Berlin agitprop group “Die Ketzer” (1929/1939)
- Deutsches Bundesarchiv, image by Helma Toelle
To resist
or not
to resist
Theatrics of comedic paranoia
Elbe Trakal
On the first of August 2020, a hot summer day in Berlin, I biked across the city center when I came upon a protest. I stepped off my bicycle. Dragged along by the moving crowd of the demonstration - a regular occurrence in Berlin, even in the midst of the corona pandemic - I was puzzled by what the people were actually protesting for or against. My first impressions were contradictory and confusing. Directly on my right, I saw a group of boomers in activewear waving Swedish flags. They were passed by a couple in acid-washed t-shirts with yin and yang symbols, their hands raised in a peace sign. To avoid staring at a group of Thor Steinar vikings, I turned to someone holding a large-scale portrait of Mahatma Gandhi. A bodybuilder type bearing painted runes on his chest trailed behind a group carrying a banner with the peace dove. On the moving cargo-bed stage of a truck, a loudspeaker blasted into the mask-less crowd: “no matter if you are on the Left or Right, we are all in this pandemic together. No borders, no nations!” And finally, what helped me find my footing, was a purple-haired grandma holding an aluminum-foil paper maché “Q” enveloped by cardboard flames. I recognized the burning “Q” as a symbol for the “QAnon” conspiracy theory.
All these gestures, outfits, and posters next to each other made me feel dizzy and paralyzed. I had to sit down by the curbside to catch my breath. This was my first impression of the “Querdenker” movement, one of several initiatives of corona deniers in Germany that used the frustration caused by corona restrictions to platform alt-right ideologies and conspiracy theories, such as QAnon. Their strategies included the imitation of symbols and terms usually associated with liberal democracy, esoteric subcultures, and the ‘68 counterculture movement - flower wreaths, tie-dye patterns, anti-nuclear signs, peace symbols, rainbow flags, and liberatory protest chants. Such copy-pasted symbols were interwoven side-by-side with right-wing signifiers from Scandinavian mythology to military attire, German Reich flags, and other symbols of historical revisionism (particularly connected to the Holocaust). Even the name of the movement, “Querdenker,” epitomizes these signification-grab tactics, alluding both to ‘thinking against the grain’ and ‘queer’ thinking, but also signaling an association with ‘Querfront’, a far-right ideology that calls for an anti-democratic collaboration with radical left forces to gain political power.1
As I was recovering by the side of the road, I overheard the repetitive chant of “Widerstand” (German for “resistance”) further behind me. I had imagined it coming from a counter-demonstration nearby but when I saw the group of buff men in tight Camp-David t-shirts chanting it, I understood that the term was just one of many snatched signifiers in the charade of political mimicry that is the Querdenker platform. “Resistance” has become a common slogan in Querdenker demonstrations and even provided the name for a political party of corona deniers formed in early 2020, called “Widerstand 2020”.2 I found the use of the term “resistance” especially troubling because I associate it with the resistance against Nazi Germany or against occupying colonizers. Its de-contextualization continued to haunt me in the days after the protest. Most of the appropriated signs seemed strategically chosen to seduce people with a vague political leaning, to entice them to protest against the government alongside Nazis, couched in universal and empty liberal messages: love, peace, and freedom. My own attachment to the term “resistance” made me empathize with the possible attachments of others. What affective or practical response could one provide to the tactics of rightist post-factual trolls? Who would haggle with a fascist over the meaning of a symbol? But then again, how could one cede it to them either? How were people drawn into the confusing marshes of populist semiotics and radicalization?
Post-factual strategies are pervasive in contemporary politics, from memes and tweets shared on social media to speeches by government officials. The illiberal rhetorics of post-socialist Hungary and Poland, for example, have regularly performed slick imitations of EU liberalism while censoring public media and implementing chauvinistic laws and sweeping economic, electoral, and judicial reforms. In their book The Light That Failed (2019), political scientists Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes describe how Putin's government used political mimicry to perform a benevolent, functioning democratic system replete with elections, demonstrations, and free speech to appease European and North-American powers while restructuring the country for the needs of the rising oligarch class.3 According to Krastev and Holmes, the most significant of these theatrical imitation techniques on display may be Putin's staged elections. They argue that it is precisely the Russian voters’ knowledge that the elections are staged, that legitimizes Putin's Power - in the voter’s mind, only a strong leader could pull that off.4 At the heart of post-factual politics lies the strategy to present the political process as a theatrical trick, with the implicit suggestion that all politics may be staged, and that all facts are a specific type of constructed lie. From the fake news circulating during the 2016 US presidential elections and the Brexit referendum to Trump’s stolen election claims and the Kremlin’s baseless justification for the aggression in Ukraine - the information war continuously surfaces mimetic trolling tactics in meme wars, user-targeted ad campaigns (such as those by Cambridge Analytica) as well as online and on-the-street protest cultures.
Many of these tactics in fact originate in avant-garde and agitprop methodologies from the early to mid-20th century, such as decontextualization and appropriation. In this text, I am interested in the theatrical roots of mimetic tactics in performative politics. In what follows, I will ask how appropriated signs address and subjectify an audience, and what kinds of resistance may be available to viewers. In the first section, I will compare an action by a Berlin agitprop street theater group of the 1930s with a scene that Augusto Boal’s Invisible Theater staged at a restaurant. Continuing in the second section, I will look at Ernst Lubitsch’s screwball comedy To Be Or Not To Be (1939) and compare it to an ‘action performance’ by the Danish group Solvognen from 1974, in addition to contemporary forms of ‘tactical frivolity’ in protest culture. With the help of these examples, I will be looking at how mimetic tactics in performance actions on the Left were historically used to address their audience affectively through transgressive and at times comedic means. I argue that such acts subjectify their audience vis-à-vis hegemonic narratives by way of a ‘coup de théâtre’, a theatrical revelation of their invisible tactics as staged performances. This coup seems to be omitted in contemporary imitation tactics on the Right. The essay ends with a brief discussion of what I call a comedic-paranoid response to propose a speculative affective resistance to the use of semiotic appropriations on the Right today.
protest of corona deniers - Berlin, August 1st 2020, Image Leonhard Lenz
"The following happened in Berlin in broad daylight on Friedrichstraße in 1930. A young man lost consciousness and collapsed just outside of the shop window of a delicatessen store so that he effectively came to lie in front of a backdrop of ham, sausages, cheeses, caviar, and pineapples. Needless to say, the young man in question was not elegantly dressed, but looked rather unemployed, as did the other young man who knelt next to him, opened his collar and cared for him. He seemed to be a friend of the one who had fainted.
