The philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, on the rising tensions and particular split between artist/spectator, genius/taste:
“In Rameau’s nephew [a character from a novel], the spectator understands that he is an uncanny enigma: his justification, in an extreme form, is reminiscent of the experience of any sensitive person who, in front of a work of art he admires, almost feels defrauded and cannot suppress his wish that he had been its author. He is in front of something that, as it seems to him, puts him back in contact with his innermost truth, yet he cannot identify with it, since, as Kant said, the work of art is precisely “that which, even after one has achieved perfect knowledge of it, one is nonetheless still unable to produce.” The spectator’s is the most radical split: his principle is what is most alien to him; his essence is in that which, by definition, does not belong to him. Taste, in order fully to be, has to become separate from the principle of creation; but without genius, taste becomes a pure reversal, that is, the very principle of perversion.” — (‘Man Without Content,’ Giorgio Agamben)
But this is not and has not always been the case…
From 13 July 2011, copied from radical africa to this site.
An Open Letter to Jacob Zuma from the Unemployed People’s Movement
Dear Mr. President
Today you will be awarded the freedom of Grahamstown by the Makana Municipality. Raglan Road, which runs up through the township, its shacks and broken down RDP houses, will be renamed Dr. Jacob Zuma Road. We have been told that the budget for the ceremony will be R250 000. We know that in reality it will cost more than this but the Municipality are refusing to give us all the documentation that would allow us to see the real cost of this ceremony.
The Makana Municipality is a failed Municipality. The needs of the people are not met, corruption is rampant and authoritarianism is worsening. Twenty thousand people remain without homes. When homes are built they fall down in the first storm. When a wall collapses people are given a plastic sheet to hang up. People go for months without water. Unemployment is at 60%. Activists are arrested on trumped up charges and given unconstitutional bail conditions that ban them from political activity. The thugs of the ANC Youth League close down meetings that they can’t control. A whole generation of youth live without hope.
Your presidency is a failed presidency. Under your authority the ANC has become, from top to bottom, very little more than a way for the politically connected and the politically loyal to feed off the public purse via access to the state. The state has become a site of patronage and self enrichment and not a tool for development. Democracy is being rapidly curtailed. The media are under serious attack, protesters are being murdered by the police in broad daylight and movements like Landless People’s Movement and Abahlali baseMjondolo, as well as local structures like the Makause Development Forum, are under open attack by the ANC with the support of the police. There is no vision for the homeless, the unemployed and the raped. The party is divided and an aggressive right wing demagoguery has taken centre stage.
A failed municipality wants to give the freedom of Grahamstown to a failed president. This is a farce. It is an insult to us. Every time we walk down Dr. Jacob Zuma road this insult will be repeated. It is unbelievable that liberation has ended in this fiasco. It is unbelievable that the unemployed and the homeless will be expected to celebrate this insult. Of course those who are looking for jobs and tenders will be in the front dancing and singing when you are given the freedom of Grahamstown. But when they lie in their beds at night they will know that by doing what they need to do for themselves and their families they are undermining the struggle of the people – a struggle that stretches back to battle led by Makana himself.
You will be given the key to Grahamstown while many of us do not even have a key to a falling down, leaking and tiny RDP house. The local politicians will herd people without water, electricity, homes, decent education, work or a decent livelihood and the freedom to organise independently to the streets to celebrate the award of your freedom of this town. The unfree will be expected to celebrate your award of the freedom of this town.
We will not be joining the celebration. If your government had brought us decent homes, jobs and schools we would gladly welcome you to our town. If you had brought us a deepening of democracy that gave us the opportunity to shift to a bottom up system we would welcome you to our town. But the reality is that there is nothing to celebrate and we will not be exploited by our councillors as they try to bring themselves closer to money and power while continuing to fail the people. We will not celebrate our own oppression.
The reception for you after the ceremony will be held at the monument to the 1820 Settlers. This monument is an insult to us. It is there to celebrate invasion, dispossession and occupation – a process that has left us shivering in the shacks of Grahamstown. We have previously called for it to be used to house the shack dwellers of Grahamstown. If you were a people’s President you would not set foot into this monument to settler colonialism in a town ringed with shacks.
