Don’t despair, Germany has a cure
Welcome.
I hate to break it to you, but if you’re reading this brochure, you are now a member of a foreign extremist organisation. This diagnosis might come as quite a shock. You might not even think of yourself as “foreign” or “extremist”—few people do. However, at least one in five people experience some form of Foreign Extremist Syndrome over the course of their lives.
Rest assured that, with the right help, many people with foreign extremism go on to lead rich and fulfilling lives: playing badminton, collecting stamps, shopping at H&M, all the things normal people do. The point is: foreign extremism is no longer a death sentence. At least, not now, not yet.
Why me?
Alexander Dobrindt, German Interior Minister. Picture by Martin Rulsch, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Perhaps you’re asking, “Why me?” Well, why not you? Foreign Extremism touches people from all walks of life. For instance, last month Germany’s domestic spy agency listed the activist group “Jewish Voice for Just Peace in the Middle East” (Jewish Voice) as a “foreign extremist” organisation.
In fact, almost anyone can succumb to this dangerous malady. Except that, despite having the most baroque, violent imaginations and willingness to fund, cheerlead and even carry out acts of mutilation and killing, the German media and political class, the police, the weapons manufacturers, and the military, seem somehow immune to “extremism”.
Weird.
Well, there was that one chap—kooky moustache, liked to yell and gesticulate with his hands. But that was a long time ago. Those kinds of extremists are very much dead or completely cured. Move along. Nothing to see here.
Acceptance
The good news is: you can be cured too.
The first stage of getting healthy is acceptance. Look in the mirror at that hideously extreme and foreign face of yours and whisper, “I am a foreign extremist”.
Then self-isolate so that your disease does not rub off on other people. It would be courteous to inform your neighbours, your employer, your bank, the immigration office, anyone who needs to take the proper precautions. And if you don’t, perhaps the Bild Zeitung will do it for you, or some lonely creep with a camera, you know, the kind of guy who lurks on the perimeter of demonstrations pointing his big lens this way and that—I’m sure he’s willing to spread the word.
And don’t forget—self care is important. Run a bath, light some candles and take care of you, because when word gets around about your little pestilence, no one will go near you.
Getting healthy
The next step is to learn what “healthy” means. Like whiteness, healthy is ubiquitous, yet transparent and hard to grasp. Healthy is the radical center against which every other state is defined. The way things are supposed to be. It is therefore the complete opposite of everything you are. That’s the key.
So take out a piece of paper and make a list of all the things you like to do, the kinds of opinions you’re inclined to have, the sorts of lowlives and degenerates you like to hang out with, and just do the opposite.
1) Be generous to the genocidaires
Let’s take the example of Jewish Voice. First of all, I’m reading a lot of really unhealthy things on their Instagram account about the genocide in Gaza. This might be surprising to someone like you, but it is very foreign and utterly extremist to be against genocide. In order to be a good normie, you need to be in favour of genocide. Or simply willing to ponder the mysterious orb of genocide and mutter, “It’s complicated.” At the very least, deny that a genocide is happening. Hundreds of thousands of people simply vanishing for no apparent reason. Just like that.
Weird.
2) Embrace apartheid
So you think that an apartheid regime is bad—that it is somehow uncool to give one group rights based upon ethnicity, while saddling another group with an inferior set of rights. Darling, check your temperature. That must be the fever talking.
Dividing people by ethnicity is perfectly healthy. Germany does it all the time: dangling Damocletian swords above naturalised citizens at home while cheering on an ethnonationalist state in the Middle East. Remember, Germany has a special psychosis, I mean special responsibility, when it comes to the Jewish people. Just last week, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz thanked Israel for doing the West’s “dirty work”. Perhaps he meant dirty wars. Egal.
3) Don’t be foreign (and keep your mouth shut)
Let’s look at the name “Jewish Voice” for a few more clues about how to expel the extremist virus. First, the “Voice” part: the opposite of using your voice is to keep your mouth shut—it’s a very healthy thing to do, not least because it keeps you safe from inhaling even more germs than are already coursing through your system.
And what about the “Jewish” part? I guess the opposite is … don’t be Jewish? But hang on, both the domestic spy agency and the Interior Minister accused Jewish Voice of being antisemitic. Hmmm, so that means you have to be both not Jewish and anti-antisemitic at the same time. Wait, my head is spinning like a dreidel. How do we square this?
Of course! Not being Jewish while accusing Jews of antisemitism? Well, that’s just being German!
Illness as teacher
They say that illness is a teacher, and now we know that the only cure for foreign extremism is to be German. But of course, you will never be German enough. So, run along, be a good foreigner and keep shtum about the massacres.
Otherwise, we’re watching.
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Neil Tennant. Photo: Henry Laurisch. CC3.0 Originally published on The Left Berlin
The year is 1993. British electro-pop duo the Pet Shop Boys are whisked through Moscow in a limousine that Gorbachev, allegedly, used to ride in. These and other thrilling anecdotes puff a recent piece authored by one half of the duo, Neil Tennant; published in March 2025, in Russia’s opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta and Britain’s The Guardian. Read a little closer and something creeps out of the shadows; something less about Russia in any concrete sense and more a phantom limb throbbing with post-Cold War dread.
From his residue of remembrances Tennant constructs two Russias: the Russia of the 1990s, bathing in the newfound “freedom” to, for instance, dance along to Tennant’s disco whimsy and the Russia of today, depicted as a brutal, warmongering state under a Hitler-like dictator, Vladimir Putin.This latter Russia is the one that haunts the western liberal imaginary. It is an evil so grave that it washes the West clean, and gives purpose and direction to societies that have neither — specifically the trillion-dollar rearmament that will finally drown “Social Europe” in the bathtub of police repression and economic austerity.
There is something weird about the article, spasmodic even. Tennant dispenses disparate sentences, each one containing a supposed fact or recollection that doesn’t easily connect with what follows or precedes it, or whose relevance is opaque. Order is only imposed by occasional meta-paragraphs which impose an interpretive frame on the reader, like a tour guide in a hall of mirrors.
Take Tennant’s recollection of riding in a limo: it only makes sense in light of an earlier paragraph in which he describes, as a youth, reading about the Russian Revolution, where one brutal empire ostensibly morphed into another with supreme villain Joseph Stalin at the helm, who is at the same moment both a “20th-century Ivan the Terrible” and a template for Putin. Tennant unwittingly taps into a stereotype that has congealed all over Western intelligentsia; history in Russia, is not a dialectic, but a loop, with a natural tendency towards authoritarianism. Putin, in Tennant’s gaze, stands as the latest divination of the eternal Asiatic despot.
Again and again, Tennant mourns the loss of freedom in Russia. So it is worth posing the question: what does he think freedom is? There are clues: In one photo accompanying the article, the Pet Shop Boys wear conical hats and onesies as they officially launch MTV in the former Soviet Union. This is Tennant’s implicit vision of freedom: the freedom to have your political struggles harvested, denuded, co-opted, and commodified, and then reflected back in the form of a three-minute music video, sandwiched between advertisements and other three-minute videos, such that politics is voided of the ecstasy and terror of having a life with meaning. Meaning itself is reduced to mimetic novelty. Russia, you’re welcome.
