A Worker Reads History

Japanese Posters

  • Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Russian workers opposing the war between Manchuria and Mongolia; Design by Yanase Masamu 1927.
  • Chinese and Japanese peasants working together, 1929; Design by Ōtsuki Genji.

The Factory as Event Site by Alain Badiou

Why Should The Worker Be a Reference in Our Vision Of Politics?

The analytical and objective conception determines the necessity of this reference through the compactness of the social bond, which is inferred in turn from the position of the exploited. But the approach is more convoluted than may at first appear. A subtle analytic (that of Marx himself, for example) clearly shows that from the mechanism of exploitation – the extortion of surplus-value – one can at first only draw the competition of workers on the market of labour-power, and by no means an immediately representable bond. Now, were this unbinding of competition stable, it would align – for those who think politics in the form of the bond and social consistencies, of “objective subjects” – the workers with the peasants, whose multiple-juxtaposition and egotism led Marx, as we know, to deem them incapable of generating an independent political force. What destabilises the competition between workers and unifies the class under a possible political representation? Truth be told, there are two responses to this question. The first (that of the 1844 Manuscripts) draws its argument from the void, directly subsumed by the generic being of workers, since the latter possess nothing but a saleable abstraction, labour-power. The second (the one belonging, rather, to Engels) argues on the basis of the characteristics of industrial labour: concentration of human masses, military discipline, and so on. This time it’s the constrained bond, the organisation of labour, that is the mode in which “the dead (the mechanical and despotic arrangement) grasps the living (worker’s labour)” that is inverted into a bond which is simultaneously free and rigorous: the syndicalism of demands, followed by the representative party.

If the first response draw its authority from the abstract characteristics of workers” alienation, and thus refers back to the Great Logic of the socio-historical presentation of capitalism, the second is instead a empirical description of a characteristic place internal to this situation, that is the factory. Marxism thus joins a global representation of workers” political positivity – it is because they are nothing that they are capable of organising everything – to a local register – it is because there exists within the social presentation this singular and separated multiple that is the factory, that there is the possibility of the workers” one in politics.

Thus, at the very heart of the objectivist version of the necessity of a worker reference, we encounter two terms, the void and the site, which as we will see only find their full sense once we decentre toward the subjective the vision of politics.

A Thesis

Letting myself be guided by these two finds of classical Marxism, the void and the factory, I propose the following thesis: in modern historical presentation, the factory is the event par excellence, the paradigm of the multiple at the edge of the void. Before making this thesis explicit, allow me some remarks on its status.

  1. The thesis is in a certain regard objective, since it characterises the factory, not as the privileged place of a subjective political activity, but as a site, that is a as a particular form of the multiple in situation.
  2. It is a thesis that affects the global signification of the worker reference (politics cannot disentangle itself from factories), and whichAA Thesis Thesis thus avoids passing through the constitution of a global subject (the class).
  3. It is a thesis that does not directly link workers to politics. In fact, to say that the factory is an event site in no way prescribes that there necessarily, or predictably, are factory events. One simply says that there can be. And, even more importantly, an event is not as such political: it is only qualified as such through the retroaction of aconditioned intervention.
  4. Therefore, it is a thesis that says the following: the factory and the workers delimit, within our situations, a possibility that there arise that on the basis of which politics can exist.
  5. The maximal form of the thesis is instead its converse: there can only be politics to the extent that is capable of intervening on the – uncertain but possible – events of which the factory is the site.
  6. The thesis does not in any sense say that workers are “political”. It says that they are inevitable for politics.

A site is, in a situation, a multiple “at the edge of the void” in the sense that, though it is presented and counted as one in the situation, none of its terms is, itself, presented in a separate manner. Such a multiple is therefore absolutely singular, because it is impossible to consider it as a part and, consequently, the State does not count it as one.

The paradoxical statement I am defending is finally that the factory, by which I mean the factory as a workers” place, belongs without doubt to the socio-historical presentation (it is counted-as-one within it), but not the workers, to the extent that they belong to the factory. So that the factory – as a workers” place – is not included in society, and the workers (of a factory) do not form a pertinent “part”, available for State counting.

Excrescences: Company and Unionism, Versus Factories and Workers

This fact – as I will argue below – is masked today, for two main reasons. The first is that if the factory is not counted by the State, its unification, that is, the multiple of which the factory is the sole element, is, itself, perfectly counted. There is even, in order to designate this singleton of the worker-multiple that is the factory, a special name, which is the company. In our view, however, it is the case that this term serves to hide a singularity beneath an excrescence. That’s because if the factory is effectively presented, though its workers are not as such, the “company” isn’t: it is a pure re-presentation, a term of the State. In this excrescence, the workers, which the factory still presents, albeit at the edge of the void, are absolutely unpresented. That’s because the company has only one element, which is the factory, and this unification is accomplished when, in the final analysis, the designation by the State of the one of this unicity, takes the explicit form of the “company head”. The “company head” is less a person than that by which the State, which does not designate, as a part, the multiples presented by the one-multiple that is the factory, re-presents their unpresentation in the guise of a singleton.

The second modern dissimulation of what the factory presents ofunpresentable workers is unionism. Unionism presents itself specifically as a worker representation in the place of work. It is through unionism that the fact that workers are unpresentable is occulted, since unionism associates the fiction of a bond to the factory-multiple. For the State, and in the collective representation it induces, the worker -multiple that the factory counts as one is presented, because it is represented by the unions. This is to forget that representation does not necessarily induce presentation, since there are parts which are not elements, inclusion being in excess over appearance. The union bond is without doubt that of a part, to with the wage demand of which the union negotiators are the bearers guaranteed by the state meta-structure. However, there is no reason to consider this part, in other words the totalisation of demands (‘legitimate demands’), as a presentation of the real terms of the worker multiple of the factory. Even if all the workers were unionised it would not follow that thus represented, they are presented as workers, that is in the effectivity of their belonging to the factory. Between the representational theme of union freedom within the factory and the presentational theme which is that of workers” freedom, there is an abyss – that of the separation of the State – an abyss that no matter what workers” revolt immediately elicits, through the conflict that it inevitably engenders between itself and the union apparatuses.

