State of Exception

This A6-sized poster series suddenly appeared on City of Vancouver utility poles around Kingsway and Knight last week. The proposition -- that fear is a method of social control -- is as old as time immemorial and can be found in pre-contact societies where the population is stratified by rank, where the distribution of wealth is unequal, where slaves are sought and kept, where a chief presides.

The Kwakwaka'wakw were at one time such a people, but we don't like to say or hear that because it is not in the interest of a progressive society to do so. Knowledge is no longer a broad nor broadening thing but a length of sharpened steel with a handle at one end. We cling to what (little) we need to know and wield its broadsword accordingly. Get us mad enough and off with your head. 

Hermann Göring was one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi Party that held power in Germany between 1933-1945. By some accounts he was an intelligent man, someone who was traumatized by the war that earned him both his reputation and his morphine addiction; but also a war that, once settled, had Germans in a state of financial servitude plagued by a hyper-inflation that gave us photos of people taking wheelbarrows full of Deutschmarks to the baker to buy bread.

It is fair to say that the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany promoted and exploited national (Aryan) pride, and that once in power (enabled by Hindenburg and a cadre of German industrialists) transitioned that pride into fear. The appearance of Hermann Göring at the Nuremberg Trials (above) was for many a portrait of evil personified. The appearance of another powerful figure in the Nazi Party, Adolf Eichmann, at an Israeli courtroom in 1961 was reported on by the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who challenged the notion of inherent evil by highlighting what Eichmann said in response to his role in the extermination of six million Jews, gypsies, socialists and those with disabilities -- that he was only following orders.

The posters around Kingsway and Knight are not giving orders, yet they are designed to order our minds in a way that honours someone who drank copiously from Fear's cup. To my mind, this message has less to do with a warning -- that we are living in what Giorgio Agamben calls a "state of exception" -- than a legitimization of those who took this "state" to horrific extremes. It is publications like this poster series that has lead many of us to refuse the publications of those who have done harm to our world -- from police officers to politicians -- often to degrees that some of us find trivial, if not unsubstantiated, in an effort to make way for something pure and perfect, which in itself is also tyrannical.

At some point today I will walk to the intersection of Kingsway and Knight to see what state these posters are in. It is my hope to find them no longer there.