Third Text, Vol. 23, Issue 4, July, 2009, 447–464

Third Text

ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © Third Text (2009)http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/09528820903007735

Commons and Crowds

Figuring Photography from Aboveand Below

Steve Edwards

If we stop history at a given point, then there are no classes but simply amultitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences.

E P Thompson

1

Laissez-faire

was planned

.

Karl Polanyi

2

AN EMPTY COLLECTIVE

It is now a commonplace to say that the anti-capitalist protest in Seattlein 1999 was a watershed moment. Commentators have suggested thatthese protests effectively marked the end of the postmodern consensus,because, for the first time in over a decade, partial claims for recognitiongave way to universal demands for global equality, liberation and soli-darity.

3

None of this is to claim that Seattle was a novel event.

4

Rather,the Seattle protests represent the eruption of the movement againstneoliberal globalisation into the public imagination: at this point, thetotalising term ‘capitalism’ and the idea of collective struggle returned tothe agenda. The practices described as ‘relational aesthetics’ and the‘new realism’ have registered this changed conjuncture. However, if artnow frequently appears under the sign of anti-capitalism, the hegemonicneoliberal ideology continues to valorise the individual over anycommon form of life – the military or various religious ‘communities’ arecurrently the only officially tolerated collective subjects.

5

This article takes the crowd as a significant marker of collective lifeand considers recent photographic representations of the anti-capitalistcrowd by Allan Sekula, Chris Marker and Joel Sternfeld. Perhaps morethan any other mode of image-making, photography has taken thedemotic life of the crowd on the streets as its key subject. As ColinWesterbeck and Joel Meyerowitz put it, working on the street, ‘yields atype of picture that is idiosyncratic to photography’.

6

The ‘IMF riot’ or

1. E P Thompson,

The Making of the English Working Class

, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1968, p 10

2. Karl Polanyi,

The Great Transformation: the Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

, Beacon Press, Boston, MA, 1957, p 141

3. See Alex Callinicos,

An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto

, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2003, pp 4–12; Peter Linebaugh,

The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All

, University of California Press, Berkeley–Los Angeles, CA, 2008, p 12; and Zanny Begg, ‘Recasting Subjectivity: Globalisation and the Photography of Andreas Gursky and Allan Sekula’,

Third Text

, 19:6, November 2005, p 629. See also David McNally,

448

the resurgence of the ‘food riot’ on a global scale makes it vitally impor-tant that we revisit these issues. Paying attention to photographic figu-rations of the ‘multitude’, or the ‘motley proletariat’ involves thinkingabout some of the ways that photography has been understood as a‘totalisation from above’, and examining photographic images of theanti-capitalist crowd as an alternative process of ‘universalisation frombelow’.

7

Central to this argument are the linked concepts of the enclo-sures and the multitude.

Recent photographic representations of the anti-capitalist crowd payattention to how protest is routinely depicted and aim to disfigure thisnormative imagery, which comes in two forms. On the one hand, thereare the standard media images that follow the long-established figure ofthe ‘mob’.

8

These are demonising images of the crowd viewed from onhigh – a particular variant currently abounds in representations of the‘Islamicist mob’. It is hardly surprising that photographs of the violentprotestor have been the mass media’s preferred imagery for the anti-capitalist protests; and, in this regard, the Black Bloc performs as usefula role for the capitalist-media machine as it does for the police. On theother hand, contemporary artists associated with a knowing or ironicrevision of documentary do little to challenge the intellectual evacuationof common life. Primarily, this flâneur-photography gives us an uncom-mon vision of the crowd as an empty signifier for individualism. Thinkof the work of Philip-Lorca di Corcia or Beat Streuli or Sophie Calle. Ineach case an individual is extracted from the crowd as the focus of atten-tion. Di Corcia’s large-scale pictures of ordinary people on the street,produced with a full battery of studio lighting, redo documentary as afashion shoot; Streuli’s portraits zoom in on individuals busy doingnothing; and Calle pursues her own version of ‘stalking art’ – trailingafter a randomly selected figure from the street – as a way of fillingempty time. Even where these pictures register ‘difference’ they followthe logic of self/other rather than one/many.

9

The abandonment or ironi-sation of documentary is the form that the ‘retreat from class’ takes inphotography. And as Jacques Rancière has compellingly argued, thetheoretical dissolution of the category of class means that, all too often,other collectives based on ‘forms of naked, unsymbolizable hatred of theother’ pour in to fill the vacuum. The visions of ‘the people’ that occupythe vacated space are usually ‘racist, xenophobic resurgences, based onthe claim to identity’.

10

COMMUNIST FIGURATIONS

Both the enclosures and the multitude have been the subject of muchrecent debate. Readers of this journal do not need another gloss on thearguments of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, but I should say somethingabout their use of the term ‘multitude’, a term which I employ differently.The image of multitude in Hardt and Negri is amorphous, elusive andslippery – it is only a little less problematic than the notion of ‘Empire’itself.

11

Multitude figures as a kind of placeholder for radical hope,naming revolt without being able to point to its embodiment. Thereare plenty of convincing criticisms of Hardt and Negri, but I simply wantto add that the figurative pattern they advance for multitude is too vague

Another World is Possible: Globalization and Anti-Capitalism

, second edition, Arbeiter Ring Publishing, Winnipeg, Manitoba, 2006; Eddie Yuen et al, eds,

The Battle for Seattle: The New Challenge to Capitalist Globalization

, Soft Skull Press, New York, 2001. Michael Denning makes these events the basis for a suggestive cultural analysis in,

Culture in the Age of Three Worlds

, Verso, London–New York, 2004, pp 35–50.

4. Arguably, the cycle of resistance of which it was part began in the mid-1970s, with what

Midnight Notes

called the crisis of the three deals – the Keynesian deal, the Stalinist one and the Third World nationalist version. ‘Toward the New Commons: Working Class Strategies and the Zapatistas’,

Midnight Notes

, cited in Denning,

Culture in the Age of Three Worlds

, op cit, p 46.

5. Witness New Labour’s squeamish attempt to avoid the word ‘class’ in the recent discussion of inequality in Britain.

6. Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz,

Bystander: A History of Street Photography

, Thames & Hudson, London, 1994, p 34

7. For ‘totalisation from above’ and ‘universalisation from below’, see Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker,

The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic

, Verso, London–New York, 2000

8. The image of the mob finds its most compelling form in Elias Canetti’s equally brilliant and reactionary book

Crowds and Power

(1962). Here the mob figures a wider pattern of contamination and horror for the other. Elias Canetti,

Crowds and Power

, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1987.

