Logics of Enmity

This uneasy moment, this moment of The War Against Terrorism, hardly seems an auspicious one to wade into the attempt at an imaginative discussion of the theoretical potentiality that counters the polarity of the state vs. terror. Even less so for an argument which would like to base its practice on an alternative reading strategy of terror and would like to try and think it as an alternative geography, as a counter cartography of subversion. One can just see heads shaking, murmurs of concern about the need to condemn these terrible acts, one remembers the incredulous responses to KarlHeinz Stockhausen’s somewhat frivolous remarks about acts of terrorism functioning as great avant garde works and one also remembers with discomfort the sight of jubilant responses from those who thought the attacks justified. This uneasy moment it seems, calls only for condemnation, for moral judgement, for the repudiation of possible justification. The languages of this moment are those of negation, of security, of closure, of enmity. That other moment of possibility in which we might rethink the relations of global power, the moment that seemed so necessary in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001 seems to have been passed by without return, has hardened into the current mournful topography of unavoidable enmity with all those so easily homogenised under the aegis of ‘terrorists’.

I would like to have this uneasy moment produce other engagements, to have it look back and see complex antecedents in wars of national liberation and anti-colonial wars and urban guerrilla movements, of fantasmatic geographies of relational circulation, of instances of unforeseen liberation and the unframing of women from various post-war patriarchal strictures. I would like to hear other voices such as that of Melek Ulagay, one of the heroines of Kutlug Ataman’s 1999 multi screen video piece “Women Who Wear Wigs”. Ulugay, an activist on the run in the 1970s and 80s, became mistakenly taken for some half fictitious persona called “Hostess Leyla” who was supposed to have been implicated in the hijacking of a Turkish Airlines plane. She tells radiant tales of her years on the run, often disguised by an atrocious blonde wig and various weird costumes, years in which she came across and was helped by the kinds of people that she, as an urban politicised intellectual, had never interacted with. Her tone is rueful, sad, comic and proud and while she mentions the totalising politics that motivated her and assures her listeners that the poor peasants who hid her and her friends were aware that they were committed to making a better world, she also recognises that she was shaped by these events rather than shaping them. While it is clear that 30 years on the run between Turkey, Syria, Palestine and Europe, until the eventual amnesty for Turkish political outlaws, inflicted much suffering on her and the loss and arrests of many others, much of the narrative is also very funny; the ridiculous disguises, the conversations with prostitutes in flea pit hotel bathrooms, the outlandish plots and signals arranged between conspirators, the unexpected kindness of strangers, the ever deteriorating awful blonde wig. Even the brutalities of the Turkish police of those days are described with a semblance of irony. An obviously committed political activist, a so-called terrorist on the run, Ulagay’s speech is not a discourse of enmity - in Ataman’s video, and guided by his desire to have the personal turn the political into high melodrama, as she tries on wigs and describes her adventures, she fleshes out an exceptionally important piece of history in which not only political but also social and cultural gains were made. These historical moments, in Europe and elsewhere have been re-written as failed instances of revolutionary nihilism and the current manifestations of urban terror have been divorced from them. Instead they are being produced as the horrific face of the so called “clash of cultures”, a prospect so dangerous that nothing short of global warfare will do to secure the West from its enmity.

While I would wish for a change of voices its not actually possible to bypass all of the polarities of enmity without understanding how they have come to so dominate the discourse of ‘terrorism’.

Before I can try and find other languages I need to try and understand exactly how this moral consensus around enmity, otherness and atavism has consolidated and why it has created a climate in which we have been so overtaken by notions of defence and security.

