ACT UP, Derek Jarman, and the Ecopolitics of the AIDS crisis

This week, I’m at the International Federation of Theatre Research conference in Accra, Ghana. The conference is about myth-making and performance, and I’m in the Political Performances working group, to whom I submitted a paper called ‘The Mythology of Globalization and Planetary Particularity: ACT UP, Derek Jarman and the Ecopolitics of the AIDS Crisis’. The shorter spoken version I gave at the conference yesterday is below. Thanks to Julia Boll and Trish Reid for convening the working group, and to anna six, Tony Fisher, and Bryony White for very helpful comments on a draft of this.

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This paper emerges from a much larger project, which I am developing with Tony Fisher and others (more on this at another time), on planetary performance.

Our aims are:

1. to draw upon the aesthetic resources of artistic interventions to theorise planetarity as an eco-political condition of entanglement between human activities and earth systems, and

2. to produce an account of what we term ‘planetarisation’: a political horizon determined by the objective of planetary replenishment.

This paper offers an example of what we think performance can offer to the project of planetarisation by taking the AIDS crisis in the west as a case study. My reason for choosing AIDS is that it was a crisis of globalization, the process whereby neoliberal capitalism sought to pick up where colonial modernity and industrialization had left off, and further subsume the world to capital accumulation. This was achieved, as Kwame Nkrumah crucially argued, by creating a global regime of neo-colonial governance, scaffolded by the liberal institutional architecture of nation-states and the international order of supranational organisations that connected them after World War Two: the United Nations System, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and so on. Under the new aesthetic sign of the globe, the global order created a mythology of unity under which all individuals and their localities could be reconciled.

By the early 1990s, the spread of AIDS in the west constituted a puncturing of this global mythology by the realities unleashed by globalization. Initiated by a huge increase in international travel, and fostered within cities ravaged by Reagan- and Thatcherite deindustrialisation, AIDS represented a return, following the logic of Césaire’s boomerang, of the multiple and interlocking crises of neoliberal globalization to their origins. This set the stage, in the early 1990s, for a version of the project dubbed by Ruth Wilson Gilmore ‘capitalism saving capitalism from capitalism’, and I want to begin by showing how mainstream representations of the AIDS crisis are not merely passive echoes of the status quo, but represent ‘globalization saving globalization from globalization’, by reasserting its core mythology in the face of incipient crisis.

Two examples from America in 1993.

World Health Organsiation Logo

This is the logo of the World Health Organisation taken from the opening of the 1993 film And the Band Played On, which finds American epidemiologist Don Francis (Matthew Modine) fighting ebola in Sudan.

Still from And the Band Played On

While this outbreak of ebola was successfully contained, the film tells the story of the failure to contain AIDS principally through the antagonism between Francis and his maverick team at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the scientist Robert Gallo (Alan Alda),

Alan Alda as Robert Gallo in And the band Played On

whose egotistical interest in taking sole credit for discovering the AIDS retrovirus is only the most extreme form of the narrow self-interest by which Francis and his team are continually impeded – another is the resistance of some gay men in San Francisco to allowing bathhouses to be shut.       

Ian McKellen as Bill Kraus in And the band Played On

At the film’s end, Francis visits gay rights activist and congressional aide Bill Kraus (Ian McKellen), who is dying of AIDS but says he’s not afraid: ‘I’m more afraid of what happens to the people who live’.

Still from the montage-vigil at the end of And the Band Played On

The scene is followed by a long montage of AIDS victims: a vigil (notably not a protest) for lives that might have been saved – implicitly – by a more enlightened approach to scientific research and governance: more co-operation and less ‘red tape’, as this banner says. Where have we heard that before?

My second example takes us from science and its regulation to the law and its interpretation.

Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington in Philadelphia

The film Philadelphia begins with Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks) and Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), lawyers – respectively – for a property developer and local residents, meeting in a judge’s office to discuss Miller’s clients’ claim that the construction of ‘skyscrapers’ is poisoning African American communities with ‘toxic dust’. The claim is dismissed. As they leave, we momentarily see, scrawled on the elevator door: ‘NO JUSTICE NO PEACE!’

Elevator door in Philadelphia

This slogan emerged after the racially motivated killing of Michael Griffith in Queens in 1986. Radical Black journalist Glen Ford emphasises its ‘political position’: ‘the price that Power must pay for continued injustice against Black people is the loss of civil peace’. For Ford, ‘no justice – no peace’ is ‘a vow by the movement to transform the crisis that is inflicted on Black people into a generalized crisis for the larger society, and for those who currently rule’. Its occurrence at the start of Philadelphia signals the incipience of such a generalized crisis, which the film’s conclusion seeks to foreclose.