449

to play the constitutive role assigned to it. An alternative vision ofthe collective could be drawn from the historians – E P Thompson,Christopher Hill, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker – who have mostconsciously employed an allegorical form of presentation to drag theradical antinomian past into our time. While their point of reference isnot Walter Benjamin, but John Milton or John Bunyan, theirs is the past‘as it flashes up in a moment of danger’: history as that ‘secret heliotro-pism’ towards the present of which Benjamin spoke.

12

The single key factor in the revival of debate on enclosures isundoubtedly neoliberal globalisation itself. A huge round of disposses-sion and accumulation is currently under way involving a global assaulton customary use rights; the transformation of common resources intoprivate property; and the introduction of market mechanisms into allaspects of social life. For instance, the current transfer of land, water andforests into private hands in India is, as Arundhati Roy suggests, ‘aprocess of barbaric dispossession on a scale that has no parallel inhistory’.

13

The British Marxist historians paid a great deal of attention tothe enclosure of the commons and the current round of enclosure givestheir work a new urgency. The British case does not offer a ‘one-size fitsall’ model for contemporary capitalism, but this work does providesubstantial intellectual tools for thinking about the latest round of globalenclosures.

The starting point for analysis of this process is the section of Marx’s

Capital

entitled ’The So-Called Primitive Accumulation’.

14

It was one ofMarx’s great insights to understand that this was ‘nothing else than thehistorical process of divorcing the producer from the means of produc-tion’.

15

The word used in this passage is ‘divorcing’, but the key term is‘separation’. For Marx, the actual historical process of accumulationwas (is) a process of class composition in which private property isconstituted by the separation of the direct producers from the means ofproduction; that is to say, by the forced dispossession of masses ofcommoners. As Marx put it:

Thus were the agricultural people, first, forcibly expropriated from thesoil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped,branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline neces-sary for the wage system.

16

This process was under way in England from the fourteenth century, andby the end of the sixteenth century a substantial class of capitalist farm-ers existed, particularly in the southern counties. The model of agrarian-capitalist improvement they developed was subsequently exported as thebasis of English colonialism: in the first instance to ‘laboratory Ireland’,then on to Virginia and Barbados.

Following from the special issue of

Midnight Notes

on ‘The NewEnclosures’ in 1990, there has been an extensive and intensive debate onenclosure and ‘primitive accumulation’.

17

Here the enclosures do notrepresent a one-time point of origin, but a perpetual assault by capitalon the global commons and commoners.

18

Historically, enclosure wasnot simply a process of fencing-off common land. Enclosing the land issimply a particularly vivid trope for a much more extensive appropria-tion of resources once held in common. The process of what David

9. The exhibition ‘Street and Studio’ held at Tate Modern in 2008 reiterates this trend: as the exhibition progresses the street gives way to the studio, or, better, the distinction collapses as the street turns into an annexe of the studio. This is another version of the metropolitan irony that feels itself much too knowing to find evidence of history or society in documentary pictures. On this see: Debra Risberg, ‘Imaginary Economies: An Interview With Allan Sekula’, Allan Sekula,

Dismal Science: Photo Works 1972–1996

, University Galleries of Illinois State University, Normal, IL, 1999, pp 236–51. Tate is merely one engine for such a view.

10. Jacques Rancière, ‘The Political Form of Democracy’,

Documenta X Documents

, Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, 1997, p 804

11. For a collection of critical reviews see Gopal Balakrishnan, ed,

Debating Empire

, Verso, London–New York, 2003

12. Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’,

Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940

, Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA–London, 2003, p 257, VI, p 391, IV, p 390

13. Arundhati Roy,

Power Politics

, South End Press, 2001, cited in David Harvey,

Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development

, Verso, London–New York, 2006, p 45

14. The translation of the German

Ursprünglich

as ‘primitive’ is obviously problematic. As a number of commentators have noted, ‘originary’ or ‘primary’ are probably nearer the mark; Adam Smith used ‘previous’. The ‘so-called’ is important, because the idea of ‘primitive accumulation’ is used loosely as a descriptive term for an

450

Harvey has usefully re-styled ‘accumulation by dispossession’

19

centrallyentailed the reification of ‘non-monetary use-rights’ into ‘capitalistproperty rights’.

20

Today financial capital, credit and debt play a centralrole. In Britain the enclosures included fencing common-grazing land;highland clearances, deforestation; drainage of the fens; restriction ofaccess to water rights or outlawing of the right to gather foodstuffs andfuel; and the introduction of draconian poaching laws. The agrarianpoor did not own the common land, but they held coincident use rightsin it. The extensive list of these rights constitutes a lost communistimaginary.

21

The propertied gentlemen were concerned that these common userights made the poor lazy and unruly: that is to say, because common-ers could shift for themselves they were independent of the wage-formand could exist largely outside the exchange economy.

22

Nearly thirtyper cent of England was enclosed between 1600 and 1760. A furthersix million acres were enclosed under Parliamentary enclosures in thelast phase between 1760 and 1830.

23

During the eighteenth century thelaw repeatedly ruled for absolute property and against coincident userights.

24

Simultaneously the established customary takings of the trades– which allowed the poor to enhance their subsistence in a way thatdid not involve submission to modern work discipline and the wage-form: shipwrights’ ‘chips’ (the right to off-cuts of wood); or tailors’‘cabbage’ (the fragments of cloth left when the garment had been cutout) – were outlawed.

25

As gentlemen of property redefined thesecustoms as crimes, the poor had the wage-form foisted upon them.

26

Ittook a protracted struggle involving the mass terror of the gallows andtransportation to impose uncommon ideas of absolute property andwage labour on a recalcitrant population.

27

Traditional rights becamecommodities and so did labour: commoners increasingly became wageworkers.

The multitude is sometimes invoked in contrast to enclosure old ornew, but the imbrications of these terms have been insufficientlygrasped. It is not just that the enclosures produced the multitude; theyalso generated its definitions. In an odd way, they also produced thedefinitions of photography. Here the point of reference is not Spinoza,but Christopher Hill’s essay ‘The Many-Headed Monster’, and itsextension into Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s marvellous book

The Many-Headed Hydra

.

28

Hill argues that elite writers in Britainbefore 1640 almost universally shared – what we might call, followingRancière – a ‘hatred of democracy’.

