[edwordsmyth]

Assata Shakur

[edwordsmyth]

"It is impossible to talk about sound, the subject is too vast. Bertolucci said that the spectator has become conscious of the images and soon he will be conscious of sound. That is when sound will start,

Before Godard, the film was developed from a story. Godard started to develop a film from images. He did not want to tell a story in the first place. One can ask the question of whether it is possible to develop a film from what you hear. So far, sound was only just there. It was not something you would work on. The sound was not really a major part of the film.

I want to see if it is possible to develop a film from what you hear, which also means from what you think: a completely opposite position from a silent movie, which tells or writes a story in chronological order with pictures in between. I would like to find out if film could be understood as, let us say, a symphony. If film could no longer be a means to tell a story but be something with which our sensibility deals in the same way it does with music." -R.W. Fassbinder

[uy9]

[uy9]

[edwordsmyth]

Eduardo Galeano

[uy9]

“The bourgeoisie loves so-called “positive” types and novels with happy endings since they lull one into thinking that it is fine to simultaneously acquire capital and maintain one’s innocence, to be a beast and still be happy.”

— Anton Chekhov, in a letter to A.S. Suvorin. (April 13, 1895)

[uy9]

Missouri Pacific snowplow

Dolton, Illinois

April 12, 1979

Photo by Bill Johnson

[proustian-dream]

The first man ever to have posed the problem of reading, and in consequence, of writing, was Spinoza, and he was also the first man in the world to have proposed both a theory of history and a philosophy of the opacity of the immediate. With him, for the first time ever, a man linked together in this way the essence of reading and the essence of history in a theory of the difference between the imaginary and the true. This explains to us why Marx could not possibly have become Marx except by founding a theory of history and a philosophy of the historical distinction between ideology and science, and why in the last analysis this foundation was consummated in the dissipation of the religious myth of reading. The Young Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts read the human essence at sight, immediately, in the transparency of its alienation. Capital, on the contrary, exactly measures a distance and an internal dislocation (décalage) in the real, inscribed in its structure, a distance and a dislocation such as to make their own effects themselves illegible, and the illusion of an immediate reading of them the ultimate apex of their effects: fetishism. It was essential to turn to history to track down this myth of reading to its lair, for it was from the history in which they offered it the cult of their religions and philosophies that men had projected it onto nature, so as not to perish in the daring project of knowing it.

Louis Althusser, "From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy", Reading Capital

[uy9]

Capitalism has facilitated democracy, fascism, state socialism, theocracy, militarism, human rights, religious revivals; it processes and transforms all social organisation into its social organisation. Every political aspiration is compatible with its productive relation. You propose the counter culture? Capital will commodify it, instigate it, reproduce it, and sell it. There is no outside of the loop.

Monsieur Dupont, "Anarchists must say what only anarchists can say"

[uy9]

In the experience of deep sadness, the world itself seems altered in some way: coloured by sadness, or disfigured … [This originates] in desolation, in the sense that the world is frozen and that nothing new is possible. This can lead to terrible paroxysms of destruction, attempts to shatter the carapace of reality and release the authentic self trapped within; but it can also lead away from the self altogether, towards new worldly commitments that recognise the urgent need to develop another logic of existence, another way of going on.

Dominic Fox, Cold World: The Aesthetics of Dejection and the Politics of Militant Dysphoria (2009)

[uy9]

In England and the United States, the police were invented within the space of just a few decades — roughly from 1825 to 1855.

The new institution was not a response to an increase in crime, and it really didn’t lead to new methods for dealing with crime. The most common way for authorities to solve a crime, before and since the invention of police, has been for someone to tell them who did it.

Besides, crime has to do with the acts of individuals, and the ruling elites who invented the police were responding to challenges posed by collective action. To put it in a nutshell: The authorities created the police in response to large, defiant crowds. That’s

— strikes in England,

— riots in the Northern US,

— and the threat of slave insurrections in the South.

So the police are a response to crowds, not to crime.

David Whitehouse, Origins of the Police, 2014

[edwordsmyth]

"My thirst for Coca Cola is by no means 'mine,' but something the Coca Cola producer specifically creates within me, turning me into as much of a product as the brew itself i.e. a device whose sole purpose and performance consists in satisfying the thirst for profit." -Günther Anders

[edwordsmyth]

Lettrist International (soon to become the Situationist International), Potlatch #5 (1954).

[edwordsmyth]

"Genocide is a process. The imperialist West built itself through genocide. It is not limited to this specific place.

