viva la vida: finding desire (again)

Search engine terms that led to niteflyer – “Who stated that Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion?”

This is one of many paradoxical aphorisms by William Blake, from his book The Marriage of Heaven & Hell (1790).

Wikipedia describes Blake’s Hell thus… “Unlike that of Milton or Dante, Blake’s conception of Hell is not as a place of punishment, but as a source of unrepressed, somewhat Dionysian energy, opposed to the authoritarian and regulated perception of Heaven. Blake’s purpose is to create what he called a “memorable fancy” in order to reveal to his readers the repressive nature of conventional morality and institutional religion…”

On desire, the voice of Blake’s Devil says:

“Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weakenough to be restrained; and the restrainer of reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling. And being restrain’d it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire”

A thorn in the side of c18th morality, Blake was a kind of modern-day MC and graff artist who “proclaimed the supremacy of the imagination over the rationalism and materialism of the 18th-century.” He was dubbed a madman and took to publishing (engraving) his etchings and poetry as part of the underground printing press at the time: “Ink-blackened print workers were jokingly referred to as “printing devils,” and revolutionary publications were regularly denounced from the pulpits as the work of the devil” (Wikipedia).

Why am I evoking the spirit of Blake now? Because in this time where I see a global system that profiteers from institutionalising spaces and curtailing the human experience – ghettos, asylums, prisons, desire(lessness) – it helps to know that in history (as in the present) there will always exist lunatics who resist the mummification of the mind and the body. And because I think it’s cool readers out there are searching for something around this too, I hope.

racial redress & citizenship in south africa

“South Africa’s democratic experiment is confronted with a central political dilemma: how to advance redress and address historical injustices while building a single national identity. This issue lies at the heart of many heated debates over issues such as economic policy, affirmative action, and skills shortages. Government has opted for racially defined redress while many of its critics recommend class as a more appropriate organising principle.

The contributors to this volume challenge both perspectives. Both scholars and activists, and from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, the authors explore the issues within four broad themes: the economy, education, sport and the civil service. Addressing the scholarly community, civil society and government, each of the authors brings their own unique perspectives to this question which is so crucial to the future of South Africa. “

Racial Redress & Citizenship in South Africa (Kristina Bentley & Adam Habib Eds, 2008, HSRC Press)

Link: A free download of the book is available on the HSRC site here.

no one is illegal

Pics from the march through Joburg yesterday 24 May protesting the xenophobic attacks.

1

2

3&4

5

6

7

8 & 9

10

* none of these were taken by me (archaic equipment & all…), so here is due credit below & click on the links for more pix from these sites:

Link: 1,3,6,7: from here

Link: 2,4,5,8,9,10: from here

Prisons are built with stones of Law,

Brothels with bricks of Religion.

“ The social cost of neoliberal policies in the US is the need to incarcerate poor people, especially minorities (almost 10% of black males in the US are incarcerated). There is no denying that there is a strong racist aspect to neo-liberalism. The neo-liberal form of capitalism attacks the population, especially the poorest communities. At the same time, South African policymakers are following neo-liberal policies.

Their bias towards reducing the role of the state and outsourcing means that South Africa could get US companies, who benefited from the racist, neo-liberal policies in the US, to build and run new South African prisons. These are companies that profit and extract rents from the incarceration industry. It is in their interest to increase incarceration and to push for laws that increase incarceration. They lobby against crime prevention programmes so that states have more money for incarceration. ”

…

“ The way we define democracy and the economic and social policies we implement to meet those standards of democracy are threatened when we adopt neoliberal economic policies. A developmental state will protect the right of a country to choose its own policies irrespective of pressure from powerful governments and financial markets. When we give up our economic policy autonomy we give up our ability to implement policies to build a society that is just. Ultimately, we give up the democratic ideals that shaped our struggle for liberation. “

[seeraj mohamed, 2 May 2008]

Links: that is what neoliberalism looks like for the full article; also not all economic growth is good and greed will catch up with you in the end.

Link: Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion, an aphorism by william blake, 1757-1827

audience as construct, cinema as spectacle

There is a distinction between film (and television) audience “as a discursive construct” of the institution and “the social world of actual audiences”, as Ien Ang points out in her book Desperately Seeking the Audience.

She argues that the institution continually seeks to conquer the audience by positioning it as “a market to be won” for the commercial industry and as “a public to be served with enlightened responsibility” for the public broadcaster.

Meanwhile, the social world of actual audiences eludes such measures of control.

The real audience will forever frustrate institutional attempts at controlling it, talking about it, packaging it and selling it – because it is not a single “taxonomic collective” in the way the institution persists in constructing it. The world of real audiences is the social world of real concrete people.

The notion of a taxonomic collective of film spectators (as audience) then, relies on a process of counting individuals, representing them as numbers (box office figures) and grouping these numbers into objectified categories of others to be controlled. These figures are not, as Ang argues, “the innocent reflection of a given reality, but a discursive construct which can only be known and encountered in and through discursive representations such as…the statistical figure”.