29

Democracy, these men agreed,would constitute a tyranny against the authority and property ofgentlemen. This anti-democratic ideology revolved around linkedtropes for the multitude, which included not only ‘the poorest he inEngland’, but sometimes even the ‘middling sort’. Hill assembles anamazing array of these metaphors. We find ‘the many-headed multi-tude’, the ‘base multitude’; ‘that wild beast multitude’; ‘the many-headed monster’; the ‘giddy multitude’; ‘a giddy, hot-headed, bloodymultitude’; the ‘headless multitude’; ‘the motley hundred-headedfaction’. The multitude was described as ‘ungodly’, ‘furious’, ‘ignoble’,‘unruly’, ‘dissolute’; it was prey to violence and tumult. It was‘mechanical’, servile and slavish. It was a ‘heap of fools’ and it was a‘pied chameleon’.

actual process in much recent theory. The idea of primitive accumulation was employed by the political economists to account for the origin of capitalist property which, they believed, arose from the abstinence practised by imaginary persons prior to the appearance of capitalism. For Marx this was a fairytale. There was no primitive Ur-moment. Against the ‘idyllic’ origin stories of political economy, Marx insists – in an image much loved by Rosa Luxemburg – capitalism came into being ‘dripping from head to foot, from every pore with blood and filth’. Karl Marx,

Capital

, vol 1, part VIII: ‘The So-Called Primitive Accumulation’, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1954, pp 667–724. The citation is from pp 711–12.

15. Marx,

Capital

, op cit, p 668

16. Ibid, p 688

17. ‘The New Enclosures,

Midnight Notes

’, no 10, 1990. See

Multitude

and

The Commoner.

18. There is a big debate on the relation of ‘primitive accumulation’ to accumulation, which ranges from Marx through Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg to Samir Amin. The essential point is that ‘accumulation in one place may correspond to primitive accumulation in another place, in which

ex novo

production of separation can be the condition of the

reproduction

of the same separation in another interlinked place’. Massimo de Angelis, ‘Marx and Primitive Accumulation: The Continuous Character of Capital’s “enclosures”’,

The Commoner

, no 2, available online at http://www.thecommoner.org, p 11. See also Massimo de Angelis,

The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital

, Pluto, London, 2006.

451

This figuration of the multitude collects together, in a series ofdemonising tropes, all of those positioned outside the dominant rela-tions of power and property. Four key features can be observed whenthe multitude is viewed from above. First, it is simultaneously pluraland singular: multitude entails a dialectic of one and many. Second, it isnot human, but an animal or a monster – a beast or a Hydra. Third, themultitude is simultaneously many-headed and acephalous or headless.In this view, the multitude may be active, but it is

not

conscious.Rather, its actions lack reason and virtue; the multitude is wild or fren-zied; it is driven by base urges, envy, animal passions and uncontrolla-ble lusts. Will or agency is here cast as riotousness. Fourth, multitude iswhat E P Thompson called a ‘horizontal sort of beast’ in which differ-ences are contiguous. Thompson made an important theoretical distinc-tion between horizontal and vertical social forms. The horizontal beastregisters differences primarily in relation to an external force (thegentlemen), rather than internal ‘vertical’ distinctions that split themultitude against itself. His example of vertical splitting is craft union-ism, but certain forms of postmodern alterity thinking fit this pattern.

30

In the preface to

The Making of the English Working Class

, Thompsoninsisted that classes were not fixed ‘things’, ‘structures’ or ‘categories’,but relations that only existed in conflict.

31

Horizontal classes come intobeing through historical struggles. Multitude names a position totalisedin opposition to that of the gentlemen. In all, this conception of themultitude is a vicious and lethal vision: levellers, servants, slaves andmechanics (workers) are grouped together as the various limbs or headsof a dangerous and inhuman monster. Their collective lot is labour andthe lash, prison and gallows, impressment and slave ship, plantation,workshop and factory.

The multitude arises out of the dissolution of communal bonds andthe creation of a new class relation. Hill shows us what the multitudelooks like when totalised from above. However, he missed someimportant determinations that cast the multitude as transnational,multi-ethnic and multi-racial: ‘motley’, a ‘heap of fools’ and a ‘piedchameleon’. The pied chameleon is possibly another allusion to theHydra, but the ‘pied’ is interesting and the other two references indi-cate ragged, multi-coloured clothes. The combination suggests povertyand clowning, but it also points to a multi-racial image of multitude.

32

Hill’s account belongs to the tradition of a ‘People’s History ofEngland’: a communist historiography shaped during the PopularFront. This is a vision of the ‘national-popular’ concerned to identifydemocratic currents and forces

within

a national formation. For themembers of the influential historians group of the Communist Party ofGreat Britain, the ‘national-popular’ came to be identified with formsof Protestant dissent: the radical sects of the English revolution; thewritings of Milton, Bunyan and William Blake; the concept of the‘Norman Yoke’; and the ideal of the ‘freeborn Englishman’.

33

But whatof those who were neither English, male nor ‘freeborn’? As Paul Gilroyhas noted, the vision of ‘socialism in one country’ and the theme of the‘freeborn Englishman’ introduce a limiting nationalist dimension intothe work of these radical thinkers.

34

This element of this intellectualtradition requires reinvention for a new socialist politics.

35

Gilroy’sown suggestion is helpful. He argues that ‘cultural historians could

19. Harvey has suggested that the debate on primitive accumulation suggests a one-off event – a sort of capitalist big bang – and fails to grasp the continuous nature of this process. For this reason he prefers the concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ to either ‘primitive accumulation’ or the enclosures. Harvey’s version puts the stress on the ongoing nature of this process, nevertheless I am going to speak of the enclosures because I want to retain the historical form of debate. David Harvey,

Spaces of Global Capitalism

, op cit.

20. E P Thompson,

Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act

, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1977, p 244, see also two other invaluable works by Thompson:

Customs in Common

, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1993; ‘The Grid of Inheritance’ [1976],

Persons & Polemics

, Merlin, London, 1994, pp 263–300.

21. Two glossaries provide essential guides to this vocabulary: the first is by Iain Boal in Yuen et al, eds,

The Battle for Seattle

, op cit; the second is by Peter Linebaugh in

The Magna Carta Manifesto

, op cit. The latter is critically updated with a series of ‘modern amplifications’.

22. Janet Neeson has calculated that in the late eighteenth century material collected for fuel alone accounted for as much as a third of commoners’ family incomes. Janet Neeson,

Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820

, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, p 165. Much of this labour of gathering was done by women and children and the enclosures and the end of communing had a particularly hard effect on women’s independence. Jane Humphries, ‘Enclosures, Common

452

take the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis in their discus-sions of the modern world and use it to produce an explicitly transna-tional and intercultural perspective.’