We thought seriously of organising a protest against this celebration. We thought of covering the streets that your cavalcade will come down with shit from our buckets. We thought of creating a human chain across Raglan Road. But we know that that the police and the army will be there in full force. They are already all over town. We don’t want more Andries Tatanes. Therefore we have decided to meet you with ideas, with this open letter.
We will continue our struggle to win our own freedom – our freedom from poverty, our freedom from political repression. We invite all those who share our concerns about the failures of the Makana Municipality and the failures of the Zuma regime to join us in this struggle to turn a colonial town into a people’s town in which there is freedom from poverty, land and housing, water and electricity, work or an income for all, decent schools and full freedom to write, speak, and organise without fear.
The Unemployed People’s Movement, Grahamstown
Ayanda Kota 078 625 6462
Xola Mali 072 299 5253
“Truth does not descend from on high, a ready-made revelation. [...] ‘only the work that declares it constitutes it’ as truth.”
The philosophy of Alain Badiou has, in the face of great skepticism, drawn my imagination and inspired my creative thought. Those of his works that I’m most interested in, Being and Event, and Logics of the Worlds, are, for me, laborious reads.
Peter Hallward, a philosopher with sharp mind and, by all appearances, admirable ethics, has been a guide to my understanding of Badiou’s work, thanks to his book, Badiou: A Subject to Truth. I highly recommend this book, to inspire and provoke creative thought. The above quote is from this book.
The rest of this post contains selected quotes from the 2003 soft cover edition of Badiou: A Subject to Truth, published by the University Minnesota Press. These quote will only provide a taste for the book and the philosophy, I recommend diving into the full volume.
“Verifiable is a function of the structure of knowledge, a correct application of rules by which a situation identifies its elements and classifies its parts.” (p. 94)
“Knowledge is operative in a situation to supply the means of arranging the parts of a site. It is a classifier of subsets. Its task is to discern or name the subsets of a situation.” (p. 95)
“The truth is constructed, bit by bit, from the void. As a result, a truth and the subject it supports will indeed be the truth of this particular situation, but will not be recognized as one of its state-sanctioned parts[...]” p. 122
The operation of truth “begins with an event or undecidable statement.” p.183
“The operation of a truth can be divided into a number of closely related moments: the naming of the event; the intervention that imposes its name and makes it stick; the division of those elements of the situation that affirm or fit the name from those that do not; the establishment of an enduring fidelity to this name.” (pp. 124-124)
“The events statement “is ontologically fully ‘detached’ from the event itself. The evental declaration ‘I love you’ is not properly a name of the evental encounter, but an ‘implicative remnant of the encounter.’ Only the encounter is properly real: the declaration is not itself the real, but its direct implication.” (p. 125)
“Badiou’s generic procedure [truth] is true because it is entirely withdrawn from what actually governs its situation. Both Deleuze and Badiou conceive the subject as the bearer of a truth that exceeds him.” (pp. 179-180)
“The sole task of an exclusively affirmative art is to render visible all that which, from the perspective of the establishment, is invisible or nonexistent.” (p. 195)
“As distinct from science, art is a matter of putting ultimately sensual experience into (verbal, visual, audible) form. The evental site in an artistic situation always lies on the edge of what it perceives, in that situation, as the void of form. Artistic events take place on the border of what is formless, or monstrous, the point at which the formal resources of the existing arts are overextended [...]” (p. 195)
“Further works undertaken in fidelity to such a violation or breakthrough can be thought of as so many ‘situated investigations [enquetes] into the truth that they actualise locally, or of which they are finite fragments.’” (p. 196)
“Scientific truth, as opposed to the currently accepted body of scientific knowledge, is not a matter of what can be verified through experimentation within assumed theoretical parameters. It concerns the invention of those parameters.” (p. 209)
“No less than its artistic counterpart, scientific truth proceeds as an effort to formalize that domain previously conceived as forms or unformable, monstrous.” (p. 209)
“In light of the new theory [of science], objectivity itself has to be rethought.” (p. 211)
“Politics is truth in the collective, by the collective. Though all generic procedures are addressed to everyone, only in the case of politics does this universality characterize both import and operation.” (p. 223)