In truth, unionism, as a particular piece of the dispositif of the parliamentary State count, that is of the count in the “Western” historical presentation, is an excrescence. Its link to the factory is that of the artifice of a representation, which comes to complete the one designate, as a singleton, by the company head. The absolutely singular character of workers” belonging to the factory is rendered invisible through the legal superimposition of a representative excrescence.

The bulk of “politicians” who refer to workers hold that the factory is disposed for politics by union representation. To which classic reactionaries object that unions must not be “politicised”. This debate becomes obsolete as soon as one shows that unionism cannot politically designate the worker reference because it is of the order of the State – of the counting of parts – and therefore it operates the disappearance of the factory as event site, that is of worker unpresentation as the feature of the factory-multiple. Neither in the version of unionism as “political education”, nor in that of unionism as the pure instrument of wage negotiation can one find the least index of a political reference to the factory. The dispute bears entirely on the State, the ones wishing to deploy within it their own personnel (that it may be socially composed of workers doesn’t change a thing), the others wanting to maintain the representative monopoly of the company head. The parliamentary rule is to cut the pear in half. But since in any case the State is itself by no means a political reality – even if it plays an important role in the field of politics – the conflict under consideration will never involve the workers in their articulation to politics.

Thus the included-singleton of the company, like the multiple-inclusion of unionism occult, in accordance with representation, the enigma of workers” presentation.

Ontology of the Site

Let us then come back to the site itself.

  1. In the factory, workers are not considered as subjects, but as forces. Consequently, they are not presented as such, but only in accordance with their abstract articulation to the productive assemblage. Labour-power is not a presentation, it is a particular piece of the one-of-the-factory. It subtracts the presentation of the worker-multiple to the profit of the factory as a productive unit. Thus, the only criterion which globally qualifies labour- power, which is productivity, is entirely extrinsic to the worker-multiple, because it only designates him – at the edge of the void – according to the presentation of the term factory, as an non-decomposable unit in presentation.
  2. Every worker is substitutable, or dispensable,which would not be the case were he presented. The layoff, a characteristic operation of the factory, even when it does not take place, designates worker unpresentation from the vantage of the one of the factory. A man has squandered his life and health on the assembly line, he is forty years old and is thrown out with no other requisite other than that of productive modernisation. How is this possible? It is obviously because, from the point of view of the situation such as it presents the factory, this worker does not exist. In particular, modernisation, a phenomenon which affects in general the presented existence of the factory in the situation, is not concerned with him in the least. What is re-presented is at most the singleton of the worker – himself as unicity, that this the non -consideration of the multiple that he is (his life, his family, his country, and so on). This abstract set (this excrescence) which is represented but not presented, enters into statistics: a certain quantity of layoffs are necessary. What is numbered here is not a presented worker multiple, it is a collection of undifferentiated unifications.
  3. Whomsoever is in civil society is presented, since presentation defines sociality as such. But the factory is precisely separated from society, by walls, security guards, hierarchies, schedules, machinic assemblages. That is because its norm, productivity, is entirely different from general social presentation. The similarity between the factory order and the military order has long been highlighted. The profound reason for this is that in both cases presentation is annulled through the sole count of substitutable singletons. A soldier is always unknown, because he is a recruit of death. Equally, to enter into the factory is to enter into unpresentation. From the point of view of the factory, a worker too is always unknown.
  4. The very idea of workers” political capacity is contrary to the essence of the factory. The factory is essentially a non-political place, whether its workers are politicised or not. That is because politics is in complete and utter contradiction to the regime of productivity. Politics is the opposite of industrial work, precisely because it is itself work, a refined creation that requires the interruption of the other work. Politics is the work of presentation, and cannot be satisfied with the unpresentable but to the extent that the presentation of this unpresentable avers the void as the being of the situation.

But at this point what is required is the interruptive capacity of the event.

The Factory Event

Let us say it plainly: if the factory is the paradigmatic event site of our societies, it is because the event within it is strictly speaking impossible without the collapse of the site as one. The factory event, since it makes exist the very thing whose inexistence sustains the one-of-the-factory, that is the workers. The factory is this exceptional place in which the charge of singularity is such that to even partially deploy it within presentation one ravages the count, in the irruption of the void which the count exiled and whose errancy it simultaneously concentrated.

A factory event is, in a particularly blunt manner, the supernumerary multiple which is composed, beyond itself, as an incalculable trait-of-the-one, of these unknown multiples which before it only stood as indifferent unifications: the workers.

The fact that modern politics cannot avoid the worker reference is grounded neither on the working class as a structural term, nor even on the workers” movement as a historic term. It is simply a question of acknowledging that the factory is an event site, and that by ignoring it, any politics would thereby allow to subsist a zone of complete unpresentation, thus reproducing in its own terms the general regime of the State.

The only place from which can originate a consistency subtracted from the reign of State re-assurance are singular, or absolutely singular, multiplicities, and therefore the site, because it is only there that the presented term, not being included in the situation, does not see its belonging over-determined by the count of the count, by the State meta-structure. What’s more, the intervening capacity of politics can only sound out and interpret the unpresentable, and hold itself on the edge of the void, to the extent that the event disposes, as a trait-of-the-one, as an illegal and supernumerary signifier, the multiple of the terms of its site. It is therefore excluded that a politics can target the subtractive character of modern situations while excluding from its field these major event sites which are factories. That is no where the origin of politics lies, but it is certainly its testing ground. And factory events, being that through which workers are averred in their unpresentation, are necessarily mediators of contemporary political consistency.

