The Spectacle of Disintegration. Маккензи Уорк
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the defeat of the Parisian proletariat in June 1848, the role of Paris as center of political contest was for the moment eclipsed. What emerged in the shadow of Red Paris was Red France. The French peasantry had its own issues: land hunger, debts, rights to the commons. In 1848 the French peasantry arrives on the political stage as an actor in its own right. In 2010 the Thai peasantry did the same. After a populist prime minister was deposed in a judicial coup, the so-called Red Shirt movement came down from the countryside to Bangkok to try to force the end to a quasi-feudal political regime in which the monarchy presided over a state and army that represented only shifting compromises among business interests.
Early in March 2010 the Thai army reported the theft of six thousand assault rifles, but who stole them? Was it what the government called terrorist elements in the Red Shirt movement? Or did the army steal them from itself, so it could blame any violence in a coming confrontation on the opposition? When the Red Shirt demonstrations came later that same month, they were the biggest in Thai history, and largely peaceful, apart from a few grenade explosions in which nobody was killed. The Red Shirts poured what they claimed was their own blood on Parliament and called for elections to end the undemocratic rule—of the Democrat Party. Not getting what they wanted, they expanded their occupation from the Phan Fah Bridge to the Rajprasong intersection in the heart of Bangkok’s tourist and commercial zone, and then into the nearby shopping district.
As part of a crackdown on Red Shirt–aligned media, including websites and radio stations, the army tried to shut down a TV station sympathetic to them. The Red Shirts stormed the station and occupied it, restoring broadcasts, at least temporarily. The army tried to retake Phan Fah bridge without success, killing two dozen people. The Red Shirts built bamboo barricades in the Rajprasong district, and held up a train coming from the Northeast carrying military vehicles.
A Red Shirt leader declared at this point that “we do not condone but we cannot control. There is no more control among the followers.” Attempts at a ceasefire negotiation failed. Red Shirts forced their way into Chulanongkorn hospital near their Rajprasong barricades searching for troops, but they did not find any. The government added US$8 million to the Bangkok police budget. Khattiya Sawasdipol, a former army officer advising the Red Shirts, was shot in the head by a sniper while being interviewed by the New York Times.
In May, helicopters dropped leaflets on the demonstrators urging them to decamp, while they fired back with homemade rockets. Their encampment was surrounded, and the army launched an assault with armored cars. There were occasions of mutiny among the government forces, shooting at the army instead of the Red Shirts, but the government prevailed. Red Shirt leaders surrendered in an attempt to prevent further violence, only to be jeered at by an unrepentant rank and file. The stock exchange, banks and shopping centers went up in flames.22 Whether or not one takes 1848 to be the moment when the peasantry enters history, in its own right, with its own demands, let’s not pretend it ever left it.
The French peasantry in 1848 did not have websites or broadcast stations, but it did have its own forms of expression: songs, pictures, almanacs, secret societies meeting in the woods. The urban left would take some time grasping how to ally itself with all this. The party of order was quicker off the mark, casting the ethereal chains of religious devotion over the populace, while enacting laws to suppress traffic in popular almanacs.
This folk art was not as dangerous as it seemed. Far from being a pure expression of autonomous peasant consciousness, popular art had for a long time imitated that of the ruling classes. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was a strange amalgam. Popular images included Napoleon and the Wandering Jew, Charles Fourier and the saints. Popular art carries new information but is full of reversals, distortions, exaggerations. Courbet appropriated this system of changes and inversions to make images for a dual public and with doubled meanings. “He exploits the area in which men still think and make images with materials long since falsified by history.”23
Courbet’s method, Clark claims, is what the Situationists call détournement: “Instead of reverence, a brutal manipulation of one’s sources. Instead of pastiche, confidence in dealing with the past: seizing the essentials … discarding the details, combining very different styles within a single image, knowing what to imitate, what to paraphrase, what to invent.”24 That there is a traffic between high and low art in Courbet is not all that original or notable. What matters is the direction: “Instead of exploiting popular art to revive official culture and titillate its special, isolated audience, Courbet did the exact opposite. He exploited high art—its techniques, its size, and something of its sophistication—in order to revive popular art.”25 Here is the key Situationist tactic avant la lettre.
Courbet confounded the expectations of both left and right: the left wanted a glorification of simple rural life; the right wanted the preservation of the myth of rural harmony. He addressed the possibility of a public that knew itself to be in a state of displacement. “Courbet’s public was exactly this labyrinth, this confusion, this lack of firm outlines and allegiances. It was industrial society in the making, still composed of raw and explosive human materials.”26 His achievement was to appropriate from both high and low culture the means to give expression to the possibility not just of a popular art, but of a popular power with one foot in peasant rebellion and the other in the radical traditions of the urban tradesmen, bohemia and the dispossessed.
Courbet is the artist who both grappled with the most pressing problems of representation in his time and got the furthest with them: “In the middle of the nineteenth century both bourgeois and popular culture were in dissolution: the one shaken and fearful, trying to grapple with the fact of revolution; the other swollen with new themes and threatened by mass production. What might have happened—what Courbet for a while tried to make happen—was a fusion of the two.”27 But it was not to be. The vicissitudes of the art market made themselves felt soon enough, but far from being a failure of Courbet alone, this was a general failure.
The failure of a public, political art sets the stage for the more agreeable avant-garde of Impressionism, which discovers what can be achieved in the restricted space that remains. Impressionism is the art of the moment in which “the circumstances of modernism were not modern, and only became so by being given the form called ‘spectacle.’”28 In short, Impressionism was the art that traced the consequences for representation of the colonization of everyday life by the commodity form, even if it did not quite know it.
Impressionism knew itself to be the art of a Paris transformed by the urban planning of Baron Haussmann, and the moral panics that ensued from it. It was a vague but widespread feeling: “Something had gone from the streets; a set of differences, some density of life, a presence, a use.”29 Part of this feeling mapped a real transformation. Haussmann tried to evict the working class from its old quarters, leaving a Paris divided geographically by class. Bourgeois Paris would be in the west and working class in the north and east. The whole space of the city would be opened up to traffic. The political city, the city of the barricade, gives way to the city of circulation. The city as horizon of collective action has to be erased, but so too the city of distinct quarters, each a microcosm of trade and manufacture. Industry became a city-wide affair, with bigger markets, bigger players, tighter margins. In place of the small shop, the big department store, and with it the deskilling of retail. The shop assistant became a whole social category. One kind of capitalism supersedes another.
It was capital that changed things, but popular discourse blamed the city. In the 1860s people believed Paris was disappearing and being replaced by something unreal. Everyday life is becoming a matter of consumption rather than industry. “Paris was in some sense being put to death, and the ground prepared for the consumer society.”30 The unitary world of the quarter, where everyone knows everyone and everyone can measure their social distance from each other directly, was disappearing.
What was so troubling was the anomie of everyday life, the interactions with so many anonymous strangers, who were not always what they seemed. Everyone seemed to be passing as what they were not. To navigate such a city takes maps, catalogues, field guides. The citizens of such a city can only interact with each other via representations that make its strange and fluctuating appearances legible. The city