Political action (praxis) not as speech, but as:
Symbolic Action (Yippies!) //
Revolutionary Action (RAF,
Weather Underground) //
Grass Roots Action // (GIP)
Community, Democracy, Immigration: The MexicanAmerican Wall
•
•
• Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Globalization and Democracy,”
Democracy Unrealized, Documenta 11 Platform 1, Enwezor et al.
editors. (Frankfurt: Hatje Kantz, 2002), 323-336.
• Armando Navarro, “The South Central Los Angeles Eruption: A
Latino Perspective,” Los Angeles Struggles Toward Multiethnic
Community, (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press,
1993), 69-86.
• Rodolfo F. Acuna, “Introducing Chicano L.A.,” Anything but
Mexican, (London and New York: Verso, 1996), 1-18.
• (Optional reading) Ghassan Kanafani, “Men in the Sun,” from
Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories, (New York: Lynn
Rienner Publishers, 1998), 21-74.
Documentary: “Walls of Shame”
• http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/general/2007/11/2008525184
011488706.html
Case Studies: The Mexican-American Border, how Multiethnic communities
are being built in LA; the riots. Community and the stranger (Dogville).
Permanent War, Bare Life and Spectacle
• Retort, “Permanent War,” Afflicted Powers, 78-107.
• J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, (New York:
Vintage, 2007), 3-15 and 19-23.
Case Studies: Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of men (2006)
and/or Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Dawn (1992).
John Heartfield, Down with these degenerate sub-men
Leni Riefenstahl, Still from Triumph of the Will, 1934
Leni Riefenstahl, Still from The Triumph of the Will
John Heartfield, Hitler Tells Fairytales
Socialist Realism
Bourgeoisie/Proletariat
Form
Quality:
Technique
Formalism
Content
Thematic
Visual Language
(Political) Tendency
Truth/reality/facts
Social function
Function or Purpose: To entertain/ to educate
Theory/Practice
Still from Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, (1967)
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Dziga Vertov, Man With a Movie Camera, 1929
Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International, 1919
Forward, forward,
Communist youth!
Forward, towards the sun.
At the sound Of your march,
Let the heaven tremble with fear.
Vladimir Mayakovski
http://www.ubu.com/film/vertov.html
Summary from last class:
Socialist Realism: With Socialist Realism, power instrumentalized
aesthetics putting it to the service of the socialist cause. Had the
function of educating the people; as an art form, it swung completely
on the side of power.
The Avant-garde: Sought to create a new art for a new man, which
involved innovations in form, or technique. (Photography as collage,
sculptures hanging from the wall, montage in cinema).
Walter Benjamin: “The correct political tendency of a work includes its
literary (artistic) quality because it includes
its literary (artistic) tendency.”
In sum, this means that a work of art should be progressive in form and
content (as technique or technical innovations, and as making the
apparatus of production available to everyone). Further, the author
needs to be aware of the work’s position within the relations of
production of its time, and to help put the apparatus at the service of
socialism.
A 100 years ago: Progressive avant-garde artists in Russia
in the 1920s faced the problem of not wanting to make
‘tabula rasa’ with the past because their work targeted the
uneducated proletariat. They thus did a combination of the
new and the old for the new socialist man.
TODAY: (and since the 1960s) cultural producers address
an educated (consumerist) public. How can we improve or
diffuse technique (when it is available for all)? Create
progressive form and content (in the post-ideological, postmedium era)? What to do with the new and the old (when
capitalism co-opts everything)?
What about politics if the working class has disappeared,
and if it is condescending to speak in their name anyways?
Ask questions; to know the history of struggles and the
role of the sensible in them (sayable and the visible).
Praxis // Poiesis // tecne
Form + content = technique (apparatus, dispositif)
Form and content belong to the same area of experience while
poiesis and praxis do not.
Theory + Practice: Which comes first?
What happens when you put theory into practice?
Think about Stalinist Russia.
Apparatus (Benjamin): "literally anything that has in some way
the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model,
control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or
discourses of living beings.” (Deleuze) Examples: mass media
apparatus, state apparatus, religious apparatus.
Technique: a means to render present
• Who speaks, for whom, from where and
how?
• Who speaks? Intellectual, activist
• For whom: constituted group or entity
• From where: Discursive
regime/ideology/group
• How? (Form, content, technique)
(Revolutionary) ACTION!
(different from Resistance)
Proletarian Left (Gauche Prolétarienne)
Groupe d’information sur les prisons
Rote Armée Faktion (Red Army Fraction)
Or Baader-Meinhof Gruppe (Group)
“Anti-imperialism and the defensive position of the counterrevolution
in its psychologic warfare against the people”
• Don De Lillo, Mao II (1992)
• Doris Lessing, The Good Terrorist, (1985)
• Jean Genet on the Black Panthers and the
Palestinian
struggle.
• Volker Schlondroff, The Legend of Rita (2000)
and The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975).
• The Weather Underground (2000)
• Werner Fassbinder, Germany in Autum (1977)
• Peter Watkins, Punishment Park (1972)
• Gerhardt Richter, Baader-Meinhof paintings
(1987)
• Black Panthers manifesto, “Ten Point
Program”
THIRD WORLD
NATIONAL LIBERATION MOVEMENTS
THIRD WORLDISM
ANTI-IMPERIALISM
Fanon, Mao, Ho-Chi Min, Sartre…
http://activismandvisualculture2009.wikispaces.com
Summary from last class:
Questions asked by students and workers:
• Who speaks?, interrogates representativity (or mediation),
and it was addressed to union delegates, intellectuals,
professors, writers and artists, equating the production of
knowledge to power.