36

His proposition can be pursuedvia the work of Linebaugh and Rediker who tackle the idea of themultitude in exactly this fashion.

Linebaugh and Rediker’s

The Many-Headed Hydra

pays particularattention to blind spots of the British Communist Party historians. Thisbook is so significant because it recasts this account of class formation asmulti-ethnic and gendered, while remaining committed to a revolution-ary socialist vision of collective agency and solidarity. If the Hydraprovided an image of the multitude seen from above, Linebaugh andRediker also look from below. They find not just the multitude organ-ised by the networks of capital; not simply diverse people mixed in workgangs or thrown together across continents, but a ‘motley proletariat’ – aconscious identification and revolutionary agency. In their book, weencounter an extraordinary cast of characters, and in every revolt orradical organisation on either side of the Atlantic a motley assortment ofantinomian radicals, slaves, sailors, dispossessed ex-commoners andIrish, the poor and those artisans who lost their independence.Linebaugh and Rediker call this process of collective self-making ‘univer-salisation from below’.

37

PHOTOGRAPHY IS A MULTITUDE

If we take the enclosures and the multitude, or primitive accumulationand the motley proletariat, to be key concepts for thinking about globalcapitalism, then it is worth noting that photography was imbued withthese terms from the outset. We can take as an example H P Robin-son’s influential book

Pictorial Effect in Photography

(1869).

38

Acrossthree pages, Robinson raged against the idea that nature ‘must be slav-ishly imitated’: copying, he said, was ‘vulgar’.

39

He despised the viewsof those who thought ‘mechanical’ copying produced pictures.

40

According to him such critics thought that any landscape was ‘equallybeautiful’ if depicted ‘absolutely accurately’. This ‘doctrine’ equated artwith ‘a servile copy of nature’ and reduced the work of all photogra-phers to ‘one dead level’. In contrast, Robinson stood for art, truth andpicture-making with photography. Robinson was articulating fairlystandard aesthetic values of his time, but it is worth paying attention tohis terms, many of which are drawn from the historical demonisationof the multitude. These few pages draw together servants, slaves,mechanics, the vulgar and levellers. These allegorical low and basecharacters were cast by gentlemen as drudges capable only of mindlesslabour. The multitude appears in this account as the links of a synec-dochic configuration – women, slaves and workers are alternativeheads of a single beast. The values of art emerged in contrast to thismotley crew.

The distinction between art and evidence, picture and document, areterms drawn from an allegory of the multitude. The photographic docu-ment generates truth effects because, in the totalisation from above, it isdeemed to be mindless (like the motley proletariat for which it is ahomology). The photographic document is related to this supposed

Rights, and Women: The Proletarianization of Families in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’,

Journal of Economic History

, 50:1, March 1990, pp 17–42.

23. David McNally,

Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique

, Verso, London–New York, 1993, p 13

24. Thompson,

Whigs and Hunters

, op cit, p 241

25. Peter Linebaugh,

The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century

, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1993. The combination suggests the nightmare of school dinners.

26. Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh and E P Thompson,

Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England

, Allen Lane, London, 1975; Linebaugh,

The London Hanged

, op cit. Marx made his own turn to Communism by observing the criminalisation of coincident use rights. Karl Marx, ‘Debates on the Thefts of Wood’, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,

Collected Works

, Volume 1, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1975 As the historians have shown, no one willingly became a wage labourer who had any choice in the matter.

27. Christopher Hill, ‘Pottage for Freeborn Englishmen: Attitudes to Wage Labour’,

Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England

, Yale University Press, New Haven–London, 1991, pp 219–38

28. Christopher Hill, ‘The Many-Headed Monster’,

Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England

, 1991, op cit, pp 181–204; Linebaugh and Rediker,

The Many-Headed Hydra

, op cit

29. Jacques Rancière,

Hatred of Democracy

, Verso, London–New York, 2007

453

absence of agency or intellectual direction; it appears as an immediateand literal copy because no gentleman has been in attendance to exer-cise ‘discrimination’. How many times have we heard this story? As areminder, a couple of examples will do. In 1859 the Edinburgh lawyer JM Duncan argued that a picture titled

An interior of Roslyn Chapel

‘was obligingly drawn by nature herself, when the owner of the camera,absent from the scene of his artistic triumph, was eating his breakfastand enjoying his morning pipe’.

41

A picture that produces itself in theRosslyn Chapel is a minor mystery worthy of Dan Brown! No less acritic than André Bazin claimed that photography was an ‘impassivemechanical process’. On the basis of this assumption he suggested: ‘forthe first time an image of the world is formed automatically, withoutthe creative intervention of man’. Bazin believed that this automaticstatus conferred on photography ‘a quality of credibility absent from allother picture-making’.

42

It is a defining characteristic of the objectivityattributed to the photograph that it is an acephalous image. At best thisimage is perceived as a natural force – in the early years there wasrepeated reference to pictures made by the agency of the sun – but theabsence of consciousness is frequently depicted as death, sleep andtorpor for the subject (think of Barthes).

Throughout its history photography has struggled to escape thisfigurative pattern. Exploring this structure could easily consume a life’swork, but a few more-or-less random examples may help. Documen-tary is a complicated and multiform practice, but we can simply notethat aspect of this tradition that employs a rhetoric of individualisation– translating social situations into personal tragedies. In this respect,the documentary mode is thoroughly synecdochic. The focus on theindividual generates subjective identification, but at the cost of losingsight of social relations: ‘humanising’ is how it is often put.

43

In thiskind of documentary work collective life tends to disappear. Incontrast, street photographers typically immerse themselves in thecrowd. Garry Winogrand is the archetypical example. Joel Meyerowitzdescribed Winogrand’s practice as ‘like going into the sea and lettingthe waves break over you. You feel the power of the sea. On the streeteach successive wave brings a whole new cast of characters. You takewave after wave, you bathe in it.’

44

The ‘oceanic’ feminine is notablehere, particularly in view of Winogrand’s Women are Beautiful (1975).His photographs often turn on single moments of dramatic interest,picturing the crowd as a flow of endless particularity. The singularityin question is ultimately a reflex of the photographer’s own uniquesubjectivity – as a figure above or outside the mass. If documentarytypically entails distance and separation, the aesthetic tradition of streetphotography pursues a paradoxically detached immersion in the crowd,while isolating individuals. Andreas Gursky offers a different model. Ithas become compulsory to note the spectacular commodity values inGerman large-scale colour photography – but Gursky’s constant returnto the theme of the crowd has been overlooked.45 In his work thecrowd is a repeated presence, but it always moves under constraint.Mass activity in his work is orchestrated movement, whether this takesthe form of consumption, work or leisure. The crowd is devoid of willor spontaneity in his pictures and always responds to external gravita-tional force, whether the trance modes of the rave, the rule-bound

30. For the ‘horizontal beast’ in contradistinction to vertical difference, see Thompson, ‘The Patricians and the Plebs’, Customs in Common, op cit.

31. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, op cit, pp 8–9. See also Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1999

32. Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra, op cit

33. For an account of some of these themes in British Communist historiography see Raphael Samuel, ‘British Marxist Historians, 1880–1990: Part One’, New Left Review, series 1, no 120, March/April 1980. There is no Part Two.

34. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Verso, London–New York, 1993, p 14. While this dimension constrains the thought of these internationalists, Gilroy is careful not to suggest that the result is racist.

35. This criticism could be pursued through engagement with Subaltern Studies or the work of Saree Makdisi who links antinomian history and autonomist ideas in his recent study of Blake. Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s, Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL, 2003.

36. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, op cit, p 15

37. The universalisation from below is an example of what Etienne Balibar calls égaliberté. According to Balibar, the central concepts of freedom and equality, which arose with the French revolution, are not bound in time and place but are capable of infinite extension. While the Rights of Man were claimed by the Third Estate, it was only a

454

activities of sport or the repetition and monotony of labour discipline.Gursky is an artist of ‘dressage’ and his pictures of crowds are avail-able for inflection with conservative, Foucauldian or Frankfurt School-inspired glosses; in one sense this is not surprising since, whatevertheir differences, these approaches share a ‘lemming theory’ of themultitude.46

‘OF A BODY THAT IS BOLD TO COME’: THREE PREMONITIONS47

Photography continues to be shaped by an imaginary constitution of themultitude, but, at the same time, the crowd remains largely invisible. Myaim here is to suggest some of the ways we might think, with the aid ofthree recent photographic projects, about an alternative vision of multi-tude from below. No doubt, quite a few of us have photographs takenduring some ‘demo’ amongst our family snaps. These are usually dullpictures of people and placards or mementoes of the ‘I was there’ type.The works I have in mind take a very different approach. These struc-tured sequences are ‘form giving’ for a vision from below. Allan Sekulahas suggested that his work Fish Story is shaped by ‘sequential montage’.His pictures are not intended to be viewed as single images, but asconstructed narrative sequences. Sekula’s response to modernist argu-ments for construction or the set-up is to produce sequences of photo-graphs that call attention to the editing process while keeping a distancefrom the fashionably staged picture.48 Arguably, this principle underliesall documentary picture stories, but Sekula has developed a highly self-conscious version modelled on the ‘horizontal montage’ of ChrisMarker.49 Horizontal montage gives form to a new vision of Thompson’s‘horizontal beast’, by establishing multi-layered and interchangeablepoints of detail that are totalised in opposition to some other horizontaland external social force. No doubt, the grid-form could be employed toachieve this, but my three examples all employ the horizontal mode toproduce premonitions of the motley proletariat in the making and eachdoes so by casting the crowd in opposition to the class rule incarnated inthe state.

WAITING FOR TEAR GAS

Allan Sekula’s Waiting for Tear Gas (White Globe to Black) is a slidesequence of eighty images created from the pictures he took during thefive days of protests against the WTO in Seattle in 1999.50 Zanny Begghas offered the most serious and thoughtful account of this work. Beggargues that Waiting for Tear Gas is a rhizomic work without beginningor end. This work however, despite the loop, is emphatically structuredand sequential: the title proclaims a directional movement – WhiteGlobe to Black. The sequence opens with an image of a white globe andcloses with a black one; in addition to suggesting a shift in globalpurview, these two images frame a sequence that moves from day tonight and from the humour of the carnival to repression. The temporalmovement offers a challenge to the anarcho-communism, spontaneism

short period before Haitian slaves demanded to be treated as men or before The Rights of Women appeared in press. Balibar also convincingly argues that equality and freedom imply one another. Any demand for the extension of one is likely to entail the other. Etienne Balibar, ‘“Rights of Man” and “Rights of the Citizen”: The Modern Dialectic of Equality and Freedom’, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, trans James Swenson, Routledge, London, 1994, pp 39–60. For a good discussion see Alex Callinicos, The Resources of Critique, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2006.

38. Henry Peach Robinson, Pictorial Effect in Photography: Being Hints on Composition and Chiaroscuro for Photographers, Piper & Carter, London, 1869

39. Ibid, p 60

40. The word ‘mechanical’ as used by the early writers on photography has been widely misunderstood by theorists and historians. This refers not to machines, but to mechanics, that is to say workers, and derives from the Renaissance distinction between the Liberal and the Mechanical Arts. For an extended account of nineteenth-century photography and aesthetic thought see my The Making of English Photography: Allegories, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA, 2006

41. J M Duncan, ‘On the law of Copyright as applied to Photographic Works’, Photographic Journal, 22 February, 1859, p 194. Duncan uses an irregular spelling for Rosslyn.

42. André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, What is Cinema?, vol 1, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 1967,pp 9–16

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or autonomism currently prominent among the cultural left. Waiting forTear Gas confronts the movement of movements with the problem oforganised power of the state.1 Allan Sekula, Waiting for Tear Gas, 1999, slide sequence, courtesy of Allan SekulaSekula refused the standard journalistic conception of the definingimage, but he pursued this project as an explicit negative critique ofphotojournalism’s protocols. As he put it: ‘[t]he rule of thumb for thissort of anti-photojournalism’ is ‘no flash, no telephoto lens, no gasmask, no auto-focus, no press pass and no pressure to grab at all coststhe one defining image of dramatic violence’. Under these self-proscribedconditions, detached vision is not really available: the photographer islikely to be treated as a protestor and subjected to the CS gas along witheveryone else. The consequence is to give us a perspective internal to thedynamic of the crowd. Here symptomatic detail is employed to build upthe life of the motley crowd rather than to dispel it. The anti-capitalistcrowd emerges in this body of images as a horizontal social form united,rather than separated, in difference. The negative protocols adopted bySekula are central to this vision, because the absence of auto-focus andlack of flash (with the jarring colour cast) provide a form for the experi-ence of the crowd; for the sensations aroused by the police charge or thechaos and confusion that attends the moment of gas or percussive explo-sion. Bad photography has long been central to the claims of criticalrealism: in this work Sekula found a new way to employ this strategy ofde-skilling.

