Pepe Le Moko (Or: The Policeman Inside)

Julien Duvivier's 1936 film Pépé Le Moko presents the story of a notorious gangster played by Jean Gabin hiding out in the Algerierian Casbah. A "Prince Among Thieves" Pépé is portrayed as a shrewd, charming, dangerous figure, possessed of a magnetic sexual charisma.

The story opens in Algiers Police Headquarters. A special squad of detectives, recently dispatched from Paris, are speculatively preparing for a swoop on the Casbah, in the hope of capturing Pépé in his lair. Brushing off the advice of the local detective Inspector Slimane, a mission is planned for that night. It goes ahead, and is a disaster - "I told you so," says Slimane, "Protected by an omniscient network of lovers, friends, and spies, Pépé cannot be taken so long as he remains on his own turf."

The Paris detectives defer to Slimane's greater experience. Slimane gets to work. Recognizing Pépé's one weakness to be women, he sends a particularly intriguing one his way, and lets her work her magic. This girl is Gaby, a Paris showgirl, a frame in whom, as Proust would have it, Pépé finds himself compelled to wrap-up the landscape, of all of his nostalgia for his Paris past.

Finally, Slimane's elaborate sting drives Pépé to the point where he can no longer stand the paralysis the Casbah has become for him. Discovering that Gaby is scheduled to leave Algiers, seized by passion, he makes his way to the dock, where he is promptly arrested. Resigning himself to his fate, he begs Slimane for a moment, to simply look out across the ocean. Slimane agrees, and Pépé slits his wrists as he watches the indifferent Gaby sail into the sunset.

Two things are noteworthy about this film. Firstly, Duvivier's idea of community concieved in the terms of a kind of immanent buffer against State power - Pépé is fine so long as he remains within the Casbah. Secondly, the character of Slimane, who taunts Pépé throughout the narrative continually with sly warnings that his day of reckoning is coming, that the date has already been marked out. In this respect, Slimane exists with respect to a Pépé according to the logic of "a second self - a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles." (Styron)

As such, Slimane conforms to the trope of what Burroughs called "the policeman inside" and what Foucalt identified as "the Fascist within." He operates freely within the Casbah, and is tolerated there, but in the form of a kind of inherent irritant. Played by Lucas Gridoux (an actor previously cast by Duvivier as Judas Iscariot) Slimane is presented as the very incarnation of obscene ressentiment - a jittery, almost repulsively cunning inhuman parasite, whose only motivation seems to be the destruction of Pépé, and whose ultimate pathetic triumph is the victory of nihilism, won on the ground of queasy nostalgic sentimentalism.

And yet: the final act of Pépé, his infinite decision to leave for good, and no matter what the cost, the cocoon of the Casbah, was undoubtedly an Act in the strict Lacanian sense of the term. He does it because he must, he is not fully aware of what he is doing...why then is it so spectacularly catastrophic - and indeed, why must it be?

To be sure, the precise narrative reason why Pépé Le Moko specifically ends in tragedy is on account of Pépé's Casbah lover Inez, who, becoming hysterical in the face of Pépé's open preparations to leave Algiers and her for good, enacts the final and decisive twist by betraying him to Slimane just at the moment at which it seems Pépé may yet escape from his shadow's clutches. Claiming that she loves Pépe too much to lose him, Inez's betrayal here strikes a stark contrast to the betrayal enacted by the character of Patricia in Godard's Breathless, who decides to give Michel away to the police in order to find out whether she loves him, only to discover, by virtue of the fact of her own action, that she doesn't - as Patricia herself puts it: "If I loved you, then I couldn't have betrayed you."

Universal Singularity

"Since the paulinian universal appears in the shape of generic sets, the church of a truth must “be” a generic “set”. The sense of being (the sense of the verb to be) becomes: being-multiple. Not only for truth-churches (those beings which save), but for every being: each and every being relates back to one (or many?) multiple-forms, at the same time as set theory articulates everything that one can say about the pure multiple as being-qua-being. Badiou’s formula according to which “mathematics is ontology” cannot, from the very start, say anything other. It finds its necessity in the meeting of the two Pauls, of the catholic and the generic, as a complex thinking of an existential and mathematical “universal singularity”."