• From where? means, from which regime of enunciation
(discursive position) or from which majoritarian or
minoritarian position of power or non-power is the voice
speaking?
• For whom? is the Maoist question of representability and
asks, in the name of whose interests or what community?
• How? is a practical question regarding the relationship
between theory and practice, form and content.
Revolutionary action or practice in the sixties and early seventies.
Radical-political groups did away with speech (praxis) and engaged with
revolutionary action (terrorism, grass-roots activism, like the GIP, or
interventions in the media, like the Yippies!)
Demise of the working-class.
Or, the splintering of the old union of the working class + vanguard
intellectual into a multiplicity of struggles for visibility and demands of rights
(Women, gays, immigrants, Arabs, Blacks…)
Demise of “representation in the political and aesthetic sense.” The grouping
of a struggle as the “Working class” was seen as constraining.
The problem is that the “representative consciousness” wishes to unveil a
truth when, in reality, he or she produces a truth while negating the other’s
right to have her own consciousness. Condemning the indignity of
mediation, anyone and everyone spoke in her own name, replacing the
older totalitarian repression by interdiction with the “capture of speech.”
Symbolic Action (Yippies!)
Revolutionary (anarchic) Action
(RAF)
Grass Roots Action (GIP)
What were the struggles against?
Against imperialism, capitalism and power.
Power: Ceased to be defined as being imposed from above (like, the
monarchy or the government).
“Power” was redefined (by Foucault) as more diffuse and slippery.
Groups in North America and Europe that united in solidarity with Third World
struggles (or National Liberation Movements); anti-imperialism (Cold War)
Hannah Arendt was skeptical of the use of violence against violence and
argued that
The Black Panthers (and anti-colonial struggles for self-determination), or
the dispossessed, the victims of colonialism cannot take revenge on their
oppressors: WHY?
What is self-determination? The right of a people to govern itself, free of an
alien entity (I.e., the British or French Empire).
According to Arendt, terrorist and anti-imperialist VIOLENCE in the seventies
brought history to a stand-still. Arguably, revolutionary action did not get rid
of capitalism and intensified the apparatus of societal control, of the
“Police Estate.”
Jean Honoré Fragonard (France), The Swing, 1747.
Yinka Shonibare UK/Nigeria,
The Swing (after Fragonard), 2001.
Jean-Paul Gauguin, What are we? Where do we come from?
Where are we going?, 1898.
Jean-Paul Gauguin, Tahitian Landscape, 1888.
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Mask from Gabon.
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907.
Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait, 1938.
Gabriel Orozco, Island Within and Island, 1993..
Auto worker in minivan plant
*Hourly wage: $26.75 plus cost of living allowance.
* Working hours: Six 7.5-hour shifts a week, plus voluntary overtime
on Sunday.
* Time off: Roughly six weeks a year, including plant shutdown, public
holidays, paid absence allowance and SPA weeks.
* Benefits: Extended health, dental, vision and prescription benefits; a
progressive pension plan; additional unemployment benefits; child
care and tuition bonuses.
Migrant worker in greenhouse (Offshore Ontario Farming Program)
* Hourly wage: $7
* Working hours: In peak season, up to 12 hours per day, six days a
week and a half- day Sunday.
* Time off: Varies, but most take several days off upon their return to
Mexico before tending to their own land, sharecropping or taking
factory jobs.
* Benefits: Ontario Health Insurance Plan for the duration of their
contract; Canada Pension Plan.
Source: Welch 2002b from URL:
http://www.uoguelph.ca/geography/research/ffw/papers/foreign-farm-workers.pdf
Simone Weil: “Why is the determination to fight
against prejudice a sure sign that one is full of it?
Such a determination necessarily arises from an
obsession. It constitutes an utterly sterile effort to
get rid of it.”
Gómez-Peña: We are equally scared of each
other… let me speak before we continue to live
together… Us who are labeled ‘extremists’ for
merely disagreeing with you…
Annie Annie Pootoogook (Canada), First Tourist, 2003,
and Family Summer Tent, 2003-04.
Let Columbus scour the seas to find India,
It is his right!
He can call our ghosts the names of spices,
He can call us Red Indians,
He can fiddle with his compass to correct his course,
Twist all the errors of the North wind,
But outside the narrow world to his map,
He cannot believe that all men are born equal
The same as air and water,
The same as people in Barcelona,
Except that they happen to worship Nature's God in
everything,
And not gold.
Fragment from Mahmoud Darwish, “The Speech of the Red Indian.”
(1992).
FYOC, some examples of (Post) colonialism, Film and
Literature:
Jim Jarmusch (US), Dead Man (1994).
Werner Herzog (From Germany, films about colonialism
and Brazil): Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre (the Wrath of God)
and Cobra Verde.
Abderrahmane Sissako (Mali), Bamako, (2006).
The poetry of Leopol Sédar (Senegal) Senghor and
Dereck Walcott (West Indies)
Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s performance work. See:
www.pochanostra.com