As Angelia Means says “After September 11, a moral consensus has “emerged” (in the US) that cuts across the boundaries of cultural and political diversity: terrorists are the enemy. Like pirates in the Nineteenth century, terrorists are hostes humani generis. In this context the torn flag of the United States, has become a polyvalent symbol, signifying both a particular nation and a universal idea. Not just amongst us, but amongst all “civilised” people, the practice of political violence against private persons is denounced as an atavistic remnant. Unfortunately the consensus that terrorists are hostes fails to grapple with the true nature of “atavistic remainders” invoked by the image of the terrorist”1

For Angelia Means , a US political theorists, there are 3 main questions that must be posed to the overarching homogenising of ‘terrorism’. The first has to do with interrogating the culpability of the object of terrorist violence “If a democratic public is complicitous in terrorism against those who are excluded from its public, does the fact that it is a democracy make it a legitimate object of the Other’s terrorism? In the history of modern democracy, a history that includes racial and colonial terrorism, was the use of terrorism by others, never justified?”2

The second question has to do with Jurgen Habermas’ admission that political violence can take the form of a more diffuse cultural violence that relies upon and reproduces self/other dichotomies. Therefore what Habermas calls the democratic project of ‘including Others’ expands the political domain to resist cultural and symbolic violence that impedes extending equal rights to all. 3

And following the logic of this argument , she poses a third question of whether political violence is unjustifiable in all cases “ And if we do assume that the terrorist is the enemy who “takes humanity back to prehistoric times” we still need to ask whether the normative project of “including the other” ultimately includes “including the enemy”.

However, given our critical commitment to the notion of ‘difference’ we have some obligation to do just that, to wade in and break up the monolithic dimension of terror by both introducing the logics of difference into it and by unhinging it from being morally yoked in singular opposition to the state.

From its beginnings, this discussion of terror has been posited around issues of justification, security and enmity. The United Nations commission on terror and terrorism published its conclusions linked to the following definition “ Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, by a group of persons or particular persons for political reasons are in any circumstances unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or other nature that may be used to justify them” 4

Here we have an argument that links terror to the ‘general public’ not to the state and yet over the past year and within hours of each violent occurrence the object of attack has been shifted from the suffering public to their affiliation with that which seemingly overrides their specificity, namely the state. This has been done, as Giorgio Agamben has recently argued persuasively, by means of countering acts of violence with discourses of security. “Security as a leading principle of state politics dates back to the birth of the modern state. Hobbes already mentions it as the opposite of fear, which compels human beings to come together within a society. Security being a leading principle of state politics, …politics secretly works towards the production of emergencies which can instantly be countered by an ever growing ambition for and dependence on, security. Today, says Agamben, Today we face extreme and most dangerous developments in the thought of security. In the course of a gradual neutralization of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security becomes the basic principle of state activity. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become itself terroristic.5

To the ‘security’ that is privileged by state discourses, Agamben opposes the notion of discipline. Discipline he argues , is the opposite of security in that it wants to produce order while security wants to regulate disorder. It is at this point, at the moment of the regulation of disorder that the work of culture finds it imperative to intervene and examine all of the potential significances of disorder. Difference as we well know, is one of the main hallmarks of a social and cultural atemisation which is often perceived as a form of ‘disorder’ in which there is no totalising set of beliefs or shared values which serves to produce a semblance of cohesion. Difference; epistemological, racial and sexual is the agent of fragmentation and thus has been outlawed from a discussion that requires the coherence and consensus that Angelia Means and Giorgio Agamben have invoked in criticism.

In this essay I am trying to think ‘terror’ through another set of parameters. I am trying to think it in relation to contemporary art and visual culture but not in a descriptive manner, neither through art works and images that reference or illustrate terror nor through ones that try to get to the heart of its political or cultural truths. Instead I wish to address a series of questions to something called ‘terror’ and the ways in which it brushes up against visual culture, the ways it weaves in and out of its narratives, the ways in which I have seen it momentarily light up the field with a glimmer of some alternative possibility of knowing that has intrigued me for a while now. For that is I believe the contemporary relation between art practices and critical theory. In this contemporary relationship we no longer think of art as applying existing knowledge through other means, no longer illustrating or analysing or translating. Rather we think that it is both a research mode and a means of knowledge production in and of itself. Therefore art and visual culture are able to produce both new knowledge as well as new modes of knowing which have the potential to unframe some serious issue, such as ‘terror’ in this instance, away from the moralising discourses that imprison it at a level that requires response. This level maintains that there is ‘terror’ out there and we need to produce a whole set of responses to it; we need to learn to read it and foresee it and protect against it and avenge and punish it. What I am wondering instead, is whether we can learn something about ourselves and our culture in the encounter with ‘terror’, whether it produces another structure of knowing the world we inhabit? I also wonder if visual culture is not perhaps the arena in which such a transformation in the status of ‘terror’ might take place. In a Deleuzian vein then this is a shift from the specific to the singular; the specific to a logic of its contexts anchors ‘terror’ in an antagonistic geo-politics and in various cultural clashes while the singular to a logic of its own self organisation recognises that it might be producing something new in the world outside of those materially specific conditions.

