2011/12/08
2011/12/06
raoul vaneigem
"Just as we distinguish in private life between what a man thinks and says about himself and what he really is and does, everyone has learned to distinguish the rhetoric and the messianic pretensions of political parties from their organization and real interests: what they think they are, from what they are. A man's illusions about himself and others are not basically different from the illusions which groups, classes, and parties have about themselves. Indeed, they come from the same source: the dominant ideas, which are the ideas of the dominant class, even if they take an antagonistic form."
from: Impossible Participation or Power as the Sum of Constraints
"To the question posed by Cravan, Gide looked at his watch and replied, whatever the real time was, "It is five o'clock." We more often ignore the point at which living poetry disturbs the time ruled by making a living. I don't claim that all of my hours are spent free from work, but I try to break out of the channels of work and boredom, and I know that only the happiness of one and all can perfect my own happiness. I obstinately continue to privilege the time of pleasure, of love, of amenities, of creation, of beginnings [trans: commensalite]. I'm not putting forward, like some hedonist, a remedy to anguish. These moments, which I champion with scorn for received ideas -- they are never finished. They help me to live better, to better explore the labyrinth where one desire hides in another."
from: Refusals and Passions
from: Impossible Participation or Power as the Sum of Constraints
"To the question posed by Cravan, Gide looked at his watch and replied, whatever the real time was, "It is five o'clock." We more often ignore the point at which living poetry disturbs the time ruled by making a living. I don't claim that all of my hours are spent free from work, but I try to break out of the channels of work and boredom, and I know that only the happiness of one and all can perfect my own happiness. I obstinately continue to privilege the time of pleasure, of love, of amenities, of creation, of beginnings [trans: commensalite]. I'm not putting forward, like some hedonist, a remedy to anguish. These moments, which I champion with scorn for received ideas -- they are never finished. They help me to live better, to better explore the labyrinth where one desire hides in another."
from: Refusals and Passions
2011/12/05
alÿs
"Samuel Beckett is the most obvious accomplice of Alÿs’s aesthetic sensibility, as the wall text at MoMA explains: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” A resident of Mexico City for the past 25 years, Alÿs has borne witness to the continual attempts (and, one might argue, successive failures) at modernization by the country’s government and its citizens, resulting in a tragic farce that, in the wake of ever-increasing violence and disorder, continues to play itself out on one of life’s largest stages. One observes this theme of repetitive failure in almost all of the artist’s work, but most apparently in his short films and performances, waged globally across international borders, labor classes, and art history.
A three-part video installation of When Faith Can Move Mountains (2002), commissioned for the second Lima Biennial and perhaps one of Alÿs’s most famous actions, is also featured, along with dozens of drawings, notes, clippings, and e-mail exchanges related to the monumental performance. For the project, 500 volunteers clad in white converged with shovels upon an enormous sand dune on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, and, over the course of an afternoon, enacted a visual demonstration of “faith vs. insanity.” Documentary evidence in the form of aerial photography, video, and personal testimony account for the exploit’s potency: Alÿs and the participants, moving the natural structure a mere few inches, had tapped into art’s revolutionary potential for change. In Kafka-esque fashion, historical determinacy was suddenly obliterated."
from: A Story of Deception
A three-part video installation of When Faith Can Move Mountains (2002), commissioned for the second Lima Biennial and perhaps one of Alÿs’s most famous actions, is also featured, along with dozens of drawings, notes, clippings, and e-mail exchanges related to the monumental performance. For the project, 500 volunteers clad in white converged with shovels upon an enormous sand dune on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, and, over the course of an afternoon, enacted a visual demonstration of “faith vs. insanity.” Documentary evidence in the form of aerial photography, video, and personal testimony account for the exploit’s potency: Alÿs and the participants, moving the natural structure a mere few inches, had tapped into art’s revolutionary potential for change. In Kafka-esque fashion, historical determinacy was suddenly obliterated."
from: A Story of Deception
to think
"The Utopian impulse in thinking is all the stronger, the less it objectifies itself as
Utopia—a further form of regression—whereby it sabotages its own realization.
Open thinking points beyond itself … Beyond all specialized and particular
content, thinking is actually and above all the force of resistance, alienated from
resistance only with great effort … The happiness visible to the eye of a thinker
is the happiness of mankind. The universal tendency toward suppression goes
against thought as such. Such thought is happiness, even where unhappiness
prevails; thought achieves happiness in the expression of unhappiness. Whoever
refuses to permit this thought to be taken from him has not resigned."
Theodor Adorno, “Resignation,” trans. Wes Blomster, in The Culture Industry:
Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 171.
Utopia—a further form of regression—whereby it sabotages its own realization.
Open thinking points beyond itself … Beyond all specialized and particular
content, thinking is actually and above all the force of resistance, alienated from
resistance only with great effort … The happiness visible to the eye of a thinker
is the happiness of mankind. The universal tendency toward suppression goes
against thought as such. Such thought is happiness, even where unhappiness
prevails; thought achieves happiness in the expression of unhappiness. Whoever
refuses to permit this thought to be taken from him has not resigned."
Theodor Adorno, “Resignation,” trans. Wes Blomster, in The Culture Industry:
Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 171.
2011/12/04
the uncanny
..."It was a moment of the uncanny which is the return of the
repressed, the return of that which is familiar but you have
forgotten and than it comes back to haunt you, like the
return of ghosts, the return of the dead. In the case of
9/11 people began to ask me: What happened here? What is
the explanation? Where did this come from? And of course,
in the minute it was attributed to a group called Al Qaida, an
Islamic terrorist group and highly fundamentalist, religious
fanatics, people began to ask: Where did they come from?
And the answer is: They were begotten by the US in
Afghanistan during the occupation of Afghanistan by the
Soviet Union. They were a relic of the so called Cold War.
So the appropriate and deepest literary framework for this is
the uncanny."
W.J.T. Mitchell
repressed, the return of that which is familiar but you have
forgotten and than it comes back to haunt you, like the
return of ghosts, the return of the dead. In the case of
9/11 people began to ask me: What happened here? What is
the explanation? Where did this come from? And of course,
in the minute it was attributed to a group called Al Qaida, an
Islamic terrorist group and highly fundamentalist, religious
fanatics, people began to ask: Where did they come from?
And the answer is: They were begotten by the US in
Afghanistan during the occupation of Afghanistan by the
Soviet Union. They were a relic of the so called Cold War.
So the appropriate and deepest literary framework for this is
the uncanny."
W.J.T. Mitchell
2011/12/01
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