Page 260 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

akin to that mentioned above in relation to advertisements and surrealism). Benjamin diagnosed the
way in which:
we are confronted with the fact... that the bourgeois apparatus of production and publication
is capable of assimilating, indeed of propagating, an astonishing amount of revolutionary
themes without ever seriously putting into question its own continued existence or that of
the class which owns it. In any case this remains true so long as it is supplied by hacks, albeit
revolutionary hacks ... I further maintain that an appreciable part of so-called left-wing
literature had no other social function than that of continually extracting new effects ot

sensations from this situation for the public's entettainment.18

The routing of surrealism suggests that the revolutionary hacks had benefited from a rearguard
action - that the radical elements they appropriated could only be used once they were first
rendered ineffective or 'harmless'. Often now, we see similar strategies, in which the radical
element is only defined by its radical action. By thus reducing anything radical to actions the
radical element can easily be attacked from within; it is vulnerable to alteration. This, surely, is the
most effective form of assimilating and neutralising the enemy and, as far as we can tell, a proven
one too: it seems to have determined much of'la strategia della tensione' in Italy across the 1970s,
is suggested in the events of May Day 1977 in Turkey and in the state infiltration of the far-tight
in West Germany.
In a way these strategies aim at control over morality. By reducing the radical to 'improper' actions
it becomes legitimate to neutralise it. In their study of 'Empire', in part as generated and sustained
through 'the huge transnational corporarions [that] construct the fundamental connective fabric
of the biopolitical world'," so that corporations and communications become one and the same,
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri reconsider the old Marxist dictum that economics dictate ethics
in the context of globalisation. Early on, they diagnose a pervasive subjectivity - the foundation for a
rewriting of ethics at the behest of:

The imperial machine ... [which] demonstrates that [an] external standpoint no longer
exists. On the contrary, communicative producrion and the construction of imperial
legitimation march hand in hand and can no longer be separated. The machine is self-
validating, autopoietic — that is, systemic. It constructs social fabrics that evacuate or render
ineffective any contradiction; it creates situations in which, before coercively neutralising
difference, seem to absorb it in an insignificant play of self-generating and self-regulating
equilibria. 2 0

This would suggest an institutionalisation of the system identified by Benjamin, and that this system
itself has become an element essential to the defence of the fantasmatic foundation. Can we not
recognise a facet or variant of the 'rendering as] ineffective' in the tendency also apparent in the
'routing of surrealism'? This, then, is the rearguard action that allows for the construction of a 'social
fabric' that neutralises radical elements - that is neutralisation.

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