In this vein I would like to ask such questions as whether we might be able to think of ‘terror’ as a form of geography, an emergent and alternative geography. Equally is this alternative geography a form of knowledge production rather than the epistemological reproduction and mirroring of colonial and imperial world positions? Might it perhaps produce something which may be described as relational geography, in the ways in which so much of contemporary visual culture is producing for us forms of relational aesthetics ? Finally I want to try and set up an interruption of ‘terrorism’ through the logics of gender and sexual difference and see to what extent this might break up both its supposedly monolithic homogeneity as well as its reportedly internal ideological coherences.

Logics of Relationality

Geography has long been for me a locus of contradictory knowledges.

Initially I worked to develop an inquiry that tried to rethink the relations between subjects and places traditionally known as 'geography', away from the dominant powers and practices that have the authority to name us, locate us, determine our collectivities and identifications and establish the rights and privileges we do or do not have. What seemed then at the outset of the project —and still does quite a bit later — so problematic was that I wanted an analysis in which no disciplinary or empirical mode prevailed so that I would not end up examining the ways in which historical, economic or cultural conditions are reflected in art works, or read contemporary, critical Geographies through art works. The danger of that was obviously that the work I was attempting would be high jacked by some academic paradigm, which would dictate a relation between theories, contexts and objects. As someone who had her initial training in the field of Art History, I knew that this form of knowledge territorialization needed to be avoided in favour of some new object of knowledge in which a semblance of parity and reciprocity might take place between the constitutive components of the study and through which a form of cultural politics could emerge from the work rather than be imposed on its materials.i

When I speak of geography I do not mean the materials we all studied at school about land masses and cloud formations and climactic zones and flora and fauna. Nor am I speaking about demographics and national formations and geo-political resources. Instead I am contemplating the possibility of rethinking the relations between subjects and places way from the organising principles of the law; the law of the state that controls privileged inclusions and desperate exclusions, or the cultural law of naturalised and essentialised heritages that assume that a place called France for example , is inhabited by French people who share a language, a historical culture, a shared set of assumptions and attitudes. What if a large part of the population is Francophone by coercion, if its lives out its life in France, in French but also in resistance and in resentment, if its complex allegiances are elsewhere and its presence in France is a legacy of colonial histories and of contemporary economic imperatives. - Could the map of that internally split entity still be called by the overly simple term of 'France', still be coloured a uniform pink or yellow of whatever colour it is the atlas, a colour that would over-ride all of the contradictory internal differences of which it is made up?

To speak of Geography in relation to issues of cultural difference, is to steer clear of identity politics, to navigate away from the internal coherence of groups with an already established identity 'in common'. In this form of politics known as identity politics the preoccupation is to populate existing models of knowledge with a broader range of subjects. It is to bring difference, whether sexual or cultural, into the existing paradigms and expand their populations. For me, a far more important project is to try and actually think difference; different modes of knowing rather than different subjects within known modes. Geography thus is a way of speaking cultural difference, a way of acknowledging that all difference is always epistemologically embedded and subject to regimes rather than simply subjugated to dominant powers. It is made manifest in the world through sign systems that include cartography, border marking, landscape stereotypes, national cultures and many others. The intersections between 'geographies' as articulated through sign systems and arts practices circulating as visual culture who might just have some chance of rewriting these systems, is the heart of the subject I am trying to produce here.