Now, I maintain that this is what Marx was the first to perceive, at a time when factories were in fact seldom counted in the general historical presentation. The vast analytic constructions of Capital are the retroactive foundation of what for him was a pre-predicative evidence: that modern politics could not be formulated, even as a hypothesis, otherwise than by proposing an interpretation-in-subject of these astounding hysterias of the social in which workers named the hidden void of the capitalist situation, by naming their own unpresentation.

Reduced to its bare bones, Marxism is jointly the hypothesis of a politics of non-domination – a politics subtracted from the statist count of the count – and the designation of the most significant event sites of modernity, those whose singularity is maximal, which are worker sites. From this twofold gesture there follows that the intervening and organised experimentation of the hypothesis must ceaselessly prepare itself for the consideration of these sites, and that the worker reference is a characteristic of politics, without which one has already given up subtracting oneself from the State count.

That is the reason why it remains legitimate to call oneself a Marxist, if one maintains that politics is possible.

source: Alain Badiou, “L’usine comme site événementiel”, Le Perroquet 62-63 (1986), pp. 1 and 4-6; translated by Alberto Toscano

http://www.prelomkolektiv.org/pdf/prelom08.pdf

A Worker Reads History

Poem by Bertolt Brecht

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima’s houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.

Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet
was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Greek triumphed in the Seven Years War.
Who triumphed with him?

Each page a victory
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?

So many particulars.
So many questions.

Architectural Retrogardism: Etarea city, Auroville city and Sinturbanizam (Sinturbanism)

Etarea City

Designed in 1967 for a site near Prague, Czechoslovakia, and exhibited that year at the Montreal Expo, Etarea was to be a city of 135,000 inhabitants, where the conveniences of automated infrastructure would satisfy future socialist generations. Etarea placed the question of meaning at centre stage. Meaning in architecture was considered in terms of both cybernetic communication and existential phenomenology, and its function was no less than to advance the communist transition. Etarea was informed by Civilization at the Crossroads (1966), an influential policy treatise that emphasized the significance of the intelligentsia and the so-called ‘scientific and technological revolution’ to future communism.

‘We are not futurologists by profession, but the future is becoming more and more significant today’, mused Czech philosopher Radovan Richta in 1967. This was a concise, if enigmatic, outline of Civilization at the Crossroads, a book-length report on the crisis of industrial socialism in Czechoslovakia. Socialism must adopt technological innovation, cybernetic science and systemic thinking, stressed the report commissioned by the Communist Party and edited by Richta. Inspired by that scenario, Gorazd Čelechovský, an architect, designed a model city of 135,000 inhabitants that would be communist, automated and radiant. Exhibited at Expo ’67 in Montreal, but never built, the city of Etarea was conceived as an alternative to contemporary, admittedly mediocre, mass housing developments. It was to be, as Čelechovský put it, ‘an equilibrium at a higher stage of development’.

For Richta, the liberation from machinic enslavement would be the consequence of gradually replacing bureaucratically organized industrial manufacturing with cybernetically governed automated production. Civilization portrayed cybernetics as ‘the only plausible foundation for governance and planning in the future’. Rather than marshalling subordinates to fulfill inflexible plans, the report tasked future socialist managers with optimizing systems. For Richta, what he called the ‘algorithmic restructuring of governance’ was not only consistent with but essential to the kind of communism where people would experience life as meaningful. Thinking of self-realizing individuals as analogous to self-regulating systems, Richta believed that ‘unlike primitive technology dominating people, the evolved and versatile one facilitates all-round human personality development’.

The scientification of communism emphasized the historical specificity of both class struggle and the future of socialism. ‘The issue of revolution once again became highly topical during the 1960s’, wrote historian Vítězslav Sommer; ‘however, this time it was contemplated more as a phenomenon of the future than as a legacy of the glorious revolutionary past’. Seeking to overhaul socialism marred by a personality cult and bureaucratic ossification, Civilization revisited revolutionary aspects of communism but placed them outside the then-mainstream arena of blue collar labour: cybernetic science and computer technology rather than industrialization. Revolution, in other words, was the business of a technical intelligentsia at home in laboratories and operations centres — what Western Marxists then described as the ‘new working class’, rather than the ‘historical’ working class of mines and factories.

The similarly polyvalent notion of životní prostředí was the most salient intellectual link between Civilization and Etarea, delineating the terrain shared by contemporary politics and architecture. Literally a ‘milieu of life’ or ‘living environment’, the term evokes an internally differentiated unity, open as such to multiple, overlapping and potentially conflicting interpretations: the well-balanced human life, optimally distributed systems, social equity, political harmony. The trend of architecture and politics in Czechoslovakia towards becoming environmental has many parallels with contemporary developments in the West and East. Under an array of concepts ranging from habitat and unitary urbanism, to urban imageability, to networked and intelligent cities — not to mention the protection of nature and environmentalism sensu stricto — the ‘environmental turn’ in the West swayed between denouncing and ameliorating capitalism. In the socialist East, meanwhile, the environmental synthesis of automation and meaning was envisioned as a road towards an ideal communist city, as in the eponymous proposal by the Moscow-based Novyi Element Rasseleniia (NER) collective, or the ziggurat cities of Sinturbanizam by the Yugoslavian architect Vjenceslav Richter.

Krivý, M., 2019. Automation or Meaning? Socialism, Humanism and Cybernetics in Etarea. Architectural Histories

Auroville City

Auroville was born on 28 February 1968. In terms of physical development, Auroville aims at becoming a model of the ‘city of the future’ or ‘the city the earth needs’. It wants to show the world that future realisations in all fields of work will allow us to build beautiful cities where people sincerely looking towards a more harmonious future will want to live. One of the most remarkable concepts of Auroville is its master plan, laid out in form of a galaxy – a galaxy in which several ‘arms’ or Lines of Force seem to unwind from a central region.

  • Gorazd ČelechovskýAt the centre stands the Matrimandir, the “soul of Auroville”, a place for individual silent concentration.
  • Radiating out beyond the Matrimandir Gardens are four Zones, each focusing on an important aspect of the township’s life:
    • Industrial (north)
    • Cultural (north east),
    • Residential (south/south west) and
    • International (west)
  • Surrounding the city area is a Green Belt consisting of forested areas, farms and sanctuaries with scattered settlements for those involved in green work.

