Zygmunt Baumann writes that the bureaucratic efficiency of modern states
(write this as the-bureaucratic-efficiency-of-modern-states: Baumann writes
it as "modernity", period) produces a moral adiaphorisation, in effect a
separation of acts from consequences: person X in office A designs a better
mobile gaschamber van; person Y in office B administrates the building of
barbed wire fences around the ghetto; neither person is *faced* with the
consequences of his actions and decisions, which are evaluated according to
bureaucratic criteria: are deadlines met, are we within budget, has the
design been approved by the appropriate authorities and so on. The
bureaucratic apparatus or mechanism is not inherently totalitarian or
homicidal, Baumann says; but mass murder is one of the things it can enable,
not only through its efficiencies but also through its telegraphic
apparatuses, its ability to produce action at a distance in such a way as to
disable conventional moral responses.

The conventional moral agent, the proper citizen with his or her compassion,
sensitivity, decorum, concern for the common good etc., can function with
*more or less* untroubled good conscience within a department dedicated to
expediting atrocities. This is because the information on which such
responsibility depends is diverted or perverted within the system, which
obscures the face of the victim and replaces it with balance sheets and
authorisation forms to be filled out in triplicate. The trigger is pulled,
but the bullet hits the target out of sight and out of hearing.

I don't know what Baumann makes of the Rwandan massacres, which were carried
out face-to-face by men, women and children wielding machetes. They would
seem to suggest that there is no inherent moral capability in human beings
which would compel us to recoil from butchery if we saw it happening right
in front of our eyes. However, this has to be considered as a different
problem. For the time being, I want to stay with Baumann's presupposition,
or presumption as it may be, that in normal circumstances human beings are
imaginatively capable in such a way that the suffering of others is
troubling to us, affects us, makes us sad or shocked or angry; that this
capability supplies the raw material of our moral sense, and that it can be
compromised or disabled by the adiaphorisation produced within bureaucratic
systems.

What I want to ask is whether "direct action", as such, is to be opposed to
adiaphoric action, action at a distance. Conventionally, direct action is
presented as an alternative to the attempted use of democratic institutional
means to procure change or reform. The latter is supposed to be ineffective:
it takes too long, and the problem is too urgent; or, it cannot deliver
because the institutions are in the grip of "conservative elements" who will
block any initiative that threatens to undermine their interests. Direct
action is then offered as an alternative *means*, an alternative way of
wielding power and influence, of producing an effect.

It is sometimes said that the choice between direct and indirect action,
like the choice between violent and nonviolent action (I do not mean to
suggest any equivalence between these two pairings), is question of tactics:
which will be the most effective means? I would say that as soon as
effectiveness - *potency* - becomes the ruling criterion for deciding
between one "tactic" or another, the agent in charge of the decision is
fatally compromised, corrupted. The difficulty here is to distinguish this
"potency" from performativity. Obviously it matters how a given course of
action will "play out"; its "rightness" or "wrongness" is not given in
advance according to some timeless canon of political good conduct. All the
same, I find that much of what is said on behalf of direct action points to
a very real danger of seduction by a fantasy of virile potency, a fascist
glamorisation of violence and domination.

There is, however, another dimension to "direct action": perhaps what is to
be preferred about it is not its greater effectiveness, its ability to
express and realise urgent demands in the face of institutional inertia, but
the fact that it produces confrontation, spectacle, the appearance of a
vis-a-vis with power: it brings political struggle into the realm of the
visible, the phenomenal, and so hopes to restore to moral consciousness the
vanished, forgotten, "disappeared" content that is sidelined, tidied away,
by modern telemachy. Its purposes is then not to make something happen, but
to bear witness to what is "really happening" (Radiohead, _Idiotheque_).
This is certainly part of the rationale behind the "politics of visibility"
with regard to sexual minorities, for example: the gay pride march is not a
military manoeuvre, but a monstration, a staging of "identity".

This is perhaps what I mean by "politics of affect": its purpose is not to
enforce or enact a policy, but to make something felt. Something, but what?
Whatever it is not possible, or not endurable, to feel about the world we
now live in: whatever has to be forgotten, in the life of feeling, in order
for the life of our "second nature", the inhuman system that provides us
human beings with our _habitus_, our chance and our prison, to be sustained
without interruption.

I have to recognise that by styling anticapitalist protest as an aesthetic
act, a presentation or _monstratio_, perhaps preoccupied with the sublime
feeling of its own political inarticulacy, I may seem to be denying it its
real political import, its bearing on matters of economic privilege and
power, its demands for change in the very systems within which it comes to
be expressed (the Free West, with its regulated fora, its economies of
information, its regimes of publicity). This would be a neutralising
gesture, a recoil away from the necessary, "dirty" violence of genuine
activism - an attempt to salvage from a politics that frightens me and fills
me with suspicion some more acceptable or manageable content.

In fact, I am trying to analyse what I take to be the endemic or
constitutive inarticulacy of anticapitalist protest, its vagueness, its
"inability to propose a viable alternative", in order to caution against any
politics that would try to suture or repair this situation by "hardening"
the moral animus of the crowds into a fundamentalist program - be it the
Unabomber's or some other.

From this perspective, the "wooliness" and "naivety" of the protesters are -
along with their immense courage - their saving grace. "Direct action" would
remain, in them, susceptible to indirection, to diremption or divagation,
because its end is not wholly, fatally, contained in its beginning. Rather
than attempting to short-circuit the interval placed by democratic
structures between resolution and action, in the interests of greater
potency and efficiency, this other direction would seek to distract the
adiaphorisation of moral feeling, to introduce odd sensations at odd times
and odd places. It would inhabit Baumann's "modernity" not only as atavism
and archaism inhabit modernity (the "neo-agrarianism" of some protesters
could be seen as falling into this trap), but as the immemorial otherness of
what I will call, again, imaginative capability: the capacity for moral
feeling which remains alien and troubling to good conscience, and is
irreducible to any politics or political programme that would base its
organisation on the supposed adequacy or uninterrupted presence-to-itself of
that conscience.