43. As Martha Rosler argued, traditional documentary is a liberal mode, closely linked to an interventionary state, charity (and we might add, or NGO). Rosler, ‘In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography)’, 3 Works, Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1981, pp 59–86.

44. Westerbeck and Meyerowitz, ‘Conversation’, Bystander, op cit, 1994

45. On the crowd in Gursky see Zanny Begg, ‘Recasting Subjectivity’, op cit.

46. For ‘dressage’ see Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, Continuum, London, 2004.

47. Ted Hughes, ‘The Thought-Fox’, The

Allan Sekula, Waiting for Tear Gas, 1999, slide sequence, courtesy of Allan Sekula

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The multitude is a relational category that only takes on existence inopposition to those who stand counter-posed to it whether in ‘equilib-rium’, ‘reciprocity’ or as ‘field of force’. The terms, of course, come fromThompson’s great account of the relation between the gentry and theplebs in the eighteenth century. Thompson wrote: ‘There is a sense inwhich rulers and crowd needed each other, watched each other,performed theatre and countertheatre to each other’s auditorium,moderated each other’s political behaviour.’51 Thompson has arguedagainst the over-extension of this analysis to all crowd situations.52

Nevertheless, the current pre-class formation of the multitude seems toecho the eighteenth-century condition. In the present situation, thedialectical antagonisms that define class come into play, even in theabsence of clear class agency or consciousness. Thompson argues thatthe crowd and the forces of order defined reciprocal subject positions –they totalised each other. In Waiting for Tear Gas the crowd and thepolice perform for one another, playing out symbolic roles of opposi-tion, force and repression. The qualification is that counter-theatre isalways a trial of strength, a testing of resolve. In counter theatre themultitude pits its collective will against the state’s determination to holdout. In this space new collective identities are shaped: drawing them intovisibility is a crucial political task.

Sekula knows this historical debate and his sequence captures some-thing of Thompson’s counter-theatre. The crowd is depicted here in itsdiversity as a carnivalesque force: punk hair and Trabajadores,assorted bohos and feminists, rock musicians and black trade union-ists, all associate freely; huge turtles cross the road; and there is theDevil himself, complete with cardboard chain saw (in fact, there aretwo Moloch and Belial). As Sekula wrote in the introduction to thiswork: ‘The alliance on the streets was indeed stranger, more varied andinspired than could be conveyed by cute alliterative play with “team-sters” and “turtles”.’53 But the sequence also pays attention to theterritorialisation of the horizontal crowd by the state. In a bizarrepicture of the public market, a sign reading ‘meet the producer’ risesbehind a line of mounted police in gas masks, the whole thing illumi-nated in lurid pink. His project documents ‘people waiting, unarmed,sometimes deliberately naked in the winter chill, for the gas and therubber bullets and the concussion grenades’.54 Waiting for tear gas is adangerous and, in some ways, heroic strategy that is calculated to drawthe latent violence of the state into the open. These protestors tauntpower; they deflate its bombast with humour and vulnerability. The‘bare breasted ladies’ – their name – explicitly play out the reciprocalbonds of authority and opposition: contrasting flesh and blood withthe armoured bodies of the police. As Sekula observes, here: ‘thehuman body asserts itself in the city streets against the abstraction ofglobal capital’.55

STARING BACK

Chris Marker has for fifty years been making films which simulta-neously record and analyse global revolutionary movements. Hisreflectively structured documentaries have recently gained a renewed

Collected Poems of Ted Hughes, Faber & Faber, London, 2003

48. Allan Sekula, ‘On “Fish Story”: The Coffin Learns to Dance’, Camera Austria, no 59/60, 1997, p 49

49. The idea of ‘horizontal montage’ applied to Marker is from André Bazin, cited in Nora M Alter, Chris Marker, University of Illinois Press, Urbana–Chicago, Illinois, 2006, p 15

50. Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St Clair and Allan Sekula, Five Days That Shook the World: The Battle for Seattle and Beyond, Verso, London–New York, 2000; Allan Sekula, ‘Waiting for Tear Gas, 1999–2000’, in Performance Under Working Conditions, Hatje Crantz, Vienna, 2003. For interesting reflections on this work see Zanny Begg, ‘Recasting Subjectivity’, op cit.

51. E P Thompson, ‘The Patricians and the Plebs’, in Customs in Common, op cit, p 57

52. EP Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy Reviewed’, in Customs in Common, op cit, p 260

53. Sekula, ‘Waiting for Tear Gas, 1999–2000’, in Performance Under Working Conditions, p 310

54. Ibid

55. Ibid, p 311

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prominence as a model for the new critical realism. Now in his eighties,Marker has once again found rebellion on the streets of Paris and in2004 responded with a film The Case of the Grinning Cat (ChatsPerchés). He also produced a series of black-and-white manipulatedphotographs that provided the centrepiece of his exhibition Staring Backat the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio in 2007. The exhibition, andthe accompanying book of the same title, bring together 200 portraitsmade by Marker across the globe between 1952 and 2006.56 The Caseof the Grinning Cat and Staring Back echo his comment in 1964 on LeJoli Mai (1962), when he suggested that he edited the fifty-five hours of

56. Chris Marker, Staring Back, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007. Some of the images in Staring Back are photographic portraits, others are extracted from his films. The book is organised in four sections: (1) ‘I Stare 1’; (2) ‘They Stare’; (3) ‘I Stare 2’; (4) ‘Beast of…’. It also contains essays by Bill Horrigan and Molly Nesbit.