As to be expected, a small crowd of passersby formed immediately around the two. Such a gathering around a public accident is like the blood that collects at the spot of a blow. And as usual, someone asked, "What’s the matter with him?" — The bitter response of the kneeling friend was also not surprising: "What the matter is? He has nothing to eat, that is the matter! Hasn't that ever happened to you?”
"Every day," nods another, "I'm unemployed as well!"
And the conversation was underway. [...]
The small exchange of opinions had lasted barely ten minutes when the shrill whistle of the raid squad sounded, and the small group of curious onlookers in front of the exquisite shop window was surrounded in a heartbeat. Within a few minutes, they were already loaded into the police car and driven to the police station despite their protest. Now about fifteen incidental passersby stood in front of the police officer and were interrogated, petty bourgeois, workers, better-off gentlemen and ladies. Their shock and indignation fell silent with amazement.
". . . What?! We're supposed to be a theater troupe? The Heretics?
You must be making fun of us. We never saw each other before. By chance, we passed by and stopped for a moment. What? We are members of a workers' theater? We did not even know that such a thing existed. And where did the young man go, who collapsed in front of the delicatessen? How am I supposed to know? I don't know him. When I arrived, no one was there anymore . . . We had no idea that they were actors. [...]"
The entire society present had to be dismissed again. They were all innocent and unsuspecting participants in a staged scene. The main actors had escaped in time.
Meanwhile, the young man had collapsed at another street corner." 6
- Section from an article by Béla Balázs, “Theater auf der Straße”, published 1949.
Scene 1: First time as comedy, second time as farce 5
“Rote Raketen” at solidarity day 13th and 14th June 1930 - Stadtmuseum Dresden, SMD_Ph_2012 00065 /SLUB Dresden / Deutsche Fotothek / photographer unknown
The interventions in theatrical language that the German workers’ theater made in the 1920s left an indelible mark on the theater arts of the Weimar Republic, as can be seen in the works of theater directors Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht. Elements such as novelty stage effects, bright costumes and masquerade, singing, and music, were utilized to attract the attention of workers.15 Piscator's own theater at Nollendorfplatz in Schöneberg employed many of the new stage effects developed in the streets, as well as modernized dramatic forms such as the spectacle-like revue, central to German agitprop. These pieces borrowed from the circus, street performance, cabaret, sketches, and songs to convey a clear and legible message for a working-class audience that was not trained in bourgeois theater conventions.16
There were two reasons why flashy theatrical effects and expressive acting techniques were used to address the working-class audience. On the one hand, the exaggerated and often allegorical representations of political forces by way of impersonification - of for example Capitalism or Militarism - helped to associate theoretical concepts with feelings and were part of a discourse of affective politics. On the other hand, campy aesthetics were embraced as a cultural language from below to differentiate from bourgeois viewing habits. While the performers’ dilettantism was decried as “poor” by the conservative press at the time, Brecht picked up on this taste judgment and reversed it. He claimed that the term “poor” adequately described the poverty and alienation of the performers’ inner and outer worlds and was hence proof of the authenticity of their plays.17 Balázs himself wrote: „They are interwoven with their class, they are grown together with their cause, a cause, in which they surely are not dilettantes. Their very interwovenness is their vocation. Who is a dilettante? One who does something on the side and inadequately, that others do better as part of their profession. If one, however, does something that no other is doing better, because there is no one else who is doing that very thing, because the thing only finds expression through him, then he is no dilettante.“18 Agitprop performances divided the audience, broke with aesthetic conventions, and fostered a sense of class belonging through a cultural expression that was born out of a desire to misfit and pleasure derived from bad quality.
Contrary to the naturalistic approach in bourgeois theater and acting theory at the time, agitprop worked with exaggerated, clichéd characters such as “the fat cat,” the policeman, the factory owner, or allegorical personifications of Imperialism, Capitalism, and Militarism. “No individual character, no individual fate exists in these scenes; instead, social types are used as symbols for political concepts. Through allegories, often with the help of masks, signs, posters and mock-ups, the current play of political forces is represented.“19 Such tactics reflected the use of the Marxist concept of ‘historical mystification’, which describes the obfuscation of political and class relations by the Capitalist mode of production.20 The use of allegories did not aim at depicting an authentic representation of the social fabric or the worker’s everyday life but instead intended to reveal what lies beneath the mask of the political and social order.21 As such, agitprop theater was raising and educating its audiences in a set of aesthetic gestures and contents. The community of viewership created along the way was part of an affective didactics of class consciousness.
In Balázs’ anecdote of Die Ketzer’s street theater it is no longer loud campy aesthetics that try to reel in a working-class audience, but indeed naturalistic performances. In the repressive environment of the time, performers had to work undetected within the masses to stage clandestine street actions. The actors in the introductory narrative realistically portrayed an unemployed worker, who collapses exhausted by the side of the street. Another actor, miming a passerby, addresses the accidental audience gathering around the first. In the experience of the audience even the police officers, who arrived to arrest the onlookers, became part of this realistic scene. It was in fact the police that accused the audience of being a workers’ theater group and revealed the theatrical trick by doing so. “We are members of a workers' theater? We did not even know that such a thing existed.” A member of the audience replied. The allegations and arrests were part of a lesson in state repression that permeated the contemporary cultural context, along with social issues such as homelessness, unemployment, and malnourishment. As the audience was interpellated by the police apparatus they were exposed to the deeply corporeal didactics of street theater within the social conditions in which they were expressed. Audience address in Die Ketzer’s street scene is different from the showy revues of the Piscator stage, yet they have been developed from the same didactic language that uses a complex array of provocations to raise the viewers’ self- and class awareness by means of a theater event. Both street theater and the revue confront the viewers with an unexpected and artificial reality, by highlighting the staged aspect of the witnessed situation. The use of unfamiliar, unintuitive single theatrical elements, such as a prop, a gesture, or a song within a theatrical performance was and continues to be used to irritate immersive viewing habits and to provoke the audience to engage with both content and formal expressions of a piece. The Brechtian use of the ‘estrangement-effect' was supposed to stimulate a sensation of alienation in the viewer, that could provoke critical distanciation as they rationally pondered on this affect, and associated it with the wider social experience of alienation. While Brecht's theater may seem tame compared to the transgressive clandestine actions of the Die Ketzer troupe, both addressed social experiences of alienation and attempted to recreate them aesthetically. In the performance by Die Ketzer it is not a single element in the representational matrix that is decontextualized, but rather it is the entire register of the event that shifts context. Allegories, showy effects, campy performances, and transgressions were all part of an affective and didactic mobilization of the common audience that was deeply ingrained in theater as an art form in the political sphere.