At the very same time as the Pet Shop Boys were launching MTV, Russia was experiencing its most crushing poverty in decades as a result of economic “shock therapy” imposed by the West, consisting of a fire-sale of public assets, the disassembly of social services, and the bludgeoning of Russia into a market economy. Shock therapy wasn’t just economics, it was necropolitics. According to one analysis in the BMJ, there were up to 3 million “excess adult deaths” between 1991 and 2001 based on mortality rates from the last days of the Soviet Union — “surplus” people who might have lived had history forked onto a different path.
It’s worth remembering that the transformation of Russia was neither spontaneous nor home grown; it was pushed through by Western governments, academics and agencies like USAID. The carnage of the ‘90s aligns well with the goals of a leaked Pentagon paper from 1992 which sought to prevent any country from ever becoming a peer competitor to the United States. Tennant seems blissfully oblivious to these unpleasant details.
Five years after the 1993 Moscow MTV junket, the Pet Shop Boys are back and the country is still in the midst of this deadly crisis. We do get a flicker of recognition, but it quickly sparks out:
“It was thrilling for me to be physically present in streets that had so much historical resonance, but it was also impossible to ignore the victims of the economic problems that followed the implosion of the Soviet system — old ladies, for instance, selling possessions on the street.”
Here is Lacan’s traumatic Real breaking through the cracks of Tennant’s fantasy Russia, only briefly, before the texts jaunts compulsively into a distracted reverie:
“Clubs were fun, and there was a wild freedom in the air. Once, when we couldn’t get a taxi, the police drove us back to our hotel from a gay club! We enjoyed hanging out with a few friends we’d made.”
Which friends?
“A young woman who was the daughter of the former Mayor of St. Petersburg, named Ksenia Sobchak, was briefly part of the clubbing crowd.”
This nightlife comrade was the daughter of Anatoly Sobchak, a key player in transforming Russia into a market economy through the application of shock therapy. Sobchak helped cobble together the Russian constitution that imposed private property on Russia and condensed power in the presidency. Of course, father and daughter are not the same entity, but both represent the class that the Pet Shop Boys enjoyed fraternising with.
According to Putin biographer Philip Short, Sobchak and his Western advisors unleashed a tidal wave of privatisation that created an oligarchic class by stripping key Soviet assets and handing them over to cronies at rock-bottom prices. Meanwhile, basic services in St. Petersburg collapsed, and for four winters straight, citizens suffered through heating cuts. By 1995, rates of homelessness, poverty, fraud, and suicide in the city were among the highest in the world, and diseases like tuberculosis, diphtheria, and dysentery were making a comeback. Life expectancy had fallen from 72 in 1987 to just 64.
The Sobchaks, their class and their western backers were collectively responsible for the economic system that led an anonymous old woman to ruin Tennant’s enjoyment with her abject poverty. Rich Russians were free to party in upmarket clubs, while the rest of the country was free to starve, free to freeze to death in apartments where the heating shuts down in the dead of winter.
How did Tennant miss all of this? Because to see it would rupture the liberal fantasy of innocence. Recognising his complicity and that of his Russian buddies, would be like finding a speck of blood in a line of cocaine — a real bummer.
On reflection the Pet Shop Boys may have always walked this line between naivete and indifference when it comes to political economy. This may have been hard to observe due to Tennant’s translucent lyrical style where camp morphs into a very British form of irony that masks a detached complicity with the way things are. Take their infamous track “West End Girls” — an account of working-class “East End boys” and daughters of the establishment “West End girls” coming together through the shared consumptive experience of clubbing. Appearing in the wake of Thatcher’s detonation of class solidarity in 1980s Britain, the track obliquely shrouds working class defeat in the gauze of social mobility. The vanquishers and the vanquished rub shoulders, strictly on weekends, strictly in the form of commodified leisure for those who can pay to play.
So it’s not that surprising that Tennant is willing to fall into a vision, however subtle, of civilisational conflict between Russia and the West. A few paragraphs after recalling his ride in a police car from a gay club to his hotel, Tennant writes that “being a Russian gay activist is now to be labelled and punished as an ‘extremist.” Russia was a fleeting gay utopia, brought to you by the Pet Shop Boys and MTV, that was then snuffed out by Putin. While it remains true that queer people in Russia live in extreme precarity, hostility to homosexuality was sustained throughout the heady ’90s even if this wasn’t visible to visiting celebrities. The effect of this contrast, whether intended or not, is to weaponize queer precarity in the service of homonationalism.
And when it comes to weaponizing tolerance, the West has game. This justification boosted the military adventurism of the “War on Terror” in the Middle East and Central Asia, with countless deaths and many countries brought to ruin as a consequence.
This brings us to the core menace of Tennant’s article: its heady blend of naivete and binarism falls into a broader miasma of messages giving drip by drip justification for the inevitability of a military conflict between Russia and the West. To his credit, Tennant never calls for war, just a “revolution of attitudes” in which Putin is put on trial and Russia atones for its brutal invasion of Ukraine. Yet even here, the spectre of a demonic Russia and an angelic West appears. I oppose imperial war machines of all stripes and believe the Russian invasion of Ukraine has no justification. That should not conceal that the war has its origins in the creeping expansion of NATO towards Russia’s borders, despite US assurances that it would not do so. Nor should it elide that the US sought to prolong the war in order to weaken Russia, scuttling a nearly completed peace agreement in 2022 at the cost of hundreds of thousands of needless deaths and mutilations.
Tennant’s reflections show us that Russia, for the West, is not really a place so much as a screen on which to project whatever fantasies align with your unconscious political commitments, whether that be a neoliberal smash-and-grab or a civilisational conflict. Through gentle, persistent messaging, it has become common sense that Putin will roll into Berlin unless European societies run on a war footing, sacrificing the fight against the existential threat of climate change and crumbling systems of social care. The parliament of Germany, where I live, has just rammed through changes to its constitution that allow the government to borrow vast sums to fuel an expansion of military power. Perhaps soon I will be selling my belongings on a street corner to pay for Panzer tanks and Javelin missiles.
To close, Tennant signs off with a little humility: “I do not imagine that anyone really cares what we think about Russia, but you did ask.” Similarly, you might wonder why I’m agonizing over Pet Shop Boys and their Russian junkets. Indeed, there is nothing special about Tennant’s article–there are hundreds like it produced every month. Nevertheless, the collective force of these and other hapless musings moves at least a few levers in the war machine. In the 1990s, the Boys were just a tiny ripple in a vast wave of soft power that gave a little glamour to the shock therapy that sent millions to their graves. Now, they unwittingly set the stage for war and austerity to engulf the entire continent, as Russia is cast, again and yet again, as the interminable enemy.
