Moreover the spirit lifted me up, and brought me unto the east gate of the LORD'S house, which looketh eastward: and behold at the door of the gate five and twenty men; among whom I saw Jaazaniah the son of Azur, and Pelatiah the son of Benaiah, princes of the people. Then said he unto me, Son of man, these are the men that devise mischief, and give wicked counsel in this city: Which say, It is not near; let us build houses: this city is the caldron, and we be the flesh. Therefore prophesy against them, prophesy, O son of man.
America is the only empire in history to export representations of internal critiques of its established values as the dominant cultural form for ideologically expressing its controlling influence over other national economies. The authentic mode of American cultural domination is situated neither in the official establishment ideology of democracy, freedom, self-determination, nor in the popular revolt against the actuality of domination which the official ideology seemingly obscures. American culture, as a colonising function of economic expansion, manifests in the world as the representation of a carefully regulated tension between establishment and internal revolt which is deployed as an apparatus to capture, format and mediate the political and social tensions of colonised countries.
We are taught, at the very beginning of our political inculcation, and as we learnt how things really in this frightening world, by means of unexpected examples, about how deepthe state really is, and how it meddles in everything and how nothing is free from its influence, we are shown MK Ultra yes, that is mind control, and psy-ops and false flags, yes, that is manipulation of and interference with the remote controlled opposition, but we also get to learn about how the security apparat funded those hapless dupes, theAbstract Expressionists, who were thereby instantly transformed for us, as we gained knowledge of the world as it really is, who became for us the exemplary cultural stooge, because it, that is the state, or so we have been taught, desired an official globally distributed American culture, and it chose them as the most expedient competitor to surrealism and socialist realism.
That’s the parable of the Abstract Expressionists and the story is part of a sort of ideological religion, distributed globally by the American communications apparatus as a hidden history, the hidden history that is known by everyone, which we have all dutifully learnt and can recite at will as prime example for the sort of thing that happens. But the Abstract Expressionists weren’t just ‘artists’, that is apparatchiks of the culture industry, they were promoted because they embodied a critique of the banality and constraints of actually existing American values in the name of the eternal and authentic American value of revolt against tyranny and constrained life - their art was free and it articulated both the prairie and the modern American urban melting pot. The Abstract Expressionists were frontiersmen and also modernist avant gardists, and the US state desired to promote precisely that in art which it was not, it wanted art that wasn’t like the propaganda of its rivals, but which it was also willing to defend militarily in the name of freedom, democracy and self-determination.
Even so, Abstract Expressionism became strategically useful at another level, it was transformed by means of contrast with other forms of cultural self-expression as something made up, inauthentic, manufactured, domesticated and artificial. By means of contrast with other cultural forms, Abstract Expressionism could be used as an example of officially recognised revolt, somehow empty and performative, against which, these other forms could be represented as the real deal, they could be shown to be not merely a representation of the action-performance of authenticity (which soon turns out to be toothless state sanctioned art) but something encountered as the ‘it’s the truth, it's actch'll / Everything is dissatisfactch'll’ authentic representation of the authentic expression of authentically lived resistance.
There was another prong to the American cultural offensive in the Cold War years which the state dubbed, The Jazz Ambassadors. Where we have learnt about what turned out to be the useful idiot characteristics of Abstract Expressionism, its essential, and disclosed, inauthenticity, its craven relation to the establishment as revealed from beneath a mere surface level, chosen and affected, non-conformity, we have also learnt, although to a slightly lesser degree, and only if we make the effort to look into it, how the Jazz Ambassadors did not play ball, and did not fall into line with the state’s demand that they repudiate Russia’s and China’s allegations of entrenched and institutionalised American racism. That is to say, the story of the Abstract expressionists is told so as to reveal by contrast the story of the Jazz Ambassadors.
We learn the narrative that the export of Jazz can be considered to be not an instrument of imperialism because it proved itself an authentic product of cultural expression and therefore independent from the apparatus by which it was circulated as a product of the regime it is represented as rejecting. We learn the lesson about the authentic cultural resistance of jazz from the distribution of its representation by global communications companies. We learn its resistance must be authentic because it is the example that is contrasted against the example of that resistance which is inauthentic.
