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Symbolic Action (Yippies!) // Revolutionary Action (RAF, Weather Underground) //

Political action (praxis) not as speech, but as:. Symbolic Action (Yippies!) // Revolutionary Action (RAF, Weather Underground) // Grass Roots Action // (GIP). Community, Democracy, Immigration: The Mexican-American Wall

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Symbolic Action (Yippies!) // Revolutionary Action (RAF, Weather Underground) //

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  1. Political action (praxis) not as speech, but as: Symbolic Action (Yippies!) // Revolutionary Action (RAF, Weather Underground) // Grass Roots Action // (GIP)

  2. Community, Democracy, Immigration: The Mexican-American 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/2007/11/2008525184011488706.html • Case Studies: The Mexican-American Border, how Multiethnic communities are being built in LA; the riots. Community and the stranger (Dogville).

  3. 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).

  4. John Heartfield, Down with these degenerate sub-men Leni Riefenstahl, Still from Triumph of the Will, 1934

  5. Leni Riefenstahl, Still from The Triumph of the Will John Heartfield, Hitler Tells Fairytales

  6. Socialist Realism Bourgeoisie/Proletariat Form Content Technique Formalism Thematic Quality: Visual Language (Political) Tendency Social function Truth/reality/facts Function or Purpose: To entertain/ to educate Theory/Practice

  7. Still from Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, (1967)

  8. Dziga Vertov, Man With a Movie Camera, 1929 Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International, 1919

  9. Forward, forward,
 Communist youth!
 Forward, towards the sun.
 At the sound
Of your march,
 Let the heaven tremble with fear. Vladimir Mayakovski

  10. http://www.ubu.com/film/vertov.html

  11. 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.

  12. 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, post-medium 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).

  13. 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

  14. 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)

  15. (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”

  16. 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”

  17. THIRD WORLD NATIONAL LIBERATION MOVEMENTS THIRD WORLDISM ANTI-IMPERIALISM Fanon, Mao, Ho-Chi Min, Sartre…

  18. http://activismandvisualculture2009.wikispaces.com

  19. 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.

  20. 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.”

  21. Symbolic Action (Yippies!)Revolutionary (anarchic) Action (RAF)Grass Roots Action (GIP)

  22. 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.”

  23. Yinka Shonibare UK/Nigeria, The Swing (after Fragonard), 2001. Jean Honoré Fragonard (France), The Swing, 1747.

  24. Jean-Paul Gauguin, What are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?, 1898. Jean-Paul Gauguin, Tahitian Landscape, 1888.

  25. Mask from Gabon. Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907.

  26. Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait, 1938.

  27. Gabriel Orozco, Island Within and Island, 1993..

  28. 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

  29. 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…

  30. AnnieAnnie Pootoogook (Canada), First Tourist, 2003, and Family Summer Tent, 2003-04.

  31. 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).

  32. 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

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