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tl;dr: I have a new website (https://adri99.net) and I’m moving as many of my socials onto open-source alternatives (see below for more details). Below is an extended reasoning:
Many of us feel stuck. Stuck in boring jobs, stuck in lives of barely-surviving, bereft of human encounters that have the meat of meaning attached to their bones. More and more, as our lives evaporate and our water molecules coalesce in the myth of the cloud–a vast, privatised warehouse of information that is very much of this grim earth–we also feel stuck inside platforms that we dislike; these 2D universes constantly rising and multiplying and demanding our attention. Once it was Myspace and now it’s—fuck, I don’t even know any more? Instagram, TikTok, Patreon, Substack, X, and also PayPal, Visa, Mastercard —a cartel of ogres given licence by the US hegemon to extract a tithe on every transaction that passes across the silver bridge. Now the voices whisper in their insidious hiss: “You need to be LinkedIn—that’s where the curators are these days. You don’t want to miss out on all that precious exposure, do you?”
They arrive in our awareness like gold prospectors, marking a claim on the frontiers of our sensory awareness; performing this feat through the medium of our free will. Because it is my fingers, after all, that flex on the keyboard as I divulge my treasures. The kind of mining their doing doesn’t really line up with images of the Wild West, dirt streaked faces emerging from subterranean shafts with value they could hold in their hands. It’s more like the cyanide extraction used by multinational companies in Romania to extract tiny specks of gold dust from the earth by dousing hills and valleys in poison (see for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Baia_Mare_cyanide_spill). Our minds are more like ore from which an infinitesimally small condensation of value can be extracted.
The Infernal Loathing Machine
When I open Instagram I feel a wash of dread as I lose myself in a flood of images and park my mind in vegan cauliflower steaks with chimichurri interspersed with images of police violence (my twin passions in life, according to the algorithm). I see people’s manicured achievements and stab inwards at my personal failures.
I always stuck around because I was afraid that opting out was a form of self-sabotage, but I’m not so sure now. My “reach” has more or less flatlined and I sense that social media allowed me to become more withdrawn from the world. I forgot how to talk about my work with real people. I so often failed to make the effort to even show up, to be a part of communities and scenes that are the lifeblood of art. This was because being on Instagram gave me the illusion of connectivity. I was alienating parts of what it means to be a flesh and bood artist being into functions of the platform.
Over time I observed that if I was semi-naked on a beach–doing my best to look like a hot, non-passing trans-feminine person living their best life—these posts got traction. Literally HUNDREDS of likes! So validating. Yet if I posted specifically about a show I was developing, or a video I had made or a text I had written, I would get 1 or 2 hearts. The evil algorithmic overlord is tuned to filter out content that looks like promotion. I’m allowed in Instagram because my hot beach body is sugar dust to scatter over a pay to play marketing platform. The ads on Instagram are abrasive and soulless but the mediated aliveness of our friends keeps us there. By trying to center myself as an artist, and not just a leisure consumer, I had broken their unwritten rules. I needed to pay up to Meta for the privilege of talking to “my” followers about what I wanted to talk about (not to mention the subtle silencing of content about Israel’s genocide in Gaza!).
It’s a subtle disciplining of a Pavlovian type where your behaviour on the platform gets shaped for you without you completely realising. It works through the giving and withholding of love (or likes rather). If a lover treated us this way, our best friend would tell us they’re abusive and to get the fuck out! But where are our best friends right now? And what does getting out even mean? Where can we even go?
“Panopticon” by chad_k is licensed under CC BY 2.0
.Lines of Flight
Deleuze and Guattari dream of “lines of flight” from the totalising system of capitalism. Yet capitalism is like the haunted house of Luis Buñuel’s El ángel exterminador that you just, for the life of you, cannot escape. You want to leave, but there is some malevolent force keeping you inside. Often these lines are hard to trace because, just when you think you’ve found a way out—say Black Lives Matter, or punk, or psychedelics—you discover that these paths can lead right back to the center through co-optation and institutional capture. In fact, as Mark Fisher describes in Capitalist Realism, the domination of this system seems so complete that for must of us it is impossible to imagine worlds outside or after capitalism.
Yet, when it comes to the internet at least, there are alternatives. There are paths worth pursuing. If, for instance, like me you feel physically unwell whenever you open Instagram, there is an open-source, decentralised alternative called Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org) that is answerable to no corporate overlord.
When tools and platforms and technologies exist precisely in contradiction to those of dominance, extraction, and control, it is incumbent upon us to use them. While these platforms won’t necessarily crush capitalism and the war machine tomorrow, they model the fact that humans are capable of constructing non-hierarchical alternatives that aren’t ruled by extractive profit motives. How can we possibly imagine socialised healthcare, or factories run as worker cooperatives, if opting out of Instagram is too violent a change to even contemplate?
The Joy of Inconvenience
Compared to their corporate doppelgängers, open-source platforms lack a little in terms of convenience, (though compared with five years ago, they have come a looooooong way).
Yet it’s worth remembering that what we experience as convenience is also a carefully designed cul-de-sac to keep us inside abusive platforms. Anything that might lead us to put down our phones is airbrushed out. If you are worried about the amount of time you spend doomscrolling, consider that it’s the “convenience” of a never ending feed catered to your compulsive obsessions that keeps you in the doomscroll loop. It is not some psychological defect on your part.
In fact, strange things can emerge from inconvenience. Strange beautiful things—like falling in love with a stranger while you wait for a bus, for instance. So far, I haven’t quite reached that kind of rapture, but here’s a very telling example: On my way out the door from YouTube, I joined a PeerTube community. There was some kind of glitch and my email verification got lost somewhere in the tubes. The kind soul running the server wrote to me to apologize and to help me set up my account. I wrote back to say thanks and, oh by the way, ask why he had set up the server. As well as some tips on how to make the most of Mastodon, he gently explained:
“I had always been interested in Free Software… and recently just decided to go all in concerning the Fediverse…. There’s a bit of an addendum to all that, which potentially makes it a longer story; summarised: I had to face the reality of disability in the past 5 years, but still wanted to use what I have in resources, ability and time to give to mankind and its development.”
Everyday communism.
I found this moving, honest, and uplifting. I haven’t felt that online for a long, long while.
The Medium Is The MEssage
Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that “the medium is the message.” It’s one thing to have an eye on content—what we express in words—but it’s equally vital or even more important to observe how platforms shape both not only what can be expressed but also the economic, social and affective experience of communicating with other humans.
Instagram and its ilk operate as affective extractors: they distract, agitate, then numb us. They become arenas where we fight for attention and success at the expense of others, mapping the values of neoliberalism directly onto virtual space. At the end of the day, when something goes wrong, I have no one to talk to—just buttons to click and forms to submit.
Mastodon and related projects center human relations over extraction. This shift isn’t just about: what can this platform do for me? But also: how can I shape the future through the technologies I give my time and attention?