In the 1970s, Brazilian theater practitioner and activist Augusto Boal developed a new theater practice in response to the authoritarian political climate in South America. The Invisible Theater staged scenes at public sites such as the following. A performer would order a meal at a restaurant, eat it and when presented the bill, they would respond that they were not able to pay. Instead, they would offer to work for their meal and ask the waiter how much they got paid by the hour. Other undercover performers would join the conversation and involve their table neighbors to discuss workers’ wages in other restaurants. In search of a concrete solution, they would collect money to pay for the meal of the performer. At the end of the performance, Boal’s actors would disclose to the visitors that they had witnessed a staged scene.22 These purposefully situated conversations about class and labor within public and semi-public spaces were developed to ideologically educate audiences. The similarity to the practice of Die Ketzer is striking, yet Boal's Invisible Theater goes one step further by not just setting the scene for discussion, but by raising demands (higher pay) and suggesting alternatives (to collectivize money).23 These plays functioned as a social rehearsals which were exercised as a discussion platforms and directives for action. Both the Invisible Theater and Die Ketzer’s clandestine street actions are characterized by an infiltration of public everyday-life spaces (a restaurant visit, a discussion outside of a shop), as well as a revelation event, that a staged performance has been witnessed. Sociologist Luc Boltanski describes this revelation the following way: “A conspiracy is an object that is only perceived as such – as distinguished from ordinary human relations – from the outside. It is distinguished from ordinary relations only by the operation of unveiling that sets an apparent but fictitious reality and a hidden but real reality side by side, on the same level. This is why the moment when the conspiracy is unmasked has the properties of a coup de théâtre, a dramatic turn of events.”24 Boltanski conceptualizes conspiracies as a fundamental struggle for the perception of reality. Their theatrical revelation moment indicates that perception of reality is highly produced and performative. Two realities are placed side by side - an “apparent but fictitious” one and a “hidden but real” one. The coup de théâtre or theatrical coup in the Die Ketzer action and the Boal scene shifts an ordinary event (a ubiquitous interaction with a homeless man, a dinner at a restaurant) into an extraordinary because staged event (a group of performers playing). This revelation interprets the fabric of everyday-life reality with Marx as ‘historically mystified’ by hegemonic political and economic structures within a capitalist society. The theatrical performance is not presented as a cultural object that is experienced passively - which historically was never the case for working-class theater – but as a situation that the audience can actively engage in and alter. The viewers are provoked to recognize their complicity or inertia within a set of social relations, and perhaps realize their agency to transcend this alienating experience along collectively rehearsed guidelines (how to pay for a meal, how to voice your concerns over social issues).
Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci has described this ideological warfare within society as the continuation of militaristic warfare on a cultural and socio-political level as the ‘war of position.’25 The mobilization and education of the civilian population were important during the early 20th century’s geopolitical struggles of the international workers’ movement, to garner support among the masses for guerilla and clandestine tactics against rising fascism. It remains a potent concept to understand information warfare in the 21st century. For instance, the various hijacked peace symbols used by corona deniers in Germany, help to perform a fictitious reality that claims right-wing ideology as socially acceptable. The Nuclear Disarmament symbol, the peace dove, and the Pace rainbow flag among others were flown along German Reich flags to make the latter appear just as harmless and consumable by a mainstream audience. Nevertheless, they also have a sinister meaning within the Querdenker movement. Adopting the belief of the Reichsbürger, a far-right historical revisionist movement in Germany, many Querdenker understand present-day Germany as a US-occupied territory and call for a peace treaty with the US (and Russia!) to liberate the country and return it to pre-world war (non-democratic) ‘sovereignty’ and territorial lines. These peace symbols defy their original meaning as demands for an international security architecture within a cold war context and become mere proxies for a return to an aggressive, militarized, and colonialist Germany.26 The peace dove has recently returned to the streets of Berlin and German media in the context of protests against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and could now be seen side by side with protest signs that called for the heavy rearmament of Germany in a context different from both its cold war origins and Reichsbürger misuse.
In the following section, I will look at the affects that the appropriation of signifiers produces in subjects as I examine Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not To Be (1942). The screwball comedy presents the Polish resistance struggle against the Nazi occupation of Warsaw as a collective and joyful endeavor. The clandestine mimetic act, the impersonation of Gestapo officers, is revealed at the beginning of the film. Through this theatrical coup the film’s audience is addressed and subjectivized along ideological lines (fascist or anti-fascist). Two audiences are confronted with two different affective addresses: an ‘accomplice audience’ with a comedic address, and a ‘paranoid audience’ with a horrifying address. I will utilize the comedic-paranoid double affect that I find in Lubitsch’s film as a possible tactic to counter mimetic interpellations on the Right. In light of today's heavy implementation of mimetic techniques in conservative and right-wing populism to destabilize both liberal and leftist discourses, our own experiences with media messages are their very own battlefield in the theater of affective politics.
agitprop group “Kolonne Links” (1929/1939)
- Deutsches Bundesarchiv, image by Helma Toelle
Image of Corona-denier protest in Berlin on August 1st 2020. The stage in front of Brandenburger Tor is flanked by banners with peace doves, the background banner reads: Terminate Ramstein Air Base now! Image by Leonhard Lenz.
“Lubinski, Kubinski…
Lominski, Rozanski and Poznanski.
We're in Warsaw, the capital of Poland.
It's August, 1939. Europe is still at peace.