“Badiou conceives of politics precisely as a matter of what Rimbaud called ‘logical revolt,’ a matter of clearly stated principle [...]” (p. 224)
The political subject acts or resists “not as a result of communication or consensus, but all at once, to the exclusion of any ‘third way’.” (p. 224)
“That everyone can join in a political process means that the Two of political antagonism is not to be thought in terms of a purely destructive competition.” (p. 225)
“What resists the organized political we is not an alternative political subject so much as the brute inertia of re-presentation, which is nothing other than the inertia of the status quo itself.” (p. 225)
“Politics thus proceeds through the invention of new subtractive mechanisms of formalization that can confront and transform this formless resistance to change.” (p. 225)
“Like any truth, a political sequence can begin only when business as usual breaks down for one reason or another. This is because what ensures submission to the status quo is ‘submission to the indetermination of power, and not to power itself.’ Under normal circumstances, we know only that the excess of the static re-presentation over elementary presentation is wildly immeasurable [...] Today’s prevailing economic regime indeed dominates its inhabitants absolutely, precisely because we can hardly imagine how we might limit or measure this regime. The first achievement of a true political intervention is thus the effective, ‘distanced’ measurement of this excess. Intervention forces the state to show its hand, to use its full powers of coercion so as to try to restore things to their proper place.” (p. 225)
This is an audio of a speech followed by song by the South Wales Striking Miners Choir and Test Dept. It’s part of an album titled Shoulder to Shoulder.
The UK miners’ strike of 1984-85 ended with the defeat of one of that country’s strongest unions after facing off against Margaret Thatcher’s government. The strike inspired two well known albums: Should to Sholder, and Freq.
The below video is a simple report on the South African shack dwellers movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo.
Mavuso Mbhekeseni has written on Abahlali baseMjondolo and its reason for being in a recent article part of which is here (you can read the complete article at Abahlali.org):
The South African calendar is full of days on which we are asked to celebrate our freedom. There is Human Rights Day, Freedom Day, Worker’s Day, Youth Day, Mandela Day, Women’s Day and Heritage Day. These days are turned to months. Those of us who refuse to celebrate these days and months as if the struggle is over and who insist that the struggle goes on are called reactionaries.
Fifty years ago the revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote that:
“The leader pacifies the people. For years on end after independence has been won, we see him, incapable of urging on the people to a concrete task, unable really to open the future to them or of flinging them into the path of national reconstruction, that is to say, of their own reconstruction; we see him reassessing the history of independence and recalling the sacred unity of the struggle for liberation. The leader, because he refuses to break up the national bourgeoisie, asks the people to fall back into the past and to become drunk on the remembrance of the epoch which led up to independence. The leader, seen objectively, brings the people to a halt and persists in either expelling them from history or preventing them from taking root in it. During the struggle for liberation the leader awakened the people and promised them a forward march, heroic and unmitigated. Today, he uses every means to put them to sleep, and three or four times a year asks them to remember the colonial period and to look back on the long way they have come since then.”
We have had more than one leader since 1994. But the party has played this role of the leader. Fanon goes on to say that:
“Now it must be said that the masses show themselves totally incapable of appreciating the long way they have come. The peasant who goes on scratching out a living from the soil, and the unemployed man who never finds employment do not manage, in spite of public holidays and flags, new and brightly-coloured though they may be, to convince themselves that anything has really changed in their lives. The bourgeoisie who are in power vainly increase the number of processions; the masses have no illusions. They are hungry; and the police officers, though now they are Africans, do not serve to reassure them particularly. The masses begin to sulk; they turn away from this nation in which they have been given no place and begin to lose interest in it.”
For us Fanon is a prophet. Our lives confirm his vision of the future and the need for struggle to continue after independence.
Human Rights Day is on the 21st of March and March is Human Rights Month. We all know that you can’t eat Human Rights or live in Human Rights. But Human Rights should protect you as you struggle for land and housing, for education, and for all that you need. Yet we have been repressed in Human Rights Month.
