of regressive brutality like that associated with racist football hooligans in the UK and elsewhere. Sociologist John Wilson describes the participants in such disconnected collectivism as ‘unclubbables’ who are eager to take advantage of public festivals and fanfare to stage group transgression of disciplinary controls.[10] However, we might also describe this species of angry dark matter as a kind of poisonous gift that circulate as much in ‘real spaces’ as in cyberspace.[11] Fortunately, as West assures us, the forces of subversive memory born of repeated failure also seek to establish a kind of shadow jurisdiction with their own outlaw justice and bottom-up counter-institutionality. Indeed, the archives, public projects, exhibitions, and publications of Temporary Services, PAD/D, AWC, Critical Art Ensemble, as well as even the premise of this book for that matter would probably not be conceivable without the creative negativity made possible by a shadowy Ressentiment.

[1] See Gilchrist’s follow-up commentary to his own Op Ed in the Los Angeles Times of July 1, 2008: http://opinion.latimes.com/opinionla/2008/07/jim-gilchrist-r.html – the video was briefly offline, and is now visible again received over seventeen thousand hits (not necessarily unique) as of December 2009.

[2] Jim Gilchrist’s Minuteman Project: http://www.minutemanproject.com/

[3] Campo Minutemen: http://www.campominutemen.com/

[4] This is a citation from Minuteman Midwest from November 2008. The site is no longer available. However, the same phrase can be found at From http://www.rense.com/general81/dept.htm, a similar angry, patriotic resentment aimed at the administration of Barak Obama is evident amongst middle and working class members of the newly formed Dallas Tea Party based in Texas: http://taxdayteaparty.com/teaparty/texas/

[5] Stormfront was founded in the early 1990s as an electronic bulletin board hosted by the Ku Klux Klan and has since morphed into an online news and merchandising source for white supremacist and ultra-nationalist organizations with built-in translation software for Serbian, Croatian, Gaelic, Dutch, Russian, Hungarian and Afrikaans, see: http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=218412

[6] For a digitally interactive cultural and political ‘response’ to the border vigilante mobilization and other forms of nationalist xenophobia see the free online video game ICED, in which the player assumes the role of a teenager attempting to avoid capture and deportation by officials:

http://www.icedgame.com/

[7] Eve Sedgwick Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet, University of California Press, 1990, 5.

[8] Benkler, op cit., 272.

[9] James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1990; Cornel West, The Cornel West Reader, Basic Civitas books, 1999, 275.

[10] John Wilson, Politics and Leisure, Allen and Unwin, inc., 1988, 56-61.

[11] Here I offer my own observations of several conversations overheard following a 2007 parade celebrating the winning game of a New York sports team in which young white men, presumably from the suburbs and outer boroughs, gleefully described running atop parked automobiles, leaping over crowd-control barricades, and becoming publicly aroused by groups of inebriated female fans, as police watched on helplessly in Lower Manhattan.