The new 1914 that confronts us an interview with Retort.

DE: Situationist writing and picture captioning frequently involved the use of pre-modern literary quotations for various reasons--to wake up readers, perhaps, or to escape the tyranny of the present. To what extent did this tactic inspire your work?

R: Of the quartet of authors of Afflicted Powers, two are historians and the other two are historically minded. Perhaps it is just the deformation of the historian to raid the lumber rooms of the past. But frankly we cannot imagine having embarked on such a project without the assistance of Hannah Arendt, Randolph Bourne, or Luxemburg. And unless [Friedrich] Nietzsche were at hand, a critique of modernity would be far more difficult to frame. Edmund Burke and Thomas Hobbes were an essential part of the analytic toolkit. Milton, who helped forge a radical, political idiom in the revolutionary decades of the seventeenth century, gave us our title and was an abiding inspiration, not least because his great poem was written in the face of defeat. And of course the indelible line of Tacitus, "They make a desert and call it peace," speaks to us across the centuries. These were words he put in the mouth of a Gaelic warrior on the eve of battle against a Roman legion in the Scottish highlands, at the far northwestern edge of the empire. We need Tacitus to remind us what kind of peace is meant by the masters of war--the peace of the "peace process," the peace of cemeteries. Much of the work of the late Pierre Vidal-Naquet, the French historian of ancient Greece and tribune of the people, was concerned with state violence and the assassination of memory, which is central to the spectacle. He was inspired by a line of Chateaubriand he found transcribed in his father's diary before his deportation to Auschwitz: "Nero triumphs in vain, as elsewhere in the empire Tacitus has already been born."

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DE: The Situationist idea of detournement never appears in Afflicted Powers. Yet the events of 9/11 could be considered detournement in at least two senses. Sense 1: literal detournement, since the hard-working French word can mean, among other things, airplane hijacking. Sense 2: reactionary detournement. That is, three elements that have been associated with Americanism since the 1920s--airplanes, skyscrapers, and mass communications--were taken by [Mohammed] Atta and his accomplices and recombined. The resulting message may not have been anti-Americanist exactly, but it was certainly anti-American. What do you think?

R: Detournement, indeed. Remember that the kind of planes that Atta and his crews refunctioned as missile-bombers to strike the World Trade Center and the Pentagon actually originated as weapons of mass destruction. The Boeing Corporation took the old bombers used to create firestorms over European and Japanese cities during the Second World War and redesigned them for purposes of mass tourism and corporate air travel in the 1960s. Atta himself, as we note in the chapter on revolutionary Islam, was an urban planner (in Cairo and Aleppo) disgusted with the Disneyfication he saw coming in the wake of the failure of secular national development in Egypt and the rest of the Third World. He was right; Dubai is one face of neoliberal globalization, megaslums another. At the same time it is necessary to acknowledge Al-Qaeda's love affair with image-politics. Even in its rejection of the West, the Islamic vanguard displays a mastery of the virtual and of the new technics of dissemination. This is one aspect of the current moment's mixture of atavism and new-fangledness that those in opposition to both Empire and Jihad, two virulent mutations of the Right, must take very seriously. The issue, in fact, is not ultimately America or Americanism, but modernity itself. (3)

Creating a user's manual for those in opposition to the "war on terror," Retort draws on the concepts of Guy Debord (spectacle) as well as Vladimir Lenin (the revolutionary vanguard) and Rosa Luxemburg (primitive accumulation). Luxemburg's Junius Pamphlet (1916) is acknowledged as an inspirational precedent. Her main theme was the "orgy" unleashed by capitalist society in 1914, but she also tried to come to terms with the "world tragedy" represented by the capitulation of Social Democracy. For Retort, the parallels are painfully obvious: the global anti-war movement failed to prevent war. And in the shadow of defeat, Afflicted Powers is ambitiously offered as an updated Junius Pamphlet for "the new 1914 which confronts us" (xii).

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Afflicted Powers offers an analysis that emphasizes "the contradictions of military neo-liberalism under conditions of spectacle" (15). For Retort, it is this war on two fronts--for the control of material resources and for the control of appearances--that needs to be understood as a precondition for effective resistance. Every thesis is debatable. Approaching Al-Qaeda as a global brand available for franchising like Kentucky Fried Chicken or Starbucks seems more plausible than Retort's comparison of the group with the Leninist vanguard. Nevertheless, Afflicted Powers robustly presents a complex of ideas and information that is meant to be used.

NOTES (1.) This interview is a result of an e-mail exchange that took place between the author and the Retort collective in November 2006. Many thanks to Iain Boal for his coordination. (2.) John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1. As quoted in Afflicted Powers by Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts (London and New York: Verso, 2005). (3.) New Left Review 41 (September/October 2006) contains a new broadside from Retort called All Quiet on the Eastern Front. Written in July 2006 in the early days of Israel's war on Lebanon, it offers further acerbic commentary on the war on terror. The text is part of an installation called "Afflicted Powers" that is being shown at the Second International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Seville, Spain, October 2006-January 2007.

DAVID EVANS is secretary of the online magazine criticaldictionary.com.