Geography is at one and the same time a concept, a sign system and an order of knowledge established at the centres of power. By introducing questions of critical epistemology, subjectivity and spectatorship into the arena of geography we shift the interrogation from the centres of power and knowledge and naming to the margins, to the site at which new and multi dimensional knowledge and identities are constantly in the process of being formed.

A possibility of thinking an alternative geographical structure emerged from the exhibition entitled "The Short Century - African Liberation Movements 1945-1989" which began in Germany (2001-2, Vila Stuck, Munich and Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, and has continued to Chicago and New York (MCA Chicago, PS1 New York) 6. The opening historical moment of the exhibition is mid-century and the independence movements and wars of national liberation, which were taking, place throughout the colonised continent of Africa. The informing notion of Africa here is very wide and it includes North Africa and parts of the Sub Saharan Middle East. This means that beyond a named place - a continent called Africa - we have a world of mutual histories and linked narratives - instead of a colonised entity, a sphere of global exchange and circulation that challenges both the hegemonic supremacy of the coloniser's culture and acknowledges the complex internal network of inter-African migrations and circulations and influences and exchanges. In my reading of the exhibition, it operates through staging a series of losses to various fundamental assumptions that the West has about itself and to which it has traditionally constituted a place named ‘Africa’ as its quintessential ‘other’. Thus in the first instance one of the fundamental Western assumptions that has been lost through the staging of this exhibition is one of the prevailing modes of European/ African interlocution, namely the constitution of Africa in resistance to Western colonisation.

Secondly we encounter a complex network of mutually informative ideological articulations and political struggles that extends beyond the continent, and of links with African American and African Latin American political and intellectual work. As in Chinue Achebe’s remarkable text, ”Tribute to James Baldwin”7 in which an African writer brought up under the cultural prejudices of British colonialism, set to travel the world under the provisions of the International Agencies that had invented the concept of ‘Development’ in which they located him, finally encounters the U.S. through his pursuit of and meeting with James Baldwin who himself was shortly to flee it for what he hoped would be the more welcoming host culture of Paris. Similarly in this exhibition, complex networks of travel and exchange, mutualities enacted largely through the back doors of culture, point to the fact that the West is part of a route and a process but hardly the destination and that the divisions of colonialism and more recently of the Cold War, which the West believes actually map out the globe, do not actually do so.

Thirdly we begin to see how these struggles for liberation and independence pierced the fabric of European and American political culture and ruptured the 20th century in the middle (the exhibition's title). How events taking place in Africa, did not follow those taking place in the West but preceded them and made them possible. How a mid-century radicality which came out of joint efforts at both liberation and social reform across Africa - actually paved the way for the explosion of student movements, anti Viet Nam war movements and social resistance movements which took place in the West almost a decade later. Thus for example, revisiting accounts of the lives of radical European thinkers of the mid century after visiting this exhibition several times, I was astonished to register how many of them single out the Algerian Independence struggle, to mark their own political awakening and radicalisation. .If the archives of Western radicality might also be located outside of itself does this mean the opportunity to actually rethink the very concept of radicality and its relation to the primary as well as to cease perceiving of its location as an index of its significance? “The Short Century” project in relegating Europe per se to a hinterland of African radicality, rewrites the dynamic described above and allows for the enactment of a European loss through the recognition of the legitimacy of another entity and its claims to a competing heritage.