Aurovilians apply the ideas of the Auroville Charter in their daily life, in policy-development, and decisions, big and small. The Charter thus forms an omnipresent referent that silently guides the people who choose to live and work for Auroville.

The Auroville Charter

  1. Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But, to live in Auroville, one must be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.
  2. Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.
  3. Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations.
  4. Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual human unity.

https://www.auroville.org/contents/1

Sinturbanizam (Sinturbanism)

Croatian architect Vjenceslav Richter published his treatise on Sinturbanism in 1964, at the moment when the influence of high modernism on architecture and urbanism in Yugoslavia was reaching its peak. Richter responded with the utopian vision of the city as a complex structure of self-contained living units fulfilling all existential and social needs of their inhabitants and serving as “spatial modulators” of social interactions. Setting rational and clearly legible spatial relations – a defining principle of Sinturbanism – in direct connection to rational organisation of Yugoslav socialist society, Richter clearly pointed the social ambitions of his proposal, but the rigidity of that correlation almost turned sinturbanism’s utopian dimension to its opposite. Preserved by elaborated relation between built and natural environment and imaginative application of technology it is important legacy of utopian spatial thinking from the period of socialism that deserves our attention.

Forecast of the synthesis of life and art as an expression of our times is a text written by Vjenceslav Richter in 1954 and published ten years later as a section in his book Sinturbanizam. The text was written as Richter’s summary of the public discussions on art which included the members of EXAT 51 in early 1952. The talks were mainly focused on the issue of abstract art and they were held in direct response to the publishing of the group’s manifesto. The talks were organized by Rudi Supek and Grgo Gamulin, two influential critics both of whom were opposed to abstraction. Since there are no transcripts available it is difficult to determine the particular content of the talks, but most participants agree that they resulted in a polemic between the members of EXAT who defended their right to practice abstraction, and the organizers who opposed it on the grounds of decadency and incompatibility with the socialist values and way of life.
The 1954 text begins by identifying three main disciplines that shape our environment: architecture, plastic and painting. Richter states that in contemporary world the three disciplines exist on their own and develop independently from each other. However, he claims, they have now reached a point when it is necessary for them to merge with each other into an artistic synthesis in order to keep on progressively developing. The division within visual arts is not a natural one; it is a result of historical, economical and political conditions. These conditions, which he does not elaborate on, are all contributing to what he calls a social medium. A social medium consists of relations between the politics, culture and individuals living within a certain historical moment. As such, the social medium that he is discussing (post World War 2 socialist Yugoslavia) is not in any case different from previous social media; it consists of the same sets of conditions. However, the contemporary social medium is specific because of the emerging realization of fundamental interconnectedness of all areas of human activity. Richter contextualizes this conclusion as a result of social changes and the resolution of class based society within socialism. However, this is the only point in the text where the synthesis of arts is discussed within the context of socialism.

The first focus of the text is to identify what brought about the division of visual arts. As a result of scientific and technical developments, the first to separate was architecture. Although architecture is still far behind other industrial production, the mechanical developments have made architecture a technical discipline rather than an artistic one. With the technical side dominating architectural production, the spatial expression in architecture was removed from the artistic elements of painting and plastic. In other words, architecture was removed from the field of arts and reduced to a technical discipline. Throughout the text Richter never explicitly states when this division of visual arts started. However, it may be assumed that the crucial moment was the industrial revolution with the emergence of bourgeois class and changing social relations. The direct effect of the separation of architecture was ‘liberation’ of painting and plastic. With artists now working for the anonymous consumers and unknown spaces, their expression became limited to the content within the frame. The dominance of museums and galleries as spaces where art is experienced and consumed highly limited the possibilities of art. This limitation of space where art is exhibited directly influenced our understanding of art as something that is separate from everyday life. Despite the proportionally high number of painters, sculptors and architects, the living spaces are constructed as utilitarian products without artistic expression. Richter considers these limitations to be responsible for the lower quality of life, in his view the understanding of the standard of living simply as a result of purchasing power is highly flawed as it does not take into account how space affects the quality of human experience.

Thinking on Screen – Films About Philosophers

Antonio Negri – A Revolt that Never Ends

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP2rsRsKCTY

BADIOU

Derrida: The Documentary

Gramsci: Everything that Concerns People

Hannah Arendt

Jean-Paul Sartre et Simone de Beauvoir

Living in the End Times (According to Slavoj Zizek)

Marx Reloaded

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1ZVv0I7DH8

The Ister

Adi Shankarachaary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSrUv2WLlzE

Conversation of The World – Valentin Y. Mudimbe and Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Мераб Мамардашвили\Merab Mamardashvili film by Valeri Balayan

Confucius: A Master Chinese Philosopher

Al-Ghazali – The Alchemist of Happiness

Sick Planet

A Sick Planet — Guy Debord

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Is racism an environmental threat? — Ghassan Hage

The book argues that the classifications and the practices that constitute colonial racism and the practices that have generated the destruction of the natural environment are mutually self-reinforcing because they share a common root: they have a common mode of existence – a manner in which we humans are inserted, and deploy ourselves, in the world – that works as their generative principle. This is what is referred to in the book as ‘generalised domestication’. The book aims to explore this generalised domestication in so far as it constitutes a way of inhabiting the social and natural world. It analyses the practices and classifications that constitute its elementary structure. Last but not least, it explores the way this structure is articulated to and came to constitute the core of mono-realist capitalist modernity, and how it continues to propel the always patriarchal, always racist, always speciesist drive to colonise the world that characterizes the modernist capitalist project.

https://politybooks.com/is-racism-an-environmental-threat/

Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin — Donna Haraway

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The Wretched of the Earth — Frantz Fanon

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Poetic Justice

Nina Simone on the Role of the Artist

Interviewer: You want your art to live on long after you?