From the moment Jazz is shown to be a more authentic form than abstract expressionism, the representation of American culture as a channel of global domination has taken on a dynamic tripartite form where an intra-spectrum exchange between more and less is established, and which all of its ideological and cultural debates adhere to: i. the official establishment position; ii. the ‘liberal’, and therefore inauthentic, position of the critics of the establishment; iii. the irreducible authenticity of those who, because of their social position, express their separation from both the establishment and its inauthentic critics - the veritable third voice. Where the state’s investment in Abstract Expressionism died a rapid death, the state has continued to officially promote jazz and its many derivatives as its major cultural export.
Representations of black culture, the authentic expression of the oppressed, is the product of American imperialism that global markets want to buy into as their means for showing their rejection of American imperialism. Black cultural expression, from Jazz to BLM, and its associated products, organisesthe receptivity of external markets through its saturating distribution by media and state institutions, to America as a totality, the America which provides all possible reaction-options to itself: official, inauthentic opposition, and authentic resistance. Receptivity to colonisation is most effectively organised when the colonising power takes on the role of its own harshest critic and invites identification with it.
There is something in the corporate export of the BLM movement on a global scale and its strategic use against Russia’s and China’s attempts to destabilise the West that resembles a controlled burn intervention, an expropriation of the ground and possibility of destabilisation. Certainly, the current version of the military-industrial-complex had to undermine Trump’s policy of isolationism in order to renew its imperial project, and an exported popular revolt against Trump served this end. 2020 was the year, the American security apparatus came out as a rainbow flag organisation.
However, the American state’s use of black culture also functions as a variation, by inversion, upon deep history’s theme of the evil counsellor. Where traditional authority figures cannot be held responsible for failure, defeat and corruption without also threatening the continuity of the entire apparatus, the figure of ‘evil counsellors’ can be deployed as lightening rods for popular anger; if necessary, these are conveniently sacrificed to appease the regime’s critics without endangering the regime itself. The evil counsellor thesis is a means to control opposition by redirecting criticism from system flaws to blameworthy individuals, who are immediately transformed into embodiments of the errors corrupting the system’s performance (no-platforming, and cancelling are sequelae of the evil counsellor hypothesis).
The Jazz Ambassador who refuses to deny or downplay racism in America inverts the role and function of the evil counsellor - the jazz ambassador is the polar opposite to the evil counsellor. The representation of the wise, good, authentic African American as ambassador of, and receptacle for, the other America, and as living representation of that America not expressed by realpolitik and expendability, is fully integrated into the colonising sweep of America’s cultural expansion. The Jazz Ambassador is effective as an instrument of foreign policy precisely because he is not reducible to it, and resists it at every step - if the name of a politically recalcitrant but culturally celebrated figure can be associated with a political or advertising campaign, the achieved ‘gain of function’ and ‘force magnification’ for the campaign is obvious. The system significance of African American resistance to the system is not a matter of an about to be revealed hypocrisy, and thus complicity, it is not another version of inauthentic opposition, but rather it is located precisely within its inviolable authenticity, which has its own employable use-value.
The desire of those who resist the system is that the system does not use their resistance, that their resistance remains precisely what it is, and nothing else - inviolable, authentic and expressive only of its own position. But the incorporation of expected resistances is the process by which the system expands its operations, no position within the system expresses its own value - there is always an exchange, you will be permitted your resistance but what you contribute to the system by your resistance is not decided by you. The value of Abstract Expressionism is as reference point for inauthenticity, the value of Jazz is as reference point for authenticity, and both can be incorporated by the culture industry.
Everybody in the world knows the name of George Floyd, his representation as icon now overlays all the struggles of the world, just as the conflicted nature of the Roman Gods once overlaid the local deities of occupied tribes. Not one of that same ‘everybody in the world’ can name a single exterminated Uighur or Rohingya, and it is this asymmetry in cultural reference that has become the definition of cultural colonisation - but more strangely still, because we are not talking here about knowledge of the celebrated names of foreign kings that we have been forced by our oppressors to memorise and venerate, but of the rebels against such kings. For this reason, we have also encountered the definition of what operates as a process of colonisation as rationalised by the ideology of the anti-colonialists, and which expresses the racism reproduced within the expansionist cultural bias of anti-racism. It is by such means that we uncover the organisational difference between oppressive and exploitative regimes, and of course, following on from that, why oppositional tendencies prefer to present themselves within a narrative of opposition to the regime of oppression rather than to the process of exploitation.
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