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Where to Find Me Now
Web ➜ WordPress
https://adri99.net
My website’s been on WordPress since forever but I shortened the URL to adri99.net, so you can scream it over the din of a basement rave and still be heard.Instagram/Twitter ➜ Mastodon
https://tldr.nettime.org/@adri99
Discussed above, but also: what is it with these Silicon Valley types, happy to host Nazis out of their throbbing commitment to free speech, but draw the line when it comes to pornography? I mean, they must be real freaks, with massive guilt complexes, jerking off in the dark while preaching about “community standards”. Of course! You would have to be horribly hung up on your body and its leaky desires to built a society where human interactions float in the cloud and the unruly body is left behind.Mastodon–or to be more precise, the communities managing the federated Mastodon servers–often allow erotic content so long as you flag it.
Substack ➜ Mailman + WordPress
https://noise.autistici.org/mailman/listinfo/adri99
Substack begone. Now my newsletter runs on Mailman (hosted by Autistici, an anticapitalist tech collectives) a tracking-free way to stay in touch with my beautiful, and yet also very smart and discerning fans. Like you. Did I say my fans were beautiful?Patreon/Substack ➜ Liberapay
https://liberapay.com/adri99/
There are a lot of people to support right now. For instance, hundreds of thouands of Gazans are living on the edge, so I don’t want to take up any of that space.What I’m talking about is alternative ways of funding art, if indeed we think that art is worth funding. We cannot rely on the market or on the distorted state capitalism to decide which artist gets to eat and which one doesn’t, who gets to realize their strange motivation and who gets pushed to the margins.
Berlin’s arts funding got gutted by 50%, and none of what’s left is going to artists who might be a little bit watermelon-inclined, if you know what I mean, cough cough genocide cough. The curators and gatekeepers at state funded institutions are terror-stricken at the thought of losing, power, access, privilege, art parties, and above all cocaine–that sweet, sweet cocaine.
Instead of Patreon or Substack I’m using Liberapay, a non-profit and open source crowdfunding platform.
My goal? 200€/week to survive this rat race. How?
- 120 humans toss in 7€ / month (less than two flat whites); or
- One oligarch rents my soul for 800€/month.
I’m good with either.
Bandcamp ➜ Archive.org (+ Liberapay)
https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A”Adrienne+Teicher”
I’m ditching Bandcamp for two reasons: their swingeing fees irritate the fuck out of me. Fan pays 1€ for 1 track – €0.15 for Bandcamp – €0.33 for Paypal = just €0.52 for artists! That’s 48% gone!! Even more grubby, the company busted its heavily unionised workforce after it was sold to an outfit called Songtradr, laying off half of the people who made Bandcamp what it was – stabbing artists and workers while slinking by like Hannibal Lector in that faded underdog garb. This anti-worker assault was a reminder that we can’t trust corporate platforms with underground culture.If, for some obscure reason, you still like to download mp3s you can do it at archive.org with a friendly reminder to lay down a few coins for the hungry artist who creates the work you love.
Telegram channel ➜ Signal group
https://adri99.net/signal
Yes, I know, Signal was funded by CIA-adjacent spooks, but at least it’s nonprofit, encrypted and it won’t mystify your elderly relatives. Unlike Telegram it doesn’t that have those weird icky crypto, gulf oil blood money vibes. Sure, Langley’s probably eavesdropping via quantum computers powered by alien tech recovered from the Roswell UFO crash site, but pobody’s nerfect.YouTube ➜ PeerTube
https://videos.abnormalbeings.space/c/adri99_channel
See above, and also, on peer tube the medium is the message. No ads, no algorithms, just a little online commune run by digital degenerates.•SUPPORt UNRULY ART•
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It’s not what they want you to think
First published on The Left Berlin
The other day I heard Bernie Sanders proclaim that “Israel has a right to defend itself”, as he made the case for a Harris presidency. He spoke in his trademark gruff manner, a tone whose charm has long faded since it has been co-opted to the service of empire—of making the empire marginally more progressive.
“…but”, he went on to deliver a call for moderation and limits to Israel’s violence. And then to insist we should still vote for politicians who enable genocide and glory in the lies that justify it. I’m not here to debate whether or not someone should vote. This is a morally and strategically complex issue that is mostly inconsequential to the mad trajectory our planet is spinning along.
What interests me more is the construction of the oath: “Israel has a right to defend itself”, that Bernie and others feel the need to recite before delivering any critique of Israel’s war on Palestine. Curiously, it is the same line used by Biden and Harris to justify sending the weapons that are doing the killing that Sanders claims to find abhorrent. And it is used by the genocidaires themselves, Netanyahu and others, along with their cheerleaders. This should be enough to make us pause and consider what this supposedly self-evident truth says and does not say.
So, once again: “Israel has a right to defend itself.”
Let’s start with the “Israel” part. In what sense does the identity of being Israel constitute a set of rights? Is it that Israel, as a nation-state, has a right to defend itself, because, apparently, nation-states have a right to self-defence?
A lot of legal minds don’t think international law supports what Israel has done to Gaza. In any case, I doubt that many people are weighing the UN charter in their heads when someone is droning on about Israel’s righteous violence. They are more likely to reach for whatever commonplace ideas of fairness they have accumulated in their everyday lives.
For instance, the way I typically understand self-defence is that, when someone is attacking me, I have the right to use violence to repel their violence. So if someone comes into my house and strikes me with a baseball bat, I can use the counter-violence of my cast iron wok or electric fly swatter until they stop, and preferably leave. The right to self-defence does not endorse finding out where my attacker lives and blowing up their house, killing them, their families and their neighbours as well.
This is obviously not a perfect analogy for many reasons. Individuals and nation-states are different kinds of entities, and also, the Hamas attacks on October 7 took place in the context of Israel’s long genocidal campaign against Palestine. It is not some random home invasion.
I make the analogy to show that even if we were to agree that nation-states have a right to use violence to make themselves safe, in the case of Israel, this right applied only when Hamas was attacking the rave, kibbutzim and military bases along the borders of the Gaza concentration camp. Once Hamas left, that licence expired.
What about the rockets? Given that they have caused very few civilian casualties, the right to self-defence does not extend to obliterating apartment buildings, schools, universities and hospitals on the faintest whiff of conjecture that someone is hiding a rocket launcher in an MRI machine.
Perhaps Israel does understand self-defence to mean that when someone attacks you, you have an unlimited right to strike back with no consideration of proportionality. An eye for an eye doctrine, or at the latest count 250 eyes for an eye, according to the Lancet journal (and not just eyes, but arms, legs, jaws, skin–hundreds of thousands of human lives obliterated).
If this is the case, then the right to violence extends in all directions—physical, temporal—and to all actors in the bloody drama of human existence. Israel justifies its violent war on Gaza based on the October 7 attack. Fine. But in this infinite regress, Hamas can then say the October 7 attack was justified by, for instance, Israeli snipers shooting out the knees of peaceful protesters. Or the kid you pushed around when you were 13 can show up at your work and break your legs, so you can never ever bully them again. This concept of self-defence bloats and degenerates to the point where it can justify virtually any act of violence, by anyone, committed anywhere—because there will always be some act of violence preceding it.