Nina Simone: Oh yes.

Interviewer: And your music says this, and it speaks to Black people.  I want you to tell me what your gut feeling is about.

Nina Simone: Well, look, off the top of my head, as far as I’m concerned, thousands and thousands of years ago, we were, for lack of a better expression, “on top”.  If there were oppressors, they were me and you (laughs).  We were not being oppressed, we had kings and queens.  We had civilizations that we don’t know very much about.  So as far as I’m concerned, my music is addressed to my people, especially to make them more curious about where they came from and their own identity and pride in that identity.  That’s why in my songs I try to make them as powerful as possible, mostly just to make them curious about themselves.  We don’t know anything about ourselves.  We don’t even have the pride and dignity of the African people.  We cant’ even talk about where we came from. We don’t know.  It’s like a lost race.   And my songs are deliberately to provoke this feeling of like “who am I and where did I come from?  Do I really like me, and why do I like me? And, if I am Black and beautiful, I really am and I know it, and I don’t care who cares/says what”.  That’s what my songs are about, and it is addressed to Black people.  Though at times, the songs, I hope, that in their musical concept and in their musical form and power, that they will also live on after I die in as much that they are universal songs.

Interviewer: I don’t think that an artist should be involved in these kinds of things.

Nina Simone: An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times. I think that is true of painters, sculptors, poets, musicians. As far as I’m concerned, it’s their choice, but I CHOOSE to reflect the times and situations in which I find myself. That, to me, is my duty. And at this crucial time in our lives, when everything is so desperate, when everyday is a matter of survival, I don’t think you can help but be involved. Young people, black and white, know this. That’s why they’re so involved in politics. We will shape and mold this country or it will not be molded and shaped at all anymore. So I don’t think you have a choice. How can you be an artist and NOT reflect the times? That to me is the definition of an artist.

https://youtu.be/N7sBojD-cfs

The Rose That Grew From Concrete – Tupac Shakur

Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete?
Proving nature’s law is wrong it learned to walk without having feet.
Funny it seems, but by keeping it’s dreams, it learned to breathe fresh air.
Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else ever cared.

Can You See the Pride in the Panther? – Tupac Shakur

Can You See the Pride In the Panther
As he grows in splendor and grace
Toppling obstacles placed in the way,
of the progression of his race.

Can You See the Pride In the Panther
as she nurtures her young all alone
The seed must grow regardless
of the fact that it is planted in stone.

Can You See the Pride In the Panthers
as they unify as one.
The flower blooms with brilliance,
and outshines the rays of the sun.

Family Tree – Tupac Shakur

Because we all spring from different trees
does not mean we are not created equally
Is the true beauty in the tree
or in the vast forest in which it breathes?

I find greatness in the tree,that grows against all odds
It blossoms in darkness, and gives birth to promising pods
I was that tree that grew from the weeds and wasn’t meant to be
Ashamed I’m not, in fact I am proud, of my thriving -family –tree

The tree must fight to breathe
among the evils of the weeds

“We talk a lot about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., but it’s time to be like them, as strong as them. They were mortal men like us and every one of us can be like them. I don’t want to be a role model. I just want to be someone who says, this is who I am, this is what I do. I say what’s on my mind.” – Tupac Amaru Shakur (T.I.P).

The Creative Process By James Baldwin

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Dissent as an Event in Art

Carla Lonzi, Art Critic – Autoritratto (Self-Portrait) – An Excerpt

It wasn’t an interest in art, my interest that is, at the beginning, I have to tell the truth, if I retrace the steps from the very beginning it comes out that I immediately had this existential feeling, like a warning from within, but my interest was in humanity in general, since I was a girl, of strong possibilities, rich possibilities, of great moments of exaltation and happiness, of opening, as if extraordinary things were possible between beings, and then I felt, instead, the frustration of closed situations, where I didn’t understand from where it came, where I felt limitations that cut off all pleasure. So, I, from this existential feeling, I began to look, being certain that it was expressed somewhere, that it would be manifested somewhere, a potentiality that I felt humanity possessed. I knew I had it and that I felt that it belonged to everyone, no matter who they were … Besides that I considered myself, let’s say, someone on the border, who hadn’t yet entered into the country, and yet, I knew this country existed and I surely had periods when I said, “I will spend my entire life here at the border.” So, I thought that to find this path, would require actions that would smash this environment that was keeping me out, and I took these actions, one after another, as you know. Then, I understood that these actions corresponded to a kind of initiation. This seems like a fact to me … For example, I had a religious period, from age 10 to 13: it was extremely important for me. I definitely won’t manage to explain it because it isn’t as interesting as other periods … but, I understood that … I didn’t rebel against culture, this is what I want to say. For me, culture wasn’t the cure-all, neither was religion, but in the religious experience I understood that an initiation in other layers of reality that I related to was possible, in line with my aspirations, and it helped me understand how humanity was actually something, let’s say, bottomless and without real distinctions, which is how I felt about it. I arrived at art when, having passed through my religious experience, I found in the artistic experience an activity that didn’t require belief, which hadn’t really interested me anyway, but satisfied an analogous need. That’s how I came closer to art.

Then I thought that, since … then, I finished university and, for me, university hadn’t been very satisfying, I mean, it was a bureaucratic fact, of culture, rather repressive … even philosophy hadn’t enthused me, but my excitement for art continued to grow, visual art to be exact. And, so, I set about to concern myself with visual art. To concern myself … let’s say, with spending a great deal of time reflecting on these facts, and later, needing to find an occupation, a profession, I decided to become an art critic. But not thinking that this activity corresponded to judgment, to an acquisition of power, to a social maneuver, or to the work of the historian or the event organizer. When I found myself working as an art critic, I saw that it was a phony profession, completely phony, that it had … maybe 90 percent, let’s say, was the university. And so, I kept away from the professional aspects of the activity of the art critic and little by little individuated the elements that for me, are completely intolerable. The most intolerable is this: that there should be an activity that calls for itself individuals, like myself, who wanted to have a deeper initiation into what is typically considered culture, right?