In March 2005 residents of the Kennedy Road settlement blockaded the road because they wanted to fight for their right to land in Kennedy Road. They knew that shelter, electricity, water and sanitation is their human rights. But they were beaten and fourteen people, the Kennedy Fourteen, were arrested. Even school children were taken to Westville prison. That is illegal but it was the protesters that were called criminals. The road blockade was how they mobilized, organized and emerged as a poor people’s movement. The movement grew out the fact that the response to the road blockade was police brutality instead of negotiation. Should the Kennedy People really have been celebrating Human Rights Day while they were being beaten and jailed? Should they have been celebrating while the police occupied their settlement?
We have not only been beaten and jailed in Human Rights Month. We have also been evicted.
This is a short abstract film by Viking Eggeling. “This film comprised of 6,720 drawings inaugurates the beginning of experimental film: an art nouveau that uses film as a medium for visual expression…“
Symphonie diagonale (1925) — originally silent, and I personally prefer muting this film when watching or putting on a soundtrack of your own choosing.
Laurence Cox on social movements and the case of Ireland (excerpt):
Movement organisations, for their part, now face substantial challenges. Is there a way back from dependence on funding? The much-discussed US book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded suggests that if there is, it lies in a shift from service delivery to advocacy and campaigning, linked to a principled decision for financial independence and self-funding. My own sense from talking to organisers over recent years is that this is now widely seen as common sense, but that it requires the development of skills which have not been in much demand in the years of funding proposals and policy submissions; and the willingness to endure an upheaval in internal relations as members, rather than professionals, come to take the lead in practice and not simply rhetorically.
[...]What critical political economy has lost, in its long engagement with the politics of ‘opinion’, is a willingness to reflect on agency – how a critique can come to acquire social and economic force – and to find ways of translating technical expertise into straightforward, strategic demands; key issues which can be widely understood and widely supported by those who do not have postgraduate degrees but nevertheless perceive themselves as losing out from the bailout and the cuts.
The key battle in this last respect, for several years now, has been the struggle in Rossport in the west of Ireland. At its simplest, we have a government minister, since imprisoned for corruption, handing over the keys to €540 billion of gas reserves to Shell and Statoil; the state under various governments backing this up with the deployment of the military and a police occupation whose overall conduct the police Ombudsman has been instructed not to investigate; and a right-wing hate campaign in the media against leading campaigners. We also have a remarkable alliance of social movements doing its very best under immense pressure to resist and transform this situation. Most recently, a recording of police discussing raping and deporting activists has highlighted realities which many people have preferred to ignore.
Rossport is not only the place where the actual economic choices made by the mainstream parties are most clearly visible, it is also a place which brings together local communities in struggle, key union issues, ecological concerns, an experience of police violence shared by many poor people on this island, majority world solidarity and, most recently, core feminist concerns. In the late 1970s, an alliance of mass movements stopped plans for nuclear power in Ireland at Carnsore Point in Wexford. If anywhere has the capacity to be the Carnsore Point of the 2010s – a place where the machinery of destruction and impoverishment can be stopped in its tracks, and where social movements can rally around the development of alternatives for Irish development – it is Rossport.
In order for this to happen, of course, movements and intellectuals have to throw off the ‘muck of ages’, or rather the office suits donned for the years of partnership. The desire to be on the inside, in line for funding and a seat at the table, dies hard – as does the intellectual desire to be a respectable dissenter. A respectable dissenter, in our contemporary usage, of course, is in the last analysis a member of the elite – one calling for a different direction, but making this call to other members of the elite. An effective organiser, by contrast, is one whose primary concern is to find issues around which ordinary people are willing to mobilise, around which effective alliances can be made, and which can offer the possibility of disrupting the polite and respectable world of meetings and policy papers.
Zodwa Nsibande, from a post on South Africa’s Abahlali baseMjondolo, a shack dwellers movement:
In our days being involved in the struggle for change is no longer as popular as it was before simply because many people believe that because we had got rid of the oppressive government everything is now ok. But freedom was never just a case of replacing a white government with a black government. It was a case of building a different kind of society – a society that put human beings at the centre, a society in which there would be decent homes, decent work, decent schools and decent health care for everyone. It was a case of building a participatory democracy in which everyone’s voice and life would count the same irregardless of whether they were a woman or a man, black or white, gay or straight or poor or rich. In fact it was a case of building a society where poverty would be ended.