Translation of Maquerelle du Vrai, 13 June 2005 - Text by Guillaume Destivère
[Cited from Irrational Numbers]

The Therapeutic Truth of Art?

In the Brian Eno interview in the December/January 1993 issue of The Wire, Eno mentions Miles Davis, and calls into question the relationship between a work of art and the context in which it is embedded.

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'What would you be hearing if you didn't know you were listening to Miles Davis?' I think of context as everything that isn't physically contained in the grooves of the record, and in his case that seems quite a lot. It includes your knowledge, first of all, that everyone else says he's great: that must modify the way you hear him. But it also includes a host of other strands: that he was a handsome and imposing man, a member of a romantic minority, that he played with Charlie Parker, that he spans generations, that he underwent various addictions, that he married Cicely Tyson, that he dressed well, that Jean-Luc Godard liked him, that he wore shades and was very cool, that he himself said little about his work, and so on. Surely all that affects how you hear him: I mean, could it possibly have felt the same if he'd been an overweight heating engineer from Oslo? When you listen to music, Aren't you also 'listening' to all the stuff around it, too? How important is that to the experience you' re having, and is it differently important with different musics, different artists?

Miles was an intelligent man, by all accounts, and must have become increasingly aware of the power of his personal charisma, especially in the later years as he watched his reputation grow over his declining trumpeting skills. Perhaps he said to himself: 'These people are hearing a lot more context than music, so perhaps I accept that I am now primarily a context maker. My art is not just what comes out of the end of my trumpet or appears on a record, but a larger experience which is intimately connected to who I appear to be, to my life and charisma, to the Miles Davis story." In that scenario, the 'music', the sonic bit, could end up being quite a small part of the whole experience. Developing the context- the package, the delivery system, the buzz, the spin, the story - might itself become the art. Like perfume...

Professional critics in particular find such suggestions objectionable. They have invested heavily in the idea that music itself offers intrinsic, objective, self contained criteria that allow you to make judgments of worthiness. In the pursuit of True Value and other things with capital letters, they reject as immoral the idea that an artist could be 'manipulative' in this way. It seems to them cynical: they want to believe: to be certain that this was The Truth, a pure expression of spirit wrought in sound. They want it to 'out there', 'real', but now they're getting the message that what its worth is sort of connected with how much they're prepared to take part in the fabrication of a story about it. Awful! To discover that you're actually a co-conspirator in the creation of value, caught in the act of make-believe. 'How can it be worth anything if I did it myself?'

I remember seeing a thing on TV years ago. An Indonesian shaman was treating sick people by apparently reaching into their bodies and pulling out bloody rags which he claimed were the cause of their disease. It all took place in dim light, in smoky huts, after intense incantations. A Western team filmed him with infrared cameras and, of course, were able to show that he was performing a conjuring trick. He wasn't taking anything out of their bodies after all. So he was a fake, no? Well, maybe-- but his patients kept getting better. He was healing by context-- making a psychological space where people somehow got themselves well. The rag was just a prop. Was Miles, with a trumpet as a prop, making a place where we, in our collective imaginations, could somehow have great musical experiences? I think so. Thanks, Miles, and thanks everyone else who took part, too.

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It is interesting to note here Eno's polemic against the pseudo-Truth of a professional critic in reference to the conception of Truth held by Alain Badiou. The effective difference between them is a definition of truth as militant identification (Badiou) and the definition of truth as a displaced alterity to be worshipped at a distance (The Critics).

In these terms, we can understand precisely why Eno set-up the figure of the Shaman as the model of the artist. The Shaman as Artist, for Eno, is simply a subject skillfully conducting a convincing ritual by means of their chosen instrument.

Certain questions emerge from this. Most fundamentally, the question of the necessary conditions which must be in place for a shamanistic ritual like the kind Eno describes to work.
For his part, Eno invokes a therapeutic discourse: "He was healing by context - making a psychological space where people somehow got themselves well."