I don’t think that’s what Israel or its defenders want to imply. In fact, I see the outlines of something much more ominous lurking beneath the surface.
Let’s circle back to the question of what “Israel” signifies. Perhaps they are saying that Israel has a right to defend itself not as any old nation-state, but because it is Israel. What then is the elusive quality of “being Israel” that grants it special rights to use violence against its perceived enemies?
The way I see it, Israel’s right to self-defence is not about the October 7 attacks or the fleeting barrages of rockets that disturb the sky over Tel Aviv. Rather, it is coiled with a desire to repress the memory that Israel was created very recently on lands upon which others lived and who were violently expelled. The Nakba haunts the lands upon which the nation-state of Israel stands.
So it is the mere existence of Palestinians at all that constitutes a psychic and existential threat to the state of Israel, against which Israel feels emboldened to unleash unending waves of slaughter until those they perceive as a threat escape into permanent exile or turn into dust. This would go a long way to explain why so many fading empires and settler-colonies are backing Israel’s genocide with moral support and military aid. Also, why Israel’s war on Palestine has no end in sight; why parents carry their children home from school as bags of meat; why Gaza sometimes looks less like a city under siege and more like the cratered surface of the moon.
However you interpret it, none of the many implications of the dirge that “Israel has a right to defend itself” withstand scrutiny—unless you are inclined to partake in a nihilistic orgy of retributive violence, or you think that certain ethnic enclaves possess special rights to commit genocide.
So we should just stop saying it.
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So you know, I reveal a few plot details.
I am Cuba
As bombs fell on Beirut last night, I was alone in my apartment, with a cold, feeling useless and afraid of the slide slide slide into war and fascism. To distract myself, I dove into the expansive archive of the Soviet movie studio Mosfilm, restored and freely available on YouTube. I watched I am Cuba, (dir: Mikhail Kalatozov) a film that weaves together four vignettes of everyday life in a society on the brink of transformation.
As I watched, I thought, I need to adjust how I see myself and the society that I live in. I still carry the programming of growing up in a liberal democratic society: the belief that we live in a society of rules and norms impartially applied to all, that justice exists, that power is subject to checks and balances, and that when there is overreach or abuse–say by police or politicians–it is isolated. No-one is above the law; wrongdoers will be brought to justice, even when they wear a blue uniform.
(And also that we have a free and indepenedent media, yada yada yada, fourth estate, blah blah, I can’t even be bothered to finish that sentence, because it is so worthless).
We don’t live in that fantasy. The zone we live in is much closer to the world of I am Cuba, a dictatorship where power is exercised through control over the police, security services, consumer goods and the media. Of course, Cuba and Germany were and are on different ends of the chain of extractive capitalism, and I am not hopeful that we have revolutionary energies just waiting to be unleashed. Nevertheless, this vision of Cuba under dictatorship help me let go of the illusion of a free society.
The film’s third vignette resonated most with me, and challenged me deeply. Perhaps because the protagonist, Enrique, is a middle class student revolutionary, while the other vignettes deal with the struggles of the proletariat and peasant classes.
Enrique is wrestling with his desire to enact violent revenge after Castro is falsely reported to have been killed, and a friend is captured and murdered by the police. His comrades counsel him against what might sometimes be called “adventurism”–essentially saying, take out one guy and another functionary will take his place, just as violent or worse. Better to act rationally, strategically, and wait for the right, revolutionary moment.Nevertheless, Enrique follows his emotions to the top of a building, picks up a sniper rifle from its hiding place and aims at a palace in the distance. In his sights he finds someone I believe is the chief of Havana’s murderous police, enjoying a breakfast of fried eggs with his family on a terrace, laughing, smiling, and kissing his children. Faced with this domestic scene, Enrique puts down his rifle and falls into despair.
As I watched, I observed that my mind was searching for a moral. A warning against acting on one’s own, perhaps, or a cautionary tale against impulsivity and adventurism. Yet Enrique’s hesitation seem less rooted in loyalty to the Leninist revolutionary cell, than a rush of sentimentality, of not wanting to shoot the man in front of his children. Maybe it has something to do with the dominance of the pater familias, a deep conditioning that prevents us from killing our fathers, lords, teachers, rulers, oppressors, literally, or metaphorically.
Whatever the reason, this hesitation proves costly. In the very next scene, the police raid the apartment where his comrades are printing pamphlets confirming that Castro is alive. One of his friends is shot as he sends papers cascading from the balcony, his body landing in the street. Another is shot in the back after he dares to mouth a revolutionary slogan at the police. His killer? The same man Enrique had in his crosshairs.
That afternoon, Enrique delivers a speech at a demonstration before the police forcibly clear the square. A dove is killed by a police bullet and falls near where Enrique stands. With the dove in one hand and a rock in the other, Enrique leads the demonstrators forward against the massive violent force of the state, manifest as water bursting fourth from cannons. Enrique spots the Chief of Police leaning on a car and he edges relentlessly forward. The Chief of Police sees Enrique approach and fires. But Enrique staggers on as bullet after bullet strike his body until he collapses on the ground.
The vignette concludes with Enrique’s funeral, which becomes a sombre rally through Havana’s streets. It seems as if the whole city is observing his death, is galvanised by it. From balconies, endless streams of petals fall, and a vast Cuban flag is unfurled by cigar rollers from the top floor of their factory. Enrique’s pointless, irrational death–walking into bullets–in the end serves a strategic purpose: he becomes a martyr whose death galvanises the movement he died for.
What does this say about our situation? That acts of symbolic sacrifice have their place in a revolutionary struggle. Decisions made in the heat of violence can resonate in ways that cannot be predicted or mapped out through rational analysis alone.
I salute all the comrades right now, putting their soft, vulnerable bodies up against the armoured, weaponised bodies of the police—strangled, kicked, punched, insulted, pepper sprayed. When you see these sneering bipedal tanks in action, it is hard not to think that a crypto-Nazi movement has integrated itself within the ranks of the police.
Yet Enrique’s death resonated among the population of Havana because the population were willing and able to allow their bodies to resonate with his sacrifice. I do not see anything like this from where I sit in Berlin. In this way, our situation and that of I am Cuba could not be more different.
It is justified to feel angry at people who refuse to feel outrage after 12 months of killing in Gaza and now Lebanon supported, funded and legitimised by the German government. I understand—and I experience—the anger at a populace who justify, or by and large simply ignore mass rape in Israeli detention camps and city blocks in Beirut flattened by bombs.
As people who desire revolution, we can feel these things in our bodies, but resentment cannot guide our politics. The task of changing society is changing society. And we don’t get to choose the material that we work with. Our task is to find the best way to work with we’re given.