At the moment, life in Warsaw
is going on as normally as ever.
But suddenly,
something seems to have happened.
Are those Poles seeing a ghost?
Why does this car suddenly stop?
Everybody seems to be staring
in one direction.
People seem to be frightened,
even terrified. Some flabbergasted.
Can it be true? It must be true. No doubt.
The man with the little mustache,
Adolf Hitler.
Adolf Hitler in Warsaw
when the two countries are still at peace…
and all by himself?
He seems strangely unconcerned
by all the excitement he's causing.
Is he by any chance interested
in Mr. Maslowski's delicatessen?
That's impossible! He's a vegetarian.
And yet,
he doesn't always stick to his diet.
Sometimes he swallows whole countries.
Does he want to eat up Poland, too?
Anyhow, how did he get here?
What happened?”
- Voice over from the introductory sequence of “To Be Or Not To Be” (1942, director: Ernst Lubitsch), screenplay by Edwin Justus Mayer.
Scene 2: To resist or not to resist
The introductory sequence of Ernst Lubitsch's screwball jewel To Be Or Not To Be (USA, 1942) shows street scenes of a fictional Warsaw. Cars pass by, people sit in cafes, pedestrians window-shop. Then, faces stare at something off-screen. Cars stop. People run to see what is happening. Tilt. Adolf Hitler. Pensively reading the crowd, then turns to peek into a delicatessen shop window. When he turns back at the crowd, the camera shows him from a high-angle shot surrounded by onlookers. Cut to the inside of Theater Polski. On the stage, an ensemble is rehearsing Gestapo, a satirical play about the Nazis. A conflict ensues between the director and the performer playing Hitler (Tom Dugan) when the director cries disappointedly “It’s not convincing. To me, he just seems like a man with a little mustache!” “But so is Hitler!” replies the make-up artist. Furious, the actor playing Hitler leaves the stage through a backdoor and steps out into the streets of Warsaw to prove his credibility to an unsuspecting audience. We are back at the beginning, the confusion of the onlookers is resolved when a girl steps up to Hitler and asks the actor that plays him for an autograph.
The jump backward in time from the street to the interior of the theater also constitutes a switch in narrative perspective. The opening sequence shows fast-paced edits of street scenes and storefronts at a busy intersection in Warsaw in the style of newsreel footage. The voiceover describes the unfolding events in a sensationalist tone, both surprising and alarming. With the cut into the theater, this initial journalistic narrative position is contrasted with camera movements, multi-perspective cinematic editing, and dialogue to introduce several characters of the ensemble cast. As the fact that Hitler is performed by an actor from the theater company is revealed, we - the film viewers - are invited to identify with those who caused the commotion in the streets of Warsaw. The narrative perspective of the film is established as that of the acting troupe.
This first sequence is a rehearsal, a pre-enactment of the actual historical tragedy (or farce?) that is about to take place. It locates us as co-conspirators in comedic resistance, a form of resistance that will persist throughout the film. As the plot unfolds, and the “real” Hitler invades Poland, the acting ensemble continues to make use of clandestine mimetic tactics as a form of theatrical weapon: the ability to copy life truthfully and deceive spectators in the auditorium and on the streets. Subsequently, as part of the resistance against the Nazi occupation, the actors slip once more into the roles of Gestapo officers, originally rehearsed for their play, and infiltrate enemy lines by impersonation.
Still from To Be Or Not To Be (1939), Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
Besides this political conspiracy, the film involves a second libidinal one. In addition to their play Gestapo, the theater troupe is also staging Shakespeare’s Hamlet. After the film’s exposition, the star of the ensemble performing Hamlet, Joseph Tura (Jack Benny), gets on stage to say the inevitable line after which the film is named: “To Be Or Not To Be”. What he doesn’t know is that the line is also a secret cue for the admirers of Maria Tura (Carole Lombard) - the female star of the ensemble and wife of Joseph Tura. To whoever hears it, it is a signal that she will be alone in her backstage room, awaiting amorous visitors. As Hamlet delivers his famous soliloquy, a young pilot in the third row, Lieut. Sobinski (Robert Stack) gets up, politely pushes through the aisle, incites a commotion in the auditorium, and causes a nervous breakdown for Hamlet in his signature moment on stage. Throughout the film, the line is repeated under different circumstances by various characters. Charged with multiple meanings (the actors monologue, a code word for a lover, a secret signal for a spy), it is able to both thoroughly torment Tura, as the victim of its conspiracy, and cause great pleasure for us viewers, complicit to Maria’s promiscuous plans. Thus Joseph Tura is both, a perpetrator of a conspiracy as a member of the Polish Gestapo-imitating resistance and an addressee of Maria Tura’s conspiracy. The film's double positionality towards a conspiracy runs through Joseph Tura’s split perspective as a tragi-comedic character. Structurally this reading of the film suggests that any audience of a conspiracy may be split in the same manner. Whether or not a conspiracy is acted out with the viewer’s complicity or against it has much to do with their ideological (and libidinal) position. Here the differentiation between tragedy and comedy could help understand a viewer’s relationship to a conspiracy.
In her book The Odd One In (2008), philosopher Alenka Zupančič explains that “tragedy represents a bare life deprived of its singular Master-Signifier…[C]omedy serves as a bunch of Master-Signifiers... Master-Signifiers enter the scene of comedy not in order to have the last word, but in order to be repeated there (as well as subjected to other comic techniques)“.27 Zupančič continues: “Comedy moves, of course, very close to a fundamental kernel of nonsense... [We] really encounter nonsense only when and where a sense surprises us“.28 As it demarcates a shift in the signifying chain, the theatrical coup in the introductory sequence changes the audience’s perception of Hitler’s body as a Master-Signifier in various ways. Those that come to understand Hitler’s shopping spree at a delicatessen as a defiant political act by a Polish actor could laugh at it. Those who see Hitler deprived of his authority as Master-Signifier by the theatrical trick may experience the scene as threatening. The first set of spectators constitutes the ‘accomplice audience,’ with whom the film asks us, viewers, to identify. This ‘accomplice audience’ sees the shift in meanings as comedic. Following this, we are introduced to the ensemble's clandestine operations, become part of the cunning of the characters’ plan, and watch events unfold as the uninitiated enemy stumbles into situations set up with our knowledge. The second set of spectators identifies with those being copied and poked fun at. They may interpret the revelation of the prank as a threat to their ideological integrity. For this ‘paranoid audience’ the possibility that Hitler is not Hitler, but a performer standing in for him, realizes a paranoid fantasy. While being a member of the Gestapo-imitating ‘accomplice audience,’ Joseph Tura is also a member of the ‘paranoid audience’ in terms of the conspiracy that his wife Maria Tura plots against him. We, viewers of the film, are addressed as accomplices for both conspiracies (against the Nazi occupiers and against Joseph Tura).