For myself, because I had long been preoccupied with conjunctions of geographical counter cartographies and contemporary arts practices - this project of thinking about the possibilities of museums’ and exhibitions’ potential encounters with cultural difference, opened a great vista of alternative mappings. Namely what if we took the privilege of mapping away from the nation state, where entwined with epistemic structures it had produced one of our most unshakable authorities, and handed it over to the resistance initiatives that the state terms 'terror'. Those groups which had been the impetus of national liberation movements and insurgencies of anti-colonial resistance. If we attempted to decouple the exclusive relations between each so called ‘terrorist’ group and the immediate and specific state strictures it was struggling against and instead traced its numerous links with other groups and their shared theoretical precepts and mutual engagements. What would we see if RAF and Brigada Rossa, PLO and IRA, ETA and extreme breakaway groups of Green Peace eco warriors were to be linked with slightly older histories of FLP Alegria, Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, Movement National Congolaise, ANC politics in South Africa and Black Panthers in the USA, to mention only a very few of the struggles that emerged in mid century8. One of the most interesting points to emerge is a recognition that with hindsight, European radicalism has once again written itself as a form of diffusionism, its sources and impetuses exclusive unto to itself. In the numerous books on the ‘the Sixties’ only conjunctions of very old and very European histories are acknowledged; of state fascisms, of proletarian struggles, of engaged intellectuals and mobilised rebellious students – as linking the numerous protest movements and radical resistance actions of the moment. Even the circulation of the Viet Nam war - the site of horrific histories of atrocious colonialism from the Indochine of the French colonial empire to the divided nation of post war super power struggle between the US and the USSR- as a catalyst of much local Western and non Western protest, has been divested of its colonial and race politics and become the floating signifier of unruly, rebellious and anti-authoritarian youth. But even a very superficial historical investigation reveals that everything was linked, though the popular imagination that encountered these links – everyone with a television in 1977, viewers of what Jean Baudrillard was to call “Our Theatre of cruelty”, saw the German tourists cowering in the Lufthansa plane, jointly patrolled by German RAF activists and Palestinian PLO guerrillas on the soil of Mogadishu, Somalia which is of course in Africa , or the Japanese members of radical armed resistance in support of Palestine gunning down Europe bound travellers in Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport. Everyone saw the traces of RAF actions against politicians and financiers in Germany and those of Brigada Rossa actions in Italy, but to speak of the connections between them is to recognise the duality of unresolved fascist pasts in both countries. Everyone in 1979 was party to the veiled nuances and to the cultural shock of the purported collective suicides at Stammheim Prison, but to question them would have meant to breach the carefully constructed boundary between the legal ‘state’ and outlawed ‘terror’ viewed from within a n exclusively European model. The problem was that not many people at that moment had the tools and reading strategies to link manifestations taking place in Western Europe, the Middle east and Africa and Japan and locate them within a mutually imbricated politics that extended beyond the hollow and melodramatic jargon of the revolutionary romance of the moment or the equally hollow authoritarian discourse of politicians who saw their societies as at the edge of an abyss.

The actions and protagonists of ‘terror’ have always been positioned by the state as marginal resistances to itself, as murderers and destroyers of the civil order that the state upholds through its institutions and its laws and their constant and vigilant policing. But what if we, for a moment, tried to read them as a set of geographical ambivalences, as a set of Third Spaces, in which the nation state is unframed, the histories of colonialism are allowed to break out of their imprisoning legacies of oppression, thought flows in numerous directions and named spaces are occupied with numerous and contradictory subjectivities.