In short, cinema as spectacle finds its other in the institutional construction of an audience.

This is a premise of something I’m working on now…and will hopefully lead somewhere else after ‘the task’ is done… somewhere that says if cinema X above is the institutional p.o.v then cinema Y exists outside of the institution and is necessarily therefore… cinema as practice that loses (and finds) itself in the other…somewhere there.

ام (mother)

“It is a delight for me to read her notebooks from those years, which describe a magic world that no longer exists. Clara lived in a universe of her own invention, protected from life’s inclement weather, where the prosaic truth of material objects mingled with the tumultuous reality of dreams and the laws of physics and logic did not apply.”

– from The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

ام – arabic script for mother

Links: pic is old room by boskizzi under this creative commons license

la perruque

Sometimes individuals employ popular tactics within the framework of an imposed market economy and culture that chip away at the power’s ideology, forging new ways of relating and of producing without leaving the space of the dominant.

Michel de Certeau calls it “the practice of economic diversion”, which in reality he says “is the return of a socio-political ethics into an economic system”. It is, according to Certeau the “interplay of voluntary allowances that counts on reciprocity and organizes a social network articulated by the ‘obligation to give.’”

He refers to examples of the French worker who does his own work on company time as practising la perruque – diverting time (not goods or money) “from the factory for the work that is free, creative, and precisely not directed toward profit”.

In different words, these are the ‘stolen moments’ during ‘work-time’ used to create, produce and use – not simply consume – something other than what one is being paid to do.

Shoplifters of the world, unite and take over… it also makes me think about my own procrastination differently…

Pic – Metropolis, a film by Fritz Lang

forbidden birds

The Uruguayan political prisoners may not talk without permission, or whistle, smile, sing, walk fast, or greet other prisoners; nor may they make or receive drawings of pregnant women, couples, butterflies, stars or birds.

One Sunday, Didasko Perez, school teacher, tortured and jailed for having ideological ideas, is visited by his daughter Milay, age five. She brings him a drawing of birds. The guards destroy it at the entrance to the jail.

On the following Sunday, Milay brings him a drawing of trees. Trees are not forbidden, and the drawing gets through. Didasko praises her work and asks about the coloured circles scattered in the treetops, many small circles half-hidden among the branches: “Are they oranges? What fruit is it?”

The child puts a finger on his mouth. “Ssssshhh.” And she whispers in his ear: “Silly. Don’t you see they’re the eyes? They’re the eyes of the birds that I’ve smuggled in for you.”

– – Eduardo Galeano

Link – From Century of the Wind, Forbidden Birds 1976: Liberty

labyrinth

I was in a labyrinth of stairs. This labyrinth was not entirely roofed over. I climbed; other stairways led downwards. On a landing I realized that I had arrived at a summit. A wide view of many lands opened up before me. I saw other men standing on other peaks. One of these men was suddenly seized by dizziness and fell. The dizziness spread; others were now falling from other peaks into the depths below. When I became too dizzy, I woke up.

– Walter Benjamin, 28 June 1938

3 days in the land of a dying illusion*

When cities crack, do stories too,
their scaffolding
collapsing?
Then I trawl the fragments lying disarranged,
searching, this side and that.
Emerge, ashen,
fragments limply
dangling
from upturned palms.

When cities crack, do memories too,
like china heirlooms
smashing?
Then I crawl into the folds of memory,
lifting,
calling,
tapping.
Searching for the missing,
never finding.
Brushing, carefully dusting,
only ever finding
skeletons of silence
cobwebs of sound.

When cities crack, do people too,
their lives
disintegrating?
Then they seep slowly through the cracks,
drip drip,
only brittle vessels remaining.
Then I come with upturned palms of stained
-scraps and chips of-
glass,
bits and
-collage-
pieces,
mosaic pictures hobbled together from fragments.
Here, I say, I’ve salvaged what I could,
your stories,
and then capsize ashen palms into cracked vessels,
everything together lumping.
“I’m sorry it’s so disarranged, like ravaged cities

cracking.”

Link: poem by Ishtiyaq Shukri

Link: * title of prose from Call Me Not A Man by Mtutuzeli Matshoba

Link: pic – Tiny People by Bright Tal under a creative commons license

(“This is the wall built by Israel in Abu Dis, an Arab neighbourhood in East Jerusalem. It divides Abu Dis into two. The wall is a “sophisticated” means of occupying land from Palestinians.

This is the wall built by Israel in Abu Dis, an Arab a neighbourhood in East Jerusalem. It divides Abu Dis into two. The wall is a “sophisticated” means of occupying land from Palestinians.

A person living on one side of the wall cannot move to the other side to go to work or school, to visit friends or family, to go to the doctor or just to take a trip somewhere when they feel like it.

In order to do any of these ordinary things they need to get a permit from the Israeli army, which may or may not be granted.

It is about 8 metres (26 feet) high. People look tiny next to it; maybe it was designed to make them feel tiny. Being humiliated and harassed by armed soldiers on a daily basis might also make you feel tiny. It might also make you want to leave your home and move elsewhere.”)