The theatrical coup functions as a transgressive and affective address that confronts the viewer with hegemonic narratives and reveals her ideological situatedness within the ‘war of position.’ Laughter is an immediate, affective, and involuntary reaction that instantly localizes each audience member vis-á-vis hegemonic narratives. So is the horror that the ‘paranoid audience’ experiences. It is also experienced instantaneously as the misrepresented power structure is ridiculed. In the example of the Querdenker protest, I myself felt the address by the word “resistance” right away. The understanding of its misappropriation came upon me like a shock. This paranoid affect seems to be rooted in the subjectivizing force of interpellation itself, which the paranoiac over-determines as always already directed at herself. For Marxist Philosopher Louis Althusser, subjectivization lies at the core of ideological state apparatuses. Within modern disciplinary societies, an individual becomes a subject of a state as it is trained to listen for various interpellations that may be directed at it.29 This waiting for the signs to signify marks subjectification as a paranoid over-identification with the hegemonic narrative of power structures. The figure of the passerby responding by turning and reacting to the hail of a police officer is the epitomical scene of subjectification. However, for the ‘paranoid audience,’ the theatrical coup confuses subjectification. The power structure that hailed it has lost its Master-Signifier. The cop turns out to be just an actor. As the world is accumulating signs the paranoiac can’t exactly grasp what they mean. Their very meaningfulness is nevertheless upheld as a legitimization of the broader power structure that defines the signs. “It doesn't matter what it means, it's still signifying. The sign that refers to other signs is struck with a strange impotence and uncertainty, but mighty is the signifier that constitutes the chain. The paranoiac shares this impotence of the deterritorialized sign [...], but that only gives him better access to the superpower of the signifier, through the royal feeling of wrath, as master of the network spreading through the atmosphere.”30 That the Master-cop, Hitler, is an actor has to mean something, some vast conspiracy. Herein lies the power of conspiracy theories. It is their paranoid affect that needs to be upheld in order to legitimize the power of those who tell them.
Still from To Be Or Not To Be (1939), Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
Yet what to do when we find ourselves structurally on the wrong side? When we are interpellated not only by state apparatuses, neoliberal agents, and populists? When I heard the chants for a fake “resistance” my reaction was shocked laughter, but one that captured and paralyzed me like venom. The initial affect may be the right instinct. Within the conspiratorial right-wing matrices targeted against us, I propose a reenactment of Joseph Tura’s split positionality as a tragi-comedic character and call for a mimetic offensive of the double affect of comedic paranoia. Figurehead of paranoid fiction Philipp K. Dick proposes ‘fake fakes’ as a counter-strategy against the empty and counterfeit realities. “In my writing I got so interested in fakes that I finally came up with the concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions. Consternation. The park being cunningly transmuted from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces. For instance, suppose the Matterhorn turned into a genuine snow-covered mountain? What if the entire place, by a miracle of God’s power and wisdom, was changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye, into something incorruptible? They would have to close down.”31 The mimetically simulated world that Disneyland has created can be resisted, Dick suggests, when “all of us” clandestinely overnight exchanged the fake signifiers again with real ones, and demanded a real world or ‘fake fake’ world to substitute the fake one. The Disneyland “officials” would have to deal with the paranoid “horror” these “sinister forces” have directed at them by the re-instated real. His guerilla reality substitution would be one example of a comedic-paranoid response.
Against the mimetic overproduction and subsequent deflation of signifiers by the Right, the comedic-paranoid resistance would suggest a terrifyingly consistent and repetitive reinstatement of already emptied-out signifiers. For every snippet of fake news, for every public lie, we need a disjunctive truth-ambush, in the form of ‘fake fakes’ and radical realification. And not just for the signifiers that the Right and conservatives have appropriated from the Left, but also for the signifiers they still think to be authentically their own. These are the first ones that have to be realified. Fredric Jameson’s suggestion to nationalize the army and enlist every citizen into it, while demanding public health care, free housing, free universities, and overall employment for all through the universal military institution is one such example of the realification of the fake world.32 Another one was the appropriation of Christmas by the Danish theater group Solvognen to demand its materialist overhaul, based on its promises of charity and generosity. In their action Julemandshæren - The Santa Claus Army (1974) - the Christiania-based Solvognen (The Sun Chariot) theater group used hundreds of workers dressed up as Santa Claus to demand the implementation of Christmas' highest virtue, charity, from those who ultimately have the means to offer it, corporations. They occupied a recently closed General Motors factory outside of Copenhagen to pressure the company to give jobs back to workers; they walked into a large downtown department store to take and give away goods, and crowded banks to demand loans. In Jon Bang Carlsen’s documentary of Solvognen’s street action, (Dejlig er den himmel blå - How Fair and Blue the Heavens are, 1975), we see a group of Santa Clauses hand presents to customers in the Magasin department store in Copenhagen. They grab books and place them in the hands of shoppers, when an announcement comes on: “The management would like to inform you that the persons in Santa costumes that are giving away goods are not employed by Magasin.” Security guards arrive at the scene to reclaim the presents from the customers, push red robes, and pull strap-on beards. A commotion forms as the Santas sing and dance in a circle. Finally, police drag the activists out of the store to arrest them as customers and crying children look on in confusion.