Perhaps what we might find here then is a form of relational geography. The relationality of this model of geography lies in two important transitions. The first is that it is no longer anchored in the cohering imperative of the nation state. It is not the state with its illusions of being seamlessly bound from the outside and solidly coherent from the inside, that makes up the single unit components of the geographical map. At the same time, there is no parallel illusion that this conjunction of ‘terror’ movements and their links with earlier movements, have a unified and mutual ideological core, a shared revolutionary agenda. Instead we have a map that is composed of aggregates of intensities, of insurgencies that link and empathize and spark off each other, of generational loyalties that cross boundaries, histories and languages. This relational geography does not operate, as does classical geography, out of a single principle that maps everything in an outward bound motion with itself at the centre. Instead it is cumulative, it lurches sideways, it is constructed out of chance meetings in cafes, of shared reading groups at universities, of childhood deprivations that could speak to one another, of snatches of music on transistor radios, of intense rages, of glimmers of hope offered by ideas that enabled imagining a better world. A work made by Benin artist Georges A’deagbo for the Lyon Biennale of 2000 and entitled “Death and Ressurection” operated in the mode of such a geographical circulation9. It took up the moment of the artist’s sojourn as a student in Paris in the 1960s and his abrupt return to Benin in the middle in the middle of those studies, to help out his family. The work uses his archive of accumulated materials and images of the period as its visual/textual resources. Momentary encounters while in Paris, odd mirrorings of his own foreignness, an unexpected sympathy and identification with Maria Callas whose photographs and tragedies were in every illustrated journals of the day – all these accumulate to an oddly Benjaminian set of interactions with a Paris that is produced out of inexplicit distances and differences and dissonances . The work does not reflect the excited discovery of a longed for and valorised world, it does not rehearse that well worn ground of the colonial pre-disposed to fall in love with the city that had so long inhabited in his imagination through literary and visual images. Nor does it follow that other familiar trope in which the visiting African sees a migrant population from formerly colonised nations re-writing the former colonial centre with its imported habits and languages and forms of expression. Instead he himself is reflected from seemingly inappropriate surfaces; marble steps and operatic divas, worn dress shoes, record sleeves and police reports of petty crimes in local newspapers. This is a topography viewed neither from Paris nor from Benin, but a relational space stretching out between them which could (and does in future works by A’deagbo) be swayed by some chance encounter to spread to some very different locality, not necessarily bound to its axes by any specific world histories. And yet, for all its seeming haphazardness, it is intensely critical in a way that we do not yet know how to read theoretically or ideologically, perhaps simply turning an idiosyncratic anthropological counter gaze on those usually privileged with looking and documenting. Or perhaps it is the look of difference rather than the imaging of the different which gives the work its frisson of having made the familiar, strange.

Not being mapped out of any centre nor out of a periphery ,this relational geography I am speaking of has no particular direction, but instead establishes connection in the manner of the fold, its boundaries touching / not touching its inner recesses.

Logics of Difference

One of those lurching flows of relational geography can also be seen in the specific ways in which images of women terrorists have circulated in visual and political culture. The visual markers of terrorism and its aftermath are familiar iconic tropes. Chè Guevara in a black beret has graced political posters and T-shirts and record covers across the globe for decades now, with little relation to either Cuba and its revolution nor the connections it established with rural insurgencies in Peru and Bolivia where Guevara found his death in 1967. His beautiful features and jet black locks, the conjunctions of Latin America and the Caribbean, the beret imbued with a gold star resonating of an earlier communist revolution, all merged to produce an alluring apparition for the romance and dashed hopes of revolutionary political fervour. Equally the airplane sitting isolated at the margins of the runways in a slightly unfamiliar landscape, viewed through a telephoto lens from great distance and free of the paraphernalia of fuel trucks and catering vans and other civilian ministrations, the fate of its human cargo sealed inside unknown – has become an uneasy media trope. Johan Grimonprez’s inventive and impressive film “Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y” made for the 1997 Documenta X which produces a late 20th century history out of skyjackings, was the first inkling I had that it might be possible to think subterfuge and dissonance, mixed together with popular culture, into a political counter-history. This historical narrative pieced together seemingly disparate and often obscurely incomprehensible acts, into a coherent history of disruption of what became increasingly clear, was a civil aviation counterpart of the ‘military-industrial-complex’ to take up 60’s speak. The film’s deep understanding of just how revolutionary accessible travel had been in the 1960s and of the easy democratic glamour of the pilots and stewardesses which accompanied it, snatches the image of those stationary hijacked planes away from the alarmism and fear mongering of government bulletins and media reporting, and turns it into another relational geography, a meeting ground for tourists and revolutionaries and terrorists and cranks and business men and officials from everywhere. A meeting ground of fantasies of exotic travel and adventurous escape, of markets to be discovered and conquered, of influence to be peddled and information exchanged and of course of an incredible opportunity to capitalise on all these excitable hopes and make one’s political case heard at a previously unimagined prominence. This combined realm of pleasure and terror would work to terrorise not only those on the plane and those who have political and commercial responsibility to protect them, but also all those at home entertaining the same fantasies that propelled the travellers onto their planes in the first place, an attack on both political and fantasmatic terrains.