Statue of William Penn on top of Philadelphia City Hall in Philadelphia

The film executes this foreclosure under the figure of William Penn, colonial founder of Pennsylvania, represented here by his statue on top of City Hall in Philadelphia, surrounded by the ‘skyscrapers’ of rapacious capitalism. This is the film’s location for a trial in which Andrew Beckett is suing his former legal firm for sacking him because he has AIDS.

Denzel Washington and the defence team from the trial in Philadelphia

Beckett is now represented by Miller, having overcome both his homophobia and prejudicial fear of HIV, who wins the case, defeating unfettered capitalism, represented by Beckett’s former employer (Jason Robards), Mary Steenburgen as their supercilious counsel, and Obba Babbatundé as a lawyer, apparently modelled on Johnnie Cochran, who made his name representing Black people against the state (this is before the OJ Simpson trial). The mythology invoked here is of interests that had seemed opposed, successfully reconciled by the enlightened paternity of liberal institutions, casting out extremists to both sides (both neoliberal and Black radical).

Benjamin West’s painting ‘Penn’s Treaty with the Indians’ (1772)

Enlightened paternity is represented by Penn, whose treaty with Tamanend of the Lenape nation (1683) committed settlers to live in peace with Indigenous people, or at least that is the mythologized account represented by Benjamin West’s 1772 painting of the event.

The problem with the narrative that pits liberal institutions against the skyscrapers of unfettered capitalism, however, is that Philadelphia City Hall was itself a skyscraper (the tallest habitable building in the world from its completion in 1894 until 1908), and it was built 150 years after Penn’s mythologized treaty was superseded by the ‘Walking Purchase’ (1737), an instrument of lawfare that forced the Lenape to cede 1.2M acres of land to settlers. In 2004, the US Court of Appeal upheld the decision of the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to dismissed a suit by the Delaware Nation against Pennsylvania for this theft of their lands. All this to say that rather than being allowed to become the occasion for a generalized crisis of globalization to emerge, the AIDS crisis is used in Philadelphia as an opportunity to salvage the liberal institutions of the global (neo-)colonial order from imminent crisis.

ACT UP’s Burroughs Welcome Action, Wall Street, Wall St, 24 March 1987

None of this would have been revelatory to the activists of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, which was formed in 1987, whose direct action – planned and executed by chapters, affinity groups, and other informal associations – can be read now as a guide to the plural and interlocking interests that shaped the conjunctural emergence of the AIDS crisis. This image, for example, shows the Burroughs Welcome protest against corporate profiteering from AIDS, part of a process whereby ACT UP sought – like the Black Power movement – to translate the particular crisis of AIDS ‘into a generalized crisis for the larger society’. ACT UP targeted the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the CDC, the Catholic church, and federal and state governments, as well as supporting a Haitian Underground Railroad and interventions in Puerto Rico designed, variously, to expose, challenge and counteract the capitalist, ideological, legal, and neo-colonial dimensions of the crisis.

ACT UP was enormously successful. The redefinition of AIDS by the CDC to include women, the changing of legislation governing access to experimental therapies and drug trials by the Food and Drug Administration, President Reagan’s first public statement on the crisis, the broad availability of antiretroviral therapies, and countless more local changes would not have been volunteered when they were (and very possibly not at all) without ACT UP’s direct action. Nonetheless, these successes tend to represent answers to the perennial question of those in power: what has to change so that everything can stay the same? In the case of AIDS, regimes of governance surrounding diagnosis and treatment had to change, so that they became more responsive to the needs of a larger proportion of the population. This point was reinforced by the gradual realisation, during the crisis, that ‘everyone’ – and not ‘only’ Black and queer people and drug users – was susceptible to the disease. Crucially, power only asks what has to change when it has been forced to acknowledge that something must change, but nonetheless, in relation to AIDS, concessions proved a successful means of foreclosing demands for Universal Healthcare and queer and Black liberation, replacing them with less restricted healthcare and certain rights and freedoms for some Black and queer people. Thus, in spite of ACT UP’s efforts, those in power were able to prevent AIDS from becoming a generalized crisis: eventually, without social justice, there was peace.