I’m not convinced that walking into gunfire from the Berlin police will spark a revolution, should it to come to that, because we are dealing with a very different time and place: a decadent Western empire, with just enough treats and fear to keep the population more or less invested in the status quo (whether that status quo be a coalition of social democrats, greens and liberals, or the far-right and ultra right–there’s not a lot of sunlight between them). The death of a demonstrator will be written over by the media and largely ignored.
There is a role for strategy and a role for symbolic sacrifice. The question is timing. And the time may come when enough of our fellow humans become disenchanted with the status quo, and we can present an alternative that is worth fighting and dying for.
The task now is to become ready to take on that role. I am not ready, but I want to be.
Come and See
I also watched Come and See (dir: Elem Klimov), the Soviet anti-war film, for the first time—alone. It’s a film best watched with someone else so you can process afterwards. But it is definitely worth seeing, especially if you need to be shocked out of apathy.
Briefly, its about a young teenager named Flyora who joins the Belarussian partisans and is physically and psychologically transformed by the German and Nazi atrocities that he witnesses. I keep wondering how many children are living a similar nightmare in Gaza and Lebanon and other lands turned into hellscapes by war.
The film is also a useful reminder that German violence in the Second World War was not limited to Jewish victims, nor even to the Sinti and Roma. Millions of Slavs, were murdered in violent, slightly less systematic ways, because they were also considered sub-human. And it was not only the SS carrying out the violence, but the regular German army.
This is something that German zionism conveniently sweeps away. It may even be one of the key psychological pillars for the morbid philosemitism of the German media, political and cultural elite.
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Last Tuesday, Spring finally broke through the winter gloom. I was with my kindred lover, friend, collaborator Kate, locking our bikes beside a small playground to get ice cream. I pulled Kate towards me and kissed them and they kissed me back.
Three honks from a nearby car shred our intimacy. Our mouths pulled away and we glanced through the tinted windows at the vague globulous outline of the driver within.
“Is that about us?” Kate asked me. “Are we being hate-crimed?”
Maybe he was just waiting for a friend and was irritable, I wondered. Maybe it had nothing to do with us.
Our defiant mouths closed in on one another. The driver honked again. And again. This time we ignored him, though, now I felt myself as achingly visible to the world and I made inventory of what we were wearing.
I was wearing a long, bright blue butterfly dress, its little antennas poked out from the space between my breasts. Kate was wearing fishnets over marine blue stockings and red leather shorts, suspenders and a t-shirt. This always happens in times of danger. I suppose it’s an evolutionary safety mechanism, something little mammals evolved in cruel and indifferent jungles to blend into their surroundings and disappear..
We moved to to the line of people snaking from the ice cream parlour and took up space behind a young girl, around eight years old, standing alone. After a few moments, a woman introduced herself as the girl’s mother and apologetically cut in front of us. To her apology I said:
“That’s why we have kids, isn’t it? So they can hold places for us in the line.”
“I was born in the Soviet Union, so I’m a professional when it comes to lining up.”
I laughed a little too loudly, revealing the taut vigilance that tightened my body. I noticed a man emerging from the car, a large man, swollen to an extent that I suppose is only possible through the use of steroids. His hair was clipped, and he wore a muscle t-shirt. He walked towards us with slow menace; it was clear he wasn’t after a cone.
“You should be ashamed to do that in front of children.”
“I’m sorry, but we don’t feel ashamed.” I said.
“I have kids,” Kate added, “there is nothing wrong with expressing love.”
“You should be ashamed.” He repeated. Again and again. He spoke a lot about children but I suspected his focus on their supposed innocence was just a screen to hide his disgust at the very fact of our existence–that we would flaunt it so. That we, freaks in his eyes, should have the gall to feel safe to show affection in a public space.
“That’s enough. You can go now,” said the mother. He edged closer to her.
“What has this got to do with you?”
“You’re threatening people.”
“I’m not threatening anyone. You’re threatening me.”
I noticed his hands were curled into fists and I told him so.
The eight-year-old, very courageously, joined the chorus of people pleading with him to go away.
He looked down at her, “Is that what you do? Is that how you act when adults are talking? You think its okay to talk to adults like that?”
The child looked at the ground.
The push-pull continued for some more minutes. Two of his friends joined him. Another man tried to intervene on our behalf. I did my best to ignore him for his own safety.
“I’m not doing anything,” said the muscleman. “I am just standing here on the street and you are yelling at me.” He said. “All I want is peace.”
“So do we.” I said, trying to speak with sincerity. “You want peace, we want peace, so let’s just end this conversation.”
A friend of the muscleman, shorter, pudgy, with a slightly queer edge, began to plead ironically for the three of them to leave. “Can we go now? Please! I’m afraid of these people,” he said, waving his hand at us.
The muscleman paused, muttered something, before hulking back to his car.
***
The police wore body armour and looked ready for combat. They carried pepper spray and batons and moved in long lines on our periphery. They were waiting for a pretence to strike, for instance: a forbidden chant like “From the River To The Sea – Palestine Will Be Free”, which to my mind, is akin to hauling someone away from a Greensboro lunch counter.
As we crossed an intersection, the police struck. Three or four demonstrators got churned up in this man-machine of gruesomely hard bodies acting in violent concert. They were pushed to the ground and trampled beneath toe-capped boots. A sucker punch was thrown, the target reeled, and was then gripped from every limb and hauled from the crowd, hands covering his mouth and nose so that he could not breathe.
It was Wednesday the first of May. We were demonstrating for Palestine and our path almost crossed the ice cream parlour. I thought of the muscleman. If he had thrown a punch at me, would I have called for the police? Would I have begged the state to ride in with its monopoly on violence to save me from his malice?
Both the muscleman and the bureaucrats with truncheons and toe-capped boots worship power over others, despite the justifications they spit your way, whether that be “save the children” or “regulation transgressed”. Relying on these forces for protection is self-defeating, like using a bullet to heal a wound.
It’s never the right time for this conversation as there are always more important battles to be fought. So now as good a time as any to ask: how can we avoid planting the seeds of the old power in the earth of the new?
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It must have been the summer of 2022 that I learned that the annual Nakba Day demonstration had been officially forbidden in Berlin. The global march commemorates the events of 1948 when Israeli forces drove at least 750,000 Palestinians into exile and killed more than 15,000, seizing control of 78% of historical Palestine. This genocidal war continues not only through physical violence, but also through an insidious manipulation of the very categories of thought in Palestine and around the world: that war is peace, that aggression is self-defence, that there were no people here when we arrived, but if there were then they deserved what they got.
Shocked by how just how blatantly fascistic the Berlin authorities were behaving, I shared the news with a couple of close friends. We shook our heads, muttered our disbelief – and moved on. There were projects to complete, applications for funding that would not write themselves, and, after all, we were burnt out. And afraid. The 2019 anti-BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) law in Berlin had sent a clear message: solidarity with Palestinians could jeopardize any chance of receiving state funding or resources. In corona times, I had my first (and perhaps only) taste of arts funding. I had overblown fears that if I stuck my neck out for Palestine they would snatch this away. To my anxiety-ridden brain, this would mean not having enough income, which would in turn annihilate my dreams of obtaining permanent residence in Germany. I would be condemned to the Sisophysian grind of bi-annual visits to the immigration office to prove that I am a loyal, timid and self-sufficient worker-consumer in the glorious fatherland.