Still from Dejlig er den himmel blå - How Fair and Blue the Heavens are (1975), Directed by Jon Bang Carlsen
Leading up to the Christmas holidays, Julemandshæren went on for five days with the intention to demonstrate against unemployment, the oil crisis, bourgeois consumerism, and Capitalist alienation on national television. This public performance did not qualify for police permits as Solvognen’s street actions in the past were not considered theatrical arts in Denmark. Consequently, it had to be organized in secret and planned strategically. Danish theater critic Aage Jørgensen described it this way: “One must be prepared to see the performance stopped the moment it starts to resemble reality too strongly - or rather the moment it becomes reality.”33 A significant number of participants had to pass as unremarkable elements of the ordinary public life of Capitalist society, such that they could be activated and concentrated spontaneously within minutes. The red and white Santa costume functioned as a Master-Signifier that represented the allegorical character of Christmas, provided a cover for the demonstrators, and also pointedly depicted the colors of the Danish flag. But even more so, the costume was the uniform of the underpaid service labor force of Santa performers, a seasonal job often carried out by long-term unemployed workers.
Crucial to the success of the action was the presence of a wide public audience, especially on national television. The police carried hand-cuffed Santas out of department stores and the General Motors factory by the dozens. These images circulated in the media and inscribed themselves into the action, marking the revelation of the theatrical trick as part of the group’s media commentary on state repression. Christmas, as a symbol of traditionalism, family, and Christian ideals, was thoroughly challenged as an empty signifier in a Capitalist reality that the action masterfully brought into view: exploitative labor conditions, economic depression, excessive consumerism, and police repression. Instead, the paranoid-comedic address of the Santa Clause army confronted both passersby and store owners with an unrelenting call for the reinstatement of Christmas’ altruistic promises. The action performance was thus a positivist resistance in the form of a utopic reinvention of Christmas: loans, jobs, and free goods for everybody, now!
Still from Dejlig er den himmel blå - How Fair and Blue the Heavens are (1975),
Directed by Jon Bang Carlsen
The interplay of clandestine actions and their revelation as theatrical events broadcast on television or live media became more ubiquitous in the 1990s, epitomized by the political actions of Greenpeace and ACT UP. Techniques to confront power structures by comedically evading and dodging protocols of interaction and expectations of mediatization continue to be paramount in political activism and direct actions today. Such techniques have been developed in guerilla theater and various forms of activism. Paradigmatic seems to be the practice of ‘tactical frivolity,’ employed for instance by the alter-globalization movement at the Global Day Of Action during the 2000 IMF and WorldBank summit in Prague. Pink and silver carnival costumes, queer paper mache tanks, and spurts of ballons that oozed over cops offered “a radical visual, sonic and corporeal contrast to the agents of the state, whose own contradictions, hierarchy, violence, and oppressive measures [were] effectively outed.”34 Activist groups such as Philadelphia’s Revolutionary Anarchist Clown Bloc or the UK’s Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army employ comedic and festive outfits (costumes of clowns or fairies), props (cakes, inflatables), pranks, and clowning to attract the attention of the media.35 Moreover their tactics force police to constantly re-evaluate their opponents’ attitudes, as they actively divert from law enforcement protocols through the display of erratic, ludic, sexualized, and hedonistic behavior. Deterritorializing interpellation within a policing context, ‘tactical frivolity’ mirrors and makes visible the paranoid apparatus of the police itself. However, it is also used in counter-demonstrations against right-wing protesters. One of many examples of 'joyful militancy'36 in autonomist, anarchist, and direct action strategies,‘tactical frivolity’ demonstrates the durability of comedic resistance tactics in the present day. It points to practices of power inversion in various carnival and jubilee traditions around the world, in which trickster or fool characters act as clergymen, political and military leaders, and colonizers. Carnivals often employ paranoid-comedic affects as a form of resistant performativity. Clowns in protests are one of many characters of mimetic resistance that continue strategies of appropriation and comedic address of avant-garde theater practices in public politics today.37
Image from the Global Day for Action Prague 2ooo, www.agp.org
Conclusion
Clandestine mimetic acts make ideological narratives visible, as they locate their audience’s position within a hegemonic discourse affectively via humorous or paranoid inflections. The coup de théâtre is an important condition for clandestine mimetic acts to become legible in a war of position, by shedding its clandestine quality and revealing itself, instantaneously, as a theatrical event. Such coups can occur under different circumstances: by the performing actors themselves (as in the Boal scene at the restaurant), by the repressive conditions under which the performance took place (as in the police’s accusations after the street action of Die Ketzer) or at the hands of the media (on television as with Solvognen's piece). In the very moment of revelation the audience is also established, in a way that it recognizes itself as witnessing a theatrical act. The coup transforms these acts into aesthetic political interpellations with a subjectifying quality, that arrests the audience-witnesses as subjects vis-á-vis hegemonic narratives.
With the pervasive use of mimetic tactics by the populist Right, the act of revelation is often suspended altogether, merely hinted at as a possibility within a paranoid discourse of uncertain truths. Be it on a demonstration such as the Querdenker one I stumbled upon in Berlin in August 2020, be it Putin’s publicly faked elections, or QAnon's supposedly leaked data sets, the question of whether or not we are witnessing a real or fake event constitutes much of their grasp on power over their followers. QAnon appeared first as a thread of posts on 4chan, by a user named Q Clearance Patriot (or simply Q) who claimed to have access to top-secret government files. In the thread, participants tried to interpret Q’s posts while discussing whether or not the posts were authentic leaks or part of an Augmented Reality (AR) game. Posts regularly stated “this is a game” as well as “this is not a game”. Q’s identity and why they stopped posting following Trump’s election loss in December 2020 is itself a heated debate on QAnon forums. Similar to agitprop theater or Solvognen’s street actions, QAnon addressed their audience by mimicking powerful narratives (data leaks, political elites abusing power, criminal machinations of politicians) and confronted it with a specific kind of transgressive and gamified affect including threat, paranoia, or ridicule, and created a sense of collective viewership in various social media. The Querdenker movement incorporated parts of the QAnon conspiracy and generally worked with a similar logic of appropriations of symbology from the Left (‘resistance’) and liberal-center (‘peace’, anti-aids campaign). The varying experiences of alienation or loss of agency that many may have experienced during the corona pandemic confronted with governmental decisions, or political and scientific patronization, surfaced in the mocking and appropriation of liberal messages, such as freedom and inclusion. The imitation of these pervasive symbols was strategic in surfacing far-right ideologies and presenting them as mainstream and acceptable to a widely groomed audience in Germany (from esoteric subcultures, internet novice Boomers, to government skeptics). An example in point is the use of the yellow badge by corona deniers in Germany, with the label “Ungeimpft” (un-vaccinated).38 These badges horrendously relativize anti-semitism and the violent practices that targeted and excluded Jews in Europe for centuries through to the present day and give Holocaust deniers a new platform. With this example we can see how such appropriated signifiers address both audiences, those that understand the symbol as an in-crowd code (such as the Reichsbürger understanding of the pilfered peace symbols mentioned in the first section) and those paranoid addressees for whom the stolen symbols are meaningless, vulgar, or threatening partly because their performative use finds no public explanation.