Photograph by David Wojnarowicz of Peter Hujar

Nonetheless, ACT UP remains extremely instructive for social movements and – I want to suggest, for eco-politics. The artist David Wojnarowicz wrote that he imagined ‘what it would be like if friends had a demonstration each time a lover or a friend or a stranger died of AIDS’ (this is his photograph of the body of his friend Peter Hujar). He went on to suggest that ‘friends, lovers or neighbors’ might ‘take the dead body and drive with it in a car’ and ‘blast through the gates of the White House and come to a screeching halt before the entrance and dump their lifeless form on the front steps’. Seizing on this prompt, on 11 October 1992, ACT UP members marched with the ashes of former lovers and friends to the White House to scatter them on its lawn. ‘What’s come out of this epidemic?’, one asked, ‘It’s ashes. It’s bone chips’.

Political funeral held by ACT UP members for Tim Bailey

ACT UP members then began the practice of political funerals. This image of a tussle between pallbearers and the police struggling over the coffin of Tim Bailey may call to mind the 2022 funeral of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in Jerusalem, and the biopolitical connection between those condemned to die of AIDS and those condemned to live under apartheid is obvious. At the political funeral of Mark Lowe Fisher, fellow activist Jon Greenberg remembered the feeling of collective power and consciousness Fisher had created as an activist:

Funeral of Mark Lowe Fisher

We each became part of the other and as a unit our collective spirit crossed an illusory boundary which we only knew was an illusion after we had crossed it. We were each a part of Mark on that day, and he was a part of each of us. Through collective empowerment we declared who we were and how we felt and made a place for ourselves in the universe.

Greenberg’s evocation of the dissolving of boundaries among this small group of activists and between them and ‘the universe’, in the visible, public presence of the body of his comrade, evokes a dimension of existence revealed by the AIDS crisis, namely planetary particularity: the interpenetration of human, cosmic and microbial scales.

It connects directly to Derek Jarman’s film Blue, in which a screen of constant blue is combined with the Tiresian meditation of a man with AIDS, whose experience is a medium through which the microscopic and macroscopic merge:

Still from Derek Jarman’s Blue

My retina

Is a distant planet

A red Mars

From a Boy’s Own comic

With yellow infection

Bubbling at the corner

I said this looks like a planet

The doctor says ― “Oh, I think

It looks like a pizza”

In Blue, Jarman’s narrator gives voice to interpenetrations of the human and that which cannot be either perceived or encompassed at a human scale. For Jarman, though, this was not merely a poetic device, but rooted in the practice of making a garden, in the years following his diagnosis as HIV positive, on the shingle beach outside Prospect Cottage on Dungeness.

Derek Jarman in his garden

‘The gardener’, Jarman writes, digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end’. Jarman wrote that his garden was ‘no hortus conclusus’, ‘my garden’s boundaries are the horizon’, and they stretched further still. Walking the beach to collect stones, which he invests ‘with the power of those at Avebury’, Jarman also recited the names of plants, whose uses and pharmacological powers he copied from medieval and early modern herbals into his diaries, while ‘In the roaring waters / I hear the voices of dead friends’. Walking the garden he describes himself ‘holding the hands’ of those same friends, scattered: ‘Matthew fucked Mark fucked Luke fucked John / Who lay in the bed that I lie on / Touch fingers again as you sing this song / Cold, cold, cold, they died so silently’.

Derek Jarman

One such friend was Howard Brookner, whom Jarman recalled speaking to by phone as he was dying in New York: ‘long silences and the low wounded moaning…The echoing emptiness of those groans encircling the world by satellite’. As well as summoning wisdom and magic long past and reuniting friends and lovers scattered and torn apart by illness and death, Jarman conceived of the practice of making his garden as reaching into an unimaginable future:

to whom it may concern

in the dead stones of a planet

no longer remembered as earth

may he decipher this opaque hieroglyph

perform an archaeology of soul

on these precious fragments

all that remains of our vanished days

here - at the sea's edge

Jarman called his garden ‘an anchor’, and my proposal is that we likewise consider its particularity as an anchor for the planetary: a means, in Brian Burkhart’s phrase, of ‘thinking in locality’ about scales of time and space that exceed human horizons.

Jarman’s garden

There is a great deal to be said, of course, about current attempts to prevent the generalization of our multiple and interlocking ecological crises as a crisis of globalization, and about effective eco-political critiques of the present and prefigurations of viable futures, but I will end with a simple provocation. Read in dialogue with each other, ACT UP and Jarman’s responses to the AIDS crisis provide a model for an eco-politics that:

1. refuses to throw out the human baby with the ideological bathwater of humanism,

2. insists on the inter-operation – in our current crisis – of the incompatible scales of earth systems and political conjunctures, and

3. finds ways of re-enchanting the particularity of our encounters with the world with planetary significance.