At a certain level, the seemingly endless fascination with women terrorists, such as Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin of the RAF and Leila Khaled of the PLFP, some of the early heroines of the urban insurgencies of the 1960s and 1970s could be said to be operating at a similar level. Everyone remembers their names, certain images of them; Kahled wrapped in a kefiye and toting a sub machine gun, Meinhof in the courtyard of Stammheim prison, hair spiked and arms above her head, Ensslin dead on the floor of her cell, have circulated far beyond the discussions of the particular events and moments to which they serve as testimony. These images circulate as both the ultimate transgression and the ultimate tragedy. It is as such that Gudrun Ensslin became the main figure in Gerhard Richter’s melancholy series of paintings of the final RAF suicides at Stammheim prison. Painted nearly 10 years after the events themselves, executed in sober monochrome greys that mimic newsprint photos, melding the figures into the concrete surroundings of their imprisonment, they serve Richter as a leave taking and a distancing from an impossible impasse.

Traditional understandings of femininity and of terrorism it could be said, would make both inconceivable to think of as inhabiting the same subject. Thus terrorism became not just a political abject but also one of the natural order of nurturing women and the domestic regulation of the family, a double abhorrence. In the same vein this unimaginable duality would be used to make them, the women, monstrous and unthinkable. Woman, the over determined and over invested sign of femininity becomes in the instance of this popular reception of numerous political movements, both the marker of its ultimate rebellion and of its greatest tragic loss ; the submission to a patriarchal order of both state and family. Equally it is the marker of the most extreme form of liberation, a literal smashing of those constraints.

The literature on the famous women who took part in terrorist activities is unhelpful in trying to puzzle out this continuing fascination with them, it does little more than rehearse the incomprehension of the duality of ‘woman’ and ‘terrorist’ or it tries to humanise their stories with sagas of unhappy childhoods and adolescences constrained by authority.10 On the one hand an over dramatic predetermination haunts this writing, reflecting the incommensurability of ‘woman’ and ‘terrorist’ and on the other, recent contemporary arts practices that reference these figures and recent developments in the map of terror such as women suicide bombers in Palestine, keep drawing us back to re-examine just this conjunction. In recent months Palestinians Wafa Idris and Dareen Abu Aesha both exploded themselves as suicide bombers in Israel and the radical Al Aqusa Martyrs Brigade announced that they were establishing a special unit of women suicide bombers and naming it after Wafa Idris11. Culturally , we remember the female protagonist of the 2001 Tamil film “The Terrorist” and the Algerian women in Pontecorvo’s film “Battle of Algiers” smuggling guns through the checkpoints of French soldiers. Reading endless newspaper reports of the recent suicide bombers and speculation over their actions seems to vet nothing but the writer’s puzzlement of ‘how could they?’ and questions of whether this is an advance or a regression for feminism. Missing from both is the bumbling arbitrariness and unexpected stumbling so evident in Melek Ulagay’s monologue in Women Who Wear Wigs - the unimagined consequences of disguising yourself in an airline stewardess’ uniform and blonde wig might be that you inadvertently become ‘Hostess Leyla’ who is wanted by the police as a highjacker, even though she never existed. If you hide out in a hotel that is in fact a brothel you might get taken up by prostitutes who are far more concerned with how to get your male comrade to marry you, then with the fact that you stick out like a sore thumb in that environment and obviously are on the run. A femininity that is positioned less as a tragically moralised entity propelled towards a tragic end, then as one who can produce contingent negotiations from unexpected situations.