There was also pushback from outside. A friend invited me to contribute a few minutes to a video about the challenges facing freelance artists in Berlin, that would ultimately be shown to representatives of arts funding organs in Berlin. I said I wanted to talk about the anti-BDS law and its chilling effect on the entire ecosystem of free expression.
We sat in a park on the canal, and I remember the gentle sun on our faces as my friend turned to me with resignation and said “no, we tried already, we made so many representations, we’ve told them over and over again, they won’t listen.”
“But this is the only chance I will ever have to talk right to their faces.”
“My love, find something else that’s important. Say that instead.”
I twisted like a leaf. In my mind, these kinds of clashes get reduced to a simple question: “either they are the crazy ones, or I am crazy.” I become a child again faced with the authority vested in a parent of a teacher; seeing something unjust and being told to sit down and shut up unless I really want to find out what injustice means.
So when my friend held a phone up to my face and pressed record, I talked about something else. What it was, now, I have no idea. Because it was not something that needed to be said. Because the words have been buried in shame.
Which brings me to my drag character, Trish.
Image: Loup Deflandre Trish arrived like a deranged thought in my mind a year and a half ago. Deranged, yet crystal clear: I would become a late 80s/early 90s Australian weatherwoman. The how and the why would come later – the aching necessity of Trish was beyond question.
Over the winter I developed Trish as a lucky member of the König drag scholarship which provided a crucial space to birth new personas through workshops in movement, voice, character development, props and costumes.
When it came time for my debut performance, I decided I would speak about the genocide in Gaza. I got push back from some colleagues, who looked at me aghast. “It won’t work,” they insisted. “What if someone freaks out? Then the whole show is over.”
The acquiescent child in me curled up in a corner.
“Okay, I will do something else.”
I felt sick inside. I felt like my guts were turning rotten. I could not imagine how I could possibly do a performance and not say the words burning in my mouth
I told the story to two dear ones, both of whom up-ended the “who is the crazy one” equation I had grown used to. Their arguments were sophisticated but can be summarized, simply, as “that’s bullshit.”
Later that night, as I washed dishes: a revelation. This was the show. The silencing itself. The silencing we do to ourselves and to others and how it hollows us out from the inside.
For those of you who missed it, the performance begins with Trish grinding through another weather forecast, before realizing that the emergent hole in the Ozone Layer (this being the late ’80s) is a metaphor for a vast absence that she is covering over: “that Australia (wink wink) is carrying out an act of….” Trish approaches the breach again and again but can’t make the leap, can’t say it, and is instead condemned to the brutalizing effects of her self-censorship “an abscess-like absence in the sky that will suck you up and destroy you because you can’t say a word that starts with G and ends with enocide.”
I suppose one useful thing about art, and drag in particular, is that its a kind of alchemy where you take the shit in your life – your failures, the blows you inflict on others, the blows you inflict on yourself – and transform it into something else: in my case, an awakening.
For two nights, in front of 300 people at Delphi Theatre, I made a solemn oath – via the psychic parasite of Trish – to forego silence as Israel’s 70+ years of violence takes an even more accelerated and monstrous form, while the German state punishes anyone seeking to stop this slaughter. And I asked that audience to look at their own silence, their own complicity, and say: No more. Never again. Together we discovered that we have to let go of the one illusion that holds us in place: that if you curl up into a ball, the storm will pass.
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I blame my parents. For everything. For waking up every morning, twisted in sheets, worrying about everything and nothing. For my shame (except the sexy bits, I’ll keep those). For my addiction to vegan Instagram. For my lack of ambition. For the glob of self loathing nesting at my core. Above all, I blame my parents for the decay of the membrane that holds the multiverse in place.
That, at least, is the vibe set by the science fiction comedy Everything Everywhere All At Once.
So, briefly: the plot. Evelyn Quan Wang and her husband Waymond are proprietors of a flailing laundromat in a sun-bleached corner of suburbia. Their daughter Joy is a portrait of teenage nihilism, deeply depressed and estranged from her parents, especially Evelyn. Evelyn, for her part, barely registers the distance between them. Instead she coats their shared world in fat-shaming and homophobia, introducing Joy’s long-term girlfriend to her grandfather as nothing more than a “best friend”
Alongside the domestic disquiet, the laundromat is creaking beneath crippling debts, and Evelyn is tormented by an upcoming meeting at the IRS, which could bring the whole house of soap suds down.
It’s in the midst of this turmoil that Evelyn’s grip on reality spins wildly out of control. During her humiliation at the hands of IRS inspector Deidre Beaubeirdre, Evelyn discovers not only that there are multiple universes each branching off from one another at every moment that a decision is taken, but that she is being hunted across this multiverse by a dimension hopping entity called Jobu, armed with a weapon that can devastate whole universes.
This movie is no Solaris. It doesn’t attempt to dive deeply into the implications of a multiverse (nor should it necessarily). The quantum spiel operates purely as metaphor, but for what exactly?
My initial assumption was that the multiverse stood as a metaphor for late capitalism. And I was justified. The film places a major emphasis on the corrosive role of debt on the Wang family. Also, visual effects seem to be inspired by contemporary social media aesthetics. The multitude of universes that Evelyn visits flicker past the screen giving of a world brimming with information but without the means to gain anything like knowledge or understanding. Debt and disorientation are palpable experiences in late capitalism.
There’s even a monologue that may as well have been lifted from an Adam Curtis documentary. Describing Jobu’s mysterious weapon, an alternate Waymond reflects that:
“We don’t know exactly what it is. We don’t know what it’s for. But we can all feel it. You’ve been feeling it too, haven’t you? Something is off. Your clothes never wear as well the next day. Your hair never falls in quite the same way. Even your coffee tastes… wrong. Our institutions are crumbling. Nobody trusts their neighbour anymore. And you stay up at night wondering to yourself… How can we get back?”
At this juncture, I was reminded of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, a book observing the stark reality that our imaginations are so constrained that it’s easier to envision the end of the world (in Hollywood’s fixation with apocalypse) than the end of capitalism. I thought that Evelyn’s adventures in the multiverse might trace a line of escape from this predicament, insofar as, if every possibility exists, then an alternative to capitalism is not only possible, but necessary and inevitable.
My hopes were dashed. In fact, the multitude of multiverses that Evelyn navigates are remarkably similar to her origin universe, with only one or two diverging details. For instance, there’s a universe where Evelyn is tasked with twirling a sign advertising a pizza parlour, or another where humans have evolved long, floppy, sausage-like fingers. Sausage-finger people – this is the limit of the human imagination.