That is to say, the United States built itself as the United States through a genocide that claimed the lives of 25 to 35 million men and women. The Americas became Latin America—whether Central or South America—through the genocide of hundreds of millions of men and women. The Aboriginal people—the first people of planet Earth—were eliminated to allow for the emergence of Australia.

In other words, genocide served as an existential mechanism for capital as it coalesced into Western imperialist capital; it was built through a genocidal process. Israel is the latest incarnation of these Western capitalist genocidaires.

Naturally, to confront this, one must be aware that one is facing the dynamics of capital, rather than mere subterfuges—that is, things linked in one way or another to the dynamics of capital.

In other words, our own national bourgeoisie—whether Palestinian, Lebanese, or Jordanian—is complicit in this phenomenon. The social bloc here—the social bloc found in Egypt, that is, the 120 million men and women right next to Gaza—has not yet stirred. In other words, they have not yet grasped the fact that their historic task is to rid themselves of capital—of the capital that operates in Egypt just as it does in Gaza, and in the West Bank, albeit at different paces. That is to say, here the killing happens much faster, while there it happens much less—but tomorrow, the killing will intensify there and elsewhere.

This, then, is the global dynamic, and it encompasses the entire issue of how the historic social bloc is structured. The historic social bloc takes shape through struggle, and it is within that struggle—as it advances, as the social bloc's emerging consciousness matures, and as it ultimately brings about the demise of genocidal capitalism (or any other form)—that this happens…

This genocide continues at varying rates, but it did not begin today. We must realize that the genocide began a century ago." -Georges Abdallah

[uy9]

If someone wishes to erect a victory monument after vanquishing rebellious peasants, he might use paraphernalia according to the following instructions: Place a quadrangular stone block measuring ten feet in width and four feet in height on a quadrangular stone slab which measures twenty feet in length and one foot in height. On the four corners of the ledge place tied­up cows, sheep, pigs, etc. But on the four corners of the stone block place four baskets, filled with butter, eggs, onions, and herbs, or whatever you like. In the centre of this stone block place a second one, measuring seven feet in length and one foot in height. On top of this second block place a strong chest four feet high, measuring six and a half feet wide at the bottom and four feet wide at the top. Then place a kettle upside down on top of the chest. The kettle’s diameter should be four and a half feet at the rim and three feet at its bottom. Surmount the kettle with a cheese bowl which is half a foot high and two and a half feet in diameter at the bottom. Cover this bowl with a thick plate that protrudes beyond its rim. On the plate, place a keg of butter which is three feet high and two and a half feet in diameter at the bottom. Cover this bowl with a thick plate that protrudes beyond its rim. On the plate, place a keg of butter which is three feet high and has a diameter of a foot and a half at the bottom, and of only a foot at the top. Its spout should protrude beyond this. On the top of the butter keg, place a well­formed milk jug, two and a half feet high, and with a diameter which is one foot at its bulge, half a foot at its top, and is wider at its bottom. Into this jug put four rods branching into forks on top and extending five and a half feet in height, so that the rods will protrude by half a foot, and then hang peasants’ tool on it – like hoes, pitchforks, flails, etc. The rods are to be surmounted by a chicken basket, topped by a lard tub upon which sits an afflicted peasant with a sword stuck into his back.

Albrecht Dürer, "Unterweisung der Messung (Treatise on Measurement)", 1525

[uy9]

So was Dürer sympathetic or hostile to the rebellious peasants? Many other references and interpretations could be found to support either position. Stephen Greenblatt has concluded that Dürer was probably firm in his condemnation of the peasants’ violence, but in that historical situation, representations did not always work as they were intended to. For Greenblatt, it is not a question of “the theoretical condition of all signs, but the contingent condition of certain signs at particular historical moments, moments in which the ruling elite, deeply threatened, conjure up images of repression so harsh that they can double as images of protest.

Amir Djalali, "The Measure of Turmoil: Dürer’s Monument to the Vanquished Peasants", 2012

[uy9]

To him she was a fragmented commodity whose feelings and choices were rarely considered: her head and her heart were separated from her back and her hands and divided from her womb and vagina. Her back and muscle were hired into field labour…her hands were demanded to nurse and nurture the white man… Her vagina, used for his sexual pleasure, was the gateway to the womb, which was his place of capital investment – the capital investment being the sex-act and the resulting child the accumulated surplus…

Barbara Omolade, “Hearts of Darkness”, 1983