Unyoked from a moralising discourse on femininity however, these endlessly recurrent images become another form of circulation, another set of unexpected connections and legitimations. In the recent work of several young Basque artists such as Jon Mikel Uban and Txomin Badiola we find odd, buried references to German radicals of the 1970s. These works play with various signs and markers of ‘terrorism’ in quite sly ways; men sit in cars waiting for we know not what, bodies are pulled out of cars either dead or asleep, here on the wall a small photograph of Ulrike Meinhof, there a series of frames of Fassbinder in the film Deutschland im Herbst. Uban is more involved in appropriating and evacuating the forms of supposed ‘terrorist’ behaviour of all meaning, staging deliberately ambiguous set pieces and exposing the paranoid suspiciousness bred by the dominance of enmity. Txomin is more involved in remixing set scenes from identifiable avant garde films and staging his own in a pastiche in which he combines the images of terror with those of sexual , particularly queer sexual, fantasies which he has christened “Bad Forms”12. Both produce sly, ambiguous, ‘bad’ forms which have obviously more to do with the reaction to and reception of ETA in Spain, with the fears and suspicions generated and the atmosphere of a watchfulness verging on hysteria, as they do with their own need to be provocative in a political climate in which it is difficult to produce a thoughtful response. However it is the references to a past and to a kind of ‘terrorist’ pedigree that I find so interesting here. To some extent in Uban’s work this is an obvious ploy, combining an image of fairly innocuous activity with an image from the 1970s German RAF photo album, gives these seemingly innocent actions a frisson of dangerous possibility, a deliberate obfuscation aimed at complicating what has become a far too simple discussion. But beyond working and unsettling his audience, there is a set of claims here to a pedigree and a lineage and to a European radicality that had an acute sense of its own imbrication in colonial histories. Why Ulrike Meinhof ? I had been asking myself ever since I first saw these images, what is it specifically about her, that produces a good provenance for someone insisting on the right for extreme resistance as a political option?

A recent discussion by Thomas Elsaesser of two films: Schloendorf’s 1978 Deutschland im Herbst an omnibus film of responses to the recent deaths of the remainder of the Baader-Meinhof group in Stammheim prison with contributions by Schloendorf, Fassbinder and Kluge among others and Todesspiel made for television in 1997 by one of Germany’s most prominent directors Heinrich Breloer covering much the same historical moment, provided some possible insight into this question13. Elsaesser’s brilliantly complex argument uses this comparison to set up two very different moments of political reception.

The one in 1978 is characterised by “attention on ‘sympathasizers’ : students, young unemployed, writers and intellectuals who before condemning the RAF outright wanted to know more about their motives. Suspecting the available information to be suspect, these sympathasizers asked themselves with anguish where they stood in the ensuing debates about violence that split families and estranged life long friends”14 Germany in Autumn was made from the perspective of the RAF and their sympathisers while Death Game focused on one of their victims Hans Martin Schleyer and on the then Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Thus as Elsaesser says it shifts the focus from the insurgencies to the state and its mechanism for re-imposing order.

I have been wondering whether ‘Ulrike Meinhof’’ connotes a cultural climate in which such sympathies are possible or might be recouperable. Meinhof was after all not just one of the main actors in the daring actions of the RAF, she was also a writer, editor, interviewer, film maker of prodigious energies and great visibility. She provided a bridge between those taking actions and those with sympathies for them. She was the proof that extreme actions were grounded in an elaborate set of political beliefs, historical knowledge, widely informed allegiances and a profound sense of injustice. That one could align oneself with the aims if not with the means.

I wonder if the constant circulation of the images of women terrorists such as Ulrike Meinhof is not in part about an attempt at recovering an ethical and political complexity in which it is possible to entertain sympathy, rather than echo the binary opposites of terrorism vs. the state. Perhaps their constant presence among us as image referents, is precisely not to do with the impossibility of ‘woman’ and ‘terrorist’ co-existing , but with the possibility of regaining a semblance of the critical ambivalence and scepticism which characterised their political moment , propelled them to action and communicated itself to so large a public. The politics obviously cannot and need not be recovered, they have long been replaced by far greater complexities but the subject positions and the relational locations of being simultaneously within and without do hold some promise at this anxious moment.

IRIT ROGOFF
Goldsmiths College, London University