The critic has an awkward psychological makeup, along with a sense of exclusion. In fact, critics are all … they’re not very friendly people, I mean, psychologically, they aren’t commendable, in the sense that I don’t even like how I started out. Yes, I had this sense of being an outsider, very strongly, in worldly things, and I think this came from a childhood experience, feeling excluded from something … And it is probably this that brought me to be interested in artists, because they seemed to me those who had the least of these characteristics: they are the least detached, I think, they have less of a sense of discord … I don’t know. For which, then, my behavior as a critic coincided with a need to interfere in other people’s situations. If I have to identify a moment in which this disposition manifested itself, which would then lead to becoming an art critic … since I was little, in public gardens, if I saw other children, for example, with an adult watching them, I went over to play with them, I remember this sense of not wanting to go back very clearly, of wanting to be a part of something of the other. For this reason, I think, that at age nine I wanted to go to boarding school, to choose a situation that belonged completely to me, and in the end, I blended into that way of life to the point that my father, when he noticed, brought me home right away. If I think back on my life, there are many of these moments.(L. Cossettini, Milano: Ricordi, 2010, pp. VI-VII.)

Then, I remember in middle school, when I had to write an essay about what I wanted to be when I grew up, I wrote that I would conduct interviews, I even remember I said I wanted to interview Laurel and Hardy, specifically. I think all critics have this element, this desire to interfere in other people’s lives. Naturally, it isn’t so pleasant when, from this rather interesting beginning, it isn’t good or bad, it is a fact, existential, then it becomes a profession, an institution, so, there, it becomes something that is no longer justifiable, and at the same time, no longer even benefits the critic, because the only thing that benefits the critic is this meddling, to be able to continue to do this, to keep doing it to the point that one isn’t conscious of it and does it without any qualms, well. Instead, then, to turn it into a career, to work from a position of power, this is a crust that develops over it and doesn’t really have anything to do with it.

The critic, with this need to interfere, is the most likely to initiate things or experiences around the business of others and this is necessary to maintain, because, for me, it is very important that a part of society, small as it may be, is close to artists and this should be the group most willing and interested in them. And artists should keep these people close, that in a certain sense, present themselves as something artists need and represent, in a way, the needs of society. But, this, should be maintained in a norvigian art magazine pure state, not as an institution because once it is made into an institution, it takes on all the vices of the institution and all its ideologies. The critic, rather than being he who is accommodating and in need, becomes he who judges and creates a hierarchy. And in this activity he ends up carrying out, he erases the point of departure from which he began, and becomes a completely inauthentic person, no longer authentic.

There was a moment when Rimbaud said: everybody will be a poet, there will be a world in which everybody is a poet. So, what does this mean? It means it isn’t possible, no, no, it isn’t possible, from my point of view now, since we are talking about criticism, that this … Ultimately, a part of humanity produces things, okay, a creative part, a totally separate part of humanity comments on these things, Now, how this commentary functions for society, that expounds on art, seems to me quite useless and in the end becomes damaging because that part of humanity that produces things should, I think, inspire another part of humanity to absorb and to produce. Not to produce in a specific way, with paintings or making objects, but to produce movements of life, as beings … to develop a creative condition in people, to live life in a creative way, not in obedience with the models that society proposes over and over. That everybody will be poets, artists, not in the sense that everyone will paint the highways and apartment buildings, but that people will live in a creative way, to live in a way that isn’t detached and in peace with themselves, that is alive.

Because I cannot understand the way critics talk about artists, and then, they have such a phony life or they are phony when they talk about artists or they’re phony when they’re living their lives, because you can’t understand a person who’s so disconnected. How can a critic, who should be writing or speaking in a way that is a testimony to his way of life, but he lives in another way … like a little bureaucrat, a little careerist, an industrious person … who from that little territory he possesses, trespasses onto things that humanity has toiled at much more and much more deeply, and says his piece and then he returns to his small-minded things. This seems strange to me. Then it seems that … since humanity has no shame in commenting, yes, this I need to understand, how humanity isn’t ashamed of passing its time blabbering on about things that should shock it, disturb it, that should help it, that should … but instead humanity chatters, and with this chatter neutralizes art, exhausts it.

Luigi Nono’s Political Thought and Musical Activism

La fabbrica illuminata (The illuminated factory)
La fabrica illuminata is a composition for voice and four-channel tape to texts by Giuliano Scabia and a fragment of Due poesie a T. by Cesare Pavese. Composed in 1964 for the inaugural concert of the Premio Italia, and dedicated to the workers of the Italsider factory in Genoa-Cornigliano, it was not performed on that occasion, because it was censored by the management of RAI television because of its highly-politicized texts that were considered offensive to the Government. The first public performance took place in Venice on September 15th 1964 at the XXVII International Festival of Contemporary Music – La Biennale, performed by mezzosoprano Carla Henius with Nono directing the sound. The work was commissioned to Nono by RAI television while he was working with Scabia on Un diario italiano, of which La fabbrica illuminata was to be an episode. The original project, later abandoned, was based on the idea of politically and socially committed musical theatre, inspired by the Soviet avant-gardes (and authors such as Vsevolod Emilievich Meyerchold, for example), and by the political theatre of Erwin Piscator. (L. Cossettini, Milano: Ricordi, 2010, pp. VI-VII.)