Ultimately, the cause for the breakdown of Evelyn’s reality is not capitalism, but the rift between mother and daughter. That’s it. Jobu, we discover, is a version of Joy who, has built a kind of everything-bagel/black hole which will annihilate her despair by destroying the entire multiverse system. Fortunately, an extended heart-to-heart mother-daughter conversation is all it takes to save the multiverse from destruction, while capitalism is let off the hook.
So much of apocalyptic cinema is beamed through this familial lens. Think Birdbox or A Quiet Place. This is because, even though mangled and oversimplified, the ideas of Sigmund Freud cast a long shadow over Hollywood. The idea that all problems can be traced back to your family – especially your relationship with your mother – seems to lurk in at least every second film.
This general tendency in Capitalism was traced by the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari in their book Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Capitalism exploits the nuclear family as both a means to propagate itself and obscure its dominance in everyday life. The home where estrangement festers, the IRS office where the state wields debt as social control, and the laundromat where Evelyn’s enormous capacities are whittled down to a few basic functions – these are all spaces where capitalism produces itself on and through human beings and the relations between them.
But in the film, when Evelyn heals the rift with her daughter, everything goes back to normal, and she can resume her role as an obedient subjects of capitalism, even making friends with the IRS inspector who persecuted her.
Not all films are blind to the role of capitalism. Beau is Afraid is a similarly psychedelic journey across a fractured reality that also uses familial trauma to drive the action. In contrast to Everything Everywhere All at Once, Beau’s adventures shows how parental guilt and shame makes us vulnerable to manipulation. Mega-corporations exploit anxieties produced at the site of the family to increase their profits and cement their control over consumers.
Yet, even though its critique is on point, Beau is Afraid is just as clueless when it comes to offering alternatives, leaving us enlightened, but stranded in the abyss.
Perhaps the rot is so deep, that it extends all the way to down to the kinds of stories we have been conditioned over centuries to enjoy. If so, we are badly in need of a multiverse if we’re ever going to find our way to a world where the human imagination is not so constrained as it is in ours.
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There was a time, almost 8 or 9 years ago, when my duo HYENAZ was invited to perform at a festival in the Baltics. On the phone with the organizer we discussed the logistics of our travel to the festival until the conversation took on a conspiratorial tone.
“You know,” their voice lowered to a whisper “this is rather last minute because we were trying to get [a more successful queer artist] and in the end we couldn’t afford them. So we asked you.”
“Oh… that’s… nice of you to tell us.”
“Yes, but that’s not the point. What I want to say is. We are sponsored by [a German cultural funding organisation], but they didn’t want to support you. They only agreed to pay because there was no time to find anyone else. I thought you should know.”
This was my first experience of the state ideological apparatus known as ‘arts funding’. Hegemony through the purse strings. The effect it has on you is subtle. You get a bit of money from a grant and you want a bit more. You start to see yourself as a player, as an insider, as successful – until the day time comes when you want to say something, but you can’t, because your new patrons wouldn’t like it.
The festival organiser wouldn’t say the exact reason we were queers non grata, but we surmised it had something to do with the fact that we were pro-porn at a time when that wasn’t fashionable.
I thought of this moment when I learned that, in the wake of Israel’s genocide against Gaza1 we hear that organisations in Berlin are being threatened with funding cuts if they make statements in support of the Palestinians. It even emerged that the Neukölln cultural organisation Oyoun was pressured by the Berlin Senate to drop an event by the group Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East because, in supporting both peace and justice in Palestine, the group’s Jewish and Israeli membership are considered anti-Semitic by the white German anti/philo-semites who police free speech in Germany.
As an artist, opposing Israeli genocide places you in direct opposition with the German state. Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), which seeks to replicate strategies that helped end apartheid in South Africa, is for all intents and purposes, officially banned in Germany. In 2019, the German parliament passed a non-binding anti-BDS resolution calling the movement and its supporters ‘antisemitic’. The resolution also prohibits state organisations from supporting individuals, events and institutions that support BDS or question Israel’s right to exist as a homeland for only some of its citizens, those classified as Jews.
This not only impacts public supporters of BDS, rather it has a chilling effect on the arts scene as a whole. Artists ask themselves, if BDS is beyond the pale, does a Palestinian flag emoji on your Instagram bio make you unfundable? Or attending a demonstration? Or writing this article?
No one really knows, and when no one knows, the urge to censor yourself “just in case” is strong. What if curator X at gallery Y sees my activism and pulls the show because they are afraid of the consequences on them – then my show is toast and I can’t pay my rent.2 The very act of thinking these anxious thoughts means that the strategy of sowing uncertainty places powerful limits on freedom of expression.
In low-pressure moments, it’s easy to feel that taking money from the state won’t compromise you, that you’ll always be brave enough to act outside state influence. But in extraordinary moments like the ones we are living now, our state patrons can pull the strings to ensure that we artists think, speak and act as we are told.
Or at least they can try. Oyoun has so far resisted the heat and the event is still scheduled to take place. And as more and more of us realise that silence is no longer and never was a viable strategy, we have a unique opportunity to take back the freedom to call out injustice in the world where we see it.
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The German version of this text on the italodisco artist Fancy was first published in Siegessäule for their regular column “Drehmoment”, in which musicians describe an album that is of key importance to them. Here is the text in English.
The word “circlusion” is penetration’s other. It describes a sexual act in which one thing, normally an orifice, encloses another thing inside itself, for instance when an anus circludes a cock or a vagina circludes a dildo. Whereas this “being penetrated” is normally considered passive in heteronormative and even homonormative discourses, the circluding orifice can be both active and passive; even transcend this binary altogether.
Popular music, for the most part, reproduces masculinist tropes of phallus-worship. Take a song like Closer by Nine Inch Nails. When Trent Reznor sings “I want to fuck you like an animal,” do you imagine that he is penetrating, or do you envision that Reznor is circluding you, with his anus, his mouth or his cunt? Our society valorises penetration and there is a direct line between the libidnal worship of frontmen on the one hand and fascist dictators on the other.
Enter Munich-born italo-disco star Fancy, who I read as an out and proud circluder. Take the single Slice Me Nice. Atop Moroder-esque synths and drum machines, Fancy reveals to us that he is “like a cake that wants to be baked,” adding “It’s time for action baby, cut me in two”. Its a simple perhaps crude image, yet it makes the pleasure of making one’s body a host for another active.
In L.A.D.Y. O, Fancy explicitly recasts the masochistic protagonist of the novel Story of O as a sadistic dominatrix. Whereas in the novel, the penetration of O’s orifices by members of a secret society is intrinsically linked to her submissiveness, in Fancy’s retelling, he becomes the submissive and begs her to “Tie me up, give me pain”. He goes on: “Chain me, I can’t stand no more” while assuring her that he is “gonna like it for sure.” O, in both the novel and in the song, could very well stand for orifice. But in Fancy’s hands O can no longer stand for object, for it is she who has the active role in his fantasy.
This ingeniously closes the circle between active and passive, penetration and circlusion. Again and again, Fancy shows us that sex need not be a dyad, but a vast ocean of sensations, organs and ways of relating to one another.
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