A Fragment of a Point that Might Well Lead Somewhere But Doesn’t As of Yet

Yesterday, after a brief stop at the embassy to turn over my housing deposit, I went downtown. The geography of Algiers is still somewhat baffling, but as the car descended the hills into lower town, even with all the defensive walls and blind curves, I began to understand how the city fits together. For the first time, I was near the sea and, as such, I could plot myself; if not in relation to the city, then to the historical geographies of the greater Mediterranean. To the east is Sicily; then, further on, the Phoenician ports at Tyre and Saida, on the Levantine coast just south of Beirut; to the north, there is Barcelona and Marseilles, with its legendary port; to the west, Oran and, further still, Gibraltar, the narrow strait through which Europe absorbed its knowledge of the ancient world. Along the sea, the city itself is crescent shaped, and from the corniche, near the Grande Poste, I could make out Martyrs’ Memorial across the bay. From there I walked north, on Didouche Mourad, toward the Casbah, before getting lost in a tangle of streets that deposited me, bewildered but unharmed, under the loggias that line the western shore. Here and there was a garden, a fountain, or a memorial to something so apparently obvious that it need not be explained. And rising above all, like a visitation from the specter of Baron von Hausmann, row after row of whitewashed buildings, done up in the style of the Second Empire, the uniform blue of their shutters momentarily contrasted with the cloud-hung, steel-slate sky.

Near the center of town, in the middle of Didouche Mourad, a statue of Emir Abd al-Qader sits in a small park, penned in, on all sides, by shops and administrative buildings. The emir faces east, astride a horse, situated atop a high pedestal. In one hand he holds the reigns of his mount. In another, his scimitar; it is raised, waiting to strike. Wrapped around the base of the monument are other images, either representations of the emir at different moments in his life, or portraits of his comrades, fellow horsemen doing battle with the infidel French. The portraits are stylized, as is the statue. It reads as deco: the lines are a bit too dramatic, the curves far too severe. It would not be mistaken for life, but it is as representational as the non-representational ever hopes to be. It has that look: the look that screams Works Progress Administration, or early Soviet Realist. The legend on the monument is composed in Arabic script, and placed near its summit, four or more feet from the ground. Given the angle, and the stylized lettering, it is almost impossible to read; its legibility depends, in large part, on the time of day and the quality of light. Beneath, near the base, someone has scrawled a more obvious, more insistent, dedication. “Bab El Oued lves Cristiano Ronaldo.” The glory of the professional soccer player, here invoked, is apparently as compelling as the immortality of the scholar, the soldier, the man of God.

Monumental art, of this variety, is designed not to invoke memory but to stabilize its contents, to cut through the rhizomorphic density of signifiers that constitute the monstrous body of the past, and to articulate some purpose, some direction, some significance. This emir is not the emir, but the emir as mnemonic, both a pattern, and a prompt. He is the condensation of a revolutionary history, the meaning of which depends upon the performative register of historical narrative. This emir is not the emir, and the emir has no meaning, absent the retelling of twice-told tales, and the inscription of his life—an idealist conceit—over the fractious body of the nation. This emir is not the emir, but the embodiment of the heroic mode; here brought to earth, but not too near, by the very familiarity of the visage. This emir is not the emir, but the emir as embodiment of all men in the struggle, the representation of a particular type of man, of masculinity, of strength in pursuit of power; and of power pursued not for its own sake, but for the purposes of justice. This emir is not the emir, but the emir rendered for the purposes of state; a nationalist icon, surrounded, if not overwhelmed, by the city that surges around him.

Ronaldo, by contrast, arrives as the monstrous body of capital itself. Only a fragment, a seedling, a sliver, it grows and it festers. In agitating, it remaps the social body, rendering it in his image. Ronaldo arrives as the consummate body: he is the avatar of neoliberalism. His story is well sold. He grew up poor, his house barely a shack. He was saved by football. He built his mother a home. He gets his teeth fixed. He strips off his shirt. He goes shopping. He vacations in France. He is desire embodied; not desired or desirous, but representative of the desire to realize one’s desire, to live and to be and to make oneself through consumption, through spectacle; to be seen, to become not a person, but a body, an object among objects; to be secure in that firmament, held fast as a thing within the order of things.