Nono’s suggestions about the art of music
  • It is natural that if one does not study and analyze my compositional practice, including its relationship between technique and ideology, but remains conditioned by traditional and nowadays conservative beliefs concerning either technique or the ideological moment that becomes music, one falsifies and equivocates my active position as a musician who is totally engaged in the current political struggle.
  • When we talk about “commitment” in music today, it is often at the theoretical or technical level, but rarely at the ideological level. Contrary to what many believe, these two forms of commitment are not incompatible. Starting from the most everyday reality, the most current one, relying on the great impulses of rebellion and hope that shake our world, one can, out of all immature realism, realise an imaginative work that satisfies as much the progressive support of contemporary thought as the great masses. The relationships between the creator and the masses (of the working class in particular) must no longer be those of professor to pupil, of initiator to neophyte. They must first find themselves at the origin of the work.
  • My composition seminar took place in light of the cultural and political directions of Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and of the resolution of the Cuban National Congress on Education and Culture of April 1971. We discussed the need to overcome and break both the myth of colonising Eurocentrism and the schematic application of European socialism, which almost never corresponds to the socio-economic cultural reality of Latin America. All technical analyses followed within that context.
  • We have to understand and appropriate any element and any technological advance that is actually innovative, that we differentiate and empower by our theoretical and practical conception of the present struggle. That we associate with our capacity for invention and creation for the hegemony, according to Gramsci’s term, of the revolutionary forces, in their destructive, constructive, and intellectual practices. An example: the development and application of electronic technology in contemporary music, the electronic studio. It is an advance and an unprecedented expressive possibility for musical creation.
  • I am convinced that with today’s music (independently of whether it is associated with a text or not) we can analyse, understand and intervene in our lives. (…) Not to achieve sectorial, technological, sociological or aesthetic recognition, but as a cultural-political choice that casts light on the use, the function and the objectives of the technical and expressive means that the musician has or ‘invents’.

Excerpts from A Note on Art in Yugoslavia, in The Fox, vol.1(1), 1975, New York

Zoran Popović and Jasna Tijardović

A lot of people in the West associate art in Yugoslavia with Social Realism. According to Western propaganda there is no free individual work in the “communist countries” and, since Social Realism is “official” in the USSR, it’s assumed all communist artists apparently must follow this party line. In fact, in Yugoslavia, and even Officially, Social Realism is not an ideology of importance. Today, social realism is a thing of the past, something nobody—meaning museums as well as artists—thinks about. […]

At the Project ’74 exhibition in Cologne, instead of art-as-art we got art-as-politics. But, when the museum declined to accept the latter, it was shown at the Paul Maenz Gallery. This is part of the quantification of quality. Reducing every “quality” to “quantity”, the bourgeois society economizes on intellectual activity. It understands “reality” at the lowest cost. It considers all aesthetical factors permeated with unmaterial essence. The “magnificence” and “richness of expression and form” of the artwork exhibited at 420 West Broadway are represented as an essence (of culture, of history, of art) which no other language can depict. Any deeper consideration is simply proclaimed pedantry; everything that seems so “natural” to the situation is only a factor of good-show-business.

During our stay in New York, we tried to talk with as many artists and students as we could. We talked about what we saw and what we know of the galleries as well as our experiences in Yugoslavia. That meant we spoke somehow differently and perhaps sometimes more fundamentally. We have the feeling that this sort of “deeper” talk was thought to be inappropriate or strange, or looked on as a reflection of something having its sources in the socio-political system that we come from—as if we were expressing no our opinion but merely the Official opinion of our State. It seemed to be considered that what we thought or did was not of ourselves but somebody else, that we were mere products, finally, of a Communist ideology—and it is well known what that means. It is equated, for one thing, with Social Realism and that means ‘poverty’ in art. In New York, it seems that everybody believe they are thinking freely, democratically, as if this thinking has no connection with the society they live in.

New York, New York—Belgrade, Yugoslavia

In the Time of Coronavirus: Thoughts from Naples and Belgrade

On Pessimism and Optimism in the Time of COVID-19 Pandemic — Dušan Grlja from Beton

Beton (Concrete), from Belgrade, was a joint cultural and artistic endeavour of the members of the original editorial board. We understood the editorial office primarily as an intermediary (how else), which, following its poetic determinants, would provide an organized, well-thought-out printed / digital place in the media field and editorial support for publishing texts and visual contributions by our esteemed authors mostly from the (ex-)Yugoslav space, but also from the former and present neighbourhood – these published authors and their readers together with the editorial board formed the political and aesthetic field of Beton. In 2019 Beton phase 2 began. In print and online. The concreting of the damned courtyard continues, but the change should definitely be marked. The new editorial board brings its editorial policy and its thematic orientations, but the aegis under which it works remains the same: the expansion of the space of freedom, always against censorship, against any and all dogmatism; against revisionism; against the nationalist matrix and the relativization of the 1990s; against the “conspiracy of silence” and the calculated (s) half rebellion; against patriarchal backwardness and stale lies about the free market. http://www.elektrobeton.net/vesti/na-kraju-pocetak/

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Gestures of Radical Imagination: A Program For The Useful Revolution — Emanuele Braga from Institute of Radical Imagination

The Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI), from Naples, is a group of curators, activists, scholars and cultural producers with a shared interest in co-producing research, knowledge, artistic and political research-interventions aimed at implementing post-capitalist forms of life. IRI is a hybrid between a travelling research centre, a refuge for intellectuals and artists at risk, a radical museum and a policy-making body generating ideas and applied knowledge that respond to specific urgent needs on the ground – more than a structure, an intellectual logistical infrastructure operating across existing arts, academic and activist networks. https://instituteofradicalimagination.org/about/

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Films of protest/rebellion/revolution

October: Ten Days That Shook the World, 1927

This film is the final part of director Sergei Eisenstein’s trilogy. He admitted that the revolution had “given him the most precious of all things: It made him an artist.”

Chapaev, 1934

This is a film by the Vasiliev brothers about self-sacrificing Red Army commander Vasily Chapaev, who with his friends Petka and Anka fought the White Guard.

Lenin in October, 1937

Shot 20 years after the revolution, Mikhail Romm’s film concentrates on the personality of Vladimir Lenin – a funny neurotic before turning out to be the genius of the revolution. In the opinion of his contemporaries, actor Boris Schukin played the revolution’s leader so virtuously that viewers stood up and applauded when he appeared on screen – it was as if they were standing in front of Lenin himself.