Those who think that the time of struggle is over are forgetting that we are still living under a kind of apartheid but that in this apartheid the difference is the people are divided by class. The gap between those who have and those who don’t have is huge and it is getting worse. Those who say that we must be patient are forgetting that things are getting worse for the poor and not better.
And here is a look at Spain’s days of protests in May of 2011.
By Siân Ruddick:
Mass demonstrations and protest camps have mushroomed across Spain as the young and the unemployed say “enough”. As many as 40 percent of Spain’s 4.5 million unemployed are under 25.
The economic crisis has brought further austerity and attacks on workers and the poor. But now the people are fighting back.
Unemployment runs at 21% in the country, 45% for those who are 18 to 25 years old.
Sokari Ekine writes about Uganda and Africa:
Uprisings continue across the continent, with Uganda being the latest country where citizens have taken to the streets in protest against rising food and energy prices.
[...]The protests have met with a violent response from the government of Yoweri Museveni, with police firing live bullets at crowds, beatings and mass arrests.
[...]Ndumba Jonnah Kamwanyah in the Southern Africa FBP likens Museveni to Egypt’s Mubarak with the same mindset and the same relationship with the West:
‘Typical of a mindset of a dictator, President Yoweri Museveni, who has been in power for 25 years, does not see the connection between the uprisings and his governing style. Instead his delusional mentality makes him see how indispensable he is to Uganda. Narcissistic is what he is, just like all dictators and autocratic leaders, and he does not care about what the Ugandan citizens think or want.’
Protest in Uganda
In Egypt, here’s a peek at May 20, Tahrir Square:
Hossam el-Hamalway in an interview:
The revolution was against the Mubarak regime but all we’ve managed to do so far is remove Mubarak himself. The ones running the country right now are Mubarak’s generals, who were the backbone of his dictatorship from day one.
[...]Attempts are already under way by middle-class activists to place limits on this revolution and ensure it remains only within the realm of formal political institutions.
[...]But the main part of any revolution has to be socio-economic emancipation for the citizens of a country; if you want to eliminate corruption or stop vote-buying then you have to give people decent salaries, make them aware of their rights and not leave them in dire economic need. A middle-class activist can return to his executive job after they think the revolution is over, but a public transport worker who has spent 20 years in service and is getting paid only 189 Egyptian pounds a month – you can’t ask this guy to go back to work and tell his starving kids at home that everything will be sorted out once we have a civilian government in the future.So this is phase two of the revolution, the phase of socio-economic change. What we need to do now is take Tahrir to the factories, the universities, the workplaces. In every single institution in this country there is a mini-Mubarak who needs to be overthrown. In every institution there are figures from the old state security regime who need to be overthrown. These guys are the counter-revolution.
And in Greece, according to Matthaois Tsimitakis:
The village of Keratea is a conservative and peaceful place, about an hour’s drive from Athens. When, a few months ago, the central government decided without consultation to create a garbage landfill destroying antiquities, polluting the environment and defying the European Commission’s rejection of the plan as unsustainable, Keratea erupted into violent confrontation with the police.
[...]The Keratea resistance is part of a series of low or higher intensity confrontations with the government, its preferred contractors and the repressive apparatus of state brought in to protect the corporations. Such local movements have spread all over the country for some time, defending public spaces against privatization (this has happened repeatedly in Athens where the last remaining green spots are consistently given over to construction companies), natural resources (the Canadian gold mining corporation TVX is facing a strong resistance movement in the North of the country), or protesting against the repeated corruption scandals.
Palestinian refugees marched to commemorate Nakba on May 15, the expulsion of hundreds of thousands from their homes in today’s occupied Palestine and Israel.
Karma Nabulsi has this to say:
It was the moment for which we had all been holding our breath for decades – for 63 years to be precise. Palestinians everywhere watched the unfolding scene transfixed and awed. The camera followed the movements of a small group of people advancing from the mass of protesters. They were carefully making their way down a hill towards the high fence that closed off the mined field separating Syria from its own occupied territory of the Golan that borders historic Palestine, now Israel.
They were mostly young Palestinians, drawn from the 470,000-plus refugee community in Syria: from Yarmouk refugee camp inside Damascus, from Khan el-Sheikh camp outside it, from Deraa and Homs refugee camps in the south, from Palestinian gatherings all over the country.