Chris Marker, Staring Back, black and white photograph, courtesy of the Wexner Centerfor the Arts

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Chris Marker, Staring Back, black and white photograph, courtesy of the Wexner Centerfor the Arts

Chris Marker, Staring Back, black and white photograph, courtesy of the Wexner Centerfor the Arts

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footage so that ‘a totality emerges from the cross section’.57 My focus ison the first section of this work titled: ‘I Stare 1’, which consists ofseventy-five photographs.2 Chris Marker, Staring Back, black and white photograph, courtesy of the Wexner Center for the Arts3 Chris Marker, Staring Back, black and white photograph, courtesy of the Wexner Center for the Arts4 Chris Marker, Staring Back, black and white photograph, courtesy of the Wexner Center for the ArtsAt first sight Marker seems to echo the reduction of the crowd to aseries of individuals. ‘I Stare 1’ contains prominent images of peopleextracted from the crowd, digitally highlighted to enhance the singular-ity of the subject. However, Marker’s pictures do not entirely repress thecrowd, whose presence is always felt, and he does not catch his subjectsunawares. Repeatedly, the demonstrators ‘stare back’ and fix Marker intheir gaze. These images remain significant details of common life. Inpart, the overarching construction here is the figure known as ChrisMarker who appears not as singular creative individual but as a partici-pant witness to half a century of political struggle. As usual, Marker’svoice is everywhere in this project, wry and melancholic, pointing outthe idiosyncratic histories, as well as knowingly drawing attention to thefoibles of the left. But if the chronology of Marker’s life provides a framefor these images – it includes one rare picture of him (he is under arrestat the Pentagon demonstration in 1967) – the focus is simultaneously onthe inner life of the crowd. He zooms in on the internal differences inunity. One of the notable features of the sequence is the increasingnumber of women evident in the recent demonstrations, even if thisarises as a by-product of Marker’s dodgy fascination with female ‘beau-ties’. French students, young workers and old CGT union membersappear alongside people from Africa and Asia. Each brings a particularhistory to the life commonly defined in its opposition to the forces of theright

‘I Stare 1’ begins with an image from 1961 of a group of men andwomen standing on a balcony observing a demonstration. The centralfigure in the beret is the elderly Maurice Thorez, then General Secretaryof the PCF. The demonstration commemorates the eight people killedthe week before, at Charonne Metro station, who had been protestingagainst the role of the ultra-right Organisation armée secrète in terroris-ing opposition to the French war in Algeria. When the police ran amok,the demonstrators took refuge in the station and these eight individualswere killed in the crush. It is significant that the sequence opens with thispicture. The image of Thorez and the tree just behind him cast a shadowover these images, but it is also important that Marker begins with animage of state repression and anti-colonial solidarity. For all the senti-mentalism evident in some of these photographs there is also a hard edgein evidence. Images of police violence erupt in Marker’s crowd. Theinitial pictures give us bloodied faces and baton-wielding police from theearlier historical moments. The police back then wore simple helmetsand sometimes goggles. In the recent demonstrations, state repression isless evident, but an image of a watching policeman in body armour indi-cates that it is still there when required.

Marker’s camera seems to dwell on youthful faces. There is some-thing perhaps voyeuristic about this, but Marker employs these imagesto project futurity. The image of the crowd that emerges here is one ofradical continuity: in his words, ‘a new generation takes the baton’. At acouple of points the icon of Che evokes memories of earlier struggles.France in 1961, the USA in 1967, May 1968 are connected to recentFrench demonstrations including protests against Le Pen, and those

57. ‘An Interview with Chris Marker’, [1964], Alter, Chris Marker, op cit, p 131

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challenging insecurity of youth employment resulting from the ContratPremière Embauche in 2006. Only the armour of the police seems tochange. ‘No it ain’t a still from Pudovkin. Just today at the Bastille’, hewrote of one image from 2006.58 The line is classic Marker, evokingboth the history of film and revolutionary history, with both found inthe present. No doubt he would have liked to include impossible photo-graphs of 1871, 1848 and 1789, and also of anti-colonial struggles fromSaint-Domingue to Algeria. Marker ends his sequence with the openingimage paired with a new one. Where Thorez stood, there are now otherpeople watching a new protest against racism and capitalist degrada-tion. These images bind together fifty years of history. In between takingthese two pictures, he writes:

I have been in Japan, Korea, Bolivia, Chile. I have filmed students inGuinea-Bissau, medics in Kosovo, Bosnian refugees, Brazilian activists,animals everywhere. I covered the first free elections in East Germanyafter the fall of the Wall, and I sniffed the first moments of perestroika inMoscow, when people weren’t afraid to talk to each other any more.I traded film for video, and video for the computer. In the middle, on thebalcony, the tree has grown, just a little. Within these few inches, fortyyears of my life.59

This passage notably refuses to privilege either change or continuity. Theimage of the tree seems to impose an image of organic development, yetthe people are different. While the background has changed little thefocus of the struggle now lies elsewhere. The final image casts thesequence as a melancholic mourning for the lost politics of the PCF, butthis is not all there is to the sequence. Marker’s horizontal montage is apoetic configuration that refuses the linear temporality of defeat ‘fromthe standpoint of the defeated’. If history is a series of victories by theruling powers, Marker’s work steps out of this linear construction;instead he employs horizontal montage to suggest a continuity of dissen-sus. Like Benjamin, to whom he seems closest here, ‘I Stare 1’ offers aleft vision of:

… apokatastasis in the sense that every past victim, every attempt atemancipation, however humble and “minor”, will be rescued from obliv-ion and ‘mentioned in dispatches’ (citée à l’ordre de jour), that is to sayrecognized, honoured and remembered.60

‘I Stare 1’ continues the project of Marker’s work, from Le fond de l’airest rouge to The Last Bolshevik, to rescue the defeated activists of theleft ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity’.61 Marker, the artistof revolutionary memory, calls upon us to remember that a motleyproletariat has to be remade in a ‘full’ time that joins then and now.

TREADING ON KINGS

Joel Sternfeld’s Treading on Kings: Protesting the G8 in Genoa of 2001takes a different tack.62 Sternfeld consciously turns away from depictingthe crowd and opts to represent participants through a series of formalportraits. However, this project again diverges significantly from those

58. Bill Horrigan, ‘Some Other Time’, Staring Back, op cit, p 139

59. Staring Back, p 43

60. Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’, London, Verso, 2005, p 35. Löwy is commenting on Thesis III of Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’.

61. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, op cit, p 12

62. ‘Treading on Kings: Protesting the G8 in Genoa’ was exhibited at White Box, New York, 2002. The book of the same title is published by Steidl.