The Flight, 1970

This two-part film based on the works of Mikhail Bulgakov (primarily his play Flight and the novel The White Guard). Having participated in the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, Alexander Alov and Vladimir Naumov’s film depicts the radical rupture of moral and ethical values that occurred during the revolution, as well as the difficulties of the immigration and the lost role of the intelligentsia in the new Soviet era.

Angels of the Revolution, 2014

This is an unusual story of the consequences of the revolution filmed by Venetian Film Festival-winner Alexei Fedorchenko (First on the Moon, Silent Souls). It’s about a group of revolutionaries who come to the taiga to “enlighten” the indigenous peoples in the name of art. Fedorchenko’s screen heroes are based on 1920s avant-garde artists: Painters, architects, musicians, and others. The mosaic of facts blended with the director’s imagination shows the confrontation between the foremost Soviet citizens and the smaller peoples of Siberia and the North who were detached from the revolutionary sentiment.

The Battle of Algiers -La battaglia di Algeri, 1966

In the 1950s, fear and violence escalate as the people of Algiers fight for independence from the French government.

Land and Freedom – Tierra y Libertad, 1995

The film narrates the story of David Carr, an unemployed worker and member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, who decides to fight for the republican side in the Spanish Civil War, an anti-rebel coalition of Socialists, Communists and Anarchists.

I Am Cuba – Soy Cuba, 1964

Four vignettes about the lives of the Cuban people set during the pre-revolutionary era.

https://my.mail.ru/video/embed/1541595313087720933

Strike – Стачка, 1925

Strike is a silent film made in the Soviet Union by Sergei Eisenstein.

Three Songs About Lenin – Tri pesni o Lenine, 1934

Three anonymous songs about Lenin provide the basis for this documentary that celebrates the achievements of the Soviet Union and Lenin’s role in creating them.

1900 – Novecento, 1976

The epic tale of a class struggle in twentieth century Italy, as seen through the eyes of two childhood friends on opposing sides.

Rosa Luxemburg – Die Geduld der Rosa Luxemburg, 1986

Polish socialist and Marxist Rosa Luxemburg works tirelessly in the service of revolution in early 20th century Poland and Germany. While Luxemburg campaigns for her beliefs, she is repeatedly imprisoned as she forms the Spartacist League offering a new vision for Germany.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PP-x-FI2Tz8

In the Year of the Pig, 1986

A documentary chronicling the background to, and history of, the Vietnam War.

Salt of the Earth, 1954

Mexican workers at a Zinc mine call a general strike. It is only through the solidarity of the workers, and importantly the indomitable resolve of their wives, mothers and daughters, that they eventually triumph.

Mexico: The Frozen Revolution -México, la revolución congelada, 1971

A thorough analysis of the social- politics of Mexico, within the historical context of the Mexican Revolution (1910). Includes footage of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, interviews with farmers, politicians, intellectuals, middle class, trade unionists.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised – Chavez: Inside the Coup, 2003

In April 2002, an Irish film crew is making a documentary about Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, when a coup from the opposition is made.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKf1nccf3OI

The Last Zapatistas, Forgotten Heroes – Los últimos zapatistas, héroes olvidados, 2002

In the year 2000 the Mexican film director, Francesco Taboada Tabone, began his search for the last of the soldiers to have fought beside General Emiliano Zapata in the 1910 Revolution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX5sHJbhnPA

The East is Red – Dongfang hong, 1965

The East Is Red is a 1965 Chinese film directed by Wang Ping. It is a “song and dance epic” dramatizing the history of the Chinese Revolution and the Communist Party under the leadership of Mao Zedong, from the beginnings of the Boxer Rebellion, to the Civil War against the Nationalists, to the victory of the Communists and the establishing of the People’s Republic.

Lumumba, 2000

At the Berlin Conference of 1885, Europe divided up the African continent. The Congo became the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium. On June 30, 1960, a young revolutionary Patrice Lumumba, became, at age 36, the first head of government of the new independent state. He would last two months in office.

The Battle of Neretva – Bitka na Neretvi, 1969

World war two drama about the 1943 battle around the Neretva River between Axis forces and Yugoslav partisan units.

Who’s Singin’ Over There? – Ko to tamo peva?, 1980

It’s April 5, 1941, somewhere in Serbia. A group of people go on a bus to Belgrade, on a journey that will change their lives forever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTXDA2v3V08

Walter Defends Sarajevo – Valter brani Sarajevo, 1972

The film, Walter Defends Sarajevo (1972), tells the story of Vladimir Valter Perić, leader of Sarajevo’s underground resistance movement when it was occupied by Nazis forces during WWII.

Balkan ekspres, 1983

World War II, Serbia. A band of small-time crooks aren’t interested in either the occupation or the resistance movement—their lone ambition is to survive in one piece. They flee from the capital to the countryside disguised as a musical troupe called “Balkan Express” and wait for the end of the war while supporting themselves through petty theft. Despite the fact that all of their energy is being spent on avoiding everything related to the war, a combination of circumstances forces them into a situation where they must act like heroes. Black humor interweaves with an exciting plot and nostalgic music seems to struggle with the horrors of war.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2gaaD_pfTQ

I Even Met Happy Gypsies – Skupljači perja, 1967

The film is centered on Romani people’s life in a village in northern Vojvodina. The authenticity of I Even Met Happy Gypsies is amplified by the use of genuine Gypsy melodies on the soundtrack; in addition, the film was shot in a near-extinct Gypsy language called Romany, requiring the film to carry subtitles even when released in Yugoslavia. I Even Met Happy Gypsies was the recipient of an award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Aesthetic mode of production as reversal – “retournement”

By aesthetic mode of production we understand the combination of factors whose effect is to operate the reversal. To operate the reversal means to give an ideological function to certain real-imaginary elements that are regionally produced by a historically determined state of the aesthetic process. We might say that art repeats in the real the ideological repetition of this real. Nevertheless this reversal does not produce the real; it realizes its reflection.

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