As we find ourselves addressed by populist copies of hegemonic narratives, how can we expose their fabricated realities? How can we reclaim their emptied-out signifiers and realify them back into a world that makes sense? I suggest to affirm the affect of the comedic paranoia that I experienced as I heard the “resistance” chants of corona deniers. As I sat by the side of the road intently listening to their chants, I began to grasp the meaning of their call for “resistance.” I had misunderstood them at first. They were not calling for a resistance to the liberal government and their corona measures but they were wishfully calling for a medical resistance. Like plants that become pesticide-resistant or drug-resistant bacteria, they were chanting to channel a medical disease resistance to the virus. In fact, they may have been calling for more vaccines and we had just not found a way to understand each other. They were calling for an invitation to be infected by the virus so that they may develop their own resistance to it. Be my guest. But please Querdenker, quarantine! Much like Jameson’s example of the universal army, leftist semiotics exaggerate dominant narratives and often imbue them with radical utopic ruptures. Paranoid-comedic worlds can open breaking points in semiotic warfare. The army of Santa Clauses of Solvognen, which set out to redeem Christmas by giving away consumer goods and forcing loan and job offers, used the cultural values of Christmas to reconstruct its tradition as a materialist monument to Capitalist critique. The performers of Boal’s Invisible Theater collectivized money to pay for meals and to rehabilitate restaurants as public sites for communality. Resistant acts of ‘tactical frivolity’ and ‘joyful militancy’ both incorporate militaristic language and costumes as they counter state forces and reinstate paranoid-comedic affects in contemporary politics. Their actions are a symbol of the continuous joyful destruction of the liberal order along with its nationalist and capitalist illiberal core. Let the department stores and delicatessen shops be the backdrops to our carnivalesque insurrections. Let Christmas be a jubilee that destroys the debts we have collected throughout the years; let the disarmed militaries of the world feed us until the birds in Disneyland are migrating once more.
*thank you to Kayla Weisdorf, Nomaduma Rosa Masilela and Anna Roy Winder Salling for editing this text with me.
[https://www.europenowjournal.org/2021/07/25/querdenker-querfront-and-qanon-on-the-german-far-right-and-its-american-occupation/] last visited on September 5, 2022. ↩︎
2
Widerstand 2020 was disbanded a year later. Some of it’s founding members continued to form the political party “Die Basis” (the base), which was also registered for the German federal elections 2021, but didn’t gain any significant support. ↩︎
3
Holmes, S. & Krastev, I. “The light that failed: A reckoning.” (New York: Pegasus Books, 2019) ↩︎
4
Ibid, p.60ff. ↩︎
5
“First time as comedy, second time as farce” was the name of a conference on Ernst Lubitsch at the Solvenian cinematheque in 2013. The subsequent publication “Lubitsch can’t wait” was published at kinoteka and edited by Mladen Dolar, Ivanka Novak and Jela Krečič.
Dolar, Mladen “To Be Or Not To Be? No, Thank You” published in “Lubitsch Can't Wait” edited by Novak, Ivanka, Krečič, Jela, Dolar, Mladen (Ljubljana: kinoteka – Slovenian Cinematheque, 2014) ↩︎
6
This excerpt is from Balázs, Béla “Theater auf der Straße” (originally published in “Theater der Welt - Ein Almanach”, edited by Herbert Jhering, Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1949) in “Deutsches Arbeitertheater 1918-1933 – 2. Band” edited by Hoffmann, Ludwig und Hoffmann-Ostwald, Daniel (München: Rogner & Bernhard, 1973), p. 452-457. The translation from German is my own. ↩︎
7
Ibid.↩︎
8
Balázs adapted Brecht’s play for the screen for G.W. Pabst's The Threepenny Opera (Die 3 Groschen-Oper, 1931, director: Georg Wilhelm Pabst) and wrote The Blue Light (Das Blaue Licht, 1932, directress: Leni Riefenstahl). ↩︎
9
Most of the German agitprop troupes existed in the heavily industrialized regions of Saxony (Rote Ratten, Rote Raketen (both Dresden) Rote Rebellen (Chemnitz)), Ruhr-area (Rote Hämmer, Nordwestran!) and the working class cities Hamburg (Die Nieter) and Berlin (Kollonne Links, Roter Wedding, Rote Rebellen, die Ketzer). ↩︎
10
Hoffmann, Ludwig und Hoffmann-Ostwald, Daniel “Deutsches Arbeitertheater 1918-1933 – 2. Band” edited by Hoffmann, Ludwig und Hoffmann-Ostwald, Daniel (München: Rogner & Bernhard, 1973), p. 193. ↩︎
11
Ibid, p. 14.