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ironic works in which the multitude is evaded. The signifiers of the crowdare present in this work, but they surround the portraits, framing them.This strategy is designed to give a very different image of the predominantrepresentation of the protests in Genoa and the Italian state’s rerun of the‘strategy of tension’. Sternfeld, like Sekula and Marker, rejects the clichédimage of violent protest – he notes that all the journalists were based inthe same hotel and they were all intent on capturing the same picture ofa young man hurling a petrol bomb. In contrast, Sternfeld works tocounter the trope of ‘invasion’. This is also a documentation of lives madein dissent, and the photographer again pays a great deal of attention tothe horizontal unity in diversity of the protestors; to age, gender, ethnicityand appearance. Perhaps the salient feature in Sternfeld’s project residesin his concern to convey something of the protestors’ intentions, argu-ments and their humour. The facing character of his pictures and quota-tions from participants are both important to producing this effect.Sternfeld’s book refuses to see the crowd as an acephalous rabble. In thissense, his project has much in kind with that trend in Marxist history, orhistory from below, that is concerned with discovering ‘the faces in thecrowd’ – the reference here is to the work of George Rudé and his effortsto identify anonymous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century protestors.63

In a series of historical studies Rudé examined the records of thosearrested and tried and then traced these individuals through rate booksand other local sources. In this way he was able to put elementary lifestories to protestors, to identify their trades and the patterns of solidarityin communities. This identification allows for a sense of motivation andrational aspiration against the standard view of the mindless mob.64

Sternfeld’s images achieve something similar: they face the viewer withprotestors, not as members of a violent and irrational crowd, but aseminently sane subjects in opposition.

It is important to pay attention to the narrative structure of Treadingon Kings. The book is organised in three loose phases: the first includesimages of Genoa’s old port; an official car arriving at the PalazzoDucale; a smashed store front; and a series of pictures of the destruction,torn posters and spilled blood left after the police unleashed a frenzy ofbrutality against protestors staying in the Diaz School. The middleportion contains twenty-seven portraits, each with accompanying state-ments by the portrayed subject on the facing page. The book ends with agroup of photographs relating to the death of twenty-three-year-oldprotestor Carlo Giuliani at the hands the police and a final image of thelaughing crowd with the legend, ‘You think you’ve killed him but helives in us’. The texts that accompany the portraits, and those thatappear between the sections, recount the harrowing violence to whichdemonstrators were subjected: innocent and unarmed protestors beatenand brutalised; the crazed attack in the Diaz school; the threats of sexualviolence against those arrested; detained protestors beaten in custodyand forced to chant Fascist anthems; and of course the shooting dead ofcomrade Giuliani. Sternfeld’s construction achieves an inversion of theusual values that pit the individual against the violent mob. The portraitsare sandwiched between these images of state terror, but the bruising,bandages, plaster casts, sticking plasters and taser marks so prominenton the bodies of those pictured also act as indexical traces of that force..These marks on the body bind the sequence together. They internalise

63. The term was from Asa Briggs and was taken as the title of Chapter 13 of Rudé’s The Crowd in History 1730–1848, Lawrence & Wishart, London, revised second edition, 1981 and later used as the title for a collection of his essays.

64. George Rudé, The Crowd in History, op cit, p 7

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the images of state power explicit in the first and last sequence throughthe portrait form.65 Sternfeld also pays attention to the labour and riskof witnessing; to the efforts of the state and its allies to monopolise theimage of protest. One man carries a camera bag, another holds postersmarking the ongoing disaster in Bhopal, photographers and journalistsshow the marks of the beatings they received, and, memorably, an inde-pendent media reporter with an injured eye appears in a T-shirt embla-zoned with: ‘adjustable Lenz short medium long glasses’. The forces oforder would prefer the crowd to remain invisible and unrecorded, to be

65. I would like to thank Tamara Trodd for suggesting that I consider the role of bruising in these pictures.

Joel Sternfeld, A protestor from Bhopal, Italy, 2001, C-print (original in colour), courtesyof the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. People are still dying in Bhopal. Overtwenty thousand have died, and those born after the disaster have growth and menstrualproblems. Over one hundred twenty thousand are still suffering from chronic diseases ofthe eye, the brain and reproductive and immune systems. Five thousand metric tons ofchemicals were dumped into the ground inside and outside the factory – it has gone intothe drinking water, the only source of drinking water for ten communities. Union Carbideevades justice, and now it has sold itself to Dow Chemical.

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denied vision or voice. Sternfeld’s version of the crowd removes legiti-macy from the neoliberal state. Rationality and individuality is strippedfrom the G8 and its guard dogs and attributed to the multitude: it is the‘special bodies of armed men’ that here take on the characteristic ofviolent, irrational mob.

Thompson, Hill, Linebaugh and Rediker employ a conception of alle-gorical time that draws the radical past into our time, refusing thetemporality of defeat – the closure of narrative endings – to enrich thecurrent communist imagination.66 The vision of the crowd that emergesin their work involves a dialectic of one and many; the internal dynamicof the crowd opens onto collective struggle and its depiction; the hori-zontal vision at the heart of this body of thought contrasts positivelywith the vertical divisions adopted in much recent theory. In the work ofLinebaugh and Rediker this conception is recast in motley form. In so far

66. For an important account of closure against the radical imagination see Laura Mulvey, ‘Changes: Thoughts on Myth, Narrative and Historical Experience’, Visual and Other Pleasures, Macmillan, Basingstoke–London, 1989, pp 159–76. The responses to Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man continue this theme.

Joel Sternfeld, The fifth floor of the Armando Diaz School after a police raid, Genoa, 21July 2001. C-Print, courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

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as they engage with cultural work, these historians draw on the literatureand poetry from Milton to the Romantics. However, much recent art isrediscovering the themes that have been central to the communist imagi-nation. Sekula, Marker and Sternfeld provide one set of examples forarticulating a form for the multitude.

These photographic examinations of anti-capitalist protests alsoremind us what is wrong with Mikhail Bakhtin’s vision of carnival.67 Thetime of carnival may turn the world upside down for an hour or a day;the crowd can jest and cavort, but the state remains unamused. Thedeadly forces of order strive to turn the world right way up again.Thompson’s dramatic model provides a frame for thinking about thesethree projects, but a proviso is necessary: modern power would preferinvisibility to the push-me-pull-you of counter-theatre; the empire ofcapital would like to dispense with this little play act and issue in a worldwithout the crowd. This would be, to use Rancière’s conception, a ‘policeorder’: a consensual definition of democracy without gaps or fissures,which leaves large sections of the world’s population ‘uncounted’. Itwould be a world in which the monopoly of violence would be joined bya monopoly over the image.68 While repression waits in the wings ofMarker’s sequence, the excess of force meted out in Seattle and Genoa isintended to rupture the dynamic of the crowd and to prevent the counter-theatre coalescing. The images of the crowd provided by Sekula, Markerand Sternfeld offer us a glimpse of life in common. This new vision ofsolidarity turns on a dialectic of the one and the many, and their crowd isa marker of (horizontal) relationality within representation. Theseprojects make a beginning: we need more work to help us to begin a poli-tics of ‘counting’ for the motley proletariat ‘that is bold to come’.

67. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans Hélèn Iswolsky, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1984

68. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans Julie Rose, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1999