But was he? Or rather, was it not the case that the primitive tribal context in which the Shaman was working had already mandated the production of this space, and that in relation to it, the Shaman was serving merely as its operator?

On this point, perhaps, is where the analogy Eno draws between Miles Davis and the Shaman breaks down.

To be sure: Davis himself working to a certain degree within an idiom - Jazz - which existed prior to his work and which cannot be attributed to him. But unlike the figure of the Shaman, the figure of Davis himself cannot be understood understood as merely functionary in reference to this idiom, for the reason that, unlike the absolutely material context supplied by a given tribal society held tightly together by blood and soil, the idiom of Jazz existed for Davis in terms of a purely abstract truth, which by his actions he worked to materialize.

The logic of this extends. Insofar as an subjects orientates their actions around a given, concrete context, such a subject commits themselves to serving as the instrument of that context. In cases such as these, in makes sense to speak in terms of the therapeutic, indeed, in terms of functions generally.

But in cases where the subject orientates themselves towards something not already given, towards something not apparent, a different model of understanding needs to be employed.

One might ask the question: what ultimately did Jazz mean to Miles Davis? What did Jazz mean to a man who devoted his life to changing what it meant?

Adventures in Cyberspace

"A question that VR poses, in its full positivity, is where to locate the community. Because we are vanishing. In the absence of the polis, something like VR obligates us to pose ethical questions about contact, memory, the prosthetic subject, and it teaches us to dislocate our proper place."
- Avital Ronell

Experimental Communities

In the introduction to Michael Nyman's book "Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond" Brian Eno notes that almost all of the small hardcore group of twenty-thirty people who attended experimental music performances in Britain in the 1960s were themselves experimental artists. Christian Wolff said something similar about the 1950s New York scene. Similar things have also been said by various people about the early respective histories of the New York and UK punk scenes. Furthermore, I would suppose a similar logic to be at work with the virtual community in development today.

In any case, in all of these cases, two aesthetic principles were and are at work. Firstly: the idea that "anyone could play it" - the idea that no special training was required to make art, indeed, the idea that "art does not exist". Secondly, the idea that the barrier between the performer and the audience could be broken down, and that an event not reducible to either could be erected from the ruins of this barrier.

In all of this, in a certain way the logic at work was paradoxical. This, because the series of discrete "events" created from the series of specific happenings were in a sense nothing but particular instantiations of a kind of meta-event was always-already going on: the meta-event of the experimental community itself which was generating these occurances, but this meta-event was in fact nothing except that aggregate of the discrete events, retroactively supposed by them, rather than preexisting them.

What to make of this? It is difficult to say, partly because this paradox raises a question that is difficult to think. This is the question of the "before the event" - the question of what was happening, "before" there was an experimental community with enough self-belief, to believe in its own self.

Writing in "For Marx" on the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Louis Althusser issues the following - for him, extremely uncharacteristic elegy. He says: "In the general context of the human development which may be said to make urgent, if not inevitable, all great historical discoveries, the individual who makes himself the author of one of them is of necessity in the paradoxical situation of having to learn the way of saying what he is going to discover in the very way he must forget. Perhaps but, too, it is this situation which gives Marx’s Early Works that tragic imminence and permanence, that extreme tension between a beginning and an end, between a language and a meaning, out of which no philosophy could come without forgetting that the destiny they are committed to is irreversible."

If we can read this passage with reference to the idea of a community, rather than the idea of the individual, we might begin to examine the question of how the notion of an experimental community - of a community-in-becoming - might be rendered legible.

Ethics of the Virtual

Everywhere, we are bearing witness today to the erection of scaffolds, as the intensive construction of a true virtual community gathers pace.

For my part, I fear this, and I hope for it at the exact same time.

What is happening here? What has happened already? What has already been meant, by we who already are this?

What is being born here? What is the connection between this new and shimmering crystal earth and the dead earth of blood and soil which we have already left behind?

How is one here? How does one act here? How does one speak here? Is it as simple as an act of translation?

I do not want to speak too soon.

Because the ethics of authenticity have been proven to be monstrous, there is a need today for some kind of ethics of the virtual.