The troupe “Das Rote Sprachrohr“ for example is documented at a workers mass event performing “Lied der roten Einheitsfront” (the song of the red union front) during the sport festival scene in Bertolt Brecht’s und Slatan Dudow’s film Kuhle Wampe oder: Wem gehört die Welt? (Kuhle Wampe / To Whom Does the World Belong? 1932, director: Slatan Dudow). ↩︎
12
Moos, Siegfried “Hallo Leuna! - Die Staatsgewalt!” in “Deutsches Arbeitertheater 1918-1933 – 2. Band” edited by Hoffmann, Ludwig und Hoffmann-Ostwald, Daniel (München: Rogner & Bernhard, 1973) ↩︎
13
Hoffmann, Ludwig und Hoffmann-Ostwald, Daniel “Deutsches Arbeitertheater 1918-1933 – 2. Band” edited by Hoffmann, Ludwig und Hoffmann-Ostwald, Daniel (München: Rogner & Bernhard, 1973), p.316. ↩︎
14
By 1939, the workers-theater association ATBD had grown to almost 10.000 members. Balázs, Béla “Theater auf der Straße” (originally published in “Theater der Welt - Ein Almanach”, edited by Herbert Jhering, Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1949) in “Deutsches Arbeitertheater 1918-1933 – 2. Band” edited by Hoffmann, Ludwig und Hoffmann-Ostwald, Daniel (München: Rogner & Bernhard, 1973), p. 453. ↩︎
15
Hoffmann, Ludwig und Hoffmann-Ostwald, Daniel “Deutsches Arbeitertheater 1918-1933 – 2. Band” edited by Hoffmann, Ludwig und Hoffmann-Ostwald, Daniel (München: Rogner & Bernhard, 1973), p. 316. ↩︎
16
Käbnick, Hans “Die nächste Etappe des Arbeitertheaters” in “Deutsches Arbeitertheater 1918-1933 – 2. Band” edited by Hoffmann, Ludwig und Hoffmann-Ostwald, Daniel (München: Rogner & Bernhard, 1973),
Balázs, Béla “Arbeitertheater” (originally published in Die Weltbühne, 1930) in “Deutsches Arbeitertheater 1918-1933 – 2. Band” edited by Hoffmann, Ludwig und Hoffmann-Ostwald, Daniel (München: Rogner & Bernhard, 1973) ↩︎
17
Brecht, Bertolt “Einiges über Proletarische Schauspieler“ in “Gesammelte Werke 15: Schriften zum Theater 1” (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967a), p. 433. ↩︎
18
“Sie sind mit ihrer Klasse verwachsen, sie sind mit ihrer Sache verwachsen, mit einer Sache, in der sie gewiß keine Dilettanten sind. Dieses Verwachsensein ist ihre Berufung. Wer ist Dilettant? Einer, der etwas nebenbei und unzulänglich macht, was andere beruflich besser machen. So aber einer etwas macht, was kein anderer besser machen kann, weil überhaupt kein anderer dieses macht, weil das Ding eben nur durch ihn allein zum Ausdruck kommen kann, so ist er kein Dilettant. “ Balázs, Béla “Arbeitertheater” (originally published in Die Weltbühne, 1930) in “Deutsches Arbeitertheater 1918-1933 – 2. Band” edited by Hoffmann, Ludwig und Hoffmann-Ostwald, Daniel (München: Rogner & Bernhard, 1973), p. 122. The translation from German is my own. ↩︎
19
“In diesen Szenen gibt es keinen persönlichen Charakter und kein persönliches Schicksal. Soziale Typen, Symbole politischer Begriffe treten auf. In Allegorien, oft mit Masken, Zeichen, Plakaten, Attrappen wird hier das Spiel der politischen Kräfte des Tages dargestellt.” Balázs, Béla “Arbeitertheater” (originally published in Die Weltbühne, 1930) in “Deutsches Arbeitertheater 1918-1933 – 2. Band” edited by Hoffmann, Ludwig und Hoffmann-Ostwald, Daniel (München: Rogner & Bernhard, 1973), p. 120f. The translation from German is my own. ↩︎
20
Marx, Karl “Das Kapital - Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band” (Berlin: Dietz, 1962), p. 562. ↩︎
21
Wolf, Friedrich “Schöpferische Probleme des Agitproptheaters” (originally published in “Aufsätze über Theater”, Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1957) published in “Deutsches Arbeitertheater 1918-1933 – 2. Band” edited by Hoffmann, Ludwig und Hoffmann-Ostwald, Daniel (München: Rogner & Bernhard, 1973), p. 435. ↩︎
22
Bishop, Clair “Artificial Hells - Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship“ (New York: Verso, 2012), p. 122ff. ↩︎
23
Ibid, p.125. ↩︎
24
Boltanski, Luc “Mysteries and Conspiracies”, Polity, Cambridge 2014 (translated by Catherine Porter), published as “Énigmes et Complots”, (Paris: GALLIMARD, 2012), p. 13. Emphasis in original. ↩︎
25
Gramsci, A. “Selections from the Prison Notebooks”. Hoare, Q., Nowell Smith, G., eds. (New York: International Publishers, 2003) ↩︎
26
[https://www.europenowjournal.org/2021/07/25/querdenker-querfront-and-qanon-on-the-german-far-right-and-its-american-occupation/] last visited on September 5, 2022. ↩︎
27
Zupančič, Alenka “The odd one in: on comedy” (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), p.177. ↩︎
28
Ibid, p. 180. Emphasis in original. ↩︎
29
Althusser, Louis "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (New York and London: Verso, 2012), p.163. ↩︎
30
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix “A Thousand Plateaus” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), translated by Brian Massumi, p.112. ↩︎
31
Dick, Philip K. “How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later” (1978) published in “The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings”, edited by Lawrence Sutin. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995) ↩︎
32
Jameson, Fredric “An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army.” Edited by Slavoj Žižek. (London and New York: Verso, 2016) ↩︎
33
Jorgensen, Aage “Touring the 1970's with the Solvognen in Denmark” published in “Scandinavian Theatre” (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, Vol. 26, No. 3, Autumn, 1982), pp. 15-28. ↩︎
34
Starr, A. “Global Revolt: A Guide to the Movements Against Globalization” (London: Zed Books, 2005) ↩︎
35
St. John, Graham “Protestival: Global Days of Action and Carnivalized Politics in the Present”, Social Movement Studies,Vol. 7, No. 2, 167–190, September 2008. ↩︎
36
bergman, carla and Montgomery, Nick “Joyful Militancy” (Chico, Oakland, Edinburgh, Baltimore: AK Press, 2017) ↩︎
37
Another potent example here is the zombie. In recent years zombie appearances have increased on political demonstrations, as symbols of impoverished and overworked living dead or brainless consumerism. An example was the Hamburg G20 protests in 2017. ↩︎
38
The yellow badge was a symbol that Jews were requested to wear through several centuries of European history as a marker of denunciation. In Germany it is especially known as a symbol that the Nazis ordered Jews to wear at all times, including in concentration camps. The use by corona deniers was denounced as anti-semitic and several calls for its prohibition were hailed, among others by Dr. Felix Klein, Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany. ↩︎