Patriarch to continent., Simon Critchley, places the beginning of politics-proper in the feeling of disappointment; similarly, philosophy for him (and Alain Badiou) begins in nihilism, which is not exactly conterminous with disappointment, but which is certainly mixing in the same zone. The spirit of Algiers began in disappointment, and perhaps a dose of nihilism, about ten years ago. That’s when I met their members, drank with them, argued with them, took an ill-advised trip to rural Alabama with them.
They were not yet Algiers, but they were a collective, along with other visual, acoustic and literary artists in Atlanta at the time. They were drawn together by political disappointment – the political gesture of combination – but quickly those first few gestures gave way to vent a frustration at the general lack of disappointment they saw around them. Stuck in the foetid afterbirth of the stillborn New American Century, with a vast imperial project beginning in Afghanistan and Iraq, America had clenched teeth, and the adrenalin shakes, but it had largely not yet made the elementary fall back into disappointment seen in Seattle, 1999.
In Atlanta the middle classes (or better, white middle class aspirants) were content; content in an economy growing through the populist easy-money of housing speculation, and content in the new enemy of the post-Cold War: Muslims. It was all set up for contented discontent – more money, easier credit; the parallel Apple-isation and Walmart-isation of consumerism; phallocentric military potency displayed on television news every night by journalists “embedded” with Iraq-ghanistan’s invaders; and the cosy hatred of knowing who has to be killed: Osama bin Laden, and the rest of what Bush/Cheney cast as the Leninist van guard of the Islamic masses, al Qaeda. 9/11 gave a mission, and mass disappointment was put on hold.
Those around the embryonic Algiers didn’t buy it. The riches of the neo-liberal boom-time didn’t quite reach them; none of them were Marx or Engels, but they were historically orientated, not betting on the golden future; there was a knowledge the crash was coming. They were not messianic technophiles either; that capital’s deployment of technology would solve all our woes was too easy a get-out clause; precision-guided bombing was not going to expunge the blood and bone fragments from war any more than the appearance of the Toyota Prius was going to transform the I75/85 connector into the Garden of Eden.
Moreover they were not going to buy the Samuel Huntington, clash of civilisations bullshit which distracted us from the imperial nature of the war games; lining up East and West, like a full-scale game of chess, global black, global white, that was too easy as well. Easy like the housing-bubble money, easy like video game bombing which is real on the recipient’s end. Let us add another disappointment here: a disappointment with al Qaeda themselves, a group of zealots dead-set on the terroristic propaganda of the deed, an abdication of politics for spectacular terror (which makes good ratings for CNN, however macabre). Al Queda closely resembled the narodniks and anarchists of the early nineteen-hundreds; nothing like any kind of Leninist anti-imperialists real political disapointees could get behind.
In 1979 Tony Bennett famously deconstructed Althusser’s epistemology, and the lit-crit of Terry Eagleton spawned from it. He refused what they accepted, that there was an aesthetic field as such, and instead posited aesthetics as a power-relation – the relation of the canonisers who declare what the aesthetic is, and those who then follow or contest the canon. Art, then, much like politics, is a space of occupation and intervention. Certainly the art and politics of the Atlanta collective I knew were closely intertwined and rooted in their profound disappointment in both political and artistic fields around them. But in the end they couldn’t articulate this in Atlanta any longer; it became useless as a hub, and the collective physically dispersed.
That sensation of having to intervene and occupy, rooted in disappointment, has nevertheless continued. A collaboration spanning the old country, Atlanta, but also Paris, New York and London, has come about. Its geography sounds like that of a boutique fashion store, but in fact it is more like the pilot fish which swims close to the shark’s head. After the centrifuge of diaspora, the collective precipitated-out, as so many do, on the banks of the major thoroughfares by which global capital flows. It is from here – a nowhere hovering somewhere in the mid-Atlantic – that the group Algiers comes to us. The feeling of disappointment has more or less passed now, instead replaced by the dull compulsion of non-alienated labour, the compulsion all artists have to intervene in the fight of the aesthetic, and all politicos have to engage in struggle. Rightly more interested in the Spaghetti West than whatever West the discordar-de-la-civilización-istas have in mind, they come carrying Franz Fanon’s colonial memory, but somehow spawned in them through John Brown, Diego Rivera and Ennio Morricone.
They will not make your teeth whiter, your car greener, or your bomb more accurate; they will (probably) not get you laid, make you rich, or be supporting Vampire Weekend on tour. But Algiers are prone to doing this:
Algiers – Blood from Algiers on Vimeo.
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