Slowly, and in spite of the shouted warnings from the villagers from Majdal Shams about the lethal landmines installed by the Israeli military right up to the fence, these remarkable ordinary young people – Palestinian refugees – began to both climb and push at the fence. We were going home.
It was a profoundly revolutionary moment, for these hundreds of young people entering Majdal Shams last Sunday made public the private heart of every Palestinian citizen, who has lived each day since 1948 in the emergency crisis of a catastrophe. Waiting, and struggling, and organising for only two things: liberation and return.
[...]On Sunday, this moment of return was enacted simultaneously in Haifa and among Palestinians displaced inside Israel, on the borders of Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and Gaza, in the West Bank near the Qalandia refugee camp – wherever the more than 7 million stateless Palestinian refugees now live, very near their original villages and towns. Just out of sight, over the hill, across the border.
Moe Ali Nayel writes:
things will not be the same as before 15 May. Just like after Muhammad Bouazizi, things are not the same as before he shook the Arab world. The Arab people, us, the Arab youth, we are not going to let the status quocontinue, we are not going to be humiliated by our own people anymore. We are not going to let Palestine and the Palestinian people be humiliated and tortured every time they breathe.
We are freedom-loving people and we won’t live anymore on empty promises from our corrupt governments who use Palestine as a pretext to repress us while they enjoy stealing from our pockets. We won’t let them continue to make sure Israel is safe and sound, enjoying the beautiful land of Palestine, while hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees live in inhumane conditions in the camps.
In Portugal, on March 12 ” Upwards of 300,000 people took to the streets in Lisbon and other Portuguese cities on Saturday to protest job insecurity…”
In the UK, there have been cuts to education, health care and social spending after providing massive ‘bailouts’ to financial institutions that continue to pull in enormous profits. This has resulted in direct action, protests, and occupations of universities.
From We are the Third Force by S’bu Zikode of Abahlali baseMjondolo:
The community has realised that voting for parties has not brought any change to us.
[...]For us time has been a very good teacher. People have realised so many things. We have learnt from the past – we have suffered alone. That pain and suffering has taught us a lot. We have begun to realise that we are not supposed to be living under these conditions.
And here’s a little song courtesy of Nina Simone:
This is a quick list of archives I’ve come across over time. Feel free to suggest other internet archives in the comments section, so that I can try to keep this post as useful and helpful as possible.
The various archives listed contain podcasts, stock film, documentaries, shorts, recited poetry, experimental music and sound, lectures, etc. I tried to include only sites that have archives of materials as opposed to shows I like.
- UbuWeb: an excellent collection of video, audio, etc.
- Internet Archive: stock footage, documentaries, etc.
- Public Moving Image Archives and Research Centers: A listing of archives by region/country, assembled by US Library of Congress.
- LibriVox: audio books, free, from the public domain.
- huffduffer: a podcast aggregator.
- Sound Transit: archive of field recordings from around the world… with phonographic communities are building audio maps of cities.
- Lost and Found Sounds by the Kitchen Sisters: archive of audio clips.
- Backdoor Broadcasting Company: archive of webcast audio.
- Center for Social Theory and Comparative History Seminar Series: audio lectures.
- Resistance Mp3: audio of presentations by speakers from a broad spectrum of ‘the left’.
- UC Berkeley Library Social Activism Sound Recording Project – Black Panther Party: source media about the Black Panthers.
- Modernist Journals Project: to produce digital editions of culturally significant English language magazines from around the early 20th century.
- Internet Library of Early Journals: to digitise substantial runs of 18th and 19th century journals.
- Project Gutenberg: free ebooks.
- ebooks@Adelaide: free ebooks.
- Planet eBook: free ebooks.
- PDF Planet: free ebooks.
- Europa Film Treasures: a digitized film archive (Europe).
- Open Images: a digitized film archive (Europe).
- National Film Board: a digitized film archive (Canada).
- Video Active: a collection of television programmes and stills from audiovisual archives across Europe.
- London Transit Museum: London transit film collection.
- Russian Archives Online: archive of Russian images, sound, film.
- mosfilm: collection of contemporary Russian films.
- World Digital Library: significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.