De Artificiali Perspectiva

the lid taken off

"Consumption is not, as one might generally imagine (which is why economic "science" is fundamentally averse to discussing it), an indeterminate marginal sector where an individual, elsewhere constrained by social rules, would finally recover, in the "private" sphere, a margin of freedom and personal play when left on his own. Consumption is a collective and active behavior, a constraint, a morality, and an institution. It is a complete system of values, with all that the term implies concerning group integration and social control.

We don't realize how much the current indoctrination into systematic and organized consumption is the equivalent and the extension, in the twentieth century, of the great indoctrination of rural populations into industrial labor, which occurred throughout the nineteenth century. The same process of rationalization of productive forces, which took place in the nineteenth century in the sector of production is accomplished, in the twentieth century, in the sector of consumption. Having socialized the masses into a labor force, the industrial system had to go further in order to fulfill itself and to socialize the masses (that is, to control them) into a force of consumption."
- Jean Baudrillard, Consumer Society
(via Zeynep)

***

"The “bloody week,” as it was called, also involved an enormous destruction of property. The Communards, to be sure, were not enamored of the privileges of private property and were not averse to destroying hated symbols. The Vendôme Column—which Napoleon III had doted upon—was toppled in a grand ceremony on the May 16 to symbolize the end of authoritarian rule. The painter Courbet was later held responsible for this act, and condemned to pay for the reconstruction of the monument out of his own pocket. The Communards also decreed, but never carried out, the destruction of the Chapel of Expiation, by which Louis XVIII had sought to impress upon Parisians their guilt in executing his brother. And when Thiers had shown his true colors, the Communards took a certain delight in dismantling his Parisian residence, stone by stone, in a symbolic gesture that Goncourt felt had an “excellent bad effect." But the wholesale burning of Paris was another matter entirely."
- David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity

***

"We compile a new index that summarizes these variables, and then ask -- for every percentage cut in government spending, how much more instability should we expect? The data shows a clear link between the magnitude of expenditure cutbacks and increases in social unrest. With every additional percentage point of GDP in spending cuts, the risk of unrest increases."
- Jacopo Ponticelli and Hans-Joachim Voth, Austerity and Anarchy: Budget Cuts and Social Unrest in Europe, 1919-2009 (pdf)

***

"Lewis Namier famously described 18th-century British politics as ‘aristocracy tempered by rioting’. In fact riots often combine the form of radical protest with reactionary content.
[...]
As well established as the riot tradition is reactive alarmism that the country is going to hell in a looted shopping trolley. Namier’s bon mot could be rewritten for our times as ‘plutocracy tempered by riot’. Consumerism holds up varnished designer tat as the sine qua non of civic respect. Its supporting ideology holds that monetary access to consumer goods flows from desert, the sort of thing stockpiled by politicians’ beloved ‘hard-working people and their families’. But everyone – not least Keele University cleaning staff, employed for over thirty years, who get up before six every morning to earn the minimum wage – knows that that is all balls. Acquisitiveness and arson are, as far as this goes, two sides of the same coin. Consumerism may be a mug’s game; but acting as though it efficiently metes out rewards according to desert is a mug’s game run by the mugs. Small wonder when the lid is taken off that those who know the system is a put-up job fill their boots."
- Glen Newey, "To Hell in a Looted Shopping Trolley"

Bahrain: Shouting in the Dark

Lenin on auteurism

"We must learn to combine the 'public meeting' democracy of the working people — turbulent, surging, overflowing its banks like a spring flood — with iron discipline while at work, with unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person, the Soviet leader, while at work."
- The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government

(via)

Fathers and Sons

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Gabrielle and Jean, 1895

written in pencil in the sealed railway car

written in pencil in the sealed railway car (Dan Pagis)

here in this carload
I am eve
with abel my son
if you see my older son
cain son of adam
tell him that I

Plaque commemorating three Levellers shot by Oliver Cromwell in Burford
(Kaihsu Tai, 17 May 2008)

***

Profit motive and the whispering wind
(John Gianvito, 2007)

***

Toute révolution est un coup de dés
(Danièle Huillet et Jean-Marie Straub, 1977)

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Pied Beauty
by Gerard Manley Hopkins


Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

(via)

Mother's Day Proclamation (Julia Ward Howe, 1870)

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

25 de Abril Sempre, Fascismo Nunca Mais

A true militant cinema

"Today I think that militant films have the same defect as militant groups - they have the "mania of the All": each film is total, all-inclusive. A true militant cinema would be a cinema which militated as cinema, where one film would make you want to see a hundred others on the same subject.

[...]

So the unification always happens on the basis of a kind of amnesia and the desire to nourish this amnesia with beautiful images (the red flags of 1900.) This amnesia is a paradoxical but important phenomenon in the lives of Franco-Italian intellectuals: these cultures imbued with Marxism are cultures where the history of the workers' movement is not well known, because it is the parties who write history.

On the other hand, for people haunted by writing like the CAHIERS, it's clear that writing divides, while images unify (through common fear or recognition.) Today, in France, in cinema, you have to divide. And it can only be done by making contemporary films (and not moving evocations.) For example, it's quite possible to make a Communist trade-unionist a fictional character; it's what Godard does in COMMENT CA VA. It's quite possible to film the suicide of a young person; it's what Bresson does in THE DEVIL, PROBABLY. But these are contemporary films, which do not surrender to the simulacrum of memory."

- Serge Daney

Farbkreis (Zur Farbenlehre)